When Techstars founder and longtime CEO David Brown announced in September that he’d step down from his executive role in 2021, the exact timing was ambiguous.
Now, just a few weeks into the new year, the Boulder company’s board of directors has appointed Maëlle Gavet as Brown’s successor.
Gavet comes to Techstars with vast tech experience, serving in executive roles at the Boston Consulting Group and OZON.ru, Russia’s largest e-commerce site, as well as real estate platform Compass.
She enters the fold at a key time for the startup and venture-focused company, as the company continues to expand its footprint amid an entrepreneurial world deeply impact by Covid-19.
To date, Techstars has invested in more than 2,300 companies and the company’s portfolio of is worth more than $185 billion today.
Brown will continue to serve on the board and fellow co-founder David Cohen will assume the new role of chairman of the board of directors.
Given Techstars’ decentralized geographical structure, Gavet will remain based in New York City.
As she assumes the new role, we asked Gavet about her past experience, goals for the future and what’s next for Techstars.
What have you learned from your past experiences that you’ll take with you to Techstars? I’ve had a diversity of experiences in my 15-year career as a three-time founder, tech industry executive and LP, working in markets across the world, from Russia to South Africa to the U.S. and several markets across Europe. Through each of these experiences I saw first-hand how much a strong support network, access to capital and being supported by passionate, mission-oriented people matters.
During my time at Priceline, I worked with the founders of Kayak, Agoda, and Booking.com, and at Compass, I worked with real estate agents who built their own business and often gathered a small team. It taught me that entrepreneurs can be found everywhere and access to capital and networks should be, and can be, available to everyone to solve today’s challenges. The experience of writing my book, Trampled by Unicorns, Big Tech’s Empathy Problem and How to Fix It, also heightened my awareness of how VC can truly impact—both positively and negatively—many issues in tech and the world.
In addition to my experience with founders, I have built a career on scaling/growing an organization. For example, Compass, where I was Chief Operating Officer for three years, is now on the road to IPO.
You mentioned diversity in your statement, how can Techstars take additional steps to prioritize diversity (in all its forms) going forward? It’s no secret that the tech and investment industries are lagging in diversity and equity in many areas, especially access to capital and important resources like mentorship. Of our current 2,300+ company portfolio, 26% of our founders identify as female - just above the global average hovering at 20% - and 43% of our founders identify as people of color, 11% specifically identifying as Black or African American. While we are proud of what we have accomplished to date, we acknowledge there is far more work to be done and have some big initiatives in the works to continue to support underrepresented and marginalized entrepreneurs and continue our efforts to diversity inequities across the startup and Venture capital ecosystems. Part of these initiatives include the commitment made last year to diversifying our business and network by putting more resources towards social impact. A few ways we have done this includes:
- We have a program dedicated to empowering 1,000 diverse CEOs by 2026.
- Our Cox Enterprises Social Impact Accelerator Powered by Techstars pivoted its focus this year to specifically focus on entrepreneurs creating solutions in the area of social justice.
- Techstars Music, along with its member companies and new partner Right Hand Music Group, is committing more capital and support than ever for underrepresented tech founders in its 2021 accelerator class.
This is just the beginning of our journey to prioritize diversity. Techstars’ operational model and geographical reach offer powerful paths to breaking down barriers that prevent so many talented founders from the success they deserve. By expanding our business, we can accelerate transformation of the tech and VC industries, especially in the areas of diversity and social impact.
As a result of the pandemic, Techstars was forced to quickly pivot to virtual programming. How will the company use that experience to guide future programs, even after we emerge from the current pandemic? Before the pandemic, Techstars was already a highly virtual company with nearly 300 employees spread across 22 countries, the majority of whom worked fully remotely. We also already had strong expertise and best practices in virtual programming - our Techstars Anywhere Accelerator has always been virtual. Pivoting nearly all of our programs in 2020 to virtual accelerators, gave us many learnings and we’ve developed even more best practices that we will take forward in the post-Covid-19 world, whatever that may look like.
While it required significant changes, we’ve seen some real benefits from the virtual model that we will want to incorporate into our programming moving forward, even when we return to safe in-person operations. Through our virtual programming and demo days, we are able to connect our founders to an even larger and more diverse set of mentors and investors. Before COVID-19, many investors and entrepreneurial ecosystems were geographically focused and connections were driven primarily by in-person meetings and events. Operating virtually allows founders around the world more flexibility because they can attend any program from wherever they are located, without barriers that might arise from the need to relocate. And as we all embrace asynchronous communication and new ways of networking and hosting events, we are able to help connect founders and investors from all parts of the world, which in turn creates additional and new opportunities to help our companies succeed.
Despite the pandemic, 2020 brought a host of new accelerator programs and partnerships for Techstars, including the Denver-based Workforce Development Accelerator. What areas/industries/verticals are you hoping to expand Techstars into going forward? Techstars’ mission is to help entrepreneurs succeed everywhere around the world. We are at a particularly painful moment in time for many reasons and we need entrepreneurs of all types now more than ever. The possibilities out there are endless. But I think there is real urgency around addressing the significant challenges we see in the areas of diversity, social impact and sustainability.
What are your long-term goals and aspirations for Techstars and its network of entrepreneurs? Techstars has built such a strong foundation in its business under David Brown’s leadership, seeing growth of more than 10x since 2014. That momentum created a new opportunity to scale, leading to an ultimate goal of expansion.
There is an amazing pool of untapped talent and underinvested ecosystems out there. There are so many founders who have the potential to transform the world with solutions we really need but haven’t had access to the right resources to break through and scale in their industries. Techstars’ vision from the beginning was a geographically distributed model that could help entrepreneurs everywhere and we will look to continue this initiative.
There are a lot of opportunities to explore, so I will spend my first 100 days meeting with people who know the business - employees, entrepreneurs, investors, corporate partners, and community leaders. I want to hear from them what’s going well, what should be leveraged further, as well as what should change.
