Boulder-based Techstars has appointed two new C-level executives, neither of which will be located in Colorado.
Aparna Ramaswamy, Techstars’ new chief human capital officer, will be based in Stamford, Connecticut. Kimberly Smith will fill a newly formed executive role as chief capital formation officer and is based in New York. While Techstars is still legally based in Boulder, CEO Maelle Gavet said in a recent interview with the Denver Business Journal that it is no longer accurate to think of that as the company’s headquarters.
“We are registered as a company in Colorado, but if you look at the way our employees are located, we have employees in 30-plus U.S. states and 16 countries around the world. If you take just the leadership team, we have two people in Colorado, but everybody else is outside of Colorado,” Gavet said. “We are very, truly distributed, from a physical perspective and a mindset perspective.”
Ramaswamy is filling a spot left vacant by Fran James, Techstars’ former chief people officer.
Ramaswamy was most recently chief human capital officer at Success Academy Charter Schools in New York. During her time in that position, she implemented the organization’s first inclusion council, along with its diversity, equity and inclusion commitments, Techstars said in a press release.
Ramaswamy’s experience with DEI is important to Techstars right now because if its recent launch of nine accelerator programs in the U.S. in partnership with JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM). Though the program is open to founders of all backgrounds, the accelerators will make specific efforts to recruit startups led by racial or ethnic minorities.
Meanwhile, Smith has been with Techstars since September 2021. Smith was a partner at New York hedge fund Owl Creek Asset Management prior to joining Techstars.
Techstars employs 320 people globally, with 254 in the U.S. and 76 in Colorado.
The company’s distribution outside of Boulder has come as part of a combination of the company’s desire to maintain strong local connections to the companies in its accelerator programs and its wide geographic reach. That means it needs a strong local presence in a lot of different locations.
“This is a very hands-on approach, even though this year we’re going to invest in more than 600 companies. We find this balance between being one of the largest pre-seed investors in the world and yet being very local, very hands on, very high touch with the companies we invest in,” Gavet said. “We operate under this idea that talent is distributed evenly, but opportunity and access are not. We want to apply that to ourselves, too; we reach out for talent everywhere.”
