TechStars, Lies & Videotape

TechStars is an absolutely amazing program, and we had a fantastic experience. I could not be more complementary of the program itself. My post was only commenting on the TV show, and trying to clear up some events that were portrayed by Bloomberg.

never said 'the ends justify the means'

while i agree that the show is not all-inclusive of the complexity of startups, i think it's funny how much noise is made about the show itself, when the good news is people are excited about startups enough to 1. make a show and 2. to watch it

some of us are going to succeed and some of us are going to fail... some publicly, some not so publicly

TechStars chose, and we agreed, to doing this in the public eye

As Melanie's co-founder for ToVieFor, it's true that they painted her in a bad light. She's super intelligent and very very good at grabbing onto a vision and propelling it forward. She may have hung on too tight to that vision at times, but I'd take that any day over a co-founder who was aimless and did not know what they wanted. We were up against a very difficult, entrenched industry, and she made as good of progress as I could expect any new entrepreneur to make.

I too am a bit disappointed in Bloomberg. The fact of the matter is that you have a lot of strong, driven entrepreneurs in the same program, and while some of what you saw is accurate, Bloomberg really made an effort to polarize and make extreme the various personality types. Reece does not always talk about sports or use athlete analogies. Jason Baptiste doesn't walk around constantly saying he'll own the internet (although if you prod him for it, he'll probably say it), and Melanie is not clueless. I'm super excited for her current startup, she definitely shows more wisdom in leaner methodologies.

In short, TechStars++, Bloomberg--.

Hello everyone, this is Alessio Signorini (@a_signorini), CTO and co-founder of Immersive Labs, which was one of the companies on the show.

At our final interviews to get into the program, they told us that we were accepted before telling us about the show. They actually asked us "would you mind being part of a documentary on your experience filmed by Bloomberg?". We didn't mind. I did not feel it was forced on us. They asked politely, and we agreed enthusiastically. We really wanted to be in TechStars.

TechStars was a great experience for me. I lived/worked for 4 months, 20 hours a day, shoulder-to-shoulder with 40 among the brightest people you can find in the US which now become my closest friend. It did not matter what we were doing or where, we were all helping each other succeed, sharing experiences, contacts, reviewing pitches, etc. And even now, 6 months later, we still speak often and have tons of fun every time we see each other. It's a family.

But that's not all, TechStars allowed us to meet and bond with dozens of the greatest and smartest investors and CEOs of the United States. They helped us, coached us, and pushed us to the our best at all time. And even now that the show is over, they are reaching out, helping out, and creating connections for us. It is great. Simply great.

We really all feel part of a big group which I am sure will last forever.

Having the cameras around during the program was actually fun, at least for me. The crews became friends and it was normal to have them around. They did not change a bit what we were doing and how: they did not tell us what to say, they did not create drama, they did not ask gotcha-questions. Of course, compressing 5000 hours of video in less than 2 hours of show forced them to do some liberal editing. And I am sure that lots of things changed at Bloomberg between January and last Tuesday. They had to focus on 6 companies instead of 11, pick some characters instead of the teams, and reduce hours of meetings into a few seconds.

Melanie is great and is already running with a new idea. The show did not portray her that way. Too bad. Same thing for the meeting with my co-founder, they should have skipped the money troubles of Jason, it did not help anybody. But that's show-business I guess, and since everything during the program went so smooth and it was so positive, they probably had to focus on those two moments to create a bit of drama, which, given the amount of "reality" on TV nowadays, seem to be necessary.

I highly, highly, highly, highly, highly, highly, highly... :) recommend submitting your application to TechStars and do your best to be accepted into the program. It may just be the best thing you do after coming up with the idea for your company.

I disagreed.

David Tisch, David Cohen, and the other dozens mentors who helped us during the program have been amazing. They stayed in the office with us until late at night. And you can hear our comments about them on TV in different occasions, even in the finale.

Maybe Bloomberg exaggerated a bit the personalities of everyone (e.g., Jason of OnSwipe is great to be around, he jokes a lot) but the TechStars program in itself was great.

And if you do not like people criticizing your idea, you probably shouldn't be an entrepreneur, because that will happen a lot. And that's ok. It's your job to listen and figure out if they are right, or convince them if they are wrong.