Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup by Brad Feld and David Cohen is a collection of advice for entrepreneurs looking to start their own business. The book is derived from the authors' experience running TechStars, a startup accelerator in Boulder, Colorado. They present a series of advice and methodologies, from product development, team building, fundraising, and dealing with failure. The book includes real-world examples from TechStar alum, such as SendGrid and Sphero. This book matters in today's context as the pace of innovation continues to accelerate, and entrepreneurs need to be agile and efficient. Feld and Cohen's work is a significant contribution to the field of entrepreneurship, particularly in its focus on startup accelerators. Their unique perspective comes from their hands-on experience running TechStars and their interactions with hundreds of startups.
• Execution speed determines competitive advantage: Feld and Cohen emphasize that in rapidly evolving markets, the ability to execute quickly often matters more than having perfect plans or superior resources. Companies that can iterate, adapt, and improve faster than competitors often win regardless of starting position. • Focus intensely on solving real customer problems: Successful startups obsess over understanding and solving genuine customer problems rather than building technology for its own sake. Deep customer empathy and problem understanding drive product decisions that create lasting value and competitive differentiation. • Team quality multiplies execution capability: Exceptional teams can overcome resource constraints, market challenges, and competitive pressures that stop average teams. Investing time and resources in building great teams provides higher returns than most other startup activities. • Learn from failure quickly and systematically: Failure is inevitable in startups, but successful entrepreneurs learn from failures quickly and systematically rather than ignoring them or repeating the same mistakes. Rapid learning cycles enable better decision-making and continuous improvement. • Build sustainable businesses, not just growth metrics: While growth is important, sustainable business models that generate customer value and revenue provide better long-term outcomes than unsustainable growth driven by excessive spending or unrealistic assumptions about future market conditions. • Network effects and community building create lasting advantages: Businesses that create value through network effects and community building often develop sustainable competitive advantages that are difficult for competitors to replicate. These advantages compound over time and provide protection against competitive threats.
The Entrepreneurial Mindset "Do More Faster" compiles insights from successful entrepreneurs and investors about building startups in accelerated environments. Brad Feld and David Cohen draw from their experience with Techstars and hundreds of startup companies to provide practical guidance about execution, team building, and strategic thinking that drives startup success. The book addresses the unique challenges and opportunities that face entrepreneurs in fast-moving markets where technology, customer behavior, and competitive dynamics change rapidly. Rather than promoting theoretical frameworks, the authors focus on actionable insights that help entrepreneurs navigate uncertainty and build sustainable businesses. The collection of essays and case studies reflects diverse perspectives from founders, investors, and advisors who have experienced both startup successes and failures. This diversity provides comprehensive coverage of entrepreneurial challenges while maintaining practical focus on execution and results. Speed and Execution Excellence The book emphasizes that execution speed often determines startup success more than strategic brilliance or resource advantages. In rapidly evolving markets, companies that can test ideas, gather feedback, and iterate quickly often capture opportunities that slower competitors miss despite having superior initial concepts. Execution excellence involves not just moving quickly, but moving quickly in the right direction based on customer feedback and market data. This requires systematic approaches to experimentation, measurement, and learning that enable rapid course correction when initial assumptions prove incorrect. The authors also address how to balance speed with quality, recognizing that moving too quickly can create technical debt, customer dissatisfaction, or operational problems that slow long-term progress. Effective entrepreneurs develop judgment about when to prioritize speed and when to invest in sustainability and quality. Customer-Centric Product Development The book strongly emphasizes customer obsession as a fundamental driver of startup success. Companies that understand customer problems deeply and solve them effectively often succeed even with limited resources or competitive disadvantages. This customer focus requires ongoing engagement, feedback collection, and product iteration based on actual user needs. Customer development involves not just understanding current customer needs, but anticipating how those needs might evolve as markets and technologies change. Successful entrepreneurs often identify emerging customer problems and build solutions before customers fully recognize their needs. The book also addresses how to balance customer feedback with strategic vision, recognizing that customers can't always articulate what they need and that successful products sometimes create new customer behaviors rather than just serving existing preferences. Team Building and Leadership Exceptional teams represent the most important factor in startup success according to the book's contributors. Great teams can overcome resource constraints, market challenges, and competitive pressures that stop average teams. This makes team building and leadership development crucial entrepreneurial skills. Effective team building involves not just hiring talented individuals, but creating cultures and working relationships that enable collaboration, innovation, and sustained high performance under pressure. This includes approaches to communication, decision-making, and conflict resolution that support team effectiveness. The book also addresses leadership challenges that emerge as startups grow and evolve, requiring founders to develop new skills in management, strategic planning, and organizational development while maintaining entrepreneurial agility and customer focus. Learning from Failure and Iteration The book presents failure as an inevitable and valuable part of the entrepreneurial process when approached systematically. Successful entrepreneurs fail fast, learn quickly, and apply insights to improve their approaches rather than repeating the same mistakes or avoiding risk entirely. Systematic learning from failure requires creating cultures and processes that encourage experimentation while capturing insights from both successes and failures. This includes approaches to post-mortem analysis, knowledge sharing, and organizational learning that prevent repeated mistakes. The authors also discuss how to maintain morale and momentum while learning from failures, recognizing that excessive risk aversion can prevent the experimentation necessary for breakthrough innovation and market success. Sustainable Business Model Development While the book emphasizes speed and growth, it also stresses the importance of building sustainable business models that generate customer value and revenue rather than just pursuing growth metrics without underlying economic viability. Sustainable businesses provide better long-term outcomes than unsustainable growth strategies. Business model sustainability involves understanding unit economics, customer acquisition costs, lifetime value, and other financial metrics that determine whether businesses can generate profitable growth over time. This financial understanding guides strategic decisions about pricing, marketing, and operational investment. The book also addresses how to balance short-term growth objectives with long-term sustainability, recognizing that some growth investments may reduce short-term profitability while building capabilities for sustained competitive advantage. Network Effects and Community Building The book explores how successful startups often create value through network effects where products become more valuable as more people use them, and through community building that creates emotional connections between customers and brands. These approaches often generate sustainable competitive advantages. Network effects require careful attention to product design, user acquisition sequencing, and community management that encourage participation and engagement. Successful implementation of network effects often determines whether businesses achieve winner-take-all market positions. Community building involves creating shared values, experiences, and connections that go beyond transactional relationships between companies and customers. Strong communities often provide protection against competitive threats while enabling sustainable growth through word-of-mouth marketing and customer retention. This comprehensive approach enables entrepreneurs to build startups that can execute quickly while developing sustainable competitive advantages and long-term business success.
Execution Speed Creates Competitive Moats In rapidly changing markets, the ability to execute quickly often creates more sustainable competitive advantages than initial resource advantages or strategic positioning. Companies that can adapt and improve faster than competitors often win regardless of starting position or market share. Customer Obsession Drives Product-Market Fit Deep understanding of customer problems and systematic focus on solving them effectively leads to stronger product-market fit than technology-first or feature-driven approaches. Companies that maintain customer obsession throughout their growth often build more sustainable businesses. Team Quality Multiplies All Other Advantages Exceptional teams can overcome resource constraints, market challenges, and competitive pressures that stop average teams. The quality of people and working relationships often determines startup outcomes more than strategy, funding, or market positioning. Failure Provides Competitive Intelligence Systematic learning from failures generates insights that enable better decision-making and competitive positioning. Entrepreneurs who learn from failures quickly and systematically often develop advantages over competitors who avoid risk or fail to capture learning from setbacks. Sustainable Growth Beats Unsustainable Metrics While rapid growth attracts attention, sustainable business models that generate genuine customer value often provide better long-term outcomes than growth strategies based on unsustainable economics or unrealistic market assumptions. Network Effects Compound Over Time Businesses that create network effects where products become more valuable as more people use them often develop winner-take-all competitive positions that become stronger over time and harder for competitors to challenge.
Immediate Implementation (Week 1-4) • Identify the core customer problem your business solves and develop systematic approaches to understanding how well you're solving it. Create regular customer feedback loops that inform product development and business strategy decisions. • Assess your current team's capabilities and working relationships to identify opportunities for improvement in collaboration, communication, and execution speed. Invest in team development that multiplies your execution capability. • Implement rapid experimentation and iteration processes that enable faster learning and improvement. Focus on testing key business assumptions quickly rather than perfecting products before market validation. Skill Development (Month 2-3) • Develop systematic approaches to learning from both successes and failures that capture insights and prevent repeated mistakes. Create post-mortem processes and knowledge sharing that improve decision-making over time. • Build financial understanding and tracking systems that measure unit economics, customer acquisition costs, and other metrics that determine business sustainability rather than just growth metrics. • Practice balancing speed with quality by developing judgment about when to prioritize rapid execution and when to invest in sustainability and long-term capabilities. Advanced Integration (3+ Months) • Design products and business models that can benefit from network effects where value increases as more customers participate. Focus on features and experiences that become more valuable with larger user bases. • Build community and brand loyalty that creates emotional connections beyond transactional relationships with customers. Strong communities often provide sustainable competitive advantages and growth opportunities. • Scale execution capabilities by developing systems, processes, and team structures that maintain speed and agility while handling larger operations and more complex challenges.
Real-World Experience Foundation Do More Faster works because it's based on extensive real-world experience from successful entrepreneurs and investors rather than theoretical frameworks. The insights reflect actual patterns that drive startup success and failure in competitive markets. Focus on Execution Over Strategy The approach succeeds because it recognizes that execution capability often matters more than strategic brilliance in startup environments. Most startups fail due to execution problems rather than strategic flaws, making execution focus more practical than strategic optimization. Systems Thinking About Startup Success The framework works because it addresses startup success as a system of interconnected factors rather than focusing on isolated elements. Team quality, customer focus, execution speed, and business model sustainability all reinforce each other when properly integrated. Practical Implementation Orientation The book's effectiveness comes from providing specific, actionable guidance that entrepreneurs can implement immediately rather than general principles that require extensive interpretation. This practical orientation enables faster application and better results.