David Cohen and Brad Feld
Do More Faster
ISBN: 978-1-119-58328-8
I get a lot of questions from first-time founders and new entrepreneurs. How do you know whether or not your idea is a “good idea?” How do you find customers? Will anyone actually buy this thing I built? I try to answer as many as I can from my own experience as a founder and an entrepreneur, but I always through that it would be nice to have a concise resource to which I could refer people. I’ve found that resource in Do More Faster: Techstars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup by David Cohen and Brad Feld, two of the founders of Techstars. Do More Faster is a collection of stories and anecdotes from mentors and founders connected to the Techstars ecosystem, covering many of the struggles entrepreneurs can experience along their journey.
The stories reinforce the guiding principles of Techstars’ programs, including their accelerators around the world and the Startup Weekend program, of which I facilitate and organize our local event, Startup Weekend Iowa City. There are stories included on how to talk to potential customers, why you should focus on the problem you are trying to solve rather than a specific solution, why you should quickly build prototypes and get them out the door for customer feedback, and why your founding team is the most important aspect of your fledgling startup. It really felt like the authors took much of what I’ve personally learned through experience and distilled it into a hardcover book.
I really enjoyed the founder-focused chapters the most. As I’ve discussed elsewhere in this blog, self-care is too often overlooked as a topic for discussion among entrepreneurs. I’m glad that it was covered briefly at the end of the book – even just a few years ago, it was rare to see any discussion of work/life balance in a book targeted to newer entrepreneurs – everything was focused on the hustle and grind. Also discussed were the topics of iteration, pivoting, and failure: again, several points that were rarely discussed even just a few years ago. New entrepreneurs tend not to understand that most startups fail, no matter how hard you work. When I have discussions with other entrepreneurs, they rarely want to discuss the failures, only the wins. Failure should be viewed as a learning process, and I feel as though we’re finally turning a corner on this.
Overall, 9/10, would recommend as a fantastic and concise resource for new founders and entrepreneurs, functioning as a kind of instruction manual for the startup ecosystem. It also works well as a refresher for those of us in the thick of things – we tend to forget some of the basics, especially self-care and accepting and learning from failure, when we’re in the middle of building something great. Do More Faster is also a great way to see some of the inner workings of Techstars, for those founders who are building something they may want to take through an incubator or accelerator in the future. Most modern accelerators are built off of the Techstars model, so this is a chance to look “behind the curtain.”