Most people who sell a company for tens of millions of dollars go quiet for a while. They buy the house, take the sabbatical, tell themselves they have earned the pause. David Cohen took a different route. After his companies were bought, the thing that pulled at him was not another product. It was a question about how founders get their start, and why the earliest stage of building a company felt so lonely and so unfair.
That question turned into Techstars, and Techstars turned into one of the most active early-stage investors on the planet. But to understand why it worked, you have to start earlier, in a basement, with code.
Chapter OneThe basement years
Cohen was born in DeLand, Florida, and studied computer science at the University of Central Florida. He describes himself, plainly and a little fondly, as a geeky ex-hacker. That is not a marketing line. His first real company, Pinpoint Technologies, was software for emergency dispatch, the unglamorous but critical business of getting ambulances where they need to go. He co-founded it in 1993.
Pinpoint grew the hard way. What started as a basement project became a company doing roughly fifty million dollars in annual revenue with more than two hundred and fifty employees. In 1999 it was acquired by ZOLL Medical Corporation. Cohen had done the thing every founder dreams about, and he had done it without a famous logo or a splashy launch.
He kept building. He launched iContact.com, an early attempt at a social network for mobile devices, and later earFeeder, a music news startup that was acquired the same year he started it. Two exits and a few detours later, Cohen had a rare kind of pattern recognition: he knew what it felt like to build from nothing, and he knew how much of the outcome came down to who happened to help you along the way.
Chapter TwoA better way to back founders
In 2006, angel investing was mostly a handshake business. A founder pitched, an investor wrote a check, and then everyone hoped. Cohen thought founders deserved more than a check. They needed mentors who had already made the mistakes, a community that would answer the phone, and capital that came with a network attached.
So he co-founded Techstars with Brad Feld, Jared Polis, and David Brown, and ran the first program in Boulder, Colorado in 2007. The design was deliberately intense. A small cohort, a fixed run of weeks, and a firehose of mentorship from people who had built and sold real companies. Techstars became known for accepting only around one percent of applicants, a number that sounds like gatekeeping until you realize the point was depth, not exclusivity. Fewer founders meant every one of them could get real attention.
The Techstars bet
Cohen wagered that a room full of experienced mentors was worth more to a young founder than the size of the check. That wager reorganized how a generation of accelerators think about early-stage support.
The results piled up. Techstars grew from one program in Boulder into a network operating across dozens of countries, backing thousands of startups. More than a dozen went on to become unicorns. The roster reads like a tour of the last two decades of tech: Chainalysis, DigitalOcean, Remitly, SendGrid, ClassPass, DataRobot, Outreach, PillPack. Each of them, at one point, was just a small team getting real help early.
Relative scale of the Techstars footprint. Bars are illustrative, not to a single axis.
Chapter ThreeWhat Give First actually means
If you spend any time around Techstars, you will hear two words over and over: Give First. It has become shorthand for the whole culture, and it is also, Cohen says, the most misunderstood idea he has. People assume it means paying it forward, a kind of karmic exchange where you help now so you can collect later. That is exactly what he is trying to avoid.
The distinction matters. A transaction has a scoreboard. You keep track, you expect a return, and the moment the ledger feels unbalanced, the relationship curdles. Give First removes the scoreboard entirely. You help because helping is the right default, and you accept that you may never see the payoff. Cohen's own experience is the evidence he points to. As he puts it, giving without expecting any direct benefit has paid back in spades, but only because he was not counting.
That philosophy scales in a way that pure self-interest does not. When thousands of mentors, founders, and investors all operate on Give First, the network becomes generous by default, and generosity turns out to be a competitive advantage. It is the quiet engine underneath the unicorn headlines.
Chapter FourThe operator's instincts
Cohen writes as well as he builds. With Brad Feld he co-authored Do More Faster: Techstars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup, a collection of hard-won advice organized around the idea that speed and focus beat perfection. He also keeps a personal blog where he thinks out loud about investing, community, and the evolution of Give First itself, once asking whether the future is about giving first, building first, or both.
He backs people over ideas, which sounds like a cliche until you notice how consistently he means it. Ideas mutate. A startup can pivot five times before it finds its shape. The one constant is the founder, so Cohen bets on the person who will still be standing after the idea changes. It is the same systems instinct from his hacker days, applied to human beings: find the part that holds under stress, and invest there.
Away from the deal flow, he stays close to home in Boulder, a city he helped turn into a genuine startup hub. He is a founding board member of Endeavor Colorado and a co-founder of the Techstars Foundation, and he serves on the advisory board of the Silicon Flatirons Center at the University of Colorado. He reads non-fiction, plays tennis, and generally keeps a lower profile than the size of his footprint would suggest.
Chapter FiveWhy it still matters
The startup world has cycled through plenty of fashions since 2006. Bubbles inflated and popped, buzzwords came and went, and the definition of a hot sector changed every couple of years. Give First outlasted all of it, because it was never a strategy in the first place. It was a temperament, and temperament is durable.
There is something worth stealing here, whether or not you ever raise a dollar. Help people before there is anything in it for you. Do it consistently. Do it at scale if you can. Cohen turned that simple posture into an institution that has touched thousands of companies, and he did it without ever making the giving feel like a trade. For a geeky ex-hacker from Florida, it is a remarkably human system, and it keeps compounding.