Pros
*Working with founders *98% of employees and team members are good people
Cons
2% of the team creates 95% of the issues. And that 2% are the ELT, comprised of mostly large corporate figures who have never started a company, worked with early stage teams, or really even understand the fundamentals of the business. They arrived with their playbooks and assume they are correct. But if you look at the evidence, it's a constant churn cycle these past two years alone where we've lost some of the best MDs, two of the best GMs, and many other great people who are just burnt out or tired of being treated poorly or looked at as "not doing enough". This perspective is quite widely held by accelerator staff - the experience across engineering, legal, etc. is not quite the same. The CEO talks a lot about honest talks and empathy, but you don't see it in her actions. The HC team creates more problems then they do value. And the team that is about the business has the least amount of influence on the direction Techstars takes. It's a far cry from the tenure of David Cohen and what it was like working alongside him and the original executive team closely connected to program teams.
