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Flash Slideshow: Mass High Tech All-Stars Thought Leadership Roundtable
Shawn Broderick says his hair is on fire.
Early this March — Broderick can’t remember the exact date — venture capital investor Brad Feld asked if he would make a full-time commitment to run a new venture. Broderick had 24 hours to decide. Because he said yes, he’s signed a short-term lease on Cambridge office space, signed on a few advisers and has begun vetting a stack of 600 applications to fill a dozen spaces.
In its first few weeks of life, TechStars Boston, the Massachusetts branch of the Boulder, Colo.-based tech incubator that Feld helped found in 2006, might look an awful lot like the dozen or so ventures it plans to nurture here.
To the companies it incubates, “We want to look like another founder,” Broderick said. “We want to look like that last founder you pull in just before you start kicking ass.”
TechStars takes 6 percent of common stock in companies that enter the program. In exchange, companies get $6,000 cash per founder, access to a list of mentors and three months of shared office space with about 10 other startups. TechStars will host weekly sessions with mentors and an investor demo day for companies. Some of the incubator’s events will be open to the public, Broderick said.
In Boston, it will all take place under high ceilings and tall windows on the top floor of the former Cambridge Electric Light Co. building on Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square. Founded in Boulder by Feld and three entrepreneurs, TechStars announced the launch of its Boston program in February, beginning the mad rush to establish itself here. Investors backing the Boston program are iRobot Corp. (Nasdaq: IRBT) CEO Colin Angle, StillSecure Inc. corporate director Will Herman, Avid Technology Inc. (Nasdaq: AVID) founder Bill Warner and Spark Capital.
Feld, a one-time Ph.D. candidate at MIT who founded Feld Technologies Inc. in Massachusetts in 1987, said Boston lacks an enterprise that can bring together experienced technology leaders with first-time entrepreneurs who are “the lifeblood” of a startup ecosystem. Now managing director at The Foundry, a Boulder venture capital firm, Feld said experienced entrepreneurs want that opportunity as much as newcomers do.
“You have to have something tangible and substantive for the mentors to work on other than yet another meeting, yet another evening event, yet another monthly thing where I see all the same people,” he said. “All that stuff’s fine, but there’s a gaping hole in the middle if you don’t have something substantive for people to dig into.”
MIT Entrepreneurship Center chairman Edward Roberts, who called Feld a student in the 1980s, pointed to a string of incubators that failed after the dot-com bubble burst. TechStars will have to be smarter and more entrepreneurial-minded, he said. If it can do that, it will be an “amplifier,” he said — much like the banks and law firms that serve the startup ecosystem here.
“What we have done principally over the last 30 years is, we’ve taken the root system of people wanting to be entrepreneurs and start companies and we’ve made that a much stronger signal force in Boston by building on it with every mechanism under the sun,” Roberts said.
It’s an experience Broderick can relate to, with both success and disappointment. In 1996, Broderick was a co-founder at Cambridge-based Internet game maker Genetic Anomalies Inc., which sold three years later to California-based gaming software maker THQ Inc. for nearly $8 million in stock. He then founded DigitalShares Inc., developing “virtualized financial instruments,” and Voxx Inc., a voice services company, both of which shut down without a successful exit. His current company, TrustPlus Inc., is growing about 8 percent a year, he said, with Broderick and CTO Michael Johnson working from home to keep the online reputation-management business going.
Broderick said regardless of the success or failure of the 10 or so companies that will join him at TechStars Boston this May, he hopes the program will have an impact.
“Part of our goal is, it’s not just about these individual companies — it’s about the community,” he said. “Boston has some habits of insularity. Everybody’s trying to make that better.”
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