The Making of a Tech Star

Since its founding in 2006, Techstars has been on a mission to help entrepreneurs build their businesses. Each year, nearly 500 companies participate in a three-month mentorship driven accelerator, receiving up to USD120,000, workspace, educational programming, hands-on mentorship and lifelong access to the Techstars network. In 2017, Techstars made scaling history when one of its graduating companies, SendGrid, a leading digital communication platform, became the very first startup from any accelerator program to go public.

The SendGrid founders entered Techstars Class 4 in Boulder, Colorado, USA, in 2009 to solve a ubiquitous problem — getting basic emails sent. As a serial entrepreneur, principal Founder Isaac Saldana was frustrated. He spent a lot of time setting up automated email notifications to users — such as password resets, confirmations, verification links, purchase receipts, et cetera — only to find that nearly half of them ended up in the user’s spam folder. He along with co-Founders Jose Lopez and Tim Jenkins, built a solution and took it to Techstars to see if other companies shared the same pain points.

It turns out they did. By graduation, SendGrid had nearly 100 paying customers and had delivered over 100 million emails. It also raised USD750,000 in Series A funding led by Highway 12 Ventures shortly after being incubated by Techstars. And nine years later, it was acquired by Twilio, part of the Techstars Ventures portfolio, for USD2 billion.

“Techstars was instrumental in getting SendGrid both the exposure that it needed and also the fundraising that it needed,” says Sameer Dholakia, CEO of SendGrid, who has also served as a Techstars mentor. “It was pretty evident quickly that this was going to be a high growth business.”

Getting culture right

It’s no secret that scaling a company can pose serious challenges, and SendGrid faced many as it continued to grow quickly. However, one aspect that the company got right from the beginning was culture, which is based upon four H values: happy, hungry, humble and honest.

“The challenge on the culture dimension was how do we make all the changes we need to make in the business while still being true to our culture and our values,” says Dholakia. “It’s much easier to scale culture when you’re small because of the number of humans that you brought into the organization. The variance is a lot lower and the fidelity of the signal you get on bringing people in and making sure they have the right values is a lot clearer.”

The key to scaling the culture: embedding it in every aspect of the employee experience as well as structurally throughout the organization “so that it’s impossible for any employee to work at your company without really experiencing those values,” says Dholakia. For example, potential candidates interview with four or five interviewers, each tasked with trying to identify whether or not the candidate is aligned with one of the four H’s. In addition, Dholakia meets with all new employees during the onboarding process not only to share the four H’s, but also to ask each employee to participate in protecting, defending and strengthening them.

Through YPO’s affiliate partnership, members can fast track to the interview stage when they apply to Techstars accelerator program.

“One of the great lessons you learn as you go from a startup to a scaled company is ownership diminishes over time unless you proactively focus on it,” says Dholakia. “That obligation we give them on day one is a really important part of why our culture has been so strong even as we’ve tripled and quadrupled in scale.”

Accelerating growth

SendGrid shares these learnings with Techstars startups in various accelerators. In fact, employees have spent over 500 hours as mentors in 2018 alone.

“The spirit of Techstars is very well encapsulated in #givefirst,” says Dholakia. “We’ve been there in the shoes of all the startups going through it. We’ve had our bumps just like every company so we like to share those learnings back with our fellow Techstars classes.”