Do More Faster

How can you build a high-impact startup when time, money, and experience are all working against you? In Do More Faster, TechStars founders David Cohen and Brad Feld argue that great startups succeed not because of a stroke of genius but because of focused, relentless execution combined with mentorship, community, and velocity. Their central thesis is clear: your key advantage as a startup is your ability to act quickly, learn from feedback, and adapt before anyone else can.

Cohen and Feld, drawing from the TechStars accelerator experience, contend that entrepreneurship isn’t about having a billion-dollar idea—it’s about learning faster than your competition. Big ideas are overrated; great execution is everything. The title, borrowed from a TechStars mantra, is both a challenge and a playbook for early-stage founders. It captures the bias toward action that distinguishes successful entrepreneurs from dreamers who simply wait for the perfect moment.

The Power of Acceleration and Mentorship

The TechStars model—placing ten startups in an intensive three-month mentorship program—serves as a microcosm for how focus, urgency, and feedback loops can condense years of learning into weeks. Cohen and Feld emphasize that the most valuable asset an entrepreneur can access isn’t money, but the wisdom of mentors. The book was written to scale that mentorship to anyone starting a company, capturing advice from over 100 successful founders and investors.

From Zynga’s Mark Pincus to WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg, each contributor frames a real-world lesson. Some are cautionary tales about premature scaling, others are case studies on how a pivot led to breakout success. The core message: learning from others’ experience accelerates your own. TechStars itself exists because the authors wanted to help young founders avoid common early-stage pitfalls—like chasing too many features, hiring without care, or falling in love with their idea instead of their customers.

The Seven Themes of Startup Mastery

The book organizes startup wisdom into seven overarching themes—Idea & Vision, People, Execution, Product, Fundraising, Legal & Structure, and Work–Life Balance. These sections follow the natural evolution of a startup, from its earliest conception to establishing sustainable balance amid chaos. Each theme is packed with mini-essays written by mentors and founders who lived the lessons firsthand.

• Idea & Vision: A reminder that your first idea will likely be wrong. Execution, iteration, and passion matter far more.
• People: The right team is your foundation—avoid founder conflict, hire deliberately, and build a culture of trust.
• Execution: Startups win by moving quickly while learning constantly. Measure progress through validated learning, not vanity metrics.
• Product: Don’t wait for perfect. Ship early, test with users, and be willing to throw things away.
• Fundraising: Understand the trade-offs of taking money, and remember that bootstrapping often builds resilience.
• Legal & Structure: Deal with equity, incorporation, and vesting early. A handshake isn’t enough when stakes are real.
• Work–Life Balance: Long-term success depends on staying mentally and physically healthy while nurturing relationships.

The Mindset of Doing More Faster

Feld and Cohen show that doing more faster is not about reckless speed—it’s about velocity with purpose. You test, measure, and adjust constantly, combining validated learning (Eric Ries's term in The Lean Startup) with a growth-driven mindset. They encourage founders to build quickly, fail cheaply, and learn relentlessly. “Fail fast” becomes less a slogan and more a scientific method for reducing uncertainty at high speed.

As you progress through their lessons, you sense a shift from tactical advice toward a philosophy of entrepreneurship rooted in curiosity, humility, and perseverance. The message is both human and practical: startups are not mechanical entities—they’re emotional journeys driven by passion, pain, and people. Great founders treat failure as feedback, execution as learning, and speed as their greatest weapon.

Why It Matters

In an era where anyone can build a product overnight, the difference between surviving and thriving lies in how fast you learn. Do More Faster teaches you to channel urgency into discovery—to connect with mentors, understand your users, and make decisions quickly even when uncertainty looms. It emphasizes entrepreneurship not as a solo act but as a team sport supported by community and guided by principles of openness, iteration, and resilience.

Ultimately, Cohen and Feld want you to stop waiting for the perfect moment, product, or investor. They want you to start now—to build, test, fail, and rebuild until your vision matches real-world needs. The book’s core message echoes Steve Jobs’s rallying cry: “Real artists ship.” Or in the TechStars vernacular—startups succeed because they learn how to do more, faster.

One of the book’s most provocative lessons comes from Tim Ferriss (“Trust Me, Your Idea Is Worthless”), who insists that aspiring founders stop worshiping their ideas and start focusing on what they can build. As Ferriss puts it, “You can steal ideas, but you can’t steal execution or passion.” There’s no market for ideas because success lies not in innovation alone, but in acting faster and smarter than others.

Why Ideas Don’t Matter

Ferriss describes hundreds of would-be entrepreneurs who approach him with a “world-changing” idea but demand a nondisclosure agreement before sharing it. His rule: never sign NDAs, because anyone who overprotects an idea undervalues the real work of building something customers will love. He invests in people, not concepts—because even failed entrepreneurs who execute can learn and win later. Investors like Warren Buffett share the same philosophy: they don’t buy dreams; they buy executional competence.

Examples of Execution Over Ideation

TechStars showcases this through multiple pivots. For instance, Next Big Sound arrived with a different idea than what it eventually became. The founders quickly scrapped their social music game after seeing poor traction and built a data analytics company for musicians—a pivot that earned major funding. Similarly, Occipital’s Jeff Powers and Vikas Reddy pivoted from image editing software to build the barcode-scanning app RedLaser, later acquired by eBay. Execution turned lost causes into multimillion-dollar outcomes.

Action Defines Entrepreneurs

If you’re afraid to expose your idea to the world, Ferriss says, you’re not ready for entrepreneurship. The moment of truth comes from engagement with users, feedback, and failure. In contrast, brainstorming is a risk-free pastime. True founders embrace rejection and use it as fuel. They test, iterate, and adapt based on reality, not fantasy. Execution differentiates talking about change from creating it.

“David didn’t beat Goliath with a whiteboard,” Ferriss reminds us. “He got amongst it.”

In essence, the lesson aligns with the broader TechStars ethos: stop hiding, start doing. Cohen and Feld drive home that your idea will evolve dramatically if you get it into the hands of users. The courage to launch immediately, test visibly, and learn publicly is how founders separate possibility from progress.

Kevin Mann’s story of founding Graphic.ly captures the fuel that sustains every hard-working founder: passion rooted in personal pain. Mann’s frustration after traveling 100 miles for a missing comic issue led him to realize that buying comics digitally should be as easy as a movie on iTunes. From this annoyance grew a startup that revolutionized digital comics distribution. His story distills a key TechStars principle: the best ideas come from solving problems you care deeply about.

The Role of Emotional Investment

Cohen and Feld emphasize that passion isn’t optional—it’s armor for the brutal emotional volatility of entrepreneurship. Without it, you’ll quit when the early wins fade and reality bites. Mann’s love of comics helped him endure the grind of production, rejection, and financial risk. His genuine enthusiasm also attracted mentors like Micah Baldwin, who later became Graphic.ly’s CEO and turned the company into a venture-backed success.

Pain as Inspiration

Isaac Saldana’s founding of SendGrid offers another example. As a developer struggling with e-mails being flagged as spam, Saldana dug deep into the messy world of deliverability and turned his own pain into a multimillion-dollar service used by companies like Foursquare and GetSatisfaction. “Look for the pain,” the authors repeat—that’s where opportunity lives. If you can solve a painful, recurring problem for yourself, chances are thousands of others share it.

Following Passion Through Obstacles

Passion-driven founders also tend to attract allies. Mann’s commitment led investors to rally behind him; Saldana’s authenticity drew mentors out of their comfort zones. Passion is magnetic because it proves authenticity. It also keeps founders resilient when failures accumulate. As the book repeatedly shows, passion transforms frustration into innovation.

Following your heart doesn’t guarantee success, but it guarantees you’ll keep moving when others give up. Whether it’s building comics for fans or fixing broken e-mails, founders driven by love for their craft—or hate for a problem—inevitably build something meaningful.

A recurring TechStars commandment is “Fail fast.” As Alex White from Next Big Sound learned, failure isn’t the opposite of success—it’s the raw material that creates it. White spent years building a fantasy record-label simulation before realizing during TechStars that his model didn’t work. When mentors told him, “We believe in you, not your idea,” he pivoted in a single day to create what became the leading analytics platform for the music industry.

Redefining Failure as Learning

Cohen and Feld reinterpret failure as rapid feedback. When startups try ten things quickly, they find one that works before others even start. The key is to test assumptions early with real users, discard what fails, and move forward emotionally unscathed. White tested multiple user interfaces and business models in quick succession until his metrics resonated with his audience—and investors noticed.

Prototyping Over Planning

Greg Reinacker’s story of NewsGator reinforces this. Instead of long business plans, he built a prototype RSS reader for Outlook over one weekend. Within weeks, downloads and feedback started pouring in, proving that execution beats planning. The prototype evolved into a full-fledged company with recurring revenue and venture backing. His advice is blunt: “Don’t plan. Prototype.”

When to Pull the Plug

Sometimes “failing fast” means killing a project entirely. Serial entrepreneur Paul Berberian learned this the hard way with the failed novelty gadget Zenie Bottle—a “lava lamp meets social network.” When it didn’t work, he shut it down quickly, returned investors’ money, and later built Raindance Communications, which sold for millions. Knowing when to stop is as crucial as knowing when to start.

“You only truly fail if you stop trying,” White concludes. The secret isn’t avoiding mistakes—it’s accelerating them.

This attitude echoes Eric Ries’s Lean Startup philosophy: progress equals validated learning. Fail fast doesn’t mean rush blindly—it means build, measure, learn, repeat. In the TechStars world, each short cycle of experimentation gets you closer to something customers will love.

Feld and Cohen dedicate an entire theme to what they call the heartbeat of startups: people. Whether it’s co-founders, employees, or mentors, the right individuals determine whether your company thrives or implodes. The authors summarize it bluntly: “The three most important things in entrepreneurship are people, people, people.”

Never Go It Alone

Mark O’Sullivan, founder of Vanilla Forums, learned this firsthand. After working solo for years, he joined TechStars and realized he couldn’t scale or survive without a co-founder. Partnering with Todd Burry changed everything—the workload, morale, and quality of execution improved dramatically. Their friendship and complementary skills turned burnout into momentum. Most iconic companies—from Apple to Google—were started by co-founders, not lone geniuses.

Hire Slow, Fire Fast

Matt Blumberg of Return Path drives home a painful truth: one wrong hire in a 10-person startup changes your DNA by 10%. Founders must resist the urge to hire quickly and the fear of firing slowly. Early hires define your culture, productivity, and speed. Like organs in a transplant, some fit and thrive while others get rejected—detect that quickly and act decisively.

Culture and Mentorship

Greg Gottesman’s “Define Your Culture” outlines traits that distinguish great cultures: no politics, mutual respect, obsession with customers, frugality, and high energy. Emily Olson of Foodzie adds that engaged mentorship keeps founders grounded. By regularly looping back to mentors for input—and closing the feedback loop—startups become learning organisms.

Together, these stories show that execution depends less on tactics and more on human chemistry. Founders build products; cultures turn them into movements. The best entrepreneurs invest as much in relationships as they do in technology.

Execution separates the startups you’ve heard of from those you never will. “Do more faster” is both the framework and the test. In this section, the authors highlight how execution isn’t frantic activity—it’s disciplined learning. Founders who move fast but measure effectively evolve before the market does.

Speed with Purpose

Feld and Cohen explain that small teams thrive because they can make decisions faster than large corporations bogged down by fear and bureaucracy. Speed grants confidence and unfair advantage. As David Cohen notes, “Startups must move at bullet time.” Companies like Occipital and DailyBurn succeeded by shipping products monthly, not annually, and iterating in public.

Measure, Don’t Guess

Investor and analytics guru Dave McClure teaches the “AARRR” pirate metrics—Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue—as the compass for early-stage learning. If something doesn’t improve one of these metrics, it’s distraction. Likewise, Ryan McIntyre (*Excite.com*) warns founders to balance gut intuition with solid data. Together they show that execution means combining art and science: track results but trust experience when data is fuzzy.

Bias Toward Action

Author and entrepreneur Ben Casnocha distills execution into two steps: start, then keep going. He argues that paralysis by analysis kills more startups than bad ideas ever do. Inaction and overplanning are the enemies of learning. Borrowing wisdom from leaders like Andy Grove and Colin Powell, Casnocha suggests making decisions on 40% of the information you wish you had—and adjusting rapidly.

Execution isn’t chaos; it’s constant refinement. Startups that master this rhythm—fast action, fast learning, fast iteration—move from uncertainty to inevitability while competitors are still writing business plans.

Money can fuel your vision—or destroy it. Cohen and Feld demystify the funding process and advocate a principle many founders overlook: you don’t have to raise money. Bootstrapping, they argue, builds discipline and ownership you’ll rarely regain after bringing in investors. Yet when funding is necessary, understanding who you’re partnering with and why becomes crucial.

Bootstrapping Builds Character

David Brown, co-founder of Pinpoint Technologies, recalls using a $100,000 customer loan to build a product rather than chase VCs. The result was a $40 million company with zero dilution. Similarly, TechStars graduates J-Squared used early revenue from Facebook apps to become profitable without external capital. Resource constraints sharpened their creativity and forced rapid pivots toward sustainable products.

Choosing the Right Investors

Brad Feld warns against “angel investors who aren’t.” Some show up for status or jobs, not to invest. The authors recommend due diligence on investors the same way they scrutinize you—ask for references, confirm they’ve funded companies before, and watch for exploitative terms. Genuine investors align incentives, not ownership grabs. Jeff Clavier’s “three asses rule” encapsulates what real seed investors want: a smart-ass team, kick-ass product, and big-ass market.

Valuation and Control

Finally, they caution founders not to overoptimize on valuation. Early investors take substantial risk and deserve meaningful returns. If you raise at too high a valuation without traction, you risk painful down rounds later. Fair, transparent deals create long-term alignment. When negotiating term sheets, focus on two levers: returns and control—everything else is noise.

The book reframes funding as a partnership, not a payday. The goal isn’t just to get financed—it’s to build a business strong enough that raising money becomes optional.

Lawyers and paperwork don’t seem glamorous until skipping them wrecks your company. Feld and Cohen devote an entire section to the unsexy but essential work of incorporating, defining equity, and protecting intellectual property. Their mantra: Deal with structure now or pay exponentially later.

Form Early and Choose Wisely

Startup attorney Brad Bernthal explains that by default, an informal project operates as a general partnership—meaning personal liability for debts and lawsuits. Incorporate early to protect yourself and your co-founders. He urges every founder to set ownership stakes, IP assignment agreements, and vesting schedules before any success clouds judgment. Without them, former collaborators can later claim large unearned equity slices.

Vesting Protects Everyone

Jon Fox of Intense Debate tells how one co-founder quit early—luckily, vesting reduced his stake so remaining founders could move forward fairly and investors stayed confident. Vesting isn’t investor control; it’s protection from imbalance and resentment. It’s how you prove commitment to the team and yourself.

Delaware, 83(b), and Lawyers

Entrepreneurs should “default to Delaware,” the most business-friendly state for incorporation, adds Jon Taylor. Matt Galligan’s painful oversight—forgetting to file an 83(b) election—cost him thousands in unnecessary taxes after his startup sold to AOL. The book uses stories like this to hammer home that small legal oversights snowball fast. And as Feld quips, “Your brother-in-law is probably not the right corporate lawyer.” Work with startup-savvy counsel who understands equity and fundraising.

A startup’s foundation isn’t its codebase; it’s its capitalization table. Solid legal ground gives you freedom to innovate without fear of future chaos.

Few startup books talk about burnout as candidly as Do More Faster. Feld and Cohen believe work–life balance is a competitive advantage. Sustained creativity, emotional resilience, and team health depend on founders who know when to rest. Entrepreneurship is a marathon disguised as a sprint.

Isolation and Renewal

Brad Feld shares his personal story of burnout, divorce, and rediscovery through boundaries and intentional “Life Dinners” with his wife Amy Batchelor. Their rules—quarterly off-grid vacations, defined work zones, and scheduled reflections—help him stay grounded while managing multiple startups and investments. Entrepreneurs, he warns, don’t fail from lack of effort but from unrelenting effort without recovery.

Health and Perspective

Andy Smith of DailyBurn urges founders to treat their bodies like startups: maintain energy through fitness, nutrition, and sleep. Regular exercise enhances cognitive performance and decision quality—critical assets in the chaos of early growth. Seth Levine encourages “getting out from behind your computer” to think while hiking, running, or biking with colleagues; creative clarity often shows up outdoors, not in the inbox.

Passion that Feeds, Not Consumes

Eran Egozy of Harmonix Music Systems (creator of Guitar Hero) illustrates healthy passion. For a decade before success, his joy in fusing music and technology sustained the team through failure after failure. Passion kept them alive; obsession might have burned them out. Likewise, Mark Solon’s story of moving from Boston to Boise shows how following your heart can lead to both fulfillment and business opportunity.

Work without recovery leads to collapse. The final TechStars lesson: build a company you love without losing yourself in it. Because to do more faster, you also have to live better longer.