David Cohen

The best mentors present their opinions simply as data and not as direction. ”

If you're not working on something you're passionate about, it's a long, hard road. ”

There's no law that says you have to do what your mentor suggests. And the sooner you learn how to say 'no' confidently, the easier it will be to manage these key relationships. ”

If you're in a squeeze for capital and you have a solid, mutually beneficial relationship with a VC, your chances of raising will increase dramatically. ”

The more you're real with people, and the more you let people help you, the more they get to understand how you operate as an entrepreneur. The stronger that relationship is, then the more likely there's a future together in that relationship. ”

Going public is one step in the life cycle of a company; it's not the last step. ”

We've been publishing the TechStars data fully since the beginning on TechStars.com. For every single company, you can see if it's a failure, success, how much they raised. Entrepreneurs deserve that sort of transparency from accelerators, and it's not hard to do. ”

If I had a do over, I'd indubitably start investing in startups earlier in life! ”

Because one of the main jobs of a CEO is to set the vision and strategy for the company, I'm a big believer in making one of the founders the default CEO. ”

Twilio is a great example of a company executing tremendously well on its vision and delivering a beautiful set of products that solves real problems. ”