Harper Reed Quotes

TechStars is mentorship-driven.

Part of the thing that's magic about TechStars is it's about a community that wants to make itself better.

The most important thing you need to make one of those incubator/accelerator type projects work is to have some people who understand how to do it and want to do it in a particular place.

We think of the Techstars product as not really the accelerator but the network. That's what entrepreneurs should be valuing here. I think it's the most undervalued thing that many entrepreneurs don't get.

I'll be a mentor to those who want to create a business, product or service and aren't exactly sure how to do that. To me, it's a true sign of success if I can help someone have a better time of it.

Silicon Valley has evolved a critical mass of engineers and venture capitalists and all the support structure - the law firms, the real estate, all that - that are all actually geared toward being accepting of startups.

Kickstarter was already up and going when I got the Fellowship. Spending time with the other Fellows was about camaraderie, and I talked to a lot of amazing and creative people.

I don't think Philadelphia's challenge is in coming up with great ideas or having great founders. I think the real challenge is keeping them here.

Silicon Valley is the best place to start a tech company in so many ways.

Believe it or not, the first spark for everything I've done today came down to me meeting one person in college who changed my life. A student named Anthony Adams who lived across the hall from me in our freshman dorm showed me what it meant to be an 'entrepreneur' when I saw him launch his own start-up company.

I separate the world of startup communities into two constituencies - leaders and feeders. The leaders are entrepreneurs and the feeders everyone else.

You've got to really enable the next generation of start-ups.

I really have become very interested at working with and helping entrepreneurs at the early stages of their growth.

I have a vested interest in increasing the amount of diversity in my own business. That's something that I care about. So mentoring people who are trying to break into the business who could use a hand, that's the type of person I look for.

You need to create a place where young students can flesh out their business plans and further develop their research projects and then have a fund to help students get started in their businesses.

I'm a rock star at the WeWorks and tech centers of New York.

What I Iove about Y Combinator is that it is a level playing field. If you get in, you immediately become a Silicon Valley insider.

Super early-stage companies have a village that form around them for support.

The Columbia Startup Lab is a visible symbol of how the university is making entrepreneurship an integral part of all colleges at the university.

The chance to interact with big shots is drawing scads of aspiring entrepreneurs to Quora, along with venture capitalists and other Valley players.

I think it's smart to always keep an eye on the companies that sit within incubator communities, which bring together the skills and expertise needed to grow an enterprise.

It's a pleasure to contribute to the entrepreneurial community at USC.

Entrepreneurship: 10% coach, 20% player, 30% cheerleader, 40% waterboy.

Products a start-up builds are really experiments…Learning about how to build a sustainable business is the outcome of those experiments [which follow] a three-step process: Build, measure, learn.” “[A startup is] … an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

I think it's important we continue to find new ways for start-up businesses to get access to funding, mentorship and business advice.