TechStars New York has a new managing director: Eugene Chung, a former senior associate at big VC firm New Enterprise Associates. He replaces David Tisch, who stepped down from the job in August and still has a role with the program.
TechStars has emerged as one of the top startup accelerators in the country in the past few years, amid an explosion of similar entrepreneurship “bootcamp” programs. Like most accelerators, TechStars has a competitive selection process and brings in technology startup teams for a few months of dedicated product development. It ends with a splashy demo day, where entrepreneurs pitch their project to investors and the press.
As director in New York, Chung will oversee the day-to-day operations of the program, including its application process and investor pitch session. Before NEA, Chung worked at animation studio Pixar and private equity firm Warburg Pincus.
The TechStars program emphasizes its network of mentors, who give startup teams advice, introduce them to others in business, and may wind up as investors themselves. TechStars also has evolved outside the San Francisco Bay Area, which is the center of the technology universe, giving it perhaps a slightly different perspective than Silicon Valley incubators like Y Combinator.
The program’s main cities are Boston, New York, Seattle, and Boulder, CO. It also operates a program in San Antonio, TX, focused on cloud computing, and has begun licensing its incubator system to large companies like Microsoft and Nike.
