David Cohen (entrepreneur)
| David G. Cohen | |
|---|---|
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| Born | 1968 DeLand, Florida |
| Occupation | Founder and CEO, Techstars |
David Cohen (born 1968) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of Pinpoint Technologies, iContact.com, and Earfeeder. He is also an angel investor with a portfolio of more than 100 companies. Cohen is best known as the founder of Techstars, a mentorship-based startup accelerator.
Cohen delivered the keynote speech at RailsConf2012, a conference dedicated to Ruby on Rails, an open source web application framework for the Ruby programming language.
He and Brad Feld co-authored Do More Faster: Techstars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup.
Cohen was born in 1968 in DeLand, FL.
Cohen began working as a software engineer in 1991 when he became the Director of Development for Automated Dispatch Services, Inc., where he worked until 1994.
Cohen founded Pinpoint Technologies in 1993. He served as its CTO and vice president of research and development. The company developed public safety and EMS dispatch vehicle software. Zoll Medical Corporation acquired Pinpoint Technologies in 1999. Cohen stayed on with the company until 2004.
Cohen then founded iContact.com. iContact.com was a social networking service for mobile devices. It is now defunct. In an interview with weblog The Rise to the Top and on his Techstars profile, Cohen refers to this company as "a graceful failure" because it returned 78% of its funding to outside investors. Writing on his blog, Cohen said the company “failed well by deciding to cut our losses before we spent all the money trying to make something happen. The writing was on the wall, so we read it.”
In 2006, Cohen founded the music service earFeeder.com. He developed the company to solve a personal need unmet by the market. SonicSwap bought earFeeder.com in 2006.
Cohen is the founder and executive director of Techstars, a startup accelerator program. Cohen co-founded Techstars in 2006 with Brad Feld, Jared Polis, and David Brown. The first program ran in 2007. Cohen designed Techstars to improve the existing system of angel investing and to provide more support to startups. In a speech at the Future of Entrepreneurship Education Summit, Cohen said that he was particularly interested in improving the entrepreneurial ecosystem of Techstars' launch city, Boulder, Colorado. Now, Techstars has five locations that accept new startups regularly.
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