Boulder startup icon David Cohen to lead Techstars again

BOULDER — David Cohen, a longtime luminary of the Boulder startup scene, is retaking leadership of Techstars, the startup accelerator he co-founded and served as CEO for more than a decade. 

A Boulder resident, Cohen is resuming the CEO role from Maëlle Gavet, whose relatively brief but notable stint as Techstars’ boss has ended due to health issues. 

In a LinkedIn post Wednesday, Gavet, who became Techstars’ CEO in 2021, wrote, “11 years ago I had to have one of my thyroids surgically removed due to the presence of cancerous nodules and for all these years I have been able to live almost worry-free with daily medication and a checkup every six months. Unfortunately the results of the last checkup showed that nodules had started to appear on my other thyroid.”

Cohen, an entrepreneur and investor who has recently served on the board of directors for local organizations such as the Silicon Flatirons Center at the University of Colorado, founded Techstars in 2006 in Boulder alongside Brad Feld, David Brown and Jared Polis (now Colorado’s governor).

“I want to thank Maëlle for pouring her passion, blood, sweat and tears into Techstars. I feel fortunate to have worked so closely with her,” Cohen wrote Wednesday on the Techstars blog. “She built a great team, made many tough decisions, and bravely enacted complex changes that were sorely needed. But now Maëlle must focus on her health.”

Cohen was Techstars’ CEO from 2006 to 2019.

“While I am excited to be back as CEO of Techstars, I was never far away. I was the first employee and have been an employee here continuously since then,” Cohen’s blog post said. “I was the first managing director of our first and at the time, only, accelerator (Boulder) in the early years. In total, I have served as CEO or co-CEO for 13 of the 17 years that Techstars has existed and have been on the board since the company’s inception.”

Tapping a Boulder startup ecosystem veteran to lead Techstars may strike some as ironic, given the previous regime’s decision to move its headquarters to New York and to wind down its Boulder-based accelerator program after this spring’s cohort graduates. 

“Boulder has been our home for more than 17 years and that community has made us the global company we are today,” Gavet, who lives in New York, said in February. “We remain proud of our Colorado roots; however, New York is the second largest — and growing — startup ecosystem globally, and we want our headquarters to be in one of the epicenters of the startup world with more funding, connectedness, talent, knowledge and market reach.”Gavet was in Boulder last week for Boulder Startup Week. She participated in a fireside chat with University of Colorado director of innovation and entrepreneurship Stan Hickory, but did not speak publicly about Techstars’ move to New York or her intention to step down.

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