Hot tub hackathon?

Good things come to those areas blessed with Google Fiber, and so it is with Kansas City. Last summer, GOOG the Beneficent gifted the metropolitan area with its own brand of ultra high-speed Internet. Local startups have already been taking advantage of Google Fiber's 100x speed, but there is more.

So very much more.

TechStars cofounder and Foundry Group managing director Brad Feld has been inspired to perform his own act of generosity. According to VentureBeat, on Monday he closed a deal on a three-bedroom home called the "Feld KC Fiberhouse" where startups can cowork, co-live, and experiment with all that Google Fiber has to offer:

"I’m not going to be living in it. Instead, I’m going to let entrepreneurs live / work in it. Rent free. As part of helping create the Kansas City startup community. And to learn about the dynamics of Google Fiber. And to have some fun."

TechStars kicked off the startup reality show trend that Bravo, MTV, and HBO are now chasing. So it's no surprise that there's a contest and "all-star panel of judges" (including TechStars CEO David Cohen) to win a spot and offer advice. Although if Mr. Feld is really interested in "fun," may we recommend the requisite hot tub and confessional cam?

The project will be run in partnership with the Kauffman Foundation and Startup America. But it's hardly the only friendly face in the "fiberhood" (gulp). Hanover Heights is also "quite close" to Homes for Hackers, which offers free housing and Fiber, and the KC Startup Village.

All in all, it sounds like a cheaper, more wholesome version of Silicon Valley's "hacker hostels," which can cost $1,200/month and aren't always up to code. The competition ends March 22 and you can apply for one of the five slots here.

Congratulations, Mr. Feld: You are now the Lou Perlman of Startups!

Mr. Chung (Photo: TechStars)

In December, after reports about an impending downturn in the accelerator boom, some local investors expressed concerns about the future of TechStars New York. Would the next Demo Day be the same parade of oversubscribed startups when much-hyped graduates were still stuck in beta? Were the lessons learned in TechStars enough to prepare companies for life outside the bubble?

David Tisch's departure as managing director added to that uncertainty. But TechStars CEO and founder David Cohen dismissed those worries, pointing to "heavy inbound interest" in the role. Today, he announced his new hire from the 35 candidates interviewed: Eugene Chung, a former venture capitalist with New Enterprise Associates. 

NEA has been making a number of high-profile investments in New York startups, including leading Buzzfeed's recent $19.3 million Series D. Mr. Chung was "instrumental in managing" investments in BuzzFeed and Bedrocket. The Harvard MBA also has experience as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley and an energy investor at Warburg Pincus. In a prior stint at Pixar, he programmed an app that automated analysis of a film's story development.

Mr. Chung has already been mentoring TechStars companies, including Poptip, Moveline, Bondsy, Condition One, Classtivity, Wander, and Pickie and wrote about how accelerators were disrupting venture capital for the Harvard Business Review. Not too shabby as far as cover letters go.

Interim managing director Nicole Glaros, who was shipped in from Boulder to take the helm, will co-manage the spring class and be based here for the duration.

Mr. Cohen told Betabeat he expects to announce the companies selected by the end of March, before the program starts on April 2. Interest was at an all-time high, with 1,700 startups applying.

You can read posts about today's announcement from Mr. Cohen, TechStars cofounder Brad Feld, and Mr. Chung himself.

Photo: Edward Reed (via Inc.com)

At any startup accelerator, Demo Days are a relentlessly upbeat affair--a parade of promotional pitch decks and stats about market size that somehow always reach up into the billions. But in New York City, Techstars' biannual showcase takes the cake.

Founded in Boulder, the program launched in New York in 2011 (just as the startup scene cried out for tent poles to rally around) and easily fills auditoriums. Companies often announce “soft-circled” funding or even that the round has already closed. Mayor Bloomberg even called the number of investors who fly to New York to check out presentations, "proof positive that the TechStars is going to change this world and certainly change America and this city.”

Or as TechStars mentor Joel Spolsky put it before introducing one of the startups at Webster Hall: "Time to get my company oversubscribed."

However, some investors and entrepreneurs have expressed concerns about whether the spring 2013 class of TechStars New York will yield the same financial windfall--and the same amount of interest from potential applicants.

Part of the worry is related to the Series A crunch and fears of funding cliffs and falling valuations. Economic conditions are unlikely to support the accelerator boom we've seen over the past couple years. "We grew too fast," Paul Graham wrote this month, announcing that Y Combinator, the mother of all incubators, would reduce the number of startups in its program from 84 down to 50. And that was after downgrading the investment per company from $150,000 to $80,000. Under the headline, "We know accelerators are headed for a shakeout — but do they? "PandoDaily recently pointed out, there are "at least 100 such programs churning out thousands of startups a year and the expectation that 90 percent of them won’t return their money."

"I'm not sure why you'd say there's an overall constriction based on one data point on the opposite side of the country," TechStars founder and CEO David Cohen retorted by email when we brought up changes at Y Combinator as a sign of things to come for other accelerators. "The fact that TechStars is in NYC, offers more funding than Y Combinator, has an awesome alumni and mentor network right there means that more startups from the area will likely apply," he said. (In exchange for 6 percent equity, TechStars invests $18,000 per company and a $100,000 convertible note.)

Mr. Cohen noted that New York's first program raised $24.2 million including follow on rounds, where the second program raised $13.8 million and the third raised $11.6 million. As for whether the next class will see as much investment, he said, "Time will tell."

But in interviews with Betabeat, local sources also listed specific concerns related to the management of TechStars New York, which recently saw a changing of the guard. David Tisch, who rose to prominence in his role as managing director of the program, stepped down in August to focus on investing through Box Group, his boutique angel fund, which has already seen a number of exits including GroupMe and just this week Behance.

Betabeat has learned that Adam Rothenberg, a director at TechStars for the past two years, has also left the program and will likely be working on investments through Box Group as well. Both Mr. Tisch and Mr. Rothenberg declined to comment for this article.

In November, rather than announcing a permanent replacement for Mr. Tisch from within the New York ecosystem, TechStars shipped in an interim managing director from the Boulder: Nicole Glaros. Ms. Glaros, a serial entrepreneur, comes equipped with plenty of relevant experience. She's run five previous TechStars' programs and will be living here.

So far, the absence of a hometown cheerleader like Mr. Tisch doesn't appear to have affected applicant interest. Mr. Cohen told Betabeat that the April program already boasts 735 application with a month to go before the deadline. "My guess is we'll break another record--which has happened every year since inception. As you know our acceptance rate is around 1% nationally, and we've seen 1200-1400 applications in the past in NYC for 10-12 spots. This doesn't seem to be slowing down," he said.

Mr. Cohen will be "very hands on with this program as usual," he added, noting that TechStars cofounder Brad Feld "will be spending extra time with this program as well."

However, those familiar with TechStars New York noted an unusual aura of silence around this program's candidates. "It's still a big mystery. Rumors usually spread like wildfire within the TechStars community," said one source, noting that around this time insiders typically know who is applying.

A couple of sources wondered if there was difficulty in finding a permanent replacement because of the way managing directors, who get a cut of TechStar's equity in companies, are compensated. Details offered are always hazy in terms of whether the position requires a buy-in. "There is limited salary at best for the position, but there are PLENTY of great people in NYC who can make this work," one TechStars mentor told Betabeat.

Mr. Cohen dismissed speculation about compensation, adding that although no offers have been made, TechStars has "heavy inbound interest in the role." Including other cities, TechStars boasts 17 exits overall. "In the past it's helped us attract high quality people such as Katie Rae, Jason Seats, Andy Sack, Nicole Glaros, Luke Beatty, and David Tisch in the past, and I don't expect that will be a concern at all."

Then there are some more pressing issues related to the startups themselves. One angel investor attributed skepticism about this class of companies’ ability to raise to the success rate of previous graduates. "TechStars bets on a category and hopes they can shape the startup," the investor explained. "People that invest after TechStars do it with the assumption that they've been vetted." However, the investor said, some graduates, "get the money and don't understand that it's money to build a business--or at least get LAUNCH. Where's Wander? How long has it been that they've been in beta?" Bondsy, another much-hyped startup, is also still in beta.

The investor also wondered if the lessons learned during the program were enough to prepare them for life outside the accelerator's bubble. "They teach them all this crazy shit about pitching that's not applicable in the real world. When going for your next round after TechStars, you can't go with your 10-slide TechStars deck and a promise that you're going to produce."

Mr. Cohen pointed out that TechStars New York has already had one exit from its first class: ThinkNear, a hyperlocal ad company that was acquired for $22.5 million by Telenav in October. "We're talking about 2011 here, last year," Mr. Cohen said in response to those concerns about the caliber of companies. "I wonder what sort of success people expect in that timeframe, now that it's the end of 2012?" It's often mentioned that Y Combinator, which was started in 2005, depends on a handful of blockbusters for its returns, including Dropbox, Airbnb, and Heroku.

Mr. Cohen encouraged anyone with questions or concerns about the upcoming program to reach out to him. There is an upcoming recruiting event, TechStars for a Day, scheduled for January 10th. The event will feature talks from Ms. Glaros, Mr. Spolsky and Thrillist and Lerer Ventures cofounder Ben Lerer. "Most importantly, it's a chance for us to spend time with interesting companies who want to learn more about TechStars." To get an invitation, startups have to apply before the January 4th early deadline.

Ms. Glaros. (Photo: NearlyNicole.com)

TechStars NYC has been quiet since August, when managing director David Tisch announced that he would be stepping back from his day-to-day role at the accelerator program. Almost exactly a year ago, we profiled Mr. Tisch's rise to prominence in New York's startup scene largely through his role in building a satellite program for TechStars, which entered the local market just when it could benefit from a little infrastructure.

(Early observers will recall that the first class of TechStars New York was filmed for a reality show, but managed to escape the humorless vitriol directed at Randi Zuckerberg--probably because the TechStars version was for Bloomberg instead of Bravo, and involved about 100 percent fewer toga parties.) Over the past few years, Mr. Tisch has become a prolific angel investor through Box Group, and his name frequently shows up in seed funding rounds for New York companies--TechStars and otherwise. Thus finding a replacement who is as well-versed in the scene might be tricky.

But accelerator season waits for no man. Today, TechStars founder and CEO David Cohen announced an interim replacement for Mr. Tisch. Serial entrepreneur Nicole Glaros, who has been managing director of TechStars in Boulder since 2009, will be moving out East for the spring. With a new figurehead in place, applications are officially opening today for the program that starts April 4. In a blog post, Mr. Cohen, who will also be "partially based" in New York this session, wrote:

Of all of our Managing Directors nationally, Nicole has the most experience with the culture and heart of TechStars and has run five TechStars programs since 2009. She’s been responsible for funding and working with many great companies such as Ubooly, Cloudability, Mobiplug, Orbotix, and dozens more. Once we name a new permanent Managing Director for NYC, Nicole will be on site to train that person alongside her during the program next spring.

In an email to Betabeat, Mr. Cohen said "we think the permanent Managing Director in NYC will be someone from that area." As for the program's criteria, it's the same as it ever was. "We're simply looking for the best founders that we can meaningfully help," he said. "We've funded very diverse things in the past, and we'll continue to go after big ideas. I think our recent Boston class was as good example of that."

In the meantime, Ms. Glaros, who says she "love[s] people, but hates crowds," might want to steel herself for the subway-riding experience:

@leithstevens yes, excited! I'll be a little fish in the worlds biggest ocean. :-)

— Nicole Glaros (@nglaros) November 19, 2012

This post has been updated to include comments from Mr. Cohen. 

(Photo: CERN)

Yesterday we wrote that the tech accelerator epidemic had hit New Jersey. The truth may be closer to: The tech accelerator epidemic has hit everywhere. Tech accelerators are so in vogue that Forbes added an accelerator ranking to its "Midas List" coverage, which includes a list of the top 100 venture capitalists.

Incubators have become so popular that about one accelerator launches every day, David Cohen, the founder and CEO of TechStars, told Forbes. He's said it before; he was echoing his own earlier line from a panel about accelerators at SXSW. "It’s become a new college for entrepreneurs," he added.

Forbes has rated Y Combinator, TechStars and DreamIt Ventures as the top three accelerators in the country. We're all for accelerators, but one a day seems excessive. Echoes of '99?

Mr. Huh (flickr.com/yodelanecdotal)

Ben Huh, the genius behind Icanhascheezburger who has delivered cute and crazy cat pictures to the masses for years, is working on a new startup called Circa that wants to "reimagine the way you consume news." Today, TechCrunch reports that Circa has raised $750,000 from a slew of A-list investors, including a few notable New York techies.

According to Techcrunch:

Their startup Circa, which boasts a newsworthy list of advisors like former Digg CEO Jay Adelson, has just raised 750K in seed funding from eonCapital, Quotidian Ventures, Techstars’ David Cohen and David Tisch, Tumblr’s David Karp, Eric Norlin, Manesh Arora, Pedro Torres-Picon, Rick Webb, Scott Belsky and Soraya Darabi.

Mr. Huh has mostly remained mum on the details of what Circa actually is. The company's about page is sparse and generalized: "Our vision is to create the best possible news experience by optimizing for truths, encouraging diversity, and empowering readers." Okay...sounds good?

Hey, Mr. Huh: we can haz more info about Circa, plz?

Mr. Cohen

Look out, Microsoft: patent troll haters are emerging in full force, and by golly they will not let you stifle innovation. After yesterday's news that Twitter had adopted a Patent Agreement meant to stymie the patent wars, everyone practically fell over themselves in an effort to congratulate Twitter on its innovative thinking. The new agreement says that Twitter will not use patents offensively, and any company that acquires patents from Twitter has to get the innovator's consent before using them offensively. It's a smart PR move, and will no doubt further endear engineers and tech watchers to the microblogging service.

Now, startup accelerator TechStars has announced that it intends to insert these patent hack provisions into its own policy, and encourage all of the startups it incubates to do the same.

According to TechStars cofounder David Cohen:

As always, the entrepreneurs will get to choose if they want to play by these rules or not since it’s their company. But they’ll know that TechStars encourages them to adopt the provisions and we’ll make it very easy for them to do so.

If you are a fan of software innovation, you should thank Twitter for their leadership. Thank you Twitter.

While the new patent agreement is undoubtedly a step in the right direction, we're still skeptical that it will have as widespread an impact as everyone seems to think. As one patent attorney pointed out yesterday, the language in the agreement is broad enough that Twitter could probably argue that any of its patent moves are for defensive purposes.

The agreement is still in drafts form, and we're sure it will go through many iterations before Twitter settles on a final provision. In any case, any step taken by a big company to stem the absurd patent fights that have been going on recently is definitely a good one.

Mr. Shulman, left; Mr. Anthony.

Allen Shulman, the 47-year-old, snowy-haired architect who had been building homes for 25 years before he decided to do an Internet startup, promised us the sun was shining in Denver when we spoke this morning at 9 a.m. Mountain Time.

Betabeat doesn't usually cover startups based outside of New York, but we're making an exception: BrightNest has a New York investor, Quotidian Ventures, and its seed round, which closed in October, went unreported. Until now, sorry: $665,000 led by David Cohen through his fund Bullet Time Ventures, with New World Ventures, OCA Ventures, and 11 assorted angels participating, on top of a $335,000 convertible note raised from friends and friends of friends in January 2011. Mr. Shulman and his cofounder, CTO Justin Anthony, made sure to close their funding before they started the winter session at 500 Startups; the company is now raising its Series A.

When BrightNest's marketing rep pitched us on the startup—"our goal is to make changing furnace filters and cleaning gutters sexy"—we thought it sounded like, well, a bit of a reach for a write-up, for reasons other than geography. A startup built around reminding you to clean your gutters? With all the Twitters and FarmVilles competing for browsing time, how could you ever convince users to spend time with something that most closely resembles a nagging spouse, bugging you to change the lightbulbs, and making you think about things you don't want to think about, like the mold slowly spreading through your basement?

Even though BrightNest is about to roll out a feature called the "Honey-Do List," it's aiming to be more like the handy neighbor than the nagging spouse or helicopter parent. "The solution is not to be a nagging site," Mr. Shulman told Betabeat. "The solution is to be more of a lifestyle site. Most people love their homes! They're very proud of the fact that they own their house. That's still the American dream. If we aren't nagging, if we spin home maintenance and let people be proud of the fact that their home is safe, things work better. It smells better. We're helping them take better care of it."

Skeptical, we took a spin through the site. Simple, clean-looking and friendly, we found ourselves verifying that yes, we had installed smoke detectors; reading an article about how to get wine stains out; and then getting sucked into BrightNest's excellent beginner's interior decor blog (check out these sweet wall decals).

"What we found is that as long as we aren't nagging and as long as we're making the site fun and funny—we want people to get our email digest and kind of get a little chuckle," Mr. Shulman said. The digest has a 50 percent click-through rate, he said, and of BrightNest's 1,500 beta testers, 25 percent complete a task every week.

Mr. Shulman's recruitment of his CTO—hardly an easy task, as many founders can attest—is another piece of social proof. Mr. Shulman and Mr. Anthony were casual acquaintances, with a few hockey buddies in common. Around the time Mr. Shulman started thinking about BrightNest, the dirt in Mr. Anthony's furnace filter was reaching a critical mass. Literally days before Mr. Shulman called Mr. Anthony to talk about BrightNest, "Justin had one of those 'oh shit' homeowner moments," Mr. Shulman said. A furnace filter is $8 to replace. But Mr. Anthony had to call a repairman to figure out why air wasn't circulating. "The guy was laughing at him," Mr. Shulman said.

"Man, if I had some kind of site like you're talking about that could help me not be a complete homeowner moron, I'd use it in a second," Mr. Anthony told Mr. Shulman, in Mr. Shulman's recollection.

The user base is anyone who owns a home, Mr. Shulman said, and some renters as well. For now, the startup is focusing on moms and young families ages 28 to 45, he said, many of whom are first time homeowners with no idea about how to check a sump tank (more social proof for BrightNest: Google "sump tank" and you'll find oodles of clueless homeowners turning to the Internet for help).

A secondary user base is real estate professionals, who can gift their clients with branded versions of BrightNest. Builders and real estate brokers have an interest in maintaining relationships with their clients, Mr. Shulman said, for referrals and repeat business. But when he was building homes, he worried that his clients forgot about him as soon as they finished the bottle of wine he gave them as a house warming gift. That is, until something—a flooded basement, a weird smell—prompted them to call in a panic. "No matter what I did as a builder, I couldn't convince people to be proactive," he said. "They'd take all the information I gave them and put it on a shelf and wouldn't open it up until something broke." He likens BrightNest to a car dashboard that tells you when you're out of oil or have gone a certain number of miles. Eventually, he said, a BrightNest maintenance report will be like a CarFax report, a document future buyers will expect to inspect.

Real estate professionals who give their clients BrightNest pay $35 a month or $300 a year for the subscription. But Mr. Shulman emphasizes that BrightNest's main revenue will come from lead generation: light bulbs, furnace filters, and new sump pumps. The startup has the chance to become the central reference for all things home-y, and that includes eco-friendly products with a higher price tag.

Since BrightNest compares itself to Mint, and Mint had a tidy exit-by-acquisition, we asked about buyers. Potential acquirers span the gamut from Home Depot to Google and Microsoft, Mr. Shulman said, or smart grid players (we're thinking Intel, Con Edison). "There are a ton of different types of organizations that would look at BrightNest in a very interesting and critical way when it comes to acquisition," he said. "There are 60 million homeowners throughout the country and no one has been able to figure out how to engage them into continually thinking about their homeowner experience."

BrightNest—originally Abodigy when they entered 500 Startups, a name that was "universally hated"—expects to be out of closed beta in June, he said. That's a delay from original projection of "over the holidays," but we decided not to nag them about it.

"Meet the people that run TechStars and get answers to any questions and some important tips regarding the application process," says the description. It goes on:

• Which types of startups does TechStars accept?
• Is TechStars for me?
• How do I write a killer application that will stand out?
• How do I make the most out of TechStars?

TechStars applications have two deadlines: January 10 is the "early deadline" and January 23 is the "final deadline." The application is dead simple: a single-page form asking such pertinent questions as "Explain how the company will make money" and "Please describe your business in 140 characters or less." Applicants must also submit videos outlining the business model and team members.

(via We Are NY Tech)

On a warm October afternoon, before the weather turned, Betabeat was following David Tisch’s lead up and down University Place in search of an empty-ish coffee shop. Mr. Tisch, the bright-eyed, foul-mouthed managing director of TechStars New York, an incubator for young startups, shuffled along in his standard get-up: jeans, a hoodie, and a backwards baseball hat. His unruly black hair flipped out from underneath.

It’s a fitting uniform for Mr. Tisch, who in person can come across much like the founders he invests in. The grandson of self-made billionaire Laurence Tisch, his speech is peppered with the words “fuck” and “cool,” he burrows his fists in his hoodie, and, once we find a place to sit, jostles the glasses on the table when he crosses and uncrosses his long legs. “I’m pretty shy in groups. I don’t like big crowds. So being on TV is weird for me,” he said, referring to the Bloomberg TV cameras that followed him around for months to document the TechStars New York’s inaugural class.

Just 48 hours earlier, clean-shaven and in shirtsleeves this time, Mr. Tisch stood in front of the Cedar Lake auditorium in Chelsea, rearranging the paper nametags on reserved seats like an anxious dinner party host, albeit to maximize the free flow of funding rather than conversation.

By the time he introduced Mayor Bloomberg to the packed house of more than 500, including the haut monde of investors and entrepreneurs who make up TechStars’ list of mentors and backers, Mr. Tisch had a hard time wiping off his grin.

“David, thank you. Good morning, it's good to be here at Demo Day!” the Mayor said, before glancing at the iPad-cum-teleprompter he placed on the podium. “I also wanted to welcome all the VCs and angel investors who have flown in here from around the country. I think you're proof positive that the TechStars is going to change this world and certainly change America and this city.”

Two years ago, Mr. Tisch, would have been lucky to get a ticket to such an affair, much less license to arrange the wedding table. While his last name may be synonymous with New York industry, aside from a handful of angel investments, Mr. Tisch was a relative unknown in tech circles before his appointment at TechStars.

“He seemed to sort of fly in and take over this avuncular role, but I don't really know what qualified him to do that,” said one New York entrepreneur familiar with the TechStars program. “Besides the obvious family history, I have no idea what he did before.”

That kind of sentiment might explain why Mr. Tisch, who had a few fitful attempts to launch a startup after graduating from NYU law school in 2006, attacks his current role like a man with something to prove.

Since launching last October, TechStars, a program originally founded in Boulder in 2006, has fast become part of the Silicon Alley firmament. On the heels of its success, Mr. Tisch’s tenure, which was initially greeted with a tweet questioning his entrepreneurship chops, last month yielded a spot on Mayor Bloomberg’s first-ever Council on Tech.

Mr. Tisch even boasts the ultimate status symbol: a satirical Twitter account, this one run by two VC employees and an entrepreneur. After the pitches had finished,  @fakedavetisch, which comes out to play every Demo Day, tweeted, “And that’s our show! Come find me in the check-writing area later. I'll be the one offering you money without knowing your name.”

It was a joke without real fangs. A year ago one might have heard established investors grumble under their breadth about angel investing as the new rich kid vanity project and bringing in dilettantes with the last name Pritzker, Kushner or Tisch to round out a deal. (Josh Kushner, part-owner of Observer Media Group, also does seed stage tech investing through Thrive Capital. Adam Pritzker is a co-founder of General Assembly.)

Nowadays New York’s clubby class of venture capitalists and angels, who have access to the best deals and cooperate on financing rounds, seem to have closed ranks around Mr. Tisch. Such was the open landscape for seed stage funding when Mr. Tisch arrived on the scene where hustle, good instincts, and a passion for the culture can earn you industry cred.

“I mean it’s like everyone’s brand new and from five minutes ago and they’re doing cool stuff and Dave’s doing cool stuff,” said Ben Lerer, co-founder of Thrillist whose firm, Lerer Ventures was launched in 2010, and invests in TechStars New York. “Dave’s an investor in Lerer Ventures. We invested in him, he invested in us. It’s like aaaall in the family.”

And just in time, as the bubble around seed stage investment in New York is beginning to deflate. “The first people to recognize that there is an opportunity are the ones that are seeing success. Period,” added Mr. Lerer. “If you’re just realizing now that New York tech is interesting, you’re a little late to the game.”

“I TAUGHT MYSELF NOT HOW TO CODE, but how to talk code. So I could know if someone was bluffing," Mr. Tisch says over iced coffee once we settle into Pop Up Burger, a restaurant he suggests for the virtue of being almost always empty. Mr. Tisch was discussing the last six months of his year-long stint at Vornado Realty Trust, his first job after graduating NYU. “I thought that I could get tricked into believing people could do stuff that they couldn’t, so I needed to be able to vet somebody I was going work with and to be able to call bullshit.”

For Mr. Tisch, attending law school a few blocks from Tisch School of the Arts was a different experience than the one he had growing up in Scarsdale where, he says, “I don’t think I quite understood how well it was known or anything.” The “it” in question being his family fortune.

Brooklyn-born brothers Larry and Bob Tisch, Mr. Tisch’s grandfather and great uncle, respectively, parlayed a string of hotels in the Catskills and Atlantic City into ownership of the Loews Corporation, which held $70 billion in assets by the time of Larry’s death in 2003. Larry’s takeover of CBS network, where he served as president and CEO until selling it to Westinghouse Electric for $5.4 billion is perhaps best told in his biography, The King of Cash, which compares him to his good friend Warren Buffet. For two decades, the noted philanthropist also headed the board of trustees at NYU, the school he graduated from at age 18.

“Yeah, were there moments when a professor would call on me and be like, ‘Is that the same Tisch?’ You sort of smile and move on,” Mr. Tisch explained. “I don’t take all that so seriously, because it’s not doing stuff for you on a minute-by-minute basis.”

Before graduating, Mr. Tisch completed summer associateships at Skadden Arps and Wachtell Lipton--white shoe firms where most law students would kill to work. But like most entrepreneurs, the-path-less-chosen is point of pride. “Wachtell said I was the first person and only person to turn them down within an hour. . .which was cool.”

So why go to law school at all? “My grandfather phrased it as ‘learning how to think,’ which I think is something you probably do in the first six months of law school and the next two and half years you realize you’re in a vocational school,” said Mr. Tisch.

That kind of candor should come as no surprise of fans of the "TechStars" reality show who watched Mr. Tisch welcome finalists to the program with the words, “Don’t blow this fucking opportunity.”

“His style is much more outgoing and aggressive, which is probably kind of a New York thing,” said David Cohen, one of TechStar’s four co-founders, who moved his family from Boulder to New York to help launch the first class. “My style is much more subtle and Socratic...I like to help entrepreneurs find the way and he likes to aggressively say: ‘Here’s what I think.’”

But before Mr. Tisch could trade barbed one-liners on screen with tech luminaries like Fred Wilson and Mark Suster--two of TechStars’ mentors with at least a decade of experience on him--there was another career path to avoid. “I’ve been pretty adamant my whole life about trying not to work for my family,” said Mr. Tisch. In fact, it’s something of a tradition. Mr. Tisch’s father, Daniel Tisch, was the only one his brothers not work for Loews. Of course in the Tisch household, paving your own way meant running the risk arbitrage team at Salomon Brothers. “I looked at what my father had done. He had worked at Salomon Brothers and worked his way up there and left to start his own thing and never really worked under the family umbrella. I thought that was really cool. And I think my grandfather respected my dad for that and I looked up to him,” Mr. Tisch added before trailing off. “And I don’t listen well.”

Mr. Tisch attempted to launch a couple startups on his own before trying his hand at angel investing. There was LightsOver, an ill-fated group buying startup he and a couple friends worked on from Mr. Tisch’s West Village apartment after leaving Vornado. That idea never got past building a deck, or PowerPoint presentation, like the ones flashing across the giant TV screen at Demo Day from the startups he mentors. Mr. Tisch’s next attempt was to launch Knowmore out an in-house incubator he ran at KGB, a New York-based directory assistance company. In that case, the product pivoted from “alive” web pages based on KGB’s local data to a personalized content aggregator similar to News.me. But battles with management left it dead in the water.

His first angel investment, which happened in-between the two ventures, was a startup called Boxee, which he discovered through a friend at Wachtell.

“From life,” Mr. Tisch responded when we asked where he got the money to start backing startups. “I made the money doing a lot of different things. I bought stock when I was younger. I took my bar mitzvah money. I sold baseball cards on eBay and AOL. I played poker. I had an ability to take risks with money I’d made from being in a fortunate situation, so I decided that that was something I was going to spend my money on.”

The easy assumption is that Mr. Tisch used his situation to buy his way into a good deal. But in the risky early stages of a startup, founders are looking for investors who can do more than write a check. Young companies with an eye towards growth seek out backers that have the connections and insight to help them scale. Among sought after startups, reputation trumps cash in hand. Of course that may have been less true a few years ago when Mr. Tisch began. Since then, the seed stage market has been flooded with micro-VCs, venture capital firms who want to get in earlier, or accelerators like betaworks.

“I think some people do it professionally to get rich,” Chris Dixon, a serial entrepreneur who invests personally and through the Founder Collective said of angel investing. “They’re entrepreneurs who sell their company, they like startups and want to make modest to hopefully good returns, but a lot of it is to be involved in the community--that’s my motivation.” If you’re looking to cash in, there are easier alternatives, said Mr. Dixon, “I used to work at a quant hedge fund.”

Mr. Tisch met Boxee CEO Avner Ronen because the friend from Wachtell was working at a hedge fund where the CFO’s husband was one of Boxee co-founders. “He got asked what to do and he didn’t know, so he asked me: Is this interesting? I’m like,Yeah! So we had three dinners with Avner and I decided that I’d make an investment.”

Soon after, he set up Box Group, which describes itself a “boutique angel fund,” but is run by Mr. Tisch, who also invests on behalf of his two younger brothers. There was a bit of a learning curve. “I didn’t know enough about the finances behind angel investing,” he admitted. “I didn’t know what pro rata rights were to the point where I protected myself and things like that.”

MR. TISCH WASN’T THE ONLY CANDIDATE UP FOR THE TECHSTARS POSITION. As the now familiar narrative goes, the wheels for TechStars New York program were set in motion at an Angel Boot Camp in Boston in the spring of 2010. Mr. Tisch approached Mr. Cohen with a question: Why isn’t TechStars in New York? “I didn’t know who he was, really. But he seemed like a nice guy,” Mr. Cohen said on the phone from Boulder. On the Bloomberg show, he tells it a little differently: “I thought, who is this arrogant dude?!,” he says with a laugh.

TechStars had actually been considering a New York program for six months, but from their experience launching in Seattle and Boston, the co-founders knew they were missing the pivotal ingredient: a native to get the locals on board. Mr. Tisch wasn’t necessarily auditioning.

Rather, he named a few other candidates who might fit the bill, including Buzzfeed’s Jon Steinberg, who was running the incubator Dogpatch Labs at the time, First Round Capital’s Charlie O’Donnell and New York Tech Meetup’s Nate Westheimer.  “It was people who were really connected in the community,” said Mr. Tisch. Back then, that didn’t mean him.

The decision to open a New York outpost and to hire Mr. Tisch to run it happened concurrently, said Mr. Cohen. Along the way, he interviewed three or four other people. “I don’t really want to say who because I don’t think all of them would want that information to be out there . . . that they were maybe looking to make a change,” he explains.

The conversation between Mr. Cohen and Mr. Tisch was followed by a beer at a Times Square hotel and then a visit to Boulder. “I sort of observed him coaching the companies that were in the Boulder program at that time,” said Mr. Cohen. “ Once we started getting to know David, that progressed pretty quickly. There was one other candidate that stayed on the list for awhile. Most of them were ‘one or two coffees’ kind of thing and then there were David and one other person that we spent a lot of time with.”

During the interview process, Brad Feld, another of TechStar’s co-founders, asked Mr. Tisch what his network was like with entrepreneurs, developers, and VCs. By that time, he had six angel investments under his belt, including Flavors.me, CollegeOnly, StackSheet, TroopSwap, and GroupMe. Currently, his number of investments is between 45 and 50. “I’d met a ton of developers because at KGB we’d hired 20 people and I’d probably interviewed 500 developers, so my developer network in New York was weirdly strong. I’d met a decent amount--but not a huge amount--of startup CEOs and VCs. I’d never went out to raise money so I didn’t know a lot of them,” recounted Mr. Tisch. “Brad said, ‘Well, fix that.’ I spent the next month after that meeting every VC I could and then at some point along there, Techstars and me decided to click.”

One of those VCs, Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, Mr. Tisch met for the first time last May. “I was pretty awkward at first, totally nervous,” said Mr. Tisch. “We chatted about the NYC tech scene, what I was thinking about in terms of TechStars versus doing a startup.”

Mr. Tisch, a hockey fanatic who played through college, had been toying around with the idea of a sports gaming startup. In fact, three days after taking the TechStars gig, Mr. Tisch actually found himself presenting it at a Find a Tech Co-Founder event. “I only pitched that night because I had committed and didn't want to leave them with a hole and I wasn't allowed to disclose TechStars,” he said. The pitch itself “was embarrassing. People gave me good feedback, but it was a terrible pitch. Looking at the pitches we expect out of TechStars, I would not have rated myself very highly,” he said with a grin.

As managing director of TechStars New York, Mr. Tisch gets a cut of the six percent equity in the startups chosen for the program. In exchange, the finalists were given $18,000 in funding. After raising a $24 million round in September, however, that amount was raised to a $100,000 convertible note. (In January, Y Combinator, the mothership of all modern-day  incubators out in Mountain View, announced that Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and SV Angels, Ron Conway’s investment fund, pledged $150,000 a pop to every YC grad.) Mr. Tisch said he wasn’t permitted to discuss the terms of his financial arrangement and whether the job required a buy-in. But, he noted, “We have outside investors who we share the upside with.”

While the decision to hire Mr. Tisch may have clicked for the guys in Boulder and fellow investors, others in the tech scene were left wondering. The tweet questioning Mr. Tisch’s startup cred was immediately and vociferously shouted down on Twitter with investors and entrepreneurs rallying to his defense. But privately some still wondered who, exactly, he was.

"It was a legit question. Almost no one was like, ‘Hey, Dave Tisch is a douchebag.’ In fact, most people said positive things! But there were a lot of people who were wondering privately, afraid to ask,” said one startup entrepreneur. “It’s a natural question, 'Who is this guy? Where did he come from?' The issue was totally unaddressed."

"There’s a bro network for investors, they protect their own because it's an incredibly small world and deals are sensitive,” said another New York founder who wanted to remain anonymous. “You break a tacit rule if you shit on one of your own in public because chances are, that person isn't going to go away and you'll have to deal with them again a couple months later."

For his part, Mr. Cohen wasn’t worried. “A lot of David’s wisdom is very instinctual. He had invested in a bunch of companies so he has a lot of experience in watching startups evolve. He’s worked in big companies, he’s been around startups that have failed … One of the things I say about him is that he’s almost always right.” Besides, he added, “He seemed to be a really good networker; I’ve never met anybody that works harder. ”

“It was fantastic that the first program was as much of a success as it was, but it was also wasn’t jaw-droppingly surprising because you knew he hadn’t slept in four months, really,” said Union Square Ventures analyst Christina Cacioppo. “Then there was that thing last summer when the mentor list came out and it was majority male. There was that whole uproar and he went out and talked to everyone who got angry about that and took their suggestions.”

“I don’t think any of them gave me any credit until the end of our first program and then it was like, Hey, do it again,” Mr. Tisch acknowledged. “It’s crazy. Look, I agree. . . there’s not a second that I don’t think—a year and a half ago, I didn’t know any of these people that well.” It seems to be partly what inspired his single-minded devotion to TechStars.

One entrepreneur who met Mr. Tisch before TechStars official launch said, "He struck me as fratty and what I remember is he had an idea about our company that was off the map." But through the course of running TechStars, which, in a manner of speaking, is Mr. Tisch’s most successful startup, he seems to have come into his own. “You could see when he does his first intro to the first class, he hasn’t had as much experience being on stage and just to see him grow into the role of being super comfortable, he’s absolutely positively matured,” said IA Ventures Roger Ehrenberg, who is both a TechStars New York mentor and investor in the accelerator.

The startups that come out of the TechStars incubator are, naturally, fiercely loyal to Mr. Tisch. “He knows this space fucking hands down cold, he knows startups ranging back 15 to 20 years,” said Reece Pacheco, founder of Shelby.tv, which graduated from TechStars' first class--the one whose program was filmed by Bloomberg. “Yes he’s a harsh New Yorker who is going to tell your idea fucking sucks--the show showed some of that negative bullying. But he lives and dies for his startups."

Indeed, they came to his defense even as they complained about the integrity of the reality show. But the idea for the show actually preceded Mr. Tisch’s involvement. Mr. Cohen said TechStars had been approached by several networks over the years. “Other cable channels that you might see other reality shows on,” he said with a laugh when we asked about the other networks. “They were, to me, not a good brand fit. We weren’t trying to be a TV show, we were trying to be investors and show what we did. I thought: Bloomberg, serious news channel, it’s gonna be a fair representation, that was the goal.”

FOR A MAN WHO WAS SHORT ON INVESTOR CONNECTIONS, post-TechStars, Mr. Tisch’s angel dance card now seems full. “I think if you just look over the past year or two there’s a group of people who have tried to establish themselves as independent angel investors with varying degrees of New York startup experience and I think Tisch is at the very top of that group. It’s not like it was handed to him, there’s a lot of work involved,” said Ms. Cacioppo.

"Tisch is on my short list," said Chris Dixon. The angel investor was referring to the list of people he calls up to join him in startup funding rounds. “We write a hundred grand checks, it’s a very cooperative environment,”more so than VCs, he said, in terms of establishing the most helpful syndicate for a startup.

Disclosure.

The open playing field is also a factor. “Because we don’t have a Google mafia, we don’t have a Facebook mafia. We don’t have people who have spent a few years at a place have that on their resume and have cash at large or at the same relative scale,” Ms. Cacioppo explained.

“There’s become a fraternity, or a whatever, a group of people that are leaders within this world that were sort of the early adopters to New York being a hot spot for this. And so in the last year you see Thrive and you see Lerer and you see TechStars and Founders Collective and you see First Round and you even see some of the West Coast guys putting stakes in the ground here like SV,” said Mr. Lerer, who as an undergrad at UPenn was in a rival frats, actual ones, with Mr. Tisch.

With angel funding, an investor’s track record is typically established within a five year time frame. Until that happens, New York’s new arrivals to seed stage funding are often judged on their network and their ability to make connections and help the startups raise additional capital.

When GroupMe was acquired by Skype, Mr. Tisch penned a blogpost titled “Invest in People,” talking about his first meeting with the co-founders. Betabeat mentioned that some local scenesters implied that Mr. Tisch followed other investors into the deal, but talked as though he hadn’t. During our entire conversation, it was the only time, Mr. Tisch seemed visibly upset. He even claimed to be amused by @fakedavetisch. “I DISCOVERED GROUPME. no big deal,” the mock account, which is run by two women and one man, tweeted last month.

“At the end of GroupMe? No. Ask Jared and Steve. I can’t imagine, I would go ask Jared and Steve, we were pretty early,” said Mr. Tisch. “If I was last, let me know, I’ll readjust my mind.” Later on, he added, "I’m not helping or being a good investor, they can give me my money back or I can bow out, I’m really not trying to be something I’m not.”

Co-founder Jared Hecht confirmed that Mr. Tisch was GroupMe’s first yes. "David Tisch was always very involved, got us a lot of great product feedback and has always been a massive supporter," said Mr. Hecht. "Tisch represents the startups he's passionate about more than almost anyone.  He wears them on his sleeve like a badge of honor.  Literally, he's always walking around in a t-shirt of one of his portfolio companies."

Those kinds of reviews from entrepreneurs also play into deal flow. And Mr. Tisch is getting more of them from his vantage point at TechStars where he’s been known to respond to applicants at all hours of the night. “Today, entrepreneurs seem to be more likely to be the ones putting their deals together and deciding how much each person/fund ‘gets,’ rather than a lead investor or VC firm," said Ms. Capaccio. "So in the past, if you were an angel, you might have had to be 'blessed' by the VC firm to get a piece of the hot deals. Today, it's the entrepreneurs who give the blessings.”

Skepticism around Mr. Tisch has morphed into something else entirely. “I have a lot of people who have expressed interest in giving me their money to manage,” Mr. Tisch said. “I find it a huge responsibility in investing someone else’s money. I try to invest with my gut and my heart and I think that trying to do that with someone else’s money is harder than doing it with your own.”

Although he said the next logical step for him would be to raise a small fund. “I haven't taken steps to do that at this point.  Diving deeper into something is a constant temptation, it is for anyone around this space... But I am really happy doing what I am doing.”