In a span of ten years, Techstars has grown immensely not just as an incubator but a networked startup accelerator. Techstars has been on the rise ever since David cohen founded this. 
Today almost 92% startups incubated in Techstars are active and reaping profits. There are notable mentors in the Techstars hub like Dennis Crowley-CEO of Foursquare, HubSpot CTO-Dharmesh Shah, tumblr CEO David Karp and Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures.

Techstars run in a number of cities such as New York, Seattle, San Antonio as well as Boulder. Amongst this, New York is the hottest since David Tisch who has been the manager here has been able to more than 1000 startup applicants across the globe. However the saddest part is David Tisch resigned last summer to start his new fund: Box Group. So Techstars is still in a dilemma to find a perfect replacement for him.

The irony of the whole situation is that even if Techstars has grown big and attracts huge applicants, there are not much big stories to gorge on. As compared to Y Combinator that has seen brilliant billion dollar stories from Airbnb, Dropbox and more, Techstars is still behind in the marathon.

The number of startups that come into existence have reduced since the last year. Startups atr in the phase of “Facebook Fallout” and the aftermath of Facebook’s disappointing IPO. So along with this and David Tisch resigning Techstars is experiencing a crisis.

The Techstars NYC’s Spring program will be headed by Nicole Carlos. There are some good pointers to look at the brighter side of all things Techstars:

• There is a surge in startups applying this 2013 and there are around 1,100 applicants.
• Some brilliant mentors will be there this spring like Joel Spolsky of Stack Overflow, Alexandra Wilson of Gilt, Ben Siscovick of IA Ventures, former Associated Content CEO Patrick Keane and Jay Levy of Zelkova Ventures.
• David Cohen is already out looking for a replacement for David Tisch and he is meeting people. The next big billion dollar startup from Techstars is ThinkNear which recently had an acquisition worth $22.5 million.

So yes there are some real good things happening. Techstars has surely survived the bad times along with the Facebook’s IPO and Zynga going haywire. There is nothing to worrry says David Cohen. Now there are similar 700 incubation programs for startups. The Techstars brand is big and will grow bigger. And startups must survive. That is what startups are meant to fight for!

Apply to Techstars.

Best of luck!