Welcome to GeekWire, I'm GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop. This is a special bonus episode of the GeekWire podcast

following up on a topic that we covered last week. I'm talking now with Chris DeVore,

he is founding managing partner at Founders Coop and the

former managing director of Tech Star Seattle.

Hey Chris, thanks for jumping on.

No, thanks for having me, Todd. I appreciate it.

So we talked a lot last week, Taylor Soper, my

colleague and I, on last week's episode about the closure of Tech Star Seattle.

Of course, the two of us are looking in from the outside.

You're no longer inside, but you were for many years.

So we thought it would be interesting to jump on with you

and get your perspective, not only on what happened at TechStar Seattle,

but from a bigger picture, what's going to happen next and what the future of accelerators are in the

startup community. First off, can you give us a sense for someone who didn't

participate in a Textar Seattle program back in the hey day,

what was it like? What did it feel like to be in the middle of it?

Yeah, I mean, you know, I'll try to be brief because I know we got to get to the point here but the original

promise I think of both Tech Stars and Y Combinator and they started right around the same time.

It was such a powerful new idea at the time, which as you know it used to be that to start a startup you need to raise millions of dollars in venture capital and have a big team and because of the sort of

collapse in the cost of starting startups because of open source

software and cloud infrastructure.

There was this moment when all of a sudden people

...