It was back in 2010 when our colleague John Cook got a peek inside the new home of Tech Stars Seattle,

the startup accelerator that had just expanded to the city at the time.

Founded in 2006 in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 2006 in Boulder, Colorado.

Techstars provides fledgling startups with early capital, coaching,

mentorship, a chance to pitch to investors, and an opportunity to work for three months

in a shared space with other entrepreneurs, as

tech stars participant Josh Molinot explained to John at the time.

It can be distracting but it's also productive in the way that I can just grab another team member or something

and say, hey, what do you think about this feature?

Or what do you think about this?

We can demo products.

Everyone's here super late and super early, so we're free to move about.

So there's some elements that are not as productive, but there's also elements that are super super productive.

Yeah. What's super late? How late are people in here working?

One, two a.m. sometimes. So we're working, we're working pretty light. working. Here's how the first tech stars Seattle managing director, Andy Sack,

described the origins of the Seattle program in an interview with Robert Scobel around the same time.

I saw and witnessed Boulder's program for two years as a mentor and got really excited about

the program.

There's Y Combinator and there's Tech Stars.

And they're similar in some respects and very different in others and but both of them focus on the top end of quality

For more than a decade it worked

Tech Stars Seattle helped launch more than 160 startups,

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