Chasing Unicorns: The Techstars Playbook for Building Billion-Dollar Startups

"Chasing Unicorns doesn't just offer a model for growing a business-it takes you into the trenches with successful entrepreneurs. Hegazi and Cohen know what it takes to scale startups, and their lessons can help founders avoid costly mistakes and missed opportunities."

- Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Potential and Think Again, and host of Re: Thinking

"Chasing Unicorns pairs a practical framework with the human side of entrepreneurship. Hegazi and Cohen's interviews with founders are a goldmine for anyone who wants to understand what it really takes to build a unicorn."

- Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and Incorruptible

"PRIDE-informed by decades of pattern recognition across thousands of Techstars startups-is a framework I wish every founder had before hitting the wall. Hegazi and Cohen show that most startup failures aren't failures of intelligence or ambition, but of sequence."

- Tom Eisenmann, Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School, and author of Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success

Why do only a handful of startups become billion-dollar companies while thousands of others stall?

Over more than two decades, Techstars has worked with more than 5,000 startups across over 50 countries, creating one of the world's largest proving grounds for understanding how enduring companies are built. From this unparalleled vantage point, David Cohen, Founder & CEO of Techstars, and entrepreneur Amir Hegazi uncover the recurring patterns behind thirteen Techstars unicorns.

The result is PRIDE-a practical framework showing that great companies aren't built by doing everything at once, but by doing the right things in the right order.

• Pain-Lock - Solve a painful problem customers already need solved.
• Refine - Narrow relentlessly until your solution becomes indispensable.
• Install - Build repeatable systems that scale beyond the founder.
• Dominate - Maximize value before pursuing new markets.
• Expand - Grow without losing what made your company exceptional.

Drawing on candid interviews with founders behind SendGrid, DigitalOcean, Chainalysis, Outreach, Remitly, TradingView, Owlet, Veho, Self Financial, Twelve, Salesloft, Degreed, and OpenLoop, Chasing Unicorns goes beyond startup mythology to reveal the invisible work behind extraordinary companies: customer obsession, disciplined execution, difficult trade-offs, resilience, and leadership that compounds over time.

Whether you're launching your first startup, scaling an existing company, investing in founders, or leading innovation inside a larger organization, Chasing Unicorns is a practical field guide grounded in one of the world's largest startup ecosystems and informed by decades of real-world entrepreneurial experience.