Ketaki Desai is the cofounder of DashStrøm. She is a 3X founder with wide-ranging experience in operations, technology, and teams. She was the VP of Business Development at the Ontario Center of Innovation managing an investment portfolio and programs of over $200M, Head of Strategy for a $1B Life Sciences fund at UPMC, and Product Owner for a $1B Common Core-based Education technology platform for the LAUSD. Desai is an avid hiker (Kilimanjaro, O-circuit, TMB) and a black belt in karate.

What advice do you find yourself giving most often to founders?

1. Listen to your gut! As a founder, especially someone as accomplished as those selected in the Techstars cohorts, every one of them has gotten there because they knew how to build something successfully. The mentors are there to guide, but in the end, the decision is on the founders.

2. No single decision is going to single-handedly make or break your business. It is always a sum of decisions so don't procrastinate because you are not feeling decisive. Test it out, if it doesn't work, try something else.

Why are you a mentor with Techstars?

Growing up in India, my mom worked two jobs to put food on the table. She would still find the time to teach kids who had it worse than us. It is because of this that I have always had a give-first philosophy. I have personally experienced a wealth of knowledge and professional guidance from the mentors in my life, they have shaped me into who I am today. It is for these reasons that I truly enjoy mentoring Techstars companies — if a few lessons from my life can make a difference in how founders build their companies, then that is what matters!

What trends or innovations are you most excited about?

We struggle with so many fundamental issues as a society, whether it is educating at the pace of technology, being sustainable and efficient with our use of resources, finding ways to build more connected and accessible cities, and bettering the quality of life for all. In that sense, I am hopeful that AI will enable us to build new and more sustainable ways of living so long as we are intentional about building it right and providing better guardrails. I do believe that founders today care about these issues and want to find ways to innovate for a better world.

How do you encourage startups to stay innovative and adaptable in a rapidly changing market?

I believe fundamentally founders are building solutions that solve problems. So long as founders understand the customers they building for and their pain points, they will always succeed. To me, it is not so much keeping up with the pace of innovation as it is knowing the people whose problems you are solving. Technology is just the means to getting to that solution — cheaper, faster, and simpler.

Describe a situation with a startup founder or team where you felt like you made a difference.

I still chat regularly with one of the founders who I mentored from the first San Francisco cohort that I participated in (back when it was still Techstars Oakland). We have gotten really close as friends, and enjoy discussing the ups and downs of our startups. I feel like we have both simultaneously helped each other when things have been rough — both professionally and personally — and continue to find that support in our friendship.

I remember another instance when two cofounders were battling with a monumental decision on how to spend their time and money. I gave them some ideas of how I would have strategized in a similar situation, going from the spectrum of what you get with spending less time and less money to significant time and money. It helped them decide where they would want to focus their resources and I felt like I had taught them how to fish. ;)

Read More