He does. "Thank you for trusting me," he says.
The next meeting, with a company called Lua Technologies, is testier. "The scariest thing about your team is that you're top-heavy," Tisch says. The company has three co-founders, plus two engineers, a designer, and a marketer. Tisch looks dismissively at the marketing guy and then turns to the company's CEO, Michael DeFranco, and suggests that he might want to fire him. DeFranco stumbles in response but holds his ground. Tisch excuses himself. He returns and makes the team an offer. "We love you guys," he says.
A few hours later, Jay Finch, a 26-year-old applicant from Jersey City, walks into the room. Finch's company, Socstock, which aims to replace traditional small-business loans with crowdsourced funding from customers, is one that Tisch has been eyeing for months. He loves the business model, and he especially likes Finch, because he has a great story. Finch is a former Goldman Sachs analyst who quit his job because he wanted to help neighborhood businesses rather than ridiculously wealthy investors.
Finch is also one of only two black CEOs to make it to the final round. "I genuinely want to fund an African American founder this time," says Tisch. "That's an important box to check. If we don't get there with Jay, we won't get there with anybody else this time." The company got mostly good marks from the selection committee, and Tisch tells me that Finch will probably get an offer.
The only hitch is that a nearly identical company applied to TechStars just before the deadline. The CEO is also a young guy named Jay—his last name is Lee—and he has a remarkably similar background. A Harvard Law graduate and former securities lawyer, Lee started Smallknot, which is based in Brooklyn, New York, with a Harvard classmate.
Finch is Tisch's first choice, but the meeting doesn't go particularly well. When Tisch asks Finch to rethink Socstock's repayment process, Finch struggles to offer alternatives. "You're adding all of this weird complexity to the process," Tisch says.
"We're not married to it," Finch says.
Tisch changes the subject. "What do you think of your name?" he asks.
"We like it," says Finch's co-founder, Julissa Arce, a former Goldman Sachs vice president.
Tisch snorts. "That's because you're finance people," he says. "You need to connect emotionally with your users. You have a lot of heart. Take that and put it in your product. It isn't there now."
When Tisch excuses himself, the co-founders look mystified.
"They think too much like bankers," Tisch tells me after Finch and Arce are gone. "I feel like we have to meet with the other team."
I return the following Thursday and find Tisch in a buoyant mood. TechStars has made eight offers so far—most recently to a Dutch start-up called Karma, which hadn't filled out an application but which (thanks to a recommendation from a prominent VC) seemed too promising to pass up.
The meeting with Smallknot, Socstock's competitor, went well. Tisch's only concern is that Lee hasn't managed to hire a full-time software developer. "You say you're trying to inspire a movement," Tisch's partner, Adam Rothenberg, wrote to Lee in an e-mail. "How come you can't inspire one developer to join your team?"
Meanwhile, Tisch is agonizing about whether to reject Moveline. When he called Cook to tell him about the selection committee's recommendation, Cook defended his idea with aplomb, Tisch tells me. Three days later—and more than two years after he first applied—Cook will get his offer.
Thursday night, Smallknot hires a software developer and immediately reports back to Tisch. Tisch sends an e-mail around 1 a.m. Saturday, asking some technical questions about Smallknot's model. Lee wakes up his co-founder, and the two men scramble to craft a response, which they send at 3:43 a.m. They are accepted Sunday evening.
On the other side of the Hudson River, Jay Finch spends the weekend waiting. "When I didn't hear on Sunday, I knew something was up," he says over coffee a few days later. "I was bummed."
When I tell him that a competing company called Smallknot was accepted into the program, he looks crestfallen.
"But they're not really a competitor, right?" he asks. "They don't have the same market as us?"
Yes, I say, they pretty much do. I tell him that his was one of 30 crowdfunding businesses to apply to TechStars this time around—a fact that I think is going to cheer him up but serves only to make the situation seem more hopeless.
"Well, now those guys have all the resources and connections that TechStars has," Finch says. "That's a problem for us."
He sits there for a minute without saying anything, then slowly begins to regain his composure. He tells me that he will press on, though maybe not in New York. He says he's heard a lot of good things about 500 Startups, a Bay Area incubator, and may apply to that program. He isn't giving up.
Three weeks later, on March 14, the 14 teams—some 70 hopeful people—will arrive at the TechStars offices on the sixth floor of the Village Voice building in New York City, taking seats under vinyl banners that bear the names and logos of their newborn companies. They will work nonstop for three months—the typical approach is to take meetings with mentors during the day and use nights and weekends to write code. They won't sleep more than a few hours a night.
And, despite Tisch's best efforts to pick winners, they won't all succeed. "It's hard," he says. "You're going off so little data, and these companies are so early that you can't feel utterly confident in the bets you make. Once they start the program, that's when you get to know how well you picked them. That's when the pressure starts."
