- Techstars Detroit announced it has appointed Suneel Gupta as its founder-in-residence
Techstars Detroit has announced that it appointed Suneel Gupta as its founder-in-residence. Formerly known as Techstars Mobility, Techstars Detroit is a corporate-funded startup accelerator program that has 90-day courses that help entrepreneurs get their ideas revved up.
Gupta’s roots in Michigan date back to 1967 when his mom had become the first female engineer at Ford Motor Company. She and Suneel’s father worked in the auto industry for more than 30 years until April 4, 2011, when they were both laid off.
Gupta was born in Livonia and raised in Novi. And he attended Novi public schools and washed dishes on nights and weekends at the Salvatore Scallopini’s restaurant. Gupta also worked as a writer for the DNC back in 2004 and MTV Networks in 2009. From there, he was hired as the VP of Product Development at Groupon where he helped lead the business from its earliest stage with less than 10 non-sales people on staff and under $50 million in revenue to post-IPO with more than 5,000 people on staff and over $3 billion in revenue.
In 2012, Suneel’s brother Dr. Sanjay Gupta helped him launched Rise Labs — which is a healthcare company that uses technology to shrink costs. After Rise Labs served over 1,000 patients, Michelle Obama asked Rise to be her team’s official technology partner. And through this public-private partnership, they had delivered health coaching to lower-income areas of the country. In 2016, Michael Bloomberg had convened a bi-partisan commission on the Future of Work and Suneel was asked to join and bring Rise’s lessons to policymakers.
Gupta also led and lectured on Entrepreneurship at the University of Michigan and was named a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University. And Gupta has an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management and a law degree from Northwestern Law School. Gupta is married to Leena Rao — an editor who worked for TechCrunch, Google Ventures, and Fortune Magazine.
In an interview with the Crain’s Detroit podcast, Gupta pointed out that when he was starting his first company, he had received valuable input from TaskRabbit founder and FUEL Capital founder Leah Busque about how to create a proper pitch deck.
“And when I was raising money for my startup, I was getting a lot of noes from investors. And she literally sat down with me at a coffee shop and went through slide-by-slide my pitch and said ‘this is what’s working’ and ‘this is what’s not working,” said Gupta. “By the time I left that meeting, I had culled this 25-slide monstrosity of a pitch deck down to eight slides that were very, very clear. I had a much better story in my head. And when I went forward and started talking to investors, I just had much more success. So it is really gratifying to pay that forward.”
The Techstars team in Detroit includes managing director Ted Serbinski and program manager Kelly Kang. And the Techstars Detroit mentors include Chris Thomas (Detroit Mobility Institute), Debra Brackeen (AAA), Dhani Jones (Qey Capital), Eric Blumbergs (Honda), Erica Klampfl (Ford), Jessica Robinson (Detroit Mobility Institute), Jill Ford (Toyota AI Ventures), Ken Washington (Ford), Mike Scrudato (Munich RE), Patrick Falle (Yaypay), Reilly Brennan (Trucks Venture Capital), and Bill Coughlin (Ford).
