Jennifer Cabala

Director, Operations in Berlin, Germany

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Hi, I’m Jennifer Cabala, and I’m Director of Program Operations for Techstars - including our accelerators and Startup Weekend.

What I love about working at Techstars is working with entrepreneurs and the incredible community leaders who are building entrepreneurial ecosystems worldwide. We are in 150 countries. It is so amazing to work with entrepreneurs in developing ecosystems when entrepreneurship can be as much about transforming your community as it is about transforming your own life. With operations, every day I get to look at how to serve so many amazing people with different interests, needs and constraints. Putting in systems to support them so they can focus on changing their world is incredibly gratifying.

I moved to Berlin to build an international operations team. It was important to me to be in another country so that I could better understand the needs of our team outside the US. It has already paid dividends in helping us craft more internationally focused materials and allowed me to be more forward-thinking as we continue to grow.

I love making things that help people. Some of the things I've built:

*The playbook on how to run a Techstars Accelerator program, covering strategy to logistics. I also built associated checklists and templates. The playbook is used by every Techstars Accelerator program today and has allowed the company to improve and scale our programs from 6 to 23 in 3 years.

*The curriculum and system for Startup Next, a program to help brand new founders prepare to bootstrap or go into an an accelerator. Now used in 25 cities worldwide.

*Lots of events, the Seattle Startup Awards, Startup Day - a one-day conference for aspiring founders (450 attendees), many startup weekends.

Much of my current work is private and focused on an internal audience.

After years in the spotlight as a television news anchor and reporter, I'm taking a break from public writing and speaking.

I have fun memories of my time in tv news (and my most famous clip will probably live on the internet forever at the top of my google rankings) but nothing compares to having a deep and positive impact on a group of world changers.

  • Work
    • Techstars