Techstars should see some other big exits over time with SendGrid (couldn't find actual current valuation) and DigitalOcean ($153M Valuation in 3 years) to name a few
yclist has a few errors, so not sure if it's all 100% accurate.
To name a few:
xobni - bought by yahoo and now shut down (listed as active)
like.fm - dead, but listed as active
Exec - listed as active, but was bought by Handybook
Bump - listed active, but dead
Relentless focus on building the thing the customer wanted vs focus on viral marketing strategies. That said, they had an inherent viral growth strategy by targeting their initial user base to a very sociable/vocal college crowd. That wasn't a growth hack, it was merely solving a problem that most college kids had.
Looks like Spiegel didn't pay attention at the bullish attitude Andrew Mason had this early on turning down crazy acquisition offers with Groupon, and we know how that ended.
I added the article here because that is exactly how I felt after someone forwarded it to me. There was no value in the comments on VentureBeat (and the author was commenting at all there anyway) so I figured there would be some worthwhile discussions here on the topic and potential someone with data to backup Michael if they agreed with him.
I would completely agree. At the core of it, customer discovery and learning what product your customers want/will pay for (and thus you should build) is the core of subscribing to being a "lean startup." Product does matter, but what matters more is building something someone would pay for