How Maëlle Gavet preserves startup spirit across large-scale companies

Executive overview

Most companies lose their entrepreneurial energy as they scale — founders get absorbed, culture homogenises, and acquired startups get smothered by the parent. Maëlle Gavet, CEO of Techstars, has spent her career threading that needle: building large, complex organisations while protecting the conditions that make startups thrive.

Her playbook draws from running Russia's largest e-commerce company, operating inside the Priceline Group's brand-autonomous model, and now deploying capital into overlooked founders worldwide.

The core insight: entrepreneurial spirit is preserved by design — through deliberate autonomy, clear values, and treating founders as the primary customer.

From zero-to-one to scale: Maëlle's early career

• Became CEO of Ozon (Russia's leading e-commerce company) after six weeks as a BCG consultant on the project.
• Prior entrepreneurship — three ventures including birthday party organising and a Moscow events business — gave her pattern recognition across every function.
• Fear combined with excitement became her reliable signal to pursue an opportunity.
• Russia in 2009 had 50% online penetration, 80%+ cash-on-delivery transactions, and no national delivery infrastructure — each one a constraint to engineer around.
• Ozon invented pickup points (2,000+ across Russia) to solve cash-on-delivery; Amazon launched a similar model years later.
• Raised $100M in 2011 — the largest venture round in Europe at the time; company reached $1.5B valuation by 2015.
• Left Russia in 2014 after the annexation of Crimea made continued operation untenable.

The high-tech, high-touch balance

• Technology optimised for efficiency alone misses the human layer; human-first approaches miss what technology enables.
• Ozon's nationwide delivery network required marrying logistics technology with 2,000 physical pickup points staffed by people.
• Compass (US residential real estate) ran the same hybrid: tech platform plus founder Robert Reffkin making daily personal calls to agents.
• The e-commerce and real estate contexts were structurally similar — both required platform leverage and relationship depth simultaneously.
• "When you hit that right balance — that's where magic happens."

The Priceline Group model: how to preserve startup spirit post-acquisition

• Priceline Group (now Booking Holdings) kept each acquired brand — Kayak, OpenTable, Agoda — run by its original founding team.
• Common infrastructure and camaraderie were built without mandating operational conformity.
• Founders still felt ownership because they retained operational control.
• The typical acquirer mistake: "I own you" attitude triggers slow cultural erosion, one budget decision at a time.
• Priceline's alternative: "I would have done it differently — but I trust the founder."
• Board management insight from chairman Jeff Boyd: know when to open debate and when to close it; balance friendliness with directness.

Techstars: investing in overlooked founders

• Maëlle joined Techstars in 2021; on arrival, none of 280 employees described it as an investment business — the identity mismatch was the first thing she fixed.
• Reframed the mission: Techstars is a pre-seed investor whose edge is founder support, not just community-building.
• Common shares mean Techstars is "in the trenches" with founders regardless of outcome — aligned incentives, not advisory distance.
• Over 70% of Techstars companies raise capital within three years — more than any other global accelerator.
• 40+ programs worldwide; almost all portfolio companies are outside Silicon Valley.
• Thesis: talent and ideas are distributed evenly, but capital is not — that gap is the opportunity.
• Alumni include Zipline (drone delivery) and ClassPass (fitness network access).

Values as an operating framework

• Most founders have never written down their personal values — Maëlle's first coaching question is always: "What are your values? Write them down."
• Company values and founder values overlap heavily but not completely — mapping both reveals where they diverge.
• Values set the lines that don't move under pressure: at Ozon, Maëlle told the board on day one the business had to be "squeaky clean" — no bribes, full stop.
• When deciding whether to comment publicly on world events: if the issue touches the business, use your values as the framework. If it doesn't, stay quiet.
• CEOs speaking on external topics are assumed to speak for the company — that conflation has to be managed deliberately.
• Grandfather's principle, applied throughout: "Nothing worth doing is ever easy. Fight for what you believe in — even if there's a cost."