The Trouble with Startup Accelerators | Hacker News Reader

The Trouble with Startup Accelerators

axios.com

50 pointssamizdis10 comments

Basically, the ODX accelerator was a startup itself.

Startup should thoroughly vet accelerator programs they apply to, because most are a waste of time in the best case or kill your company in the worst case.

One needs to understand the business model and the KPIs of each accelerator (just like with investors and customers) to figure out if there is a fit.

To expand on your assertion, I’m sharing a link to a framework that I drafted a few years back for evaluating an accelerator (referred to as an incubator in the paper):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B75fn5jlTYO3ODQ5X0NhM0txQ2M...

> While charging fees to startups has historically been seen as predatory (or gauche perhaps), that perception might be changing.

> “My take is it’s totally transparent and fine,” said a former insider of 500 Global, which currently charges $37,500 for its flagship accelerator.

No it’s still predatory and gauche.

I'd say, no accelerator on earth is giving anyone almost $40k worth of value

Most VCs and most accelerators are bad. Nearly all of them are pile ons. Hope the downturn wipes a lot of them out. Randos became "VC"s in the bull market.

Remind me, what exactly is the benefit of taking capital and competition out of the market?

Founders should be doing due diligence on their investors, and if they have better options it’s theirs to take.

Opportunity cost. In a bull market, a lot of bad ideas get (human) resources that would be better off working on something else.

Because the competition becomes primarily about raising money and less about building a successful product or business. In that environment, being scrappy and doing more with less gets you crushed by overfunded competitors with slick decks.

It’s not strictly better if your goal is to raise money and take some off the table, but it does create headwinds to building a stable right-sized business when investors mentality is full bull-market swoon.

I don't see that this is necessarily a critique of accelerators, seems to focus mostly in a rather ephemeral way on ODX.

They prey on people with delusions of grandeur who need the identity of "entrepreneur", since "unemployed since you quit your first job out of college after two years" doesn't have quite the same prestige. "The others, you see, they just don't get it. This is about scale, Zero to One! I'm my own boss!" It's really sad to watch.

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