Who Gets Into Accelerators? Persistent Men With SaaS Apps, Says Study
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
14.8% of rejected applicants were female vs. 13.2% accepted... So close-minded!
Pretty sick of journalists flagrantly stretching the truth to make sexisms suggestions.
Edit : Ok, I understood the math incorrectly here.
Because "accepting" it means conceding that it's an unalterable and permanent condition - often times expressed as a biotruth about women being one way and men being another.
Most people feel that isn't the case though. That the disparity is a social problem that we can change and fix.
Recently saw a really interesting well-researched Norwegian documentary that explores this topic and kinda throws that whole view into question:
it's not 14% of female founders rejected, its 14% of rejected founders were female (while about 13% of accepted founders were female). There's no male persecution going on here.
For the same reason that 50 years ago nobody should have believed that women were less interested in going to college, becoming a doctor, or becoming a lawyer.
All of those are at parity now, but 50 years ago people were spouting opinions just like yours. They were wrong.
They didn't mention how many of unsuccessful applicants did SaaS apps. Furthermore, people who were accepted had more applications behind them then rejects.
Two big rejection criteria that many people misunderstand:
- Accelerator programs require founders to do more, faster than can be reasonably managed by a single person, hence no sole founders. There is too much work to do without at least two people on the founding team. It is not that you can't successfully build a startup as a sole founder (I am one) but that you are unlikely to successfully execute an accelerator program as one, which is an important distinction.
- Simple Web/SaaS applications fit the program timeline of accelerator models. They are not designed for hardcore technology or infrastructure startups that require an enormous amount of heavy lifting on the engineering side in order to have a Minimum Viable Product. These companies often require closer to a year to get off the ground, which is far longer than most accelerator programs run and often have very different customer sales cycles. The kinds of startups that fit within typical accelerator program scope are a small fraction of all startups you could build.
If you look at the statistics irrelevant to the constraints of an accelerator program, such as gender balance, you see that the statistics for accepted and rejected startups look similar, which is what you would expect if the selection process was working well.
As the study only took into account those applications made via the F6S platform, I would not trust the figures. Some founders are unable to use it for a start, as they're insistent on only allowing logins with either Facebook or Linkedin. Not everyone uses or is willing to connect those services, like myself.
When we applied for both Techstars and 9MileLabs we had to go through F6s as well.
> because I wish to prove myself to my peers before seeking co-founders.
Why is that reasoning a gating factor for finding a co-founder?
The co-founder quandary is due to repeated past experiences of having my work being overly-criticised, so lack faith in my myself. Although, I'm now trying to overcome those hurdles I've set myself.
Do you have little traction or are you just applying based on the idea?
HN strongly prefers original sources, as long as they're reasonably readable.