How Hardware Startup Accelerators Surprised Me

Going through a program like YC one takes it as a matter of course that the software gets written. It's almost assumed to be a downhill process. The hard part that gets hammered into you is Growth - the program is by and large a merciless, insanely purpose driven, bootcamp-come-network for Growth. Prototypes in, hockey sticks out.

With hardware there is an incircuitable field of well documented terrors, known to be fatal, that stands between conceiving a product and releasing it. The added value of a hardware startup accelerator than is being your Westley when you need to get through the Trough of Fire Swamps. In many cases it's simply plugging you into the group of vendors that can scale parts, manufacturing, and fulfillment - for much of it, what you don't know will kill you and no one person or company knows it all – that's why it takes a network.

Simplified: Hardware accelerators are cool because they are providing value where no one else is (solving the trough of sorrow problem by creating fungible networks). Y Combinator is cool because it pioneered the same thing for growth.