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Wow, everyone except YC and Techstars Boulder has a terrible success rate: http://www.seed-db.com/accelerators http://www.seed-db.com/accelerators Is this data

Wow, everyone except YC and Techstars Boulder has a terrible success rate: http://www.seed-db.com/accelerators http://www.seed-db.com/accelerators Is this data complete?

secoif 14y ago
Are exits the only measure of success?
- MaxGabriel 14y ago
  Recent quote from PG on this: "Exits are a stupid test for what they're trying to measure here. By that standard, Airbnb and Dropbox are failures. Exits are a reasonable test for investments made, say, 10 years ago. But none of the incubators are that old yet. So the right way to judge them is by the valuations of the startups they've funded. Unless the venture business as a whole loses money, that will be a lower bound on the eventual exit numbers. Then you don't need to measure fuzzy stuff like "VC perceptions" either. Each incubator has a single score: average valuation. The last time we calculated ours (for the Forbes incubator rankings: http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/04/30/top-tech-i... http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/04/30/top-tech-i...) it was $45.2m. You could still screw up e.g. in the case where a company hasn't raised money for a long time and whose last post-money valuation is 1/10 of what they could raise at now. But you won't screw up as badly as if you just measure acquisitions." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4143062 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4143062
gav 14y ago
It doesn't give any sort of time frame; it's not surprising that YC is top, they've been operating longer. Personally I'd like a count of [number of companies still in business]+[number of exits].
gphil 14y ago
As an alum of Dreamit Philly, I can tell you that there is a lot of missing data there at least. On the order of many millions in funding missing for that program alone. There is also at least one missing exit.
- jedc 14y ago
  I get funding data from Crunchbase; I hope by being transparent with Seed-DB it helps improve data quality there, too. (Though I also want founders to eventually be able to add it in themselves on Seed-DB.) If there's a missing exit, please let me know details. jed.christiansen@seed-db.com
seats 14y ago
I run TechStars Cloud. Roughly complete for me. Key thing when you look at this data is to remember timing. I've only run 1 program thus far and it only completed 3 months ago. Wouldn't expect to see much in the way of exits after 3 months ;)
ig1 14y ago
Average time for startup to go from founding to exit is seven years. YC is the only one to have even been in existence for seven years. Not only that but even for YC non-exited companies are worth significantly more than the ones that have exited. Dropbox and Airbnb (both five years old) are individually likely to be worth more than the sum total of every YC exit made so far.
yoseph 14y ago
I'm a FounderFuel alum and I can say with certainty that the data isn't complete. From the first cohort alone, around $2.5m has been raised so far. They're now about to start their third cohort in August.
startupstella 14y ago
As an alum of Excelerate Labs, I can tell you this data is nowhere near accurate. For example, FeeFighters exited about 4 months ago and we had about $1.5 million in funding and 8 employees...none of that is listed here. The information is incomplete or incorrect for the majority of companies who went through Excelerate.

Wow, everyone except YC and Techstars Boulder has a terrible success rate: http://www.seed-db.com/accelerators http://www.seed-db.com/accelerators Is this data complete?

secoif 14y ago

Are exits the only measure of success?

MaxGabriel 14y ago
Recent quote from PG on this: "Exits are a stupid test for what they're trying to measure here. By that standard, Airbnb and Dropbox are failures. Exits are a reasonable test for investments made, say, 10 years ago. But none of the incubators are that old yet. So the right way to judge them is by the valuations of the startups they've funded. Unless the venture business as a whole loses money, that will be a lower bound on the eventual exit numbers. Then you don't need to measure fuzzy stuff like "VC perceptions" either. Each incubator has a single score: average valuation. The last time we calculated ours (for the Forbes incubator rankings: http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/04/30/top-tech-i... http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/04/30/top-tech-i...) it was $45.2m. You could still screw up e.g. in the case where a company hasn't raised money for a long time and whose last post-money valuation is 1/10 of what they could raise at now. But you won't screw up as badly as if you just measure acquisitions." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4143062 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4143062

gav 14y ago

It doesn't give any sort of time frame; it's not surprising that YC is top, they've been operating longer. Personally I'd like a count of [number of companies still in business]+[number of exits].

gphil 14y ago

As an alum of Dreamit Philly, I can tell you that there is a lot of missing data there at least. On the order of many millions in funding missing for that program alone. There is also at least one missing exit.

jedc 14y ago
I get funding data from Crunchbase; I hope by being transparent with Seed-DB it helps improve data quality there, too. (Though I also want founders to eventually be able to add it in themselves on Seed-DB.) If there's a missing exit, please let me know details. jed.christiansen@seed-db.com

seats 14y ago

I run TechStars Cloud. Roughly complete for me. Key thing when you look at this data is to remember timing. I've only run 1 program thus far and it only completed 3 months ago. Wouldn't expect to see much in the way of exits after 3 months ;)

ig1 14y ago

Average time for startup to go from founding to exit is seven years. YC is the only one to have even been in existence for seven years. Not only that but even for YC non-exited companies are worth significantly more than the ones that have exited. Dropbox and Airbnb (both five years old) are individually likely to be worth more than the sum total of every YC exit made so far.

yoseph 14y ago

I'm a FounderFuel alum and I can say with certainty that the data isn't complete. From the first cohort alone, around $2.5m has been raised so far. They're now about to start their third cohort in August.

startupstella 14y ago

As an alum of Excelerate Labs, I can tell you this data is nowhere near accurate. For example, FeeFighters exited about 4 months ago and we had about $1.5 million in funding and 8 employees...none of that is listed here. The information is incomplete or incorrect for the majority of companies who went through Excelerate.