I think the biggest problem is not so much the equity that you can lose, but also the time startups lose, especially in many of the newly created accelerators.

I think the biggest problem is not so much the equity that you can lose, but also the time startups lose, especially in many of the newly created accelerators. I have seen founders being obligated to attend 9-5 in poorly designed co-working office-spaces when their own arrangements are much more efficient, having to pitch daily to people that have no impact on your success and having to attend day-long workshops on subjects they already master or are irrelevant to their challenges. In that way I have seen startups join accelerators and wasting a lot of time boosting the accelerators themselves (especially if they are corporate-driven) but decelerating themselves. When it comes to Demoday, there suddenly are few investors and even fewer press. The key thing that new accelerators don't realize is that YC did this for many, many years until their current status quo. Many accelerators think that just by calling a demo-day and showing ten startups that they pumped a total of $500K in, they will be the next YC. If they don't have the track-record yet, they better have 200K of followup cash ready for each startup to show that they really mean it and that their curation process resulted in a meaningful selection.