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Startup Accelerator Fail: Most Graduates Go Nowhere
- onion2k 13y agoFull disclosure: I'm a founder of UsableHQ ( http://www.usablehq.com http://www.usablehq.com ), a graduate of the first round of the UK's Ignite100 accelerator. Exits take time. Quite a long time at that. Even an "overnight success" takes a year or two. Most of YC's exits took 3 or 4 (http://yclist.com http://yclist.com). Given that the majority of accelerator programmes have been going less than that, you wouldn't really expect to see significant numbers yet. Exits are a pretty poor metric to gauge accelerators on at this stage. Also... in the UK start-up scene there's a definite trend towards "accelerator + PoC funding" at the moment. You get the standard accelerator deal of "$n per founder", but with an attached convertible note of $100,000+ agreed at the beginning if you complete the programme and hit a few targets (having a working MVP, proving a market exists, having a plan to take the product to the world, etc). You're not compelled to take the post-accelerator investment, but it does mean that rather than 13 weeks to go from zero-to-investable you have a runway of 13 weeks plus about a year if you're frugal. It's still hard, but it's a lot less distracting than trying to raise funding the traditional way. You can concentrate on the business. That's what you're supposed to be doing as an entrepreneur after all. I strongly believe it's the future of accelerator programmes (confirmation bias, etc etc).