> they have a success rate (Active + Acquired companies) of over 90% Firstly, nowhere on that page does TechStars claim a 90% success rate. The interpretation

> they have a success rate (Active + Acquired companies) of over 90% Firstly, nowhere on that page does TechStars claim a 90% success rate. The interpretation of Active + Acquired = Success, is actually wrong. It is actually trivially easy for a startup that, for all intents and purposes, is dead, to keep limping along for years, or to otherwise maintain a skeleton presence. You could consider using the acquisition % as a metric for success, but even acquisition/exit % is not a good metric for success because the best companies go years and years before IPO/exit (see: YC's biggest winners like Dropbox and Airbnb, which have not exited yet but are widely considered mega-unicorn successes), and because acquihires are actually failures, just dressed up as soft exits. The closest metrics to success for measuring an accelerator's performance that I can think of are % of graduate companies that raise money, average seed valuation of companies after graduation, and/or average valuation of graduate companies in the entire portfolio. Even those metrics are flawed.