Most accelerators make atartups worse. What do the good ones do?
Every accelerator makes a version of the same offer: capital, mentorship, a network, three months of support, and materially better odds of survival. Evidence suggests that little of it actually works.
In April, Youn Baek and Deepak Hegde of NYU Stern published a working paper through the National Bureau of Economic Research examining nearly 750,000 American startups across 329 programs. Between 60 and 80 percent of accelerators, they found, leave the companies that join them worse off than if they had never applied. A smaller group does the opposite, raising funding, growth and exit rates by a wide margin. Among them, Y Combinator, Techstars and Endless Frontier Labs.
The study establishes which programs work, but it does not explain why. For that, we asked founder and product-market fit expert Yann Goarin.
Goarin spent a decade at Google and YouTube, where he launched more than twenty products in Europe and...
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