

Startup Accelerator Fail: Most Graduates Go Nowhere - pain_perdu
http://readwrite.com/2012/06/21/startup-accelerator-fail-most-graduates-go-nowhere

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onion2k
Full disclosure: I'm a founder of UsableHQ ( <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>). 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).

