2. You just picked random companies that support your point.
3. I don't understand the logic behind "accelerators slow you down." Most accelerators encourage you to do a ton of customer validation and to pivot - or ditch your idea completely - when necessary. By maintaining a fast paced environment with a lot of mentors around, they help you move faster, not slower.
Have you gone through any accelerator programs? From some friends I hear the mentorship can very much slow you down- constant meetings. Maybe they just did it wrong, but I hear accelerator programs can slow you down in certain scenarios.
Company's are not random. They are mainstream consumer apps. The next big consumer app = mainstream. Does that not make sense?
"The next big consumer app = mainstream. Does that not make sense?"
No it doesn't, that a big consumer app is considered 'mainstream' is an artifact of the fact that app got marketshare, its a dependent variable, not an independent variable.
Your claim is similar to ones that argue college is a waste of time, spend that four years doing things instead of learning stuff you'll never use. The fallacy of the college argument, and yours, is that structured learning has benefit in information gained over time at the start which is unmatched by unstructured learning.
Consider the time spent in an accelerator at those 'useless' mentoring meetings, they are with folks who have done a lot of different things, seen what is successful and what isn't, and more importantly know what traction 'feels' like when its happening. That lets one quickly learn the right stuff without having to waste time chasing ideas which aren't really having an impact.
I noticed that you backed off your argument a bit here: "I hear accelerator programs can slow you down in certain scenarios." If you're being honest with yourself then you can understand that "certain scenarios" is not "all scenarios" and by that reasoning your thesis fails. By that reasoning you would have to change your thesis "most likely" to maybe "possible".
If you want to reason about what makes a consumer app either a good fit or a bad fit for an accelerator that would be good to talk about. What sort of problems are ill suited to an accelerator environment and why? (and trust me, meeting frequency is not a good metric) There are a lot of accelerators out there [1], why not go through their funded projects and rank them consumer/non-consumer (you will need to define consumer app fairly precisely I suspect) and then bring some reasoning to the table that lets folks know how you arrived at the conclusion you did and why you believe it. We'd love to hear about it.
Your argument is logical. I will change "most likely" to "possibly."Most likely is more sensational. Thanks for the comment. Also- I don't think mentoring is useless and I think school is important.
I have not, but I work about 200 feet from Techstars Seattle and am friends with many of the companies from many of the classes there. I also work for Startup Weekend, so I've heard about a lot of accelerators all over the world.
I'm not saying all accelerators are good. Far from it. And I'm not saying accelerators don't have a ton of problems. I just don't think the article you wrote addresses any of them.
That's more of a caricature of what you go through - going through an accelerator just means you have that buffet of support if you choose to dip into it. You still spend every waking hour working on your product - sometimes you take one of those hours to meet the C-level exec from a company you admire. (i went through an accelerator in LA and that was my experience)
As a mentor though you can tune your interaction with a company to not slow them down with meetings right? Get them to execute on an idea and build up momentum with that execution and THEN if necessary pivot and iterate.
Or is your point that accelerator programs are aimed at companies in a particular stage and consumer apps don't need help through that stage. Surely the programs aren't that long and the next big thing could easily benefit from many of the benefits like networking and exposure?
YC is by no means the first incubator. There were hundreds in the late 90's in silicon valley. Lots of junk, and few that turned out big businesses. Some of those big businesses failed in the .com crash simply because the capital markets imploded (and others because their business had been over-valued).
Yes coincidence. I have no affiliation with YC. Okay so take the biggest consumer apps in the past 5 years- Instagram, Spotify, Pinterest, foursquare, tumblr. They all pass the smell test. I threw in FB, Youtube, Twitter (on the bubble of pre/post accelerator), and a few others...
Lets take a more scientific look at the YC generation of accelerators (which significantly differed from earlier incubators).
Since 2008 there have been only six consumer startups founded that have hit the billion dollar valuation mark: Instagram, Pinterest, Dropbox, Evernote, Groupon and AirBnB (you might choose to exclude Dropbox and Evernote from the consumer market).
Two of them are from YC, and Pinterest was founded by a YC alumni.
1 - what's the proportion of incubators/accelerator companies are pursuing consumer applications?
2 - it's very easy to pick home run successes that are rare to begin with. It's relatively easy to crunch numbers to give the number of successes that come out of an accelerator. It doesn't make sense to cherry pick those successes to be compared to let alone conclude that they will essentially reduce your chances. I'd guess that the odds about the same between accelerator and non/accelerators wrt the success the author is talking about.
3 - I don't think the proposition makes much sense to begin with given how accelerators are so trendy and may be of questionable quality. A note: this is my anecdotal observation, I haven't taken a look at incubators/accelerators in detail.
4 - Has anyone done any investigative work on where accelerator
alumni have gone? There are many other benefits to incubators that can't be quantified by a binary outcome. I'd guess that in a good incubator (like YC), alumni are on average, better off, for a variety of reasons
I think the reason might be that people who are able to build "the next big consumer app" just don't need an accelerator to start building. Just like Steve Jobs didn't need an MBA from Harvard in order to build Apple.
I would say this is more a function of the improbability of social products becoming mainstream than anything else. I don't think there is enough data to draw any conclusions yet.
The only way it comes from an accelerator/incubator is if it built there, a-la Reddit from YC. Reddit is quickly becoming something that should fit the list at the beginning of this post (it's blowing up) and it was built during YC's first class.
However, the odds of say, Twitter, joining an incubator as they were blowing up seems unlikely.
I think going through an accelerator/incubator is seen as sort of a quick path to success. They are short. You can get decent press right away. Great products often require much more time, thought, and energy than accelerators/incubators allow for. YC is definitely one of the best.
YC is the Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT and Caltech of accelerators, all rolled into one. But that doesn't mean startups who can't get into YC are wasting their time going through other accelerators anymore than students who can't get into S/H/Y/P/M/C are wasting their time going to Berkeley or Cal State Stanislaus or wherever they can get accepted. Ya, they'll have a lower chance of success, but there will still be guys who go to liberal arts colleges in Oregon - and dropout after a year - who change the World.
2. You just picked random companies that support your point.
3. I don't understand the logic behind "accelerators slow you down." Most accelerators encourage you to do a ton of customer validation and to pivot - or ditch your idea completely - when necessary. By maintaining a fast paced environment with a lot of mentors around, they help you move faster, not slower.