Stage: pre-incorporation until Seed
Pros: If the program is well designed, you get a little bit of money + the opportunity to network with corporate people that understand your technology and that can be potentially help you in developing it. Possibility to develop a strong (international) network of peer startuppers working on similar challenges.
Cons: The accelerator takes part of your company. Most accelerators are accelerators only on paper.
Look for: Involvement of relevant companies for your business at that moment of time, Vertical industry focus, possibility to access relevant Investor for your startup through the accelerator.
The first program clearly identified as an accelerator was Y-Combinator that started back in 2005 in the USA. Since then this typology of programs grew constantly year over year, and today it is estimated that ***more than 2000 accelerators are active all over the world.***
Even though the terms accelerators and incubators are usually used interchangeably, there is a profound difference among them.
<aside> 💡 Accelerators, as the word suggest, are programs designed to accelerate the learning process of startups.
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This means providing the startup with a information dense program. This modality of engagement (forcing founders to think and rethink thoroughly about what they are doing in a short period of time), help them stress test the business idea by strengthening their capability to elaborate information.
Four different stages of the acceleration process could be identified: application, acceleration phase, demo day and follow on.
The amount of information per unit of time that startups (should be able to) access during the program is therefore way higher than in incubators. In incubators this type of knowledge is usually developed across a wider time span since interactions with stakeholders are less structured.
Different studies have found out that It is exactly the mix of easy access and broad exposure to external knowledge, the high-pressure environment that require intensive exchanges of information, and time-paced weekly check-in by the management team that drives learning in accelerated start-ups.
But accelerators do not provide their services for free.
<aside> 💡 Most of the programs that label themselves accelerators take up to 10-15% of your equity, irrespective of the fact that they accelerate learning or not.
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<aside> ✅ Cohort program
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