Dear awesome startups, don’t join an accelerator, unless…

There is a fundamental disconnect with the concept of an Accelerator and the concept of a Disruptive Startup. If you do the math, honestly, they are a really crappy deal for the Startup. The "acceleration" they provide is little more than standard information, standard anecdote experiences, and standard MBA advice. If what they offered actually had they value they claim, they would be creating a startup themselves. Accelerators are parasites on your ambition and capability. Trust yourself, trust your team, and be adult enough to not sign up for a nanny program that is just going to treat you like children and take a portion of your equity for it.

"So don’t join an accelerator unless you can win it." So we're basically in a situation in which self-selection rules now. In the future, if you made it through an accelerator and "won" it you were already in a position to do so. That means that the benefit of actually winning the round from the accelerator was minimal since you most likely would have succeeded anyway.

Given the massive difference in funding between an accelerator seed (tens of thousands) and the first raised round (millions) it seems like the accelerators disproportionately gain from having these self selected success stories.

Accelerators, more recently, really seem to provide business direction and a stream of well documented CEO advice which, for a lot of these startups, solves zero of their engineering or customer problems. It's not that the mentorship provided at the labs is not useful but rather that it seems to solve a less important part of the overall problems early companies have.

And to top it off, like the article mentions, the effort rewarded during an accelerator is often related to pizzaz, flash, and cool demos rather than core product. I hope the accelerators look to strengthen their offerings to seed companies and really incubate them rather than slip further towards the "gateway to VCs" which, at times, seems like the predominant movement.

I don't think anyone who hasn't started a company is qualified to write an article like this.

If there’s a chance you’ll pivot halfway through the program and demo a one-month-old idea to a crowd of investors and media, you’re not going to win.

This is just flat-out wrong... Greplin, Codeacademy, Meteor all come to mind. Most companies don't pivot, but the ones that do, often end up doing the best (at least in YC history).

Incubators and VCs may be oranges and apples, but YC started a new kind of incubation system, to which the name "accelerator" (which is in common use) is more fitting than "incubator".

A traditional VC, compared to an incubator, was able to offer access to bigger money in the next rounds (whether the VC's own, or other funds it co-invests in), and networking.

But YC (and other accelerators) actually give you everything a traditional VC does. The main difference is bureaucracy & first round size: A traditional VC spends 2-3 whole months trying to decide if to take a deal or not; therefore it makes no sense to invest anything less than $500K (and often no less than $2M), and you have 1-2 investments/year/partner.

YC and other accelerators invest ~$20K, with (comparatively) no overhead, but otherwise give the same access to networking and future money.

It's apples to oranges only in the sense that when you're hungry, either one will help you get through the hunger. For one of them, you have to wait much longer in line, and it keeps your hunger at bay for longer.