Item — HN Reader

I like accelerators for two reasons: 1) Having a same-time-founded cohort of companies. Moral support, entertainment, and when ~80% of them fail, you can pick and choose assets (great developers) having great visibility into them.

2) I like the idea of accelerators for people with $0 and just out of college or high school, or who need structure. If I could give 5% of my company to give an accelerator a win (both in money upside and reputation), I'd do it, especially if I were in a third-tier city like Vancouver which deserves a second tier startup population.

1 comments

(I saw I got voted down and should explain)

I think the odds of failure at 50-80%, including my own company, and having a bunch of ready ways to re-deploy those people into other projects is good for EVERYONE -- the engineers can move to the most successful projects. If I worked on something for a year or two and it flopped, I'd love to go work at a startup I'd been following the whole time, rather than trying to find a regular job.

I think SFBA in general is basically an incubator/accelerator, if you've been involved in one startup even as an engineer. Formal accelerators help a lot more in places where most of the people who want to do a startup have NOT yet worked for one. College would be the best example.