Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasonlbaptiste | Hacker News Reader

Not sustainable. They key to the accelerators is actually what happens after: ie- how to grow from 18k + simeple product to more people, funding, and a network. That requires yc tuesday dinners, techstars mentor meetings, demo day allocations, etc. Just not possible to have the people that need to be involved there spread out across 500 accelerators.

View on HN

Solid point, and agree.

With open angel forum in 12 cities now we might be able to help fund maybe two or three dozen of these accelerators--but not much more.

The good news is that if even only 1 of 50 companies out of a University accelerator is successful--and the other 49 serve as an education--it's still well worth doing.

the goal of these is to inspire and educate--not have the same batting average as YC or TS.

Another useful resource would be something along the lines of "funded founders" dinners with companies you've invested in or really like in order to help them deal with growing the company. YC helps going from zero to funded, but what about after? The zero to funded is a 3 month process thing, but the growing after funded is an indefinite time period. Progression I see being useful:

YC/TechStars

OAF

What I described above.

I hear FoundersTable will be kicking off again in 2011. That covers the gap you were discussing: http://stirr.net/founders-table/

There's a lot to be said for going to an Ivy League school, it definitely gives you a head start in a lot of fields - the connections you can make while at school, the brilliant people you'll learn from, and the vast support network you'll have when you get out are not matched at the thousands of lesser schools across the country, and the extra kick you'll receive from being at an Ivy will be most useful right after you graduate.

But the fact that the "lesser" schools can't quite give you that same push doesn't mean that they shouldn't exist, or that you might not be helped immensely by going to one of them.

Not sustainable, sure - YC is the elite of elite accelerators, obviously it's going to be extremely difficult to reproduce its success. But there's still room to grow here, and a lot of people going it on their own that can't get into one of the elite accelerators (if I'm correct YC now accepts a vastly smaller percentage of applicants than Yale or Harvard) but would greatly benefit from some funding, advice, and being helped through some of the unfamiliar business dealings while they focused on their products.

Maybe 500 accelerators is a bit much, but I'd imagine that we could certainly do with a few more, unless we've already reached a point where spots are going unfilled...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com