Accelerators: fantastic…but not magic
Accelerators are amazing. They create tremendous value without question. But let’s get a couple of things straight:
- No one can build a great company for you.
- Great companies have been built without accelerators (or even venture capital if you can believe it 😂 )
Dispelling the Myth
The narrative around startup accelerators can make it seem as if acceptance into the club is the be-all / end-all for aspiring entrepreneurs. But it isn’t true.
Accelerator participation yields some real benefits, it’s true–focus, clarity, drive, sense of urgency, healthy competition and peer motivation, expanding networks, and more. But accelerators are not magic. And acceptance into one doesn’t mean invariable success and vice versa.
What “getting in” actually looks like behind the scenes:
I did YC (W15) with my last company, a data science company called ŷhat (now part of Alteryx). Greg (my cofounder) and I applied 3 times before we got in.
The first time we applied was with a totally different product than the one we ultimately pursued. High-level the idea was for an interactive TV app (think a second-screen e-commerce play). We had zero experience in media and entertainment, and YC made the right call to decline our application. We just weren’t the right team for that.
Our second rejection was for the data science company that we did wind-up building and that YC would ultimately fund at the end of the day.
But our tour of duty with YC wouldn’t be in the cards for another 2 years!
As ŷhat, Greg and I first applied in early 2013. We got the interview. We flew to San Francisco, got grilled in the 10 min interview, and waited patiently in our sad hotel room near the It’s-It factory…eventually, we got the pass email from pg:
This would be the first of many many many pass emails investors would send me over the years. But there’s nothing quite like the first one…Greg and I were very disappointed. At least it was pg, right?
Here’s an email I dug up from the archives that I sent to a friend after ŷhat’s YC rejection in 2013. I remember sending it vividly (note: i’m emailing a personal friend who’d participated in a charity boxing match the same time we were interviewing with YC. I missed the match, and that’s what that part is about 😂)
But Greg and I had already made our decision to start ŷhat with or without YC before we boarded the flight out west a few days prior. And that’s exactly what we did.
The Game-Changer
Between 2013 and 2015 we wrote code and threw it away a few times. We won and lost customers. We hired great people. We did a lot of work. We even raised some $$ before we did YC somehow (thanks Tom Loverro then at RRE (now at IVP) and Ed Sim of boldstart.vc for believing in us along with our amazing first-check angel investors). Greg i still owe you for paying my rent for i think 3 months?
But our YC story isn’t unique..far from it. Lots of blockbuster YC teams didn’t get in the first time around. Check out this amazing interview with Sam Altman and Drew Houston: On starting and scaling Dropbox (YC W07). But these are easy to find and there are lots.
By 2015, we’d been building for 2 years (more if you want to start the clock when we were working nights/weekends on the side). At the time, Greg and I were roommates.
We didn’t even plan to apply again. Greg noticed the deadline and we knocked it out in 25 mins without thinking. 3rd times a charm — got in.
The difference the third time was that the questions in the application were boring. We knew the answers front n back. And we were far more concerned with our then-customers than w/ an irrelevant far-off questionnaire.
We’d made progress enough that YC partners could see and understand the opportunity the same way we did. And we gave them enough signals that that they could take us seriously.
The True Litmus Test
Quitting your job to start your company with or without a fancy accelerator is the ultimate litmus test for whether you should start one. I know it seems like a frustrating dilemma; a bit of a chicken-and-egg. But from experience, I’ve come to appreciate the wisdom in this narrative and believe it to be true.
If you find yourself consumed with a problem or product for months, and all you can think about is fixing it, then you’ve got yourself a compelling reason to start a company.
Accelerators like YC and Techstars can spot the difference between “that” and well, “not that” a mile away
What are accelerators all about anyways?
Accelerators serve as a catalyst for intense focus over a set period of time (often 3 months). A fixed time-period surrounded by folks equally or more creative, talented, and hungry than you are and who are also committed to the same level of focus. This tends to have some powerful properties:
- You are pushed and you push others to ship more, sell more, do more
- A burning deadline makes it far easier to see/avoid useless “vision quests”
- Fresh eyes from creative outsiders == valuable perspective
- Rare concentration w/ narrow focus is fertile ground to learn many things
- Everyone in your life knows you’re heads down…powerful social excuse
- Unambiguous (ideally quantifiable) goals with a fixed albeit arbitrary 3 month timeframe is an inherent productivity booster
“Just Start”
Yes, accelerators are great platforms to enter into this kind of operating paradigm.
But where are the rules that prohibit you from this kind of work style without permission?? I didn’t get that memo.
So my unsolicited advice is to just start…
You and your team are free to manufacture this level concentrated work period yourselves. Give yourselves an acceptable social excuse for doing what needs doing for your startup.
Get in a room and set an objective for the next 90 days that feels barely within the laws of physics…you should feel a pretty uncomfortable but still believe it is achievable in principle without squinting too hard. The goal you choose should be dead-simple to understand. And, most importantly, it should be unambiguous (ideally quantifiable but binary true/false or otherwise unambiguous) for you and the team assess/evaluate at the end.
Then just go for it.
Tell investors and your friends that you’re wired-in for a few months and crush it.
That’s a wrap
Startups don’t build themselves…lots of legwork is mandatory to get them going. But the startup / tech zeitgeist obscures this fact, the same way much of today’s “influencer culture” distorts our sense for the normal or average.
By analogy, if the highly-curated, selective posting on IG misrepresents what normal life is like, the “came out of nowhere” or “overnight success” portrayal of a startup is often a skewed portrayal of the true story shorn of hardships, pivots, near-death moments, and other genuine characteristics. Plus, on top of vanity and fame and other anxiety-inducing drivers on social media, startups are additionally incentivized to downplay their early struggles in order to create the perception of effortless and instantaneous growth.
Do not be gaslit. If running your startup feels like a grind, you are not crazy. Building your company is every bit as hard as it seams. And you are not alone. Block out the noise. Forget about the rest. Just run your game.
If you found this post useful, you might also enjoy these:
Two ways to irreparably f***k up your startup
SOC 2: unsung superpower for growth
Book a 1:1 with me here: intro.co/austinogilvie to talk startups
