Accelerators as the Future of Organization
Tech accelerators are famous across tech communities worldwide — they act as platforms for founders, pipelines for investors, and laboratories for innovation itself. But few are thinking about how their impact will expand far beyond the tech community, affecting work settings, systems, institutions and organizations everywhere.
Here’s why.
Historically, angel investors and seed-stage venture capitalists organized accelerators for several reasons:
- First, to create a system for evaluating early stage companies, as opposed to a non-process often including an introduction from a mutual friend, and 2–3 lunches, dinners, drinks, or calls before wiring or signing a check.
- Second, to deepen their understanding of prospective investments (and, more importantly, the founders of those companies) prior to investing in them.
- Third, to expedite the funding process once a high-potential team is identified (once a member of the accelerator’s network decides to move forward with an investment, bringing in other investors active in the relevant accelerator’s community happens much more quickly.)
So programs like Techstars (my alma mater, full disclosure), NUMA, and Y-Combinator set up the first accelerators as investment vehicles — and they (as well as hundreds of others) have proven their accelerators to be critical to establishing the tech economy, from perspectives of both survivability (what percentage of companies survive and for how long), as well as unicorn valuations/exits (or other exponential transactions). Techstars has raised behemoths like SendGrid (the accelerator space’s first IPO) and Digital Ocean, and YC has a famous wins in Airbnb, Dropbox, and Reddit.
And now, as I love to talk about often, it’s becoming clear that accelerators are a new approach to organizational development as well as ecosystem development.
Look at the ways that companies like Google are fundamentally structured to house organic innovation development. Its transition to Alphabet is proof: Google is just one of a roster of brands, products, and technologies the organization has created via its own internal structure — not strategic or executive mandates.
More on this soon. Until then —
Reach Out,
JFL
