⚡ Get All Content for 20% Off ⚡

How Accelerators Help Start-ups Get Funding Getting your venture accepted into an accelerator can help immensely when it comes to getting venture capital, thanks to a rigorous screening process and help from mentors and peers.

By Peter S. Cohan

entrepreneur daily

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Business accelerator programs offer start-ups low cost space, business services, talented employees, and contacts who can help find customers and partners in exchange for a small stake.
Unlike business incubators, business accelerators are highly selective. But like anything worth having, getting your start-up accepted by the best accelerators is a matter of winning a competition. But that is probably wise since most ventures fail.

As an investor in start-ups, I have heard the accepted wisdom that out of 10 portfolio companies, only one is likely to be a big success, the rest will either fail or barely return the investment -- "only" half of my investments failed.

And just to get into an investor's portfolio, a start-up must defy daunting odds. The venture capitalists I interviewed for my book Hungry Start-up Strategy: Creating New Ventures With Limited Resources and Unlimited Vision (Berrett-Koehler, 2012) made it clear that they talk to about 1,000 ventures a year and invest in one or two.

But getting your venture accepted into an accelerator can help immensely when it comes to getting into a venture capitalist's portfolio. That's because when a start-up is accepted, it has three months to develop a working prototype for its product and to get a customer.

Related: Cred, Connections, Cash -- The Workings of a Business Accelerator

If the start-up meets those milestones, it can tap the accelerator's network of investors to raise venture capital. And for the venture capitalists, the accelerators serve a valuable function – by forcing the start-up to demonstrate that it can get a customer before they write a check.

The more selective the accelerator, the more likely they will accept the "hottest" start-ups -- which have the greatest odds of yielding a bidding war among the most prestigious venture capital firms.
So which are the best accelerators? Y Combinator tops Forbes's April 2012 list of the top 10 incubators -- followed by TechStars, DreamIt Ventures, AngelPad and others.

The value of Y Combinator's 172 companies in April was $7.78 billion, for an average of $45.2 million per company. That includes its most valuable companies, Dropbox and Airbnb, as well as relatively small and shuttered ventures.

Companies that graduated from Y Combinator in March 2012 competed to raise capital at valuations between $10 million and $15 million. Big-name venture firms, including Sequoia Capital, early Facebook investor Yuri Milner, Ron Conway and Andreessen Horowitz provided $150,000 in guaranteed funding to each startup.

Related: Is Your Business Ready for an Incubator? 5 Tips from a 'TechStars' Grad

Consider these two examples of start-ups admitted to Y Combinator and ended up with checks from venture-capital firms three months later.

CEO and co-Founder of Bump Technologies David Lieb was irritated at having to type contact information of people he met into his smartphone, so he developed a mobile app that exchanges contact information and photos by simply "bumping" phones.

Lieb and two co-founders worked on Bump app for a year as a side project, launched it and then entered Y Combinator. After three months, Bump reached more than 4 million downloads, received $3 million in VC investment and left Y Combinator.

Eric Frenkiel worked at Facebook before co-founding fast database start-up memSQL. He concluded that there was a big need for faster databases that could analyze the huge volumes of data that social networks generated. Three months after entering Y Combinator, Frenkiel had found a customer and his partner, Nikita Shamgunov, had developed the technology.

Frenkiel and others I have spoken with at Y Combinator got value from watching the rapid progress of other companies in their cohort. These peer entrepreneurs were tackling the same challenges. Peer pressure pushed them harder to succeed. Y Combinator partners and its network of investors and advisors also provided useful advice.

When Frenkiel and Shamgunov demonstrated their product at the end of their Y Combinator stay, they received $150,000 in capital from Milner. Milner was in Russia at the time and delivered the good news via "a moveable contraption that's one-part Segway, one-part webcam." Frenkiel joked that "I never in my wildest imagination would think a robot would ever give money."

As Lieb and Frenkiel learned, it's not the robot that gives them money, it's the power of incubators to present start-ups to top venture capitalists. They have cleared a major investment hurdle: building a product and finding a customer willing to use it.

Related: Starting Up Under One Roof: A Look at Residential Incubators

Peter S. Cohan

President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates

Peter Cohan is president of Peter S. Cohan & Associates, a management consulting and venture capital firm. He is the author of Hungry Start-up Strategy (Berrett-Koehler, 2012) and a full-time visiting lecturer in strategy at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass.

Want to be an Entrepreneur Leadership Network contributor? Apply now to join.

Side Hustle

The Remote Side Hustle a 43-Year-Old Musician Works on for 1 Hour a Day Earns Nearly $3,000 a Month: 'All From the Comfort of Home'

Sam Ziegler wanted to supplement his income as a professional drummer — then his tech skills and desire to help people came together.

Marketing

Ever Wonder Why Certain Websites Rank Higher Than Yours? This SEO Expert Reveals The Secret to Dominating Search Results

It's often the smart use of SEO, now supercharged with AI, particularly in keyword optimization.

Business News

AI Is Impacting Jobs. Here Are the Gigs Affected the Most, According to an Analysis of 5 Million Upwork Postings

The researcher said in the report that freelance jobs were analyzed first because that market will likely see AI's immediate impact.

Franchise

The Top Franchise Brands Growing Globally

While our main Fastest-Growing Franchises list focuses on North American growth, more and more brands are looking to grow worldwide. These are the 25 that had the greatest franchise growth outside the U.S. and Canada from July 2022 to July 2023.