The incubator/accelerator market has a growing number of people watching and waiting for it’s bubble to pop. The reasons sighted for this looming pop should be obvious: most accelerators aren’t going to perform as well as some TechStars (TS) programs and not even close to Y-Combinator (YC). Poor performance (measured in the number of short-term wins) along with the short-term nature of the funding behind most of the accelerator programs will cause them to run out of money and simply fade into startup history. But that won’t pop the bubble.
As accelerators have become an increasingly popular way to scatter seed funding among a large number of companies, critics have noted two key developments: Companies of lesser promise are gaining acceptance, and often funding, and the quality of mentoring in the programs has decreased.
When David Tisch, former managing director of TechStars’ New York City accelerator, stepped down from his role with the program, he complained in an interview that “the majority of accelerators are not good for companies.” - http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-14/waiting-for-the-accelerator-bubble-to-pop
I think the bubble pops when the application numbers and quality of the people applying drops. That will happen when people no longer feel they need what accelerators offer. The leading indicator will be poor performance of the companies coming out of the program, which is likely a result of the poor quality of entrepreneurs in the program.
The Angel and VC community reacted to YC’s early success and latched on to the TechStars model that was viewed as a copy of Paul Graham’s YC model but open (there are only two models for success). This experimentation with the TechStars worked in terms of building a big lead list of early stage companies and “founders to watch” that have a baseline education and network. Education is something investors used to have to do on their own for their early stage investments, the TechStars model allows investors a way of scaling that early stage knowledge transfer.
The problem with it is that everyone copied the 12-week TechStars model and didn’t look at what brought Y-Combinator it’s early success. It isn’t the DemoDay or the great list of mentors. It is the education process (which includes holding people accountable) that built the success and now the alumni network that is allowing it to scale to a point.
When looking at the demand (indicated by the ever growing pile of applications), it isn’t just fuelled by the popularity of tech startups and the sexiness of the moment. The demand for accelerator programs is fed by a gap in the services or product that is currently offered in the education system – globally. As building companies that require highly skilled and educated employees has become ‘easier’ the higher education system that was optimized to train PhD candidates hasn’t adjusted to the new reality.
The education industry gets this and it has been learning how it can meet the need. There are a lot of experiments out there in higher education that have a long history but more recently the focus on experiential learning has seen the accelerator model meet education. The common place to find them spreading in higher education globally is to google “Venture Lab” and skip passed the .ca reference. There 25+ of them across the globe and growing.
The first generation of programs are a few years along and the next generation of programs is emerging. There is a range from innovation and entrepreneur streams in undergraduate and graduate programs to full blown programs that are accelerator-like but heavily integrated into the educational experience of students. There are still a lot of unknowns to be worked out but it is clear to me that the education system is better positioned to educate students and will eventually make most accelerator programs obsolete.
These programs will exist at every school and if they are done right at a few key schools the applicant pool will degrade for expensive accelerators.