List of Seed Accelerator Programs and their results

by robg • 14 years ago

71 29 14 years ago

rdl3• 14 years ago

The median $ seems incorrect -- for Y Combinator, it seems to be the investment just from YC, and for other programs, it seems to be their entire raise from all sources.

I believe most YC companies raise external capital on top of YC; there has been START and YC VC from $80k to $150k, and according to pg, a most YC companies that need to raise capital have been successful doing so (at least for the past few years).

pg4• 14 years ago

Yes, it's way off. It's based on Crunchbase, which is very incomplete about funding unless investors make a deliberate effort to log rounds there. The actual median up to w2012 seems to be 850k. (We don't have fundraising data from the summer batch in our system yet.)

jedc5• 14 years ago

(Seed-DB founder here)

Exactly; where the majority of startups in an accelerator don't have funding data in Crunchbase, it defaults to the funding that startups get from the accelerator itself. (This is why the list of accelerators defaults to sorting by average funding versus median funding.)

There were a few different ways I could have calculated median funding. The first is just looking at the values of startups with funding data, but this would have only identified the median funding of the "winners" of a program and thus isn't as valuable. So I calculate median by using funding data from Crunchbase for each startup, and where there's none I use the original funding from the accelerators.

If anyone has any questions, comments or feedback, my e-mail is plastered all over the site. (jed.christiansen@seed-db.com)

seats• 14 years ago

last time around

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4291075

rdl3• 14 years ago

Is it still accurate for TechStars Cloud? (I'm intrigued by the concept of thematic incubators. Particularly, what happens if you pick a theme that either eats the world (cloud) or dies (TechStars Flash would not be something I'd invest in right now...)

kevinpfab• 14 years ago

Yes, the numbers for TechStars Cloud are accurate. If you're interested in learning more about the themed program, feel free to contact me and I'll answer any questions you have!

Source: I was a founder in TSC's first class.

mikegirouard• 14 years ago

I knew I had seen this before...

subrat_rout• 14 years ago

I can't find Founder Institute.

jedc5• 14 years ago

I have a pretty strict definition of what constitutes a "seed accelerator": http://www.seed-db.com/about/view?page=definition

Since Founder Institute charges startups to be a part of the program, it's not included.

aneth44• 14 years ago

Most pertinent observation: there isn't much money in startups. The odds truly are horrendous.

Even from YC, the average exit is only $2M. From other accelerators, the total of all exists is well below what most founders want for their own exit.

This might explain why companies are so quick to jump on $10M aquihire deals.

Conclusion? If you want financial gain from a startup, go for sustainable revenue and building a real profitable business. Or get into YC and be one of their more successful bets.

Granted, there may be a lot more exits in the future from some of these accelerators, but it's doubtful that will change the averages by any order of magnitude.

Perhaps we should ask ourselves, why do these investors stick around?

dmk23• 14 years ago

Nice to see that this independent report confirms what I've posited earlier in "You Can Go It Alone" thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4799752

acgourley2• 14 years ago

Your conclusion doesn't follow unless you have a chart showing the average outcomes there are better. There are a lot of smart people betting their own money that you're wrong, after all.

pg4• 14 years ago

I'm not sure why you think the average exit is $2 million. Are you getting that from the column titled "Average $?" If you mouse over that title, you'll see it refers to the average amount raised.

bkanber• 14 years ago

He may be getting that figure from the $950M "$ Exits" figure divided by 450 companies -- but that's incorrect as not all 450 companies have had exits.

I'd imagine that probably 45 companies have had exits, making the avg exit value around $20M, which sounds pretty realistic to me.

shin_lao• 14 years ago

I assume you divided the exit value by the number of companies to come up with something around $ 2M.

First, not all companies exited, therefore "expected exit value" is probably much higher (and I would rather look at the median value to have a better ideas of the odds).

Additionally, the purpose of building a company isn't to "make an exit", it's to build a business. "A startup" is, to me, the early phase through which many business go.

The journey is more important than the destination. Building a business is a life-changing experience.

You will become rich, if you accept that wealth comes in different forms; the irony is that pecuniary wealth will be more likely to happen if not sought after.

laverick• 14 years ago

I get the gist of your statement and don't entirely disagree on how to optimise your own outcome as an individual, but I also think you're ignoring that most seed accelerators are a relatively new, and there's a lot of shareholder value out there that hasn't seen an exit. Case in point - add a Dropbox and AirBnb exit and suddenly the number triples...

olalonde• 14 years ago

> Conclusion? If you want financial gain from a startup, go for sustainable revenue and building a real profitable business.

As opposed to going for unsustainable revenue and building an unprofitable business?

acgourley2• 14 years ago

I just wanted to point out many of those programs are < 4 years old and four years after YC's founding nearly everyone was skeptical of them. It just takes a while to a) get a few winners b) get a market value on them.

If the powerlaw of startup outcomes is accurate, nearly all of these programs are too young and too small to have telling data.

jedc5• 14 years ago

Seed-DB founder here.

I've recently added a feature where I grant permission for users to enter/edit information on their accelerator and their accelerator startups to Seed-DB. It's a manual process, and I only give this permission to accelerator program founders or administrators. But if that's you, please get in touch. (jed.christiansen@seed-db.com)

Otherwise, if you sign up for the newsletter (http://www.seed-db.com/about/view?page=newsletter <- very low traffic) you'll hear about all the new stuff first.

fidanov2• 14 years ago

Funny table, but does not showing anything about the success of those businesses or the VCes. As far as this table shows, each of these companies may have been a total failure, which I am sure is not true.

There should be columns like "profits", "revenue", "median profits", "number of profitable companies". Such type of columns will show how successful are both the companies and the accelerators.

Also the "average lifespan" and "number of companies still operating" could be other interesting metrics that provide an insight on how sustainable are those companies.

jedc5• 14 years ago

Founder of Seed-DB here. I'd love to get numbers on revenue, profits, etc. but it's essentially impossible to do this for private companies. Even average lifespan is difficult because death is often not a single day, but a slow transition.

fidanov2• 14 years ago

You are right. Its hard + I suppose some VC companies will try to prevent revealing such data, as it will not show them in the best possible light.

List of Seed Accelerator Programs and their results

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