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We’ve reached a point in the startup ecosystem where accelerator participation has become something of a currency. Founders collect accelerator logos the way some people collect airline miles—stacking Techstars, Y Combinator, Seedcamp, 500, Antler, and a raft of local programs onto their pitch decks. At first glance, this might look impressive: validation upon validation, a series of stampings on your entrepreneurial passport. But let’s pause for a moment and ask—what is really being validated here?
Accelerators were never designed to be perpetual life support. They were meant to provide a boost—a finite period of mentorship, capital injection, and network access that propel a team into the market. Think of them like a launch pad: you don’t hang around the tower forever—you ignite the engines and you go.
But somewhere along the way, we’ve seen a growing culture of “accelerator hopping”: founders moving from one program to the next, sometimes stringing several together over two or three years. In theory, each should build momentum. In practice, it often signals the opposite.
Quite often, accelerator hopping means a startup hasn’t found product-market fit, and instead of facing the hard questions—like whether the idea is fundable, repeatable, or even viable—the team seeks another cycle of workshops, another round of small checks, another few months of runway.
Some do it for the funding arbitrage: piecing together survival capital through small commitments while pushing the hard work of building a scalable revenue model down the road. Others are in love with the community, the social side of startups, and the esteem of being labeled “accelerated”—but have yet to build a company that can walk on its own.
Investors spot this pattern quickly. When we see three accelerator logos on a deck, it reads less like momentum and more like drift. If the last program couldn’t get you to real traction, why should we believe the fourth will?
Accelerator hopping has a cost beyond signaling. Each program usually takes equity. Cumulatively, you can end up giving away 15–20% of your cap table before reaching a seed round—and for what? A patchwork of disconnected mentors and networks, overlapping but redundant workshops, and investor contacts who often glaze over when they hear “we just graduated another accelerator.”
Even worse is the distraction cost. Continually embedding yourself in accelerators can become an excuse to postpone customer discovery and revenue growth. You’re pitching to mentors instead of buyers. You’re chasing demo day applause instead of actual contracts. You’re calibrating for startup theater, not startup success.
Sadly, I've seen some really compelling startups screw the pooch by doing too many accelerators and winding up with a cap table so messed up that it will literally prevent VCs from investing. Stacked SAFEs and convertible notes with heinous clauses that founders signed off on without proper legal counsel, all in the excitement of getting accepted to another accelerator.
I've seen promising startups lose their will to live on when they discovered that a convertible note has come due before a priced round could convert it, and the collateral was all of their IP. With the only out being to agree to a new convertible note with 4x liquidity preferences, a usurious interest rate, and a super low valuation. A proverbial Hobson's choice. This is the stuff of nightmares. Unfortunately there are plenty of vulture capitalists out there, lying in wait to prey on unsuspecting founders.
Don’t get me wrong—accelerators can be transformational in the right circumstances. People who've heard me speak on the subject know that I'm not a fan of the 90-day programs. It's hard to get anything meaningful done in only 90 days, and yet 1.6M applications are submitted to accelerators each year (meaning many startups submit multiple times a year), with only 50,000 getting in. And of those, the average time to get a full funding round done has actually stretched out to three years after the accelerator course, according to the latest metrics.
Three. Years. Think about that. Why is everyone clamoring to make the 3% cut for this? It is literally easier to get into Harvard, but at least then you'd have something to show for it. And statistics hide the cause and effect relationship. It isn't that getting into a great accelerator will ensure your success, it's that your success will ensure getting into a great accelerator. YC's infamous 1% acceptance rate comes from the fact that they generate a huge number of applications... the PR machine is self-regenerating.
A great fit between program and founder can shape the trajectory of a business. But like any scarce resource, their power depends on knowing when to stop.
My advice:
Accelerator hopping is a symptom of a deeper fear: the fear of graduating into the unstructured, brutally honest world of customers and investors. But that’s the real work of entrepreneurship. If you keep circling the launch pad, you’ll never break orbit.
As I like to remind founders: the measure of a successful startup CEO isn't the number of accelerator applications they can fill out in a year, it's about getting real traction with customers, MVPs, team recruitment, and investors. It's hard to do that moving all over the country every 90 days for another sprinkling of fairy dust.
