Every accelerator makes a version of the same offer: capital, mentorship, a network, three months of support, and materially better odds of survival. Evidence suggests that little of it actually works.
In April, Youn Baek and Deepak Hegde of NYU Stern published a working paper through the National Bureau of Economic Research examining nearly 750,000 American startups across 329 programs. Between 60 and 80 percent of accelerators, they found, leave the companies that join them worse off than if they had never applied. A smaller group does the opposite, raising funding, growth and exit rates by a wide margin. Among them, Y Combinator, Techstars and Endless Frontier Labs.
The study establishes which programs work, but it does not explain why. For that, we asked founder and product-market fit expert Yann Goarin.
Goarin spent a decade at Google and YouTube, where he launched more than twenty products in Europe and the United States, and has since led product and marketing at several venture-backed startups. He founded Zag Labs in 2023, an advisory firm that has helped more than a hundred early-stage companies go to market and accelerate their path to product-market fit. He developed the “PMF System”, a method that treats product-market fit as a problem-solving process rather than an event or a vibe. He is currently Founder in Residence at AAXIS, where he leads the enterprise technology firm’s venture-building work. He also mentors and judges at five accelerator programs across the US (Techstars, gener8tor, FoundersBoost, Expert Dojo, and USC’s Iovine and Young Academy), which gives him a unique perspective on how different programs support their founders.
