NBER measured 329 accelerators - most of them leave startups worse off

Every accelerator pitch rests on the same claim: we add value on top of the founders we already picked. Two researchers borrowed the "teacher value-added" method from education economics to pull those two things apart, across roughly 750,000 US startups.

- Most accelerators post negative value added against comparable startups that never joined one
- A small tail of programs carries all the real gains: acquisitions, headcount, revenue, valuation
- Better ventures also sort into better programs, so a strong cohort is partly selection, not coaching
- The good accelerators shut weak ventures down faster, which the paper counts as value too
- Free working paper, no signup

Read it before you pay for a batch: the result is about which program, not whether a program, and a famous logo mostly tells you who applied. One caveat - the sample ends in 2022, so no AI cohort is in it.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w35063

📎 Read also:
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→ 105 YC founders now work at OpenAI or Anthropic
→ Startups.RIP - 5,700+ dead YC startups with post-mortems