Risk friendly\/fail friendly ecosystem<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nConsidering those key elements, an incubator works well if you have space, mentors, community and ties to a strategic goal.<\/p>\n
It particularly suits long-term projects that will spend months\/years in the early formation and somewhat into the validation stages of the startup lifecycle.<\/p>\n
But what happens when you need to get to product\/market Fit sooner? When three years is too long to prove that people want what the startup is trying to create?<\/p>\n
In tech startups in particular, three years is a really long time. What happens when you want to fast track the learnings to fail fast, rapidly experiment and scale globally?<\/p>\n
That is when you need to accelerate a business.<\/p>\n
The accelerator<\/h3>\n
In 2005, Paul Graham launched Y Combinator, probably the most popular and certainly one of the most prolific startup accelerator programs.<\/p>\n
Y Combinator\u2019s origin, like many startups\u2019 origin stories, was born from solving a different challenge \u2013 they wanted to do seed funding with standardised terms. What they found was that funding startups in a bunch, instead of one at a time, was a much better way to support, grow and fund startups.<\/p>\n
As of 2016, Y Combinator has invested in about 940 companies including Dropbox, Airbnb,Coinbase, Stripe, Reddit, Zenefits, BuildZoom, Instacart, Twitch.tv, Machine Zone,Weebly, and Chinese startup Raven Tech, with the combined market capitalisation of YC companies at over $65 billion.<\/p>\n
So what does an accelerator program look like?<\/h4>\n
Accelerators are specifically designed programs to accelerate a startup success (or failure.) The key things that differentiate an accelerator program from an incubator are:<\/p>\n