As I wrote in a previous post, accelerators are known for putting infrastructure around something so traditionally unstructured. At Techstars, founders will meet 50-100 mentors, report weekly on KPI progress, send a weekly update to mentors and investors, pitch practice, and so on. One paper I recently read explains that while there is little evidence explaining how exactly accelerators affect startups, there is one critical benefit of an accelerator program: “structured accountability.”
Accelerators can help founders do something we often have no time to do — deep reflection. Surprisingly, that sort of contemplative time can only be found in structure. Through the process of sending out weekly updates to a captive audience, meeting with 75-100 mentors and investors pitching and iterating all of the time builds greater self-efficacy around a founder’s company, it can cause a founder to pause and think. There are other reasons why accelerators help founders develop structured accountability. They require founders to achieve milestones faster through intensive learning, develop the entrepreneurial ecosystem around the accelerator, and more. Another Brookings article asked one of our own founders, Brad Feld, why accelerators are so valuable, and different from other entrepreneurship support and early stage investors. Feld’s philosophy on why accelerators can work is validated by the findings around structured accountability. When companies make the decision to join an accelerator, they’re certainly gaining a lot of important financial and network resources. But, they’re also gaining a critical training on teaching their teams how to create good work habits. And, while we hope all of our teams have really good work habits, we know that there’s always room to improve. The key is to learn to work like someone’s watching, even when no one is. Read more about accelerators at Tech.Co
