Has anyone seen an objective study of the impact of incubators and accelerators (not the same thing) on the typical rates of startup success?

90% of startups fail, less than 1% receive funding.
74% of funded startups fail.

I'm looking into how much those rates change by going through an incubator or accelerator.

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Most established incubators and accelerators will have success metrics on their site. The challenge is that different organization report their success differently. For example, success can be finding the next round of funding, reaching IPO, staying in business for X Number of years. It is incredibly difficult to compare apples to apples, especially given how certain industries are more difficult to disrupt than others. Similarly, just because an incubator takes on a very aggressive approach eg. betting on crazy moonshots and have fewer successes, does not mean they are less profitable/ less innovative/ have intrinsically less merit than others.

At the end of the day, from the founder's perspective it comes down to resources and fit eg. Do you work well with the managing director, do you agree with the advice that is being given, do the resources they provide match your needs.

The commonly cited 90% statistic is actually not about startups as we understand it in tech. It is a gov metric looking at the number of legal entities that are being incorporated and dissolved within an X number of years. Theoretically, this would include mom and pop shops eg. Bodegas. It would also exclude pre-MVP/ people in the ideation phase.

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Sure the % aren't precise but speaking from experience, not as a founder but someone who has worked in/with startups for 20 years, and in a dozen programs, it's pretty accurate.

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Interested in the answer for this

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Interested to know

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It also depends on your product market readiness too. Do you have traction and how solid are the use cases?

True, through the selection process, the incubators filter out the ideas that they feel will not succeed. They provide resources so founders can focus on building the idea. With this it may seem like the success rate is higher there, but, this doesn’t mean ideas outside these incubators or accelerators have higher failure rate. At the end, it’s the idea (market fit), resources to execute, and ability to execute.

If you take money without being experienced, in my 5 years of watching other youngish founders you're still in the 90% territory. I've seen almost all bootstraps (or near bootstrap) projects survive.

Annecdotal and maybe because people that don't need money are less risky, but I think it's at least partially because people who avoid money can focus on build/sell and avoid the inefficient raise process that doesn't actually add value to the company.

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