Here is a list of accelerators, incubators, and fellowships for startup entrepreneurs. Starting a startup is tough. You will likely not succeed. But it's always good to try!
Maybe it's destiny, but I just read an insightful article in The New York Times about entrepreneurship everyone who feels they are too old to start something should read.
Most tech start-up founders who have successfully raised venture capital have much less unusual résumés, according to data analysis by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business. The average founder is 38, with a master’s degree and 16 years of work experience.
Yet if someone like that came to a top venture capitalist’s office, he or she could very well be turned away. Start-up investors often accept pitches only from people they know, and rely heavily on gut feelings, intuition and what’s worked before. “I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg,” Paul Graham, co-founder of the seed investor Y Combinator, once said.
Well dang! I'm 38, have a Master's degree from Haas School of Business, and have 16 years of work experience. I've also built a sustainable lifestyle business for the past six years that continues to grow. Maybe, there's some credibility in these old bones to start a new VC-backed business after all.
A List Of Accelerators, Incubators, And Fellowships For Startup Entrepreneurs
Believing is half the battle. Before getting bumped up to USTA 5.0 level tennis last year, I never thought I belonged. My serve and backhand sucked, and my knee injury was slowing me down. But after going 3-3 this season, when I hoped to win just one match, suddenly my serve and backhand are more powerful because I finally believe! The knee pain is still there, but I soldier on.
When you don't believe in yourself, it's terrifying to face opponents who can embarrass you with a double bagel beat down (0-0). But if you can some how flip the mental switch, I'm sure all of us who TRY will surprise ourselves in some way.
The same concept goes for starting a business. We don't try because we don't believe we have the credentials. I don't “look” like the typical VC-backed Silicon Valley founder. Hence, I question my own beliefs. Having a diverse group of people in any ecosystem can help inspire more people to try.
Starting A Startup
For a little while, I decided I would not pursue the path of spending the next 5-10 years killing myself to build a big business. Instead, I would continue maintaining a lifestyle business because it's so much easier since the momentum is already there. Financial Samurai has lasted for the past six years because it's fun! I write to express, connect, and learn. Growing this site's traffic and revenue is not a focal point, but a nice side benefit. To turn FS into a money making machine would bum me out because this site is so personal.
But I realize things don't have to be all or nothing. My biggest fear was messing up a good thing already with Financial Samurai. Instead, why not continue writing on Financial Samurai and incorporate a new business idea instead? Financial Samurai can be a great testing platform to get the product to fit the market. Readers can also go on the entrepreneurial ride with me as I promise to make it entertaining.
The one thing that drives entrepreneurship is the realization that something cannot be left not done. Based on my experiences in the finance industry and as an oft injured athlete, the world could sure use two products, a financial app and a piece of athletic hardware I've come up with.
Finding Support For Your Startup
I'm looking for support from incubators / accelerators to help me get these products to market. Those of you who find this article through Search may be looking for the same thing. There are so many minefields to navigate in the startup world. Why not try and enlist help from those who've already been there?
But given most startups fail, and most VC-backed startups also fail, I've come up with a logical entrepreneurship progression:
If I cannot convince an accelerator or incubator to back my company, then the chances of failure are even greater. If one can't even get a B+ in biology class, it's probably not a good idea to dedicate the next 10+ years of one's life to be a doctor. We've got to strive but also face reality as well.
Step one for me and for you is to apply to enough fellowships, incubators, and accelerators so that one of them may actually take us in. The financial support will be important to help defray opportunity cost. Even better is the guidance from experienced entrepreneurs on how to bring the product to market.
List Of Accelerators, Incubators, Fellowship Programs
When I was in college, I became envious of my then girlfriend who won a $10,000 scholarship to study abroad in China. As someone who could speak Mandarin much better than her due to living in Taipei for four years as a kid and having Mandarin-speaking parents, I wondered why I couldn't get a study abroad scholarship myself.
The obvious reason why was because I never bothered to apply! What a dumbass. After coming to my senses, I applied for a small $500 scholarship from William & Mary's Charles Reeves International Center. After going through an interview, I was rejected. Pissed, I went back and lobbied my case until they finally said yes.
Lesson learned: don't take “no” for an answer!
There is a plethora of fellowships, incubators, and accelerators to apply to in order to receive funding and guidance. Here are some of the most popular I've researched for my own entrepreneurial journey.
General Accelerators / Incubators
- Y Combinator – The most popular startup accelerator that has produced companies like AirBnB and DropBox. They invest $120,000 in each company for a 7% stake. Three month program that ends with a demo day of your actual product.
- TechStars – Techstars provides $118,000 in seed funding, intensive mentorship, and an amazing network of mentors and alumni for 7-10% equity in your company.
- 500 Startups – Four-month accelerator program in Mountain View, San Francisco, and Mexico City; has invested in over 1,000 startups.
- AngelPad: AngelPad offers the complete opposite in the same area by investing larger amounts of money in fewer startups over a longer period of time in order to provide a more intensive and tailored mentorship incubation program to the startups that they take under their wing.
- Startupbootcamp – Startupbootcamp's accelerator programs have one key focus – to connect startups with the most relevant mentors, investors and partners from around the world. They do this through an intensive three-month program that’s been fine tuned since 2010 to efficiently tap into the largest international network of over 400 alumni founders, top corporate partners, and investors spanning all stages of growth. All programs culminate with up to a 1000 attendee investor Demo Day celebrating the progress that’s been made and preparing for future scale.
- Matter: Their 5 month program kicks off with an intensive bootcamp focused on building scalable media ventures with a human-centered, prototype-driven design process. Next, share-outs, weekly speakers, and monthly design reviews build up to a demo day in SF and a media showcase in NYC. They invest $50,000 in their companies.
- Founders Space: An incubator + accelerator looking beyond just tech. Comprehensive program taught by entrepreneurs who’ve done it all. Community of founders who are passionate about helping one another. Free co-working space to collaborate with your cohorts during the program. Network of top advisors, growth hackers, lawyers, angels & marketing pros. Access to our mentoring sessions and workshops for 12 months. Optionality on receiving cash or equity.
- Advance Technology Development Center (ATDC) – Georgia Tech Fintech incubator for Georgians. ATDC’s 150 graduates have collectively raised more than $2 billion in capital. In 2014, Signature and Graduate companies merited $50+ million in capital. Nationally, 90% of technology startups fail. More than 90% of the ATDC’s Signature graduates are successful five years after their graduation.
- MassChallenge – 4-month programs: mentorship, office space, education, network & community, and other resources. $2 million+ cash awards, $10 million in-kind. Open to all: any early-stage startup, in any industry, from anywhere in the world. No equity taken. No restrictions on the startups. Wow, this program looks great! Programs are in Boston, UK, and Israel.
Financial Technology Focused (FinTech) Accelerators
- Ynext Incubator by Yodlee –Ynext Incubator is a 6-month program for developers, innovators, and entrepreneurs to launch disruptive products that leverage transactional financial data. 12 months of free access to the Yodlee platform. Note: Congrats to Yodlee for getting acquired by Envestnet for $18.88/share on 8/10/2015! One of my favorite companies in the Valley.
- Barclays Accelerator – A 13-week accelerator program out of New York and London. Partnership with TechStars. Barclays is one of the largest banks in the world.
- Bright Bridge Ventures – Fintech incubator. Funding of £1 – £10m for each company will be provided by their anchor investor, Blenheim Chalcot, and selected co-investment partners including QED Investors.
- Coin Apex – NYC based tech incubator now specializing in the Bitcoin space.
- FinLeap – Fintech focused. They provide you with 0.5 – 5 million euro in seed funding and access to their financial network, which includes Angels and Industry Investors. They value smaller investments with higher stakes for the founding teams.
- FinTech Circle – Angel program primarily focused on fintech companies out of the UK.
- FinTech Innovation Labs – 12-week mentorship program in Hong Kong, New York, and London.
- FinTech Sandbox – Boston based incubator that offers startups free access to data feeds and APIs from providers such as Thomson Reuters and Xignite.
- New York Angels – They lead deals ranging from $100,000–$1.0 million. Invested over $100 million in more than 100 venture companies.
- PlugnPlay Accelerator – Plug and Play FinTech provides funding, mentorship and acceleration to startups and first-time entrepreneurs to help them bring to market the next disruptive solution for the growing worldwide economy. Over a 12-week period, the accelerator program will accept 20-30 startups in each of two classes in its 2015 inaugural program. The stage-agnostic accelerator is seeking applications from startups focused on mobile payments and banking, as well as security and authentication.
- QC FinTech – Three-month accelerator bootcamp in Charlotte. Charlotte is the second largest financial capital in the US. It has ten's of thousands of folks serving in the financial services industry that provides a collection of knowledge and talent anywhere outside of the top 5 cities in the World.
- Rockstart – They've got a digital health accelerator, web & mobile accelerator, and a smart energy accelerator based in Amsterdam.
- Six Thirty – SixThirty is different from most accelerators because they maintain a healthy balance of helpful programming and networking opportunities. SixThirty invests in fintech companies with working products, so the type of value-added discussions we seek to have are based around the typical issues for companies at this stage, which involve sales, marketing, hiring, and fundraising.
- Upwest Labs: A Silicon Valley-based seed fund that looks to invest in and partner with Israeli startups that are targeting the US market. To date, UpWest Labs portfolio startups have raised more than $100M in funding with an average seed round of over $1M per company; Over 70% of the startups have raised follow-on funding, with a few of them acquired by the likes of Google and Priceline.
Fellowships (No Equity Exchange)
- Y Combinator Fellowship – $12,000 fellowship, no equity exchange, 10 week program down in Mountain View to help early stage startup founders grow their ideas. 6,500 people applied in the inaugural round for just ~20 spots. That's a 0.3% acceptance rate.
- Lightspeed Venture Fellowships: Each selected team will receive $5,000 per team and $10,000 per team member, mentoring by one of Lightspeed’s investment professionals, as well as office space in Menlo Park, CA throughout the summer. No equity is exchanged, and there's no obligation to accept money from Lightspeed.
Hardware Accelerators
- Lemnos Labs: Accelerator to help develop hardware startup companies. Invests up to $250,000 for a 25% stake. Lemnos Labs has $70 million in backing, and offices in Singapore, Scotland, and San Francisco.
- Hax Accelerator: Started in 2012 with nine startups, and is incubating 80 companies in 2015. It has a 3.5 month program, most of which is in Shenzhen! This is brilliant for hardware startups and those who want to live abroad and learn Mandarin. I'm definitely applying here.
- Highway1: Hardware accelerator owned by PCH, an Irish design and manufacturing company.
Lots Of Accelerators, Incubators, And Fellowships To Choose From
After reading this post, there's no excuse not to apply to as many accelerators as possible to support your idea. If you have an average 5% chance of getting accepted, you'll have to apply to 15-20 accelerators / fellowships to finally get in. Good thing there's plenty out there.
We must accept the fact there's only a tiny chance of creating a great big company. But if we can focus on trying to succeed at the first step, which is putting together a pitch to get into an accelerator, then we give ourselves a greater chance for success. Big wins are simply a cumulation of small wins along an unknown journey.
Related:
How One Startup Founder Enriched Himself And Screwed His Employees
Candid Advice For Employees Joining A Startup
Recommendations
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IgniteUNY is an accelerator based in Troy, NY and takes no equity from the startups. They provide a 8-week program that prepares student startups for seed funding and entrance into later-stage accelerators. We want to encourage entrepreneurs to launch and grow their startups here in New York.
Very informative post! Entrepreneurs can learn more about Ynext Incubator here: https://bit.ly/1PKwKFW and apply by September 15, 2015.
Here in Pittsburgh, the one everyone talks about is alphalab. Also, alphalab gear for hardware/robotics. Seeing lots of interesting activity in the startup world around town.
This is the first I have ever even heard of an Accelerator/Incubator. It is very appealing knowing there are companies out there like that to help you grow. Now if I only had a cool product or investion! Do they help grow blogs?! ;)
The statistics suggest that you have a better chance of both success and being accepted into an incubator if you have a co-founder. Many VC’s will not fund single founder ventures.
Also, what about this site? Y-combinator would demand so much that you’d likely have no time to maintain so you’d prob have to have one heck of an article queue.
Good thing I’ve got a co-founder!
To answer your question:
“But I realize things don’t have to be all or nothing. My biggest fear was messing up a good thing already with Financial Samurai. Instead, why not continue writing on Financial Samurai and incorporate a new business idea instead? Financial Samurai can be a great testing platform to get the product to fit the market. Readers can also go on the entrepreneurial ride with me as I promise to make it entertaining.”
Nice! This is a sort of Ultimate list for start-up entrepreneurs, very useful resource, thanks for putting it together.
Another place that I believe may be of interest, is SCORE.org.
They work with the SBA and provide mentorship for startups or small businesses. You can book an appointment with mentors in your industry, and many I have talked to had 35+ years of experience and worked as CEOs or VPs before they retired. They have invaluable knowledge and can help refine a business plan, marketing strategy, set up a supply chain…
The best of all, it’s FREE! And the people I talked to were top notch.
Cool. What is SBA? Small Business Association?
Yes, it’s the Small Business Association. Also I would add that, at least in Houston, they partnered with the Houston Community College to use their facilities for courses that mentors would give and illustrate with their own experience.
It’s a great motivational and networking opportunity that start-ups could use.
Correct. I don’t know about up in the city but down here in the valley they have a great network of retired business executives who will mentor you through getting your business started and common hurdles along the way.
In my experience it’s not as tech-focused as your typical valley incubator, but there are retired tech execs in their stable who can give valuable advice.
Wow there are way more than I would have imagined. That’s really cool! Even though I’m sure most of them are really competitive, they give lots of people including yourself options and resources they wouldn’t easily have on their own.
I think you’re exactly right that people regret more of what they don’t do versus having tried and failed. It’s about satiating our “what if I had tried…” appetite. Best of luck with whichever ones you apply to!
After doing some research, I’m pretty excited about the one that combines international travel, with Mandarin, and entrepreneurship!
Very interesting article and thanks for summarising these thoughts. I have had the same idea for a while and actually came up with a platform (https://mystartupland.com) for startup founders to review (anonymously) startup accelerators, because let’s face it, not all of us can make it to the top 10 or so.
Which accelerators come out on top? Which accelerators are the ones to avoid based on your platform?
As expected most of the those very famous have a lot of positive reviews… My assumption is that they actually know what they are doing and have a strong network. Having said that, we see that based on some parameters, even the one that have 5 stars rating, don’t do well for example in clients intros or VC networking.
On the other hand, we see that those in “weak” regions (i.e. Eastern Europe) have less positive feedback; most likely due to lack of entrepreneurship background by the founders as well as low community level.
Once I will have more data to analyse I will actually make a ranking for top performers and share it with you, if interested.
Sam, I think a successful entrepreneur must have a high level of confidence in themselves and in the product. I’m reading a book called “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules are Lives” and it makes a compelling case that luck is a big factor in differentiating the winners and losers. For example John Grisham, Dr. Suess, and J.K. Rowling all had their original manuscripts repeatedly rejected before getting a publishing deal. I think they said John Grisham’s first book, “A Time to Kill” was rejected 28 times before finding a publisher.
Based on what I’ve read recently, your plan to hit as many accelerators and incubators as possible sounds spot on! Have a plan for a good product and hope to be in the right place and the right time. Good luck!
Or Tim Westergren of Pandora who got over 300 rejections before getting his first funding.
The Pandora story is amazing.
Thanks for the luck wishes!
“The one thing that drives entrepreneurship is the realization that something cannot be left not done.” – I absolutely love this! There are so many times people think of something that could make big difference in the world but don’t do it because they don’t have that big push to do the work to get it out there.
I don’t have any experience with accelerators, incubators, or fellowships but if you believe you have a good product and you have tested the idea with focus groups then I would still try and give it a try. Obviously it would be on a smaller scale initially. Sure the chances of succeeding go down if you aren’t in one of those programs but the chances aren’t zero! A good product with good leadership can still make it in the market.
The other side of the coin is that every founder believes their product/solution is obvious, yet most don’t get anywhere close to providing a sustainable income stream.
Hence, all entrepreneurs who’ve applied to such accelerator programs and never get in should find comfort that they at least tried, and might have saved lots of money, time, and heartache working on their product to no success.
Of course there are plenty of companies that succeed going the non accelerator route too.
MassChallenge is another great accelerator/incubator. It is based in Boston and is run competition-style, with the winners getting funding. Because it is a non-profit, the funding is not given in exchange for any equity.
Might be a good one for your list (great list by the way!). https://masschallenge.org/
Very cool. Will add to the list. You’d think there’d be a lot of incubators out in Boston given the size of the city and education.
I just looked at the program. WOW! Looks like one of the best. Thanks for sharing.
“Y Combinators – They invest $120,000 in each company for a ~20% stake.”
I don’t see how 120k is enough to help a tech startup especially for a 20% stake. I’m sure the mentorship, advice and contacts are invaluable but not the 120k/20% stake. The 120k/20% stake would be golden for a couple of tech founders that are young and straight out of there mama’s basement. They are basically evaluating the startup at 600k. For a more mature tech founder it may not be worth it.
Sorry, it’s actually $120,000 for a 7% stake.
https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-new-deal
Thanks, that sounds a lot more reasonable