Are Accelerators Akin to Beer or Wine? Evidence from Startup Nation

The success of YCombinator and the proliferation of startup accelerators across the globe have stimulated significant scholarly work. We join the conversation and ask the following question; are accelerators akin to beer, where quality is mainly a function of the institution of origin (i.e., brewery for beer, an accelerator for startups), or are they similar to wine, where quality varies greatly across years (i.e., for a given winery, some vintage years are of the highest quality while others are not). To that end, we undertake a variance decomposition analysis of the population of hundreds of startups graduating from dozens of Israeli accelerators. We find a substantial fraction of startup performance is due to cohort-vintage; i.e., within-accelerator cross-cohort variation. Our findings suggest that the performance differential among startups graduating from different cohorts of the same accelerator may be greater than for those graduating from different accelerators. It, therefore, calls for more research on the constant evolution and change within accelerators over time (and cohorts)