I know it’s been a bit quiet here on Mercury’s Blog for a few months. Over the past year I’ve been studying at Cambridge University for my MBA, and this summer I undertook a research project around Y Combinator.
Y Combinator is a very unique seed accelerator program. Startup companies get ~$15–20k in funding in return for ~6% equity, three months of intensive business and product advice, connections to mentors and potential advisors. Inkling Markets was in the second cohort of Y Combinator funded companies, for example.
My hypothesis was that a lot of people/organizations are starting seed accelerators without really examining the full scope of innovations they need to think about in order to achieve their goals. I wanted to take the opportunity to look into why entrepreneurs choose to go into a seed accelerator, why individuals choose to start a seed accelerator, and then propose a framework for designing new programs.
You can click here to view the post on my personal blog that has a bit longer executive summary. But I’ve embedded the paper and data sources below. I hope you find it interesting.
Appendix A — List of Seed Accelerators
Click here to view the list of seed accelerators. Only seed accelerator programs are listed; see main paper for details.
Appendix B — Example Seed Accelerator financial model
Appendix C — List of all companies founded by Seed Accelerators
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Jed Christiansen 