by weitendorf | 2025-04-08 05:30:22+00:00
I would love to see the actual long term statistics for this program and others like it, because from the outside looking in, it seems to produce a lot of zombie companies and companies that are wholly structured around financing themselves through more grants and other public programs.

The incentives are just bad all around. The “LP”s are lawmakers and politicians, but in the best case only insofar as the program is popular or contributed to economic good vibes that keep them in office and lawn. The "GP"s are bureaucrats with no skin in the game except for avoiding fraud and impropriety and keeping their management chain happy (ultimately reporting to politicians who can also have worst case incentives of directory the money towards, ahem, personally expedient things).

Then on the other side, clearly it is such a bureaucratic program that regular entrepreneurs struggle to navigate it. The accelerator you mention is spending potential teaching/helping time towards the goal of building a sustainable business on figuring out how to get money from the program (normally accelerators GIVE you money) - presumably they are coinvesting or taking a cut somehow, which ultimately means they are basically getting paid to shuttle people through the program [0]. And founders are spending time they should spend building and validating their product, or fundraising from people with skin in the game (who care about the important things and not so much whether form 47b was stamped by a notary), on figuring out how to get a grant.

In my opinion this kind of funding should be split between a much lower-bureaucracy and overhead public program (eg UBI) and the private sector. That makes the overhead for security “operational” startup expenses like housing/feeding the founders very very low, and directs “capital” startup expenses like buildings, equipment, and employees’ initial salaries more efficiently [1]. Or you can tax middle class workers less (you guys have really high payroll/VAT) and give them more control over their retirement money so it’s easier to build a solid amount of personal wealth to start a business.

IMO there is a misconception with new founders in general, including me when first starting a company, that you should spend a lot of time fundraising and need to get a big check to get started [2]. Programs like this make it worse because you spend crucial time building the company and your skills as a founder on passing some well-defined hurdle like “get the big grant” or “get accepted into program X” - it is your first major task as a startup founder - only to then be faced with the fact that almost *no future company task will be that well-defined*, and the realization that *you spent a lot of time “buying more time” to get to profitability when you could have just worked on that to begin with*.

[0] Unless you are a lawyer, in the US it's seen as corruption when private parties serve as paid facilitators and gatekeepers to public programs.

[1] One of the reasons it's hard to start a mid-sized company is that "traditional" lenders only want you to borrow things like equipment and buildings that you can get almost all the value back from if you fail, VC only want you to spend money on things with the possibility of yielding huge returns, and PE just have better opportunities than taking a chance on Joe Schmo. So if you can reach ramen-profitability without VC and only need traditional loans to get started it should be much easier to start a medium sized company.

[2] Obviously raising money can be essential or really beneficial, and it's a "founder task" but I think many people forget that it's not an end-unto-itself, but a way to get you from point A to point B. The only people who should truly see it as an end-unto-itself are people who just want to pay themselves and their friends with no intention of starting a sustainable business (that is also called fraud or scamming). Everybody else should just see it as a step on the path towards a sustainable business, and not a legitimizing mark/right of passage. Actually, if you take VC money on a convertible note to spend on stuff that you could have financed traditionally or didn't really need you are essentially giving away tons of upside with little change in downside.