Startup accelerators have become a central part of entrepreneurial ecosystems. They promise fast, high-intensity learning through mentorship, peer cohorts, and connections to investors and partners. They are also often expected to broaden opportunity, helping founders without deep networks or prior experience close the gap and compete more effectively.
Yet founders enter accelerators with very different reservoirs of pre-entry knowledge, built through education, industry and management experience, and prior entrepreneurial exposure. That difference matters because acceleration is compressed. In a short window, founders must absorb advice, decide what to ignore, prioritize what to change, and execute quickly. Teams with more experience and expertise often find it easier to translate mentor feedback into concrete actions. Less experienced founders can benefit from the same exposure, but they may need more structure and support to turn guidance into results.
A recent Strategic Management Journal article by USC Marshall’s Melody H. Chang, associate professor of management and organization, and Valentina A. Assenova, professor of management at the Wharton School, finds that accelerators improve startup performance on average, but the gains are not evenly distributed. Using data from more than 6,700 startups that applied to roughly 280 accelerators across 147 countries, the authors show that founding teams with more prior experience see substantially larger post-program gains. One year after acceleration, more seasoned teams experience roughly four times the revenue growth and 12 times the employment growth of less experienced teams. Novice founders still see gains, but the evidence suggests accelerators more often “push up the ceiling” for already-prepared teams than “pull up the floor” for those starting with less experience.
The study also shows that program design shapes who benefits most. Specialized, less structured accelerators, where mentorship is flexible and often sector-specific, tend to create more value for founders with strong foundations who can apply targeted guidance immediately. More structured and generalist programs, by contrast, with clearer curricula and standardized content, tend to deliver more modest but meaningful benefits for novice founders who need foundational capability building. The central takeaway is fit: Returns are higher when a program’s structure and specialization align with what founders bring with them.
Together, these findings suggest three practical takeaways for entrepreneurs, accelerator leaders, and policymakers.
First, founders should treat accelerator choice as a fit decision, not simply a brand decision. Experienced teams may gain more from specialized, flexible programs that support targeted problem-solving. Novice teams may gain more from structured programs that teach fundamentals clearly and reduce ambiguity.
