James GreenGeneral Partner, DQventures · 🚀 Helping still-employed professionals launch their own business (without quitting first) | GP @

The Problem with Accelerator Programs

2 Mar 2026 · 1 min

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A founder told the speaker his real goal was building an independent company and avoiding a job, not chasing a unicorn. Accelerators pressure founders to claim hyper-growth ambitions they don't have, forcing them to misrepresent what they actually want: freedom and the ability to work for themselves.

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He had been through one of the accelerator programs, and I thought something he shared, which I think is really pertinent, is that he had no ambition to build a unicorn. He just wanted to build a company. And, but the problem with when you go through an accelerator is they're only looking for unicorns. Like they are basically VCs at a much earlier stage. And so as a founder going into those programs, you end up having to lie and say, yeah, my ambition is to build a global company and change the world. But actually what he wanted, and he was telling me that he believed that most of the other people in the program wanted, was just not to work in a corporate job, to get freedom to do a good job working for their own company and not work for someone else.