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A better way to compare these two would be in Founder Energy conversion to cashflow-generating startup.

What are the costs and benefits?

What is the startup failure rate of YC vs. Techstar startups?

Accelerators provide community (early adopters, validators, testers, collaborators, cofounders, advisors), but at a cost of capital that is often quite high.

Community provides the initial traction that can qualify a startup for follow-on VC, but the path becomes one of applying to accelerator to gain the community to attain the traction to impress investors to pay for more CAC and MVP engineers to hockey-stick growth while showing retention graph "smilies."

What is the cost of this community and what does the failure rate say about the benefit conferred.

YC and Techstars are great-- but why do so many startups that graduate still fail?

And how can we improve on founder, startup, community, and vc formation so that the founder failure rate goes down?

These are the existential questions that our civilization must answer, ie getting the answer correct is probably on Fermi's Great Filter final exam.

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