Ask HN: Why does being in an accelerator pre-YC lessen your YC chances?

We have a much higher threshold for startups that have already been through an "accelerator" program. Mainly because we expect them to have thereby been accelerated; if they're not doing well, we worry they might be unacceleratable. It's also a problem that such startups will be twice as diluted at Demo Day, which decreases their fundraising options.

I can think of two startups we've funded that had been through things calling themselves "accelerators" before YC.

Pretty sure the reason that you didn't get into YC wasn't simply because of some binary metric like your previously going though an accelerator. Give them more credit than that and look deeper, regardless of what the email said.

-A fellow YC reject from a few years back

I think one needs to have the right expectations about what they want to achieve from an accelerator. If you are a company with a broad audience like consumer web or consumer mobile, an accelerator will help you build your company fundamentals, guide you through the generic process of starting up and at the end of it all give you audience with the investors; and if you are in a program like YC garner you a little more attention. So I really fail to see how useful it is to go through two different accelerators other than the just the last two reasons.

If I were running an accelerator and you were applying to mine after having gone through another program, I wouldn't just look at if I will gain (financially or otherwise) from you but really question how you will gain from having you in in the accelerator, having already gone through a similar, perhaps even conflicting process.

For a company with a more specialized market like education or health, while the requirements above stay the same, there are important differences. So going through a generalized accelerator to build those fundamentals and then going through an accelerator specific to your industry makes sense because while building strong fundamentals in business may be the smae, scaling up, selling and operating successfully in these industries is rather different and perhaps even more different than the consumer space, like Imagine K12 for education and Rockhealth for health; or even the other way round.

Any low-value credentials on an application make a company look bad. Another example: winning a business plan competition. The problem is that you thought mentioning it would improve your chances of getting accepted. If that's the best you've got, you haven't got much.

There are some corporate accelerator programs who licensed TechStars model. If they will see startup who went thru accelerator and didn't raised money - they will ask thought questions. The funny thing is, that even being in coworking space and not raising money was also a negative signal.