Startup Accelerator Fail: Most Graduates Go Nowhere
Exits are a stupid test for what they're trying to measure here.  By that standard, Airbnb and Dropbox are failures.<p>Exits are a reasonable test for investments made, say, 10 years ago.  But none of the incubators are that old yet.  So the right way to judge them is by the valuations of the startups they've funded.  Unless the venture business as a whole loses money, that will be a lower bound on the eventual exit numbers.<p>Then you don't need to measure fuzzy stuff like "VC perceptions" either.  Each incubator has a single score: average valuation.  The last time we calculated ours (for the Forbes incubator rankings: <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/04/30/top-tech-incubators-as-ranked-by-forbes-y-combinator-tops-with-7-billion-in-value/" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/04/30/top-tech-i...</a>) it was $45.2m.<p>You could still screw up e.g. in the case where a company hasn't raised money for a long time and whose last post-money valuation is 1/10 of what they could raise at now.  But you won't screw up as badly as if you just measure acquisitions.