Strip away the unnecessary.

Whatever the goal of your accelerator - whether it's the startup's next investment round, a pilot project rolled out, or getting to profitability - we need to design a programme that cuts out the extraneous to get them there faster.

There's very little margin for error. A few hours per week wasted, or a week or two mired in hessitation or conflict, and we've failed that startup.

Having a few clear acceleration goals serves three purposes:

1. They help attract quality applicants in your pipeline.
2. They align your startups' motivations with your own.
3. They serve as a guide for programme design decisions.

Contrarily, having too many goals, or adding elements to your programme that are incongruent with everyone's goals (often just because you've seen them in another accelerator) leads to tension.

This tension slows things down, and this slow-down makes good startups fail in accelerators.

Often, this is perceived as a selection problem; bad apples, lacking ambition, or just "not getting it". But in cases where those same founders succeed outside of the accelerator, it often comes down to an alignment issue with their host accelerator.

If you're familiar with Customer Development, this is a familiar principle. When you discover a customer's job-to-be-done, this had a direct effect on your market positioning, as well as your product. You speak to the customers' job-to-be-done, and you only include features that help them.

Let's look at few examples.