Some people argue that startup accelerators and stanford can't scale up and that if you make them available to 10-100x more people, these systems would lose all their worth.
I think that’s true about stanford and startup accelerators. but it’s not true about every human network that is designed to fulfill human potential.
let's reason about this:
top schools and accelerators are event planning companies first and foremost. they book your time weekly and ask you to show up at specific times in specific places every week and do specific things. they literally even track attendance (RSVPs) as their core engagement metric while the program is ongoing.
the nature of your interactions in those time blocks is either in the form of consuming/creating specific information or forming relationships with specific people for a specific purpose.
they also use money and status and scarcity (deadlines, low acceptance rate) to attract smart people and make sure they complete the whole program.
they then bring economic opportunity providers to you at the end of the program to ensure you increase your access to capital thru them (e.g. employers in a hiring fair, or investors in a demo day).
they then take credit (economically and/or reputation-ally) when their grads succeed and that’s how they manage to maintain a good top of funnel for their next cohorts. they are consumers of talent and do what it takes to make sure a critical mass of the talent they enroll can succeed visibly, otherwise less and less people will sign up for the next cohorts.
both schools and accelerators are net positive products in the world, but their business models are designed to keep opportunities scarce, in an increasingly abundant world.
in other words, they can take in less than 1% of all the high potential people. i
t’s always raised a question in my mind: how do you enable 100% of high potential, hardworking people? other than telling them to move to the US? (that's okay but the rest of the world will eventually burn in hell if all the ambitious people did move to 1 place and their home countries got worse and worse, which they do btw)
what is the true blocker and can it be automated?
to reason about this, we need to first unbundle these 2 systems intelligently.
the biggest attraction of accelerators is the money. while many people appreciate the mentorship/luck etc., the sign ups would be drastically lower if there was no funding, since most people tell themselves they already have enough mentorship/luck (limiting belief but the market does what it does. trying to running an accelerator that doesn't invest/host demo day and look at the sign up rates).
the biggest attraction of schools is the status (which gives individuals a huge leverage in career, dating life and circle of friends. the 3 important things that matter in a human’s life.)
if stanford removed its curriculums, classes, lectures and degrees but was somehow able to still deliver on career, dating life and circle of friends, it’d have the same number of applications.
to build new systems that enable 100% of high potential hard working people, all it takes is to build high status human networks formed around fulfilling potential for specific purposes. and continuously build a better access to economic opportunities.
think of the US. US itself is such a network and it is made by humans.
Will the US get worse if there were 1 billion Americans? No, it’d get better. that human-made culture and constitution would compound economic opportunities.
one could argue accelerators and schools are designed to have a hierarchy, a set of gatekeepers and mentors and their internal systems of defining who is good vs bad vs best, to judge and rate their networks, whereas US as a network is designed to turn every individual into the judge, the creator of their own ratings, and to break the damn gates that block each individual's path to self actualization.
now, if accelerators and universities are the product of a time of scarcity, who are the people building human networks that fulfill human potential at scale?
Who are the people funding them?
And most importantly, what’s stopping you from doubling down in this problem space?
P.S: many people familiar with this space may say "but companies like OnDeck tried this and they had to scale down". I've looked into OnDeck and concluded their scaling down had nothing to do with the problem/solution space itself, but rather with the founding team's expectation from the journey. In fact, I believe if they still care to pursue their founding mission with the same intensity as day 1 (which I hope they do), they absolutely can achieve it.
I operate in this space and while I see 9999 ways a company in this space can fail, I do not see 1 reason achieving this is impossible.
If you resonate with these you should email us at team@learningloop.com and say hi. We're all in and we enjoy jamming with others who are obsessed with this space
