Day 12 · Getting the most from an accelerator

By Karthik Nagapuri · 2026-09-25 · Draper Founder Program #2

The program's closing session as a founder's guide: what accelerators actually measure, why you are the cake and everything else is icing, how to ask for introductions without burning social capital, how venture funds really work, and how to diligence an investor back.

The last day was quieter than I expected. No keynote, no pitch marathon. Just the cohort, the Draper team, and a long, loose conversation that started as a feedback session and turned into one of the most honest explanations I have heard of how the other side of the table works.

This chapter is for anyone thinking about joining an accelerator, anyone currently in one, and anyone who has just finished one and is wondering what it was for. It is also, for its second half, a plain-language crash course in how venture capital funds work, which I suspect many first-time founders in India (me included, until recently) do not really know.

I have one recording from the day, so the chapter is organised around the lessons in that session, with a few clearly labelled reflections of my own. The session was led by Aaliyah Barker, principal investor and program director at Draper University, who had run our investor night, our one-on-ones and our Demo Day prep, and who was visiting Hyderabad for the program. She opened by saying she is very blunt, and wanted us to be blunt back.

Selling is a muscle, not a personality

Before the feedback started, she said something that I think every technical founder needs to hear once.

Being a founder, especially a technical one, can feel like impersonating someone else. You stand in front of investors saying "we're doing this and then we're going to do this", and part of you thinks, that is not me. Her view was that you fake it a little until it becomes you, and that even if a particular startup does not work out, the journey makes you a more well-rounded person, in whatever you choose to do next.

Then she turned it around. She said that when she meets people who are only brilliant at pitching, she gets a little wary. "Is that all you do? Do you not have any skills?" Most founders in the room were busy actually being a doctor or actually writing code, doing the real work their startup is about. That makes it hard to spend all your time being a salesperson.

It's hard to spend all your time just being a salesperson, but you'll get better about it over time. It's certainly a muscle.

• Aaliyah Barker, Draper University

The lesson for founders: do not wait until you feel like a natural seller. Nobody who builds things does. Selling is a muscle, and like any muscle it grows with repetition, not with personality. And if you are the kind of founder who finds pitching easy, make sure there is substance underneath it, because experienced investors are listening for exactly that.

What an accelerator actually measures

The part of the session that reframed the whole program for me was when she explained what Draper University measures. Only two things:

1. Customers, meaning your traction within a year of the program.
2. Funding, within the same window.

"That is the only two things we care about." Every session, mentor and one-on-one is judged by whether it moves founders towards those two things. If a session felt useless, they want to know. If a mentor really helped and made introductions, they want to know that too.

This is worth knowing about any accelerator you join, because it tells you how to use it. Find out what the program is measured on, and point every conversation at it. If the program cares about customers and funding within twelve months, then the best use of your time inside it is whatever gets you closer to customers and funding within twelve months. Not the most interesting session, not the most famous mentor.

She was also clear that they are not competing with other accelerators. If you get into a bigger program after this one, that is a win for them. Programs that understand this are the ones worth joining: they see themselves as a step on your path, not the destination.

You are the cake

Then came the line of the day.

That stuff is great, and it's like icing on the cake. But you have to have the cake, and you are the cake.

• Aaliyah Barker, Draper University

Her point was that funding and traction are hard to get without a foundation, and the foundation is not the accelerator you attended, the investor backing you or the advisor on your slide. It is you, as a person. That is why the program puts weight on things like the survival weekend. The discomfort is the point. Getting uncomfortable is how the person part of the founder grows.

This has a practical consequence for how you present yourself. Logos of programs, advisors and investors on a deck are icing. They help, but only if there is cake under them: what you have built, what you have learned from customers, what you can do better than anyone else. If the icing on your deck is taller than the cake, investors will notice, and so will you, eventually.

Set your goal on day one

One founder observed that the program seemed to have quietly segmented the cohort by goal: some companies were raising, some were chasing customers, some needed research help. Aaliyah asked whether goals and KPIs had been set at the start. The program team said they had asked each founder personally and interviewed them, but that almost everyone had said they wanted to raise money, even founders who had really come for validation or market access.

That is a very common founder reflex, and it is worth resisting. "Raise money" is rarely the true goal of a founder in week one. Usually it is something more specific: find the first ten paying customers, prove the technology works outside the lab, get an answer to one hard question. If you tell a program "we want to raise", it will point you at investors. If you tell it "we need to know whether hospitals will pay for this", it can point you at people who can answer that.

So, before you join any program, write down the one outcome that would make it worth your time, and say it out loud to the team in the first week. A program can only aim you if you give it a target.

Where the real value hides: the residency and your peers

When Aaliyah asked what could have been better, a founder said the thing almost everyone agreed with: the unofficial evenings working together in the apartments were where we learned most from each other.

She agreed, and went further. In her experience across programs, the most valuable thing is not the mentors or the sessions. It is living together. You can always talk to mentors later. You may never again live, for weeks, alongside a group of people who are all working on startups, all slightly crazy in the same way, each with different networks, skills and backgrounds. Even college, she said, puts people with different majors together. A residency puts people with the same obsession together.

A founder then suggested making it formal: structured peer sessions where each founder teaches what they are best at, since everyone in a cohort has a distinct strength. "We get to learn a lot, as well as we know when to reach each person." She said this is something they are still trying to figure out across all their global programs, and asked for ideas.

Someone also singled out an early pitch session with Kiran Babu, who listened to every founder's pitch, word by word, and gave specific feedback to each one in front of everyone. By general agreement, it was one of the best sessions of the program. The general lesson: public, specific feedback on everyone's work teaches the whole room, because you learn from other people's mistakes as fast as your own.

Aaliyah picked up on that and drew a distinction I had not thought about before.

There's a difference between your showcase pitch and your investor pitch.

• Aaliyah Barker, Draper University

A showcase pitch, the kind you give on a Demo Day stage, is built for a room: it has to be clear to a banker, a community builder and a fund manager at once, in four minutes, with no chance to ask what they care about. An investor pitch is a conversation with one person, where you can go deeper on the questions that matter to that fund. Her suggestion for future cohorts was a Demo Day-specific session near the start, so founders know from week one what they are working towards and can ask mentors for the right kind of help.

If you are in any program that ends on a stage, ask early which of the two you are being judged on, and do not assume a great stage pitch will carry a one-to-one meeting, or the other way round.

What this means for you, in any accelerator:

• Say yes to the unofficial time. The late evenings, the shared meals, the "can you look at my deck" at midnight. That is often where the real program is.
• Map your cohort's skills early. In the first week, learn what each founder is best at. By the end, you will know exactly who to call for design, for fundraising, for sales, for hardware.
• Offer your own strength first. The fastest way to be part of the peer network is to teach something useful.

Give feedback like a design partner

The feedback session itself was a small lesson in how to give a program useful input. What the cohort said, generalised:

• Sector-specific mentors. Founders wanted investors and operators with direct experience in their space, not only general startup advice.
• Scheduling buffers. A couple of people had days where one-on-ones clashed, partly because meetings overran when founders (fairly) kept asking for five more minutes. The suggestion was buffer time and clearer structure for each meeting.
• Know the final format early. If the Demo Day format had been shared at the start, founders would have prepared towards it from day one.
• It felt compressed. A longer program would give more return on the time.
• Hosting guests. A few sessions got messy when not everyone was present and nobody was sure how to host a visiting guest.
• More one-on-one on the actual product. Group sessions on topics like IP filing were useful, but founders wanted individual time on "what we are building, and are we good at it".

Her responses were practical. Buffer time and clearer meeting structure: easy. A Demo Day prep session at the start: easy. Sector mentors: already being worked on, and easier as the local community grows. More one-on-ones: already the direction, with fewer big sessions. She also noted, a little ruefully, that meetings can be hard to structure, because in many cultures the first fifteen minutes are spent on "hello, how are you".

Notice what made this feedback useful. It was specific, it was operational, and much of it came with a suggested fix. "It was messy" is hard to act on. "Share the final pitch format in week one" is easy. The same rule applies when you give feedback to your own team, your investors or your customers: specific, fixable, and kind.

She thanked us for being "design partners" for the Hyderabad program, which is exactly the right frame. An early cohort of any program is a beta test. The founders who treat it that way, and say what is broken, usually get more out of it.

Guidance is not a substitute for doing the job

A theme she returned to several times was the fine line between guidance and support on one hand, and dependence on the other. As alumni, we can use the network. But meeting a mentor and talking about something does nothing for you on its own.

You just as a founder can't rely on external support from mentors and advisors to do your job.

• Aaliyah Barker, Draper University

"Learning is great, but you've got to learn by doing." She also described how they approach expectation-setting, which I think applies to every relationship a founder has: be clear at the start about what someone can do for you, what they cannot, and what might happen if it aligns. Mentors, advisors, accelerators and investors all fall somewhere on that spectrum. When you know which bucket someone is in, you stop being disappointed by them, and you stop leaning on them for things that were always your job.

Introductions are borrowed social capital

This was the most practically useful ten minutes of the session, and probably of the week.

She told us her personal rule, which she tells every cohort at the start: she does not make introductions unless she has invested. Every introduction spends the introducer's social capital. She will only make one if she believes it will create value for the person she is introducing you to. What usually happens, she said, is that she ends up making introductions anyway, but not because she was asked. It happens because in a one-on-one someone said something, she thought of someone, and she saw alignment.

Read that again from the founder's side. The introductions that happen are the ones where the introducer sees value for both sides. Your job is not to ask better. It is to make the value obvious, by being clear about what you do, what you need and why this particular connection makes sense.

Do not ask strangers for favours

A few people outside the cohort had approached her and started asking for things. "I don't know you. I'm not going to make introductions to someone I don't know." Basic human psychology, she said: people help people they know. She added, fairly, that norms may vary across cultures, so take it with a grain of salt. But the principle travels well.

"Yes, I'll let you know" often means no

In her experience in the US, many people will not say no directly. They say yes, yes, I'll let you know, and you never hear from them again. It may be the same here. Saying no to someone's face is uncomfortable, so people avoid it. Read silence as a soft decline, do not take it personally, and do not build your plan on it.

And sometimes a no is not about you at all. She might not make an introduction simply because she does not know the company well enough, or does not know the other person well enough.

Ask many people for small things

Her last point here was the one I have repeated to myself most since.

Have enough people in your circle that you can ask all of them for little things, instead of two people for big things.

• Aaliyah Barker, Draper University

This is a quiet but powerful strategy. A founder who leans on two mentors for everything wears them out. A founder with thirty relationships, each asked for one small thing, spreads the load, learns from more perspectives, and builds a network that gets stronger each time it is used.

Show up, even when it seems irrelevant

Another member of the program team added a point about discipline. Whatever program you are in, if you are asked to do something, do it, because a lot of thought usually went into why. Skipping it sends a signal to the people who might invest in you or mentor you that you are not that serious. And if you do not follow through on what others ask of you, how will you expect your team to follow you?

Aaliyah softened it slightly: protecting your time is important and sensible. But if something is a whole-group session, it is usually because someone believed it was relevant to the whole group. Come in with the right perspective. Even a speaker from an unrelated industry is a connection, and they are probably connected to great people in your industry. Walking out because something looks irrelevant can come across as ego.

How venture funds actually work

Someone asked how a fund really works, from the analyst to the decision makers, and at what stage of deployment. What she promised would be a two-minute rundown became the most useful part of the afternoon. She was careful to say she had never raised a fund herself, so this is a practitioner's sketch, not a legal textbook. It is still more than most founders are ever told.

The chain of money

At the top are limited partners (LPs): large institutions like banks, pension funds and universities, and very wealthy families through their family offices. Their portfolios are highly diversified, and venture capital is one small, risky slice of them.

A general partner (GP) runs a venture firm and has to convince LPs to put money into the fund. A fund is usually assembled from many LPs, each contributing a portion. There are a great many seed investors competing for relatively few LPs, so every VC needs a differentiator. Draper's, she said, is residency and community: living alongside founders for weeks gives them far better diligence than the single meeting most VCs get. That, she said honestly, is also why the residency matters so much to them as investors.

That caption is the key to understanding investor behaviour. Your investor has promised returns to someone else. Almost everything they do, from how fast they decide to how hard they push for growth, follows from that promise.

The management fee is smaller than you think

Out of the fund, the firm takes a management fee, usually around 2% a year, to pay for an office, staff and salaries. She did the arithmetic for the room: on a hypothetical $100 million fund, that is $2 million a year. On a typical first fund of $10 million, it is $200,000, which in the US is roughly one mid-level manager's salary. "You guys think VCs are rich." Her point was that many people who start funds already have money, often from exiting a company, because the early years of being a VC do not pay much. It also explains why large funds tend to be run by people on their third or fourth fund, not their first.

The clock is always running

A fund typically has to return capital to its LPs in about ten years. Companies take roughly five to ten years to produce a big return (getting shorter with AI, she said). So a VC wants to deploy most of the money early, typically in the first three years, and is usually raising the next fund every few years, because raising from LPs is slow and competitive.

That gives founders a very useful question to ask any investor: when did you raise your current fund? If the answer is seven years ago, there may be little capital left, and what remains may go into safer, later-stage deals just to get well-known names into the portfolio. It is not automatically bad, but it raises questions, and you should ask them.

Why the best deals get fought over

When a founder suggested Draper run small-cheque challenges for startups, she explained that a smaller early fund is on their roadmap, but that they first need to show LPs a track record from programs like ours. That is how funds are raised: "here is the community I have access to, and here is what I could have done if I had capital."

Then she described the other side: there are as many venture capitalists as there are founders, and the companies with the most momentum and traction are the ones VCs compete for. As they compete, terms move in the founder's favour. Momentum and traction change the power balance.

Diligence the investor back

Her advice on choosing investors was blunt, and it applies to anyone offering you money.

• Look at the portfolio. Who have they backed, in what sectors, at what stage?
• Find out where they are in the fund cycle. New fund, mid-cycle, or near the end?
• Talk to one or two founders they have backed and ask what the experience was really like. "There are more cases than you would think" of VCs who treat founders badly, or who do not share the founder's long-term vision. It is your company, not theirs.
• Ask how they actually help. Some firms have platform teams for go-to-market or operations. Some partners, she said of herself, spend evenings sending introductions until a portfolio company's round closes. Others do nothing after the money lands.
• Be careful who holds your shares. Advisors do not usually have real power, but giving away lots of equity to them looks bad to VCs. Early investors, on the other hand, can have a lot of control. Choose them as carefully as you would a co-founder.

On where to incorporate, she said most US seed investors will expect a US (typically Delaware) company because it keeps their legal costs low on standard documents, but that once you reach a priced round it matters less, and many companies have investors from several countries. What matters most is who the investor is, how much of the company they own, and what you got in exchange: capital, strategic value or both. (This is general context from the session, not legal advice. Talk to a lawyer before you incorporate anywhere.)

Investors are not the finish line

All of this led to the line I most want to remember from the session.

Quit thinking that investors are your finish line, or that your goal is to make investors happy. It's just to get customers. Do that, and investors will crawl towards you.

• Aaliyah Barker, Draper University

It is easy, in a program that ends with a Demo Day, to start treating investors as the audience for everything you do. They are not. They are a lagging indicator. Customers are the leading one.

A launchpad, not a finish line

She was candid about the economics of the program itself. Running a residency is very expensive: housing, food, staff, mentors. The model that worked in Silicon Valley, and that they are now taking global, is to show a local community that the program is a hub for high-quality startups, not just many startups. Investors do not care about quantity, only quality. When founders go on to raise capital and bring it back to the local economy, local partners and sponsors fund longer programs.

So she asked us to think of the two weeks as a launchpad, with a network and a staff we can keep reaching out to, rather than a complete program. The long-term idea is that what happens in Silicon Valley can happen here, so that founders do not need to go there for the program, only for the market.

Her last request was simple: post about it. As a program's reputation grows, so does the reputation of everyone associated with it. That works in both directions, which is one more reason to choose programs carefully and then help them succeed.

Reflection: selling as research

This section is my own reflection, not a record of the session.

The opening remark about feeling like an impostor landed with me. I build things. My co-founder Piyush is a doctor. Neither of us grew up thinking of ourselves as salespeople. What changed my mind over the fortnight is realising that most of the selling people told us to do is not performance. At WearSynapse, it means going to hospitals, sitting with doctors, asking where it hurts and coming back with something slightly better. That is closer to research than to theatre.

If you are a technical founder who dreads selling, try that reframe. "Selling" can mean "being in the room with the customer more often than anyone else, and listening harder". You can do that without pretending to be someone else, and it happens to be exactly what builds the cake.

Apply it to your startup

• If you are applying to an accelerator: find out what it measures, what its differentiator is (residency, sector focus, capital, network) and who its alumni are. Talk to two of them, the same way you would diligence an investor.
• If you are in one right now: write your one-line goal and tell the team this week. Map your cohort's skills. Show up to the sessions that look irrelevant. Give specific, fixable feedback.
• If you have just finished one: treat it as a launchpad. List the five people from the program you will stay in touch with, and what small thing you can offer each of them.
• If you are raising: build an investor diligence card for everyone you talk to (fund age, deployment stage, portfolio, two founder references, how they help). Then spend most of your week on customers anyway.
• If you are a student or future founder: start building your circle now, long before you need anything from it. Help people with small things. When the day comes that you need an introduction, you will be asking friends, not strangers.

Resources from the day

The last day had no slides and no deck, so these are the frameworks, ideas and people from the session, plus the earlier-program tools it kept pointing back to.

Who taught

• Aaliyah Barker, principal investor and program director, Draper University: the closing feedback session, the "you are the cake" talk, introductions and social capital, and the rundown of how venture funds work.
• The Draper University India team, who ran the program in Hyderabad and joined the feedback discussion (including the point about showing up to every group session).
• Kiran Babu, whose early pitch session the cohort singled out as one of the most useful of the fortnight.

Frameworks and ideas

• The two-metric test: customers and funding within a year of the program, the only two things the program says it measures.
• You are the cake: the founder is the foundation, and programs, advisors and investors are icing.
• Showcase pitch vs investor pitch: one is built for a room, the other for a single fund.
• Introductions as social capital: introductions come from established relationships and visible alignment, and a wide circle of small asks beats a narrow circle of big ones.
• Expectation-setting: be clear at the start about what a mentor, advisor, program or investor can do, cannot do, and might do if it aligns.
• The chain of money: limited partners, general partners, the fund, the management fee (around 2% a year), the fund clock (about ten years, most deployment in the first three).
• Investor diligence: portfolio, fund age and stage of deployment, one or two founder references, and how the investor actually helps.

Tools and habits mentioned

• Social media posts about the program (the one request made of alumni).
• Structured peer skill-sharing sessions, suggested by the cohort as a format for future programs.
• A Demo Day prep session at the start of a program, suggested as a fix for learning the final format too late.

From earlier in the program

• PSMBT (Problem, Solution, Market, Business, Team) as a conviction checklist, from Day 1.
• Pain × frequency × consequence, and observed versus estimated behaviour, from Day 2.

What to take away

• You are the cake. Accelerators, advisors and investors are icing. The foundation is the founder.
• Know what your program measures, and aim every conversation at it.
• Set a specific goal on day one. "Raise money" is rarely the real one.
• The peer group is the program. The residency and the late evenings are where much of the learning happens.
• Selling is a muscle. It grows with repetition, not personality.
• Introductions spend someone else's social capital. Earn the relationship, make the value obvious, then ask small.
• "I'll let you know" is often a no. Read silence kindly and move on.
• Know the fund clock. Ask investors when they raised their fund, who is in their portfolio, and talk to their founders.
• Investors are not the finish line. Customers are. Traction brings investors to you.
• Show up. Group sessions exist for a reason, and skipping them sends a signal.

Try this

1. Your two-metric scorecard. Write down where you stand today on customers and on funding. Set a target for each twelve months from now. Put the sheet somewhere you will see it weekly.
2. The social capital ledger. List ten people you might ask for an introduction. For each one, write the last time you gave them something of value. Where the answer is "never", give before you ask.
3. Small asks, wide circle. Pick one big favour you were planning to ask one person. Break it into five small asks you could make of five different people instead.
4. Investor diligence card. For every investor you are talking to, fill in: year the current fund was raised, stage of deployment, focus sectors, two portfolio founders you have spoken to, and how they actually help. Do not sign with anyone whose card still has blanks.
5. The cake audit. Write down three things on your deck that are icing (logos, programs, advisors). Then write three that are cake (what you have built, what you have learned from customers, what you do better than anyone). If the second list is weaker, that is your work for the next month.
6. Teach one thing. Pick the skill you are strongest at and offer a thirty-minute session to two other founders this month. You will learn who to call, and they will learn to call you.