I'm gonna get killed for saying this, but fuck it. I've built ecosystems, so I know this first hand. Accelerators and incubators are total wastes of time and money and actually net negative to ecosystem building. Why? Kingmaking doesn't work for ecosystem building. It actively disrupts the competitive habitat of a chain. The most important thing to understand is, as a foundation, you literally never know who will be your biggest builders months or years down the line. If you asked me to pick who the best builders in my ecosystem would have been a few years ago, I would have been dead fucking wrong. This is assuming these accelerators function as they theoretically should. But the reality is even worse and darker. Thru my VC alt, I've even attended a few demo days and seen the project pitches coming straight out of some accelerators... its honestly dreadful. The quality of builders and ideas is terrible. You are hard pressed to find one or two remotely interesting ideas. Why is this? Well I suspect it's because most of these are quite rushed given they are naturally cohort based. It's just infeasible that you will have 15 amazing ideas in your eco out of 300 applications at a single arbitrary point in time. Moreover, some of the builders don't really have any ideas. They just have the right credentials to be chosen, and then have to rush to come up with an idea to build within a timeframe. I'm never a fan of that either. There is honestly a bunch of other darker reasons which I won't touch on too much. Especially when there are third-party extractors involved. Most incubators are scams too, just pumping out as many tokens as possible. So why are these popular? Simply because its kind of sexy to outsiders and investors imo. But what do I know? Anyways, all of this is not to shit on Mega, I love them so I do hope this time it's different. It just made me want to write some thoughts as a cautionary word for this style of eco building. As always, I'm here to provide solutions and open to differing opinions :) 🫶