Nate says that as a first-time founder it'd be very difficult to build without an accelerator setting — going it alone could take 5 or 10 times longer. Accelerators like Antler have experts who see thousands of ideas a year and, being investors themselves, can quickly tell you whether your market is big enough.
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Nate met his co-founder Drew at the Antler residency and is bullish on the format for first-timers: "if you're a first time founder, it'd be very difficult to build without that kind of setting." Going alone "would just take you, like, 5 or 10 times longer to understand where you're not hitting the mark." Accelerators like Antler "have experts who kind of see thousands of ideas a year," and because they're investors they can tell you fast whether something will be looked at positively or whether "the market's not big enough" and you should consider bootstrapping. He also stresses you need to be full-time: it's very hard to turn a side hustle into something venture scalable.