This is a guest post by , a well-known Estonian/Baltic VC and entrepreneur (kurat.com). He originally posted it on Facebook (great discussion ) and even before that it was a response to an email asking him advice about setting up a local startup accelerator (third such request in 24 hours). The whole discussion ties very nicely into critique of Estonian state-backed attempt to create an international startup accelerator.

Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius, Helsinki, we have a problem.

In the last 3-6 months we have seen a sudden explosion accelerators, “accelerators”, co-working spaces, support programs, “innovation awareness initiatives” etc in our region.

Going from North to South, we have serious attempts by Startup Sauna, Garage, Tehnopol, , Techhub, Startup Highway, Startup Monthly, Gamma, probably I forgot somebody. On top of that, lots of also-runs and governments wasting their money.

Everybody is trying to do something in his corner but there is no critical mass (except maybe in Startup Sauna). What the Baltics needs is ONE strong pan-regional accelerator with strong financing and strong TEAM – 2-3 full-time people and 20-30 mentors who really have achieved something (having at least $100m worth of exits or $50m in annual revenues in their track record).

Only Startup Sauna (barely) fills those criteria at the moment.

The only point of having accelerators is to produce early-stage startups. Simple criteria of success here is number of startups who have exited the accelerator and raised funding (minimum 100k EUR per startup in 12 months). An accelerator shall be able to produce at least 10 such successes a year (let’s say in 2 batches). If the success rate is 30% then you need to pass 30 startups thru the accelerator per year and have pool of 300-500 good quality projects per year.

This is impossible to achieve in one country only. We need a pan-Baltic thing.

The problem is that if the accelerator will not gain this critical mass it will lose its credit of trust in about a year. Mentors will not come because it’s waste of time, investors will not come because there are no decent companies etc.

We need somebody to put together a Baltic accelerator, perhaps a Baltic-Finnish one.

It is definitely not a problem plaguing just The Baltic/Nordic region. Om Malik covered the exact same thing just a month ago in “What history teaches us about startup incubators” outlines the same basic problems across the pond in the US.

There’s now a separate thread of discussion continuing in Arctic Startup blog (they also published the same original text, the more exposure this topic gets the better).