Paradoxical Execution for New Ventures’ Scalability: Evidence from Y Combinator

Accelerators have emerged as important organizational sponsors capable of hastening new ventures’ development by helping founders acquire entrepreneurial capabilities. Research has provided evidence that accelerated ventures, on average, develop more rapidly, attract more capital, have more employees, and receive higher evaluations. Yet, we know little about how accelerators foster new ventures’ scalability. To develop theoretical insights that might help fill this gap, we conduct an inductive case study of Y Combinator (YC), the first modern accelerator that specifically focuses on helping ventures achieve a large scale. Through a unique combination of 64 video interviews and 7,283 pages of archival material, we find that the strategic goals and methodological guidelines of YC’s acceleration program pressure founders to pursue conflicting priorities simultaneously, thus forming a pattern that we termed Paradoxical Execution. We reveal that those paradoxes must be addressed in a simultaneous rather than sequential way, and for this reason accelerators urge startups to develop a paradoxical mindset. Hence, we unveil how contrasts and paradoxes are likely to manifest from the very early stage of new ventures’ life cycle, contrariwise to what existing literature suggests. Altogether, our findings contribute to the literature on entrepreneurial ecosystems, paradox theory, and organizational scaling.