30 Accelerator Onboarding Questions (Free Template)

Most accelerator onboarding forms are built to satisfy a funder's reporting template. The result is an intake that collects demographic fields nobody uses and misses the operational context a program needs in month three.

This questionnaire is built the other way around. Every question below exists because the answer becomes valuable at a specific later point in the program. That reasoning is included with each one, so you can cut what does not apply to your model rather than guessing.

Copy it, adapt it, and use it. No attribution required.

Before you send it

Three principles worth applying regardless of which questions you keep.

Ask once, reuse many times. The information a founder gives you at intake should populate their mentor briefing, their funder report, their demo day copy, and their investor introductions. If your team retypes the same company description four times, the questionnaire has failed.

Separate facts from judgments. Facts, such as incorporation date and headcount, need updating on a schedule. Judgments, such as the founder's view of their biggest risk, are most valuable as a dated snapshot you can compare against later. Store them differently.

Keep the baseline short enough that it gets answered. Creative Destruction Lab, which has processed 15,791 applications since 2012, tracks four financial figures per session: cash burn, revenue, runway and employee count. If one of the most rigorous programs in the world operates on four numbers, your monthly update does not need thirty fields.

Section one: company fundamentals

These establish your baseline and are the fields most funders will eventually ask for.

1. What is the full legal name of the entity, and what name do you trade under? These differ more often than people expect. Getting it right at intake prevents mismatches in grant applications, investor introductions and demo day materials.

2. Where and when were you incorporated, and what is your corporate structure? Determines eligibility for most public funding. In Canada, several federal programs are restricted to incorporated for profit corporations and explicitly exclude sole proprietorships, partnerships and cooperatives.

3. What is your business number or company registration number? Required for nearly every government funding application. Collecting it once saves chasing it under deadline pressure later.

4. How many full time equivalent employees do you have, and how many contractors? Employment is one of the three near universal outcome metrics across accelerator programs worldwide. It also gates eligibility. NRC IRAP, for instance, requires 500 or fewer full time equivalents.

5. What revenue did you generate in the last twelve months, and in the last completed month? The annual figure is for reporting. The monthly figure is what actually tells you the trajectory. Ask for both.

6. What is your current monthly burn rate and how many months of runway remain? The single most operationally useful number you will collect. It determines urgency, mentor matching, and whether fundraising support is relevant now or in four months.

7. How much capital have you raised to date, from whom, and on what instrument? Capital raised is the third universal outcome metric. The instrument matters because it affects what a subsequent round looks like. Note that the post money SAFE with a valuation cap and no discount remains the standard preseed instrument.

Section two: the founding team

Every major accelerator states publicly that team is the primary selection factor. Techstars puts it as "team, team, team, market, progress, idea, in that order." These questions extend that assessment past selection into the program itself.

8. Who are the founders, what does each own, and is there a vesting schedule in place? Unvested or badly split founder equity is one of the most common issues surfaced during investor due diligence. Finding it in month one is a service to the company. Finding it during a raise is a crisis.

9. Which founders are working on this full time, and which are not? Y Combinator notes that it accepts solo founders but says plainly that one person startups are tough. Part time commitment is a legitimate program design consideration, not a judgment.

10. What has each founder built or shipped before? Y Combinator's official guidance asks for specific evidence of past achievement rather than generic claims of dedication. The same evidence makes for far better mentor matching.

11. Does the founding team have the technical capability to build the product itself? Y Combinator states that founding teams should have the skills to build the product themselves. Y Combinator managing director Dalton Caldwell lists lack of technical skill on the team among his five reasons applications do not advance.

12. Why is this team the right one for this specific problem? This is the founder market fit question. Caldwell's position is that most startup ideas are not original, and what matters is founder market fit.

13. What critical skill is missing from your team right now? More useful than any strength based question. It tells you what to recruit mentors for and what the company should be hiring for.

Section three: product and customers

14. What does your company make? Answer in one sentence, in plain language. Y Combinator's own guidance is to answer this matter of factly, in the first sentence, in the simplest terms, and it explicitly warns against marketing language. Its example of what not to write is "transforming relationships between individuals and information." If a founder cannot do this at intake, that is your first coaching intervention.

15. What stage is the product at: idea, prototype, in market, or scaling? Sets expectations for the whole program. Note that Y Combinator states around 40 percent of the companies it funds in each batch are just an idea, so idea stage is not a disqualifier, it is a design input.

16. Who is your customer, specifically? Watch for answers describing a category rather than a buyer. Specificity here predicts a great deal about the next three months.

17. How many customers do you have, and how many are paying? The gap between these two numbers is frequently the most informative thing in the entire form.

18. What is the single most important metric you watch weekly? This reveals whether the company has an operating rhythm. Founders who cannot name one are usually not measuring anything.

19. What have you learned in the last three months that changed your plan? The best proxy for whether a team actually runs experiments. It also gives you a baseline to compare against at program exit.

Section four: market and competition

20. How large is the market you are addressing, and how did you calculate that? The methodology matters more than the number. Investors spend a median of 29 seconds on the market size section of a pitch deck according to DocSend's analysis, so an unjustifiable number is a liability rather than an asset.

21. Who else is solving this problem, and why do customers choose you? DocSend's 2023 seed report found investors spent 88 percent more time on the competition section of successful decks than unsuccessful ones. Competition is not a threat to be minimised in the narrative, it is a section that earns attention.

22. What has to be true for this to become a large business? Surfaces the founder's actual assumptions. Compare this answer at intake and at exit.

23. Why now? What changed that makes this possible today? DocSend's 2023 seed report recorded a 65 percent year over year increase in investor time spent reviewing the "why now" section. Founders who cannot answer this will struggle in every pitch.

Section five: funding readiness

24. Are you planning to raise in the next twelve months, and how much? Determines whether fundraising support belongs in this founder's program or is premature.

25. What documents do you already have: pitch deck, financial model, cap table, business plan? Establishes the gap between where they are and what a raise requires. Note that NRC IRAP explicitly requires a business plan, recent financial statements, ownership structure details and team profiles.

26. Are you pursuing any grants or government funding, and which? Prevents duplicate effort, surfaces deadlines, and identifies where program support has the highest leverage.

27. Do you have any outstanding convertible instruments, notes or SAFEs? This appears on every serious due diligence list and founders routinely forget instruments signed early. Capturing it now avoids a problem later.

28. Is your intellectual property assigned to the company? A common and expensive surprise during diligence, particularly where founders built early versions while employed elsewhere or while at a university.

Section six: program expectations

29. What are the two or three things you most need from this program? GALI's research across 2,599 ventures found that a recurring criticism of accelerators is misalignment with entrepreneurs' actual needs. Asking directly is the cheapest possible mitigation, and it gives you something concrete to measure satisfaction against at exit.

30. What would make this program a failure for you? The most useful question on this list and the one most often omitted. It surfaces expectations that would otherwise remain unspoken until the exit survey, when it is too late to act on them.

Turning intake into an operating system

The questionnaire is only half the exercise. What determines whether it pays off is what happens to the answers.

Set a refresh cadence for the facts. Questions 4 through 7, covering headcount, revenue, burn and runway, should be updated on a fixed schedule. Creative Destruction Lab collects exactly these on an eight week cycle alongside structured objectives for the next interval. Anything longer than eight weeks and you are measuring history rather than trajectory.

Treat the judgments as dated snapshots. Questions 12, 19, 22, 29 and 30 are most valuable when compared across time. The delta between a founder's intake answer and their exit answer is the clearest evidence of program effect you will ever produce, and it costs nothing extra to capture.

Report distributions rather than averages. GALI's research found that only 10 percent of ventures account for over 95 percent of total equity investment. A cohort average is dominated by outliers. Medians and ranges tell your funder something true.

Do not collect what you will not use. ISED's evaluation of the Canada Accelerator and Incubator Program documented reluctance among funded organisations to participate fully in data collection due to perceived administrative burden. That burden is real and it compounds. Every field you add should have a named use.

Frequently asked questions

How long should an accelerator onboarding questionnaire be? Long enough to capture what you will genuinely use and no longer. This list of thirty is a menu rather than a mandate. The financial subset that a rigorous program actually tracks on an ongoing basis is four fields: burn, revenue, runway and headcount.

Should onboarding questions differ from application questions? Yes. Application questions are designed to discriminate between candidates. Onboarding questions are designed to operate the program. There is overlap in the factual fields, and you should carry those forward rather than asking twice, but the purpose is different.

How often should founders update their information? For financial and headcount data, every four to eight weeks. Creative Destruction Lab operates on an eight week cycle. The ISED study of Canadian accelerators found revenue advantages that were statistically significant during the participation year and insignificant the following year, which means annual collection will miss the effect entirely.

What metrics do funders in Canada expect accelerators to report? ISED's Business Accelerator and Incubator Performance Measurement Framework focuses on job creation, startup growth, and entrepreneurship among under represented groups including women and racialised communities. Collecting these from intake is far easier than reconstructing them later.

30 Questions to Ask Founders During Accelerator Onboarding