This is not indicative, at least, of 500 Startups. Look, you can fuck up your time with any incubator by not focusing on things important to your startup. Dave McClure and the other partners there will yell at you for doing this, and the common theme is "Get back to fucking work" and "Don't waste your time with bullshit meetings."<p>The overall feeling is: build, get customers, experiment and verify, and build.<p>The problem is that most accelerators (500 included) have a TON of opportunity for distraction, and undisciplined founders get distracted. For us, 500 was immensely useful because it gave us a network of people to reach out to that didn't exist in our world before 500. For finding customers, verifying assumptions, user testing, raising funding, and all that other stuff that startups have to do, this was incredibly important.<p>tl;dr: incubators are what you make of them. you can waste your time, or it can be the most productive time you'll ever have, and it all depends on your discipline. you'll have more opportunity than you would otherwise, but you have to be disciplined about what avenues you pursue and which you don't. the same is true of college, incidentally.<p>EDIT: It's important to note that I made this mistake freshman year at MIT, and learned from it. There was so much opportunity for learning, initially, that I squandered it and tried to do too much. I was incredibly busy, but never really got anything done. I learned to focus on what's important, but the resources I had at MIT meant that focus was better utilized than it would have been at a smaller school with fewer opportunities. The same is true for incubators/accelerators; we saw undisciplined founders have this problem, but we took full advantage of all the resources 500s gave us, and ignored the meetings/events we didn't care about and that weren't useful to us.