I actually agree with this.

But as it gets more popular(and competitive) I think diversty of startup founders will be smaller. And something will be lost because of it.

If we're not careful every startup founder will be from an elite background, from an elite family. Undiscovered talent will never be discovered.

Accelerators are going with the safe options, rather than potentials.

Start ups were one of the few ways people not from elite background could achieve massive success.

Completely disagree. The founders your talking about will provail no matter what. creativity, passion, inspiration isn't about money. True entrepreneur ship is about exploiting the flaws in the system. System changes and they find new flaws.

Is there evidence to support that accelerators are pre-selecting based on elite backgrounds? It would be really interesting to see YC's % of founders from Ivy league + Stanford over time.

Look at the EF Alumni. They are mostly from elite universities.

The people running EF are also elite, investment banks and management consultants. Which is probably why they hire, who they hire.

This is not surprising given British history. Culturally there is an overhanging bias towards credentials and elitism, however I get the strong feeling (as an American Co-Founder living in London the past 2 years) that things are definitely moving in the right direction here. Whereas Silicon Valley with its general west-coast counter cultural history is much more accepting but probably moving in the wrong direction as "startups" are mainstreamed and investors are looking for some signal in the noise of all the wannabes.

As usual though, successful founders must find their own way, and if they are dependent on being given a shot by some gatekeeper they probably never had much chance to be a successful entrepreneur anyway.