Data on YC-funded startups and their founders

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkdOQEasLwW_dDktRWo1czhXSi1BX1IwMnA3MnZ6aVE&hl=en&authkey=CNX-360K

by wololo • 16 years ago

49 23 16 years ago

spreadsheets.google.com

siddhant• 16 years ago

wololo4• 16 years ago

continues in the fine tradition of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=975624 (http://blog.awesomezombie.com/2009/12/analyzing-y-combinator...)

i am not trying to turn YC into a cult, but i do think it's helpful to see how hundreds of founders and their situations turned out. there are some real characters buried in there.

citizenkeys2• 16 years ago

That's why I am building YC Universe ( http://ycuniverse.com/ ).

The idea is to figure out many of the useful details of the YCombinator "black box". The plan is also to use YCombinator start-ups to get information to debug the start-up experience.

kevinburke2• 16 years ago

Thanks for putting that together, it's really awesome. Reading it in Google Docs was really annoying because any time any one opened the document a new window popped up to tell me "anonymous is now viewing." I had to download it into Excel.

citizenkeys2• 16 years ago

I'm putting together a site with all these links and information.

It's called YC Universe. The website is here: http://ycuniverse.com/

edanm• 16 years ago

I built Resourcey for the purpose of tracking Hacker News links (and any other similar sites.)

Check it out: http://resourcey.com/site_details/2/news.ycombinator.com/

scrrr• 16 years ago

Neat, but such a list needs information about who created it, when it was done and what sources were used. Right now it's pretty much untrustworthy and therefor useless.

jedc• 16 years ago

Huh. I thought it might end up being a link to my list here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkkhSN3vaY4jdF90b1l...

I agree; it would be very useful to understand where that came from. Though it looks like someone may have taken my original data above and gone through to look up articles/information to flesh everything out? (Because they kept my placeholders, where I knew how many YC companies were in a class though some hadn't launched.)

wololo4• 16 years ago

made by me, originally for personal use, mostly in october 2010. i started with jedc's spreadsheet, but the blog.awesomezombie.com list seemed to be more accurate about placing startups in the right batches (methodology section of http://blog.awesomezombie.com/2009/12/analyzing-y-combinator... is very relevant).

the successful ones are easy, but the others are more difficult/murky/interesting, and typically map to pg essays in comical fashion.

all the standard sources: their sites themselves, their blogs/twitter accounts, crunchbase (about same vandalism rate as wikipedia), linkedin, facebook, archive.org, hacker news, techcrunch, venturebeat interviews, school newspaper interviews, googlefu. i think the more important point is that where this is wrong, to the extent that people care, they are going to let us all know and it will be fixed.

joakin2• 16 years ago

For me it says that I dont have access to that sheet with my email.

Is that normal? Is it because i live outside US?

superted• 16 years ago

I am in Sweden and I can access it successfully. Do you have a Google account?

joakin2• 16 years ago

Sure Sir :) and I frecuently use Gdocs

Jabbles• 16 years ago

Is being acquired the absolute ultimate aim for everybody's (YC) start up? Surely being profitable is enough for many people? I also think there's an extremely important distinction between "being funded" and "profitable", which this chart seems to ignore.

tomhoward• 16 years ago

From YC's point-of-view, the ultimate aim is to be acquired or to IPO (which AFAIK has never happened and is unlikely to happen in more than a few exceptional cases). An exit the only way YC gets a return on their investment.

This aligns with tech startup culture generally, where the investors invest with the hope of someday making an exit, and only then does the founders' big payday arrive (the "liquidity event").

In this context, profitability is a secondary question to whether the company is still alive, growing, and on track to delivering the founders and investors a successful exit.

thevivekpandey• 16 years ago

You say: "being profitable is enough for many people" as if being profitable is easier compared to getting acquired. For most web based companies, however, getting acquired is easier.

wololo4• 16 years ago

also, the judgments on how the startups are doing (whether they had "enough" runway) were so subjective that i removed them in the public version.

brlewis• 16 years ago

Two of the "founders doing other things" sites are still useful to me. Snipshot is the easiest online editor for simple cropping that preserves the aspect ratio. Anyvite is the only service I know of that puts event details in the email. I get annoyed at evite.

raheemm• 16 years ago

Thank you!

starkness• 16 years ago

How should we send in updates/corrections? Seems that the doc is read only.

wololo4• 16 years ago

corrections are much appreciated. i would just post them here.

simplify• 16 years ago

Slightly off topic, but I'm considering building an web app where startup founders can casually communicate. Founders would be placed into small groups, probably 3-5, and each member of a group would have a "stand up" meeting each day, talking about what they're working on that day, new problems arising, etc.

I believe this would be a healthy channel of motivation, collaboration, and networking.

Founder users of HN, what do you think? I certainly find it interesting as a founder myself, but I want to see if other founders woud be interested as well before I begin to invest time in building the web app.

kevinburke2• 16 years ago

Well you could test it out - ask 3-4 other cofounders if they're interested in doing a daily standup, then see how that works, right?

Data on YC-funded startups and their founders

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