YC Portfolio Stats

http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-portfolio-stats

by nedwin • 12 years ago

288 119 12 years ago

blog.ycombinator.com

nedwin• 12 years ago

"Number of nuclear energy companies in the current batch: 2"

Awesome. I can't seem to find these two companies yet - have they announced or still under the rader?

abstractbill• 12 years ago

That is awesome.

Have there been any aviation/aerospace companies yet?

hornbaker3• 12 years ago

Yep.

vonklaus2• 12 years ago

FireFly is a new space company in the micro-launch space. Not a YC company (to my knowledge) but they seem like a cool start up. They have some SpaceX talent on the team. They had an announcement of their new vehicle on their site but maybe they have gone into stealth mode because I cant find it right now.

kevando• 12 years ago

"it generally takes companies a few years to get above [$100 million valuation]"

Sama, dropping knowledge...

vonklaus2• 12 years ago

Not clinkle. They didn't even need a prototype...

arete888• 12 years ago

the idea of a nuclear energy startup is slightly frightening. v. interested to see what they're working on.

ar7hur• 12 years ago

Very impressive.

I'd love to know how many out of the 716 companies funded so far are still in business per se as independent entities? And among those that are not anymore, what was the exit (successful exit vs. soft landing / acquihire vs. death). I suspect it's really hard to track though, and somewhat subjective.

dm23• 12 years ago

It wouldn't be too difficult to pay someone a minimal amount to maintain a very detailed spreadsheet of every company that passes through YCombinator and record every stat they can find (and attempt to track how that changes over time). Some columns could be deleted if they are determined to not provide value obviously.

This might allow some interesting patterns to help filter future companies and let them know where the money is best allocated. Optimizing return on investment seems like it would be the most important part of YCombinator, then again I'm not a venture capitalist (but would love to be one some day).

I'm sure this is done somewhat at every incubator / startup investment group but it might be determined to be too valuable to release publicly, but at least a list of companies would be appreciated (all companies, not just the wildly successful ones).

Some possible stats off of the top of my head (per company):

- industry, location, target market

- founder's specialties (marketing, financial, developers). in-house developer or outside contractors. age of founders, university attended

- expected revenue after 1 year, 2 years, 5 years. actual revenue after those times

- number of users, number of paying customers, average revenue per customer. time from conception to first sale

Some of this might be information that they don't want to share, but if willing it would be wonderful to see. Just every data point possible that might offer some kind of correlation between extreme success / moderate success / failure.

tlrobinson2• 12 years ago

Like http://yclist.com/ ?

Looks fairly up to date, but I'm not sure how accurate it is.

I recall seeing a spreadsheet that included other similar programs but I can't find it right now.

iamwil• 12 years ago

http://ycpages.info/

http://ycuniverse.com/

jedc3• 12 years ago

http://www.seed-db.com collects stats for YC and every other accelerator, too... the companies they've funded, who's invested for how much and when, etc.

pskittle• 12 years ago

I wonder why they don't keep statistics on jobs created o rev generated, will be interesting to see quantifiable impact created by the YC community.

josefresco• 12 years ago

I also was surprised (not shocked) to see that data missing. Not shocked because those in the "VC business" usually don't care so much, as long as the get a return on their investment, which could be accomplished without any meaningful revenue.

ProAm• 12 years ago

I'd be interested in this. I bet it is much smaller than any of us anticipate. I'd estimate <5000 jobs total as a high water mark.

gtCameron• 12 years ago

That would be only 7 employees per company on average. I'm sure there are a lot that never got past the 1-2 range but there are also Dropbox and AirBnb on the other end. Those two combined have around 2,000 employees according to Crunchbase.

mbesto2• 12 years ago

In the FCC statement Alexis (YC Partner) mentioned 3,000 new jobs.

To put this in perspective, SalesForce employs ~12,000 (4x that) and has roughly the same market cap ($30b).

IMO, if I were YC I wouldn't be touting this number (nor am I indicating that they do currently). What's probably more important is how many new markets have been created, and therefore jobs, due to YC companies. A number which will be extremely difficult to measure unbiasly. Otherwise, this simply reinforces the notion that software is eating the world and developers are paid too much.

2arrs2ells2• 12 years ago

When going through YC, it was incredible how respectful the program was with founders' time.

This happens during YC (no pointless meetings) and afterwards (no burdensome data reporting requirements).

asenna• 12 years ago

The three companies worth over a billion dollars being: Dropbox, Airbnb and.. I can't seem to remember the third one. Reddit?

tlrobinson2• 12 years ago

Stripe

smeyer• 12 years ago

Stripe, I believe.

Edit: Here's an article when they hit a $1.75B valuation: http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/22/with-an-eye-to-internationa...

xanderstrike• 12 years ago

Last I heard (early 2013), Reddit was valued at 400-500 million. I can't imagine it's gotten much more than that.

alain94040• 12 years ago

reddit sold for no more than $20M according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4530030

dutchbrit3• 12 years ago

Ouch!

nayefc2• 12 years ago

We'll see who's worth what when they hit the public market :)

huhtenberg• 12 years ago

  Number of companies funded by YC so far: 716

Can you share how many are outright dead and how many are working, more or less, on the same idea that they started with?

Spendar89• 12 years ago

Another commenter posted this link: http://yclist.com/

According to it, 46 companies are "dead", 52 are "exited" and 445 are "active".

mjffjm• 12 years ago

yclist has a few errors, so not sure if it's all 100% accurate.

To name a few: xobni - bought by yahoo and now shut down (listed as active) like.fm - dead, but listed as active Exec - listed as active, but was bought by Handybook Bump - listed active, but dead

jcampbell12• 12 years ago

Total market cap of all YC companies

The word "market" seems pretty strange here. Are there any YC companies with a "market" valuation?

tomblomfield• 12 years ago

Yes - VC investment is a private market, but a market nonetheless.

jcampbell12• 12 years ago

I assume it is a combination of acquisition price or last VC valuation, or market cap of IPO'd companies (which I don't think there are any). It is a useful number, but calling it "market cap" seems strange to me.

hornbaker3• 12 years ago

Any company which has sold equity, whether on the private or public markets, has a "market" valuation based on the per-share price. Private companies may also get a market valuation with a 409A valuation, but those are typically kept as low as legally justifiable for stock option attractiveness.

crapshoot101• 12 years ago

Perhaps, but it is a market valuation for preferred stock, not for common stock, a distinction when market valuation generally refers to the latter. Ie, companies doing a round at a $1B valuation aren't implicitly worth a billion$ - the liquidity preference affects it.

edanm• 12 years ago

So conservatively, by market cap it looks like YC is doing 10X on their investment, which is very impressive.

And this is conservatively, since the 3 billion in funding has already been handed out, but some of the companies that have received that funding haven't had a chance to grow and become valuable.

sama2• 12 years ago

that's how much the companies have raised in total, not from us--we invest usually between 15-20k per company.

and of course, investors only own a percentage of the companies, not nearly 100%.

technotony• 12 years ago

Way better return than that. Assuming they've invested $20k in each company so far (and not including current batch with the new investments but that's fair as there is no return from that) then they've invested $14MM or so for 6% of founders common stock. All that really matters is their ownership of the biggest companies, which will have raised a lot of money, but lets assume they got diluted 2/3rds and own 2% of airbnb/dropbox (I have little feel for how accurate that assumption is). Then the portfolio is worth about $600MM. That's an astonishing 40x return, and it's probably way better than that as we aren't seeing the full returns yet especially from the recent batches (a fairer analysis might be to only include companies 5 years old or something). The analysis I'd really like to see is a cohort analysis showing mean valuation by batch over time, but this might be misleading due to changing market conditions.

johansch2• 12 years ago

The frontpage (http://www.ycombinator.com) now has a quote from Satya Nadella:

“It’s fantastic to see the work Y Combinator is doing to foster innovation and entrepreneurship in the startup community and Hacker News is one of my favorite sources of pointers to hackers and their hacks!”

What's his user name?

bignaj4• 12 years ago

Did anyone else notice that Satya has quite a habit of using run-on sentences? I also thought this while reading his letter to employees.

aroch• 12 years ago

It seems to be a fairly common occurrence in Indians who learned English as a second language (and I would guess other ethnic groups as well).

mahyarm• 12 years ago

Describing programming details seems to encourage complicated run on sentences in my experience.

r00fus• 12 years ago

Is that possibly the culture at Microsoft? I knew a guy who moved from Intel to Microsoft and I noticed his speech tended to more verbosity after the move.

aashaykumar922• 12 years ago

I'm not saying he doesn't have a user name but a user name is not required to read HN and click on the links.

lukego2• 12 years ago

I would be really curious to know what the median outcome is for YC companies and their founders.

johansch2• 12 years ago

Average is about a 40M valuation. (Yeah, I know that's not exactly what you asked about.)

arjunnarayan• 12 years ago

I would bet that the median outcome is failure. Even within an impressive group, you're not going to escape the basic power law dynamics in starting companies.

lukego2• 12 years ago

I mean, did the median founders have a good experience overall?

What is the distribution of personal satisfaction amongst founders? (Is that a power law too where nearly everybody is miserable and wishes they stayed in school, but the billionaires are so happy that it averages out? :-))

nayefc2• 12 years ago

"Total market cap of all YC companies: >$30 billion"

According to who?

HistoryInAction• 12 years ago

Can you include a stat about (order of magnitude?) jobs created?

craft_• 12 years ago

How do you keep track of how much the companies raise after leaving YC?

epaladin• 12 years ago

That sort of data usually makes it into CrunchBase eventually...

_craft• 12 years ago

Crunchbase isn't the most reliable, so I was wondering if they surveyed their companies, etc.

maxbrown• 12 years ago

As a past investor in all of the companies, I assume they would be informed about the future rounds and updated cap tables.

rubiquity• 12 years ago

But we don’t keep statistics on total revenue

Ahhh, yet another reminder as to what matters and what doesn't in the game of VC.

mbesto2• 12 years ago

or for that matter - profits or earnings.

mhartl• 12 years ago

It's important to criticize venture capital for the right reasons. VCs correctly care about value, not revenue or profit, but by itself this isn't a problem because the few most valuable companies typically dominate the returns, and they are virtually always insanely profitable in the long run. VCs thus don't deserve derision for not caring about revenue or profit in the short term.

On the other hand, because only the top few companies matter to a VC's returns, the VC's incentives are not always well-aligned with the interests of the founders. This is because VCs can invest in a large number of companies and thus realize the expected value of their investments (due to the law of large numbers [2]). Founders, on the other hand, even if they are insanely prolific, can probably only start a handful of companies in a lifetime, and are thus exposed to a much higher variance in outcomes.

For example, if the founders have a choice between a 50% chance of making a $50m company (expected value $25m) and a 1% chance of making a $10b company (expected value $100m), VCs have a strong incentive to push for the latter, even though most founders would prefer the former. This mismatch of incentives, not a lack of focus on revenue or profit, is the real problem with VC (at least from a founder's point of view).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_present_value

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers

shawndrost• 12 years ago

VCs actually have a solution to this incentive mismatch: when you ask a not-yet-wealthy founder to swing for the fences (which typically happens during an investment round) you invite them to take some of the investment money out of the company and into their personal accounts.

emmett• 12 years ago

How could YC possibly keep statistics on revenue for the entire portfolio?

Sam isn't saying "we don't care about revenue", he's saying "we don't have any way to keep statistics on the total revenue of all portfolio companies". Those are very very different statements.

chuckcode• 12 years ago

Lots of success stories there with a 10x of investment and many jobs and fortunes made. But also interesting to see just how hard it is to succeed big with 20 of 716 (2.8%) making it to $100M valuation so far even among this every elite set of entrepreneurs given only 3% of the current batch's applicants were accepted.

nostromo2• 12 years ago

Note the power-law distribution; Airbnb and Dropbox are ~2/3rds of the entire portfolio.

And at least 80% of the portfolio value comes from 23 companies - about 3% of companies funded.

jcrjcr• 12 years ago

That's the nature of startups. Most don't succeed. I don't think YC would make a claim that they are some automatic path to success, just that they help good ideas to get there

mfrommil• 12 years ago

Although having a 3% (or greater based on what happens in the future) shot at your startup becoming worth $100M has got to be significantly better than the odds of any other startup reaching a $100M valuation.

aashaykumar922• 12 years ago

The most impressive 'stat' about these stats is how little most of the startups were when they were accepted into YC. And the average goes on to raise ~$40M(taken from a existing comment on this thread). Take Airbnb as an example...probably no VC, and hardly any angels, would have ever invested in them at the stage YC did.

alexmr• 12 years ago

Looks like they'll get a 4th billion dollar company with machine zone if this round closes: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/07/16/newest-hit-game-maker...

hornbaker3• 12 years ago

Wow. If that round closes, they'll have a bigger market cap than Zynga (currently only $2.7B).

nl2• 12 years ago

Funding valuation != Market Cap

outside1234• 12 years ago

All vanity stats. Where are the revenue and profit figures?

dutchbrit3• 12 years ago

"But we don’t keep statistics on total revenue or jobs created, though I expect both numbers would be impressive."

I find this rather odd, since these numbers actually mean a lot to YCombinator. You even blogged that YCombinator would like to create 1 million jobs recently (http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-rfs-one-million-jobs). How can you know you've reached one of your goals without even tracking the stats? Even though you don't have stats on revenue, do you at least keep track of profits? This seems like quite important/crucial information.

Ps. Don't see this post as a bash - I think what you guys are doing is awesome!

Cheers,

Sam Granger

beambot• 12 years ago

One plausible explanation... YC needs to be notified when portfolio companies take on new funding, upon which they will receive access to valuation and financing information (eg. so they can exercise any pro rata rights). They don't need to go out of their way to request this information, nor do they need to unduly burden their portfolio.

For job and revenue information, they would need to directly reach out to portfolio companies and ask them to self-report. I'm sure most would... but it's not exactly passive.

sama2• 12 years ago

We hate asking portfolio companies to do any extra work for us. They notify all previous investors when they raise more money, so we have that information, but for jobs and revenue we'd have to ask them to take time to do something that would be helpful for us and not for them.

(We may start asking for more company performance stats, since fewer and fewer companies have boards and it's valuable for companies to report this frequently. But that'd be because we thought it was in the best interest of the companies, not YC.)

boomzilla2• 12 years ago

Is the number of employees always one of the first bullet points in board meeting Power Point slide? You could just add them all up.

dutchbrit3• 12 years ago

Hey Sam, thanks for your reply. I understand your point of view, but surely, asking them on a yearly basis for example shouldn't take up that much time. At the end of the day, we're talking about figures that any founder should know out the top of their head (maybe not to the dot but at least a rough estimate). I agree that it should benefit the companies too, don't get me wrong. Ps. Please say hi to Lachy next time you see him!

Ps 2. Not sure why this is being downvoted, but whatever!

dmor2• 12 years ago

Hi Sam, I was able to pull some data on these things via Mattermark. http://mattermark.com/yc-portfolio-stats-mattermark-crunches...

267 companies currently have 2 or more employees

8,164 people are currently employed by a YC company [1]

121 companies have disclosed an exit (no IPOs, all acquisitions so far)

66% of YC companies are based in the Bay Area, followed by New York (7%) and Boston (2%)

76 un-exited companies have raised a venture round of funding (Series A or beyond)

There is a nearly 50/50 split between B2B and B2C startups in the portfolio

The average Series A stage YC company has 26 employees and has raised $10.2M of funding in its lifetime.

[1] The total number is probably much higher, many of these companies do not have LinkedIn pages or employees on LinkedIn, Crunchbase, news, and other sources until they are further along. I think an estimate of 9,000 to 10,000 current jobs created by current YC companies is reasonable.

larrys• 12 years ago

"we'd have to ask them to take time to do something that would be helpful for us and not for them."

I see it as what is good for you is good for them.

Knowing jobs allows you to influence policy because info like that is often used by politicians as a reason for agreeing with a particular position. Also a politician that is impressed with YC (for whatever reason "hey they create jobs") would be more likely to help a YC company (or YC) the same way a politician would take note and help anything that he personally has experience with. So keeping up the YC brand is important. [1]

I'm also not clear on exactly (with respect to jobs for example) how much work is involved in supplying that information. (Obv. someone at YC has to keep track of it of course which is work but it certainly seems worthwhile to do.)

[1] For example say I am contacted by YC for something that I do. Don't you think because I know who you are I am going to take notice and possibly be a bit more helpful than if I got a call from an incubator that I had never heard of?

bradgessler• 12 years ago

You could get away with a voluntary Wufoo survey limited to 5- 10 questions. Our company would have time for that (2-3 minutes?)

brandnewlow• 12 years ago

I was just wondering last night when YC was going to build a free Mint-like money tracking app for portfolio companies that had the secondary effect of reporting back how they were doing financially. That way there'd be no bothersome reporting obligations for founders beyond checking a box to let YC pull reports or get read-only access.

JonFish85• 12 years ago

Do you at least keep track of profits? This seems like quite important/crucial information.

I'd be surprised if many of the YC companies actually turn a profit. I imagine that YC's work has long since been done when a company finally starts making money.

11235813212• 12 years ago

I say this non-facetiously: any startup that looks like it might be hitting 1,000,000 jobs will be quite visible to YC as a good candidate to hit that number. They don't need to know how many jobs are created by most of their companies because it doesn't matter.

Also, once YC funds a company, they don't care what goal the company originally planned to hit during interviews.

joshred• 12 years ago

Only a select few of the largest companies in the world employ 1,000,000+ people. The chance that a startup company will displace an international conglomerate like Walmart (most of whom's employees work for very low wages) is nil.

paul• 12 years ago

While those are definitely interesting numbers, it's important to understand that for rapidly growing companies, jobs and revenue are typically trailing indicators of success, while valuation is more of a leading indicator (though obviously not 100% reliable). For example, Google and Facebook both had high valuations long before they had high revenue or head count.

kremdela• 12 years ago

I'd be interested to see the stats on valuations of companies that applied to YC but were rejected.

dools• 12 years ago

Market cap usually only refers to publicly traded companies... Does that apply here?

cottonseed• 12 years ago

You fund <3% of applicants. Surely this means you are passing up a lot of potential positive value. Just curious, what's the limiting factor for YC in scaling to more companies?

JoeAltmaier• 12 years ago

Applications continue to grow. So while percentage drops, # sponsored (was/is?) growing.

outericky• 12 years ago

There are certainly tangible hurdles to scaling. Namely, number of partners. Quality support, advice is hard to do with a 100:1 ratio. Much better at 10:1. There's also physical space, but as we see, YC is opening up more space so that will scale slowly. But as these companies mature and maybe become partners themselves, that will scale too.

joshdance• 12 years ago

Power law. I wonder what companies make up 80% of these numbers.

jedc3• 12 years ago

Dropbox, AirBnB, and Stripe are the companies that have publicly achieved valuations of >$1Billion; those three alone likely drive 80%+ of the numbers.

_zeo8• 12 years ago

Does YC own aprox. 5-7% of the $30B marketcap? Or is there dilution?

jedc3• 12 years ago

There's definitely dilution. YC gets common (aka founders) shares for their initial 5-7%, so they get diluted just like founders do.

penfold26• 12 years ago

I think an even better idea would be yclist.com or total YC websites calculated along with alexa ranking. That would give a great indication of who has been successful or not. Keep in mind YC also gets also significant press than normal startups so its expected that most should do ok at least.

hamsternipples• 12 years ago

Number of YC companies Steve Jobs has worked at, so far: 0

atroyn• 12 years ago

I'd like to see some stats on the companies that failed after YC. How far did they get? Why did they fail? (e.g. failed to raise VS team exploded VS killed by competitor).

This sort of info would be valuable to first-time founders, as they're the sorts of hazards you only typically learn to navigate by experiencing them first hand.

YC Portfolio Stats

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