

Data on YC-funded startups and their founders - wololo
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkdOQEasLwW_dDktRWo1czhXSi1BX1IwMnA3MnZ6aVE&hl=en&authkey=CNX-360K

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kevinburke
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.

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raheemm
Thank you!

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brlewis
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.

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simplify
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.

~~~
kevinburke
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?

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citizenkeys
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
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/>

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

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

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siddhant
There's also <http://yclist.com>

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

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.

~~~
citizenkeys
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.

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joakin
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?

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

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joakin
Sure Sir :) and I frecuently use Gdocs

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Jabbles
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
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.

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scrrr
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
Huh. I thought it might end up being a link to my list here:
[https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkkhSN3vaY4jdF90b1l...](https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkkhSN3vaY4jdF90b1l1Vnl5NmZjaTBNQWlJYVozMEE&hl=en#gid=0)

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.)

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wololo
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...](http://blog.awesomezombie.com/2009/12/analyzing-y-
combinator.html) 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.

~~~
ig1
I'm the author of the awesomezombie list, I've got quite a bit of background
research that didn't make it onto that post, so if there's any companies you
were stuck with give me a ping and I'll see if I have any more info.

Although a quick look through your spreadsheet indicates you seem to have done
a pretty comprehensive job !

I noticed you've got ModFour as a dev shop, they actually went through YC with
a product called ShopKick (see my answer at [http://www.quora.com/What-did-
the-Y-Combinator-startup-Mod-F...](http://www.quora.com/What-did-the-Y-
Combinator-startup-Mod-Four-2006-do)).

I've also got a twitter feed of all the YC companies:
<http://twitter.com/#!/imranghory/ycombinator>

(there are also ycombinator-wXX and ycombinator-sXX lists for the individual
batches)

