
YC Portfolio Stats - nedwin
http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-portfolio-stats
======
dutchbrit
"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](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

~~~
sama
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.)

~~~
dmor
Hi Sam, I was able to pull some data on these things via Mattermark.
[http://mattermark.com/yc-portfolio-stats-mattermark-
crunches...](http://mattermark.com/yc-portfolio-stats-mattermark-crunches-the-
numbers/)

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.

~~~
drp4929
YC's goal is to help startups take first baby steps and raise money on a
larger scale.

So most important stat is what % of companies do that. Based on your data it
seems (76 + XYZ) out of 716 where XYZ is companies out of 121 exits who raised
more money prior to exit.

It'd be interesting to know based on cohort (batch) analysis if YC is getting
better in achieving its goal or not.

It'd also be interesting to know where YC stands on this compared to other
comparable accelerators/incubators.

~~~
amirmc
> _" YC's goal is to help startups ... raise money on a larger scale."_

I don't think this is YC's goal. I recall comments from pg to the effect that
if all the companies raised money on demo day, then maybe YC wasn't selecting
properly (for the risky, out-there, stuff).

~~~
drp4929
Quote from the about page
([http://www.ycombinator.com/about/](http://www.ycombinator.com/about/)) ...

"At Y Combinator, our goal is to get you through the first phase. This usually
means: get you to the point where you’ve built something impressive enough to
raise money on a larger scale. Then we can introduce you to later stage
investors—or occasionally even acquirers."

~~~
amirmc
I stand corrected, thank you.

What I was trying to get at above was that if "% of companies funded" post
demo-day is a metric YC wants to maximise, then it would be trivial for them
to get to near 100% by _only_ selecting the obviously investable propositions
3 months earlier. If they did this, they'd simply be following whatever fad
that VCs happen to be chasing and might miss outliers (even PG tried to
convince the Airbnb founders to try something else).

------
nostromo
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
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
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.

~~~
EricDeb
Note that's 3% of the startups that get into YC... which has a 3% acceptance
rate.

------
alexmr
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...](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/07/16/newest-hit-game-maker-
machine-zone-nears-3-billion-
valuation/?mod=WSJBlog&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wsj%2Fbiztech%2Ffeed+\(WSJ.com%3A+Business+Technology\))

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

~~~
nl
Funding valuation != Market Cap

~~~
karamazov
Actually, they're the same thing: both are computed as (number of shares
outstanding) * (price per share).

The difference is that market cap is used for companies that have IPO'd (and
therefore have a broad market for their shares with continuous price
adjustments) versus companies that have raised money through private markets
(and therefore have infrequent price adjustments).

One can reasonably argue that valuations are less precise than market caps as
a result, but both are dictated by sophisticated investors and should be more
or less correct on average.

(In fact, valuations _are_ less precise, but this has a lot more to do with
the amount of uncertainty inherent in any early-stage company than it does
with the availability of shares on a public market; Wall St. has its ups and
downs just like Silicon Valley.)

~~~
nl
_Actually, they 're the same thing: both are computed as (number of shares
outstanding) _ (price per share).*

No, they are _not_ the same thing. They are calculated the same way, but
_Market_ in the phrase _Market_ Cap means "public (share) markets".

 _market cap is used for companies that have IPO 'd [(] and therefore have a
broad market for their shares with continuous price adjustments_

A pretty important distinction! If a share is "valued" at a price but there
are no buyers then the valuation isn't shared by many others.

To be clear: I understand that the math is the same, but a market cap shows
the consensus view of the market, while a funding valuation only shows the
value a small set of investors put on a company.

------
nedwin
"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
That is awesome.

Have there been any aviation/aerospace companies yet?

~~~
vonklaus
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.

------
ar7hur
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.

~~~
dm2
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.

~~~
tlrobinson
Like [http://yclist.com/](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.

~~~
lisper
YCList is definitely not up to date. There are at least three companies that I
know are dead (because I invested in them) that are not listed as dead. And
there are almost certainly a lot more because I only looked at my portfolio.

------
johansch
The frontpage ([http://www.ycombinator.com](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?

~~~
bignaj
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
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).

~~~
bignaj
Satya has been in the US for quite a while though. For a C-level exec of such
a prominent company you would think an editor could help or maybe it's
something he could work on personally. I tried to chalk it up to "personal
style" but it's really egregious. Might be a bit beyond what can qualify as
"style" and more towards the "grammatically incorrect" side of the spectrum.

~~~
lxmorj
Bike shedding!

~~~
bignaj
For any engineer/dev eloquent communication skills don't matter that much...
but for a CEO they matter quite a bit!

------
aashaykumar92
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.

------
pskittle
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.

~~~
ProAm
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.

~~~
mbesto
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.

~~~
loganu
That was something that stood out for me in Alexis' statement. At a $30
billion market cap, that's $10m per employee. I think that number alone is
enough to indicate that YC isn't creating jobs as much as it is deriving value
from software killing jobs. (They'd phrase it better, but any software making
things easier, faster, etc will require less brainpower/ employees.) The
counter to this is either talk about the bubble making all valuations
ridiculous, or that these companies are currently pretty small; If they grow
to create or lead new industries, jobs will likely be created, and market-cap-
per-employee numbers fall.

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

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

~~~
alain94040
reddit sold for no more than $20M according to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4530030](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4530030)

~~~
dutchbrit
Ouch!

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

~~~
arjunnarayan
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.

~~~
lukego
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? :-))

~~~
argonaut
From random anecdotal observations, the median outcome is that the startup
fails and the founding team splits up to do other things. These things are the
typical things that intelligent high-achievers do - engineers at other tech
companies, PMs, biz dev. I see a disproportionate number working on their own
ideas or joining other YC startups that are doing well.

------
jcampbell1
> Total market cap of all YC companies

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

~~~
hornbaker
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
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.

------
atroyn
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.

------
chuckcode
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.

------
edanm
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.

~~~
sama
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%.

------
penfold26
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.

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

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

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

------
cottonseed
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?

~~~
outericky
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.

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

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

------
huhtenberg

      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
Another commenter posted this link: [http://yclist.com/](http://yclist.com/)

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

~~~
mjffjm
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

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

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

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

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

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

According to who?

------
outside1234
All vanity stats. Where are the revenue and profit figures?

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

------
rubiquity
> _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.

~~~
mhartl
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_present_value)

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

~~~
shawndrost
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.

