

Reflections On YC Demo Day: How The Seed Market Has Changed - arnauddri
http://tomtunguz.com/yc-demo-day-spring-2014/

======
napoleond
This is interesting, but I think it speaks more to which "beachheads"
companies are choosing rather than which markets they ultimately target. For
example, with consumer vs. enterprise I suspect that when Dropbox did Demo Day
they would have been labelled a "consumer" company although the enterprise
potential was obviously there. Vertical SaaS is another example--choosing a
vertical is an excellent way to start, and it can be enormously lucrative for
a small team, but I imagine that "VC-style" exits will usually require
branching past it.

~~~
orky56
Great point. It also indicates to investors what startups think is a good
starting off point. It makes sense to go after a vertical rather than
horizontal since that is more consistent with PG's well strategy (go deep and
narrow rather than wide and shallow). Generalizing quite a bit but they are
more able to get traction, get subscriptions, and increase LTV early on. The
sustainable business model is more mature and a better signal to investors
rather than selling only the vision that might happen with more horizontal
plays.

------
resu_nimda
Nice analysis, but it's hard to draw conclusions from only two data points.
Seems like you have the data for up to 12 demo days and it would be really
cool to have someone make some graphs (though maybe this was already done and
they were intentionally withheld ;) ).

~~~
unreal37
I agree. A change from 47% to 56% isn't really a dramatic shift, and could
represent only 1 or 2 companies difference with such a small sample size. Hard
to draw any conclusions at all.

------
_s
For those wanting to dig further, here's a list of all companies
(active/exited/dead): [http://yclist.com/](http://yclist.com/)

~~~
jedc
Try Seed-DB (my site) for lists of YC companies and every other accelerator I
know about globally: [http://www.seed-db.com/accelerators](http://www.seed-
db.com/accelerators)

3700+ companies, >$4Billion in funding, and an investor graph of thousands of
investors

~~~
sdesol
Nice site. There appears to be a bug with the "Cohort Date" column sort for
firefox 28 on windows 7. It works in chrome but not firefox.

------
bradhe
What's the end game for a YC non-profit? Besides corporate social
responsibility, how does a non-profit founded at YC benefit the business
ecosystem at large?

