
Seed-DB - jedc
http://www.seed-db.com/
======
pg
I was curious how accurate this is, so I looked at our stats. The actual
amount raised by the 380 YC cos before the current batch is $1,048,274,000. So
the average per co is is $2.75 million.

Believe it or not I'd never calculated the total amount of funding raised. I
was interested to see that it's now over a billion dollars.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Wow, that is a pretty impressive number. I wonder if there is some way to
compute economic impact of an accelerator (which is to say the secondary and
tertiary impacts from rents, services, employement taxes, etc.)

~~~
Variance
In a perfectly efficient market, YC's marginal benefit to the economy would be
described by its profits, specifically cash flows to investors. If YC was
publicly held, that would then translate into the share price. If YC were a
monopoly and acted to maximize profits, the marginal benefit would be in
alternative to no accelerators existing at all, and its net profits would
equal its economic impact.

Since our economy is not ideally efficient, we can reasonably say that the
profits don't fully describe its impact, but I have no idea what sort of
portion would describe the disparity. Note, though, that we would expect just
as much of a chance for the profits to overreport economic impact as to
underreport it. A generalized method for finding the margin probably exists in
some research somewhere, and one unique to YC could probably be approximated
using fundamental analysis of the company and those it affects.

We could also back into the economic benefit by looking at the spending
multiplier that the company has for its operating expenses, but that would be
more complex, since spending multipliers are more touchy and contentious as a
means of finding economic value of some expenditure.

The way that these sorts of things are usually quantified is in terms of GDP
generated and other measurables like tax volumes, which I think is somewhat
unideal, but it's one of the few tools available for such a hard-to-quantify
item as economic impact. A study was done on the economic impact of Eli Lilly
in Indiana [1] that used similar measures, though they had their own model
that was implemented and ended up coming up with around twice the economic
impact compared to the GDP measurement alone.

[1] [http://www.ibrc.indiana.edu/studies/20090604_lilly-report-
fi...](http://www.ibrc.indiana.edu/studies/20090604_lilly-report-final.pdf)

Another problem is that the notion of "economic impact" is difficult to pin
down, which is why it's usually easier to just look at more objectively
defined variables like net profit, GDP contribution, or revenue/expense cash
flows. The easiest thing to do would be to just look at the GDP created by an
accelerator, which can be computed from the accounting of YC and those that it
interacts with.

Even this is hard to work with for YC though, because YC can be said to "lose"
a lot of its potential GDP contribution when it goes around founding
incredibly successful companies but only being very successful due to funding
the companies during their infancies, when they can easily explode in value
after YC. Traditional methods of calculating GDP will have a hard time
attributing these value increases to YC, even though YC made them possible in
the first place. This comes back to the problem of profits and other
financials not accurately representing economic impact, which is especially
difficult in YC's case. It's just so hard to quantify the marginal value
increase of a company going through YC versus not having gone through YC,
which is the core issue.

------
makmanalp
Wow, everyone except YC and Techstars Boulder has a terrible success rate:
<http://www.seed-db.com/accelerators>

Is this data complete?

~~~
gphil
As an alum of Dreamit Philly, I can tell you that there is a lot of missing
data there at least. On the order of many millions in funding missing for that
program alone. There is also at least one missing exit.

~~~
jedc
I get funding data from Crunchbase; I hope by being transparent with Seed-DB
it helps improve data quality there, too. (Though I also want founders to
eventually be able to add it in themselves on Seed-DB.)

If there's a missing exit, please let me know details. jed.christiansen@seed-
db.com

------
tstonez
As Jed notes in his post and on the site there is clearly work to be done
(this is an MVP) but I think this is a great tool for founders to compare
accelerator programs.

They all have the same spiel about mentoring and funding but this gives some
real clarity to the murky waters of seed accelerators. Beyond the top-tier
(YC, TechStars, Seedcamp [IMHO]) it is hard to know the value of some of these
programmes.

Keep up the good work, looking forward to see AngelList and Linkedin data
integrated ;)

------
ig1
I run <http://seedtable.com> which similarly provides analytics built on-top
of Crunchbase and what I found from looking at the financial numbers is that
Crunchbase just isn't reliable enough to do analytics on.

Rounds are frequently incorrect (typos in numbers, orders of magnitude wrong,
foreign currencies treated as if they were USD, etc.) or missing.

It's definitely better than nothing, but should be treated with caution.

~~~
jedc
This is just the first step; I've got more planned to make this better.

But I also believe that by publicizing this it will encourage accelerators to
have their startups monitor/clean up their data on Crunchbase. (And I
personally think that's good for the startup ecosystem.)

~~~
ig1
Agreed. You should ping Techcrunch they're normally happy to cover third-party
tools built on-top of Crunchbase.

It's a shame that Crunchbase has become so neglected under AOL though.

Incidentally if you want to grab a drink/coffee sometime feel free to drop me
an email (address on my profile).

------
DanielRibeiro
Specific data on YC companies: <http://yclist.com/>

Even more datap[1]: <http://ycpages.info/>

Some more activity on Angel list: <https://angel.co/y-combinator#activity>

[1] Hn dicussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2273898>

~~~
jedc
YClist is a bit out of date. It gets information from the Google Spreadsheets
I used to maintain, but which I've since deprecated.

------
jot
It will be interesting to see Start-Up Chile added to this list. I think the
number of companies they've funded has almost passed YC now.

------
blaines
This seems like a list of news stories than a reliable data source. Feedgen is
obviously not active - try going to the site. i/o ventures doesn't even have
any companies listed.

Nice list of company names though. Lots of really really bad ones in the list.
Some clearly good ones.

------
etrain
Love the data and the site. Would be fantastic if you'd open up an API to this
data to make it easy to ingest and analyze in external tools (R, Excel,
whatever).

It would be easy enough to scrape it, but formal support for data export is
such a huge win for sites like this.

~~~
jedc
That's a little bit longer term for me, but would like to do it. (For context,
this is the first webapp I've ever built.)

------
ricardobeat
No Brazilian accelerators in the list :(

There are a few: Semente, 21212, Aceleradora, Endeavor.. though it's hard to
find information on them.

ps: Bootstrap didn't fit that well there, looks a bit awkward.

------
jessepollak
Really enjoyed looking at the data—nice compilation!

One quick question, what do these badges mean:

<http://cl.ly/image/1X0T2E1a0T2m>

~~~
jedc
It's my confidence level in the exit values. Only a few have been public or
widely reported. The rest are purely my guesses. I wanted to put a High /
Medium / Low confidence against each value.

Looks like I should make this more clear in the interface!

~~~
jessepollak
Ah, that makes sense. Yeah, a label would be nice—otherwise, great job!

------
jaequery
the numbers don't look too hot ...

