
Y Combinator's Portfolio Performance - over $1MM in cash? - dawie
http://sam.bluwiki.com/blog/2007/04/y-combinators-portfolio.html
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pg
GI, GO

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dawie
Throw us a bone Paul

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pg
We're slightly profitable. Probably not as profitable as all the people
copying us think. It's hard to predict how much we'll make long-term. We won't
make much from the startups that get bought early. If a startup gets bought
for $5m after taking an angel round that dilutes us down to 4%, that's only
$183k (200 - 17.5) pretax. We won't be buying Gulfstreams on those deals, no
matter how many of them there are.

For us to make a lot of money, we'd have to invest in companies that scored
very big, and we have no idea yet how many will go through YC. The data is
moderately encouraging so far. As well as Loopt there are two other startups
funded by big VCs that haven't launched yet. But there's still not enough data
to see trends.

Fortunately, unlike a VC firm, we don't need to make a lot of money. The main
reason we're doing YC is that it's a cool hack. It makes it even cooler that
we might make some money out of it, but that's not essential. We just need to
make enough not to have to stop, and we'll probably manage that.

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dawie
I guess it all comes down to "Doing what you Love", and thanks for the bone.

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aston
I recall PG saying somewhere that they took a loss on either Kiko or Reddit.
Probably Kiko.

Also, funding numbers used to be different. The earlier startups got $6k times
N, rather than $5k + $5k times N.

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brett
Yeah, I remember that too. Something like Kiko took ~100k in angel money and
the angels got preferred stock so YC ended up with about $0.38 on the dollar.

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vegashacker
Good memory. Here's the actual quote:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=5036>

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dawie
Sam, why did you not post this to YC news yourself?

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Sam_Odio
I wanted to spend some more time on the numbers before passing it around.

Also, I think users here consider posting your own blog to be bad form; and I
don't really need the points :)

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brett
I don't know if I buy "posting your own blog is bad form". You still only get
one vote.

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yaacovtp
There are several people here who I would gladly mark most of their posts as
spam because they submit each and every thing they write on their blogs.

How about an adsense like blog spam sidebar where the crappy submissions have
to sit in shame?

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brett
I tend to agree, but my point is: Spam is spam and good posts are good posts,
your own or otherwise. We shouldn't define "good form" based on how we want
the morons to behave.

