
YC Stats Winter 2015 - austenallred
http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-stats-winter-2015
======
illdave
Interesting to note that the average founder age is 30.27 (median is 29). Not
that that's old, of course - just that I imagined it'd be younger.

~~~
codeonfire
Why would you not assume the opposite? I would assume the most experienced
people with the most knowledge, contacts, and money to be in their 40s and
50s.

~~~
dominicgs
Warning, I'm about to make a couple of massive generalisations...

I would guess that most 40-50 year olds who already have knowledge, contacts
and money don't apply to YC, probably because they don't feel that they need
it.

I expect that founders at that age are more likely to be coming from a
position of experience within their target industry, i.e. solving a problem
that they've seen/experienced. They may not be trying to become "X for Y" but
solving problem Z that a limited number of clients will pay good money to have
solved.

Older founders may have more to risk, so the "go big or go home" model may not
be as attractive to them.

As I said, this is a huge generalisation with a lot of guesswork thrown in. I
would love to see some more detailed data so that we could draw some
conclusions.

~~~
pc86
Not to mention the fact that it's probably quite a bit harder to convince a
group of 40-50 year olds to move to SV for 3 months for $18k than it is a
group a 21 year olds.

~~~
codeonfire
It's $120k now but yes, one 40 year old engineer working full time makes that
in 9 months. Why doesn't YC offer more attractive investment, say $500k, and
allow non-SV offices? Is it just the presumption that this won't lead to large
returns? Is there any data to support that?

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cllns

      Companies with a female founder: 25 (21.93%)
    
      Companies with a Black founder: 9 (7.89%)
    
      Companies with a Hispanic founder: 6 (5.26%)
    

They should release the stats of the number of people overall, not the number
of companies with at least one member who fits into one of those groups.

For example, say X% of the people are female, etc.

~~~
katm
We've historically reported companies versus individuals, so we wanted to stay
consistent. But that's fair -- we'll put it in those terms next time we
release stats.

~~~
staunch
Sam Altman wrote 8 months ago:

> _As a side note, even though it will break backwards compatibility, we are
> considering changing how we look at this to the percentage of all founders
> that are women instead of the percentage of companies with a female
> founder._

[http://blog.ycombinator.com/diversity-and-
startups](http://blog.ycombinator.com/diversity-and-startups)

After being told by dozens of people how obviously misleading this statistic
is. It was beneath YC to ever release such a phony stat, but it's downright
unethical to continue propagating it.

~~~
wj
I'm sure you didn't mean it but your post comes across as entitled.

YC has no obligation to share stats and just because you disagree with the
methodology doesn't make them unethical.

~~~
unclesaamm
Likewise, just because you disagree with the parent poster's interpretation
doesn't make them "entitled". Just as YC has no obligation to share stats, the
parent has no obligation to not have an ethical opinion about that, or to
share it.

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pyrrhotech
I think the rising age of founder trend is a good one. Probably means the
snapchat/whatsapp/instagram gold mine is nearly dry and some actually
difficult-to-implement and domain-knowledge requiring ideas are starting to
come into focus again.

~~~
mathgeek
It could also be a sign of many different things. My "gut guess" is that
founders with some startup experience that now are heading out on their own
are being selected for.

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spcoll
No stats for Asian founders? It would be interesting to see a complete
breakdown of WC W15 entrepreneurs by ethnicity.

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bytasv
Is "Countries represented" only from W15 or overall? If it's only from W15,
could it be possible to know the list of all countries represented since the
beginning of YC?

~~~
katm
This is only representative of W15 companies. We don't have a list of
countries overall, since it's not something we've always tracked. But that
would certainly be interesting to see.

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lordnacho
It would be great to have stats on the applicants as well. It would be good to
know whether to bother applying given various info (single founder, no
customers yet, sector, etc).

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kilovoltaire
What are the four $1B+ companies?

I can think of AirBnB, Dropbox, Stripe, ...

~~~
Alex3917
Twitch.

~~~
dkyc
Technically Twitch sold for $970m... Maybe he's referring to Quora (they
joined YC late-stage)

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srinivsn
What's the difference between B2B vs. Enterprise?

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bache
B2B would solve issue's for businesses of any size while enterprise is
creating products for the fortune 500.

~~~
mattmanser
Enterprise has nothing to do with only 500 companies in the US.

There is no real difference.

Though some might say if you charge thousands and have dedicated salespeople,
you're enterprise, even if you sell to a 25 person architect firm. Sales force
is definitely though of as enterprise. While basecamp or twilio is more B2B.
It's fuzzy, if there even is a difference.

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gabegottlieb
Anyone else surprised at the number of startups in this class? (114) How much
individual attention can each startup get?

~~~
salusinarduis
YC has a sharded structure now. Arguably startups now get more attention than
in some of the earlier batches.

~~~
jonlucc
Can you explain this a little more? Are there different groups where each
group has a mentor or shared resources?

~~~
salusinarduis
Prior to sharding all partners were responsible for keeping up with everyone
in a batch.

Now there are multiple groupings of partners which oversee a smaller subset.

I'm not certain, but I'm sure partners are assigned based on their domain
expertise. Though, I'm sure all partners are open to helping anyone in the
batch if needed.

Can anyone comment on this?

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mtviewdave
It would be interesting to see a breakdown by founder team size.

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minimaxir
Why are the YC total stats for all YC companies on the W2015 infographic? That
seems out of scope.

The percentages of companies with a female/black/Hispanic are slightly off. As
worded, it should be calculated by

    
    
       (# W2015 companies with atleast 1 female/black/Hispanic founder) / (# W2015 companies).
    

For companies w/ female founders, 25 / 114 = 21.93%, not 23%.

Black: 9 / 114 = 7.89%, not 8.03%

Hispanic: 6 / 114 = 5.26%, not 5.35%

~~~
katm
Thanks for catching. Making a few updates to clarify.

~~~
astrange
Your Hispanic founder graphic seems to be missing the flagpole!

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chadkruse
Anyone happen to know the other two nonprofits besides
[http://democracyos.org/](http://democracyos.org/) ?

~~~
CPLX
Watsi is one, presumably.

~~~
icco
These stats are just for this batch, watsi was a previous batch.

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thearn4
I'm interested to hear more about the one aerospace startup that they funded
in this class.

~~~
katm
They haven't launched publicly yet. You'll hear about them soon.

~~~
thearn4
Excellent. If we're talking civil aviation and space, it may be one of the
hardest industries to disrupt thanks to regulatory capture (and a million
other things), but from a technical standpoint there is a tremendous amount of
room for improving the current state-of-the-art.

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michaelchisari
I applied with an entertainment (film) industry related startup, but looking
at the company categories, it looks like that wasn't on the menu this time
around.

Always next time, though!

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32faction
Id like to know more info about that aerospace startup.

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someear
would be interesting to see similar stats for the groups that applied. Both
along the company categories and the gender/race breakdown.

~~~
hbhakhra
Also how many total applications did they receive?

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vrp101
The SketchDeck link redirects to the page itself. I'm sure they would
appreciate some YC traffic.

~~~
katm
Roger - updated!

~~~
edmack
Thanks :)

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fsniper
Which company is from Turkey?

~~~
gokhan
[http://www.ebrandvalue.com/](http://www.ebrandvalue.com/)

~~~
fsniper
Oh. I did not know. my friends are working there.

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ngoel36
Which was the aerospace co?

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mceoin
No Australians huh? We'll have to do something about that!

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vasilipupkin
so, invested a total of 101 million and current value of investments = 0.06 *
30 bln * dilution factor. So roughly speaking, current value = 300-400 mln ?

~~~
robhunter
Where do you get the 101 million from?

~~~
vasilipupkin
120K * 842 companies

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rubiquity
Would you be able to provide a breakdown on the industry of the companies
beyond B2B, B2C, etc? I'm curious how many are in developer tooling, oil & gas
and so on and so forth.

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jlhonora
Which one is the Chilean company?

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monsterix
Age of the eldest entrepreneur @YCcombinator = 66?

I sure want to know more about this person, and their start_up!

I'm a relatively older entrepreneur too, fall right on the right side of the
median. Recently I had been been thinking of applying to YC. But couldn't
convince myself for it, and my age was one of the reasons.

~~~
justplay
please go and apply. if you need inspiration check
[http://fundersandfounders.com/too-late-to-start-life-
crisis/](http://fundersandfounders.com/too-late-to-start-life-crisis/)

~~~
monsterix
This is great, thanks for the encouraging note!

