

A startup's odds of success - revillew
http://www.businessinsider.com/startup-odds-of-success-2013-5
Obviously makes some generalities in the calculations, but an interesting approach.
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adamzerner
"37 of the 511 companies that have gone through the Y Combinator program over
the past 5 years"

These 511 include companies that are a few months old as well as companies
that are 5 years old.

No business is gonna be worth 40 million dollars right away. I'd say you have
to give a company at least 5 years until you judge its success or failure on
whether or not they're worth 40 million dollars.

So then, I'd say a more telling statistic would be: of the YCombinator
companies who have been around 5+ years, how many of them are worth 40
million? And 40 million is high for a barometer of success. I'd probably make
it 5 or 10 million. (who wouldn't be happy with a 5-10 million dollar
company). And if you want to judge younger companies, you could come up with
another stat, but you have to have lower expectations for younger companies.

Sorry to say, but this big shot needs to go back to Yale and take a course on
statistics.

