Hmm, this 74% stat is directly conflating funding and profit; it's a conflation that doesn't seem to make sense to me, as I really only care about the profit side of the equation. If you suppose that profit increases monotonically, this title hints at tremendous success - but I don't make that assumption. I'd be more interested to know the medium-to-long-term success - say, profitability at 12 months, or 24.
The similarity between the two is clear when you're running an early stage startup: being either funded or profitable means you are not imminently going to run out of money. And since that is usually the main thing you're worried about in a startup 6 months old, that is an important similarity.
Aha - I think I follow. I thought the 74% was an attempt to inform us about the startups. In a sense, it's not - it's telling us more about YC and its ability to pick and/or guide startups such that they don't quickly crash and burn. Thank you; that makes more sense, now.
Don't get me wrong the 74% is impressive, but I'd expect a large percentage of YC projects to get additional funding. They've already cleared a bunch of hurdles and have a strong team backing them.
I don't have accurate data for YC startups overall, though you can assume that any that haven't raised series A and are more than a year or two old are profitable, since otherwise they wouldn't have been able to continue working on the startup.
There are a few that are making really large amounts of money, but I know they wouldn't like it if I outed them.
That's cool. It's sort of a shame that the "We're really profitable now and don't need any more funding" doesn't get as much/any press compared with "We just took more funding".
Makes for a great headline but it's actually not difficult to achieve when you have no employees, no office space and your product is a webapp (hosting costs are a few hundred dollars per month at most).
The biggest cost tends to be the founders' living expenses. If they're young, that can be low. But it is not a trivial matter to reach this threshold after 6 months. Viaweb didn't.
