It'd be interesting to see their % of investments in hard tech startups versus the entire VC industry. Ten years ago the entire VC industry was almost exclusively investing in software startups where many of them were sort of gimmicky social media apps or just taking a traditionally offline business and putting it on the cloud, I'd argue that YC was one of the first ones to buck that trend, Sam has a handful of posts just on hard startups.
YC made 398 investments in 2020 and I estimated that at least 33 of them could be considered "hard tech" [1]. It's hard to judge what startups are "trivial software" versus "hard tech" without looking through each one, so I tried to just filter out anything software-related, even though many of those (maybe even most) are probably as non-trivial as a hard tech startup.
It'd be interesting to see their % of investments in hard tech startups versus the entire VC industry. Ten years ago the entire VC industry was almost exclusively investing in software startups where many of them were sort of gimmicky social media apps or just taking a traditionally offline business and putting it on the cloud, I'd argue that YC was one of the first ones to buck that trend, Sam has a handful of posts just on hard startups.
YC made 398 investments in 2020 and I estimated that at least 33 of them could be considered "hard tech" [1]. It's hard to judge what startups are "trivial software" versus "hard tech" without looking through each one, so I tried to just filter out anything software-related, even though many of those (maybe even most) are probably as non-trivial as a hard tech startup.
1. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?batch=S20&batch=W20&i...