Even if you multiple this amount by 2. Dividing this into the number of companies makes one wonder about the exposure rate in hte media for YC startups. Seems like are getting headlines and cover stories more than others.
Saying, for that only, it is worth to join YC. Let alone the weekly meetings (dinners, etc.).
Just for instance, let's just take a look at the following two CrunchBase entries:
While the first have sold his first startup (XIV) to IBM for $300M, Three year later, he sold his second startup (diligent) to IBM (again) for $165M, ($465M in total), the knowledge of TC about him is nearly zero. All they can tell is that for his new startup (third) he raised $9M.
On the other hand, if you'll wake up Mike arrington in the middle of his deep sleeps and ask him to name 18 YC startups he will do that right away, without even opening his second eye, wouldn't he?
Techcrunch predominantly covers consumer startups, b2b startups in general get much less coverage. Crunchbase has better b2b coverage, but by-and-large it's because companies have added themselves (and naturally smaller startups have more incentive to do this, so you'll find more recent b2b startups than older ones).
There used to be a list of launched companies in the YC faq, but there started to be so many that it was always out of date. We have a list ourselves of course, but we couldn't publish that because it's full of stuff companies don't want disclosed. And it would be a lot of work to tease apart the stuff that's secret from the stuff that isn't. Often I'm not sure myself. So making a publicly viewable list of all the startups seems to fall into the category of things that might be interesting to do, but wouldn't actually help the startups much, and would be a significant amount of work.
I think this comment at 3:51 PM EST on 10/17/2010 may be the official death knell of structured data.
A few years ago, YC would have maintained portfolio data in a spreadsheet or database. But in today's world, it's probably in a wiki.
It might be surprising that an uberhacker like PG doesn't have a custom database of YC startups (which would, by definition, make it trivial to export the "non-secret" stuff). That's why I think this comment speaks volumes about how -- even amongst supernerds who think in a systematic, structured way -- a loose affiliation of hypertext documents is the preferred way to capture and record institutional knowledge.
Or maybe it is in a spreadsheet and PG is just lazy. But I doubt it.
We do have a custom database. What makes it hard to export data is that we have no representation of what info is public. The database knows only that e.g. startup x has raised a series A round, or has been acquired, but it doesn't know whether those things have been announced yet.
I believe the only dataset that YC needs to furnish is the official list of alumni.
Follow-on rounds, exits, and current status can all be provided by the community. But there seems to be no authoritative dataset that shows which startups participated in YC.
But from your comments, I'm guessing that some companies prefer that their mere involvement with YC not be disclosed at all, which makes this a harder task then just periodically exporting the name and URL of every portfolio company.
"Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated." - Structured Data
There is a reliable source of YC alumni list from outside of YC, but I hesitate to mention it as it includes founders of startups that are still in stealth. If anyone needs the list PM me.
Although with a bit of thinking I'm sure most people can figure out where to get it from.
Well, in all geekiness, pg could release the structure of 'the list' without revealing the actual data & put an end to all of this structured vs. unstructured speculation. Just sayin'.
I think his point was that if it's in a spreadsheet, it would only take a few minutes to copy the "name" column, excluding all startups where the "launched" column indicates that they're still in stealth.
He wasn't calling using a spreadsheet lazy; he was calling using one and still being unwilling to compile a list of YC startups lazy. Of course, PG is busy enough that I wouldn't blame him anyway (but he does have people working for him to do things like that).
I thought that as well and then I remembered, they don't fund companies or ideas, they fund teams. These teams, may or may not change the idea the had when they applied.
Jed (the source spreadsheet maintainer) does a really good job of keeping the newer companies up to date with public info, but it's hard to find a lot of public info on YC companies before the fact that they were YC was newsworthy.
I agree, but it's probably up to the founders and pg how much information they make public, more so from the founders. It'd be interesting to see someone publish their quarterly earnings akin to what balsamiq did awhile back (http://blogs.balsamiq.com/product//2010/01/03/a-look-back-at...).
Does someone have Jed's contact details, I did a lot of research on this for a blog post a while back, probably makes sense for me send some of the corrections his way.
Hey all, I'm glad to see this has attracted some attention. I originally made it for myself to get an overview of all the startups in one place. I couldn't find an official list and the spreadsheet I linked was the best I could find, but I can't even sort it.
The data is pulled from the spreadsheet, but unfortunately it's not all accurate. The estimated aquisition price is estimated by the author of the original spreadsheet. Also, a number of domains are defunct, but the startups aren't listed as dead or exited. And as pg points out, some names are also wrong.
There are several other bugs I'm aware of too. I just wanted to get something functional out to see if anyone was actually interested. I'll fix things up and add more features when I have time (who the acquirer was, link to a press release).
I was thinking of making this into an open wiki, as there's no one reliable source to pull data from. It'd also be much easier to maintain.
That's my blog post, I'm currently feeding my data to Jed, so hopefully the combined data will be a bit more accurate. I haven't updated it in ten months or so, so any changes since then won't be included.
Speaking of this, anyone have any insight as to why LaunchHear.com has a page rank of zero despite being linked to by TechCrunch and a few other sites? Granted we aren't promoting the site right now because we're working on other parts of our business, but it annoys me because we haven't done anything that's even grey area, let alone in violation of Google's rules.
Keep in mind the oldest YC companies have only been around ~5 years. There are some YC companies worth more than that but haven't exited. The common examples (based on others' estimations) are Dropbox and AirBnB.
This one gives a rough estimate for chances of being successful. I am surprised that even for Y Combinator funded companies it's rather small (when looking only at exits) considering the fact that PG says being acquired is almost always the way to go. It's interesting to know how the rest of the companies are doing (how many are profitable).
- link the word "exited" to a press release about the exit, or something similar.
- If the exit was in the form of being absorbed into a larger company, something like "Exited - [company name]" would be nice (for example, Divvyshot should say Exited - Facebook).
Even if you multiple this amount by 2. Dividing this into the number of companies makes one wonder about the exposure rate in hte media for YC startups. Seems like are getting headlines and cover stories more than others.
Saying, for that only, it is worth to join YC. Let alone the weekly meetings (dinners, etc.).
Just for instance, let's just take a look at the following two CrunchBase entries:
1. http://www.crunchbase.com/person/moshe-yanai
2. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/{YC-Funded-Startup-Name-He...
While the first have sold his first startup (XIV) to IBM for $300M, Three year later, he sold his second startup (diligent) to IBM (again) for $165M, ($465M in total), the knowledge of TC about him is nearly zero. All they can tell is that for his new startup (third) he raised $9M.
On the other hand, if you'll wake up Mike arrington in the middle of his deep sleeps and ask him to name 18 YC startups he will do that right away, without even opening his second eye, wouldn't he?