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I'm surprised that the responses here thusfar are negative. Right now there are certainly more companies being funded by later stage VCs than YC knock-offs, so
by wheels 19y ago
I'm surprised that the responses here thusfar are negative. Right now there are certainly more companies being funded by later stage VCs than YC knock-offs, so there's obviously a large enough pool of companies that can make it to that next phase. But can seed groups pick them?
I'll just make up some numbers:
Let's assume that the seed investment gets diluted down to 2% before an exit, and let's assume a buyout of $5 million. If we pretend that the only costs of running a seed firm are the investments, with seed investments of $15k, that means one successful at that level would cover 13 startups.
YC seems to be shooting for successful exits of 1/3 of their startups. If a group emulating could even do a quarter as well as YC hopes, then they'd come out ok (using my pretend numbers).
- skmurphy 19y ago13 x $15K is $180K; 2% of 5 Million is 100K this is 6.6X If YC only had 1/3 exit they would earn 2.2X which is surely less than their total cost per investment YC looks more like a heavyweight advisor or individual angel than a seed fund in terms of the size of their equity stake.
- wheels 19y agoOops, I accidentally messed up things by a factor of two. Reworking, this means that a YC clone would need to do half as well as YC.