17 ms·

Y Combinator, Backer of Dropbox, Vaults from Experiment to Kingmaker

141 points by dopeboy 9y ago

aphextron 9y ago
Is there a non paywalled link?
- eat_veggies 9y ago
  Facebook redirect trick works as usual http://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/y-combinator-backer-of-dropbox-vaults-from-experiment-to-kingmaker-1521718200 http://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/y-c...
  - skepticmoron 9y ago
    What if you don’t have a Facebook account, Senator.
  - Redoubts 9y ago
    Hah, never heard of the Facebook trick before. Thanks.
  - quickthrower2 9y ago
    Gotta love idempotence
- leotravis10 9y ago
  Here you go: http://archive.is/GcbOK http://archive.is/GcbOK
- CrazyCatDog 9y ago
  As Dropbox Inc. begins trading as a public company, it marks the first IPO by a Y Combinator company and a milestone for the accelerator behind other hit companies like Airbnb and Reddit. Although Y Combinator still nurtures scores of startups like those stars, it has busied itself with a wave of growth initiatives like raising capital from endowments, pushing harder into later-stage investing and backing more enterprise companies than ever before. But in tackling those changes, Y Combinator walks a fine line to keep offering founders the level of personal attention that companies like Dropbox and Airbnb received in the program. “I view it as my responsibility to not lose that spirit,” said Y Combinator President Sam Altman. After launching in 2005, the program’s early batches had a couple dozen companies. At its demo day earlier this week, the program paraded 141 companies before investors crowded into a room at the Computer History Museum, as venture capitalists sat on the floor because the seats were all taken. Once focused primarily on young founders of consumer apps, the accelerator program is now filled with startups that are more mature than their predecessors, and many of them come with different objectives in mind. Two years ago, Y Combinator raised a $1.25 billion growth fund to invest in alumni coming out of its early-stage program. Y Combinator declined to comment on how much it had under management, but it has funding from institutions such as university endowments and a pension fund. Partners today collect management fees, in contrast to the early years, when the operation was funded personally by Y Combinator’s founders. At one point, they even used proceeds from the sale of some of Y Combinator’s stock in Dropbox, according to a person familiar with the matter. In expanding beyond its early-stage program, the accelerator says its growth-stage program will function as a kind of “grad school” for YC companies that are post-Series A and have 50 to 100 employees. Longtime followers of Y Combinator say the group has maintained its premier status by staying selective. More than 7,000 companies applied for the 141 slots in Y Combinator’s most recent class. “Y Combinator is the Stanford or Harvard of accelerators,” said SV Angel founder Ron Conway. Fifteen Y Combinator companies have gone on to raise funding or be acquired at a valuation of $1 billion or more. It remains to be seen whether these highflying alumni will have exits that live up to their lofty private-market valuations. Dropbox, which commanded a $10 billion valuation in its last funding round, has set an IPO target price range that implies a market capitalization approaching $9 billion. Software startup Zenefits Inc. was, for a time, another Y Combinator-backed hit. Once valued at $4.5 billion, Zenefits later slashed its valuation to $2 billion in 2016 in the aftermath of scrutiny by regulators. Airbnb, which at $31 billion has the highest valuation of any Y Combinator company, has said its long-awaited IPO won’t happen until 2019 at the earliest. The most recent batch in Y Combinator’s accelerator had more B2B than consumer companies, with 17% in biotech or health care, including Nectome, a company that aims to back up customers’ brains. Harj Taggar, a Y Combinator alumnus with two different startups, said the camaraderie and support he felt from the other entrepreneurs and founders defined the program in its early years. He said he was close to the founders in 2008, and several of them lived in the same San Francisco apartment tower, which they dubbed the “Y Scraper.” Years later in his second stint, Mr. Taggar said, the program was much larger and not as tightly knit, but that the exponentially larger alumni network helped scale up his company. Some of his first customers included such Y Combinator alumni as Dropbox, Flexport and Reddit. “It felt like going through a machine,” Mr. Taggar said, noting the program in his second stint was much more structured than the first time. Many sector-specific accelerators that specialize in areas like health care. Other well-known accelerator programs, such as Techstars, often take a more thematic approach. But Y Combinator Chief Executive Michael Seibel said his goal is to help founders with everything from running a fundraising process to the stress of running a startup. “You don’t go to YC because they know more about your core product, core service, core customer than you do,” Mr. Seibel said. “You go to YC for everything else.”
jey 9y ago
Via outline.com: https://outline.com/VY5L3z https://outline.com/VY5L3z
- koolba 9y ago
  While I love the utility of it, how the hell is that website legal? It’s stated purpose is to violate copyright law?! From the page trailer: > Outline is a free service that makes websites more readable. We remove the clutter, like ads, related links, and comments—so you can read comfortably.
  - lallysingh 9y ago
    From the latency, it looks like it doesn't cache. So it's literally transformative. If that matters, I don't know.
    - fjsolwmv 9y ago
      Where did this "editing a copy makes it transformative" meme come from? Legally, transformative means "created a substantially new work" not "mechanically applied a style change that preserves all of the original content and its original value"
      - lallysingh 9y ago
        It's a bunch of legal laymen conjecturing on legal issues.
      - woolvalley 9y ago
        By that logic adblock, readable mode, applying your own css and making the text bigger with cmd-+ is 'copyright' infringement since every modification is modifying some copy in memory.
  - fsniper 9y ago
    It's not the only service that does this. Even browsers have out of the box support for some of them.
HHalvi 9y ago
I don't know if it's a popular opinion to hold but YC has always been a kingmaker from the start. Only when Dropbox filed an IPO and is now worth a bazzilion dollars in the public market most of the media has caught up to their work. To the entire team at YC keep going there are phenomenal startups to come :)
- ellisv 9y ago
  In my opinion YC had some good wins early on but now, especially as the cohorts have gotten much larger, it’s not clear if they’re still “kingmakers”. It would be more impressive if their cohorts were still very small and had a high success rate (however you measure success).
  - ENadyr 9y ago
    The key factor here is the time it takes for a startup to be "successful", it took 9-11 years for Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe to get to where they are today after they went through YC. It will take a similar amount of time to see how successful the larger batches are. I'm guessing your concern is whether they manage to give the same attention to each of the startups as the intake size increases. PG talks about doing things that don't scale (http://paulgraham.com/ds.html http://paulgraham.com/ds.html), so I'm guessing YC is trying to experiment with scaling, and it will be at least a few years to see definitive results.
  - snowmaker 9y ago
    Per company, our success rate is actually much higher now than it was in the early batches for the Dropbox era.
enitihas 9y ago
"Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel." - It says below the image. Isn't he the CEO of the accelerator program and not whole of YC?
- sytse 9y ago
  Correct. But I think the main program is called Y Combinator and the whole is called YC Group, Sam Altman is the CEO of that.
dopeboy 9y ago
Hey guys, this wasn't supposed to be on the front page. We (Manish, Zach, Kaya, and Lucas) are at the YC hackathon taking place right now. We're building an app that is like MoviePass for different publications. I posted this link here because FB, Google, etc bypass WSJ paywalls but HN doesn't (which we need for our demo).
- samstave 9y ago
  "Yeah we should just Streisand effect our sitch to the HN community" Heh /r/didntmeanto Well played.
- drharby 9y ago
  "Oops" That is really funny. Real life writes better material for Silicon Valley.
  - winfred 9y ago
    Ssssssttt. Don't wake the children yet.
Mononokay 9y ago
Even the first batch of YC was fairly successful - reddit made three millionaires, and Loopt made two or three.
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  "millionaire" is hardly successful for YC, any of those people and more would have been millionaires if they joined an established big company. $10millionaires would be interesting credit for YC (and maybe some of them are). And Reddit's impact on society as a top 10 consumer website is undeniable regardless of financials.
  - whataretensors 9y ago
    Especially since you have to be close to a millionaire already to invest in anything.
- geofft 9y ago
  Loopt only made millionaires in a technical sense - they turned $39M of investment into a $43M exit after 7 years. I would imagine most people can do this, e.g. by sticking the money into bonds or ETFs or something. In fact, with $10M of the exit earmarked for employee retention, it seems likely that at least some investors lost money. If investors are willing to lose money on a promising company, making millionaires out of their millions isn't hard at all. EDIT: I found this old HN thread from Loopt's exit. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3683994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3683994 Top comments are telling: "Michael Moritz (Sequoia partner) is still on the board of Green Dot, now a publicly traded company worth north of a billion dollars. Almost the entire board is Private Equity/VC guys, they do this kind of inside baseball all the time, it's no sweat off their back to do Moritz a favor." "Buddy exits like this one and the Hunch exit are very demoralising. They make startups look like some sort of game. As you indicated, Loopt was clearly dying and yet people still got rich off of it." (Of course, none of this should be taken as a negative view of Loopt's founder, who now leads YC - the chances of having a good exit are so low and so randomized that a qualified, smart, knowledgeable founder can still simply be unlucky. But it's still a fact that he was unlucky, and we shouldn't pretend Loopt was a successful exit.)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mankash666 9y ago
YC today is becoming the same as brand-name universities have. Their hype cycle as kingmaker now attracts 7000 applications for 141 slots. If you pick the best and the brightest, your value add is debatable. Just like Ivy league schools - regardless of how good their program is, by virtue of picking the best, they have de-risked their brand dilution considerably. Mark Z didn't need Harvard or a degree to become a billionaire. If all the knowledge of YC gets democratized, anyone from anywhere can thrive at a business without going through YC
- csomar 9y ago
  > If all the knowledge of YC gets democratized, anyone from anywhere can thrive at a business without going through YC Hardly. Most of the knowledge is out there, and more. Here is how I think YC can rocketship you: - Access to capital. Suddenly, you are visible. - Legal advice from top experts. - Network of startups and guys that connect with you. - Massive interest from media (vs. if you were a noname out there) - Pressure to achieve. You are more pressured to give results along your peers. - Forcing you to move to the bay area. A good idea since the startup scene is still centralized.
- shafyy 9y ago
  To be fair, they do share a lot of their knowledge openly. Just check out their YouTube Channel and blog. There are no secrets or tricks. But I guess YC is more than knowledge. It has a strong signal effect, and the regular OH sessions you get with the partners potentially can help you a lot (even though you already might know what they telling you, but like a fitness coach, it helps you stay on track). Plus the alumni network, which I guess is especially valuable for B2B businesses and future partnerships. I didn't go through YC but know some people that have and I think that what it breaks down to.
- DoreenMichele 9y ago
  If all the knowledge of YC gets democratized, anyone from anywhere can thrive at a business without going through YC I doubt that. Knowledge alone is not what they provide. Additionally, even if it were, we often don't know what we know and trying to capture and convey our knowledge is incredibly challenging. What people soak up by being in the same room with those in the know and getting their feedback live and watching them model behavior is just not something you can actually convey by (say) writing a book. The book would be the tip of the iceberg, at best.
joeblau 9y ago
1280 Companies[1] — 1 IPO Kingmakers... hardly. I remember going to a Commonwealth Club talk in January of 2013 titled: "Y Combinator:The Secret in this Incubator's Sauce". They talked about how YC exits are on par with or worse than any person trying to start a company. Sure there is tons of support when you're in the program and they really try to ensure soft landings through their relationships, but it's hardly a machine where your entrance into YC guarantees you a billion dollar valuation and great IPO. Saying that, I still think YC is a wonderful program. It's what business school should be — starting and running a company; not talking about it. They have amazing leadership, mentorship, relationships and community in place which remove huge barriers from starting a company. I advise everyone I know who has a company idea to apply every semester. [1] - http://yclist.com http://yclist.com
- chaostheory 9y ago
  This gives a better picture than yclist https://www.seed-db.com/accelerators https://www.seed-db.com/accelerators If you look at the runners up to YC, they're still far behind on a lot of metrics
- shafyy 9y ago
  What makes you think business school is strictly for people who want to be entrepreneurs? Now, I agree that all these new "Entrepreneurship Master's" are a bunch of BS, but business school per se might have its merits.
  - joeblau 9y ago
    I don't think business school is for people that want to be entrepreneurs. I have a lot of friends who think that business school is for people who want to become entrepreneurs. Business school is for people that want to learn how to run and optimize other peoples businesses. I'm currently enrolled in Harvard's Executive MBA program and it's a great program, but it's focused on how to optimize a company that's already moving. I've also attend a few YC Startup Schools and those are optimized for someone who wants to create something from scratch. There are a lot of overlapping concepts, but Startup School and Business School clearly have different goals. After thinking about it, you're right — Business school probably should't be renamed, but more explicit: Run Someone Else's Business School. And YC is more like: Run Your Own Startup School.
rokhayakebe 9y ago
Makes sense: Mastermind group. I would like to see a decentralized YC trial, i.e. a group of 10 startups/entrepreneurs, who are at a similar level, come together in a form of support group/alliance: monthly meetings, weekly email newsletters, one-to-one support & communication across several disciplines, etc... I want to track their performance and outcome after 1, 2, 3 years and compare with other existing models.
simonebrunozzi 9y ago
Does anybody know if the terms they offer to startups are negotiable / have been negotiated before? I believe that it's currently $120k for 7% of the company, with pro rata rights. (it roughly equates to investing $120k at a 1.7M cap).
- tim333 9y ago
  I think I heard it said there has been the odd exception but the vast majority are that deal. Update: "While we may deviate from this in exceptional cases, it will still be the case for almost all of the companies we fund." https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-new-deal/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-new-deal/

141 points by dopeboy 9y ago

aphextron 9y ago

Is there a non paywalled link?

eat_veggies 9y ago
Facebook redirect trick works as usual http://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/y-combinator-backer-of-dropbox-vaults-from-experiment-to-kingmaker-1521718200 http://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/y-c...
- skepticmoron 9y ago
  What if you don’t have a Facebook account, Senator.
- Redoubts 9y ago
  Hah, never heard of the Facebook trick before. Thanks.
- quickthrower2 9y ago
  Gotta love idempotence
leotravis10 9y ago
Here you go: http://archive.is/GcbOK http://archive.is/GcbOK
CrazyCatDog 9y ago
As Dropbox Inc. begins trading as a public company, it marks the first IPO by a Y Combinator company and a milestone for the accelerator behind other hit companies like Airbnb and Reddit. Although Y Combinator still nurtures scores of startups like those stars, it has busied itself with a wave of growth initiatives like raising capital from endowments, pushing harder into later-stage investing and backing more enterprise companies than ever before. But in tackling those changes, Y Combinator walks a fine line to keep offering founders the level of personal attention that companies like Dropbox and Airbnb received in the program. “I view it as my responsibility to not lose that spirit,” said Y Combinator President Sam Altman. After launching in 2005, the program’s early batches had a couple dozen companies. At its demo day earlier this week, the program paraded 141 companies before investors crowded into a room at the Computer History Museum, as venture capitalists sat on the floor because the seats were all taken. Once focused primarily on young founders of consumer apps, the accelerator program is now filled with startups that are more mature than their predecessors, and many of them come with different objectives in mind. Two years ago, Y Combinator raised a $1.25 billion growth fund to invest in alumni coming out of its early-stage program. Y Combinator declined to comment on how much it had under management, but it has funding from institutions such as university endowments and a pension fund. Partners today collect management fees, in contrast to the early years, when the operation was funded personally by Y Combinator’s founders. At one point, they even used proceeds from the sale of some of Y Combinator’s stock in Dropbox, according to a person familiar with the matter. In expanding beyond its early-stage program, the accelerator says its growth-stage program will function as a kind of “grad school” for YC companies that are post-Series A and have 50 to 100 employees. Longtime followers of Y Combinator say the group has maintained its premier status by staying selective. More than 7,000 companies applied for the 141 slots in Y Combinator’s most recent class. “Y Combinator is the Stanford or Harvard of accelerators,” said SV Angel founder Ron Conway. Fifteen Y Combinator companies have gone on to raise funding or be acquired at a valuation of $1 billion or more. It remains to be seen whether these highflying alumni will have exits that live up to their lofty private-market valuations. Dropbox, which commanded a $10 billion valuation in its last funding round, has set an IPO target price range that implies a market capitalization approaching $9 billion. Software startup Zenefits Inc. was, for a time, another Y Combinator-backed hit. Once valued at $4.5 billion, Zenefits later slashed its valuation to $2 billion in 2016 in the aftermath of scrutiny by regulators. Airbnb, which at $31 billion has the highest valuation of any Y Combinator company, has said its long-awaited IPO won’t happen until 2019 at the earliest. The most recent batch in Y Combinator’s accelerator had more B2B than consumer companies, with 17% in biotech or health care, including Nectome, a company that aims to back up customers’ brains. Harj Taggar, a Y Combinator alumnus with two different startups, said the camaraderie and support he felt from the other entrepreneurs and founders defined the program in its early years. He said he was close to the founders in 2008, and several of them lived in the same San Francisco apartment tower, which they dubbed the “Y Scraper.” Years later in his second stint, Mr. Taggar said, the program was much larger and not as tightly knit, but that the exponentially larger alumni network helped scale up his company. Some of his first customers included such Y Combinator alumni as Dropbox, Flexport and Reddit. “It felt like going through a machine,” Mr. Taggar said, noting the program in his second stint was much more structured than the first time. Many sector-specific accelerators that specialize in areas like health care. Other well-known accelerator programs, such as Techstars, often take a more thematic approach. But Y Combinator Chief Executive Michael Seibel said his goal is to help founders with everything from running a fundraising process to the stress of running a startup. “You don’t go to YC because they know more about your core product, core service, core customer than you do,” Mr. Seibel said. “You go to YC for everything else.”

jey 9y ago

Via outline.com: https://outline.com/VY5L3z https://outline.com/VY5L3z

koolba 9y ago
While I love the utility of it, how the hell is that website legal? It’s stated purpose is to violate copyright law?! From the page trailer: > Outline is a free service that makes websites more readable. We remove the clutter, like ads, related links, and comments—so you can read comfortably.
- lallysingh 9y ago
  From the latency, it looks like it doesn't cache. So it's literally transformative. If that matters, I don't know.
  - fjsolwmv 9y ago
    Where did this "editing a copy makes it transformative" meme come from? Legally, transformative means "created a substantially new work" not "mechanically applied a style change that preserves all of the original content and its original value"
    - lallysingh 9y ago
      It's a bunch of legal laymen conjecturing on legal issues.
    - woolvalley 9y ago
      By that logic adblock, readable mode, applying your own css and making the text bigger with cmd-+ is 'copyright' infringement since every modification is modifying some copy in memory.
- fsniper 9y ago
  It's not the only service that does this. Even browsers have out of the box support for some of them.

HHalvi 9y ago

I don't know if it's a popular opinion to hold but YC has always been a kingmaker from the start. Only when Dropbox filed an IPO and is now worth a bazzilion dollars in the public market most of the media has caught up to their work. To the entire team at YC keep going there are phenomenal startups to come :)

ellisv 9y ago
In my opinion YC had some good wins early on but now, especially as the cohorts have gotten much larger, it’s not clear if they’re still “kingmakers”. It would be more impressive if their cohorts were still very small and had a high success rate (however you measure success).
- ENadyr 9y ago
  The key factor here is the time it takes for a startup to be "successful", it took 9-11 years for Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe to get to where they are today after they went through YC. It will take a similar amount of time to see how successful the larger batches are. I'm guessing your concern is whether they manage to give the same attention to each of the startups as the intake size increases. PG talks about doing things that don't scale (http://paulgraham.com/ds.html http://paulgraham.com/ds.html), so I'm guessing YC is trying to experiment with scaling, and it will be at least a few years to see definitive results.
- snowmaker 9y ago
  Per company, our success rate is actually much higher now than it was in the early batches for the Dropbox era.

enitihas 9y ago

"Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel." - It says below the image. Isn't he the CEO of the accelerator program and not whole of YC?

sytse 9y ago
Correct. But I think the main program is called Y Combinator and the whole is called YC Group, Sam Altman is the CEO of that.

dopeboy 9y ago

Hey guys, this wasn't supposed to be on the front page. We (Manish, Zach, Kaya, and Lucas) are at the YC hackathon taking place right now. We're building an app that is like MoviePass for different publications. I posted this link here because FB, Google, etc bypass WSJ paywalls but HN doesn't (which we need for our demo).

samstave 9y ago
"Yeah we should just Streisand effect our sitch to the HN community" Heh /r/didntmeanto Well played.
drharby 9y ago
"Oops" That is really funny. Real life writes better material for Silicon Valley.
- winfred 9y ago
  Ssssssttt. Don't wake the children yet.

Mononokay 9y ago

Even the first batch of YC was fairly successful - reddit made three millionaires, and Loopt made two or three.

fjsolwmv 9y ago
"millionaire" is hardly successful for YC, any of those people and more would have been millionaires if they joined an established big company. $10millionaires would be interesting credit for YC (and maybe some of them are). And Reddit's impact on society as a top 10 consumer website is undeniable regardless of financials.
- whataretensors 9y ago
  Especially since you have to be close to a millionaire already to invest in anything.
geofft 9y ago
Loopt only made millionaires in a technical sense - they turned $39M of investment into a $43M exit after 7 years. I would imagine most people can do this, e.g. by sticking the money into bonds or ETFs or something. In fact, with $10M of the exit earmarked for employee retention, it seems likely that at least some investors lost money. If investors are willing to lose money on a promising company, making millionaires out of their millions isn't hard at all. EDIT: I found this old HN thread from Loopt's exit. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3683994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3683994 Top comments are telling: "Michael Moritz (Sequoia partner) is still on the board of Green Dot, now a publicly traded company worth north of a billion dollars. Almost the entire board is Private Equity/VC guys, they do this kind of inside baseball all the time, it's no sweat off their back to do Moritz a favor." "Buddy exits like this one and the Hunch exit are very demoralising. They make startups look like some sort of game. As you indicated, Loopt was clearly dying and yet people still got rich off of it." (Of course, none of this should be taken as a negative view of Loopt's founder, who now leads YC - the chances of having a good exit are so low and so randomized that a qualified, smart, knowledgeable founder can still simply be unlucky. But it's still a fact that he was unlucky, and we shouldn't pretend Loopt was a successful exit.)

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

mankash666 9y ago

YC today is becoming the same as brand-name universities have. Their hype cycle as kingmaker now attracts 7000 applications for 141 slots. If you pick the best and the brightest, your value add is debatable. Just like Ivy league schools - regardless of how good their program is, by virtue of picking the best, they have de-risked their brand dilution considerably. Mark Z didn't need Harvard or a degree to become a billionaire. If all the knowledge of YC gets democratized, anyone from anywhere can thrive at a business without going through YC

csomar 9y ago
> If all the knowledge of YC gets democratized, anyone from anywhere can thrive at a business without going through YC Hardly. Most of the knowledge is out there, and more. Here is how I think YC can rocketship you: - Access to capital. Suddenly, you are visible. - Legal advice from top experts. - Network of startups and guys that connect with you. - Massive interest from media (vs. if you were a noname out there) - Pressure to achieve. You are more pressured to give results along your peers. - Forcing you to move to the bay area. A good idea since the startup scene is still centralized.
shafyy 9y ago
To be fair, they do share a lot of their knowledge openly. Just check out their YouTube Channel and blog. There are no secrets or tricks. But I guess YC is more than knowledge. It has a strong signal effect, and the regular OH sessions you get with the partners potentially can help you a lot (even though you already might know what they telling you, but like a fitness coach, it helps you stay on track). Plus the alumni network, which I guess is especially valuable for B2B businesses and future partnerships. I didn't go through YC but know some people that have and I think that what it breaks down to.
DoreenMichele 9y ago
If all the knowledge of YC gets democratized, anyone from anywhere can thrive at a business without going through YC I doubt that. Knowledge alone is not what they provide. Additionally, even if it were, we often don't know what we know and trying to capture and convey our knowledge is incredibly challenging. What people soak up by being in the same room with those in the know and getting their feedback live and watching them model behavior is just not something you can actually convey by (say) writing a book. The book would be the tip of the iceberg, at best.

joeblau 9y ago

1280 Companies[1] — 1 IPO Kingmakers... hardly. I remember going to a Commonwealth Club talk in January of 2013 titled: "Y Combinator:The Secret in this Incubator's Sauce". They talked about how YC exits are on par with or worse than any person trying to start a company. Sure there is tons of support when you're in the program and they really try to ensure soft landings through their relationships, but it's hardly a machine where your entrance into YC guarantees you a billion dollar valuation and great IPO. Saying that, I still think YC is a wonderful program. It's what business school should be — starting and running a company; not talking about it. They have amazing leadership, mentorship, relationships and community in place which remove huge barriers from starting a company. I advise everyone I know who has a company idea to apply every semester. [1] - http://yclist.com http://yclist.com

chaostheory 9y ago
This gives a better picture than yclist https://www.seed-db.com/accelerators https://www.seed-db.com/accelerators If you look at the runners up to YC, they're still far behind on a lot of metrics
shafyy 9y ago
What makes you think business school is strictly for people who want to be entrepreneurs? Now, I agree that all these new "Entrepreneurship Master's" are a bunch of BS, but business school per se might have its merits.
- joeblau 9y ago
  I don't think business school is for people that want to be entrepreneurs. I have a lot of friends who think that business school is for people who want to become entrepreneurs. Business school is for people that want to learn how to run and optimize other peoples businesses. I'm currently enrolled in Harvard's Executive MBA program and it's a great program, but it's focused on how to optimize a company that's already moving. I've also attend a few YC Startup Schools and those are optimized for someone who wants to create something from scratch. There are a lot of overlapping concepts, but Startup School and Business School clearly have different goals. After thinking about it, you're right — Business school probably should't be renamed, but more explicit: Run Someone Else's Business School. And YC is more like: Run Your Own Startup School.

rokhayakebe 9y ago

Makes sense: Mastermind group. I would like to see a decentralized YC trial, i.e. a group of 10 startups/entrepreneurs, who are at a similar level, come together in a form of support group/alliance: monthly meetings, weekly email newsletters, one-to-one support & communication across several disciplines, etc... I want to track their performance and outcome after 1, 2, 3 years and compare with other existing models.

simonebrunozzi 9y ago

Does anybody know if the terms they offer to startups are negotiable / have been negotiated before? I believe that it's currently $120k for 7% of the company, with pro rata rights. (it roughly equates to investing $120k at a 1.7M cap).

tim333 9y ago
I think I heard it said there has been the odd exception but the vast majority are that deal. Update: "While we may deviate from this in exceptional cases, it will still be the case for almost all of the companies we fund." https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-new-deal/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-new-deal/