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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.)

"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.)