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I doubt realized returns are available, but I think it's possible to at least very roughly estimate money invested. Their current "deal" is $120k for 7%, and th

I doubt realized returns are available, but I think it's possible to at least very roughly estimate money invested. Their current "deal" is $120k for 7%, and that number has been going up over the years. So say all 1,588 startups they've funded got that investment (not true, since earlier investments were something like $20k). You're looking at about $150m in cash investments. According to https://www.ycombinator.com/people/ https://www.ycombinator.com/people/, there are about 50 people working full-time at YC. We're being conservative, so let's say 150 people at $150k/year salaries, over the 13 years since YC's founding (again, very high estimates since they obviously did not start with even remotely close to that many people). That's about $300m. So we're at maybe $450m spent on initial investments and people over the years. Maybe throw in another $200m for extra investments (I presume they re-invest in a couple promising companies on demo day) and other costs. They say their portfolio's valuation is roughly $80b. Their "deal" is for 7%. I'm not super familiar with the technical stuff but they really only need to keep about 1% of that total value to be fairly successful, and I imagine that number is probably much higher unless I'm misunderstanding some of the details about how fundraising works.

austenallred 9y ago
Their return from Airbnb alone will probably cover the costs of investing in every other YC company. So Dropbox, Stripe, Twitch, Reddit, Cruise etc. are gravy. Those are phenomenal returns.
- dsacco 9y ago
  I think the fact that they're phenomenal is pretty clear, but I think a more important question is how reliable the returns are. They might be reliable, but that doesn't seem obvious to me from the comments in this thread, and it's still not clear to me that YC is capable of catapulting an arbitrary company in their set to wild success ("kingmaking") or that they're capable of repeating those successes over the long term.
  - austenallred 9y ago
    They have consistently pumped out many of the top companies in Silicon Valley for over 10 years now. Most of the companies are newer, as always, and I don’t think YC would claim they can pick any random company and make them successful, but if YC isn’t a “kingmaker” then there’s no such thing in Silicon Valley.
  - DoreenMichele 9y ago
    It was found that 90 percent of the small businesses fail within one year. http://smb-trends.com/2011/02/smb-failure-rate-us/ http://smb-trends.com/2011/02/smb-failure-rate-us/ Out of 1280 YC companies, only 139 are listed as dead. Without pulling out a calculator to determine an exact figure, that roughly flips that figure from 90% failure rate to a near 90% success rate. And actually it is worse than that because the 90% failure rate is in the first year and the near 90% success rate for YC is an "all time" figure for the history of YC. http://yclist.com http://yclist.com

austenallred 9y ago

Their return from Airbnb alone will probably cover the costs of investing in every other YC company. So Dropbox, Stripe, Twitch, Reddit, Cruise etc. are gravy. Those are phenomenal returns.

dsacco 9y ago
I think the fact that they're phenomenal is pretty clear, but I think a more important question is how reliable the returns are. They might be reliable, but that doesn't seem obvious to me from the comments in this thread, and it's still not clear to me that YC is capable of catapulting an arbitrary company in their set to wild success ("kingmaking") or that they're capable of repeating those successes over the long term.
- austenallred 9y ago
  They have consistently pumped out many of the top companies in Silicon Valley for over 10 years now. Most of the companies are newer, as always, and I don’t think YC would claim they can pick any random company and make them successful, but if YC isn’t a “kingmaker” then there’s no such thing in Silicon Valley.
- DoreenMichele 9y ago
  It was found that 90 percent of the small businesses fail within one year. http://smb-trends.com/2011/02/smb-failure-rate-us/ http://smb-trends.com/2011/02/smb-failure-rate-us/ Out of 1280 YC companies, only 139 are listed as dead. Without pulling out a calculator to determine an exact figure, that roughly flips that figure from 90% failure rate to a near 90% success rate. And actually it is worse than that because the 90% failure rate is in the first year and the near 90% success rate for YC is an "all time" figure for the history of YC. http://yclist.com http://yclist.com