7 ms·

Ask PG: Can you please provide statistics of YC funded cos?

44 points by ideas101 18y ago

Just wondering whether you can provide numbers for the companies you've funded - such as how many of them got acquired, how many of them got VC funding, how many closed their shop, how many are still running well and making some good money etc. thanks.

pg 18y ago
We'd funded 80 as of January. Of those, 57 are still alive. The others either merged, died, or got bought. 6 got bought (Reddit, Infogami, Textpayme, Zenter, Anywhere.fm, and Auctomatic). I think only 1 other merged. So 16 must have died. I think 10 have so far done series A rounds, but there will probably be more of those in the future. Nearly all the rest are either funded by angels or (esp in the case of the most recent group) still raising money. Edit: I forgot Parakey. So make that 7 got bought, and thus 15 must have died.
- emmett 18y ago
  16 "must have died"...just goes to show that startups don't really die, they just fade away. The only YC startup I know of that officially ended at a specific time is Kiko; are there others?
  - pg 18y ago
    I can't think of any others that ended suddenly. Usually death is in a series of gradual steps, starting with a long stretch without updates, continuing through founders taking jobs or going back to school, and ending with the site going dead.
- dcurtis 18y ago
  Are any of them profitable, in the DHH sense?
- ivankirigin 18y ago
  There is a lack of specific information as to why YC companies die. Your generalizations are extremely helpful, but is there some repository of stories as to what happened in each case? A ping out to all companies to report on their status might be the best way to go. Then you'd hear from those still living, which is how not to die, right? :)
  - SwellJoe 18y ago
    He's talked about this before (mostly here at News.YC and in his the "How not to die" essay, which you've alluded to). But, I've noticed that most go back to what they were doing before because the raising of additional funds proved difficult or boring. I think the rejection process can also be really hard on folks, and very few startups get funded on their first try, so there's a lot of rejection. I believe that's the case with three of the companies that "died" from WFP07 (which are the only ones I know well enough to say anything about). One went back to contracting and building cool websites for indie rock bands and related companies, and another company sort of split off into different things...2/3 of them ended up working for other YC companies (one of which has since exited), while the third went back to writing (I think). The third company that "died" went back to school to do research, and presumably the grants needed to continue the work are easier to obtain for PhD students than investment for research-stage ideas that don't quite have a market and won't for another few years.
    - ivankirigin 18y ago
      Context is everything. I'm looking to better understand why a company might succeed or fail - something beyond a meaningless percentage. It seems like a very useful skill. A company that can't raise money for an idea or implementation I judge to be bad shouldn't weight down my perception of raising money on a good idea. Thanks for the info though. A fuller picture would also involve the personalities of the founders. Judging potential future performance from an initial meeting is invaluable. I've been thinking a lot about this in preparation to start hiring.
  - pg 18y ago
    Usually the way startups die is that they launch something, users ignore it, investors are lukewarm, and they get demoralized and give up. Sometimes there are other forces encouraging them to give up, like the pull of school, or the push of founder conflicts. It's normal for users not to like what you first launch with, and for investors to be lukewarm. (Investors are basically permanently lukewarm.) So the groups who give up usually are looking at about the same information as other groups who keep going and succeed. Most of the time it comes down to whether they see the glass as half full or half empty.
- ideas101 18y ago
  thanks - i think it would be helpful if someone can create a table with the status beside each company ... this can also help people who are interested in doing some kind of analysis of these startups ... 80 is pretty good number to do some valuable study.
  - joshwa 18y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator obviously doesn't inlcude all 80. c.f. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/y-combinator http://www.crunchbase.com/company/y-combinator
- Mistone 18y ago
  hows that for disclosure - thanks for the update keep rockin!
- jdavid 18y ago
  pg,.. a nice graphical time line would be fun to see. i think a series of wired like info porn on the subject would be great. [a histogram of growth rates] [a histogram of round based success] [a histogram of general margins] - burn vs. profit [an aggregate timeline of all companies] - maybe something like this http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/02/23/movies/20080223_REVENUE_GRAPHIC.html# http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/02/23/movies/2008022...
  - SwellJoe 18y ago
    pg doesn't actually really have that data. He doesn't sit on the board of any YC companies, and all he knows is what he's told. So, you asking YC companies directly for the data would probably be as effective as asking pg to build such a chart for you. pg has a general idea of the relative successes of YC companies because he chats with them every few weeks or months...but he's not the accountant for any of them. And, of course, disclosing that data for private companies is probably unwise. All YC companies have competitors (if it's a good idea, somebody is already working on it or will be by the time you launch), and having the laundry aired in public is probably a bad idea. The ones who want to talk about aspects of their business, generally talk on their blogs.
    - jdavid 18y ago
      i do not really want individual stats. that would be like asking the companies to reveal their secret sauce. i am curious about the trend data that YC has generated. example: (startup life expediency) @month 0: 80 companies @month 1: 80 companies ..... @month 36: 4 companies example: (won a series A) @month 0: 0 companies ... @month 4: ~5 companies ... @month 12: ~7 companies a final comparative time line histogram could be made of variable percentages of YC companies vs. some measured goal so you could have histogram timelines of VC age vs. having angel funds, or YC vs. VC funds. or YC vs. liquidity, which might lead to the following example: example:(YC age vs. liquidity) @month 0: 0 companies @month 12: 1% companies @month 24: 5% companies @month 36: 10% companies @month 48: 10% companies graphs like these could lead to some interesting metrics about the measurable success of going through the YC process. Its a great way to study groups and to begin the comparison between group 1 and group 2 or YC vs. non YC. It should help build a case that getting into YC might improve your chance of success by say 10% or 50%. A lot of what pg talks about is how he feels that YC will improve your chance of success by more than 6%. I think at this point pg could present a fairly empirical case to prove that. I sense that many of us believe that to be true, but I have talked to some ex-startup vets here in Wisconsin who are not so convinced and others that are. I just think it would be great data to think about.
- champion 18y ago
  > 6 got bought (reddit, infogami ... Didn't reddit "buy" infogami? Seems a little funny to count that as a sale ;-)
  - nostrademons 18y ago
    He's counting the combined company of Reddit + Infogami (Notabug) as both of them. Conde Nast's acquisition was for all of it, even if Aaron did get fired a couple weeks later...
    - andreyf 18y ago
      even if Aaron did get fired a couple weeks later I think he quit more than got fired, but spun it off that way for the romanticism. It's funny how being fired can be romanticized :)
  - pg 18y ago
    No, it was a merger. The two combined to form Notabug.
- rms 18y ago
  Also Parakey, but maybe they're a special case
  - pg 18y ago
    Oops, yes, forgot them.
- anewaccountname 18y ago
  I thought Infogami merged with reddit.
- okeumeni 18y ago
  >So 16 must have died. 16 out of 80 is 20%, when you say "must have", does it mean once you gave them money you forgot about them, Or it simply means that 20% is acceptable?
  - pg 18y ago
    I mean nothing more than it's the number I'm deriving rather than the one I started from.