6 ms·

This doesn't seem very accurate, judging from the first couple entries. Textpayme was a morph of Firecrawl, and Club Beta I've never heard of.

by pg 16y ago

bkrausz 16y ago
Jed (the source spreadsheet maintainer) does a really good job of keeping the newer companies up to date with public info, but it's hard to find a lot of public info on YC companies before the fact that they were YC was newsworthy.
- mlLK 16y ago
  I agree, but it's probably up to the founders and pg how much information they make public, more so from the founders. It'd be interesting to see someone publish their quarterly earnings akin to what balsamiq did awhile back (http://blogs.balsamiq.com/product//2010/01/03/a-look-back-at-2009/ http://blogs.balsamiq.com/product//2010/01/03/a-look-back-at...). This list is a good start, but far from up to date; just see, this (http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&q=site:ycombinator.com+intitle:YC+10&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai= http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&...) for YC 10.
- ig1 16y ago
  Does someone have Jed's contact details, I did a lot of research on this for a blog post a while back, probably makes sense for me send some of the corrections his way.
  - jedc 16y ago
    Just check my HN profile. :) And I would absolutely appreciate any/all corrections. I know the early years of YC data aren't as accurate as the last few.
mlLK 16y ago
http://blog.jedchristiansen.com/2009/09/21/copying-y-combinator-why-and-how/ http://blog.jedchristiansen.com/2009/09/21/copying-y-combina... Looks like he wrote a thesis on "seed accelerators" using YC as a model.
points 16y ago
Is there an 'official' list that's better? Seems a useful thing to have.
- grinich 16y ago
  Why would it be useful?
  - ig1 16y ago
    Judging YCombinator performance against Techstars, etc. Although I think at this point it's pretty indisputable that YC has a substantial lead on any of it's competitors.
  - Aetius 16y ago
    It is interesting just to see what types of companies they fund.
    - rdj 16y ago
      I thought that as well and then I remembered, they don't fund companies or ideas, they fund teams. These teams, may or may not change the idea the had when they applied.
- pg 16y ago
  There used to be a list of launched companies in the YC faq, but there started to be so many that it was always out of date. We have a list ourselves of course, but we couldn't publish that because it's full of stuff companies don't want disclosed. And it would be a lot of work to tease apart the stuff that's secret from the stuff that isn't. Often I'm not sure myself. So making a publicly viewable list of all the startups seems to fall into the category of things that might be interesting to do, but wouldn't actually help the startups much, and would be a significant amount of work.
  - portman 16y ago
    I think this comment at 3:51 PM EST on 10/17/2010 may be the official death knell of structured data. A few years ago, YC would have maintained portfolio data in a spreadsheet or database. But in today's world, it's probably in a wiki. It might be surprising that an uberhacker like PG doesn't have a custom database of YC startups (which would, by definition, make it trivial to export the "non-secret" stuff). That's why I think this comment speaks volumes about how -- even amongst supernerds who think in a systematic, structured way -- a loose affiliation of hypertext documents is the preferred way to capture and record institutional knowledge. Or maybe it is in a spreadsheet and PG is just lazy. But I doubt it.

This doesn't seem very accurate, judging from the first couple entries. Textpayme was a morph of Firecrawl, and Club Beta I've never heard of.

by pg 16y ago

This doesn't seem very accurate, judging from the first couple entries. Textpayme was a morph of Firecrawl, and Club Beta I've never heard of.

bkrausz 16y ago

Jed (the source spreadsheet maintainer) does a really good job of keeping the newer companies up to date with public info, but it's hard to find a lot of public info on YC companies before the fact that they were YC was newsworthy.

mlLK 16y ago
I agree, but it's probably up to the founders and pg how much information they make public, more so from the founders. It'd be interesting to see someone publish their quarterly earnings akin to what balsamiq did awhile back (http://blogs.balsamiq.com/product//2010/01/03/a-look-back-at-2009/ http://blogs.balsamiq.com/product//2010/01/03/a-look-back-at...). This list is a good start, but far from up to date; just see, this (http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&q=site:ycombinator.com+intitle:YC+10&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai= http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&...) for YC 10.
ig1 16y ago
Does someone have Jed's contact details, I did a lot of research on this for a blog post a while back, probably makes sense for me send some of the corrections his way.
- jedc 16y ago
  Just check my HN profile. :) And I would absolutely appreciate any/all corrections. I know the early years of YC data aren't as accurate as the last few.

mlLK 16y ago

http://blog.jedchristiansen.com/2009/09/21/copying-y-combinator-why-and-how/ http://blog.jedchristiansen.com/2009/09/21/copying-y-combina... Looks like he wrote a thesis on "seed accelerators" using YC as a model.

points 16y ago

Is there an 'official' list that's better? Seems a useful thing to have.

grinich 16y ago
Why would it be useful?
- ig1 16y ago
  Judging YCombinator performance against Techstars, etc. Although I think at this point it's pretty indisputable that YC has a substantial lead on any of it's competitors.
- Aetius 16y ago
  It is interesting just to see what types of companies they fund.
  - rdj 16y ago
    I thought that as well and then I remembered, they don't fund companies or ideas, they fund teams. These teams, may or may not change the idea the had when they applied.
pg 16y ago
There used to be a list of launched companies in the YC faq, but there started to be so many that it was always out of date. We have a list ourselves of course, but we couldn't publish that because it's full of stuff companies don't want disclosed. And it would be a lot of work to tease apart the stuff that's secret from the stuff that isn't. Often I'm not sure myself. So making a publicly viewable list of all the startups seems to fall into the category of things that might be interesting to do, but wouldn't actually help the startups much, and would be a significant amount of work.
- portman 16y ago
  I think this comment at 3:51 PM EST on 10/17/2010 may be the official death knell of structured data. A few years ago, YC would have maintained portfolio data in a spreadsheet or database. But in today's world, it's probably in a wiki. It might be surprising that an uberhacker like PG doesn't have a custom database of YC startups (which would, by definition, make it trivial to export the "non-secret" stuff). That's why I think this comment speaks volumes about how -- even amongst supernerds who think in a systematic, structured way -- a loose affiliation of hypertext documents is the preferred way to capture and record institutional knowledge. Or maybe it is in a spreadsheet and PG is just lazy. But I doubt it.