4 ms·

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

by points 16y ago

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There used to be a list of launched companies in the YC faq, but there started to be so many that it was always out of date.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.
  - Jd 16y ago
    spreadsheet != laziness (at least, not necessarily)
    - jackowayed 16y ago
      I think his point was that if it's in a spreadsheet, it would only take a few minutes to copy the "name" column, excluding all startups where the "launched" column indicates that they're still in stealth. He wasn't calling using a spreadsheet lazy; he was calling using one and still being unwilling to compile a list of YC startups lazy. Of course, PG is busy enough that I wouldn't blame him anyway (but he does have people working for him to do things like that).
  - c1sc0 16y ago
    Well, in all geekiness, pg could release the structure of 'the list' without revealing the actual data & put an end to all of this structured vs. unstructured speculation. Just sayin'.
  - pg 16y ago
    We do have a custom database. What makes it hard to export data is that we have no representation of what info is public. The database knows only that e.g. startup x has raised a series A round, or has been acquired, but it doesn't know whether those things have been announced yet.

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

by 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.
- Jd 16y ago
  spreadsheet != laziness (at least, not necessarily)
  - jackowayed 16y ago
    I think his point was that if it's in a spreadsheet, it would only take a few minutes to copy the "name" column, excluding all startups where the "launched" column indicates that they're still in stealth. He wasn't calling using a spreadsheet lazy; he was calling using one and still being unwilling to compile a list of YC startups lazy. Of course, PG is busy enough that I wouldn't blame him anyway (but he does have people working for him to do things like that).
- c1sc0 16y ago
  Well, in all geekiness, pg could release the structure of 'the list' without revealing the actual data & put an end to all of this structured vs. unstructured speculation. Just sayin'.
- pg 16y ago
  We do have a custom database. What makes it hard to export data is that we have no representation of what info is public. The database knows only that e.g. startup x has raised a series A round, or has been acquired, but it doesn't know whether those things have been announced yet.