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YC Top Companies List
- andygcook 8y agoHow are the valuations calculated for companies that haven't raised a priced equity round in a long time? Specifically I'm thinking about companies like Zapier. They initially raised $1.3M in 2012 but haven't raised since and have funded off revenue. Is it based on private 409A valuations or some sort of formula on YC's end?
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- snowmaker 8y agoThey're based on fundraising or acquisition valuations, not 409A valuations. You're right that some of the companies have not raised money in a while, which in many cases means that their valuation would be higher if they were re-valued today.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoIs it a safe assumption that any company on the list who was in operation as of October 2015 with a valuation below $300 million at the time was accepted into YC Continuity?
- snowmaker 8y agoI think there's a misunderstanding of the way YC Continuity works. YC Continuity isn't a program like YC with an acceptance process.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoI appreciate the clarification. Apologies for my misunderstanding.
- filleokus 8y agoAre they ranked by valuation? Can't seem to find any explanation of how the rank is calculated. Also surprisingly many of those I've never heard of, despite spending way too much time at HN :)
- katm 8y agoYes - by valuation.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gmg 8y agoIn the first paragraph they say it's by valuation... ;) > The top 100 YC companies are listed by valuation (including the top 12 exits), as of October 16, 2018. I find it quite interesting seeing several founder names repeated for a number of the Top 100 companies.
- superplussed 8y agoVery cool to see this. Btw, at the bottom you guys linked to a blog post that didn't resolve: http://www.ycombinator.com/top-companies-2018 http://www.ycombinator.com/top-companies-2018
- katm 8y agoThanks for catching! Fixing now. Here's the real link: https://blog.ycombinator.com/category/top-companies-2018/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/category/top-companies-2018/.
- quadcore 8y agoFirebase is #91 and they exited at ~$85 millions if I remember correctly. That gives an idea how mind blowing this list is imho.
- throwaway93847 8y agoThis is incorrect; acquisition details were never made public.
- sah2ed 8y agoInteresting to learn that 9 out of the top 100 are solo founders ...
- jack6e 8y agoThey state that the cumulative valuation of these 100 companies is $100+ billion, of which $81+ billion comes from the top 5 companies, and $95+ billion comes from the top 10. Also interesting that the top 2 (Airbnb and Stripe) were in the 2009 cohorts. From the depths of the recession to $50+ billion combined valuation.
- anoncoward111 8y agoYeah these statistics should give any armchair VC/angel wannabees some thought: Out of the 2000 or so startups that deserve some type of funding[1], the chance that you will pick a $1B unicorn is about 0.2%. Additionally, the chance that you will choose the next Airbnb or Stripe is closer to 0.002%. For comparison, you could turn $150,000 into $4,500,000 with about a 3% chance if you find a vegas table willing to service this bet size (which they have done in the past). [1]a16z said this recently
- vasilipupkin 8y agoI've done quite a bit of angel investing and have a pretty good IRR. The key is to make sure you stay within your area of competence or within area of competence of those you trust. Also, the numbers will necessarily look worse for a fund or accelerator like Y Combinator than for an individual angel. Y Combinator has to fund cohorts of companies, right? they can't just say one year, nope, I found nothing I want to invest in this year. But as an individual angel you can.
- tlb 8y agoI don't see how you get those numbers. From the article, 19 / 1900 YC startups are above $1B, or 1% (not 0.2%). Many of the 1900 are young, so the fraction of any cohort that will eventually reach $1B is more than that. The chance of having picked exactly AirBnB or Stripe from among YC startups is 2/1900, or 0.11% (not 0.002%). More companies out of that 1900 are likely to achieve similar valuations in the future. The payoff ratio for angel investing is much higher than the 30:1 that Roulette pays. On the order of 1000:1 is typical ($10M cap safe - $20B IPO with 50% dilution on the way.)
- ones_and_zeros 8y agoThe valuation to jobs created ratio really highlights the imbalance between capital and labor in tech.
- aaachilless 8y agoI'm not sure what the spirit of your comment is, but I feel like I should point out that this is to some extent the "point" of technology: to create more value with less human capital.
- mbesto 8y agoWhich is funny because many people in tech who are fighting against/for regulations tout how tech is creating so many jobs. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- chabons 8y agoPerhaps the raw number of jobs isn't the best denominator then, since many of the jobs in tech likely pay more to acknowledge this fact. A better measure would be something like the total of wages payed, or total of wages payed for the bottom 4 quintiles of workers by salary (cut out C-class executive outliers). Equity of course makes that harder, but most of the companies on this list are big enough that they're probably paying more in salary at this point anyways. I'd be interested to see where that places tech companies vs. more traditional businesses.
- aaachilless 8y agoi think that's an interesting idea. instead of "how many jobs did we create?" you could ask "how much socioeconomic mobility did we create?". or something along those lines
- talltimtom 8y agoI think Pfizer has 3 times the number of employees and 2 times the valuation. So not really something that jumps out as being such a huge difference. Even though you would expect a large difference since most tech companies don’t employ unskilled labor and instead just (ab)used them through the gig economy.
- henryl 8y agoPretty sure Stripe is S2010.
- snowmaker 8y agoNope, it was S09.
- Impossible 8y agoMeta is at 38 and it recently suspended operations (https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/09/14/ar-startup-meta-layoffs-pause-chinese-investor.amp.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/09/14/ar-start...)? Is there still hope for an acquisition? I know this list is a ranking of amount raised but it seems odd to list dead companies as examples of the "top".
- michaelbuckbee 8y agoI imagine that there will be an acquisition of patents/technology but as so much of the company has already gone on to other things the timing of an acquihire, etc. seems to be against them.
- haaen 8y agoYC has funded approximately 1,900 companies. 93 are valued at $100 million or more. 19 are valued at $1 billion or more. Stripped from nuance, one could say that if you get accepted into YC, you have a 5 percent chance of building a $100 million company, and a 1 percent chance of building a $1 billion company. That's impressive. Afaik, YC is the only seed funder-startup accelerator in the world, among thousands of other ones, that has given birth to companies worth $1 billion ore more. At least until three years ago, it hasn't passed funding on a single billion dollar company (1). Also, rumours are that Coinbase is raising money at a valuation of $8 billion (2). This is the same valuation that the company supposedly gave itself when it acquired earn.com in april this year (3). (1) https://twitter.com/rabois/status/634205368172814337 https://twitter.com/rabois/status/634205368172814337 (2) https://www.businessinsider.com/coinbase-8-billion-company-funding-2018-10/ https://www.businessinsider.com/coinbase-8-billion-company-f... (3) https://www.recode.net/2018/4/27/17287184/coinbase-earn-acquisition-stock-valuation-eight-billion-earn https://www.recode.net/2018/4/27/17287184/coinbase-earn-acqu...
- venantius 8y ago> Afaik, YC is the only seed funder-startup accelerator in the world, among thousands of other ones, that has given birth to companies worth $1 billion ore more. Seedcamp (London) has backed 3 unicorns: Revolut [$1.7B], UiPath [$3B], and TransferWise [$1.6B], and that's just a venture firm I know off the top of my head. While these days they're closer to a first-round fund (with a similar economic deal to YC) than an accelerator, most of those were from back when they were operating in a proper accelerator model. I suspect there are probably a few other accelerators around the world that have unicorns in their portfolio - you just don't hear about them because they're not local.
- ryanSrich 8y agoReally interesting to see the number of jobs created. I imagine that just means "number of employees". Even so, the fact that Brex is a company with only 48 employees with over a $1billion dollar valuation is interesting (also the fact that I've never heard of them, and they only went through YC a year ago).
- syntaxing 8y agoI'm curious how much YC has made these couples years from this list. Does YC take a specific percentage when you join their incubator?
- andygcook 8y agoYC usually takes 7% for $150k in funding. You can read more about the Y Combinator Deal here https://www.ycombinator.com/deal https://www.ycombinator.com/deal
- capocannoniere 8y agoInteresting to note: > In addition, we will continue to support the company in the priced equity round in which the safe converts, and subsequent financing rounds (priced equity rounds or bridge financing rounds) by participating in those rounds to approximately maintain our 7% ownership. This has been the case since 2015 approximately [1]. This means YC's stake in many of these companies is in the order of 10s or even 100s of millions, since they keep their 7% through subsequent funding rounds. That's huge. [1] https://blog.ycombinator.com/pro-rata/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/pro-rata/
- graybolt 8y agoIt's tricky to figure out, because of course there's the standard 7% for 150k but they also do some later stage deals.
- snowmaker 8y agoTrue, but this list only includes companies that went through YC's core program.
- Suncho 8y agoAre we sure that "jobs created" is something to be proud of? Fewer jobs is generally better. I'd rather see how many jobs they've eliminated, but that's probably hard to calculate. Or maybe value per employee. The fewer employees, the higher the number.
- dqdo 8y agoLook carefully at the number of jobs created. Some companies have less than 100 employees with >100 million valuation. I believe that Heroku had just 40. It’s amazing how small these teams are and what they are able to achieve.
- graybolt 8y agoWow, basically all of the valuation is generated by the top 10 companies. 81% from the top 5, 95% from the top 10. I guess this explains VC strategy somewhat: if you're not trying to become a unicorn, you're worthless to the VC. I wish there was more data supporting the idea of making small, long-term businesses, but it really seems like the big money is all in going for unicorn status. Which is a shame, because I think this drives some of the problem behaviors you see in SV.
- askafriend 8y agoYou can build successful, small, long-term businesses. There is nothing stopping you. Just don't raise venture capital. You can seek capital, just not venture capital. Venture capital is a very specific style of investing and the model relies on outsized successes. It is a very small portion of the overall capital ecosystem that drives our economy. It is not the end-all be-all of capital allocation. The mistake laypeople on HN make is thinking that's the only way to capitalize a business. It's not.
- graybolt 8y agoSo where else do you find capital, then, for something not focused on extreme growth? I've got plenty of ideas kicking around, and the experience and skills to build them, but they're entirely moderate-growth businesses with a ceiling of single- or double-digit millions a year in revenue. Most of them could be started for between $10-100k. A bank is tricky; you put your own savings on the line, and most banks don't really care about your specific situation, just that you're a risky customer. I'd prefer not to use family and friends because that has the potential to destroy relationships. Angels are usually interested in large growth potential. Where else do you look for capital?
- paxys 8y agoYou are looking for a "risk-free obligation-free" option, which doesn't exist.
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- 8_hours_ago 8y agoJustin Kan and Kyle Vogt are both on that list twice. That's impressive!
- abcdefg123456e 8y agoI worked for #15 on that list and let me tell you those guys are some real jerks. This is their COO yelling at their carriers https://youtube.com/watch?v=ooTmdOyKYpQ https://youtube.com/watch?v=ooTmdOyKYpQ
- antaviana 8y agoThe guy yelling mentions at the video that has not slept for 3 days...
- hobofan 8y agoAnd that makes it excusable?
- fernandotakai 8y agoargh, that's super sad. i use them all the time.
- camjohnson26 8y ago#15 is Rappi
- baristaGeek 8y agoYou do know that those rappitenderos were stopping the engineers from solving the bug, right?
- DrNuke 8y ago96 .com, 2 .co, 1 .ai, 1 .tv —— lesson learnt!
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- sroussey 8y agoLove to see a list ranked by revenue instead.
- antaviana 8y agoIt would be interesting to know the cap delta, not only the cap. For example, if a company has a valuation of 5B and to reach that point raised 4B, its cap delta is 1B. Not sure why only the total cap is the one publicized, probably are more newsworthy bigger vanity numbers than smaller sanity numbers.
- aston 8y agoThe distribution by batch is pretty interesting: S2011 10 W2012 10 S2012 9 S2014 7 W2013 7 S2013 6 W2016 6 W2015 6 S2016 5 W2014 5 S2010 4 S2015 4 W2011 4 S2009 3 W2008 2 W2007 2 W2017 2 S2006 2 W2009 1 W2018 1 W2010 1 S2008 1 S2005 1 S2007 1 The top three batches were consecutive starting from summer 2011 through summer of 2012. That period happens to also be when the seed and venture capital ecosystem started its recovery from the 2008 crisis [0]. What I wonder is, which way does the arrow of causation point? Did the success of these companies lift the entire ecosystem? Or were macroeconomic factors the dominant driver of capital entering this market, and those three batches happened to benefit? edit: There's another possibility here, which is that there are two curves that may have maximized for companies around that time period. The first is the batch size, which has increased from ~10 companies to ~100 over the years. And the other curve is that companies take something like 5-10 years to mature. Maybe it's just that the companies of that vintage are just old enough to be really valuable, and that there were enough companies in the batch to push them to the top of this ranking. My money is on macro effects, though. [0] https://medium.com/the-mission/state-of-seed-investing-in-2018-25eb28ac0e93 https://medium.com/the-mission/state-of-seed-investing-in-20...
- immad 8y agoAlso the bottom of that list has companies worth 400x less than the top of the list. So you would want to apply another scaling curve for that.
- nostromo 8y agoThe results are very different by market cap though. Half of the value on the list came from 2009 alone (Stripe and Airbnb). (Obviously it takes a while to become a unicorn.) Here's the sum of the unicorn market caps by year: 2005 1b 2006 (none) 2007 11 2008 5 2009 50 2010 2 2011 (none) 2012 10 2013 6 2014 16 2015 1 2016 1 2017 1
- savrajsingh 8y agoalso of note, there was an economic crisis in 2009, which is also the year with the highest current market cap (it was super hard to raise a round of any size at that time)
- gist 8y ago> They have created over 28,000 jobs. I always get a kick out of the 'created jobs' meme. It is always bandied about in such a positive way. As if you took people out of work and employed them. The truth is you also need a number that reflect the amount of people that were put out of work or disadvantaged by a startup. And the people who worked for startups (to a lesser degree) that would have gotten a job somewhere else. What is really sad for young people I think is this perception that the road is paved with gold for anyone in the startup business. Sure they know most don't succeed in the same way that they know it's hard to play major league sports or be a music or movie star. But I really don't know if they fully understand how much of a long shot it really is. YC celebrating this is fine it's what I would do from a marketing and PR angle. But the truth is they are in the business of getting as many people involved in startups that they can because it benefits them greatly. This is not sour grapes either. I make money off of all of these startups directly (in a pick axe kind of way). It has been great for sure but it also takes advantage of the hopes and dreams of a generation who think the only thing you can do is 'do a startup by going to an accelerator and raising angel and vc funds'. That is most certainly not the case.
- nraynaud 8y ago$3.5M mobilized capital per job, when is it more efficient to just give handouts to random people? :) But I think it's extremely misleading to talk about jobs, we are all here to destroy jobs and concentrate wealth, and some of us are doing worse than others at Uber, Lyft and co, where the value coming from the destruction goes to the VCs, and if they crash the value taken goes nowhere.
- asaph 8y agoIn the list of top investors at the bottom, I'm surprised to see FundersClub so high (#5 ahead of even Sequoia Capital!) and AngelList not listed.
- immad 8y agoSV Angel and FundersClub have deployed an “index fund” strategy on yc batches for a long time. So makes sense that they are high up on the list.
- asaph 8y agoHow do the returns on those "index funds" compare with returns on an S&P500 index fund over the same time period?
- immad 8y agoI believe that they are much better than S&P500 index. Returns are very top heavy so as long as you are in some of the top ones they can be really good. SV Angel did Airbnb and FundersClub did Coinbase. But past performance is not an indicator of future performance...
- kenneth 8y agoI don't imagine they count AngelList as a fund, or AL would easily be at the top of the list. (If they counted each company that had an AL series LLC on its cap table.)
- bad_ramen_soup 8y agoIs Uber not a YC company?
- zubairshams 8y agoNo. Here's the full Y Combinator funded companies list: https://yclist.com/ https://yclist.com/
- ezekg 8y agoTIL Heroku only has 30 employees. That's crazy for the kind of service they provide.
- Shounak 8y agoI love this list! A quick typo fix: In the listing for Instacart it says “Valued at over $7s Billion”, which should be changed to just “$7 Billion”.
- choppaface 8y agoIt looks like Sam is mostly on track to make his bet: https://blog.samaltman.com/bubble-talk https://blog.samaltman.com/bubble-talk For (3), Gitlab is at approx $1.1B.
- dmode 8y agoI read yesterday that Uber will be valued at $120bn during its IPO. That will mean (1) will be met pretty easily.
- olvo 8y agoSeems like a strange exercise, since it doesn't actually touch on the bubble part. A bubble is when valuations are higher than the actual value, which usually means the performance after an exit. Presumably we would have to wait some time after that happens to see whether that is true. If they perform well we weren't in a bubble and if they don't valuations are likely to fall as people lose confidence.
- capocannoniere 8y agoYes. (1) is pretty close to being true. Will be true with Uber's $120B valuation (2) is already true according to the list. Stripe and Instacart alone are already worth > $27B in aggregate (3) might actually be already true, or at least close to it. Gitlab is worth $1.1B, and there are a few other YC W15 companies that are already worth hundreds of millions and are on track to become unicorns: EquipmentShare, AtomWise, RazorPay, Qventus, GrubMarket, among others.
- JesseAldridge 8y agoIt would be interesting to graph the valuations of all of these companies over time. You could make the x-axis "company age" rather than time in order to make a more apples-to-apples comparison between older YC companies and younger YC companies. I did a bit of work along these lines a few weeks ago: https://github.com/JesseAldridge/yc_still_good https://github.com/JesseAldridge/yc_still_good Here is the graph I'm talking about: https://github.com/JesseAldridge/yc_still_good/blob/master/reports/valuation_vs_age.png?raw=true https://github.com/JesseAldridge/yc_still_good/blob/master/r...
- bertm 8y agoGreat analysis. I wonder how a semi-log graph would look.
- Beefin 8y agointeresting half are b2b, but thats also a super wide net to cast.
- mbesto 8y agoA couple of interesting things to note here: 1) Jobs created is not a "net new" job creation. I'm still waiting for someone to do research on how many jobs get displaced by tech based companies. I think tech based companies are amazing vehicles for wealth creation, but not so great for global job creation. 1a) I find it interesting that they still have a RFS for "one million jobs" https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#million given that their highest number of touted jobs is 4k max. For comparison, Amazon has 500k jobs. Maybe 50k or 100k is more of an admirable goal? 2) Interesting to see YC - in some ways admitting I guess - that technology itself is not a sector, but that technology is enabling certain sectors. I think this is the right way to look at it. Yet we still often refer to many of these companies simply as "tech companies". 3) This really should be split between acquired and not acquired companies. For example, Cruise being valued at $14B after being bought by GM seems weird. Or Dropbox, who is now publicly traded and their value changes every second. YC will never do this, but I'd love to see realized vs unrealized gains.
- itronitron 8y agoIt would be nice to see job creation broken down into 'salary/income generated'
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- muzz 8y agoZenefits is still in the Top 10 (at #8)??
- ajoy 8y agoI am torn about using valuation to rank companies. Valuation is is a vanity metric. Its just a number that VCs use to trade their capital, not the true worth of a company. You could raise $1 million from your rich uncle claiming to hold 0.1% of company and claim a $1B valuation. But then the question is, what do you use as the true worth of a company?
- laser 8y agoBut I don't think any of these were valued by their rich uncles—they were primarily valued by professional venture capitalists putting money into the companies at said valuations. Venture capitalists may have flaws in their valuation methodologies, but who's valuation could you trust more than theirs, as they put their money where their mouth is?
- rajacombinator 8y agoThis actually shows how bad the odds are and should discourage anyone from starting or joining a startup...
- AznHisoka 8y agoShouldn't DoorDash be #1 if we're talking about jobs created? I'm sure there are more than 900 DoorDash drivers out there delivering food.
- radiusvector 8y agoAnalyzed in depth - https://sridharsmusic.com/analyzing-ycs-top-100-companies-list-by-vintage/ https://sridharsmusic.com/analyzing-ycs-top-100-companies-li...
- mdotk 8y agoWhy is Atrium on this list? It's an overpriced law firm.
- golemiprague 8y agoAlmost no women within the founders, I wonder what is their excuse, it is not like all the founders suppose to be technical so even that can't really be an excuse. It is not like kids are the problem since a lot of them were very young when creating the company. When they talk about pay gap or high level positions do they take into account the fact that women don't seem to create businesses?
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- JamesAdir 8y agoListing private companies by valuation has nothing with reality, just trying to bump up the next investment rounds. Until a company is public and traded you can put almost any price on it. With that being said - kodus to all the companies about the thousand of jobs created.
- tinkerteller 8y agoIf all of these companies were incorporated as part of YC batch that would be very impressive. I've increasing feeling that many companies just want to get listed as "YC company" to leverage investor network and take advantage of branding.
- secfirstmd 8y agoI would like to see some equivalent for YC Top Companies for measure and recognise their social impact: -Lowest Carbon emitted -Diversity of workforce -Pay gap between lowest and highest -Open source commitment -etc
- siquick 8y agoDoes anyone have any stats on Reddit (users, revenue etc) because $1bn seems like a pretty low valuation for one of the most popular sites on the internet?