7 ms·

Headquarter Locations of Top 101 Y Combinator Companies

103 points by beavershaw 8y ago

kjullien 8y ago
I can't tell if this shows a terrible bias towards NA or if people who aren't from NA don't even bother applying for X reason(s) or get rejected. edit: I am getting downvoted to hell for some reason when I'm simply trying to start a discussion based on a fact... hmmm... I don't get HN... "The only other countries with top companies were Canada (2), the UK (2), Colombia, India and the Netherlands." "94 of the top 101 companies are based in the US."
- tlb 8y ago
  The map shows headquarters location, not where the founders are from. Many founding teams came from around the world, but put their company headquarters in the Bay Area because of access to engineering and design talent and later-stage investors.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Many founding teams came from around the world, but put their company headquarters in the Bay Area because ...they have to for at least 3 months to be a YC company, and after that the question is what is the compelling reason to move?
- quaice 8y ago
  You might be misinterpreting the data here.
- stephengillie 8y ago
  > I can't tell if this shows a terrible bias towards NA or if people who aren't from NA don't even bother applying for X reason(s) or get rejected. Why not both? There's a probably at least a bias to English fluency, if not a blanket rejection of non-English applications. There's been a long-standing bias towards teams, which mandates a level of charisma and social skills that many talented engineers struggle with. For a long time, YC completely excluded solo founders. And I believe being on-site is another requirement, which is classist. People from other states and countries who don't already have affluence probably don't even bother.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > I can't tell if this shows a terrible bias towards NA YC requires a 3 month relocation to Silicon Valley. That itself creates a pretty strong bias. There are probably language, cultural, and other biases at play, too.
theandrewbailey 8y ago
Is the map keyed incorrectly? California is colored purple, but that means only 4 HQs are located there, not 74.
- ndonnellan 8y ago
  Kind of hard to see, but I believe there is a black dot (74) on the bay area
- quaunaut 8y ago
  The map separates the Bay Area of California from the rest of California, hence being 74(if you zoom in to see the dark portion for the bay area).
- asciimo 8y ago
  This thing is a data visualization nightmare.
jedberg 8y ago
Back in the day, there was a single apartment building in SF where many of the YC companies started out. We used to joke that it might be more efficient for YC to just buy the building, since 1/2 of the money they were giving the startups was going to the landlord. This probably helped create a nexus in SF for YC. Heck, even YC itself develops all their software in SF. But even besides that, it still makes sense. While it is true that there are many people all around the world with the skills necessary for working at a startup, many of them congregate in SF. If you want the largest possible hiring pool and you're set on having a physical office, SF will give you the deepest pool, since you probably can't afford to pay to move someone to SF. I'm personally running my company fully remote so I can tap into the talent that has chosen not to move to SF (despite being here myself), and I suspect that trend will continue to grow, making it more likely for more companies to not be based in SF. On the flip side, even if the talent is elsewhere, it's still a huge advantage for our HQ and me to be here, because it's where all the investors and advisors are.
- danpalmer 8y ago
  > Heck, even YC itself develops all their software in SF. A little off topic, but what software does YC develop? Obviously there's HN, Bookface, and there's probably a bit of web development that needs doing for things like the Top 100 companies list, is there much else? More generally, I realise that YC is a tech incubator so they're likely to develop software for things that other companies wouldn't, but do they really need a dev team? The blog could be Wordpress/etc, HN and Bookface could be Discourse. Is it all being over-engineered? Is there a large dev team where other organisations of a similar size might have one or two IT people?
  - stephengillie 8y ago
    YC funds HN so poorly that they can barely afford a single core to run this web forum.
    - snowmaker 8y ago
      It doesn't have to do with funding. The codebase is just efficient so it doesn't need much to run very fast.
pg_bot 8y ago
The most striking thing about this map to me was that you could draw a straight line from the bottom of Virginia all the way across the United States and you wouldn't find a single top company until you hit Los Angeles. There are about 100 million people that live in that area so it's surprising that there isn't at least 1 company headquartered there.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > The most striking thing about this map to me was that you could draw a straight line from the bottom of Virginia all the way across the United States and you wouldn't find a single top company until you hit Los Angeles. Why is it surprising? YC has historically required relocating to the Bay, so it's not really surprising that the vast majority of top 101 YC companies are in the Bay, or that of the 27 that aren't, there are many paths on the Earth's surface that include 100 million people and none of those relocated top YC companies; and that is even before considering the (also unsurprising) concentration of non-Bay top YC companies in NYC, which leaves even fewer for the rest of the planet.
  - pg_bot 8y ago
    I didn't say surprising, I said striking. No one has decided to relocate to San Diego, Austin, Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, Phoenix, Atlanta, New Orleans, Miami, Nashville, or Charlotte? I think it would be silly to equate populations of people that differ wildly in language, customs, and economic opportunity. The world is not evenly distributed. Besides there aren't that many ways to divide the world by 100 Million people, there are 76.
    - nostrademons 8y ago
      "Besides there aren't that many ways to divide the world by 100 Million people, there are 76." There are (7.6B choose 100M) = (7600000000! / (100000000! * 7500000000!)) > well over a googol. Different ways to slice up the world do not have to be disjoint.
      - 8y ago
jppope 8y ago
I think more than anything this information shines a light on how much opportunity there is for investment elsewhere.
zckao 8y ago
This seems like an instance where visualization confuses more than clarifies. The paragraph at the bottom of the page presented as a table would be more comprehensible.
sroussey 8y ago
So why isn’t YC in SF?
shazow 8y ago
Headquarter location is kind of an arbitrary line to draw, especially with poor data. Many of these companies are fully remote or have multiple large offices. Just off the top of my head: PagerDuty has a large office in Toronto. GitLab and Zapier are very remote-first focused, I'm sure there's a dozen more on that list. The problem is that almost all of these companies started out in the Bay Area when they did YC there. It's hard to find up to date information about how SF-centric they are now that they've matured, but it's easy to assume that they are by default. This feels as useful as talking about incorporation state (so much Delaware!). I'd love to see more data about how distributed companies are these days vs being monolithic offices in SF.
- httpz 8y ago
  It's not completely arbitrary. Where the HQ is usually shows where the company got started and experienced its initial growth. Also, while a company may have multiple remote offices, most execs will be in HQ and that can have a huge impact on the culture of the company. A Google office in Japan may feel more like a Silicon Valley company than a Japanese company's office in Silicon Valley.
  - RobLach 8y ago
    I do believe that but this particular data set will demonstrate very little evidence of that since since the very likely biggest reason Y Combinator companies seem to be centered around SV is because that's where SV is; and so the data is biased beyond usability in this manner.
- raverbashing 8y ago
  Does YC incorporate the companies in CA or Delaware?
bsvalley 8y ago
Technically speaking they’re all Delaware C-corps ;)
sbilstein 8y ago
Makes sense to me. If you really want to make it big in fashion, you move to a fashion city. If you want to make it big in music, you probably move to LA, Brooklyn, or Nashville. Startups are a scene too; you can succeed elsewhere but why make it harder for yourself?
- r_singh 8y ago
  While your comment makes sense, I think you're underestimating the size of the world outside of YC's circle. It's incorrect to be in the delusion that you have to move to the valley to be a top company, but that depends on the definition of top, which here is valuation and it's hard to beat valuations that the Silicon Valley can afford and help realise because of the ecosystem that's formed over the years. YC is based in the USA, so it's not really a surprise that you'd have to move there to be a top YC company. You can build a top company anywhere in the world, even if your definition is that of valuation, the process remains by and large the same that YC advocates in documents such as the startup playbook and the startup school courses (the parlance may be different in material from different sources), and I believe that it gets easier to build a top company where you are if you make your own definition of top as valuations could be deceiving. You don't necessarily have to move to SV to make a top company by valuation, top YC company: stats suggest yes, but I still believe there's slim chances you could do it from anywhere, YC tries hard to be inclusive, however their location presents them with constraints, hence the stats. To decide where to move in order to build a top company, first understand what is your definition of a top company and whether you really want to disrupt your life, move to the valley, and build what the world calls a top company. PS - No disrespect to valuations, the Silicon Valley or anyone's ideologies.
  - sbilstein 8y ago
    I don't think we actually disagree on any of those points. You can definitely build businesses anywhere in the world but people move to scenes to increase their chances of an outsize success. Plenty great bands come from small towns and regional scenes but a disproportionate amount of famous, world-touring bands are based out of Brooklyn or LA and the musicians you might meet there are aiming for that lifestyle. If you define success differently, it's all up for grabs. If you want to build the next Uber, you are giving yourself a bigger shot (and tough competition) by moving to SF. Of course, companies like Mailchimp are massively successful outside of the bubble but there just isn't the same pressure and rising tide in a city like Atlanta than there is in SF. I suspect many people end up in the Bay Area not to risk it all, disrupt their lives and start a company but simply because they got an awesome job at a growing company. Further down the line the scene makes them consider 'maybe I could do this too'. FWIW, I got advice when starting my business to move out of the Bay Area and somewhere way cheaper to extend my runway. I'm glad I didn't because even with smaller monthly expenses I'd lose out on the small network I have and the luck afforded to me simply by being here.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
juhq 8y ago
It's neat that on the map usa is divided into states but other countries are, well, just countries. Why not draw the countries into smaller pieces as well? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_state
- nine_k 8y ago
  If there were many companies per "other country", that would make sense. There are very few companies outside US in the list, and the only country with two entries is UK; both companies are in London. If the chart had, say, 10 companies from India, showing the borders of India's states on the map would definitely make sense.
  - nsgi 8y ago
    Canada also has two entries
r_singh 8y ago
The HQ state for RazorPay (the company located in India), is Karnataka.
1024core 8y ago
What, they couldn't figure out the state in which Bangalore (India) is located?
hiyou102 8y ago
I'm a little surprised that there isn't a single "top" YC company in Seattle. Why is that? It seems like the city has talent and capital.
christefano 8y ago
I was glad to see Portland represented (hey, inDinero, greetings from NE Portland!). Sometimes startups refer to this part of the Pacific Northwest as “Silicon Forest”, though that hasn’t seemed to take off. My old stomping grounds in Los Angeles made a good showing (Hush, SFOX, GOAT, and Soylent), and my bet is more and more future startups will be based there than anywhere else outside of SF and NYC. Sometimes called Silicon Beach, which was originally the name for San Diego’s startup scene and later claimed by Venice & Santa Monica — though it really refers to all of LA at this point.
drb91 8y ago
There’s a huge amount of selection bias here when YC itself is located in SV.
ralph84 8y ago
Non-competes aren't enforceable in California. I think that is something often overlooked but key to why California continues to overwhelmingly dominate for startups.
kozikow 8y ago
IMO the key factor is that so many investors are in California and investors prefer to have a founding team locally accessible. What else? Talent? Yes, but at a cost that is becoming unbearable for early-stage startups. Customers? Maybe if you are B2B technology, but most startups are not.

103 points by beavershaw 8y ago

I can't tell if this shows a terrible bias towards NA or if people who aren't from NA don't even bother applying for X reason(s) or get rejected. edit: I am getting downvoted to hell for some reason when I'm simply trying to start a discussion based on a fact... hmmm... I don't get HN... "The only other countries with top companies were Canada (2), the UK (2), Colombia, India and the Netherlands." "94 of the top 101 companies are based in the US."

tlb 8y ago
The map shows headquarters location, not where the founders are from. Many founding teams came from around the world, but put their company headquarters in the Bay Area because of access to engineering and design talent and later-stage investors.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Many founding teams came from around the world, but put their company headquarters in the Bay Area because ...they have to for at least 3 months to be a YC company, and after that the question is what is the compelling reason to move?
quaice 8y ago
You might be misinterpreting the data here.
stephengillie 8y ago
> I can't tell if this shows a terrible bias towards NA or if people who aren't from NA don't even bother applying for X reason(s) or get rejected. Why not both? There's a probably at least a bias to English fluency, if not a blanket rejection of non-English applications. There's been a long-standing bias towards teams, which mandates a level of charisma and social skills that many talented engineers struggle with. For a long time, YC completely excluded solo founders. And I believe being on-site is another requirement, which is classist. People from other states and countries who don't already have affluence probably don't even bother.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> I can't tell if this shows a terrible bias towards NA YC requires a 3 month relocation to Silicon Valley. That itself creates a pretty strong bias. There are probably language, cultural, and other biases at play, too.

theandrewbailey 8y ago

Is the map keyed incorrectly? California is colored purple, but that means only 4 HQs are located there, not 74.

ndonnellan 8y ago
Kind of hard to see, but I believe there is a black dot (74) on the bay area
quaunaut 8y ago
The map separates the Bay Area of California from the rest of California, hence being 74(if you zoom in to see the dark portion for the bay area).
asciimo 8y ago
This thing is a data visualization nightmare.

jedberg 8y ago

Back in the day, there was a single apartment building in SF where many of the YC companies started out. We used to joke that it might be more efficient for YC to just buy the building, since 1/2 of the money they were giving the startups was going to the landlord. This probably helped create a nexus in SF for YC. Heck, even YC itself develops all their software in SF. But even besides that, it still makes sense. While it is true that there are many people all around the world with the skills necessary for working at a startup, many of them congregate in SF. If you want the largest possible hiring pool and you're set on having a physical office, SF will give you the deepest pool, since you probably can't afford to pay to move someone to SF. I'm personally running my company fully remote so I can tap into the talent that has chosen not to move to SF (despite being here myself), and I suspect that trend will continue to grow, making it more likely for more companies to not be based in SF. On the flip side, even if the talent is elsewhere, it's still a huge advantage for our HQ and me to be here, because it's where all the investors and advisors are.

danpalmer 8y ago
> Heck, even YC itself develops all their software in SF. A little off topic, but what software does YC develop? Obviously there's HN, Bookface, and there's probably a bit of web development that needs doing for things like the Top 100 companies list, is there much else? More generally, I realise that YC is a tech incubator so they're likely to develop software for things that other companies wouldn't, but do they really need a dev team? The blog could be Wordpress/etc, HN and Bookface could be Discourse. Is it all being over-engineered? Is there a large dev team where other organisations of a similar size might have one or two IT people?
- stephengillie 8y ago
  YC funds HN so poorly that they can barely afford a single core to run this web forum.
  - snowmaker 8y ago
    It doesn't have to do with funding. The codebase is just efficient so it doesn't need much to run very fast.

pg_bot 8y ago

The most striking thing about this map to me was that you could draw a straight line from the bottom of Virginia all the way across the United States and you wouldn't find a single top company until you hit Los Angeles. There are about 100 million people that live in that area so it's surprising that there isn't at least 1 company headquartered there.

dragonwriter 8y ago
> The most striking thing about this map to me was that you could draw a straight line from the bottom of Virginia all the way across the United States and you wouldn't find a single top company until you hit Los Angeles. Why is it surprising? YC has historically required relocating to the Bay, so it's not really surprising that the vast majority of top 101 YC companies are in the Bay, or that of the 27 that aren't, there are many paths on the Earth's surface that include 100 million people and none of those relocated top YC companies; and that is even before considering the (also unsurprising) concentration of non-Bay top YC companies in NYC, which leaves even fewer for the rest of the planet.
- pg_bot 8y ago
  I didn't say surprising, I said striking. No one has decided to relocate to San Diego, Austin, Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, Phoenix, Atlanta, New Orleans, Miami, Nashville, or Charlotte? I think it would be silly to equate populations of people that differ wildly in language, customs, and economic opportunity. The world is not evenly distributed. Besides there aren't that many ways to divide the world by 100 Million people, there are 76.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    "Besides there aren't that many ways to divide the world by 100 Million people, there are 76." There are (7.6B choose 100M) = (7600000000! / (100000000! * 7500000000!)) > well over a googol. Different ways to slice up the world do not have to be disjoint.
    - 8y ago

jppope 8y ago

I think more than anything this information shines a light on how much opportunity there is for investment elsewhere.

zckao 8y ago

This seems like an instance where visualization confuses more than clarifies. The paragraph at the bottom of the page presented as a table would be more comprehensible.

sroussey 8y ago

So why isn’t YC in SF?

shazow 8y ago

Headquarter location is kind of an arbitrary line to draw, especially with poor data. Many of these companies are fully remote or have multiple large offices. Just off the top of my head: PagerDuty has a large office in Toronto. GitLab and Zapier are very remote-first focused, I'm sure there's a dozen more on that list. The problem is that almost all of these companies started out in the Bay Area when they did YC there. It's hard to find up to date information about how SF-centric they are now that they've matured, but it's easy to assume that they are by default. This feels as useful as talking about incorporation state (so much Delaware!). I'd love to see more data about how distributed companies are these days vs being monolithic offices in SF.

httpz 8y ago
It's not completely arbitrary. Where the HQ is usually shows where the company got started and experienced its initial growth. Also, while a company may have multiple remote offices, most execs will be in HQ and that can have a huge impact on the culture of the company. A Google office in Japan may feel more like a Silicon Valley company than a Japanese company's office in Silicon Valley.
- RobLach 8y ago
  I do believe that but this particular data set will demonstrate very little evidence of that since since the very likely biggest reason Y Combinator companies seem to be centered around SV is because that's where SV is; and so the data is biased beyond usability in this manner.
raverbashing 8y ago
Does YC incorporate the companies in CA or Delaware?

bsvalley 8y ago

Technically speaking they’re all Delaware C-corps ;)

sbilstein 8y ago

Makes sense to me. If you really want to make it big in fashion, you move to a fashion city. If you want to make it big in music, you probably move to LA, Brooklyn, or Nashville. Startups are a scene too; you can succeed elsewhere but why make it harder for yourself?

r_singh 8y ago
While your comment makes sense, I think you're underestimating the size of the world outside of YC's circle. It's incorrect to be in the delusion that you have to move to the valley to be a top company, but that depends on the definition of top, which here is valuation and it's hard to beat valuations that the Silicon Valley can afford and help realise because of the ecosystem that's formed over the years. YC is based in the USA, so it's not really a surprise that you'd have to move there to be a top YC company. You can build a top company anywhere in the world, even if your definition is that of valuation, the process remains by and large the same that YC advocates in documents such as the startup playbook and the startup school courses (the parlance may be different in material from different sources), and I believe that it gets easier to build a top company where you are if you make your own definition of top as valuations could be deceiving. You don't necessarily have to move to SV to make a top company by valuation, top YC company: stats suggest yes, but I still believe there's slim chances you could do it from anywhere, YC tries hard to be inclusive, however their location presents them with constraints, hence the stats. To decide where to move in order to build a top company, first understand what is your definition of a top company and whether you really want to disrupt your life, move to the valley, and build what the world calls a top company. PS - No disrespect to valuations, the Silicon Valley or anyone's ideologies.
- sbilstein 8y ago
  I don't think we actually disagree on any of those points. You can definitely build businesses anywhere in the world but people move to scenes to increase their chances of an outsize success. Plenty great bands come from small towns and regional scenes but a disproportionate amount of famous, world-touring bands are based out of Brooklyn or LA and the musicians you might meet there are aiming for that lifestyle. If you define success differently, it's all up for grabs. If you want to build the next Uber, you are giving yourself a bigger shot (and tough competition) by moving to SF. Of course, companies like Mailchimp are massively successful outside of the bubble but there just isn't the same pressure and rising tide in a city like Atlanta than there is in SF. I suspect many people end up in the Bay Area not to risk it all, disrupt their lives and start a company but simply because they got an awesome job at a growing company. Further down the line the scene makes them consider 'maybe I could do this too'. FWIW, I got advice when starting my business to move out of the Bay Area and somewhere way cheaper to extend my runway. I'm glad I didn't because even with smaller monthly expenses I'd lose out on the small network I have and the luck afforded to me simply by being here.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

juhq 8y ago

It's neat that on the map usa is divided into states but other countries are, well, just countries. Why not draw the countries into smaller pieces as well? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_state

nine_k 8y ago
If there were many companies per "other country", that would make sense. There are very few companies outside US in the list, and the only country with two entries is UK; both companies are in London. If the chart had, say, 10 companies from India, showing the borders of India's states on the map would definitely make sense.
- nsgi 8y ago
  Canada also has two entries

r_singh 8y ago

The HQ state for RazorPay (the company located in India), is Karnataka.

1024core 8y ago

What, they couldn't figure out the state in which Bangalore (India) is located?

hiyou102 8y ago

I'm a little surprised that there isn't a single "top" YC company in Seattle. Why is that? It seems like the city has talent and capital.

christefano 8y ago

I was glad to see Portland represented (hey, inDinero, greetings from NE Portland!). Sometimes startups refer to this part of the Pacific Northwest as “Silicon Forest”, though that hasn’t seemed to take off. My old stomping grounds in Los Angeles made a good showing (Hush, SFOX, GOAT, and Soylent), and my bet is more and more future startups will be based there than anywhere else outside of SF and NYC. Sometimes called Silicon Beach, which was originally the name for San Diego’s startup scene and later claimed by Venice & Santa Monica — though it really refers to all of LA at this point.

drb91 8y ago

There’s a huge amount of selection bias here when YC itself is located in SV.

ralph84 8y ago

Non-competes aren't enforceable in California. I think that is something often overlooked but key to why California continues to overwhelmingly dominate for startups.

kozikow 8y ago

IMO the key factor is that so many investors are in California and investors prefer to have a founding team locally accessible. What else? Talent? Yes, but at a cost that is becoming unbearable for early-stage startups. Customers? Maybe if you are B2B technology, but most startups are not.