3 ms·
"Graham also released some metrics on Y Combinator: it has 564 startups total. Of the 285 that have valuations, the total valuation of the companies is $11.6 bi
by e3pi 13y ago
"Graham also released some metrics on Y Combinator: it has 564 startups total. Of the 285 that have valuations, the total valuation of the companies is $11.6 billion."
!
- adventured 13y agoI wonder which companies are skewing that the most, anybody have a list of the top Y Combinator companies? Obviously the average of $46 million doesn't provide a clear picture at all.
- aaronbrethorst 13y agoIf memory serves, I believe that AirBnB and Dropbox represent about half of that.
- jwoah12 13y agoJust taking out Dropbox and Airbnb, the average for the rest already drops quite a bit. With Dropbox at more than $4bil [1] and Airbnb at $2.5bil [2], that leaves the remaining 283 at about $5bil total, or $17.6mil each. Taking out others like Weebly would drop it further. [1] - http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/02/07/why-is-dropbox-worth-more-than-4-billion/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/02/07/why-is-dropbox-... [2] - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-19/airbnb-said-to-be-raising-money-from-peter-thiel.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-19/airbnb-said-to-be-r...
- il 13y agoSo what you're saying is that if you take all of the successful companies out of an investor's portfolio, that portfolio will have a lower value.
- waterside81 13y agoWell I think more precisely, he's implying if you take out the few heavy hitters, then the value drops precipitously.
- ibdknox 13y agoOr stated even more precisely, the mean and median are very different :)
- guiambros 13y agoNo, he/she is saying that "average" is a poor metric to represent the totality of the samples. This is particularly true when you have such a high standard deviation. By eliminating some of the biggest outliers, you're reducing the standard deviation, thus making the average metric more representative. You'd also have to disregard the companies with very low or no value, but it seems this was already done in PG's original statement: "Of the 285 _that have_ valuations..."
- marvin 13y agoWasn't reddit sold quite cheaply, and not part of this list?
- jwoah12 13y agoYes, my mistake. Edited.
- martythemaniak 13y agoMeasuring the "average" in any power-law distribution is mostly meaningless.
- kalininalex 13y agoIt would be interesting to know what the median valuation is. Half the startups will be above it, and half below it. This would provide additional interesting details.