Well there is massive survivorship bias here. For all you know there is another VC that invested 20MM into 5 equally great-looking YC companies that all went b

Well there is massive survivorship bias here. For all you know there is another VC that invested 20MM into 5 equally great-looking YC companies that all went bust, and now that VC is out of business and the former partners are homeless. Sequoia presumably only ends up invested in only a small # of companies from YC, so saying their success is based on Y Combinator is logically incorrect. Their success would be based on their own ability to invest in the type of companies they like to invest in. Perhaps in theory YC is helping to increase the supply of these companies, but that would affect all VCs equally. And of course, Sequoia also invests in a lot of companies that never went through YC and end up being successful. I'm not any sort of huge YC or Sequoia apologist either, this post is just a giant logical fallacy.