6 ms·
Analyzing Y Combinator
- arasakik 17y agoWait, what? Chatterous is most definitely not closed. More info: http://venturebeat.com/2008/07/14/chatterous-raises-angel-funding-to-integrate-email-instant-messaging-and-sms/ http://venturebeat.com/2008/07/14/chatterous-raises-angel-fu...
- gfodor 17y agoYeah I saw this as I had a chatterous chat room open in another window and was very confused.
- natrius 17y agoCan you blame him? That article is over a year old. The copyright date on chatterous.com is 2008. I don't understand how that kind of oversight could last for a year on an actively developed product.
- mattmaroon 17y agoPossibly because it is completely and totally irrelevant. You'd think half the startups on the web were closed if you went by copyright dates. It's one of those things you put there, then forget you ever put it there, and neither you nor anyone else ever even notices it. And it doesn't matter. Farm Town said for months (and still probably does to this day) "Notify me when myr crops are ready." They misspelled a two letter word. Didn't stop them from getting 30m users. I'm guessing Chatterous's out of date copyright won't hold them back either.
- natrius 17y agoI don't think it's a problem, but it is an oversight that would make people think the site isn't active. I don't think out of date copyrights are common on active sites after February.
- chris100 17y agoBy the way, technically if the text of your home page has not changed since you wrote it in 2008, it would be illegal for you to claim a copyright year of 2009. Why? Because the date serves a purpose: so that people can know when your copyright expires and your content falls into the public domain. If you move up the date incorrectly, you are cheating the rest of the world. As you can imagine, we are not that eager to copy your home page for free 75 years from now, but the law doesn't care.
- forensic 17y agoI'm pretty sure that's not how it works. "Copyright notice was required under the 1976 Copyright Act. This requirement was eliminated when the United States adhered to the Berne Convention, effective March 1, 1989." (First Hit on Google, 2009, p.1)
- dpifke 17y agoThe copyright notice is unnecessary, but the grandparent is absolutely correct on how it works. The year is date of first publication. See http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ03.pdf http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ03.pdf.
- ig1 17y agoNo it wouldn't, there's no penalty for falsely claiming a copyright unless the copyright belongs to someone else. Having a date and copyright symbol isn't required by the Berne convention, however it can impact the size of damages awarded in a copyright infringement case.
- nudist 17y agoNeat list, but just keep in mind that many of these (20-40%?) are inaccurate. Many startups listed as active have actually failed, but they kept their site up. Also, a vast majority of the acquisitions shown here were for talent. They generally involve very little actual money and in many cases could be considered company failures. Still, I'm happy for the successes. But in startupland there are many magic tricks to make things look better than they are.
- veemjeem 17y agoI'm sure for every round of YC, there are a few companies that don't even make it to launch. The ones that don't launch are not even listed.
- ig1 17y agoI've got most of the companies that failed to launch, plus we know how many companies YC has funded in total so we can deduce how many never launched but aren't listed either.
- ig1 17y agoI had a bit of a dilema on that point. I'm reasonably connected with the london startup scene, which naturally has connections to the YC scene, so I know through a fairly reliable grapevine that some of the acquisitions were "mercy acquisitions". However given this information is essentially "private" I don't feel comfortable publically disclosing it, so I've stuck to public published data about acquisitions. I'm going to go into the acquistions a bit more in another post, I'll see if I can find some way around the dilema.
- eru 17y agoWhat are the reasons that the `official' information is kind of closed?
- wensing 17y agoOT, but why did you use a backtick for your 'quotes'? Is that an OS or keyboard thing, or a personal preference, or what? I've never been able to determine the rhyme or reason on that.
- spicyj 17y agoPresumably it's the ASCII-man’s way of doing “curly” quotation marks.
- kd5bjo 17y agoIn TeX, backticks are used for open quotes, and straight ones are used for close quotes. That's where I picked up the habit originally.
- seiji 17y agoSee: http://www.public.asu.edu/~arrows/tidbits/quotes.html http://www.public.asu.edu/~arrows/tidbits/quotes.html English keyboards don't have the nice typographical up/down quote marks and using « » just looks strange... so we hack it with `quotes.'
- breck 17y agoWhat's really cool is that 18% of YC founders are now millionaires.
- jack7890 17y agoIs this true? Evidence?
- zackattack 17y agoIt's not true. He's just not very smart. He thinks that receiving funding makes you a millionaire.
- breck 17y agoActually, I don't think that, I was just being a wise ass (so your comment is deserved :) ).
- breck 17y agoWell, it could be true. Maybe someone should do the math? And yes I'm talking liquidity, not paper worth.
- manish 17y agoI did not understand how 2.6x of 15K will be 650K, can someone please explain
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- uuilly 17y agoI had forgotten all about "Web Shaka" (YouOs). Far and away the most classic name for a company. I hope they are doing well wherever they went.
- thomaspaine 17y agoOne of the co-founders went on to co-found thesixtyone (YC W09)
- srini 17y agoThanks for your wishes! We're still lurking around news.YC. We, WebShaka, went on to work on Project Wedding after YouOS; when that site was acquired, we and YC had an exit. The four of us are all in startups of various maturities; as someone already mentioned: Sam went on to start thesixtyone.com, which was round #2 of YC for him!
- wensing 17y agoNow just imagine if we had a post-mortem on every one that said 'closed'.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- callmeed 17y ago13 acquisitions out of 145 companies. Almost l0%. Seems decent considering that 145 number includes some that are < 1 year old.
- pg 17y ago"80 - Active (25 having received further investment rounds)" The internal contradiction here should have set off some alarms. Are the other 55 supposed to have made it to profitability without raising any further money? According to our records, 89 of 144 startups we funded up to this summer are still alive, for some definition of alive. When startups die, they usually die gradually, so it's hard to say when a startup is actually dead. Some other mistakes I noticed: Nearly all cycles have the wrong number of startups. The furthest off is W07, which he lists has having had 15 startups but actually had 12. There have been two mergers, not one (Ninite is also a merger). YouOS didn't die; it morphed into Project Wedding, which was acquired. 8aweek didn't die either; that's now SocialBrowse. Nambii and pocketfungames are the same company, as were Boso and Auctomatic. Chatterous, iJigg, and Ididwork are all still alive. There's at least one startup listed as active that has been acquired, but it may not be public knowledge. I've never heard of Innovation Fuels. It doesn't seem fair to accuse us of "lack of transparency." Every startup launches publicly when they're ready, after which we list them on our site. It wouldn't be appropriate to list them before they've launched (or more precisely, it would launch them). We're usually not supposed to disclose when they raise additional funding or get acquired. And we're not always sure till long after the fact when they die.
- sriramk 17y agoI think some of these mistakes are understandable. For example, YouOS's home page says that it has been shut down and someone not familiar with the details would interpret this thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=260267 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=260267) to mean that it had died and the founders had gone their separate ways.
- srini 17y agoYou're right - that should be clearer. I've updated youos.com to more accurately reflect our history: WebShaka went on to work on Project Wedding; when that site was acquired, the founders and YC had an exit.
- mattmaroon 17y agoThat's funny, I read through it really quickly and thought "this guy's way off". He's got some acquisitions here I'm guessing you guys would consider more in the failed category. He's got at least one active that I'm almost positive is not, and at least one closed that I know was an acquisition. I too noticed Chatterous and Boso. I thought "oh crap, I didn't know iJigg closed." Then I just looked at their site, which I guess he did not. I can see how it would be really hard for an outsider to know some of those. I can't see why one would bother to try, at least publicly, to bring transparency to a private concern.
- pxlpshr 17y agoIn my mind -- who gives a damn. Either ycom is for you or it isn't. You know what's important about it? Ycom gives young people with ideas but no track record an opportunity to prove themselves. Outside of SV, it's very difficult for most young entrep. working in technology to find people/ecosphere, much less investors, who can relate... If you think ycom's "rate of failure" is a jeopardy to your idea... you're likely drinking wayyyyy to much of your own kool-aid. You're not an entrepreneur if you're focused on failure.
- gridspy 17y agoIf YC is financially sound, it will continue to fund more smart entrepreneurs and will get emulated. Great for everyone.
- pxlpshr 17y agoquite shocked this was down-voted to the ground. i wish people would express themselves outside of pressing a button. maybe it was just me but i thought the tone of the blog post was negative, or perhaps it was just because he opened by stating ycom lacked transparency and it came off accusatory. furthermore, i understand the importance of performance metrics but I always felt like ycom's purpose was more altruistic than just being about the return. (i'm a realist, i understand bills need to be paid and money to reinvest, but yeah...)
- ig1 17y agoPartly I was playing devil's advocate, I think YC do a great job overall (although I do think a little more transparency on failures would be good for everyone), but it is a criticism I've heard repeatedly. As I do point out in my conclusion YC do look like they do much better than angel investors and provide real "extra value".
- Kliment 17y agoI like the idea of doing an analysis like this, however deficient the data. It makes people think about it. That said, why not have a status line next to each startup in the list on the YC page, that fetches updates from the startup website? Limit it to n characters and show the text and update time. This will also provide an automatic measure of when they last showed signs of life.
- FreeRadical 17y agoI think there's too much arguement over active and inactive in this thread when the real discussion should be around the rates of return versus traditional angel investors.
- tdavis 17y agoI'm amazed at how good TicketStumbler is at keeping off all YC-related lists! You can add another "Active/Accidental Stealth" to S08 if you like ;)
- ig1 17y agod'oh. Don't know how I missed that one, added it now.
- pchristensen 17y agoLooks like you have to add an acquisition: AppJet/Etherpad - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=977015 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=977015