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"But we don’t keep statistics on total revenue or jobs created, though I expect both numbers would be impressive."

I find this rather odd, since these numbers actually mean a lot to YCombinator. You even blogged that YCombinator would like to create 1 million jobs recently (http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-rfs-one-million-jobs). How can you know you've reached one of your goals without even tracking the stats? Even though you don't have stats on revenue, do you at least keep track of profits? This seems like quite important/crucial information.

Ps. Don't see this post as a bash - I think what you guys are doing is awesome!

Cheers,

Sam Granger

We hate asking portfolio companies to do any extra work for us. They notify all previous investors when they raise more money, so we have that information, but for jobs and revenue we'd have to ask them to take time to do something that would be helpful for us and not for them.

(We may start asking for more company performance stats, since fewer and fewer companies have boards and it's valuable for companies to report this frequently. But that'd be because we thought it was in the best interest of the companies, not YC.)

While those are definitely interesting numbers, it's important to understand that for rapidly growing companies, jobs and revenue are typically trailing indicators of success, while valuation is more of a leading indicator (though obviously not 100% reliable). For example, Google and Facebook both had high valuations long before they had high revenue or head count.
One plausible explanation... YC needs to be notified when portfolio companies take on new funding, upon which they will receive access to valuation and financing information (eg. so they can exercise any pro rata rights). They don't need to go out of their way to request this information, nor do they need to unduly burden their portfolio.

For job and revenue information, they would need to directly reach out to portfolio companies and ask them to self-report. I'm sure most would... but it's not exactly passive.

I say this non-facetiously: any startup that looks like it might be hitting 1,000,000 jobs will be quite visible to YC as a good candidate to hit that number. They don't need to know how many jobs are created by most of their companies because it doesn't matter.

Also, once YC funds a company, they don't care what goal the company originally planned to hit during interviews.

>Do you at least keep track of profits? This seems like quite important/crucial information.

I'd be surprised if many of the YC companies actually turn a profit. I imagine that YC's work has long since been done when a company finally starts making money.

Note the power-law distribution; Airbnb and Dropbox are ~2/3rds of the entire portfolio.

And at least 80% of the portfolio value comes from 23 companies - about 3% of companies funded.

That's the nature of startups. Most don't succeed. I don't think YC would make a claim that they are some automatic path to success, just that they help good ideas to get there
Looks like they'll get a 4th billion dollar company with machine zone if this round closes: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/07/16/newest-hit-game-maker...
Wow. If that round closes, they'll have a bigger market cap than Zynga (currently only $2.7B).
"Number of nuclear energy companies in the current batch: 2"

Awesome. I can't seem to find these two companies yet - have they announced or still under the rader?

That is awesome.

Have there been any aviation/aerospace companies yet?

the idea of a nuclear energy startup is slightly frightening. v. interested to see what they're working on.
"it generally takes companies a few years to get above [$100 million valuation]"

Sama, dropping knowledge...

Very impressive.

I'd love to know how many out of the 716 companies funded so far are still in business per se as independent entities? And among those that are not anymore, what was the exit (successful exit vs. soft landing / acquihire vs. death). I suspect it's really hard to track though, and somewhat subjective.

It wouldn't be too difficult to pay someone a minimal amount to maintain a very detailed spreadsheet of every company that passes through YCombinator and record every stat they can find (and attempt to track how that changes over time). Some columns could be deleted if they are determined to not provide value obviously.

This might allow some interesting patterns to help filter future companies and let them know where the money is best allocated. Optimizing return on investment seems like it would be the most important part of YCombinator, then again I'm not a venture capitalist (but would love to be one some day).

I'm sure this is done somewhat at every incubator / startup investment group but it might be determined to be too valuable to release publicly, but at least a list of companies would be appreciated (all companies, not just the wildly successful ones).

Some possible stats off of the top of my head (per company):

- industry, location, target market

- founder's specialties (marketing, financial, developers). in-house developer or outside contractors. age of founders, university attended

- expected revenue after 1 year, 2 years, 5 years. actual revenue after those times

- number of users, number of paying customers, average revenue per customer. time from conception to first sale

Some of this might be information that they don't want to share, but if willing it would be wonderful to see. Just every data point possible that might offer some kind of correlation between extreme success / moderate success / failure.

The frontpage (http://www.ycombinator.com) now has a quote from Satya Nadella:

“It’s fantastic to see the work Y Combinator is doing to foster innovation and entrepreneurship in the startup community and Hacker News is one of my favorite sources of pointers to hackers and their hacks!”

What's his user name?

I'm not saying he doesn't have a user name but a user name is not required to read HN and click on the links.
Did anyone else notice that Satya has quite a habit of using run-on sentences? I also thought this while reading his letter to employees.
The most impressive 'stat' about these stats is how little most of the startups were when they were accepted into YC. And the average goes on to raise ~$40M(taken from a existing comment on this thread). Take Airbnb as an example...probably no VC, and hardly any angels, would have ever invested in them at the stage YC did.
I wonder why they don't keep statistics on jobs created o rev generated, will be interesting to see quantifiable impact created by the YC community.
When going through YC, it was incredible how respectful the program was with founders' time.

This happens during YC (no pointless meetings) and afterwards (no burdensome data reporting requirements).

I also was surprised (not shocked) to see that data missing. Not shocked because those in the "VC business" usually don't care so much, as long as the get a return on their investment, which could be accomplished without any meaningful revenue.
I'd be interested in this. I bet it is much smaller than any of us anticipate. I'd estimate <5000 jobs total as a high water mark.
I'd be interested to see the stats on valuations of companies that applied to YC but were rejected.
The three companies worth over a billion dollars being: Dropbox, Airbnb and.. I can't seem to remember the third one. Reddit?
Stripe, I believe.

Edit: Here's an article when they hit a $1.75B valuation: http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/22/with-an-eye-to-internationa...

reddit sold for no more than $20M according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4530030
Last I heard (early 2013), Reddit was valued at 400-500 million. I can't imagine it's gotten much more than that.
We'll see who's worth what when they hit the public market :)
Stripe
I would be really curious to know what the median outcome is for YC companies and their founders.
> Total market cap of all YC companies

The word "market" seems pretty strange here. Are there any YC companies with a "market" valuation?

I'd like to see some stats on the companies that failed after YC. How far did they get? Why did they fail? (e.g. failed to raise VS team exploded VS killed by competitor).

This sort of info would be valuable to first-time founders, as they're the sorts of hazards you only typically learn to navigate by experiencing them first hand.

Lots of success stories there with a 10x of investment and many jobs and fortunes made. But also interesting to see just how hard it is to succeed big with 20 of 716 (2.8%) making it to $100M valuation so far even among this every elite set of entrepreneurs given only 3% of the current batch's applicants were accepted.
So conservatively, by market cap it looks like YC is doing 10X on their investment, which is very impressive.

And this is conservatively, since the 3 billion in funding has already been handed out, but some of the companies that have received that funding haven't had a chance to grow and become valuable.

I think an even better idea would be yclist.com or total YC websites calculated along with alexa ranking. That would give a great indication of who has been successful or not. Keep in mind YC also gets also significant press than normal startups so its expected that most should do ok at least.
How do you keep track of how much the companies raise after leaving YC?
You fund <3% of applicants. Surely this means you are passing up a lot of potential positive value. Just curious, what's the limiting factor for YC in scaling to more companies?
Does YC own aprox. 5-7% of the $30B marketcap? Or is there dilution?

  Number of companies funded by YC so far: 716
Can you share how many are outright dead and how many are working, more or less, on the same idea that they started with?
Can you include a stat about (order of magnitude?) jobs created?
Market cap usually only refers to publicly traded companies... Does that apply here?
Power law. I wonder what companies make up 80% of these numbers.
"Total market cap of all YC companies: >$30 billion"

According to who?

All vanity stats. Where are the revenue and profit figures?
Number of YC companies Steve Jobs has worked at, so far: 0
> But we don’t keep statistics on total revenue

Ahhh, yet another reminder as to what matters and what doesn't in the game of VC.