i am not trying to turn YC into a cult, but i do think it's helpful to see how hundreds of founders and their situations turned out. there are some real characters buried in there.
The idea is to figure out many of the useful details of the YCombinator "black box". The plan is also to use YCombinator start-ups to get information to debug the start-up experience.
Thanks for putting that together, it's really awesome. Reading it in Google Docs was really annoying because any time any one opened the document a new window popped up to tell me "anonymous is now viewing." I had to download it into Excel.
Neat, but such a list needs information about who created it, when it was done and what sources were used. Right now it's pretty much untrustworthy and therefor useless.
I agree; it would be very useful to understand where that came from. Though it looks like someone may have taken my original data above and gone through to look up articles/information to flesh everything out? (Because they kept my placeholders, where I knew how many YC companies were in a class though some hadn't launched.)
made by me, originally for personal use, mostly in october 2010. i started with jedc's spreadsheet, but the blog.awesomezombie.com list seemed to be more accurate about placing startups in the right batches (methodology section of http://blog.awesomezombie.com/2009/12/analyzing-y-combinator... is very relevant).
the successful ones are easy, but the others are more difficult/murky/interesting, and typically map to pg essays in comical fashion.
all the standard sources: their sites themselves, their blogs/twitter accounts, crunchbase (about same vandalism rate as wikipedia), linkedin, facebook, archive.org, hacker news, techcrunch, venturebeat interviews, school newspaper interviews, googlefu. i think the more important point is that where this is wrong, to the extent that people care, they are going to let us all know and it will be fixed.
I'm the author of the awesomezombie list, I've got quite a bit of background research that didn't make it onto that post, so if there's any companies you were stuck with give me a ping and I'll see if I have any more info.
Although a quick look through your spreadsheet indicates you seem to have done a pretty comprehensive job !
Is being acquired the absolute ultimate aim for everybody's (YC) start up? Surely being profitable is enough for many people? I also think there's an extremely important distinction between "being funded" and "profitable", which this chart seems to ignore.
From YC's point-of-view, the ultimate aim is to be acquired or to IPO (which AFAIK has never happened and is unlikely to happen in more than a few exceptional cases). An exit the only way YC gets a return on their investment.
This aligns with tech startup culture generally, where the investors invest with the hope of someday making an exit, and only then does the founders' big payday arrive (the "liquidity event").
In this context, profitability is a secondary question to whether the company is still alive, growing, and on track to delivering the founders and investors a successful exit.
You say: "being profitable is enough for many people" as if being profitable is easier compared to getting acquired. For most web based companies, however, getting acquired is easier.
Two of the "founders doing other things" sites are still useful to me. Snipshot is the easiest online editor for simple cropping that preserves the aspect ratio. Anyvite is the only service I know of that puts event details in the email. I get annoyed at evite.
Slightly off topic, but I'm considering building an web app where startup founders can casually communicate. Founders would be placed into small groups, probably 3-5, and each member of a group would have a "stand up" meeting each day, talking about what they're working on that day, new problems arising, etc.
I believe this would be a healthy channel of motivation, collaboration, and networking.
Founder users of HN, what do you think? I certainly find it interesting as a founder myself, but I want to see if other founders woud be interested as well before I begin to invest time in building the web app.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 48.2 ms ] threadi am not trying to turn YC into a cult, but i do think it's helpful to see how hundreds of founders and their situations turned out. there are some real characters buried in there.
The idea is to figure out many of the useful details of the YCombinator "black box". The plan is also to use YCombinator start-ups to get information to debug the start-up experience.
It's called YC Universe. The website is here: http://ycuniverse.com/
Check it out: http://resourcey.com/site_details/2/news.ycombinator.com/
I agree; it would be very useful to understand where that came from. Though it looks like someone may have taken my original data above and gone through to look up articles/information to flesh everything out? (Because they kept my placeholders, where I knew how many YC companies were in a class though some hadn't launched.)
the successful ones are easy, but the others are more difficult/murky/interesting, and typically map to pg essays in comical fashion.
all the standard sources: their sites themselves, their blogs/twitter accounts, crunchbase (about same vandalism rate as wikipedia), linkedin, facebook, archive.org, hacker news, techcrunch, venturebeat interviews, school newspaper interviews, googlefu. i think the more important point is that where this is wrong, to the extent that people care, they are going to let us all know and it will be fixed.
Although a quick look through your spreadsheet indicates you seem to have done a pretty comprehensive job !
I noticed you've got ModFour as a dev shop, they actually went through YC with a product called ShopKick (see my answer at http://www.quora.com/What-did-the-Y-Combinator-startup-Mod-F...).
I've also got a twitter feed of all the YC companies: http://twitter.com/#!/imranghory/ycombinator
(there are also ycombinator-wXX and ycombinator-sXX lists for the individual batches)
Is that normal? Is it because i live outside US?
This aligns with tech startup culture generally, where the investors invest with the hope of someday making an exit, and only then does the founders' big payday arrive (the "liquidity event").
In this context, profitability is a secondary question to whether the company is still alive, growing, and on track to delivering the founders and investors a successful exit.
I believe this would be a healthy channel of motivation, collaboration, and networking.
Founder users of HN, what do you think? I certainly find it interesting as a founder myself, but I want to see if other founders woud be interested as well before I begin to invest time in building the web app.