If this is true, maybe there's something particularly interesting about the '84/'85 generation.
These people were about 10 years old when the Web happened and 15 years old when Napster and digital cameras took off, so they probably haven't written too many snailmail letters, bought CDs or taken photos on film.
Perhaps that gives them a perspective that's more "digitally native" than older people, yet they have more experience than the '90s-born generation.
(I'm one of those "old" people I guess, being born in 1980...)
There probably is nothing unique about he '84/'85 generation.
There is an unconscious bias when reviewing applications (especially during interviews) to vote/side with people that look/act/know the same references/same point in life/etc like you. Since previous YC graduates both recommend and (some) decide who gets in, they match what they know.
My theory - people in this age group entered college at a very low point in the software development market. This was both because of the dot-com bubble crash, and because outsourcing had just begun and quality outsourcing was far cheaper than it is today. C, Java, and horrible APIs dominated at the time. Javascript and browser compatibility were a mess. It was a far less glamorous industry than it's become now over the past 15 years.
Few people who began training for a development career at this time were in it just for quick money.
So I was born in '84 and I've been following YC since it launched in 2005. I think there are actually a few unique things about this generation:
- Grew up reading Slashdot, steeped in the values and beliefs of the OSS community.
- Were coming of age during the golden age of blogging ('05-'06) when people with a lot of industry experience were making their insights widely available for the first time. E.g. during the beginning of college when we were all trying to figure out what to do with our lives, suddenly the knowledge of how and why to do a startup became available.
- Coming of age when not suddenly it became possible (but before it easy) to build software that reached a billion people and changed the world.
- Coming of age during the birth of marketing 2.0 -- The Cluetrain Manifesto, Seth Godin, Kathy Sierra, Hugh McCleod, etc.
- Coming of age during the birth of Web 2.0, when suddenly every web business needed to be rebuilt around new design principles, technology (AJAX), and promotional techniques.
- Around for the birth of Y Combinator and The Facebook.
- Impossible to get a job with any possible upward mobility when graduating.
Most of this was happening our sophomore/junior year in college, when suddenly we knew all of this really important world-changing stuff that almost no one with established careers was paying attention to yet.
So yeah, I'm sure our generation isn't unique and wasn't the only one affected by these things, but I do think they probably had a disproportionate impact on us.
It'd be nice to see this data as a distribution. Would tell us a lot more than a median. This might help older founders decide if it's a good fit, or if we'd be outliers there.
Why would you not assume the opposite? I would assume the most experienced people with the most knowledge, contacts, and money to be in their 40s and 50s.
Well, a big point of YC is that it provides the "contacts and money". And of course anyone who is further along in their career has more at risk by going to a startup.
Warning, I'm about to make a couple of massive generalisations...
I would guess that most 40-50 year olds who already have knowledge, contacts and money don't apply to YC, probably because they don't feel that they need it.
I expect that founders at that age are more likely to be coming from a position of experience within their target industry, i.e. solving a problem that they've seen/experienced. They may not be trying to become "X for Y" but solving problem Z that a limited number of clients will pay good money to have solved.
Older founders may have more to risk, so the "go big or go home" model may not be as attractive to them.
As I said, this is a huge generalisation with a lot of guesswork thrown in. I would love to see some more detailed data so that we could draw some conclusions.
Not to mention the fact that it's probably quite a bit harder to convince a group of 40-50 year olds to move to SV for 3 months for $18k than it is a group a 21 year olds.
It's $120k now but yes, one 40 year old engineer working full time makes that in 9 months. Why doesn't YC offer more attractive investment, say $500k, and allow non-SV offices? Is it just the presumption that this won't lead to large returns? Is there any data to support that?
Silicon Valley culture is inherently ageist. The median age is by far the most surprising statistic to me. I would have thought it'd be at least 5 years younger. To me the ageist aspect is part of the idea that only young people should be building products for young people.
This is perhaps an insight into the types of companies YC is funding. They may just have a larger pool of B2B and enterprise companies this session.
In my case (I'm 48) I've been applying to YC (third time lucky) because I have plenty of experience, but don't have the contacts. I suspect most people outside Silicon Valley or the US don't have the kind of contacts that YC can provide, or the kind of money that is necessary to scale their business.
I think the median age reflects the types of companies in the batch. I think in general, younger entrepreneurs take on Consumer, maybe marketplace, and perhaps some dev tools and hardware.
The remaining categories will likely have older, more experienced people
That would have been my guess as well. For many B2B problems you kind of have to understand the right hand side B which means some industry experience. Same for something like aerospace and finance I'd guess.
That being said I also intuitively assumed a younger age. Most certainly bias on my side since it's the youngest founders I tend to read about online.
I'd like to know more about the biomedical companies. There's a lot more of them than I would have imagined. They have to be relatively capital intensive to get going, at least compared to a software startup.
Age of the eldest entrepreneur @YCcombinator = 66?
I sure want to know more about this person, and their start_up!
I'm a relatively older entrepreneur too, fall right on the right side of the median. Recently I had been been thinking of applying to YC. But couldn't convince myself for it, and my age was one of the reasons.
I'm the 66 year old founder, Ken Shear, and our company is Booktrope (my co-founders are 54 and 45). I've been around the block a few times but YC has still been the most valuable educational experience I've ever had. I can vouch for this, YC is no respecter of age, in the best sense. The partners might be quite a bit younger than I am, but years beyond me in experience of starting and growing a business so I've learned an enormous amount from talking with them and from their insights into how startups are done. For my own part, a while back I was working for a judge and one of his colleagues, amused or unhappy at something I'd done, asked me how old I was (in that tone, you know). I asked him, did he mean, intellectually, emotionally or chronologically? He wouldn't say, and neither would I. So, the other thing about YC is probably, there's incredible value to be gotten from it and it doesn't depend on your age, but on how you enjoy it.
I think the rising age of founder trend is a good one. Probably means the snapchat/whatsapp/instagram gold mine is nearly dry and some actually difficult-to-implement and domain-knowledge requiring ideas are starting to come into focus again.
It could also be a sign of many different things. My "gut guess" is that founders with some startup experience that now are heading out on their own are being selected for.
Prior to sharding all partners were responsible for keeping up with everyone in a batch.
Now there are multiple groupings of partners which oversee a smaller subset.
I'm not certain, but I'm sure partners are assigned based on their domain expertise. Though, I'm sure all partners are open to helping anyone in the batch if needed.
Enterprise is a subset of B2B cos. While this isn't an exact science and the very concept of 'Enterprise' has been disrupted by companies such as box.net, I would say that typically: Enterprise = B2B cos with annual contract values > $100k, which usually means a different sales model, too.
Enterprise has nothing to do with only 500 companies in the US.
There is no real difference.
Though some might say if you charge thousands and have dedicated salespeople, you're enterprise, even if you sell to a 25 person architect firm. Sales force is definitely though of as enterprise. While basecamp or twilio is more B2B. It's fuzzy, if there even is a difference.
Excellent. If we're talking civil aviation and space, it may be one of the hardest industries to disrupt thanks to regulatory capture (and a million other things), but from a technical standpoint there is a tremendous amount of room for improving the current state-of-the-art.
so, invested a total of 101 million and current value of investments = 0.06 * 30 bln * dilution factor. So roughly speaking, current value = 300-400 mln ?
Is "Countries represented" only from W15 or overall? If it's only from W15, could it be possible to know the list of all countries represented since the beginning of YC?
This is only representative of W15 companies. We don't have a list of countries overall, since it's not something we've always tracked. But that would certainly be interesting to see.
Would you be able to provide a breakdown on the industry of the companies beyond B2B, B2C, etc? I'm curious how many are in developer tooling, oil & gas and so on and so forth.
We've historically reported companies versus individuals, so we wanted to stay consistent. But that's fair -- we'll put it in those terms next time we release stats.
> As a side note, even though it will break backwards compatibility, we are considering changing how we look at this to the percentage of all founders that are women instead of the percentage of companies with a female founder.
After being told by dozens of people how obviously misleading this statistic is. It was beneath YC to ever release such a phony stat, but it's downright unethical to continue propagating it.
I'm just sharing my opinion. I don't mean it to be a grand condemnation or a big deal. I hardly feel entitled. When otherwise good organizations misbehave I feel free to point it out. I don't complain about getting downvoted when people disagree.
The fact is that this stat is provably misleading. People are understanding, and reporting it as, "25% of YC founders are female" when the reality is very different. YC knows about this and yet continues to use it. I think it's an understandable and small lapse in ethics predictably justified by some weak rationalization.
Likewise, just because you disagree with the parent poster's interpretation doesn't make them "entitled". Just as YC has no obligation to share stats, the parent has no obligation to not have an ethical opinion about that, or to share it.
Yikes - actually I missed the 'founder' below the numbers, so I thought 'companies with a black' was the whole description. Nothing offensive about it as it's actually written, I just skipped my coffee this morning and now look like a jackass. Mea culpa :)
It would be great to have stats on the applicants as well. It would be good to know whether to bother applying given various info (single founder, no customers yet, sector, etc).
103 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadThese people were about 10 years old when the Web happened and 15 years old when Napster and digital cameras took off, so they probably haven't written too many snailmail letters, bought CDs or taken photos on film.
Perhaps that gives them a perspective that's more "digitally native" than older people, yet they have more experience than the '90s-born generation.
(I'm one of those "old" people I guess, being born in 1980...)
There is an unconscious bias when reviewing applications (especially during interviews) to vote/side with people that look/act/know the same references/same point in life/etc like you. Since previous YC graduates both recommend and (some) decide who gets in, they match what they know.
Few people who began training for a development career at this time were in it just for quick money.
- Grew up reading Slashdot, steeped in the values and beliefs of the OSS community.
- Were coming of age during the golden age of blogging ('05-'06) when people with a lot of industry experience were making their insights widely available for the first time. E.g. during the beginning of college when we were all trying to figure out what to do with our lives, suddenly the knowledge of how and why to do a startup became available.
- Coming of age when not suddenly it became possible (but before it easy) to build software that reached a billion people and changed the world.
- Coming of age during the birth of marketing 2.0 -- The Cluetrain Manifesto, Seth Godin, Kathy Sierra, Hugh McCleod, etc.
- Coming of age during the birth of Web 2.0, when suddenly every web business needed to be rebuilt around new design principles, technology (AJAX), and promotional techniques.
- Around for the birth of Y Combinator and The Facebook.
- Impossible to get a job with any possible upward mobility when graduating.
Most of this was happening our sophomore/junior year in college, when suddenly we knew all of this really important world-changing stuff that almost no one with established careers was paying attention to yet.
So yeah, I'm sure our generation isn't unique and wasn't the only one affected by these things, but I do think they probably had a disproportionate impact on us.
I would guess that most 40-50 year olds who already have knowledge, contacts and money don't apply to YC, probably because they don't feel that they need it.
I expect that founders at that age are more likely to be coming from a position of experience within their target industry, i.e. solving a problem that they've seen/experienced. They may not be trying to become "X for Y" but solving problem Z that a limited number of clients will pay good money to have solved.
Older founders may have more to risk, so the "go big or go home" model may not be as attractive to them.
As I said, this is a huge generalisation with a lot of guesswork thrown in. I would love to see some more detailed data so that we could draw some conclusions.
This is perhaps an insight into the types of companies YC is funding. They may just have a larger pool of B2B and enterprise companies this session.
The remaining categories will likely have older, more experienced people
That being said I also intuitively assumed a younger age. Most certainly bias on my side since it's the youngest founders I tend to read about online.
The percentages of companies with a female/black/Hispanic are slightly off. As worded, it should be calculated by
For companies w/ female founders, 25 / 114 = 21.93%, not 23%.Black: 9 / 114 = 7.89%, not 8.03%
Hispanic: 6 / 114 = 5.26%, not 5.35%
I sure want to know more about this person, and their start_up!
I'm a relatively older entrepreneur too, fall right on the right side of the median. Recently I had been been thinking of applying to YC. But couldn't convince myself for it, and my age was one of the reasons.
Now there are multiple groupings of partners which oversee a smaller subset.
I'm not certain, but I'm sure partners are assigned based on their domain expertise. Though, I'm sure all partners are open to helping anyone in the batch if needed.
Can anyone comment on this?
There is no real difference.
Though some might say if you charge thousands and have dedicated salespeople, you're enterprise, even if you sell to a 25 person architect firm. Sales force is definitely though of as enterprise. While basecamp or twilio is more B2B. It's fuzzy, if there even is a difference.
E.g., something that is vertical specific may be more "Enterprise" than B2B
For example, say X% of the people are female, etc.
> As a side note, even though it will break backwards compatibility, we are considering changing how we look at this to the percentage of all founders that are women instead of the percentage of companies with a female founder.
http://blog.ycombinator.com/diversity-and-startups
After being told by dozens of people how obviously misleading this statistic is. It was beneath YC to ever release such a phony stat, but it's downright unethical to continue propagating it.
YC has no obligation to share stats and just because you disagree with the methodology doesn't make them unethical.
The fact is that this stat is provably misleading. People are understanding, and reporting it as, "25% of YC founders are female" when the reality is very different. YC knows about this and yet continues to use it. I think it's an understandable and small lapse in ethics predictably justified by some weak rationalization.
Though as I understand it, African-American is the most current terminology.
I can think of AirBnB, Dropbox, Stripe, ...
Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/07/16/newest-hit-game-maker...
[1] http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579091/0001579091140...
[2] http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/05/instacart-2b-kleiner/
[3] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/12/instacart-a-grocery...
[4] http://graphics.wsj.com/billion-dollar-club/