Status of every startup incubated by Y Combinator and other seed accelerators

* They start with ~7%, but almost all funding deals mean they get diluted. The bigger the acquisition, the more funding the company has taken (in general), so the less equity YC has (which means figuring out the average, even if you could, wouldn't help you much because the bigger funding deals would get overrepresented when you multiplied average equity * big exit where they actually were down to <1%).

* The average investment is more like $20k. It's $11k+$3k/founder, so $17k for a 2-person company and $20k for a 3-person. I think that changed fairly recently though. I remember it being all 5's and 10's when I first heard about YC. Maybe $10k+$5k/founder? So that'd be $20k for 2 founders, $25k for 3.

There's also probably a decent amount of money spent to fly people out to the interviews. $600/startup, if you assume they interview 2-3x as many as they fund, that's ~$1200 more per funded startup, or an additional 5% or so.

Plus there's the cost of the office and utilties and dinners and such. (Just wondering, how nice/expensive is the food at the dinners?)

But I think they're operating with a trend that shows that they will be highly profitable when you consider all the startups that they've already funded that will exit.

That means the startups in Summer '09, Winter '09 and this summers are probably being seeded using that fund.

The way I've generally looked at it is that YC has generally broken even or had a small profit so far on the exits they've had. They'll likely generate their massive return once companies like Dropbox, Loopt, etc have their exits.