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Curious as to how YC has done in comparison to other incubators? Any benchmarks available?

They are about 10x the next best (Techstars) based on valuation of the companies they've funded (~$80B vs ~$8B). Valuation isn't a perfect metric, but it's a reasonable proxy for performance.

Those numbers only makes sense when places in the context of the number of investments made and the total investment made.

I think the numbers make sense with or without the total number of investments figure since the large outcomes in venture are driven by a small number of companies, and not the pack.

That said, the total number of companies funded isn't that different. We're at ~1400 and according to the below, TS is at 1000: https://www.techstars.com/content/accelerators/growing-world....

It is so hard to actually get the VC business model. If in all these years, every single YC company had failed except for Airbnb, YC would still be 4X better than the second best competitor.

To put the same fact in different words, if they had not invested on Airbnb and Dropbox, they would not be the leading incubator.

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