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Comment by orb_yt | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to hear some discussion on the following:

I really like developer focused companies like Buglife. However, what path could Buglife take to reach a $1B dollar company?

The post notes that they are currently in 300 apps. I'd assume the majority of these 300 are on a free plan. Let's assume that they hit a growth spurt and end up in 10,000 apps. Let's also assume that every one of those customers is paying for their Premium plan. That works out to a little over $2 million a month in revenue.

Not only that, but there are already very established companies in this space (Fabric/Crashlytics, Firebase, Sentry, etc.). It's also fairly trivial to switch to another provider.

How do companies like this propose they hit that $1B mark?

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1) Does YCombinator only invest in companies with a plan to become $1B?

2) What you're doing right now isn't necessarily the thing you end up doing in the long term. Sometimes it makes sense to create a simple product with a smallish market that people use now, and adapt over time to address or create a larger market. This other discussion today is relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16334035

I think it's a pretty well known fact that YC tends to invest in companies that have the opportunity to be billion dollar ventures.

> What you're doing right now isn't necessarily the thing you end up doing in the long term.

What sort of opportunities do you think a company like Buglife could focus on?

> I think it's a pretty well known fact that YC tends to invest in companies that have the opportunity to be billion dollar ventures.

"Tends to" isn't the same as "always". I expect they'd rather invest in unicorns, but maybe they're willing to invest in a few more modest endeavors for various reasons.

> What sort of opportunities do you think a company like Buglife could focus on?

Beats me. I wouldn't have guessed that Amazon was going to become a cloud provider back when they were just an e-commerce site. I think Paul Graham has said that sometimes YCombinator will accept founders who have an uninteresting idea if they seem like the sort of people who are capable of generating new ideas and changing course as the situations demand.

Flamethrowers.

Crashlytics got acquired for > $100M. It wouldn't be unthinkable for Buglife to reach a similar valuation if they execute well.

I love Crashlytics, it was a great success and continues to be an awesome service. However, this comment highlights my question. Crashlytics was an early "first mover" in this area, has been a goto for developers for years now, and could likely be considered as a "best case" scenario for this type of software. Yet, it was acquired for far less than a billion dollars.

My original comment was in regards to the well known fact that YC tends to invest in companies that have the opportunity to be billion dollar companies. In fact, it's a known question during interviews[1].

So, my question is what do these founders say when asked this question? What possible paths are there to a billion dollars for this type of company?

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/coderpad

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