The Y Combinator Database | Hacker News Reader

The Y Combinator Database

ycdb.co

196 pointsmilhouse133731 comments

Infogami didn't die, it merged with reddit. I know because I had to figure out how to make that code actually run.

The footer reads:

"Search experience powered by Algolia (W14). Icons powered by Font Awesome (S15). Hosted on Heroku (W08).

The original (v1.0) YCDB was rated #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt, Sept 27, 2017. The original YCDB was made with Webflow (S13)."

I suppose you can no make an entire website/product only using YC company tech. ha.

Well, TIL that the ACLU was in YC W17 thanks to the "top 100 tweet count" page. I was kind of surprised by that, are there other well-established organizations that have joined YC at a (very) late stage or are they unique?

Quora joined after they were at a nine figure valuation.

Guessed this site was made by them when the third metric was:

"The Most Photogenic Based on Snappr Photo Quality Score"

Interesting site regardless

"Most photogenic"... Really??

EDIT: And here come the downvotes, so let me clarify my stance. I haven't a clue what Snappr does, or what their definition of 'photogenic' is. But here is the dictionary definition of 'photogenic':

    (adjective) (especially of a person) looking attractive in photographs or on film.

So my impression was that this metric was to do with how attractive perhaps the founders were. The overall impression here is YC somehow rates the aesthetic qualities of people in order to select who is 'in'. That sort of impression can do untold damage to their brand, and I am surprised that they let this be a thing.

Matt from Snappr (maker of YCDB) here - your point is totally fair, 'photogenic' is not the best word for it. I just went ahead and changed it to 'most aesthetic' for clarity. Thanks for pointing that out.

According to the page (https://www.ycdb.co/top-companies/photo-quality-score), it is:

"Score between one and 100 based on an analysis of all photos on the company's homepage. Source: Snappr."

I wonder which one's the top scoring one!

https://www.ycdb.co/top-companies/photo-quality-score

OH BOY IT'S SNAPPR! This is probably not biased.

Of course it is. The whole site is made by them[1]. Clever marketing move!

[1] YCDB is made in San Francisco by the team at Snappr, which is a YC company (W17). Why? Because we love YC companies and discovering new ones! Edited by Matt Schiller.

The "search" seems more like autocomplete than search. Try entering "banana" and the search button is disabled

They're missing the YC13 company I work at (Lob).

Matt from Snappr here. This is the source we used for the base list of companies: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ For some reason Lob doesn't appear.

YC's list has a surprising number of errors. Lob is on Seed-DB, though - https://seed-db.com/accelerators/view?acceleratorid=1011

Looking at the top 100 funded companies: it's interesting that the majority are in the "Consumer", "Dev Tools" or "Healthcare" categories, and hardly any are in the "AI and ML" category.

AI is an approach, not a market, so I suggest those who make bank from AI will be companies like consumer, healthcare etc..

It's a tool.

The list is charting total funding. Older companies that have raised more rounds will be at the top.

There is also https://yclist.com which is not as polished but has some interesting information.

Very nice! Is the raw data publicly available? Or is it just scraped from Crunchbase?

It has become very tough to scrape crunchbase off late. I cant do any scripting around it using headless chrome. It instantly recognizes you are not a human

you should make detailed ( already public, not suggesting nefarious data snooping ) info available on founder profiles. This would allow mining what kind of founders tend to do well vs average vs poorly

That information would likely be useless because of survivorship bias.

no, it wouldn't be useless. Firstly, bias alone doesn't make information useless. Secondly, how is it survivor bias if the dataset also includes failed ycombinator companies?

What's the marketing angle for Snappr here?

It's classic side-project marketing to increase brand visibility, etc

This is awesome, but I also wondered how much effort it took the Snappr team to build? I suspect just having a plug/link in the footer is enough, plus SEO juice.

A lot of the big hits from quite a while ago. I wonder if there is a trend?

How long as it been since a big, recognizable brand hit?

it'd be interesting to see companies by investment size vs. exit value. I noticed when clicking around that one of the companies with the highest investment (Cruise) exited for less than its total investment and it got me thinking about which companies might exit for a profit/loss.

YC's portfolio is staggering. Whatever they use to pick who to fund, they're doing it right.

I wonder if it would be reasonable to match their investments albeit on a much smaller scale

Reply on news.ycombinator.com