Y Combinator's Portfolio Performance - over $1MM in cash? | Hacker News Reader

Y Combinator's Portfolio Performance - over $1MM in cash?

sam.bluwiki.com

14 pointsdawie16 comments

GI, GO

Throw us a bone Paul

We're slightly profitable. Probably not as profitable as all the people copying us think. It's hard to predict how much we'll make long-term. We won't make much from the startups that get bought early. If a startup gets bought for $5m after taking an angel round that dilutes us down to 4%, that's only $183k (200 - 17.5) pretax. We won't be buying Gulfstreams on those deals, no matter how many of them there are.

For us to make a lot of money, we'd have to invest in companies that scored very big, and we have no idea yet how many will go through YC. The data is moderately encouraging so far. As well as Loopt there are two other startups funded by big VCs that haven't launched yet. But there's still not enough data to see trends.

Fortunately, unlike a VC firm, we don't need to make a lot of money. The main reason we're doing YC is that it's a cool hack. It makes it even cooler that we might make some money out of it, but that's not essential. We just need to make enough not to have to stop, and we'll probably manage that.

I guess it all comes down to "Doing what you Love", and thanks for the bone.

I recall PG saying somewhere that they took a loss on either Kiko or Reddit. Probably Kiko.

Also, funding numbers used to be different. The earlier startups got $6k times N, rather than $5k + $5k times N.

Yeah, I remember that too. Something like Kiko took ~100k in angel money and the angels got preferred stock so YC ended up with about $0.38 on the dollar.

Good memory. Here's the actual quote: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=5036

Sam, why did you not post this to YC news yourself?

I wanted to spend some more time on the numbers before passing it around.

Also, I think users here consider posting your own blog to be bad form; and I don't really need the points :)

If you're afraid to share something that you considered interesting enough to write, how are you going to promote your company?

I'm not saying spam us every time a few stray neurons fire, but I think this "don't promote your own stuff" idea is some kind of lame artifact from reddit.

I think this "don't promote your own stuff" idea is some kind of lame artifact from reddit.

I couldn't agree more. It's frustrating on reddit to see users downvoted, just because they posted their own blog. IMHO, it only solidifies the "monopoly" top content producers have on the market. New bloggers have no way of promoting their own stuff, and nobody to do it for them.

Regardless, until things change, I would rather not submit my URLs if I think I'm going to take the heat for it - even if the content is good.

I don't know if I buy "posting your own blog is bad form". You still only get one vote.

Is it worse to write relevant content on your own blog and post it, or to troll the rss feeds and jump on content that someone else wrote and post it all the time? The latter one seems even more fishy to me. If you create bad/irrelevant content wouldn't the constant down votes solve the problem?

There are several people here who I would gladly mark most of their posts as spam because they submit each and every thing they write on their blogs.

How about an adsense like blog spam sidebar where the crappy submissions have to sit in shame?

I tend to agree, but my point is: Spam is spam and good posts are good posts, your own or otherwise. We shouldn't define "good form" based on how we want the morons to behave.

I picked it up by chance on Tecnorati. I was not sure about posting your own stuff.

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