98% of Top YC Companies by valuation use a .com domain | Hacker News Reader

98% of Top YC Companies by valuation use a .com domain

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I was wondering about the statements here (2015) and they not only hold true but seem even higher for .com use in 2019:

Per: http://paulgraham.com/name.html

> 100% of the top 20 YC companies by valuation have the .com of their name. 94% of the top 50 do.

Top 20: 100% (2019)

Top 32: 100% (2019)

Top 50: 98% (2019)

Top 100: 95% (2019)

(Twitch #21 actually owns twitch.com ... xendit #53 owns xendit.com .. cleartax owns cleartax.com ... quero owns quero.com )

Ref: https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/

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But did they use a .com in the beginning? Or did they fetch those expensive domains later on?

Also, some of those companies were created a many years ago, when there were probably more cheap .com domain names available. "reddit.com" was probably pretty cheap to get in 2005.

And I bet if you look at the much longer list of all the YC companies that failed, you'll probably find out that most of them also had .com domains. If there's any correlation between domain name and success, I'm guessing it's pretty low. Companies ultimately succeed because they have a good product, good marketing and good management (and are in the right place at the right time), not because they have a catchy name.

Reddit.com is not what anyone would consider a 'valuable' domain in any way. It's pretty much random. There wouldn't really isn't any good reason to not use a .com if you are going for a madeup and pretty much random domain name (all down side).

> If there's any correlation between domain name and success, I'm guessing it's pretty low.

PG's point (and I don't agree with everything he says or thinks but he is correct here) is that any serious company uses a .com domain. Of course so do failure and non serious companies.

> when there were probably more cheap .com domain names available.

Good .com domains were expensive in the 90's. And to my reply to the other comment 'expensive' does not frame anything relating to the value for the particular purpose.

But why term it 'expensive'? For one you don't know the price but even assuming the cost was non trivial (and it almost certainly was I will agree to that) saying 'expensive' infers lack of value. It's almost the language that is used in news articles to invoke some kind of emotion in the reader beyond what it should be. "

The value relates to a particular purpose. An engineer earning $150,000 per year would be expensive to a small hardware store (a non starter even employment wise most likely) but not to Google, Amazon or even certain well funded startups.

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