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Comment by scott31 | Hacker News Reader

Investors are a pretty big signal for this. For example startups that raised money from YC is pretty much guaranteed to be successful.

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Funding is in no way a guarantee of success, and many YC companies have failed. Here's a list https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13HIAEwspdjqKENvi5uHJ...

The list only includes companies that have reported, I'm sure many others just silently die, or barely keep operating.

Another reason investment doesn't equal success, look at Pebble, $63m investment, acquired for $23m. How much of that acquisition money do you think went to employees.

Not to pick on Pebble, if your definition of success is shipping a product people love, that defines a new industry, and that you can be proud to have worked on, I'm sure that ticked all the boxes, but from a monetary standpoint, it was not a winner.

Do you have stats on that? Based on my anecdata, I don't think YC startups are guaranteed successes at all.

This is false, there are plenty of failed YC companies. Just search around you'll find lots of "Our Incredible Journey" type posts. Yes they have an advantage but are not immune to anything...

Can you define successful? Only one single company from YC has gone public. To me, having "successful" illiquid stock is the definition of "not successful" from the employee's perspective.

That's a really good point, but I assume there have been other YC Companies that have exited (acquired, etc.)

Being acquired very frequently yields a payout for investors and executives, and a $0.00 check for rank-and-file employees (or even less if they foolishly exercised their stock before acquisition).

Two YC companies have gone public, actually - Dropbox and PagerDuty.

Thanks for the correction, but the point still stands. Two out of "over 2000 YC companies." [1]

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/

What about companies that are in early/pre-seed stage? Any way to know?

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