If Airbnb is valued at $1B and if there are 200 YC alums who've raised, that adds $5M to the "average valuation" of each YC startup. (I know those #s are not right but just for purposes of the example).
Those median valuation figures available?
If optimizing for the median outcome is your goal, VC funding is probably not a good plan.
Plus, "median series A returned a loss" - huh? Can you clarify?
If 5 companies have valuations of $5, $10, $15, 20, $1000, the avg is $210 million. The median is $15 million. I'd argue the median is more representative of valuations received than averages. And if you're a startup founder, the median is more useful to gauge the program as that is more likely what your valuation will be near than the average.
New founders might care more about the median, but big investors, not so much.
>> If 5 companies have valuations of $5, $10, $15, 20, $1000
The YC average is quite decent. The median result is likely to be $0.
If this probability distribution scares you, it is time to rethink startup companies.
The median is more representative of what a founder's expected financial return is, but many folks aren't optimizing for that. If they are, you need to look at the off-balance-sheet asset: the six-figure job offer from Google, FB, MS, Yahoo, etc. etc. etc. that is generally available to people of the viable startup-starting caliber.
Since the mean startup return is so driven by a small number of massively successful outliers, it makes economic sense that the median outcome will not look so great. (If startups presented a good chance of being as good as the next best option, plus a small chance of F-U money, nobody would work anywhere else.)