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Comment by TigeriusKirk | Hacker News Reader

Asking because I have no idea - What companies were the big wins from Sam's YC time?

Flexport, Brex, Ginkgo, Rappi, Deel, Scale.ai, Rippling, Faire, OpenSea, Razorpay Checkr, Gitlab, Meesho, Monzo, Flock, Retool, IronClad, FlutterWave, Xendit Groww, Jeeves, Solugen, ShipBob, Front, Mux, TruePill, Jasper.ai ...

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=S19&batch=W19&ba...

I'm surprised I don't recognize a single one of these companies. Isn't YC most famous for companies like AirBNB, Reddit, Twitch, Instacart, Dropbox, Doordash, etc. all things I use and that broke into pop culture? Or is that entirely from pre-Altman era and now it's just all tools for developers?

YC has been doing a lot more B2B for the last decade or so than in its early days. Many of the early unicorns (including all of those you listed) were B2C companies, so they're more well-known.

Oh ok. It looks like as a small business we use Gusto, so that's been useful for us. But it's kind of strange to me they had such a string of big B2C successes early on and then that side evaporated entirely.

The B2B stuff seems like things YC companies can just sell each other and make startup pain points easier, like pick axe stuff that doesn't require as much original vision or as much risk.

If you don't recognize any companies from that list (a number of which are very successful), then that's likely because you only learn about companies once they hit a truly massive scale, which takes time (and explains why the ones you know are older).

And there's also B2B vs B2C.

You've never heard of GitLab? I also listen to a lot of podcasts and Retool/ShipBob ads are probably 2% of my total lifetime listening time

I have heard of that one, and I guess to be fair looking at the list again I've heard of OpenSea a few times too as an NFT marketplace. Just not the target customer I guess, I am not a developer (or into NFTs).

Of those, literally the only one I’ve heard of is GitLab. Hard to imagine “ShipBob” is a “big win” for YC.

It's a very big win, but it's B2B logistics, so if you don't deal in adjacent industries you're unlikely to have heard of it.

You’d need to consider baseline (wins/fails ratio) adjusted for macro conditions. And then look only at the subset of companies where Sam had impact.

A better way of looking at it would be to try analyzing the performance of Sam’s personal investments. And comparing it against a baseline (e.g. Sequoia or YC).

He became president of YC in 2014. So probably Cruise, W14.

Yeah Cruise has been killing lately

Too soon.

Gitlab is a big one.

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