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Comment by scarface_74 | Hacker News Reader

Let’s look at YCs “successes” as far as the companies that have gone public.

https://medium.com/@kazeemibrahim18/the-post-ipo-performance...

YC couldn't care less how well these companies fare post-IPO. Post-IPO, their job is essentially done, and they cash their investment.

They're probably busting champagne if the peak valuation is instantly after IPO. That means they maximized the potential payoff.

You're right that one perspective to consider how well these companies are doing is to look at their continuous growth, and that includes post-IPO valuation.

At the same time, YC backed a couple of dozen unicorns. Including those that, despite having a valuation lower than at the time of their IPO, are still in the 10-digit range. Well, I'd be the last one to complain if I got to seed fund a company that ended up at $50B+ valuation.

Having said that, it's just a financial aspect of the argument, and it's only focused on post-IPO, whereas most YC-backed unicorns have not yet done so.

If you look at product innovation, you'll see Dropbox, Airbnb, Gitlab (save for Airbnb, all failures by your standards), Stripe, Deel, Zapier, all household names in my world. Why weren't these products developed by big techs?

You could easily point to one that would be especially interested in taking over that part of the pie.

Dropbox as Steve Jobs says is a feature not a product. For the price of 2TB of storage from Dropbox, you can get the entire GSuite or Office 365 or a slew of services from Apple including 2TBs of storage. In the case of O365, you get 1TB of storage for each of 6 (5?) users and Office on an unlimited number of devices for multiple users.

What BigTech company would it have made sense to get into the AirBnb market?

Gitlab has never been the industry standard for hosted Git. It was always GitHub. Even then, I guess it would have made sense for Microsoft to compete better. They did have Team Foundation Services and after many name changes Azure DevOps (unrelated to Azure. It was more of a git compatible hosted version of TFS).

Also none of the BigTech companies are in payments aside from Apple Pay/Google Pay and Amazon mostly cares about internal payments.

Deel is also a company that wouldn’t have made sense for any of the large tech companies.

I know AWS has its own orchestration service and I’m assuming GCP and Azure have it also. What motivation would they have to offer a product that works outside of their cloud platform?

I wouldn’t be surprised if AWS Step Functions get more usage than Zapier (which I had never heard of before today).

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