Show HN: Foundertrace – chain of YC startups founded by its employees | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Foundertrace – chain of YC startups founded by its employees

foundertrace.com

39 pointsloondri14 comments

Inspired by PG’s tweet about a chain of 4 YC startups where the founder worked at a YC startup, I vibe coded and generated these genealogy chains for all ~6k YC startups. And to make these trees easily accessible I packaged them into a hosted webapp.

Few noteworthy YC startups which have had huge impact in YC ecosystem

Airbnb - 83 YC startups spawned

Stripe - 67 YC startups spawned

Dropbox - 50 YC startups spawned

Justin.tv/Twitch - 47 YC startups spawned

More recently founded YC startups which have spawned a lot more YC startups

Rappi - 21 YC startups spawned

Brex - 20 YC startups spawned

Scale AI - 19 YC startups spawned

Open articleView on HN

PG's tweet that inspired this https://x.com/paulg/status/1994904099566031300

Interesting point about the chains of YC startups. It really makes you think about how interconnected the startup ecosystem is. I wonder if there's an unspoken pressure to “keep it in the family,” so to speak, where founders might feel inclined to hire from their previous startups, or even lean on those networks when starting something new.

I've noticed trends where certain skills or experiences seem to bubble up in waves – like when a specific tech stack becomes popular and then a bunch of startups pop up around it. It’s almost like there’s a breeding ground effect happening.

And what about the concept of mentorship? Do you think these 'family trees' could lead to more structured mentorship, where founders from successful startups actively guide the next generation? Could be an interesting angle to explore!

I’m curious about Edge cases too. Like, what happens when a founder breaks away from the traditional path, either founding a startup without that chain or maybe even pivoting away from the typical YC model? It makes these genealogies feel both fascinating and a touch limiting. I love seeing these connections getting mapped out, but part of me wonders if we might miss some innovative outliers by focusing too much on these chains.

Yc founder, there's not really any pressure like this that exists. Basically i think it's a proximity thing and consistent exposure to a specific section of the startup world that makes this happen.

Basically all those people would go all the same networking events sponsored by yc. There's not pressure so much as these people all have frequent and paid for, opportunities to "hang out" and talk about tech stuff together. Its possible you could define this as "pressure" but I think it's more of who you hangout with rather than some top down implicit force.

This is awesome! One note, some of the batch years are wrong, I see someone from S24 marked as S19.

Let me check and fix. Also if possible, mind sharing for which company its marked as S19 vs S24?

https://foundertrace.com/companies/fair_square/

Very cool! It looks like you've purchased the data from a vendor, is that right? I love graphs of all kinds, so I was hoping to fetch the raw data and have a look at it with pyvis/networkx.

Have mentioned the source at the top right header. Its by Crustdata.

Sorry, what I was clumsily trying to say is something like: "As an outsider to the startup world, your project has made me curious about the shape of the startup ecosystem as a whole. I bet you have the data to generate that picture! It is unfortunate that our market system is not yet sophisticated enough to compensate people for the difficult/valuable work of data collection, while also maximizing availability of data for those curious to use it."

At first I did not explore the tree visualizations in your web app: I simply noticed an index of company trees. Using the tree visualizer (which shows founders' names and pictures), I immediately realized that these trees represent complex human stories involving thousands of years of individual people's hard work. Interpreted that way, the data deserve a degree of awed respect that I did not show in my original comment. Truly sorry for that.

If you're curious about the shape of the startup ecosystem the way I am, there are a few things you could try. (In what follows I'm assuming "full graph" means company-company links with timestamps, not stories about individual people). pyvis has a feature that allows you to build a static html file with an embedded interactive representation of a graph. The data is embedded in the file, so you might not be able to share that unless you dropped enough information to conform such sharing to your data license. IIRC the static file has limited query/filter functionality so it can be difficult to make large graphs manageable for visualization. If that happens you can try using a graph database with a query UI. I remember another HN submission last year that (IIRC) used neo4j as a backend and provided a web UI with this kind of query/visualize workflow. I believe they also shared Github repos with the front-end/back-end code.

Anyway, thank you for sharing your project and sorry for the shit comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45066060

He scrapped it

Very creative name choice by

Dasha Cherepennikova to

[flagged]

On HN, please don't use quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting someone when you aren't. It's an internet trope that doesn't contribute to thoughtful conversation, which is what we're trying for here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The etymology of "elite" is relevant, here--if you nose what I mean.

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