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198 people

ycombinator.posterous.com

92 pointspg32 comments

You probably aren't aware that we just hired 3 more. Make it 201.

Sounds like you are doing good. Issuing any stock to unqualified investors? (Psst, I won't tell the SEC if you won't, Matt)

Is there a crisis actually :)? If yes you have plenty of talent to hire...

Ha. Raising money is bad enough even when you do it above board. Thankfully it seems unlikely I'll have to again.

What is your company if you don't mind me asking?

Blue Frog Gaming

Is draftmix defunct or just in offseason?

As they say on match.com, it's complicated.

What is more significant is that these are 198 highly skilled jobs.

I'm almost positive there are a couple office manager/secretary types in there (though those can be highly skilled too, just in a different way) but yeah, mostly. The average salary is probably 50% above national average.

Ha, I originally typed "What is more significant is that, for the most part, these are 198 highly skilled jobs."

But sometimes you have to be less precise to make a more memorable point.

Interesting, how do you think it fits with your Founder Visa essay? Is it possible to extrapolate and say that 26 companies == 200 jobs, maybe 10k companies ~= 75k jobs? . IMHO, not quite, since 10k companies wouldn't get funded the way current YC companies are, but just thinking about and compiling these stats are a good tool to approach politicians.

Oh, and I just thought about a lame joke: Yay! The ramen industry has 198 new costumers. Actually not that lame, what's the value-social-capital contribution to society from a YC employee, compared to 198 new Google employees? Who would politicians backup? Why they love Wal-Mart even if it decreases the local economy output? And yeah, I know the answer to the last question ;)

another piece not included are all the contractors and service providers we pay every month. There are 18 non-founder employees at Xobni , but then we have at least 2 FTEs in contractors, a part-time CFO, a part-time bookkeeper, and stretching things a bit, a legal bill i don't want to mention (contract attorney, corporate attorney, IP attorney),

there is probably 20-30% of our workforce that isn't counted as employees

it always surprises me to see how many people's lives we touch (and i'm talking outside of all the users)

Why not count founders? At least, those who draw a salary. Those are jobs too.

They're jobs held by founders, not employees. It was an employee count.

That's not a constructive reply. It should be obvious to you that I know that. My comment contained an implicit guess at the purpose of the survey.

Founders are still employees though.

I already had a rough idea of that number. (Multiply the number of startups by 2.5 and you're close.)

I am assuming that most poeple here will be delighted by these numbers. 200 jobs. 100+ startups. Millions of users. Millions of dollars in revenue etc... Great, but frankly I would not measure YC off those numbers.

Fast forward YC 10-20 years from now. You often hear of Paypal or Google Mafia. My guess is that the YC Mafia will be orders of magnitude more powerful.

Successful founders will go on to invest into more startups or create more startups, hence creating more jobs, bringing out more technologies, helping more companies etc....

I agree with you here. The positive effects of successful startups can quickly turn exponential in scale.

YC's just a butterfly, flapping its wings on its side of the globe...

Were you referencing this: http://xkcd.com/378/ ?

Probably just the most common example used to describe chaos theory - the butterfly effect.

I would like to see the trend of this number over time

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Men:_The_198

When I go to http://ycombinator.posterous.com/ I get a message saying "Welcome to neo.taki.net :)". Is this a config error, something weird on my end, is this hacked?....

Somewhat off topic, but that blog is the first time I've seen a picture of pg after all the years of reading his essays and such. He looks nothing like I imagined he'd look. Not sure if that is good or bad, just interesting.

http://www.paulgraham.com/bio.html

Interesting, I never bothered to look for his picture. But when I visited that link I saw the pic and thought, "who's that?". Over time you get a mental picture in your mind of someone you don't see, like when listening to the radio. Then sometimes you finally see that person and the do, or do not, look like your minds picture. Now I have to reconcile his real picture with my minds picture when reading his essays. Based on the voting, I must be the only one. Oh, well...

Oh you aren't the only one. I had the same moment of cognitive dissonance at Startup School last year. You get over it. ;)

Maybe do a more involved study, see how many are programmers, how many are sales people, how many are marketing people, etc etc.

Can I just say: I LOVE posterous. Excellent startup, YC!

Wait, number 200 has to be a supermodel!!

[/HowIMetYourMotherJoke]

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