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Comment by dutchbrit | Hacker News Reader

"But we don’t keep statistics on total revenue or jobs created, though I expect both numbers would be impressive."

I find this rather odd, since these numbers actually mean a lot to YCombinator. You even blogged that YCombinator would like to create 1 million jobs recently (http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-rfs-one-million-jobs). How can you know you've reached one of your goals without even tracking the stats? Even though you don't have stats on revenue, do you at least keep track of profits? This seems like quite important/crucial information.

Ps. Don't see this post as a bash - I think what you guys are doing is awesome!

Cheers,

Sam Granger

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We hate asking portfolio companies to do any extra work for us. They notify all previous investors when they raise more money, so we have that information, but for jobs and revenue we'd have to ask them to take time to do something that would be helpful for us and not for them.

(We may start asking for more company performance stats, since fewer and fewer companies have boards and it's valuable for companies to report this frequently. But that'd be because we thought it was in the best interest of the companies, not YC.)

Is the number of employees always one of the first bullet points in board meeting Power Point slide? You could just add them all up.

What board meeting?

> fewer and fewer companies have boards

Yeah, I saw that, I was thinking most of the bigger companies that have taken extra funding and have multiple employees would have a board. I'd say these would have the lion's share of the employee count.

Hey Sam, thanks for your reply. I understand your point of view, but surely, asking them on a yearly basis for example shouldn't take up that much time. At the end of the day, we're talking about figures that any founder should know out the top of their head (maybe not to the dot but at least a rough estimate). I agree that it should benefit the companies too, don't get me wrong. Ps. Please say hi to Lachy next time you see him!

Ps 2. Not sure why this is being downvoted, but whatever!

That's an individual decision, but this is really about a decision-making algorithm. If YC asks founders for revenue numbers in this case, that implicitly endorses the idea of taking up founder time in any other case with higher RoI. That can add up really quickly, and presumably YC doesn't want to set the threshold that low.

For a cult that asks founders to attend weekly dinners I'm sure they can ask for simple statistics once a year that takes 5 minutes.

Hi Sam, I was able to pull some data on these things via Mattermark. http://mattermark.com/yc-portfolio-stats-mattermark-crunches...

267 companies currently have 2 or more employees

8,164 people are currently employed by a YC company [1]

121 companies have disclosed an exit (no IPOs, all acquisitions so far)

66% of YC companies are based in the Bay Area, followed by New York (7%) and Boston (2%)

76 un-exited companies have raised a venture round of funding (Series A or beyond)

There is a nearly 50/50 split between B2B and B2C startups in the portfolio

The average Series A stage YC company has 26 employees and has raised $10.2M of funding in its lifetime.

[1] The total number is probably much higher, many of these companies do not have LinkedIn pages or employees on LinkedIn, Crunchbase, news, and other sources until they are further along. I think an estimate of 9,000 to 10,000 current jobs created by current YC companies is reasonable.

YC's goal is to help startups take first baby steps and raise money on a larger scale.

So most important stat is what % of companies do that. Based on your data it seems (76 + XYZ) out of 716 where XYZ is companies out of 121 exits who raised more money prior to exit.

It'd be interesting to know based on cohort (batch) analysis if YC is getting better in achieving its goal or not.

It'd also be interesting to know where YC stands on this compared to other comparable accelerators/incubators.

> YC's goal is to help startups take first baby steps and raise money on a larger scale.

I thought YC companies have moved up in maturity over the years. More specifically, I thought current YC batches have more companies that have built product, found early product/market fit and are now ready to grow.

While phrased as a statement, the above is more of a question, since I don't know the answer.

That said, "and raise money on a larger scale" is still probably spot on and hasn't change much over the years.

> "YC's goal is to help startups ... raise money on a larger scale."

I don't think this is YC's goal. I recall comments from pg to the effect that if all the companies raised money on demo day, then maybe YC wasn't selecting properly (for the risky, out-there, stuff).

Quote from the about page (http://www.ycombinator.com/about/) ...

"At Y Combinator, our goal is to get you through the first phase. This usually means: get you to the point where you’ve built something impressive enough to raise money on a larger scale. Then we can introduce you to later stage investors—or occasionally even acquirers."

I stand corrected, thank you.

What I was trying to get at above was that if "% of companies funded" post demo-day is a metric YC wants to maximise, then it would be trivial for them to get to near 100% by only selecting the obviously investable propositions 3 months earlier. If they did this, they'd simply be following whatever fad that VCs happen to be chasing and might miss outliers (even PG tried to convince the Airbnb founders to try something else).

This isn't quite right, those 76 are the ones that have not yet exited. Many of the exited companies also raised money and were not included in that particular stat.

I did some cohort analysis comparing YC, 500, and Techstars over a year ago. Probably time for another one: http://mattermark.com/startup-index-y-combinator-companies-h...

"we'd have to ask them to take time to do something that would be helpful for us and not for them."

I see it as what is good for you is good for them.

Knowing jobs allows you to influence policy because info like that is often used by politicians as a reason for agreeing with a particular position. Also a politician that is impressed with YC (for whatever reason "hey they create jobs") would be more likely to help a YC company (or YC) the same way a politician would take note and help anything that he personally has experience with. So keeping up the YC brand is important. [1]

I'm also not clear on exactly (with respect to jobs for example) how much work is involved in supplying that information. (Obv. someone at YC has to keep track of it of course which is work but it certainly seems worthwhile to do.)

[1] For example say I am contacted by YC for something that I do. Don't you think because I know who you are I am going to take notice and possibly be a bit more helpful than if I got a call from an incubator that I had never heard of?

You could get away with a voluntary Wufoo survey limited to 5- 10 questions. Our company would have time for that (2-3 minutes?)

I was just wondering last night when YC was going to build a free Mint-like money tracking app for portfolio companies that had the secondary effect of reporting back how they were doing financially. That way there'd be no bothersome reporting obligations for founders beyond checking a box to let YC pull reports or get read-only access.

Why should YC have access to this info and not other investors (who've arguably put more money in)? Reporting cycles allow you present more context, whereas real-time feeds would lead to knee-jerk reactions.

While those are definitely interesting numbers, it's important to understand that for rapidly growing companies, jobs and revenue are typically trailing indicators of success, while valuation is more of a leading indicator (though obviously not 100% reliable). For example, Google and Facebook both had high valuations long before they had high revenue or head count.

One plausible explanation... YC needs to be notified when portfolio companies take on new funding, upon which they will receive access to valuation and financing information (eg. so they can exercise any pro rata rights). They don't need to go out of their way to request this information, nor do they need to unduly burden their portfolio.

For job and revenue information, they would need to directly reach out to portfolio companies and ask them to self-report. I'm sure most would... but it's not exactly passive.

I say this non-facetiously: any startup that looks like it might be hitting 1,000,000 jobs will be quite visible to YC as a good candidate to hit that number. They don't need to know how many jobs are created by most of their companies because it doesn't matter.

Also, once YC funds a company, they don't care what goal the company originally planned to hit during interviews.

Only a select few of the largest companies in the world employ 1,000,000+ people. The chance that a startup company will displace an international conglomerate like Walmart (most of whom's employees work for very low wages) is nil.

Walmart was a startup once. Starting a company to take on an entrenched giant is not rational. But I don't know what else I would do. It's right for me to take on Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis. Probably not for everyone.

Creating jobs doesn't necessarily mean employing people. A marketplace could create jobs by facilitating freelancer/client relationships which were otherwise impossible or unlikely to happen.

The criteria on the YC website specifically says they aren't talking about employing 1,000,000 people. They are talking about creating new things for people to do to earn a living.

>Do you at least keep track of profits? This seems like quite important/crucial information.

I'd be surprised if many of the YC companies actually turn a profit. I imagine that YC's work has long since been done when a company finally starts making money.

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