YC Stats Winter 2015
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
These people were about 10 years old when the Web happened and 15 years old when Napster and digital cameras took off, so they probably haven't written too many snailmail letters, bought CDs or taken photos on film.
Perhaps that gives them a perspective that's more "digitally native" than older people, yet they have more experience than the '90s-born generation.
(I'm one of those "old" people I guess, being born in 1980...)
There is an unconscious bias when reviewing applications (especially during interviews) to vote/side with people that look/act/know the same references/same point in life/etc like you. Since previous YC graduates both recommend and (some) decide who gets in, they match what they know.
Few people who began training for a development career at this time were in it just for quick money.
- Grew up reading Slashdot, steeped in the values and beliefs of the OSS community.
- Were coming of age during the golden age of blogging ('05-'06) when people with a lot of industry experience were making their insights widely available for the first time. E.g. during the beginning of college when we were all trying to figure out what to do with our lives, suddenly the knowledge of how and why to do a startup became available.
- Coming of age when not suddenly it became possible (but before it easy) to build software that reached a billion people and changed the world.
- Coming of age during the birth of marketing 2.0 -- The Cluetrain Manifesto, Seth Godin, Kathy Sierra, Hugh McCleod, etc.
- Coming of age during the birth of Web 2.0, when suddenly every web business needed to be rebuilt around new design principles, technology (AJAX), and promotional techniques.
- Around for the birth of Y Combinator and The Facebook.
- Impossible to get a job with any possible upward mobility when graduating.
Most of this was happening our sophomore/junior year in college, when suddenly we knew all of this really important world-changing stuff that almost no one with established careers was paying attention to yet.
So yeah, I'm sure our generation isn't unique and wasn't the only one affected by these things, but I do think they probably had a disproportionate impact on us.
I would guess that most 40-50 year olds who already have knowledge, contacts and money don't apply to YC, probably because they don't feel that they need it.
I expect that founders at that age are more likely to be coming from a position of experience within their target industry, i.e. solving a problem that they've seen/experienced. They may not be trying to become "X for Y" but solving problem Z that a limited number of clients will pay good money to have solved.
Older founders may have more to risk, so the "go big or go home" model may not be as attractive to them.
As I said, this is a huge generalisation with a lot of guesswork thrown in. I would love to see some more detailed data so that we could draw some conclusions.
This is perhaps an insight into the types of companies YC is funding. They may just have a larger pool of B2B and enterprise companies this session.
The remaining categories will likely have older, more experienced people
That being said I also intuitively assumed a younger age. Most certainly bias on my side since it's the youngest founders I tend to read about online.
Companies with a female founder: 25 (21.93%)
Companies with a Black founder: 9 (7.89%)
Companies with a Hispanic founder: 6 (5.26%)
For example, say X% of the people are female, etc.
> As a side note, even though it will break backwards compatibility, we are considering changing how we look at this to the percentage of all founders that are women instead of the percentage of companies with a female founder.
http://blog.ycombinator.com/diversity-and-startups
After being told by dozens of people how obviously misleading this statistic is. It was beneath YC to ever release such a phony stat, but it's downright unethical to continue propagating it.
YC has no obligation to share stats and just because you disagree with the methodology doesn't make them unethical.
The fact is that this stat is provably misleading. People are understanding, and reporting it as, "25% of YC founders are female" when the reality is very different. YC knows about this and yet continues to use it. I think it's an understandable and small lapse in ethics predictably justified by some weak rationalization.
I can think of AirBnB, Dropbox, Stripe, ...
Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/07/16/newest-hit-game-maker...
[1] http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579091/0001579091140...
[2] http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/05/instacart-2b-kleiner/
[3] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/12/instacart-a-grocery...
There is no real difference.
Though some might say if you charge thousands and have dedicated salespeople, you're enterprise, even if you sell to a 25 person architect firm. Sales force is definitely though of as enterprise. While basecamp or twilio is more B2B. It's fuzzy, if there even is a difference.
E.g., something that is vertical specific may be more "Enterprise" than B2B
Now there are multiple groupings of partners which oversee a smaller subset.
I'm not certain, but I'm sure partners are assigned based on their domain expertise. Though, I'm sure all partners are open to helping anyone in the batch if needed.
Can anyone comment on this?
The percentages of companies with a female/black/Hispanic are slightly off. As worded, it should be calculated by
(# W2015 companies with atleast 1 female/black/Hispanic founder) / (# W2015 companies).
Black: 9 / 114 = 7.89%, not 8.03%
Hispanic: 6 / 114 = 5.26%, not 5.35%
Always next time, though!
I sure want to know more about this person, and their start_up!
I'm a relatively older entrepreneur too, fall right on the right side of the median. Recently I had been been thinking of applying to YC. But couldn't convince myself for it, and my age was one of the reasons.