Analyzing Y Combinator | Hacker News Reader

Analyzing Y Combinator

blog.awesomezombie.com

169 pointsig161 comments

"80 - Active (25 having received further investment rounds)"

The internal contradiction here should have set off some alarms. Are the other 55 supposed to have made it to profitability without raising any further money?

According to our records, 89 of 144 startups we funded up to this summer are still alive, for some definition of alive. When startups die, they usually die gradually, so it's hard to say when a startup is actually dead.

Some other mistakes I noticed: Nearly all cycles have the wrong number of startups. The furthest off is W07, which he lists has having had 15 startups but actually had 12. There have been two mergers, not one (Ninite is also a merger). YouOS didn't die; it morphed into Project Wedding, which was acquired. 8aweek didn't die either; that's now SocialBrowse. Nambii and pocketfungames are the same company, as were Boso and Auctomatic. Chatterous, iJigg, and Ididwork are all still alive. There's at least one startup listed as active that has been acquired, but it may not be public knowledge.

I've never heard of Innovation Fuels.

It doesn't seem fair to accuse us of "lack of transparency." Every startup launches publicly when they're ready, after which we list them on our site. It wouldn't be appropriate to list them before they've launched (or more precisely, it would launch them). We're usually not supposed to disclose when they raise additional funding or get acquired. And we're not always sure till long after the fact when they die.

I think some of these mistakes are understandable. For example, YouOS's home page says that it has been shut down and someone not familiar with the details would interpret this thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=260267) to mean that it had died and the founders had gone their separate ways.

You're right - that should be clearer. I've updated youos.com to more accurately reflect our history:

WebShaka went on to work on Project Wedding; when that site was acquired, the founders and YC had an exit.

That's funny, I read through it really quickly and thought "this guy's way off". He's got some acquisitions here I'm guessing you guys would consider more in the failed category. He's got at least one active that I'm almost positive is not, and at least one closed that I know was an acquisition. I too noticed Chatterous and Boso.

I thought "oh crap, I didn't know iJigg closed." Then I just looked at their site, which I guess he did not.

I can see how it would be really hard for an outsider to know some of those. I can't see why one would bother to try, at least publicly, to bring transparency to a private concern.

Knowing Imran a little I'd say it's most likely that he is doing this because he finds it interesting.

People are copying this model without understanding it. Transparency is needed to understand it.

Thanks for the corrections. The article is actually more accurate than I'd have expected. Kudos to the author; hope he corrects the errors as they're pointed out.

I'm the original author. I'll make corrections to the article later today but in response:

1) I marked a startup as closed if it's publicly declared as closed, if the founders now list their employer as someone else (on linkedin, HN, etc) or if there's been no activity in the six months. In the case where it seemed ambiguous I've marked it as unknown.

2) I'll need to check my notes, Innovation fuels I checked several sources which named it as a YC company as it seemed weird as it falls outside YC's normal investment categories. Removed now.

3) YouOs / WebShaka I should have spotted as WebShaka is listed as the creator of project wedding in several places. Boso / Auctomatic I was aware that the founding teams were the same, but thought they were two separately funded YC startups as several news articles referred to them as such.

4) Chatterous blog hasn't been updated since March, their front page has a 2008 copyright, and their "featured groups" on the homepage seem both static and dead. IJigg and ididwork I marked as dead as because their public blogs (blog.ijigg.com and www.ididwork.com/blog/) are returning technical errors which suggest abandonment.

5) Transparency-wise, it's understandable you don't chose to disclose outside investment/acquisitions. However the later generally become public sooner or later anyway. The list of YC's FAQ page doesn't seem to be complete (including the ones commented out in the source code), presumably because you remove ones which have closed ?. Also there's no disclosure in terms of how many companies YC funds but fail to launch.

But thanks for the feedback, one of the reasons for early disclosure of this list is so that I can get feedback and remove mistakes from the list.

Well as a user of Chatterous; yeh it is still alive if "running" translates to "alive".

If your taking "not updated" to mean "dead" your probably right; we were waiting to see how they would monetize and nothing seems to have appeared... so "in limbo" is probably a better bet.

I personally know of several startups that are running in "zombie mode" right now in the Boston area. Their website is still up, but everyone's been laid off, development on the product has stopped, and the only reason its still up is because they pre-paid for hosting for a year or so.

Waiting for someone to write a blog on "zombie mode".

Good idea. One way to mix it up might be to use a simile with different implications: how about "dauer mode" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dauer_larva

Innovation Fuels came from the list from the Venture Beat list of YC S08 demo-day startups :

http://venturebeatprofiles.com/company/profile/innovation-fu...

There was also a newspaper source which my google-fu can't locate right now, but presumably one of the two copied the mistake from the other.

Neat list, but just keep in mind that many of these (20-40%?) are inaccurate. Many startups listed as active have actually failed, but they kept their site up.

Also, a vast majority of the acquisitions shown here were for talent. They generally involve very little actual money and in many cases could be considered company failures.

Still, I'm happy for the successes. But in startupland there are many magic tricks to make things look better than they are.

I'm sure for every round of YC, there are a few companies that don't even make it to launch. The ones that don't launch are not even listed.

I've got most of the companies that failed to launch, plus we know how many companies YC has funded in total so we can deduce how many never launched but aren't listed either.

I had a bit of a dilema on that point. I'm reasonably connected with the london startup scene, which naturally has connections to the YC scene, so I know through a fairly reliable grapevine that some of the acquisitions were "mercy acquisitions". However given this information is essentially "private" I don't feel comfortable publically disclosing it, so I've stuck to public published data about acquisitions.

I'm going to go into the acquistions a bit more in another post, I'll see if I can find some way around the dilema.

Wait, what? Chatterous is most definitely not closed.

More info: http://venturebeat.com/2008/07/14/chatterous-raises-angel-fu...

Yeah I saw this as I had a chatterous chat room open in another window and was very confused.

Can you blame him? That article is over a year old. The copyright date on chatterous.com is 2008. I don't understand how that kind of oversight could last for a year on an actively developed product.

Possibly because it is completely and totally irrelevant. You'd think half the startups on the web were closed if you went by copyright dates. It's one of those things you put there, then forget you ever put it there, and neither you nor anyone else ever even notices it.

And it doesn't matter. Farm Town said for months (and still probably does to this day) "Notify me when myr crops are ready." They misspelled a two letter word. Didn't stop them from getting 30m users. I'm guessing Chatterous's out of date copyright won't hold them back either.

I don't think it's a problem, but it is an oversight that would make people think the site isn't active. I don't think out of date copyrights are common on active sites after February.

By the way, technically if the text of your home page has not changed since you wrote it in 2008, it would be illegal for you to claim a copyright year of 2009.

Why? Because the date serves a purpose: so that people can know when your copyright expires and your content falls into the public domain. If you move up the date incorrectly, you are cheating the rest of the world.

As you can imagine, we are not that eager to copy your home page for free 75 years from now, but the law doesn't care.

I'm pretty sure that's not how it works.

"Copyright notice was required under the 1976 Copyright Act. This requirement was eliminated when the United States adhered to the Berne Convention, effective March 1, 1989." (First Hit on Google, 2009, p.1)

The copyright notice is unnecessary, but the grandparent is absolutely correct on how it works. The year is date of first publication. See http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ03.pdf.

No it wouldn't, there's no penalty for falsely claiming a copyright unless the copyright belongs to someone else.

Having a date and copyright symbol isn't required by the Berne convention, however it can impact the size of damages awarded in a copyright infringement case.

I think there's too much arguement over active and inactive in this thread when the real discussion should be around the rates of return versus traditional angel investors.

13 acquisitions out of 145 companies. Almost l0%. Seems decent considering that 145 number includes some that are < 1 year old.

I like the idea of doing an analysis like this, however deficient the data. It makes people think about it.

That said, why not have a status line next to each startup in the list on the YC page, that fetches updates from the startup website? Limit it to n characters and show the text and update time. This will also provide an automatic measure of when they last showed signs of life.

Now just imagine if we had a post-mortem on every one that said 'closed'.

What are the reasons that the `official' information is kind of closed?

OT, but why did you use a backtick for your 'quotes'? Is that an OS or keyboard thing, or a personal preference, or what? I've never been able to determine the rhyme or reason on that.

Presumably it's the ASCII-man’s way of doing “curly” quotation marks.

In TeX, backticks are used for open quotes, and straight ones are used for close quotes. That's where I picked up the habit originally.

It looks much more natural in fixed-width fonts too, using quotes like that here kind of defeats the purpose.

Yes, I am TeX-damaged. A friend of mine even tends to use \"u for an umlaut.

See: http://www.public.asu.edu/~arrows/tidbits/quotes.html

English keyboards don't have the nice typographical up/down quote marks and using « » just looks strange... so we hack it with `quotes.'

Neither do German keyboards have the nice German quote marks. You can fake them like ,,this'' however.

I'm amazed at how good TicketStumbler is at keeping off all YC-related lists! You can add another "Active/Accidental Stealth" to S08 if you like ;)

d'oh. Don't know how I missed that one, added it now.

I did not understand how 2.6x of 15K will be 650K, can someone please explain

He's assuming YC has 6% equity in the companies. 2.6 * 15k = 0.06 * 650k.

2.6 * 15K = 39K, however, as yc only takes a 6% stake, The total value of the companies have to be 39K/0.06 = 650K for yc to make the line.

In my mind -- who gives a damn. Either ycom is for you or it isn't.

You know what's important about it? Ycom gives young people with ideas but no track record an opportunity to prove themselves. Outside of SV, it's very difficult for most young entrep. working in technology to find people/ecosphere, much less investors, who can relate...

If you think ycom's "rate of failure" is a jeopardy to your idea... you're likely drinking wayyyyy to much of your own kool-aid. You're not an entrepreneur if you're focused on failure.

If YC is financially sound, it will continue to fund more smart entrepreneurs and will get emulated. Great for everyone.

Tautological.

It's just as "great for everyone" if they aren't financially sound, don't continue their funding strategies and don't get emulated.

No, not as great. Having a good example is better than not having a good example.

quite shocked this was down-voted to the ground. i wish people would express themselves outside of pressing a button. maybe it was just me but i thought the tone of the blog post was negative, or perhaps it was just because he opened by stating ycom lacked transparency and it came off accusatory.

furthermore, i understand the importance of performance metrics but I always felt like ycom's purpose was more altruistic than just being about the return. (i'm a realist, i understand bills need to be paid and money to reinvest, but yeah...)

Partly I was playing devil's advocate, I think YC do a great job overall (although I do think a little more transparency on failures would be good for everyone), but it is a criticism I've heard repeatedly.

As I do point out in my conclusion YC do look like they do much better than angel investors and provide real "extra value".

two wrongs don't make a right. if you felt the post had a problem, you should have said so, in a non-accusatory manner.

(upvoted the parent; although I don't agree it's a reasonable point that deserves an answer)

Firstly the data is interesting in it own right, and secondly it's useful for people considering where to get seed funding from.

The value of YC (and others) isn't in the money they provide (I suspect most YC funded startups could easily have got the money from other sources), it's in the expertise and connections they provides. When picking an investor you can either go on "gut" feeling about the extra value the investor provides, or you can look at hard data.

I agree that the data is interesting* and I apologize for over-reacting. I also agree with your second paragraph completely.

*Performance metrics for many of these early stage startup funds are skewed by the quality they attract. Ycom and TechStars have the creme of the crop, I expect to see better results overtime... 3 companies from S09 raised >$1M. And as you know, the rate of failure in startups is also naturally high - there are far too many factors involved that my decision would be less guided by metrics and moreso toward your second point.

I'm actually doing a similar analysis of UK universities for a non-profit I help run (http://quofoundation.org) and see the exact same issue. With universities you can get around the problem by adjusting for entry grades. I wonder if something similar would be possible in this situation.

Looks like you have to add an acquisition: AppJet/Etherpad - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=977015

I had forgotten all about "Web Shaka" (YouOs). Far and away the most classic name for a company. I hope they are doing well wherever they went.

One of the co-founders went on to co-found thesixtyone (YC W09)

Thanks for your wishes! We're still lurking around news.YC.

We, WebShaka, went on to work on Project Wedding after YouOS; when that site was acquired, we and YC had an exit.

The four of us are all in startups of various maturities; as someone already mentioned: Sam went on to start thesixtyone.com, which was round #2 of YC for him!

What's really cool is that 18% of YC founders are now millionaires.

Is this true? Evidence?

It's not true. He's just not very smart. He thinks that receiving funding makes you a millionaire.

Actually, I don't think that, I was just being a wise ass (so your comment is deserved :) ).

Well, it could be true. Maybe someone should do the math?

And yes I'm talking liquidity, not paper worth.

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