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Comment by AUmrysh | Hacker News Reader

What's really sad is that reddit and Alexis were, arguably, the most successful Y-Combinator startup, and now they've fallen by the wayside as cronyism and personal agendas take over. Alexis let this happen, though. Not that I blame him, I'd have taken the money too.

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By far and away, Airbnb is the most successful Y-Combinator startup. It's not a close race between Reddit and Airbnb. After that is Dropbox and Stripe perhaps. I don't think Reddit ever quite stacked up to these types of companies in terms of potential. Reddit is a link-aggregator, the very definition of a poor business opportunity (they don't own anything, and hardly control anything on their own site).

Airbnb is carrying a $25 billion valuation, and has a legitimate shot at justifying it in the coming years. They own their segment like an eBay or Uber, their network effect has won.

Was Reddit once the top start-up out of Y-Combinator, years ago? I'm skeptical of that having ever been true as well.

Heroku?

Heroku was acquired for $212mm. Not even close to the valuation of AirBNB.

Reddit was part of the first batch of YC and was sold for a large amount for Conde Nast, so it makes sense that at that point in time they were the most successful.

Although they're really really really not by today's standards, as you point out.

reddit was the first to release anything online[0]. It's probably fair to say at that point, they were the most successful. I think it's arguable that reddit is still the most successful of those, though Loopt may have been acquired for more money. Here's what happened to the rest:

* Memamp - desktop search: failed to launch, remaining founder hired by reddit

* Infogami - something between a blog and a wiki: merged with reddit, became reddit wiki

* Firecrawl - security software: pivoted and became TextPayMe - mobile payments: acquihired by Amazon, merged in to Amazon Payments

* Loopt - mobile location sharing: acquired by Green Dot for $43.4 million

* Kiko - online calendar: launched shortly before Google Calendar, sold to Tucows for about $250k

* Clickfacts - advertising fraud detection: operated independently for years; now appears defunct

* Simmery - can't find anything on what this company was making: defunct

[0] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.lisp/vJmLVd9lJyk/1...

I'm not sure by which objective measure that would be true besides potentially being the most visited by consumers and having the most cultural-currency. From a business perspective, they are far from being the most successful and I'm guessing the last round of funding came with quite a bit of goals that needed to be met including getting the community under control and sanitizing it for mainstream America.

Seems another business model for the internet is : Create authentic community, sell out community to corporate highest bidder who can then eliminate unwanted controversial discussion. Reddit could have monetized like craigslist and made tons of money. Idiots.

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