The distribution by batch is pretty interesting:<p><pre><code> S2011 10
W2012 10
S2012 9
S2014 7
W2013 7
S2013 6
W2016 6
W2015 6
S2016 5
W2014 5
S2010 4
S2015 4
W2011 4
S2009 3
W2008 2
W2007 2
W2017 2
S2006 2
W2009 1
W2018 1
W2010 1
S2008 1
S2005 1
S2007 1
</code></pre>
The top three batches were consecutive starting from summer 2011 through summer of 2012. That period happens to also be when the seed and venture capital ecosystem started its recovery from the 2008 crisis [0].<p>What I wonder is, which way does the arrow of causation point? Did the success of these companies lift the entire ecosystem? Or were macroeconomic factors the dominant driver of capital entering this market, and those three batches happened to benefit?<p>edit: There's another possibility here, which is that there are two curves that may have maximized for companies around that time period. The first is the batch size, which has increased from ~10 companies to ~100 over the years. And the other curve is that companies take something like 5-10 years to mature. Maybe it's just that the companies of that vintage are just old enough to be really valuable, and that there were enough companies in the batch to push them to the top of this ranking.<p>My money is on macro effects, though.<p>[0] <a href="https://medium.com/the-mission/state-of-seed-investing-in-2018-25eb28ac0e93" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/the-mission/state-of-seed-investing-in-20...</a>
YC has funded approximately 1,900 companies. 93 are valued at $100 million or more. 19 are valued at $1 billion or more. Stripped from nuance, one could say that if you get accepted into YC, you have a 5 percent chance of building a $100 million company, and a 1 percent chance of building a $1 billion company. That's impressive.<p>Afaik, YC is the only seed funder-startup accelerator in the world, among thousands of other ones, that has given birth to companies worth $1 billion ore more.<p>At least until three years ago, it hasn't passed funding on a single billion dollar company (1).<p>Also, rumours are that Coinbase is raising money at a valuation of $8 billion (2). This is the same valuation that the company supposedly gave itself when it acquired earn.com in april this year (3).<p>(1) <a href="https://twitter.com/rabois/status/634205368172814337" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/rabois/status/634205368172814337</a>
(2) <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/coinbase-8-billion-company-funding-2018-10/" rel="nofollow">https://www.businessinsider.com/coinbase-8-billion-company-f...</a>
(3) <a href="https://www.recode.net/2018/4/27/17287184/coinbase-earn-acquisition-stock-valuation-eight-billion-earn" rel="nofollow">https://www.recode.net/2018/4/27/17287184/coinbase-earn-acqu...</a>
Meta is at 38 and it recently suspended operations (<a href="https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/09/14/ar-startup-meta-layoffs-pause-chinese-investor.amp.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/09/14/ar-start...</a>)? Is there still hope for an acquisition? I know this list is a ranking of amount raised but it seems odd to list dead companies as examples of the "top".
A couple of interesting things to note here:<p>1) Jobs created is not a "net new" job creation. I'm still waiting for someone to do research on how many jobs get displaced by tech based companies. I think tech based companies are amazing vehicles for wealth creation, but not so great for global job creation.<p><pre><code> 1a) I find it interesting that they still have a RFS for "one million jobs" https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#million given that their highest number of touted jobs is 4k max. For comparison, Amazon has 500k jobs. Maybe 50k or 100k is more of an admirable goal?
</code></pre>
2) Interesting to see YC - in some ways admitting I guess - that technology itself is not a sector, but that technology is enabling certain sectors. I think this is the right way to look at it. Yet we still often refer to many of these companies simply as "tech companies".<p>3) This really should be split between acquired and not acquired companies. For example, Cruise being valued at $14B after being bought by GM seems <i>weird</i>. Or Dropbox, who is now publicly traded and their value changes every second. YC will never do this, but I'd love to see realized vs unrealized gains.
Wow, basically all of the valuation is generated by the top 10 companies. 81% from the top 5, 95% from the top 10. I guess this explains VC strategy somewhat: if you're not trying to become a unicorn, you're worthless to the VC.<p>I wish there was more data supporting the idea of making small, long-term businesses, but it really seems like the big money is all in going for unicorn status. Which is a shame, because I think this drives some of the problem behaviors you see in SV.
It looks like Sam is mostly on track to make his bet:<p><a href="https://blog.samaltman.com/bubble-talk" rel="nofollow">https://blog.samaltman.com/bubble-talk</a><p>For (3), Gitlab is at approx $1.1B.
How are the valuations calculated for companies that haven't raised a priced equity round in a long time? Specifically I'm thinking about companies like Zapier. They initially raised $1.3M in 2012 but haven't raised since and have funded off revenue. Is it based on private 409A valuations or some sort of formula on YC's end?
I worked for #15 on that list and let me tell you those guys are some real jerks. This is their COO yelling at their carriers <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=ooTmdOyKYpQ" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/watch?v=ooTmdOyKYpQ</a>
They state that the cumulative valuation of these 100 companies is $100+ billion, of which $81+ billion comes from the top 5 companies, and $95+ billion comes from the top 10.<p>Also interesting that the top 2 (Airbnb and Stripe) were in the 2009 cohorts. From the depths of the recession to $50+ billion combined valuation.
I am torn about using valuation to rank companies. Valuation is is a vanity metric. Its just a number that VCs use to trade their capital, not the true worth of a company. You could raise $1 million from your rich uncle claiming to hold 0.1% of company and claim a $1B valuation. But then the question is, what do you use as the true worth of a company?
It would be interesting to graph the valuations of all of these companies over time. You could make the x-axis "company age" rather than time in order to make a more apples-to-apples comparison between older YC companies and younger YC companies. I did a bit of work along these lines a few weeks ago:<p><a href="https://github.com/JesseAldridge/yc_still_good" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/JesseAldridge/yc_still_good</a><p>Here is the graph I'm talking about: <a href="https://github.com/JesseAldridge/yc_still_good/blob/master/reports/valuation_vs_age.png?raw=true" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/JesseAldridge/yc_still_good/blob/master/r...</a>
It would be interesting to know the cap delta, not only the cap.<p>For example, if a company has a valuation of 5B and to reach that point raised 4B, its cap delta is 1B.<p>Not sure why only the total cap is the one publicized, probably are more newsworthy bigger vanity numbers than smaller sanity numbers.
Really interesting to see the number of jobs created. I imagine that just means "number of employees". Even so, the fact that Brex is a company with only 48 employees with over a $1billion dollar valuation is interesting (also the fact that I've never heard of them, and they only went through YC a year ago).
Does anyone have any stats on Reddit (users, revenue etc) because $1bn seems like a pretty low valuation for one of the most popular sites on the internet?
Shouldn't DoorDash be #1 if we're talking about jobs created? I'm sure there are more than 900 DoorDash drivers out there delivering food.
In the list of top investors at the bottom, I'm surprised to see FundersClub so high (#5 ahead of even Sequoia Capital!) and AngelList not listed.
Listing private companies by valuation has nothing with reality, just trying to bump up the next investment rounds.
Until a company is public and traded you can put almost any price on it.
With that being said - kodus to all the companies about the thousand of jobs created.
If all of these companies were incorporated as part of YC batch that would be very impressive. I've increasing feeling that many companies just want to get listed as "YC company" to leverage investor network and take advantage of branding.
Very cool to see this. Btw, at the bottom you guys linked to a blog post that didn't resolve: <a href="http://www.ycombinator.com/top-companies-2018" rel="nofollow">http://www.ycombinator.com/top-companies-2018</a>
Are we sure that "jobs created" is something to be proud of? Fewer jobs is generally better.<p>I'd rather see how many jobs they've eliminated, but that's probably hard to calculate.<p>Or maybe value per employee. The fewer employees, the higher the number.
Look carefully at the number of jobs created. Some companies have less than 100 employees with >100 million valuation. I believe that Heroku had just 40. It’s amazing how small these teams are and what they are able to achieve.
I would like to see some equivalent for YC Top Companies for measure and recognise their social impact:<p>-Lowest Carbon emitted
-Diversity of workforce
-Pay gap between lowest and highest
-Open source commitment
-etc
Are they ranked by valuation? Can't seem to find any explanation of how the rank is calculated. Also surprisingly many of those I've never heard of, despite spending way too much time at HN :)
> They have created over 28,000 jobs.<p>I always get a kick out of the 'created jobs' meme. It is always bandied about in such a positive way. As if you took people out of work and employed them.<p>The truth is you also need a number that reflect the amount of people that were put out of work or disadvantaged by a startup. And the people who worked for startups (to a lesser degree) that would have gotten a job somewhere else.<p>What is really sad for young people I think is this perception that the road is paved with gold for anyone in the startup business. Sure they know most don't succeed in the same way that they know it's hard to play major league sports or be a music or movie star. But I really don't know if they fully understand how much of a long shot it really is.<p>YC celebrating this is fine it's what I would do from a marketing and PR angle. But the truth is they are in the business of getting as many people involved in startups that they can because it benefits them greatly.<p>This is not sour grapes either. I make money off of all of these startups directly (in a pick axe kind of way). It has been great for sure but it also takes advantage of the hopes and dreams of a generation who think the only thing you can do is 'do a startup by going to an accelerator and raising angel and vc funds'. That is most certainly not the case.