I am surprised that reddit is on #13.<p>It's alexa rank in US social media websites is #2 behind Facebook. Apart form their redesign shenanigans, people actually like the product they offer (in contrast to facebook) and they are still growing.<p>I wish Reddit stays in the kind of "grey" area where it never gets as "official" as twitter, despite the popularity. If anything, that might be entirely its appeal.<p>That predicament will eternally present a glass ceiling for reddit's revenue, but as a consumer I'd rather see that than it going the full facebook -> hyper growth above anything else approach.
Interestingly six of the top ten built on Ruby!<p>Python is also strongly represented, but zero started with back-ends on Java, .Net. PHP, or other more broadly popular options.<p>This is strong evidence that the startup world is dramatically different from that of enterprises and businesses where tech is ancillary (which dominate total numbers in popularly shared statistics). In many ways it's a vindication of PG's old essays. Though we're not all using Lisp, startups lean towards it.
Here is a breakdown of the locations based on the HQ<p><pre><code> US: 85
Remote: 4
Europe: 3
S. America: 3
S. Asia: 3
Canada: 2
Africa: 1
SE Asia: 1
Middle East: 1
</code></pre>
Two companies have HQ in two countries hence why the totals above equal 103 and not 101
Psyched to see Meesho up there. Ecomm over WhatsApp is huge in India and they've acquired a significant customer base judging from the # of app installs (~10M+). My prediction is, it won't be long before they grow too huge to be acquired or get acquired themselves.<p>I count three startups from India in YC S19 batch that rely on WhatsApp as an auxillary platform:<p>1. <a href="https://vahan.co" rel="nofollow">https://vahan.co</a> does recruitment over WhatsApp for low to medium income jobs.<p>2. <a href="https://digi-prex.com" rel="nofollow">https://digi-prex.com</a> is a subscription service for medicines.<p>3. <a href="https://mahamela.in" rel="nofollow">https://mahamela.in</a> a group buying e-commerce business.<p>Another interesting point, I think, is both startups from Zenefits co-founders are in top 100: Rippling and ZeroDown; the latter with just 15 employees.<p>Of the startups on the list, I personally like what Flexport and RigettiComputing are doing.<p>Here is a similar list of <i>top companies</i> I stumbled upon a year or so back (not just limited to YC): <a href="https://breakoutlist.com" rel="nofollow">https://breakoutlist.com</a>
If you look at the diffs between this and the last list, there are def some companies that opted out of listing. Some of them had so much funding that there's no way that they could've just fallen out. For example, Machine Zone, Zenefits, LendUp, Soylent.<p>Also interesting, are supposedly well-capitalized companies from the 2018 list that shut down: uBiome(with a fair amount of attention) and Meta.<p>Other fun observations might just be how much money people are raising. Memsql was 40 in 2018, and is 67 in 2019. I'm guessing they didn't raise money in the time between, and a bunch of companies did so in the meanwhile.<p>Also kind of interesting? CoreOS(2018 #42) was above Heroku (2018 #46), but in this year's list is above them (Heroku #71, CoreOS #73). But both were acquired by the time that the 2018 list was made. I'm not sure what this is about, but maybe it's because the acquisition terms weren't all cash, and there were fluctuations in the intervening time in Salesforce vs RHT(and then, RHT got acquired by IBM so who knows how that factors into the present value of what used to be CoreOS). Fun.
Looks like Sam is close to closing at least #1 and #2 on his bets <a href="https://blog.samaltman.com/bubble-talk" rel="nofollow">https://blog.samaltman.com/bubble-talk</a><p>With Gitlab perhaps closing #3
I am completely out of the loop so might be my ignorance, but why is Brex worth so much?<p>The founders are super smart and accomplished, I even know some people that worked at pagar.me which was big success in Brazil and can say the guys are super hard working and smart.<p>But I fail to understand why Brex is such a wonderful idea, I worked for years on the payments sector and all features listed are fairly common to all major providers.
Question for YC: How does the list rank companies like Zapier that are growing very fast, but haven't raised in years to set a current valuation? I'd imagine that revenue is factored into play but perhaps not shown.
Where is valuation? Why isn't it listed? Also, what's up with the weird name "jobs created" for employees? I feel like these details must have been chosen deliberately, but I can't determine why.
2018 list is available here [1], it's interesting to see what the big jumps are.<p>[1]<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190904014058/https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/v" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20190904014058/https://www.ycomb...</a>
I know that social and environmental good organizations historically trend towards the “not as profitable or even profitable” category which makes them less likely to be funded and consequently on this list, but I wish more of the companies on this were driving more important change in the world.
Surprised Stripe ranked ahead of Airbnb. But thinking about it makes sense, Stripe eventually will skim a percentage out of every transaction on the internet... Also only one ad-supported consumer internet company, all are either Saas or marketplaces
I'd love to see a list like this sorted by gross revenue (i.e. net GDP contribution) or total paid compensation. Contrasting either of those vs. invested capital would be particularly interesting.
There's a certain irony in a investor (YC) perpetuating the myth of private valuations. Haven't we learned from WeWork and Juul etc that private valuations are mostly meaningless?
English is not my native language, but this sentence looks really weird to me:<p>“Helion Energy is breaking the fusion barrier and will be the first to clean, safe, and low-cost commercial electricity.”
Is there a slow down trend in the number of successful companies funded more recently, say in the last 4 years?<p>I know it takes time for startups to become successful. it just seems that the pre 2015 era had more successful startups. That would mirror the broader trend we see in the marketplace of fewer and fewer successful startups.
Breakdown by industry:<p>B2B Software and Services 53<p>Financial Technology and Services 16<p>Consumer Goods and Services 11<p>Education 4<p>Automotive 3<p>Biotech 3<p>Consumer Media 3<p>Aerospace 2<p>Construction 2<p>Healthcare 2<p>Real Estate 2<p>Energy and Environment 1