How very Silicon Valley of the author to treat these numbers almost like they're profits, or any reasonable sort of "income" at all. The real question is: how much of that money has already been multiplied tenfold, through exits, IPOs or exorbitant profits?
It's pretty incredible to think that YC is likely the highest performing venture fund in history.<p>For 380 companies that works out to about $7.6 million invested into a portfolio of companies worth $7.78 billion. Assuming a 2-7% stake for YC(after dilution), that puts the value of YC's share at $155-$545 million on that $7 million invested.
What's interesting is that if 2-3 years ago, ycombinator had the ability to identify and pick winners. I have the impression that in the past year it became the other way around.<p>Y combinator by picking companies are in fact the kingmakers and are creating the winners.
It's interesting, they invest an average of $15,000 in each company so let's say they have invested somewhere around 6M.<p>According the the FAQ (<a href="http://ycombinator.com/faq.html" rel="nofollow">http://ycombinator.com/faq.html</a>) they take an average of 6 or 7 percent stake in each company.<p>For shits and giggles let's use 6%. A low end estimate of their ROI would be around a whopping 174%. Their current holdings of the 7.78 Billion would be around 466 million.<p>This is all wacky math I realize but it's interesting to take into account how well this fund has done.
Didn't Paul breakout the outcomes of Y Combinator companies a while back (e.g. acquired, sold, in business, etc)? It would be interesting to see if anything has dramatically changed.
I'm doing quick 3 min survey on what people think about certain venture capital firms and see if there is any correlation to their industry, location, school etc. Will post results back here upon completion.<p><a href="https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/VCstartup" rel="nofollow">https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/VCstartup</a>