Its quite possible that even YC would miss a few good founders. One that I came across recently was veed.io. They have raised 35 million in funding from Sequoia. What other startups that YC rejected went on to do well?
SendGrid (acquired by Twilio for $2B [1]) famously had their application rejected, and their later success caused YC to update its selection process.<p>From this Quora answer [2]:<p>> Apparently, only one partner, Robert Morris, reviewed the SendGrid application, and he gave it a highly negative score, calling it a "spam company." That pushed it so far down the application queue that no other partner reviewed it. Paul talks about how they changed the application process after that so that any applications negatively scored by Robert would also get reviewed by Paul.<p>(Interestingly, venture returns skew so highly to big winners that SendGrid's objectively huge outcome would not even have had a material impact on YC's current portfolio value of nearly $1T [3]. I'm not aware of any current $10B+ companies that were rejected by YC, though there may be some.)<p>[1] <a href="https://www.zdnet.com/article/twilio-to-acquire-email-api-platform-sendgrid-for-2-billion/" rel="nofollow">https://www.zdnet.com/article/twilio-to-acquire-email-api-pl...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.quora.com/Why-was-SendGrid-rejected-from-YCombinator/answer/Brian-Chu-2" rel="nofollow">https://www.quora.com/Why-was-SendGrid-rejected-from-YCombin...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ycombinator.com/</a>
I co-founded Fold [0], which went on to raise a $13M Series A from Craft and has some pretty incredible numbers. We were rejected a few times, one after a pretty spicy in-person interview where one of the partners told me to "have fun in jail" because we dared to mess with Bitcoin while the US regulatory system worked itself out.<p>The parent company became Thesis, a venture studio where we raised a $21M Series A, and have incubated a few more projects (Keep, tBTC, Saddle, Tally).<p>A friend's company, Wyre, was rejected. They ended up being acquired for 1.5B [1].<p>It would've been nice to do YC in 2013/14. From what I've heard from other founders, I'm not sure the value today is nearly so high.<p>[0] - <a href="https://foldapp.com" rel="nofollow">https://foldapp.com</a>
[1] - <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/crypto-startup-wyre-being-acquired-by-payments-company-bolt-for-1-5-billion-11649325602" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsj.com/articles/crypto-startup-wyre-being-acqui...</a>
My guess is that a bunch of startups that have gone on to do well and were rejected aren't broadcasting that around. Too many other priorities to deal with when things are succeeding and no reason to create any negative feelings about being rejected by YC.<p>Just think about this. Every successful startup was rejected by some VC. It is par for the course and not really a big deal if you are winning.
You can tell that being rejected by YC isn't that strong indicator for success given the number of YC startups who have been public about having only got into YC in their third or even fourth attempt. In my book that is equivalent to being rejected, and YC only accepted them after they basically made it.<p>YC is also very public that a significant number of every batch have been rejected a couple of times. So basically being rejected by YC is not even a strong indicator that you won't be a YC success.
I was rejected with clearbit.com<p>Was told the business required a degree of enterprise sales that my skills weren't suited for. It's now worth $350m (on paper at least).<p>That said, no hard feelings. They see so many applications - they're bound to make the wrong decision time to time.
12 month ago "Growing Veed.io from $0 to $5 million ARR in 2 years" <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYS3QKJHUDM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYS3QKJHUDM</a><p>YC is mentioned at timestamp <a href="https://youtu.be/pYS3QKJHUDM?t=715" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/pYS3QKJHUDM?t=715</a><p>I attended the talk. The founder said they'll grow organically and won't need any VC money. I can't find the sections are not in the youtube video (missing minutes?). So I'm interested why the founder changed his opinion.
Fairly sure that Notion and Roam are both YC rejections. While Roam isn't quite at the same level, Notion is a healthy business at venture scale, a meaningful miss to the YC portfolio.