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Comment by arihant | Hacker News Reader

> 100% of the top 20 YC companies by valuation have the .com of their name. 94% of the top 50 do. But only 66% of companies in the current batch have the .com of their name. Which suggests there are lessons ahead for most of the rest, one way or another.

I wonder how much of that is due to the fact that landscape has changed in past 8 years and top 20 YC companies are all at least a few years (5-ish?) old. I appreciate the rest of the sentiment of the post, but I don't think the numbers he chose to share clearly support the assertions. Correlation isn't causation.

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What also bugs me is that there are probably things that:

(1) successful companies do often,

(2) marginal companies do less often, and

(3) aren't actually in any way instrumental to success.

It could just be that there's a mindset among successful founders that produces a particular vector of decisions, not all of which are all that important.

Graham would probably respond: whether every component of that vector is important or not, investors are scraping for every bit of evidence they can find, and your name might be a "tell" that other components of your decision vector are hinky.

And that might be true enough, but cargo culting every decision Airbnb makes in order to slip through an investor filter is no way to live either.

You forgot (4) require significant effort. Yes, those things bug me as well. As he points out though, naming is not particularly difficult, expensive, or time consuming when done right.

yes, didn't dropbox used to be trydropbox.com? And, tho non-YC, delicious.com was del.icio.us (or something). Successful companies can buy their domain.

But I agree with pg; a startup by any other name would succeed as sweet, so why not choose one you can get.

del.icio.us is an awesome domain. I'd be inclined to believe someone came up with the domain before the name.

I couldn't always remember where the dots went. Not a great property for a domain name.

Which is why I had it on the bookmarks bar. A single bookmark to all of my bookmarks :-). I haven't used them in a long time, what are they up to these days?

I'm thinking that joshu did, IIRC

Dropbox was getdropbox.com and airbnb was airbedandbreakfast.com

I made the same mental mistake as you just did and which I now bet PG thought about and carefully dismissed. Correlation isn't causation, but the fact is the top 20 companies either started with or changed their name. Which is his thesis.

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