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All? of YC investments--left sidebar

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17 pointsdustingetz20 comments

This is one of those times it makes me sad that YC is so unconventional/lean (though I understand the decision and I'm not sure I'd do anything different in their shoes). If they hired a young/good writer whose job it was to maintain and curate a list and profile page for each company as well as post "where are they now?" posts for the 6 month survivors who want to be profiled, it would be a nice SEO/awareness boon for the young companies. It would also be a good/easy reservoir of reporter-targets (anything that helps reporters be lazy is good, IMO).

Of course, that content/awareness/traffic would also help spread the word about YC. I'm still stunned at how many geeks I talk to who have never heard of it.

I'm still stunned at how many geeks I talk to who have never heard of it.

This hit me when Drew (Houston, Dropbox) had to tell geeks about it here as if it were still 2005: http://vimeo.com/9100565

If they hired a young/good writer whose job it was to maintain and curate a list and profile page for each company as well as post "where are they now?" posts for the 6 month survivors who want to be profiled

Doesn't this very website serve that purpose?

On that last point, YC has no shortage of applicants. I'm not sure that I'd worry about spreading the word if I were them either.

Really? Then I don't think you'd be running it very effectively. That's like Apple saying, "we're selling tons of iPhones. Let's stop marketing them." Or a better analogy is Harvard saying, "we have a lot of applicants this season-- let's not market or recruit". If Harvard said that, they'd slowly watch the quality and quantity of their applicant pool drift towards the other ivy-league schools that WERE marketing.

YC has a HUGE marketing advantage in PG (and his amazing and linkworthy essays), Jessica (and her amazing book) and the success of the portfolio. But it's not an unassailable position.

edit: Duh-- news.yc is another incredible marketing asset that YC has!

I'm not saying don't market at all. Just perhaps there's not a need to market in the way that you mentioned in the previous post about portfolio pages, given pg & co can only look after so many startups per batch.

But apparently not, since pg replied saying he was working on a portfolio page and jl is working on blog posts. I concede.

Actually Jessica is trying to post more stories about YC funded startups in the YC blog lately. And I'm working on a portfolio page for our site.

There is also this google doc: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkkhSN3vaY4jdF90b1l1...

Very interesting to see that list, thanks :)

I sent him the missing Y Combinator startups from my round (Firecrawl, Memamp, and Simmery) -- anyone else have the others?

I have most at:

http://blog.awesomezombie.com/2009/12/analyzing-y-combinator...

Although there are a few '09 ones which have gone public since my post which I haven't got around to adding yet.

Firecrawl morphed into Textpayme, so if that was included there would be a double count.

Now if we just had a tiny status indicator next to each ...

Go stick them on here; http://startupwiki.co.uk/ and I will add a freature to tag the startup's as dead or alive :D and have it show up here http://startupwiki.co.uk/investor/ycombinator

I didn't know YC funded Reddit. Funny, given how much flack Reddit gets around here.

I wonder why Xobni was listed twice.

Two separate investments?

It's uncited but according to the Crunchbase page for Xobni [1] they (YC) invested a further 80K in Angel funding in Dec 2006.

1. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/xobni

No mention of Kiko :(

Arguably Y Combinator's greatest investment to date

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