2 Months Out, 74% of Latest Y Combinator Class Funded or Profitable | Hacker News Reader

2 Months Out, 74% of Latest Y Combinator Class Funded or Profitable

gigaom.com

43 pointsjfornear16 comments

Hmm, this 74% stat is directly conflating funding and profit; it's a conflation that doesn't seem to make sense to me, as I really only care about the profit side of the equation. If you suppose that profit increases monotonically, this title hints at tremendous success - but I don't make that assumption. I'd be more interested to know the medium-to-long-term success - say, profitability at 12 months, or 24.

The similarity between the two is clear when you're running an early stage startup: being either funded or profitable means you are not imminently going to run out of money. And since that is usually the main thing you're worried about in a startup 6 months old, that is an important similarity.

Aha - I think I follow. I thought the 74% was an attempt to inform us about the startups. In a sense, it's not - it's telling us more about YC and its ability to pick and/or guide startups such that they don't quickly crash and burn. Thank you; that makes more sense, now.

It means that 74% of the graduating class is alive and healthy, at least for a while. Don't try to read more than that into it.

No, that simply brings me back to wanting to see longer-term outcomes. However, so far, so good!

It's relevant because these are the companies for which YC provided enough runway to get to the next step.

What percentage are actually profitable?

Don't get me wrong the 74% is impressive, but I'd expect a large percentage of YC projects to get additional funding. They've already cleared a bunch of hurdles and have a strong team backing them.

It'd also be interesting to see what % are profitable out of all YC companies.

I saw this on another thread http://spreadsheets0.google.com/ccc?key=t_toYuVyy6fci0MAiIaZ... which shows exits, but it'd be kinda interesting to hear if any of the non-exits are raking in cash. (I know, I know, they're unlikely to tell us really).

I don't have accurate data for YC startups overall, though you can assume that any that haven't raised series A and are more than a year or two old are profitable, since otherwise they wouldn't have been able to continue working on the startup.

There are a few that are making really large amounts of money, but I know they wouldn't like it if I outed them.

That's cool. It's sort of a shame that the "We're really profitable now and don't need any more funding" doesn't get as much/any press compared with "We just took more funding".

Worked for Balsamiq.

7 out of 27, so 26%. Bear in mind that at this stage most that are profitable are only barely so.

I think that's awesome, I had 5 as a decent number in my head.

does "profitable" mean "paying the $20/mo to slicehost" as some people around here seem to think? or, paying the founders a ramen wage?

Edit: nm, I see the answer below.

Makes for a great headline but it's actually not difficult to achieve when you have no employees, no office space and your product is a webapp (hosting costs are a few hundred dollars per month at most).

The biggest cost tends to be the founders' living expenses. If they're young, that can be low. But it is not a trivial matter to reach this threshold after 6 months. Viaweb didn't.

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