YC Summer 2017 Stats
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
* How many companies with only a single founder?
* How many companies are founded by people who are not native english speaker? I mean, an entire non english speaker team, e.g., all of them were born in Russia or China and came to US in a "late" age (e.g., after 22), instead of Canada, UK etc.
It would be more interesting if we can see a YC-funded company that is founded by a single founder who is not a native English speaker and came to US after 22 and he/she is now over 35 :) This somehow makes the game harder to play, but it would be challenging and fun and inspiring :)
The stereotype of a YC company is still multi-founder + at least one native english speaker + young. It will be certainly an outlier of outlier if there's ever a YC company that sets an inspiring example that single founder + non native english speaker + "old" can be accepted to YC and can succeed. Or we may need a YC-clone that is started in non-english-speaking countries or is started by a first-generation non-native-english-speaker immigrant in US.
UNDERREPRESENTED FOUNDERS
S17 Female founders: 35 (12% of all S17 founders)
S17 Applicants who were female: 14%
S17 Companies with a female founder: 27 (21% of the batch)
S17 Applications with a female founder: 22%
S17 Black founders: 14 (4.76% of S17 founders)
S17 Companies with a Black/Af-Am founder: 8 (6.25% of the batch)
S17 Hispanic/Latinx founders: 13 (4.42% of S17 founders)
S17 Companies with a Hispanic/Latinx founder: 7 (5.47% of the batch)
Couple questions come to mind:
* For the black and hispanic stats, what were the percentage of the total applicants?
* Does the acceptance rate align with the application rate?
* Are the "% Applications with a ..." based on those that arrived at the office for an interview or total number of submissions?
* Are the stats self reported and if so optional or mandatory, or does someone at YC look at people to bucketize them?
* We see that it does for female founders.
* Total number of submissions
* Gender is reported in the applications. We asked founders in the batch to self-report for race/ethnicity.
I think it lies in that people fear being biased against for reporting their ethnicity, either via affirmative action (white/asian) or racism (everyone else).
Hm, two flaws about that dichotomy:
1) Many people that aren't white or asian also feel that affirmative action is a bias against their actual ability to contribute to society. For example, not everyone would see getting into YC as a monumental achievement, but even if they did the idea that it would be belittled because of a perception that their skin tone filled a quote is the same being biased against.
2) Many people call this racism as well. In this context, it would primarily be a reference to an institutionalized circumstance.
...for this specific batch. Is parent questioning if this is historically the case or suggesting this is a move by YC at gender diversity? Just curious.
* What proportion are from international universities (i.e., not the US)?
* What percentage of founders graduated from top 10 universities? Top 100?
* How many founders are PhD holders? How about MS? MBA?
At 30-40 years old (with the average age around 30, I imagine there are plenty of candidates between 30-40), some small percentage of people are likely to be running into their first health problems or concerns.
Financially speaking, the only thing more ridiculous than the cost of education, is the cost of healthcare. If you need health insurance to cover a prescription that costs a thousand dollars per month, you're naturally going to have serious concerns about leaving the job that provides that insurance.
Like, you'd just have to work a month or two extra before quitting to cover a year of prescriptions.
Specialists usually charge significantly more than primary care physicians and an unforseen trip to the ER can easily cost $20k. It's not as simple as working an extra month or two.
The risks of not having insurance are utterly terrible financial handcuffs. I'm just starting down the path of cancer treatments, the coverages (or lack thereof) and costs are eye-opening, and scary.
Note: I use diverse in quotes not because I don't believe it is important but because what diversity means to people varies dramatically.
Impressive. But off the top of my head I can count a few more than 10 YC companies valued at $1B or more:
1) Airbnb
2) Quora
3) Stripe
4) Dropbox
5) Instacart
6) Coinbase
7) Reddit
8) Cruise
9) Twitch
10) Gusto
11) Zenefits
12) Docker
13) Machine Zone
And a few more that are pretty close to $1B
Edit:
> But off the top of my head I can count a few more than 10 billion-dollar companies funded by YC.
I thought you were listing 10B+ companies.
Q&A app Quora valued around $1.8 billion in $85 million fundraise [2]
Docker Is Raising Funding at $1.3B Valuation [3]
Twitch was acquired by $970M, so I guess not quite $1B.
[1] https://www.recode.net/2017/7/31/16037126/reddit-funding-200...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/21/uniquorn/
[3] http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2017/08/10/docke...
So much for a stereotype of prodigy college dropout.
https://mixpanel.com/blog/2016/05/18/getting-accepted-into-y...
* VC money is more accessible for Chinese startups in China
* Chinese startups are mostly targeting local market
* Visa issues?
(these are all wild guesses)
But, is too expensive and too much bureaucracy to take a loan. Big Banks is one of the sectors that most profits in Brasil[1], so they do not care so much about small and personal loans. Or loans to small companies. And the legislation sucks too, politicians have passed a new law that will make even harder to make Angel Investments[2]. Is too risky and expensive for everyone that want to loan money to people. Loan money to government is more profitable and almost without risk to Big Banks and mutual funds. So, there is a huge opportunity to disrupt this.
[1]http://www.infomoney.com.br/mercados/acoes-e-indices/noticia... ( portuguese) [2]http://convergecom.com.br/tiinside/21/07/2017/investidor-anj...
I would like to see how much money was invested total into the companies and how much they all valued in total today.
It seems like they left out "total money invested" to make the return sound a little better.
*Because I assume that by listing "UNDERREPRESENTED FOUNDERS" YC wishes there were 50% female founders and 50% male founders? And what about the racial makeup of founders? Is the ideal world for YC a racial make up of 20% white, 20% black, 20% asian, 20% middle eastern, and 20% other?
Given that the valley now has multiple companies with $500bn+ market cap; and in the "still raising money" valuation there are companies with $50-100bn valuation; it seems to me that $85bn is rather very small.
Or more like YC has worked well for the average founder but sucked at picking even one of the bigger winners?
And this is what seems to be the case, there is no other program that has launched as many start-ups as YC has done and there is no other program that has done this for as many founders as YC has done. The network effects of that are tremendous.
Well, that depends on who you are. If you are a partner in YC, yes, ROI is your metric. If you are a founder, no, the long-term median value of all YC companies is a far more meaningful metric than YC's ROI. In particular, how much of that value comes back to the founders vs. the investors.
Only one of which was founded this millennium (but still founded before YC).
Count me and a few other Hispanics who never have been accepted. The only time its cared about is after the fact and just for show purposes like this.
On a side Note: Yc doesn't understand people like me will never have the resume they are looking for, but have the talent and drive. I could game the application process to get accepted. Because we know what you accept and its not just a race issue.
You seem to also say that they want to brag about accepting these ethnicities, so why then they discriminate _against_ them?
It's a hot topic for companies to do the right thing now, its then they start to care.
I don't think its done on purpose or with a hatred, but its an issue, look around.
The decision of who to fund may rely in part on seeking people similar to oneself and if the demographics of the applicant pool are not reflected in the staff of YC it may skew the outcome against minorities.
Well I suppose it's not impossible.
For women for example you can see from the numbers that there is no bias in the acceptance rate, the thing is that very few women apply. Could be the same for hispanics. I don't know what proportion of engineering students are hispanics but it's likely that as for women the underrepresentation starts already in school.
What evidence is there that proves an equal percentage of every race and gender leads to a more profitable company (or has a higher chance of a successful exit)?* *Because I assume that by listing "UNDERREPRESENTED FOUNDERS" YC wishes there were 50% female founders and 50% male founders? And what about the racial makeup of founders? Is the ideal world for YC a racial make up of 20% white, 20% black, 20% asian, 20% middle eastern, and 20% other?
I would venture to guess that YC understands more than you think. How could you game the application process to get accepted and what purpose would it serve? Sure you could misrepresent who are the founders in the video but don't you think they would not at the interview, assuming you would be offered an interview?
It seems to me that this would certainly be a very unwise decision given that the YC community is very tight knit. I guess there are those who would hope that if just given the chance to be heard during the interview that YC would see the passion and determination but it seems like it would be a very unwise way to start what he/she hopes would be a long term relationship. As you said, the application could be gamed but I don't think it would be looked upon as a good move and given the number of applications that YC receives, such a move is a terrible waste of the YC screeners valuable time.
Just to set my example, how many staff at YC are black or Hispanic in the list below? I find it odd considering the amount of population of these groups in the USA alone. Not many startups cater to this demographic, if they aren't being accepted.
When do we start to demand that Latino rap groups (eg. Cypress Hill) hire to meet diversity quotas?
Anyway, I'll agree that we need to have this conversation, and we need to work out some way of applying some rules that seem somewhat fair, and that the issues should be dealt with on all fronts.
We, in Australia anyway, already have varying rules / laws / regulations that apply to a workplace depending on the number of employees and / or revenue. So it would seem to make sense that diversity quotas would be applied in a similar fashion. I mean if we, as a society, believe that's necessary, which does appear to be the direction we're headed.
I guess I tend to recoil from the idea because I work in heavy steel fabrication and construction. The job roles in this industry tend to be very traditional with regard to gender. Women work the administrative side, men do all the dangerous / dirty / heavy / hot / long hours work. And as far as I can tell everyone is okay with that.
Until I see diversity quotas applied in the job roles that kill and injure men at work it's a little hard for me to take serious this ... squabbling ... in tech industry.
What might be best is, since this doesn't really involve me, as in: I don't work in the hotbed-tech-industry-in-a-large-city, I might just stay out of the conversation.
That argument was beaten to death years ago. The basic outcome is this: you should allow people to work where they want to work, anything else is conscription (the Soviets tried this with predictable effects). So unless you are willing to force people to work in jobs they don't want diversity won't be 100% across all kinds of jobs simply because people self select for the kind of jobs they feel they can do and which will not lead to them getting injured or killed on the job in higher numbers than those that are physically more suited to doing that work.
So the diversity conversation will center on those professions where such innate differences won't make a difference. Even so there are women who do traditional 'mens' jobs and do them well but they are rather the exception than the rule.
And very few of those 'mens' jobs are really in that category, most of the time it is simply tradition rather than some actual basis in fact. Though I'll definitely yield to there being some of those in the steel industry, I've worked near two steel plants (IJmuiden and Sault Ste Marie) and know many steelworkers and would definitely not see them being replaced by females (or less bulky men) any time soon.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/apr/26/meet-wo...
That said I do know a female welder and there are plenty of women in construction who don't care about danger (which should be avoided anyway), dirt or heat and for 'heavy' we have cranes.
You could also do the reverse and encourage men to get into more safe work, while freeing up competent women to go into typical male professions. Both psychology and veterinarian have both around 10 female applicants per male, and the median school grades needed for both is very high. 40% of those women could easy be denied a spot in those female dominated professions in favor of gender diversity, and could then go into tech. It would be very interesting if a large veterinarian company and IT company would join in a pledge to hire one minority gender employee if the other did so. A "fair trade" in the area of social activism.
The figures for Summer 2017 are 72 different universities out of 294 founders. That seems like a pretty specific group within academia. Possibly a set of highly selective universities. I'm curious if the applicant pool similarly as narrow, or if the brand of one's alma mater bears relevance to the process.
As mentioned prior, a piece of paper is a poor proxy for talent and drive.
Surely there's every chance that your application isn't strong enough?
If not being strong enough was a criteria then you could guarantee that every startup would succeed, but looking at a lot of accelerators, there is still a high rate of fail, so who is to say strong enough? I've also seen people you least expect to succeed often succeed and some that you would expect to succeed fail...
Your best bet as a black/latinx founder is to be that outlier or build something for your own group...
I think YC is great, but they don't get the fact that founders can have a horrible application or even look horrible on paper.
Being an entrepreneur is not a cookie cut process, nor is business or anything else.
This is either very poorly worded or unfairly incorrect. When have they not accepted black or Hispanic founders?! They might have attracted mostly white/Asian applicants, but they have never precluded any group.
"...they don't get the fact that founders can have a horrible application or even look horrible on paper."
Of course they get that fact. They often speak about how often they miss opportunities - it's not a charity and they can't pick every winner in advance. They don't just judge applicants on paper. They take a video, and they look at product traction and so on. They have people from all sorts of backgrounds showing it's not a cookie cutter process.
But if you do a bad job at presenting/explaining yourself and your idea, there's every chance you'll have similar struggles pitching to investors and customers.
Not to repeat myself, but look at the YC staff today. How many? http://www.ycombinator.com/people/
You've implied that they only started accepting black/Hispanic people like they've been banned or something?!