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Comment by thenduks | Hacker News Reader

Please enlighten me if I'm missing something obvious here, but wouldn't a pretty interesting number be the percentage of funded companies that are profitable today? I mean, maybe not as a measure of YC's success monetarily, but certainly as a success rate for choosing viable products/teams, no?

So to be clear. I'm most interested in how many of the 208 considered as part of the $22.4 million calculation are self-sustaining and making a profit today.

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That would be the wrong metric. A sandwich shop could become profitable much faster than a Google, but I'd much rather invest in the next Google.

Well, it still has to be a good sandwich shop to succeed, and I'd rather invest in a successful sandwich shop than one which will flop. So I'm just curious to know the overall track record of success had by YC funded companies - from a perspective other than 'got more funding' or 'is valued at X'.

Investors would rather invest in a company that has a 1% shot at being Google than 100% shot at being a normally successful sandwich shop.

But can we make the assumption that YC companies are chosen because they have the potential at becoming the next Google, therefore if they are profitable they're on their way towards that goal?

It's a small assumption, but I think one that could be made.

It makes more of a success/failure comparison than a return percentage calculation, but it would still be really interesting to know.

Yes exactly. I definitely didn't mean to say I wanted the numbers for profitable as opposed to the '1% chance of being Google'.

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