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Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty convinced that YC's alpha mostly comes from the fact that they can shine a turd into something that doesn't lose them much (or makes a modest profit) when it fails.

Many other VCs that have survived for that long have a huge IPO under their belt, like Google or Uber. The best in the YC portfolio are probably Stripe, Dropbox, and Coinbase. These are great companies and great exits, but don't support 1000+ $0 failures. They do deliver the goods if your failures have a ~0% return rather than a -100% return.

That is a good thing for you if you want to learn how to grow a company, though, because it is a great sign that YC actually works as an education opportunity.

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I did some back-of-the-napkin math when I first applied to YC, and IIRC just based on their unicorn and almost-unicorn companies, and assuming any outcome below $100M was equal to zero, joining YC still gave you an expected value of about $20MM.

So I think it's a way better deal than you're representing here.

It sounds like you are attributing all of the value of the company to joining YC. Many of those companies would have been worth plenty without YC. We have no idea how many.

I would suggest to you that the top YC companies often are the ones who get the least from YC. This is also almost confirmed by the many YouTube videos that YC puts out where they say things along those lines. These companies do everything right while with YC, and they continue to do everything right well past YC (as I understand it, YC is not all that helpful past series C).

I have no strong feelings towards or against YC, but your whole argument seems to hinge on

> Many of those companies would have been worth plenty without YC.

How would you know this?

Are there many companies that got accepted by YC, turned them down, and got as big as the average YC company?

I told you that there's no data, but the heads of YC have outright said this, so I believe them.

Counterfactuals like this are famously hard to prove, and even the statistic you want does not prove it.

Twitch and Cruise are other household name ones but it seems there are quite a few others that aren’t: https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/exits

Am surprised not to see Airbnb on the list tbh.

It’s somewhat uncouth to put AirBNB or Reddit on the list since they were pretty much funded out of pity (and almost weren’t funded).

Twitch has also never been able to really stand as a company on its own. It's like YouTube: a money-losing business that drives attention to the parent company.

They're under the "public" tab.

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