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Comment by tasn | Hacker News Reader

Companies take time to become successful, so the verdict is still out on most of the companies that started in the last 10 years. Time will tell.

Though there are already quite a few successrul YC companies from the last few years. Full list of top YC companies: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies (filter by "top companies")

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Just looking at how most have done since going public , most VC backed companies including YC are just exiting and finding the “bigger fool”. YC has done phenomenal for itself. For the public that bought at IPO - not so much.

https://www.marketsentiment.co/p/the-yc-report

If you invested equally in all YC companies on their IPO day, you would now be down 49% compared to the +58% return of the S&P500! 14 of the 17 companies lost money for the investor, and 3 companies lost more than 99% of their IPO value. Only one company ended up beating the S&P 500 benchmark

I believe median time to unicorn status is now about 7 years, so this is not as uncertain as you think. In other words, 50% of YC's 7-year old unicorns have already showed up. The number is higher for older companies.

Dropbox and Airbnb were superhot companies within 2 or 3 years after YC. My first Airbnb booking was in 2013, and that I felt like a late adopter.

Yes, but average time to unicorn status has been increasing since the time of Dropbox and Airbnb. I assume you can draw more inferences from companies that are earlier-stage, too.

If you read their tweets, YC's message is that their companies are growing faster than ever

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