Y Combinator Talks Numbers: 842 Companies Funded To Date, 23% With Women Founders In Current Batch

Your Windows 10 Password Will Be Your FaceY Combinator, the startup accelerator known for being the birthplace of Dropbox, Reddit, Airbnb, Stripe, and a number of other companies, released some updated stats this morning showing just how big it’s gotten — and how diverse its current class of companies is.
Y Combinator says it has now funded 842 companies to date, and those startups have raised upwards of $3 billion in investment and have a collective market cap of more than $30 billion. There are four Y Combinator companies that are worth more than $1 billion at the moment, and 32 companies valued at more than $100 million (that figure also includes companies that have been acquired.) As my colleague Josh Constine has written, these figures mean that YC itself could currently be worth more than a billion dollars on paper.
And YC, which funds two batches of startups per year in a winter and summer cohorts, says its current winter 2015 batch is its largest yet, with 114 companies. This class also has a more diverse mix of founders than we’ve seen in the past: 23 percent of startups in winter 2015’s YC class have a female founder, eight percent have a black founder, and 5.3 percent have a hispanic founder, according to YC.
There is more diversity on the age front as well in YC’s winter 2015 batch, with the youngest founder in the class being 20 and the oldest at age 66. That makes for an average age of 30.27, and median age of 29 — which means it might be time to put the old stereotype of the “best” startup founders being teenaged college students to rest for good. You can see more stats about the winter 2015 class here.
There’s still a long, long way to go for the tech industry as a whole when it comes to diversity. But if YC is an early indication of which way the industry is going, it seems to be taking small steps in a positive direction.

By: Unknown On 10:09

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If Y Combinator Did A Growth Fund, It Would Be Very, Very Late-Stage

YC-Backed Kickback Offers An Easy Way To Play Minecraft CompetitivelyFor years, Y Combinator has shied away from doing any kind of follow-on funding. That’s out of concern that this would signal risk and ward VCs away from supporting startups that don’t get this seal of approval.
However, under the firm’s new leadership with Sam Altman at the helm, it’s possible that Y Combinator will consider doing growth-stage investments, according to sources familiar with the firm’s plans. Both YC and Altman declined to comment on this story.
First off, the plans are very much “in flux,” a source tells us. The firm has discussed the possibility of growth-stage funding with external parties, but this is not at all finalized.
Second, it would definitely not involve any kind of Series A or B investments because of the signaling risk problem (e.g. companies that don’t get follow-on funding would have a much harder time raising funds from other investors).
A potential Y Combinator growth-stage fund would be much farther down the line, akin to Series E funding or growth capital that a company might need before going public. Think about it as being competitive with the kinds of firms that might invest in Airbnb at north of the $10 billion valuation.
If they were going to do it, they would think about how they could reinvent the category above and beyond offering commodity capital before an IPO. For instance, companies at this stage have this dual need to raise huge amounts of money to fuel growth and to provide liquidity to early employees. Y Combinator also, of course, has a huge talent network in its alumni pool.
Such a move would be consistent with overall trends in the venture world, which have produced a barbell-like effect favoring very early and very late-stage activity. The cost to build a minimum viable product and then distribute it to a potential audience of more than a billion consumers online or on mobile devices has dropped drastically over the past decade. That’s favored the emergence of founder-friendly firms like Y Combinator, the evolution of superangel funds, and then syndicates and individuals on platforms like AngelList.
At the same time, low interest rates have fueled a hunt for returns in the late-stage end of the market where firms like Coatue, Fidelity and T. Rowe Price have aggressively sought to put money into companies like Uber, Airbnb and Snapchat. That has driven the valuations of these companies into the billions of dollars. A Wall Street Journal report found 75 companies worth at least $1 billion, including Y Combinator alums like Stripe, Dropbox, Airbnb and Instacart.
With more YC alums on their way toward joining this club, it’s no wonder why the firm is considering getting a piece of the action.

By: Unknown On 21:05

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