YC has funded approximately 1,900 companies. 93 are valued at $100 million or more. 19 are valued at $1 billion or more. Stripped from nuance, one could say that if you get accepted into YC, you have a 5 percent chance of building a $100 million company, and a 1 percent chance of building a $1 billion company. That's impressive.
Afaik, YC is the only seed funder-startup accelerator in the world, among thousands of other ones, that has given birth to companies worth $1 billion ore more.
At least until three years ago, it hasn't passed funding on a single billion dollar company (1).
Also, rumours are that Coinbase is raising money at a valuation of $8 billion (2). This is the same valuation that the company supposedly gave itself when it acquired earn.com in april this year (3).
> Afaik, YC is the only seed funder-startup accelerator in the world, among thousands of other ones, that has given birth to companies worth $1 billion ore more.
Seedcamp (London) has backed 3 unicorns: Revolut [$1.7B], UiPath [$3B], and TransferWise [$1.6B], and that's just a venture firm I know off the top of my head. While these days they're closer to a first-round fund (with a similar economic deal to YC) than an accelerator, most of those were from back when they were operating in a proper accelerator model.
I suspect there are probably a few other accelerators around the world that have unicorns in their portfolio - you just don't hear about them because they're not local.
Suppose each founder owns 10% at $1b and only count the unicorns. Graduating from YC would represent $1b * 10 % * 1% = $1m of value.
Suppose that applying to YC gives you a 1% chance of graduating, this would mean that just applying represents $10k of value!
Of course it doesn't work like this, you need to apply bayesian statistics. Of the great applications almost all get accepted and of the bad applications almost none do.
The _average_ Y Combinator company is worth ~100M [1]
The _median_ Y Combinator company, however, is worth closer to $0 (the majority of YC companies don't get to a Series A).
This just highlights how counter-intuitive power-law distributions are.
[1] Calculation:
Discard pre YC'17 companies for the purposes of this calculation, as these are still too early stage for meaningful analysis. Brex, Faire and Atrium are the only YC '17 or later on this list.
Numerator: The top 100 companies have a combined valuation of ~$110B, according to this list.
In the most successful class (AirBnB in W09), the majority of companies went to $0. In the most successful recent class (W14), the median startup raised a seed round but nothing else in four years.
Afaik, YC is the only seed funder-startup accelerator in the world, among thousands of other ones, that has given birth to companies worth $1 billion ore more.
At least until three years ago, it hasn't passed funding on a single billion dollar company (1).
Also, rumours are that Coinbase is raising money at a valuation of $8 billion (2). This is the same valuation that the company supposedly gave itself when it acquired earn.com in april this year (3).
(1) https://twitter.com/rabois/status/634205368172814337 (2) https://www.businessinsider.com/coinbase-8-billion-company-f... (3) https://www.recode.net/2018/4/27/17287184/coinbase-earn-acqu...