> At least in the early days, YC had a very strong bias towards selecting companies that would succeed without them.
Interesting, my perception is that it's gone the other way; that not only is YC now primarily accepting companies at a later stage when they've already been substantially derisked, but it's also investing in less risky companies to begin with. Several YC partners have said this as well, e.g. Jared Friedman:
"Companies are joining YC at a much later stage. When I started YC, most companies wrote their first line of code in the first week in the program. Today, many of the companies have been working on their business for a long time and some even have substantial customers and revenue before applying. If the companies in my batch applied to YC today, I doubt that many of them would get in." http://blog.jaredfriedman.com/2015/08/18/nine-years-of-demo-...
While I'd like to believe that YC is still willing to fund companies like JustinTV or Loopt, where there is substantial risk in terms of both the technology and the sociology, the reality is that if you go down the most recent batches of demo day companies most of them look like Dollar-Shave-for-X or Uber-for-Y. Maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but perhaps the most striking thing about the most recent batches is how few of the companies are obviously terrible ideas. Unlike back in 2006 and 2007, where probably a third of the companies failed to even launch, and another third probably never got more than 100 users or whatever.
Obviously YC is now also funding energy and biotech companies that are at least as risky as anything from 2005, but if you look at the verticals where they've been active the longest it certainly seems like the trend in those areas is toward later stage and lower risk.
>Obviously YC is now also funding energy and biotech companies that are at least as risky as anything from 2005, but if you look at the verticals where they've been active the longest it certainly seems like the trend in those areas is toward later stage and lower risk.
I am sure this is a reflection of the companies they get to look at. If we use a dating analogy they seem to be getting more interest from supermodels, but this doesn’t mean they are getting more interest from potential life partners.
> I am sure this is a reflection of the companies they get to look at.
I think it's the opposite actually; there are an effectively infinite amount of startups, but the bandwidth of YC is (currently) finite. What we're seeing now is exactly what you'd predict just from the math, even without any data.
When you have a 100 times the interest and limited bandwidth then you only get a short time to look at each company and you end up choosing on the basis of appearance not substance as this is a faster heuristic.
Interesting, my perception is that it's gone the other way; that not only is YC now primarily accepting companies at a later stage when they've already been substantially derisked, but it's also investing in less risky companies to begin with. Several YC partners have said this as well, e.g. Jared Friedman:
"Companies are joining YC at a much later stage. When I started YC, most companies wrote their first line of code in the first week in the program. Today, many of the companies have been working on their business for a long time and some even have substantial customers and revenue before applying. If the companies in my batch applied to YC today, I doubt that many of them would get in." http://blog.jaredfriedman.com/2015/08/18/nine-years-of-demo-...
While I'd like to believe that YC is still willing to fund companies like JustinTV or Loopt, where there is substantial risk in terms of both the technology and the sociology, the reality is that if you go down the most recent batches of demo day companies most of them look like Dollar-Shave-for-X or Uber-for-Y. Maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but perhaps the most striking thing about the most recent batches is how few of the companies are obviously terrible ideas. Unlike back in 2006 and 2007, where probably a third of the companies failed to even launch, and another third probably never got more than 100 users or whatever.
Obviously YC is now also funding energy and biotech companies that are at least as risky as anything from 2005, but if you look at the verticals where they've been active the longest it certainly seems like the trend in those areas is toward later stage and lower risk.