Is YC better than other incubators, percentage wise?
YC Graveyard: 821 inactive Y Combinator startups
21–30 of 238 posts
Re: YC Graveyard: 821 inactive Y Combinator startups
#22> Better to have launched and lost than never to have launched at all ...yet when Google does this, people are up in arms and insist they should run their products forever, even if they have no product market fit.
That is different. Google get heat because they have poor management flailing on a huge budget when they have more important things to be working on.
These startups are flailing with poor management, but the blast radius is small because of their limited resources and nobody has a better idea for what they should have been working on. And flailing startup management is expected in a way that Google has no excuse for.
Re: YC Graveyard: 821 inactive Y Combinator startups
#23how many YC startups are there? wiki says 4K, so 821/4K = 20%. not too bad. I expected much worse.
Most YC companies are zombies. There are a lot of 3-5 person startups still "active", some of them since a decade ago.
What’s going on there? Are they profitable but just not scaling, or taking no salary?
Re: YC Graveyard: 821 inactive Y Combinator startups
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Generally the ones that don't sound useful do better. Why Stripe? Why Airbnb? Why Twitter? There's less competition and winner takes all.
How do stripe and Airbnb not sound useful? "Need to get paid" and "find accomodation" are among the oldest business models on the internet.
There were plenty of ways to get paid on the internet before stripe. On paper it didn’t look like they were doing anything new. They just did it better.
Airbnb… idk. Who wants to rent their house out to total strangers? I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t have thought it would take off like it did.
Re: YC Graveyard: 821 inactive Y Combinator startups
#25Since you probably already have this information, it would be interesting to have the "death date", with a link to the announcement or however you gathered the information.
There's not really such a thing as a concrete "date of death" in many cases, and very rarely will there be a public one -- I'm familiar with a few names on this list that never actually made a formal public announcement and kept the website running for months to well over a year after everyone was laid off
The methodology of the aggregator might have been as simple as "ping every YC company's listed website, check the response" with some light hand curation, which suggests that the number presented is just a lower bound on the number of dead YC startups
Re: YC Graveyard: 821 inactive Y Combinator startups
#26Where does the money go ? Especially for startups dead 6 months after investing
Re: YC Graveyard: 821 inactive Y Combinator startups
#27I'm onehundertpercent pissed off with YC:
* The modal win for a founder is $0.00
* PG makes big talk about winner's average returns... Yayyyyy..... However YC gets preferential shares; YC is not aligned with the common shareholders (founders; builders). YC builds a story that they support creators however YC doesn't sit on the same table-side as creators.
* I actually believe YC is worthwhile, but I wonder if Ize just been brainwashed?
(reëdited for clarity)
Re: YC Graveyard: 821 inactive Y Combinator startups
#28I personally know the founders of three YC startups that are functionally dead (raised capital, not developing anything, basically laid off everyone but the founder(s)) but are not on this list. I'd bet it's at least twice that number.
I'm curious, what do ex-founders generally do after their startup is dead? For me I just got a job after my first few ones died, until I was able to succeed at my current ones, but I'm sure many might just continue working a job indefinitely.
I don't think a lot of founders actually write code, but I did, I just realized my startup was probably going to be illegal soon and also that it wasn't going to get the funding it needed. I just kept writing code for whoever wanted to pay. It's fairly lucrative.
Looking back, maybe I should have just done the illegal thing and gotten pardoned.
Re: YC Graveyard: 821 inactive Y Combinator startups
#29Where does the money go ? Especially for startups dead 6 months after investing
Salaries and rent, probably.
Re: YC Graveyard: 821 inactive Y Combinator startups
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious, what do ex-founders generally do after their startup is dead? For me I just got a job after my first few ones died, until I was able to succeed at my current ones, but I'm sure many might just continue working a job indefinitely.
I don't think a lot of founders actually write code , but I did, I just realized my startup was probably going to be illegal soon and also that it wasn't going to get the funding it needed. I just kept writing code for whoever wanted to pay. It's fairly lucrative. Looking back, maybe I should have just done the illegal thing and gotten pardoned.
now I'm curious about the illegal thing