Show HN: Foundertrace – chain of YC startups founded by its employees • Hacker News Board

Show HN: Foundertrace – chain of YC startups founded by its employees

#1

Post by loondri » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 11:06 PM UTC

Inspired by PG’s tweet about a chain of 4 YC startups where the founder worked at a YC startup, I vibe coded and generated these genealogy chains for all ~6k YC startups. And to make these trees easily accessible I packaged them into a hosted webapp.

Few noteworthy YC startups which have had huge impact in YC ecosystem

Airbnb - 83 YC startups spawned

Stripe - 67 YC startups spawned

Dropbox - 50 YC startups spawned

Justin.tv/Twitch - 47 YC startups spawned

More recently founded YC startups which have spawned a lot more YC startups

Rappi - 21 YC startups spawned

Brex - 20 YC startups spawned

Scale AI - 19 YC startups spawned

Show HN: Foundertrace – chain of YC startups founded by its employees
foundertrace.com

Re: Show HN: Foundertrace – chain of YC startups founded by its employees

#2

Post by loondri » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 11:08 PM UTC

PG's tweet that inspired this https://x.com/paulg/status/1994904099566031300

Re: Show HN: Foundertrace – chain of YC startups founded by its employees

#3

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 11:24 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Foundertrace – chain of YC startups founded by its employees

#4

Post by ien24sdq » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 11:05 PM UTC

[flagged]

Re: Show HN: Foundertrace – chain of YC startups founded by its employees

#5

Post by dang » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 11:23 PM UTC

ien24sdq wrote: post #4

[flagged]

On HN, please don't use quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting someone when you aren't. It's an internet trope that doesn't contribute to thoughtful conversation, which is what we're trying for here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Show HN: Foundertrace – chain of YC startups founded by its employees

#6

Post by themanmaran » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 11:25 PM UTC

This is awesome! One note, some of the batch years are wrong, I see someone from S24 marked as S19.

Re: Show HN: Foundertrace – chain of YC startups founded by its employees

#7

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 11:29 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Foundertrace – chain of YC startups founded by its employees

#8

Post by conditionnumber » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 11:32 PM UTC

Very cool! It looks like you've purchased the data from a vendor, is that right? I love graphs of all kinds, so I was hoping to fetch the raw data and have a look at it with pyvis/networkx.

Re: Show HN: Foundertrace – chain of YC startups founded by its employees

#9

Post by loondri » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 12:54 AM UTC

themanmaran wrote: post #6

This is awesome! One note, some of the batch years are wrong, I see someone from S24 marked as S19.

Let me check and fix. Also if possible, mind sharing for which company its marked as S19 vs S24?

Re: Show HN: Foundertrace – chain of YC startups founded by its employees

#10

Post by loondri » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 12:55 AM UTC

conditionnumber wrote: post #8

Very cool! It looks like you've purchased the data from a vendor, is that right? I love graphs of all kinds, so I was hoping to fetch the raw data and have a look at it with pyvis/networkx.

Have mentioned the source at the top right header. Its by Crustdata.