The Ledger
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Latka: YC startups artificially inflate revenue by selling to each other
“The problem is when you go into due diligence with a YC company, their customer list is a bunch of other YC companies. So it's almost like a network marketing scheme where like they all buy each other's products to inflate the thing, but it doesn't make any se…”
Hamdi: Y Combinator AI startups are often 'fugazi' ChatGPT wrappers
“I think AI right now has a lot of like Y Combinator kind of fugazi with a couple of people and, you know, a chat GPT wrapper.”
Martin: Y Combinator startup cohort shifted from 16% to 82% remote post-COVID
“Pre-COVID, Y Combinator saw that 16% of their startups were started remotely. Today, this cohort, 82% are partially or fully remote.”
Amit RG: Remote Zoom sessions cannot replicate Y Combinator's networking value
“When you go into a thing like YC, the major takeaway or the major benefit is the network and the kind of people you meet. That, that doesn't happen over Zoom calls and, like, those Zoom sessions where a hundred people are coming together.”
Amit RG turned down Y Combinator after raising from Sequoia
“We also got selected by Combinator, but we decided to not go ahead with it. Because this thing happened like one week before YC, YC was all remote. I'm a big YC fan, but it didn't make sense, you know, to dilute so much when we were already getting, they wante…”
Bawas: European startups have higher success rates by doing YC
“They know that if you do YC, it's like you have more chance to succeed in the business. Then when you do it alone and in, in Europe.”
Latka: Failing to raise on Y Combinator Demo Day creates negative signaling risk
“A lot of people go, I want to get into YC, I want to get into YC, but they don't realize the negative, very real negative signaling risk, where if you leave YC and you do not raise on demo day, there's like a black mark on you effectively, right?”
Latka: Y Combinator-backed Segment generates over $20M in monthly recurring revenue
“YC backed over twenty million in MRR. Twenty million monthly.”
Foster: Zapier has grown profitably on customer revenue since 2012 $1M seed
“We did do a small round when we were first getting started, so we went through Y Combinator and then raised I mean, what today is a modest seed round, about a million dollars in September, twenty-twelve. But since then, we've grown profitably and on customer r…”
Jones: Founders will never find more founder-friendly terms than Y Combinator's
“I strongly encourage everyone to go through the program because you're never going to receive any more founder friendly terms than what Y Combinator offers.”
Brainboard's pre-seed investors supported the company joining Y Combinator
“They're comfortable with it. I mean, the investors we have, they already know the systems like you know, our context is we are in France. It's a French company and a lot of companies from France move to the U S and do YC.”
Falk: Top dev tools like Stripe took 2+ years between Seed and Series A
“You also look at Stripe and a bunch like Vercel, some of these other really big developer tools companies straight after YC, they raised the seed round, but then it took them a long time to raise their series A, raising going from series A to series B. That wa…”
Robin: Luma Turned Down Y Combinator and Raised $3M
“They turned down Y Combinator, little quick story. They just raised three million dollars on their own.”
TinySeed relies on LP SPVs for follow-ons rather than dedicated funds
“We're doing SPVs. We haven't really focused on two, but I think that's what we'll still do. I think we'll effectively, what we're looking to do is make our money doing our primary business. Like we don't like, we're sort of similar to YC and that, that we're l…”
Volset: Funded YC startups refused to give equity for app prototyping
“The companies are coming to me. They were already YC companies. Usually, they were already funded YC, post-funded YC companies, and so they were wise to how, how, you know, expensive equity was. So they weren't just going to dish it out to somebody for buildin…”
Foster: Y Combinator continues to add value to Zapier at scale
“We went through YC, a big stakeholder for us, one of the larger stakeholders for us, and they continue to just provide a lot of useful value, even at the stage that we're at.”
OwnLocal turned down a $17M buyout offer in 2010 after YC
“We were just at a Y Combinator. It was 2000. 10, we'd just raised, I mean, we had just closed, so we'd, we'd only been running the company for a matter of months, and we got an offer for about seventeen million dollars valuation to buy the company from let's j…”
Magdalin: Webflow has been profitable since raising $2.9M after YC in 2013
“The last money we raised was in August, 2013, right after we got out of YC. So we raised about 2.9 million. But after that, we got profitable, cashflow positive, and just been kind of funding operations with customer revenue.”
Trip Adler: $12,000 is still sufficient capital to launch an online service
“I mean back then you know, 12,000 was really, you know, it still is sufficient to get, get a service up and running.”
Nussenbaum: Y Combinator strongly encourages even co-founder equity splits
“Yeah, YC strongly encourages even or close to even.”
Dubey: Recent Y Combinator company valuations typically range from $8M to $15M
“YC companies, like, it's a range, but yeah, I mean, eight million to fifteen million is the common range for the recent YC companies.”
Vantaca acqui-hired YC-backed AI startup HOAI in late 2024
“We acquired a small kind of business, really almost aqua hired a couple of really talented partners out of Y Combinator, a company called HOAI that joined Vantica. We still operate that. That product as an independent product brand, but within Vantica closed t…”
Moore: Bootstrapped FitnessAI to $1M Revenue Before Selling at $4M ARR
“I bootstrapped it to a million in revenue. And then I raised some money, got into Y Combinator and sold it when I got to around four million in ARR.”
Sabayev: Careerist raised around $10 million total from YC and investors
“So totally, we raised around ten million from Y Combinator and a few other investors.”
Rasch: SafetyWing has raised a total of $53 million in capital
“We have raised, so we've raised a total of fifty three million dollars, actually quite a bit through a series run, so we raised, we did Y Combinator in 2018, seed run three and a half, 2019 in 2020 series A eight million, and now in 2020 series B thirty five m…”
Tutto raised a $700K pre-seed from Tinder and YC alumni
“We wanted to raise 500 K. In the end we raise more than 700. Thousand dollars from a lot of angels and the JIT investors we had, we have in the cap table Justin Martin is, is one of the founders of Tinder that investing featured in money. And we also have Aron…”
Mozart Data left Y Combinator with Tempo, Rippling, and Gaia GPS
“So in, at the end of Y Combinator we made
Three sales and we left Y Combinator with three sales. So that was Tempo and Rippling were sort of the two largest and then Gaia GPS was another sale.”
Marinelli: Traction raised $3.7M seed round from Y Combinator and Soma Capital
“We've raised 3.7 million bucks and in seed round that was a Y Cominator together with Soma Capital and other US funds.”
Martinello: Akiflo spent two months doing only user interviews after YC
“So we went back into talking to customers for two full months. We did no coding, just user interviews.”
Martinello: Akiflo gave 7% to YC and raised $150k at $1M cap
“We just gave seven percent to YC and then we raised the one point one 50 K at a million dollar cap. So still most of it.”
Volset: Airbnb raised $600K for its Series A post-YC
“They actually just to give you a context for how things have changed, they did what they then called their Series A, which later got rebranded as a Series C because there wasn't such a thing, I think, as a Series C at the time. But they raised 600,000 dollars …”
Brex Founders Initially Entered Y Combinator With a Virtual Reality Concept
“And in the middle of Stanford, we got into Y Combinator and in Y Combinator was actually a virtual reality idea. And inside Y Combinator, we actually pivoted to Brex.”
Brex Has Captured Nearly 80% Penetration Among Y Combinator Startups
“We're close to 80 today. But you know, there's still plenty left to go.”
Zinc raised under $400,000 total while generating millions in revenue
“We took one 20 back then, but yeah, we did that, and then we raised a small pre-seed round after that, so the total fundraise was under 400 K”
Weisberg: Outbound raised $2.1M seed and entered YC after initial rejection
“So we raised 2.1 million in an initial seed round. And then we did YC after they rejected us the first time, but we got Gary Tan on board and he was just terrific investor and kind of rallied, rallied lots of people. So his fund initialized, he's a YC partner …”
Brescia: Bitnami converted a $1M YC note without raising a Series A
“We took a million dollars when we went through Y Combinator in 2013, and we took about a million bucks in a convertible note, which is now just converted into equity from a bunch of people who are very smart and experienced operators who now serve as kind of a…”
Trip Adler: Scribd has raised approximately $50 million in total funding
“We raised fifty million at this point. So, so basically the trajectory was it was the first 12,000 from Y Combinator. Then we raised 40,000 in angel money. And then at that point we got some tractions. We really quickly went to raise three and a half million f…”
Fukuyama: Fond pivoted seven times in its first month at YC
“We actually changed seven times in the first month of the batch which was three month batch of programs.”
Paul Graham called Rainforest QA the worst company name in YC history
“Paul Graham, who is the famous founder of YC, announced on stage one week that we had the worst name ever to go through YC.”
Stevens-Smith: YC sends founders daily 6 AM countdown emails to Demo Day
“The next day they send an email with the countdown to demo day, right? So the next day you get an email saying a 101 days to demo day and every morning at six AM you get that same email.”
SigOpt has raised $8.8M to date, led by Andreessen Horowitz
“We have about 8.8 million dollars to date. Went through Y Combinator in winter 15. Andreessen Horowitz led our seed round immediately following that. They also led our series A last July.”
Minshew: The Muse raised roughly $270K in initial seed funding including YC
“We raised about a hundred K in January of plus we got into Y Combinator. So that came with about a 170,000 dollars. That was our first seed funding.”
Jones: Y Combinator invests $120K via priced common stock and a SAFE
“Now it's one 20, 20% or 20,000 dollars of it is invested in common share. So it's a priced round. And then the other a 100,000 dollars is invest, invested on a safe.”
HelloSign raised $3.5 million total across two venture rounds
“So after YC, we raised two million and then about two years later, we raised another million and a half. So we've raised three and a half million total.”