The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 78 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Hu: Cursor scaled from $1M to $100M revenue in one year
“We've seen crazy growth unlike anything, only possible with, right now with AI, like all these companies that we work with, zero to twelve million in 12 months. The cursor story where they went zero to one in one year, the next one to a hundred. This is, like,…”
Caldwell: Consumer startups make up only about 5% of YC's portfolio
“People think that YC funds consumer companies, and this is what our bread and butter is. And like, Yeah, like, I think it's like five percent consumer.”
Caldwell: YC accepts startups with $500K ARR or $1M+ raised
“We have folks that get into YC that have, I don't know, half a million dollars in annual recurring revenue. Also a common one here these days is, oh, I'm too far along because I've already raised some money. We have folks that apply and get accepted to YC that…”
Caldwell: Brian Armstrong's original Coinbase YC pitch wasn't about buying Bitcoin
“Another thing I want to note is even Brian and his YC application Didn't really believe in his own idea because what he basically applied to YC with was the P to P transfer parts. It wasn't buying Bitcoin and holding it. It was the idea that he could build som…”
Seibel: Stripe deliberately launched as the most expensive payment product
“When the Stripe Finders came to speak at YC, the other detail they added was it was the most expensive product in the market. Like, to make sure people really wanted it, they didn't give it away for free, they didn't price it comparably, they made it more expe…”
Rossmann: Make School is the only surviving young dropout startup from its YC batch
“My co-founder and I are the only young founders in our batch whose company is still alive. So when you look at it from that perspective, you look today, what are the companies from my YC batch that still exist and are still successful? There is, there are zero…”
Fines: The Narrative That YC Lacks Women and Black People is False
“This misconception of there are no women at YC. There are no black people at YC. There's no, you know, there's all these things, and it's like when I'm working around with all these different people, it's like, it's definitely very diverse, and we're doing eve…”
Altman: Every billion-dollar accelerator alumni so far came from Y Combinator
“However, all, every billion plus dollar company so far ever to come out and accelerate, I think there's 11, have been part of YC.”
PostHog raises a $75M Series E at a $1.4B valuation
“James is here hot off the news of raising a seventy-five million Series E round of funding at a 1.4 billion dollar valuation, making PostHog the latest YC unicorn.”
Friedman: Over 100 YC startups hiring forward deployed engineers
“I was looking earlier today, and if you look at the YC job board, there's over a hundred YC startups that are hiring for a job with the title for deployed engineer and up from basically zero, three years ago”
Palicha: Zepto raised $9M, $50M, and $100M rounds in four months
“But even from a capital perspective, we went from, like, effectively the hundred, 125 K from YC to, like, a nine million dollar round To a fifty million dollar round to a hundred million dollar round in like four months.”
Flora: Asher Bio raised its first $1M on SAFEs with an idea
“The founders of Asher came into YC with just the idea. And they were able to raise the first round of funding using safes quickly from angels. This is pretty novel for a biotech company. And using that first million or so that they raised, they could accelerat…”
The average YC company dies; getting admitted means you accomplished nothing
“The average YC company dies. Like you literally have accomplished in the scale of making any impact on the world, getting into YC means you've accomplished nothing.”
Epstein: Only 3% of top 100 YC companies rely primarily on ads
“Really only three percent of the top 100 YC companies use an advertising business model as their primary way to make money.”
Caldwell: YC's best startups often launch during economic downturns
“Some of the best companies we've ever funded happened when either there was a full downturn or at least a blip.”
Caldwell: YC Repeatedly Funded Failed Ride-Sharing Startups Before Uber
“How many times has YC funded that idea before Uber and it didn't work? This was actually a really common bad startup idea was ride sharing.”
YC is the world's largest bio and hard-tech seed investor
“YC is actually the largest bio seed investor in the world and the largest hard tech seed investor in the world. This includes accelerators, seed funds, every kind of investor.”
Astranis built its first test telecommunications satellite for under $50,000
“It turns out actually that the cheapest telecommunication satellite that is useful costs like at least ten million dollars to build and launch. And so Astronus' hack was to start with a test satellite. The satellite in this photo was their first satellite. The…”
Altman: Unknown 22-year-olds have raised rocket company funding at YC
“I think one of the things that's amazing about Silicon Valley is you actually can raise money. As an unknown twenty-two-year-old to go make a rocket company. It's happened several times at YC.”
Ralston: The average YC startup seed valuation cap exceeds $8M
“The vast majority of companies that go through YC raise seed, and the average cap tends to be over eight million now, so it's clearly not a handicap.”
Altman: YC's top single company accounts for nearly one-third of portfolio value
“YC has funded, I think around 1600 companies, maybe 1700. Our top five companies represent about two thirds of the value that we've created. And our top one company represents about one third. So this is like a, or nearly one third.”
Livingston: Y Combinator funds solo founders in every batch
“Yes, we fund solo founders, like tons of them every batch.”
Livingston: YC funded 632 startups valued at over $20B by 2014
“So fast forward to today, and Y Combinator has funded 632 startups that now have a combined valuation of over twenty billion dollars, including Dropbox, Airbnb, Weebly, and Stripe.”
Tan: Hard tech startups at YC have surged to 15–25%
“One of the things we're seeing at YC now is that number was, you know, maybe five or 10% for many years, and then now we're getting to 15, 20, 25%”
Friedman: YC Has Primarily Funded AI Companies Since ChatGPT
“For the last few years since ChatGPT, YC has been funding mainly AI companies”
Garry Tan: AI Agents Lack Legal Standing to Sign Contracts
“Agents are, like, not legal entities that could, like, sign documents, for instance. So, you know, as long as that's true, like, you actually, like, need a human to be, like, the liability sink and to be, you know, to have standing.”
Non-legal founders built Vessence MVP by embedding inside a law firm
“I worked with a company in the previous batch, the Spring batch, which was just now wrapping up, called Vessence, that are building software for lawyers. And neither of the founders has a legal background, and so the way that they got started before YC was the…”
Englander: YC W24 was the first batch almost entirely composed of AI
“That really was, that was like the first batch where it was like through and through, just, you know, AI companies pretty much”
Blomfield: YC startup Den is building a 'Cursor for knowledge work'
“There's a company in the current batch called Den, basically building cursor for knowledge work. That's trying to chain together all of these different MCP servers, which basically a way to call tools for agents.”
Gusto delayed public self-serve launch until months after Demo Day
“After demo day, we actually did not launch the product. That was also kind of a non-obvious choice we made. We'll probably talk about the seed round we did, but we actually didn't launch publicly where you could like come up as a stranger who we've never met, …”
The founders of Brex entered Y Combinator working on a VR startup
“There were the Brex founders, who I think were working on, like, a VR startup at the time.”
Segment originally applied to YC with a lecture polling tool
“They applied to YC with this idea. It was to let professors who were giving a lecture, like, poll their students, and, like, no one wanted this.”
Taggar: Dropbox founder Drew Houston was initially rejected by YC for applying solo
“Drew applied to YC as a single founder, and he was actually initially rejected and told to go get a co-founder.”
Friedman: Close to 50% of YC Summer 23 Batch Used LLMs
“I think for summer of 23, it was close to 50% of the batch.”
Optimizely pivoted in YC W10 after a failed Twitter referral widget
“This company optimizely went through YC on winter 10, and they put this prototype literally in a couple of days, and the reason why is that they had applied with YC with a very different idea. They started with a Twitter referral widget, and that idea didn't w…”
Flora: Freshpaint met 160 investors over 4.5 months to raise $1.6M
“They met with 160 investors and 39 of them said yes, which is a very high conversion rate. But the check range was all over the place. They had people write five K checks and people write 200 K checks. All right. Not everybody was some fancy VC that could writ…”
Flora: Solugen made $10K monthly selling hydrogen peroxide to hot tubs
“Turned out that hot tub supply stores Needed hydrogen peroxide to sell to people that had hot tubs, and so they were making 10,000 dollars a month selling hydrogen peroxide to hot tub supply stores.”
Airbnb's YC Application Description Explained Its Marketplace Directly Without Jargon
“Here's the actual description Airbnb used on their YC application. We built the first online marketplace that lets travelers book rooms with locals instead of hotels.”
Alströmer: Brex recruited its first 10 customers from its YC batch
“When Brex was in Wicomner in winter of 2017, they recruited the first 10 customers directly from the YC batch.”
Epstein: Stripe, Coinbase, and Brex are three top-10 YC companies
“It also turns out that three of the YC top 10 are transactional businesses too. So these are companies like Stripe, Coinbase, and Brex.”
Epstein: SaaS, transactional, and marketplaces make up 67% of top YC startups
“First is that SaaS businesses actually make up 31% of the top 100 YC companies. Transactional businesses make up 22% of the top 100 YC companies and marketplaces actually make up 14%. So just with these three business models, SaaS, transactional, and marketpla…”
Epstein: Top 10 YC companies generate 50% of top 100 overall value
“Turns out that 50% of the overall value of the top 100 YC companies actually comes from just the top 10.”
Epstein: Marketplaces make up 14% of top YC companies, 30% of value
“So marketplaces are 14% of the top 100 companies, but they actually create 30% of the overall value because so many are represented here in the top 10.”
Caldwell: OpenSea spent two years grinding on a barely working, simple website
“OpenSea was in YC in 2018, and you know, it was a rough start. They changed their idea. They were working on something else to begin with, and they pivoted into OpenSea, and they actually spent something like a year to two years Grinding it out with this reall…”
Kyle Vogt built the original Cruise self-driving MVP in three months
“The original Cruise car Was built in less than three months during YC. Kyle basically just, like, was in a garage building this car and writing code for, like, three months solid, and by the end of YC he had an MVP that he could use to drive on the highway to …”
Parker Conrad pitched Zenefits to YC as a solo non-technical founder
“Zenefits is a really good classic one. Parker was a single, non-technical founder who pitched an idea to YC, and he got in that way.”
Fines: Y Combinator Runs All Large-Scale Events With a One-Person Team
“Cause I don't think that people understand or realize we run a like really small, close knit team. And I appreciate that about YC, but I think that people feel like, or think like we have this entire events team. And they don't realize that I am the team.”