2017 YC Annual Letter

Dear YC Community:

In response to a comment on Hacker News, I’m going to try writing an annual letter to the YC community with an update on our progress.

Our mission is to enable the most innovation of any company in the world in order to make the future great for everyone.  We believe new technology, economic growth, and new ideas about how our society might function are more important than ever before.

As of January 1, 2017, YC has funded over 3,200 founders and 1,470 companies.  This year, assuming there is not a macroeconomic meltdown, we expect the total valuation of companies that have gone through our program to surpass $100 billion.  We have also funded more than 30 non-profits.

As always, most of the credit goes to our founders—they, and the astonishingly strong and helpful community they create, are what make YC special.  The second-most credit goes to our team—I am incredibly thankful to work with such a talented and driven group of people.

YC Companies & Investments

We invested about $27 million in the Winter and Summer 2016 batches, and so far we have invested about $187 million in later-stage investments from our first Continuity fund.

We are excited to fund companies in any space that we believe is good for the world and can eventually sustain a very large company.  Some of the many areas we’re interested in are noted in our Requests for Startups.

Our largest exit of 2016 was Cruise, a self-driving car company.  We expect to fund many more machine learning-driven companies in the future (I will generally avoid calling out trends in these letters, because I’ve noticed doing that produced unintended consequences, but this one is so obvious and so important that I’m happy to mention it).

Helion, Oklo, and Bright are all working toward inexpensive clean energy, an area of great interest to us.  LendUp and Coinbase are two examples of YC companies innovating in financial services technology.  Boom and Relativity Space are pursuing strategies in aerospace that most companies haven’t pursued seriously in a long time, or ever.

Gingko Bioworks is learning how to design new organisms, and Science Exchange is making it easier to get new experiments done.  FarmLogs is making it easier and more efficient to grow food, and Gobble, Instacart and Doordash are making it easier to eat it.  Reddit and 9Gag continue to make me waste enormous amounts of time, but I love every minute I waste.

Docker, PlanGrid, Checkr, Flexport, Gusto are just a few of the enterprise companies we’ve seen begin to thrive.  Machine Zone has become one of the largest gaming companies in the world.  Rappi, Wave, and Strikingly are some of the many YC companies succeeding on other continents.

In addition to the three companies we are currently best known for—Airbnb, Dropbox and Stripe—more than 50 of our companies are worth more than $100 million each.

We’ve funded a lot of other companies, but in the spirit of not exhausting your patience, I’ll stop listing them here.

Hyperscale

There’s one more trend I want to mention, though it’s not about a specific market.  I think we’re now in the era of hyperscale technology companies.  If you believe Metcalfe’s law, it stands to reason that network-effected technology companies are now far more powerful than ever before, simply because the number of people connected to the internet keeps getting bigger, and n^2 gets big really fast.

Companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft have powerful advantages that are still not fully understood by most founders and investors.  I expect that they will continue to do a lot of things well, have significant data and computation advantages, be able to attract a large percentage of the most talented engineers, and aggressively buy companies that get off to promising starts.  This trend is unlikely to reverse without antitrust action, and I suggest people carefully consider its implications for startups.  There will of course be areas where these companies are naturally weaker, and these are good areas to start companies.

Diversity & Inclusion

In 2016, we funded 68 female founders at 52 companies. About 22.3% of the companies we funded had a woman on the founding team, and about 12.5% of the founders we funded were women.  In 2016, we funded 52 Black and Latino founders at 29 companies.  11.6% of the founders we funded were Black or Latino.

The percentage of women who apply to YC is roughly the same as the percentage of women who get funded.  The same is true for Black and Latino founders.

From the data we have available, it seems that the percentage of women and people of color applying to YC is higher than the overall percentage of women and people of color starting startups.  This is encouraging, but we continue to want to understand and address the barriers that prevent more founders from underrepresented groups from starting startups and applying to YC.  We still have a long way to go.

While we remain committed to helping more underrepresented founders get started, we believe that’s only part of the solution.  We still see significant dropoffs at the stages after YC (e.g. raising late-stage capital).  The larger startup community needs to consider how little the unicorn-founder demographics resemble the early-stage demographics.

There’s clearly a lot more work to do here, and we’re committed to help do it.  We’re hosting our fourth annual Female Founders Conference this year in June, continuing our Open Office Hours with underrepresented communities and bringing in unconscious bias experts to train our team.  We’re always open to hearing how we can do a better job, so if you’ve come across practices or programs that work well to support diverse founders, please let us know.

YC Organization

Y Combinator is currently made up of 5 groups.  I’ll talk a little about each of them here.  We expect to add several more over the next few years, and in general you should expect us to try a lot of stuff (though of course not all of it will work).  You should also expect us to continue to grow the number of companies we fund.

YC (our flagship program)

In October of 2016, Michael Seibel took over responsibility for our main program as CEO of YC.  He’s doing an outstanding job, and I expect the program to significantly strengthen over the course of 2017 and beyond.

In 2016 (and the first part of 2017), we added three remarkable partners to the flagship group: Tim Brady, Adora Cheung and Daniel Gross.

One of my partners that I’d like to especially thank is Dalton Caldwell.  Dalton has been a YC partner since 2013, and now runs our admissions team, which is perhaps the most important function we have.  Dalton has taken a process that used to be stressful and deeply imperfect and improved it by a huge amount.  Though I’m sure we’ll still make mistakes, I sleep better at night thinking that we’re making far fewer in this area than we used to.

While I’m on the topic of recognizing partners, I’d also like to thank the three partners at YC that get some of the least public recognition.  Kirsty Nathoo is our CFO, and Jon and Carolynn Levy are our General Counsels.  They are full partners at YC but since they don’t advise our companies (as much) on business as the other partners, they are less well-known.  However, they work incredibly hard and thoughtfully, and they are one of the secrets to our success.  In fact, one of our most successful founders recently said to me “I tell every startup I meet they should do YC, and the reason is Jon Levy.  I don’t get how he managed to take my calls at all hours of the day, because the other founders in my batch said he did the same for them, but he solved more problems for us than I can count, and also just listened to me when I had a bad day.”

Finally, I’d like to thank our entire software team, lead by my partner Jared Friedman.  We’ve had an incredible improvement in our software over the past year, and someday when the history of YC is written, I expect that people will talk about software as one of our secret weapons.  This shouldn’t be so secret—one might reasonably expect technology investors to understand the importance of great software for themselves—but it is generally not the case.

We give companies in this program $120k for 7% ownership in their company, and work with them intensively for 3 months and then less intensively for the rest of the company’s life.  We run this program twice a year, and currently fund about 125 companies per batch. While at YC, founders get access to a range of resources, advice, connections, and special deals.

Anyone can apply on our website, and all sorts of people do (here are some common misconceptions about who YC accepts).

Companies often ask us how we decide who gets into YC.  There are four questions I consider:

1) Will this company build something lots of people really love?

If so, and if ‘lots’ is sufficiently large, the company has the chance to produce substantial earnings.

2) Will this company be easy to copy?

The most successful companies I’ve worked with have a significant competitive advantage—network effect, proprietary technology, complex coordination, or barrier to entry of some other sort.  I understand in theory it’s possible to build a very successful commodity company, but I don’t know how to do it.

3) Will these founders develop into “forces of nature”?

As most people say, it’s hard to make money unless you invest in great founders.  Defining what that means is usually left as an exercise to the reader.  Here are some questions I ask myself: Are these founders relentlessly determined?  Are they original thinkers?  Are they smart, and especially do they have new insights I haven’t heard before?  Are they good communicators (and so will they be able to hire, sell, raise money, talk to the press, etc)?  Are they focused and intense?  Do they always seem to find a way around obstacles?  Would I work for them?

This is the often the hardest factor for me to evaluate, because you have to make a judgment about trajectory—you are trying to predict where someone will be in five years.

4) Does this company have a clear and important mission?

Without this, I usually get bored.  More importantly, companies that don’t have this usually have a hard time recruiting enough great people to work with them, and thus struggle to become very large.

We especially like founders who have some sort of non-traditional background; we are somewhat suspicious of founders with extremely “tracked” lives.  Startups are not a resume item, and we don’t like founders who view YC as a stop on the way to B-school.  Although in many ways it’s a good problem to have, the increase in the value of YC’s brand means we have to work harder to find people doing a startup for the right reason: to bring an idea they’re obsessed with to life, and willing to do something unreasonable to see it happen.

We have had great success funding “unknown” people, and we will keep doing this—it’s one of our two or three best secrets.  Please help us spread the message: you don’t need to be experienced, well-known, or have an impressive resume to get into YC.  We fund smart, ambitious people with a great idea and evidence that they can build things.

If you know a founder who should apply to YC, you can recommend them to us. That said, companies don’t need a recommendation or introduction, and most companies we fund don’t have one.

As I mentioned before, I think the strength and quality of our community is one of the most important things we have to offer.  As with any community, this emerges from a complex set of factors, but I’ll mention three here.

One of the most important cultural values PG and Jessica put in place was to do the right thing for founders, even when it is not in our own short-term interest.  When I was going through YC, it was the thing that most stuck out to me as different from other investors.

Another cultural valu