It wouldn't be too difficult to pay someone a minimal amount to maintain a very detailed spreadsheet of every company that passes through YCombinator and record every stat they can find (and attempt to track how that changes over time). Some columns could be deleted if they are determined to not provide value obviously.
This might allow some interesting patterns to help filter future companies and let them know where the money is best allocated. Optimizing return on investment seems like it would be the most important part of YCombinator, then again I'm not a venture capitalist (but would love to be one some day).
I'm sure this is done somewhat at every incubator / startup investment group but it might be determined to be too valuable to release publicly, but at least a list of companies would be appreciated (all companies, not just the wildly successful ones).
Some possible stats off of the top of my head (per company):
- industry, location, target market
- founder's specialties (marketing, financial, developers). in-house developer or outside contractors. age of founders, university attended
- expected revenue after 1 year, 2 years, 5 years. actual revenue after those times
- number of users, number of paying customers, average revenue per customer. time from conception to first sale
Some of this might be information that they don't want to share, but if willing it would be wonderful to see. Just every data point possible that might offer some kind of correlation between extreme success / moderate success / failure.
YCList is definitely not up to date. There are at least three companies that I know are dead (because I invested in them) that are not listed as dead. And there are almost certainly a lot more because I only looked at my portfolio.
Ohhh, very nice, it looks like that data does exist publicly.
I'm imagining a more consolidated view with filtering / sorting, I might work on building that in the next week or two if I have some free time and see if it's useful to anyone.
http://www.seed-db.com collects stats for YC and every other accelerator, too... the companies they've funded, who's invested for how much and when, etc.
This might allow some interesting patterns to help filter future companies and let them know where the money is best allocated. Optimizing return on investment seems like it would be the most important part of YCombinator, then again I'm not a venture capitalist (but would love to be one some day).
I'm sure this is done somewhat at every incubator / startup investment group but it might be determined to be too valuable to release publicly, but at least a list of companies would be appreciated (all companies, not just the wildly successful ones).
Some possible stats off of the top of my head (per company):
- industry, location, target market
- founder's specialties (marketing, financial, developers). in-house developer or outside contractors. age of founders, university attended
- expected revenue after 1 year, 2 years, 5 years. actual revenue after those times
- number of users, number of paying customers, average revenue per customer. time from conception to first sale
Some of this might be information that they don't want to share, but if willing it would be wonderful to see. Just every data point possible that might offer some kind of correlation between extreme success / moderate success / failure.