[wasdfan]

This is base rate neglect.

The percentage of people who are competent enough (or crazy enough) to know a LISP well enough to build a product out of it AND be interested in a startup AND applying to YC is quite small in comparison to the number of people slinging code in the more popular languages (who are also interested in applying to YC).

Of course YC is funding companies that don't use i.e. LISP/Haskell/whatever is cool. If it only limited itself to the elite/hipster programmer startups (heh), it wouldn't have that many companies to invest in per year.

[kartickv]

I know this comment wasn't addressed to me, but that's why my original question was phrased as: Are Lisp startups more successful, not: Are there more Lisp startups?