[shazow]

Headquarter location is kind of an arbitrary line to draw, especially with poor data. Many of these companies are fully remote or have multiple large offices.

Just off the top of my head: PagerDuty has a large office in Toronto. GitLab and Zapier are very remote-first focused, I'm sure there's a dozen more on that list.

The problem is that almost all of these companies started out in the Bay Area when they did YC there. It's hard to find up to date information about how SF-centric they are now that they've matured, but it's easy to assume that they are by default.

This feels as useful as talking about incorporation state (so much Delaware!). I'd love to see more data about how distributed companies are these days vs being monolithic offices in SF.

[httpz]

It's not completely arbitrary. Where the HQ is usually shows where the company got started and experienced its initial growth. Also, while a company may have multiple remote offices, most execs will be in HQ and that can have a huge impact on the culture of the company. A Google office in Japan may feel more like a Silicon Valley company than a Japanese company's office in Silicon Valley.

[RobLach]

I do believe that but this particular data set will demonstrate very little evidence of that since since the very likely biggest reason Y Combinator companies seem to be centered around SV is because that's where SV is; and so the data is biased beyond usability in this manner.

[raverbashing]

Does YC incorporate the companies in CA or Delaware?