| Just this week: - Momentus: $1.2B IPO (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/07/momentus-the-latest-space-st...) - Segment: acquired for $3.2B (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24735414) - MessageBird: reached a $3B valuation (https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/08/messagebird-series-c/) More generally: - 15-20 YC companies are now worth $1B or more. - 100ish YC companies are now worth $100M - $1B. A good number of those (and others currently worth less than that) are growing very rapidly and will likely reach unicorn status in the next year. So it seems like one can reliably expect 2-3 unicorns to come out of each YC batch. Those 2-3 unicorns likely more than make up for the costs associated with running each batch (including all of the ~$150K investments). Seems quite good to me. Admittedly, there hasn't yet been a Google/Amazon/Apple/Microsoft-scale company that has come out of YC yet. I think it's only a matter of time until that happens -- anecdotally it seems like at least a handful out of the recent batches could become massive home runs, as well as other more established companies like Stripe that seem to be growing quite well. |