[MenaMena123]

The buyout prices you described are baby buys, those happen everyday, trust me investors arent thr those low ball buys. Yes people make money, but its not one for the history books, if success is maki million, then I guess thats your success.

[itsprofitbaron]

Heroku was acquired for $212MM with a 400x return to YC. I wouldn't exactly call that a baby buy with a small return from a $20k investment.

With regards to the other acquisitions I was highlighting that YC is actually successful without the need for the huge IPO with billion dollar exits. It doesn't need them in order to survive in can happily have $XX Million exits and be hugely successful.

However, they will have those billion dollar etc exits soon as you can see from the likes of some of those companies I listed such as DropBox, AirBnB, Stripe etc.

[MenaMena123]

Yes heroku did a great job, but what about the rest, they may just end up like Loopt, it was hyped and came down to alot of money raised and sold for nothing. And trust me YC isnt in this for the baby buyouts, its looking for that facebook.

Scribd is next, alot of hype and money, but just sucks.

[itsprofitbaron]

I agree with you that YC are looking for billion dollar companies but, what I am saying is that they can still be hugely successful with even those "baby buyouts" $X-XX MM exits are they still provide huge returns from their investment.

Also with regards to Loopt, I actually think they were a great company but were too early to market - which whilst it gave them some advantages it also hindered them. For example, they successfully were able to do deals with the carriers (when they were the only way to get onto phones) but this also hindered them.

Likewise, they have several patents which are extremely valuable as well as the team they built. Sure, their exit wasn't as amazing at it was hoped but thats the risk with all businesses... many fail whether they are in YC or not.

However, it will be interesting to see what will happen to Loopt but, sure that wasn't the home run they hoped it would be, that is irrelevant to the whole of YC.

I say this because, they have 60 or so companies every batch now, eventually and more likely with the improving companies every batch they will have the home run - aka the Google/Facebook that would give them they huge roi with a billion dollar plus exit.

Lets not forget, YC is still young, it was founded in 2005 and has been pretty successful so far in terms of its returns achieved already and we haven't even started to see the full returns from its investments yet.