[webwright]

I think your response and the OP are quite wrong on a few fronts.

First off, YC is NOT looking for companies that take $20M exits. They certainly happen, but it's not great for YC. 95% of the money made in the valley from liquidity events in the valley are from 10 companies-- YC is trying to be part of those 10. The smaller exits just keep the lights on (don't believe me? Do the math on what YC gets from a $20M exit after being diluted thru a funding round or two).

Second, to say "The approach of remaining independent, and investing profits back into to the company followed by technology zealots such as Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs is unattractive to an investor," is just flat out wrong. There are certainly long-game consumer plays (like Facebook) where revenue is eschewed. But Heroku? Parse? Dropbox? AirBnB? Monster cash flow businesses.

As to whether Jobs would do YC-- he might not have when Apple was already growing. What about when he was selling blue box hardware? What about when he came back from India and got a job at Atari?

[JumpCrisscross]

Do we have empirical data that YC doesn't get most of its returns from incremental exits? I thought that the hallmark of the YC model was its diversification along the long tail of founders, freeing it from the 10-bagger trap of traditional VC.

[acgourley]

Yes - http://www.quora.com/Y-Combinator/Which-are-the-most-success... (cliff notes: airbnb / dropbox are the bulk of returns)

[herval]

given neither dropbox nor airbnb was sold yet, would they classify as "returns" yet? It seems more like unrealized profit to me...