YC's been iterating on this model for 3 years now and are getting even better at identifying promising ideas and entrepreneurs. I suspect its going to take one or two more cycles to absolutely nail the model.
In terms if lessons learnt, YC has the most experience of any micro seed fund.
That first batch was actually great. It had both Reddit and Loopt in it, plus Firecrawl, which morphed into Textpayme, plus Justin and Emmett, who went on to do Justin.TV after selling Kiko.
Reddit was a merger of 2 startups from that batch, so if you count Loopt as a success (a fairly safe bet), 4/8 succeeded: Reddit, Infogami, Textpayme, and Loopt. I'd be delighted if we managed to achieve a 50% success rate ongoing.
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YC's been iterating on this model for 3 years now and are getting even better at identifying promising ideas and entrepreneurs. I suspect its going to take one or two more cycles to absolutely nail the model.
In terms if lessons learnt, YC has the most experience of any micro seed fund.
This is its competitive advantage.
That first batch was actually great. It had both Reddit and Loopt in it, plus Firecrawl, which morphed into Textpayme, plus Justin and Emmett, who went on to do Justin.TV after selling Kiko.
Reddit was a merger of 2 startups from that batch, so if you count Loopt as a success (a fairly safe bet), 4/8 succeeded: Reddit, Infogami, Textpayme, and Loopt. I'd be delighted if we managed to achieve a 50% success rate ongoing.