I already mentioned TechStars hit rate, as far as I know it: "has actually produced a couple of winners now", in the form of two small acquisitions.
YC has had a couple of pretty big acquisitions and five (I believe) small acquisitions. More importantly, I think there are at least three or four still on-going companies that will be very large successes for YC. I won't name them, as it might imply that I think others won't be big successes or it might start a flame war over "no way that blah blah idea can generate significant revenue, no matter how many million hits they get", or whatever.
And the "at this stage" bit was in reference to the fact that about 50% of the first batch of YC founders are now rich, by a reasonable definition of "rich". Each batch since then rolls off a bit, in percentages, but the bets are getting bigger and take longer to play out (our company, for example, would not be for sale for a low millions acquisition offer...but the vast majority of the exits for YC and TS companies have been in that range...and I know that a few other YC companies are also looking to build larger companies than that).
Anyway, by any metric YC has a lot of successful companies in their stable. Traffic for a few YC companies is just through the roof (Scribd, Justin.TV, Weebly, Reddit, Disqus, probably others). A couple of others have really impressive reach outside of the usual Web 2.0 set and into the "real world" (Loopt, in particular, though Inkling Markets is everywhere, too...my dad has used Inkling's product, and he just got broadband for the first time last week).
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I already mentioned TechStars hit rate, as far as I know it: "has actually produced a couple of winners now", in the form of two small acquisitions.
YC has had a couple of pretty big acquisitions and five (I believe) small acquisitions. More importantly, I think there are at least three or four still on-going companies that will be very large successes for YC. I won't name them, as it might imply that I think others won't be big successes or it might start a flame war over "no way that blah blah idea can generate significant revenue, no matter how many million hits they get", or whatever.
And the "at this stage" bit was in reference to the fact that about 50% of the first batch of YC founders are now rich, by a reasonable definition of "rich". Each batch since then rolls off a bit, in percentages, but the bets are getting bigger and take longer to play out (our company, for example, would not be for sale for a low millions acquisition offer...but the vast majority of the exits for YC and TS companies have been in that range...and I know that a few other YC companies are also looking to build larger companies than that).
Anyway, by any metric YC has a lot of successful companies in their stable. Traffic for a few YC companies is just through the roof (Scribd, Justin.TV, Weebly, Reddit, Disqus, probably others). A couple of others have really impressive reach outside of the usual Web 2.0 set and into the "real world" (Loopt, in particular, though Inkling Markets is everywhere, too...my dad has used Inkling's product, and he just got broadband for the first time last week).