Y Combinator Top Companies List 2019

[screye]

I am surprised that reddit is on #13.

It's alexa rank in US social media websites is #2 behind Facebook. Apart form their redesign shenanigans, people actually like the product they offer (in contrast to facebook) and they are still growing.

I wish Reddit stays in the kind of "grey" area where it never gets as "official" as twitter, despite the popularity. If anything, that might be entirely its appeal.

That predicament will eternally present a glass ceiling for reddit's revenue, but as a consumer I'd rather see that than it going the full facebook -> hyper growth above anything else approach.

[krn]

> I am surprised that reddit is on #13.

Reddit might be a #1 project out of all the startups ever funded by Y Combinator, but it's unlikely to ever become a top 10 company.

Because as an ad business it can neither match Google at targeting audience by exact user intent, nor Facebook at targeting audience by exact user profile.

In fact, I see reddit more like Couchsurfing: a project which would do much better as a foundation rather than a corporation, based on the role it plays in the society.

At its essence, it's a highly scalable CRUD application, which requires a simple user interface, respectful community moderation, and as little user tracking as possible.

[cm2012]

Reddit traffic converts much worse than FB traffic for advertisers at scale. This is because besides certain subreddits (which are very low scale relatively) the targeting is very weak. Unlike on FB where you can profitably target all sorts of sub groups.

[AlwaysRock]

I know twitter is a household name and everyone knows about it but is reddit really that far behind? My mom isnt using it yet but has probably been linked to it via twitter and facebook over the last year. Not to sound pretentious but there has been a huge shift in the site as it's grown over the last couple of years. Most of the popular subreddits are just pointing out silly behavior on other websites or asking for the hivemind to weigh in on their personal life.

[fullshark]

Apparently they just got funding at a 3 billion value

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-reddit-funding/reddit-val...

[nickthemagicman]

Reddit's content and success is based on its user base.

If it turns into a Facebook type place with gratuitious advertising, data mining, and privacy concerns it will be short lived revenue in my opinion.

The fun people that create the content and culture will migrate away to other sites, and Reddit will be left with the Facebook meme crowd.

Just my thoughts.

[basch]

stripe, airbnb, doordash, and instacart make sense because they offer a service people pour money through, and they can take their commission for facilitating the transaction. i would expect valuations to treat those companies better than ad driven link aggregation and message board hosting.

[LordOfWolves]

Have you been on Reddit lately? Beyond the most mainstream posts, most subs (and their participants) are full of toxicity. I've tried posting helpful comments on there to my detriment.

[killjoywashere]

I went to a Reddit meet-up sponsored by the dev team a couple years ago. Some of the numbers are crazy, like 1 developer per million daily users.

[AlchemistCamp]

Interestingly six of the top ten built on Ruby!

Python is also strongly represented, but zero started with back-ends on Java, .Net. PHP, or other more broadly popular options.

This is strong evidence that the startup world is dramatically different from that of enterprises and businesses where tech is ancillary (which dominate total numbers in popularly shared statistics). In many ways it's a vindication of PG's old essays. Though we're not all using Lisp, startups lean towards it.

[Impossible]

How much of this can be attributed to the efficiency or superiority of Ruby as a language vs most of these now maturing start ups being founded during the peak Rails era? If we look at new Unicorns founded today in 8-10 years we'll probably see slightly different stacks based on what is popular and new today, although to be fair I think a lot of the biggest "tech" unicorns IPOing the 2030s won't be traditional web applications.

[dmode]

Having worked at a few of the top ones, many of them are now investing huge $$$ to rearchitect their tech platform to Java and services. I understand that Ruby allowed them to grow fast, but I am wondering if starting with Java to begin with would have allowed them to avoid massive investment to address tech debt at the expense of growth and profitability at a late stage.

[ksec]

I think that is inevitable, but the Ruby Rails community is working hard to delay that happening. i.e You should be able to grow longer without thinking of moving languages and backend.

Now that Shopify, Github is ( or going to be ) Taking more hands on approach in Rails development rather than Basecamp, which other web framework have this luxury of billions dollar companies doing live testing for it?

[vanilla-almond]

Here is a breakdown of the locations based on the HQ

  US:          85

  Remote:      4

  Europe:      3

  S. America:  3

  S. Asia:     3

  Canada:      2

  Africa:      1  
 
  SE Asia:     1

  Middle East: 1

Two companies have HQ in two countries hence why the totals above equal 103 and not 101

[ignoramous]

Aren't all three companies from South Asia Indian: Razorpay, Meesho, and ClearTax?

[ignoramous]

Psyched to see Meesho up there. Ecomm over WhatsApp is huge in India and they've acquired a significant customer base judging from the # of app installs (~10M+). My prediction is, it won't be long before they grow too huge to be acquired or get acquired themselves.

I count three startups from India in YC S19 batch that rely on WhatsApp as an auxillary platform:

1. https://vahan.co does recruitment over WhatsApp for low to medium income jobs.

2. https://digi-prex.com is a subscription service for medicines.

3. https://mahamela.in a group buying e-commerce business.

Another interesting point, I think, is both startups from Zenefits co-founders are in top 100: Rippling and ZeroDown; the latter with just 15 employees.

Of the startups on the list, I personally like what Flexport and RigettiComputing are doing.

Here is a similar list of top companies I stumbled upon a year or so back (not just limited to YC): https://breakoutlist.com

[daveed]

If you look at the diffs between this and the last list, there are def some companies that opted out of listing. Some of them had so much funding that there's no way that they could've just fallen out. For example, Machine Zone, Zenefits, LendUp, Soylent.

Also interesting, are supposedly well-capitalized companies from the 2018 list that shut down: uBiome(with a fair amount of attention) and Meta.

Other fun observations might just be how much money people are raising. Memsql was 40 in 2018, and is 67 in 2019. I'm guessing they didn't raise money in the time between, and a bunch of companies did so in the meanwhile.

Also kind of interesting? CoreOS(2018 #42) was above Heroku (2018 #46), but in this year's list is above them (Heroku #71, CoreOS #73). But both were acquired by the time that the 2018 list was made. I'm not sure what this is about, but maybe it's because the acquisition terms weren't all cash, and there were fluctuations in the intervening time in Salesforce vs RHT(and then, RHT got acquired by IBM so who knows how that factors into the present value of what used to be CoreOS). Fun.

[DeonPenny]

Lendup fell of cause it fired most of it's staff after running out of funding. They renamed themselves too.

[choppaface]

Looks like Sam is close to closing at least #1 and #2 on his bets https://blog.samaltman.com/bubble-talk

With Gitlab perhaps closing #3

[breck]

Pretty solid predictions.

1) The below 6 companies will be worth >$200B by 1/1/2020.

public: - uber 50 - pinterest 14 - dropbox 8

private: - airbnb 35 - spacex 33 - palantir 26

$166B so very close so far.

2) Stripe, Zenefits, Instacart, Mixpanel, Teespring, Optimizely, Coinbase, Docker, and Weebly will be worth > $27B total by 1/1/2019.

Stripe alone was valued at $35B, so this one looks like a lock.

3) Winter 2015 batch will be worth >$3B on 1/1/2020.

GitLab $2.7

So looks pretty close.

Impressive.

[jeffshek]

That was interesting! Considering this article was based in 2015 (which feels like forever in startup years). Decided to look up the points.

# max(market_cap, enterprise_value) || most_recent_private_valuation

Uber - 50bn

Palantir - 10bn

SpaceX - 40bn

AirBnB - 35bn

Dropbox - 10bn

Pininterest - 10bn

2) Stripe's most valuation is 35 billion 3) GitLab latest's valuation is 2.75 billion

[cfontes]

I am completely out of the loop so might be my ignorance, but why is Brex worth so much?

The founders are super smart and accomplished, I even know some people that worked at pagar.me which was big success in Brazil and can say the guys are super hard working and smart.

But I fail to understand why Brex is such a wonderful idea, I worked for years on the payments sector and all features listed are fairly common to all major providers.

[tempsy]

Because it’s hard for a lot of startups to qualify for traditional corporate charge cards with no personal guarantee even though the venture backed ones have a lot of money in the bank.

Personally I think the fact Stripe launched a competitor will make it hard for them to grow as fast as they might have prior.

[mrnobody_67]

Because investors are happy to underwrite risky startups... recent article about about how many of their clients end up going out of business.

[andygcook]

Question for YC: How does the list rank companies like Zapier that are growing very fast, but haven't raised in years to set a current valuation? I'd imagine that revenue is factored into play but perhaps not shown.

[toomuchtodo]

Historically, I have found that these questions won’t receive a response from anyone with valuation insight at YC. I’m unsure why work isn’t shown when arriving at valuations you’re publicly communicating (even if only relative through ordering, such as in this case). I’m not asking for an S-1 or pro forma financial statements, broad strokes would be fine.

Also, touting how many people your startup employs when it’s in the job destruction business (Cruise and others) seems like an unhelpful metric to put front and center (startups are rarely going to be net job creators, software, automation, all that jazz).

Edit: It’s also odd Docker is #18 when they’re likely about to run out of cash. [1]

Disclaimer: I own equity in a YC startup, but am not currently employed by any companies in YCs portfolio.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/docker-is-in-deep-trouble/

[austenallred]

The list only uses their last valuation, so YC just acknowledges it's not a perfect metric and publishes the list by last valuation.

[yowlingcat]

Where is valuation? Why isn't it listed? Also, what's up with the weird name "jobs created" for employees? I feel like these details must have been chosen deliberately, but I can't determine why.

[quaquaqua1]

The minimum valuation is 150M, and as for the number of employees hired, I would venture to say that they are trying to use it for PR purpose. Employees are a big cost center for a business (a few thousand can cost 100M a year or more) so it sounds like they really want to highlight all the favors they are doing for the world by employing so many people.

[alteria]

2018 list is available here [1], it's interesting to see what the big jumps are.

[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20190904014058/https://www.ycomb...

[derwiki]

Can I snipe someone into diffing the two and listing “biggest jumps”?

[NotSammyHagar]

For some reason that link doesn't work, but you can navigate to the right link. Here's the 2018 one:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190901025541/https://www.ycomb...

[shubidubi]

interesting fact - out of the top 100 companies, (only?) 4 are remote.

[lacker]

Hmm, how is Cruise #3? It seems like their acquisition was for around a billion dollars, but DoorDash and Coinbase should be above that on the list.

[rblion]

TIL reddit is a YC company. I had no idea this whole time.

[jedberg]

It was the first YC company to exit (publicly, there was one from the same batch that was acquired first but wasn't made public). But then it was spun out again and recapitalized a few years later.

[yters]

In fact, isn't HN pg's version of reddit?

[tlrobinson]

It was literally one of the first (of 8) YC companies in 2006.

[jcsnv]

They were part of one of the first batches IIRC

[bryanmgreen]

I know that social and environmental good organizations historically trend towards the “not as profitable or even profitable” category which makes them less likely to be funded and consequently on this list, but I wish more of the companies on this were driving more important change in the world.

[gopi]

Surprised Stripe ranked ahead of Airbnb. But thinking about it makes sense, Stripe eventually will skim a percentage out of every transaction on the internet... Also only one ad-supported consumer internet company, all are either Saas or marketplaces

[koolba]

I'd love to see a list like this sorted by gross revenue (i.e. net GDP contribution) or total paid compensation. Contrasting either of those vs. invested capital would be particularly interesting.

[tempsy]

There's a certain irony in a investor (YC) perpetuating the myth of private valuations. Haven't we learned from WeWork and Juul etc that private valuations are mostly meaningless?

[haolez]

English is not my native language, but this sentence looks really weird to me:

“Helion Energy is breaking the fusion barrier and will be the first to clean, safe, and low-cost commercial electricity.”

[rwmurrayVT]

The descriptions of some of these are hilariously SV.

[negrit]

Surprising to not see Zenefits in the list