Seed-DB(seed-db.com)
seed-db.com
Seed-DB
http://www.seed-db.com/
11 comments
Wow, that is a pretty impressive number. I wonder if there is some way to compute economic impact of an accelerator (which is to say the secondary and tertiary impacts from rents, services, employement taxes, etc.)
In a perfectly efficient market, YC's marginal benefit to the economy would be described by its profits, specifically cash flows to investors. If YC was publicly held, that would then translate into the share price. If YC were a monopoly and acted to maximize profits, the marginal benefit would be in alternative to no accelerators existing at all, and its net profits would equal its economic impact.
Since our economy is not ideally efficient, we can reasonably say that the profits don't fully describe its impact, but I have no idea what sort of portion would describe the disparity. Note, though, that we would expect just as much of a chance for the profits to overreport economic impact as to underreport it. A generalized method for finding the margin probably exists in some research somewhere, and one unique to YC could probably be approximated using fundamental analysis of the company and those it affects.
We could also back into the economic benefit by looking at the spending multiplier that the company has for its operating expenses, but that would be more complex, since spending multipliers are more touchy and contentious as a means of finding economic value of some expenditure.
The way that these sorts of things are usually quantified is in terms of GDP generated and other measurables like tax volumes, which I think is somewhat unideal, but it's one of the few tools available for such a hard-to-quantify item as economic impact. A study was done on the economic impact of Eli Lilly in Indiana [1] that used similar measures, though they had their own model that was implemented and ended up coming up with around twice the economic impact compared to the GDP measurement alone.
[1] http://www.ibrc.indiana.edu/studies/20090604_lilly-report-fi...
Another problem is that the notion of "economic impact" is difficult to pin down, which is why it's usually easier to just look at more objectively defined variables like net profit, GDP contribution, or revenue/expense cash flows. The easiest thing to do would be to just look at the GDP created by an accelerator, which can be computed from the accounting of YC and those that it interacts with.
Even this is hard to work with for YC though, because YC can be said to "lose" a lot of its potential GDP contribution when it goes around founding incredibly successful companies but only being very successful due to funding the companies during their infancies, when they can easily explode in value after YC. Traditional methods of calculating GDP will have a hard time attributing these value increases to YC, even though YC made them possible in the first place. This comes back to the problem of profits and other financials not accurately representing economic impact, which is especially difficult in YC's case. It's just so hard to quantify the marginal value increase of a company going through YC versus not having gone through YC, which is the core issue.
Since our economy is not ideally efficient, we can reasonably say that the profits don't fully describe its impact, but I have no idea what sort of portion would describe the disparity. Note, though, that we would expect just as much of a chance for the profits to overreport economic impact as to underreport it. A generalized method for finding the margin probably exists in some research somewhere, and one unique to YC could probably be approximated using fundamental analysis of the company and those it affects.
We could also back into the economic benefit by looking at the spending multiplier that the company has for its operating expenses, but that would be more complex, since spending multipliers are more touchy and contentious as a means of finding economic value of some expenditure.
The way that these sorts of things are usually quantified is in terms of GDP generated and other measurables like tax volumes, which I think is somewhat unideal, but it's one of the few tools available for such a hard-to-quantify item as economic impact. A study was done on the economic impact of Eli Lilly in Indiana [1] that used similar measures, though they had their own model that was implemented and ended up coming up with around twice the economic impact compared to the GDP measurement alone.
[1] http://www.ibrc.indiana.edu/studies/20090604_lilly-report-fi...
Another problem is that the notion of "economic impact" is difficult to pin down, which is why it's usually easier to just look at more objectively defined variables like net profit, GDP contribution, or revenue/expense cash flows. The easiest thing to do would be to just look at the GDP created by an accelerator, which can be computed from the accounting of YC and those that it interacts with.
Even this is hard to work with for YC though, because YC can be said to "lose" a lot of its potential GDP contribution when it goes around founding incredibly successful companies but only being very successful due to funding the companies during their infancies, when they can easily explode in value after YC. Traditional methods of calculating GDP will have a hard time attributing these value increases to YC, even though YC made them possible in the first place. This comes back to the problem of profits and other financials not accurately representing economic impact, which is especially difficult in YC's case. It's just so hard to quantify the marginal value increase of a company going through YC versus not having gone through YC, which is the core issue.
Wow, everyone except YC and Techstars Boulder has a terrible success rate: http://www.seed-db.com/accelerators
Is this data complete?
Is this data complete?
I run TechStars Cloud. Roughly complete for me. Key thing when you look at this data is to remember timing.
I've only run 1 program thus far and it only completed 3 months ago. Wouldn't expect to see much in the way of exits after 3 months ;)
I've only run 1 program thus far and it only completed 3 months ago. Wouldn't expect to see much in the way of exits after 3 months ;)
Average time for startup to go from founding to exit is seven years. YC is the only one to have even been in existence for seven years.
Not only that but even for YC non-exited companies are worth significantly more than the ones that have exited. Dropbox and Airbnb (both five years old) are individually likely to be worth more than the sum total of every YC exit made so far.
Not only that but even for YC non-exited companies are worth significantly more than the ones that have exited. Dropbox and Airbnb (both five years old) are individually likely to be worth more than the sum total of every YC exit made so far.
As an alum of Excelerate Labs, I can tell you this data is nowhere near accurate. For example, FeeFighters exited about 4 months ago and we had about $1.5 million in funding and 8 employees...none of that is listed here. The information is incomplete or incorrect for the majority of companies who went through Excelerate.
It doesn't give any sort of time frame; it's not surprising that YC is top, they've been operating longer.
Personally I'd like a count of [number of companies still in business]+[number of exits].
Personally I'd like a count of [number of companies still in business]+[number of exits].
As an alum of Dreamit Philly, I can tell you that there is a lot of missing data there at least. On the order of many millions in funding missing for that program alone. There is also at least one missing exit.
I get funding data from Crunchbase; I hope by being transparent with Seed-DB it helps improve data quality there, too. (Though I also want founders to eventually be able to add it in themselves on Seed-DB.)
If there's a missing exit, please let me know details. [email protected]
If there's a missing exit, please let me know details. [email protected]
I'm a FounderFuel alum and I can say with certainty that the data isn't complete. From the first cohort alone, around $2.5m has been raised so far. They're now about to start their third cohort in August.
Are exits the only measure of success?
Recent quote from PG on this:
"Exits are a stupid test for what they're trying to measure here. By that standard, Airbnb and Dropbox are failures. Exits are a reasonable test for investments made, say, 10 years ago. But none of the incubators are that old yet. So the right way to judge them is by the valuations of the startups they've funded. Unless the venture business as a whole loses money, that will be a lower bound on the eventual exit numbers. Then you don't need to measure fuzzy stuff like "VC perceptions" either. Each incubator has a single score: average valuation. The last time we calculated ours (for the Forbes incubator rankings: http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/04/30/top-tech-i...) it was $45.2m. You could still screw up e.g. in the case where a company hasn't raised money for a long time and whose last post-money valuation is 1/10 of what they could raise at now. But you won't screw up as badly as if you just measure acquisitions."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4143062
"Exits are a stupid test for what they're trying to measure here. By that standard, Airbnb and Dropbox are failures. Exits are a reasonable test for investments made, say, 10 years ago. But none of the incubators are that old yet. So the right way to judge them is by the valuations of the startups they've funded. Unless the venture business as a whole loses money, that will be a lower bound on the eventual exit numbers. Then you don't need to measure fuzzy stuff like "VC perceptions" either. Each incubator has a single score: average valuation. The last time we calculated ours (for the Forbes incubator rankings: http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/04/30/top-tech-i...) it was $45.2m. You could still screw up e.g. in the case where a company hasn't raised money for a long time and whose last post-money valuation is 1/10 of what they could raise at now. But you won't screw up as badly as if you just measure acquisitions."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4143062
As Jed notes in his post and on the site there is clearly work to be done (this is an MVP) but I think this is a great tool for founders to compare accelerator programs.
They all have the same spiel about mentoring and funding but this gives some real clarity to the murky waters of seed accelerators. Beyond the top-tier (YC, TechStars, Seedcamp [IMHO]) it is hard to know the value of some of these programmes.
Keep up the good work, looking forward to see AngelList and Linkedin data integrated ;)
They all have the same spiel about mentoring and funding but this gives some real clarity to the murky waters of seed accelerators. Beyond the top-tier (YC, TechStars, Seedcamp [IMHO]) it is hard to know the value of some of these programmes.
Keep up the good work, looking forward to see AngelList and Linkedin data integrated ;)
I run http://seedtable.com which similarly provides analytics built on-top of Crunchbase and what I found from looking at the financial numbers is that Crunchbase just isn't reliable enough to do analytics on.
Rounds are frequently incorrect (typos in numbers, orders of magnitude wrong, foreign currencies treated as if they were USD, etc.) or missing.
It's definitely better than nothing, but should be treated with caution.
Rounds are frequently incorrect (typos in numbers, orders of magnitude wrong, foreign currencies treated as if they were USD, etc.) or missing.
It's definitely better than nothing, but should be treated with caution.
This is just the first step; I've got more planned to make this better.
But I also believe that by publicizing this it will encourage accelerators to have their startups monitor/clean up their data on Crunchbase. (And I personally think that's good for the startup ecosystem.)
But I also believe that by publicizing this it will encourage accelerators to have their startups monitor/clean up their data on Crunchbase. (And I personally think that's good for the startup ecosystem.)
Agreed. You should ping Techcrunch they're normally happy to cover third-party tools built on-top of Crunchbase.
It's a shame that Crunchbase has become so neglected under AOL though.
Incidentally if you want to grab a drink/coffee sometime feel free to drop me an email (address on my profile).
It's a shame that Crunchbase has become so neglected under AOL though.
Incidentally if you want to grab a drink/coffee sometime feel free to drop me an email (address on my profile).
Specific data on YC companies: http://yclist.com/
Even more datap[1]: http://ycpages.info/
Some more activity on Angel list: https://angel.co/y-combinator#activity
[1] Hn dicussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2273898
Even more datap[1]: http://ycpages.info/
Some more activity on Angel list: https://angel.co/y-combinator#activity
[1] Hn dicussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2273898
YClist is a bit out of date. It gets information from the Google Spreadsheets I used to maintain, but which I've since deprecated.
It will be interesting to see Start-Up Chile added to this list. I think the number of companies they've funded has almost passed YC now.
This seems like a list of news stories than a reliable data source. Feedgen is obviously not active - try going to the site. i/o ventures doesn't even have any companies listed.
Nice list of company names though. Lots of really really bad ones in the list. Some clearly good ones.
Nice list of company names though. Lots of really really bad ones in the list. Some clearly good ones.
Love the data and the site. Would be fantastic if you'd open up an API to this data to make it easy to ingest and analyze in external tools (R, Excel, whatever).
It would be easy enough to scrape it, but formal support for data export is such a huge win for sites like this.
It would be easy enough to scrape it, but formal support for data export is such a huge win for sites like this.
That's a little bit longer term for me, but would like to do it. (For context, this is the first webapp I've ever built.)
No Brazilian accelerators in the list :(
There are a few: Semente, 21212, Aceleradora, Endeavor.. though it's hard to find information on them.
ps: Bootstrap didn't fit that well there, looks a bit awkward.
There are a few: Semente, 21212, Aceleradora, Endeavor.. though it's hard to find information on them.
ps: Bootstrap didn't fit that well there, looks a bit awkward.
Really enjoyed looking at the data—nice compilation!
One quick question, what do these badges mean:
http://cl.ly/image/1X0T2E1a0T2m
One quick question, what do these badges mean:
http://cl.ly/image/1X0T2E1a0T2m
It's my confidence level in the exit values. Only a few have been public or widely reported. The rest are purely my guesses. I wanted to put a High / Medium / Low confidence against each value.
Looks like I should make this more clear in the interface!
Looks like I should make this more clear in the interface!
Ah, that makes sense. Yeah, a label would be nice—otherwise, great job!
the numbers don't look too hot ...
Believe it or not I'd never calculated the total amount of funding raised. I was interested to see that it's now over a billion dollars.