Well, TIL that the ACLU was in YC W17 thanks to the "top 100 tweet count" page. I was kind of surprised by that, are there other well-established organizations that have joined YC at a (very) late stage or are they unique?
EDIT: And here come the downvotes, so let me clarify my stance. I haven't a clue what Snappr does, or what their definition of 'photogenic' is. But here is the dictionary definition of 'photogenic':
(adjective) (especially of a person) looking attractive in photographs or on film.
So my impression was that this metric was to do with how attractive perhaps the founders were. The overall impression here is YC somehow rates the aesthetic qualities of people in order to select who is 'in'. That sort of impression can do untold damage to their brand, and I am surprised that they let this be a thing.
Matt from Snappr (maker of YCDB) here - your point is totally fair, 'photogenic' is not the best word for it. I just went ahead and changed it to 'most aesthetic' for clarity. Thanks for pointing that out.
Of course it is. The whole site is made by them[1]. Clever marketing move!
[1] YCDB is made in San Francisco by the team at Snappr, which is a YC company (W17). Why? Because we love YC companies and discovering new ones! Edited by Matt Schiller.
Matt from Snappr here. This is the source we used for the base list of companies: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ For some reason Lob doesn't appear.
Looking at the top 100 funded companies: it's interesting that the majority are in the "Consumer", "Dev Tools" or "Healthcare" categories, and hardly any are in the "AI and ML" category.
It has become very tough to scrape crunchbase off late. I cant do any scripting around it using headless chrome. It instantly recognizes you are not a human
you should make detailed ( already public, not suggesting nefarious data snooping ) info available on founder profiles. This would allow mining what kind of founders tend to do well vs average vs poorly
no, it wouldn't be useless. Firstly, bias alone doesn't make information useless. Secondly, how is it survivor bias if the dataset also includes failed ycombinator companies?
This is awesome, but I also wondered how much effort it took the Snappr team to build? I suspect just having a plug/link in the footer is enough, plus SEO juice.
it'd be interesting to see companies by investment size vs. exit value. I noticed when clicking around that one of the companies with the highest investment (Cruise) exited for less than its total investment and it got me thinking about which companies might exit for a profit/loss.
