While we all waiting for the next YC startup to go public or get acquired, we forget about YC itslef as a company. I think there is an IPO somewhere down the line.
"... I think there is an IPO somewhere down the line. ..."
Evidence? So why bother going to the market for more capital, less control & greater risk?
- more employees? (you can't scale pg, jl with more employees)
- more money? (yc spreads the risk by using micro-capital & attracting top candidates)
- more advertising? (thats how the internet and successful candidates demonstrating product).
Does not compute. What makes more sense is to bust open the VC market using less capital, less people creating the best VC coy. that grabs the cream of an untapped market. Sort of an iteration of the startup pattern applied to a different, but related industry.
IPOs accomplish two things: they raise money for the company, and give the founders a way to sell some of their shares. We don't want to raise money or sell any of our YC stock, so there would be no point.
But it's misleading even to answer as if it were an option. You need massive revenues to go public, on the order of $100m/year, which we are nowhere near. It takes 4 or 5 years on average for startups to generate returns. The only money we make now is from random early acquisitions. We can't even guess how much we'd make ongoing.
An IPO wouldn't make any sense at all for YC. An IPO, just like venture capital, allows a company to convert equity into liquid cash; but YC has no shortage of cash. Instead, YC is limited by the supply of good candidates and by how much time pg et al. have -- neither of which will be affected at all by an IPO.
perhaps more importantly, what do you guys think about the long-term viability of the YC model? are we going to get to a point (i.e. post-Web 2.0) where there just aren't any more opportunities for lightweight web companies?
That doesn't make any sense to me - why do you think that? It seems like taking in a lot of cash from wall street would put pressure on them to become more like a traditional VC.
Evidence? So why bother going to the market for more capital, less control & greater risk?
- more employees? (you can't scale pg, jl with more employees)
- more money? (yc spreads the risk by using micro-capital & attracting top candidates)
- more advertising? (thats how the internet and successful candidates demonstrating product).
Does not compute. What makes more sense is to bust open the VC market using less capital, less people creating the best VC coy. that grabs the cream of an untapped market. Sort of an iteration of the startup pattern applied to a different, but related industry.