Maybe it valued some companies at below market for $1.8M, but YC also accepts pre-revenue and sometimes pre-product companies. Surely their market value is below $1.8M.
No, it's not. Show me a team of smart founders pre-product who are telling a coherent value prop story [0] and I'll show you a check for $125k at a $5M cap.
Many, many people are not in the Silicon Valley bubble and don’t get lucky enough to break in. I know tons of smart, coherent teams who struggle to this day or gave up.
Every time I came into YC to interview (when it was in person) who did not get funded, in startup school, and all over SE Asia.
I'm just talking factually about the capital market. Plenty of funds would accept a deal of automatically funding all YC-accepted companies at a $5M valuation. I would take it myself as an angel investor. And now YC is taking it instead of lowballing.
For reference, my company was only able to raise 10k at our demo day with a 6M Cap in 2018. This deal would have kept my cofounder and I from maxing out our credit cards & sleeping on our office floor for a year.
We got acquired and I did well anyway but regardless...
