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A) Very true!

B) peaked* :)

C) Can you think of any tech companies from the last 10 years that were successful? The answer is ultimately "they exist, but the victory condition is to be bought by MANGA, so you don't remember them even if you heard about them in the first place."

EDIT: to add more context, this is a great post: https://jaredheyman.medium.com/on-the-176-annual-return-of-a... The TL;DR is that Stripe & AirBnB (and to a lesser extent DropBox, DoorDash, and Instacart) were absolutely massive wins that they have yet to (and shouldn't expect to!) replicate; otherwise, they're doing just fine in terms of ROI.



Yeah it's a good question to ask:

Was the startup success rate in 2005 overall higher or was it actually due to YC selecting so well.

Also, success is relatively defined. A $50m exit might be something that gets washed away after a TechCrunch article and a few social media posts.

But that's still life-changing money for the founders. It's not changing the world writ large, but changes the world for a few people.

= Besides, there are many successes we never talk about. Wiz is worth $32B (at least Google was willing to pay that), but rarely talked about because they're a "boring" cybersecurity infrastructure company.


yeah. That YC hasn't produced another Google or made a Facebook should in no way mean it's an utter failure.


> Can you think of any tech companies from the last 10 years that were successful?

OpenAI and Anthropic come to mind


That’s… fair, I guess. Both are majority controlled by MANGA, but they are indeed new companies. That’s kinda illuminating: it takes the breakthrough of the century to establish a new name these days, and even then you’ll probably end up selling slices of yourself to the giants.


Neither are profitable.


10 years, not weeks.


> tech companies from the last 10 years that were successful?

Discord, Anduril, CoreWeave, Veho, MoneyBox, Peak, Marshmallow.


Discord is cool! Anduril is both evil and overvalued. The rest… I mean, I think the names speak for themselves ;)


what do their names say to you?




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