Startup Investing Trends

_(This talk was written for an audience of investors.)_

Y Combinator has now funded 564 startups including the current batch, which has 53. The total valuation of the 287 that have valuations (either by raising an equity round, getting acquired, or dying) is about $11.7 billion, and the 511 prior to the current batch have collectively raised about $1.7 billion. \[[1](#f1n)\]

As usual those numbers are dominated by a few big winners. The top 10 startups account for 8.6 of that 11.7 billion. But there is a peloton of younger startups behind them. There are about 40 more that have a shot at being really big.

Things got a little out of hand last summer when we had 84 companies in the batch, so we tightened up our filter to decrease the batch size. \[[2](#f2n)\] Several journalists have tried to interpret that as evidence for some macro story they were telling, but the reason had nothing to do with any external trend. The reason was that we discovered we were using an n² algorithm, and we needed to buy time to fix it. Fortunately we've come up with several techniques for sharding YC, and the problem now seems to be fixed. With a new more scaleable model and only 53 companies, the current batch feels like a walk in the park. I'd guess we can grow another 2 or 3x before hitting the next bottleneck. \[[3](#f3n)\]

One consequence of funding such a large number of startups is that we see trends early. And since fundraising is one of the main things we help startups with, we're in a good position to notice trends in investing.

I'm going to take a shot at describing where these trends are leading. Let's start with the most basic question: will the future be better or worse than the past? Will investors, in the aggregate, make more money or less?

I think more. There are multiple forces at work, some of which will decrease returns, and some of which will increase them. I can't predict for sure which forces will prevail, but I'll describe them and you can decide for yourself.

There are two big forces driving change in startup funding: it's becoming cheaper to start a startup, and startups are becoming a more normal thing to do.

When I graduated from college in 1986, there were essentially two options: get a job or go to grad school. Now there's a third: start your own company. That's a big change. In principle it was possible to start your own company in 1986 too, but it didn't seem like a real possibility. It seemed possible to start a consulting company, or a niche product company, but it didn't seem possible to start a company that would become big. \[[4](#f4n)\]

That kind of change, from 2 paths to 3, is the sort of big social shift that only happens once every few generations. I think we're still at the beginning of this one. It's hard to predict how big a deal it will be. As big a deal as the Industrial Revolution? Maybe. Probably not. But it will be a big enough deal that it takes almost everyone by surprise, because those big social shifts always do.

One thing we can say for sure is that there will be a lot more startups. The monolithic, hierarchical companies of the mid 20th century are being [replaced](highres.html) by networks of smaller companies. This process is not just something happening now in Silicon Valley. It started decades ago, and it's happening as far afield as the car industry. It has a long way to run. \[[5](#f5n)\]

The other big driver of change is that startups are becoming cheaper to start. And in fact the two forces are related: the decreasing cost of starting a startup is one of the reasons startups are becoming a more normal thing to do.

The fact that startups need less money means founders will increasingly have the upper hand over investors. You still need just as much of their energy and imagination, but they don't need as much of your money. Because founders have the upper hand, they'll retain an increasingly large share of the stock in, and [control of](control.html), their companies. Which means investors will get less stock and less control.

Does that mean investors will make less money? Not necessarily, because there will be more good startups. The total amount of desirable startup stock available to investors will probably increase, because the number of desirable startups will probably grow faster than the percentage they sell to investors shrinks.

There's a rule of thumb in the VC business that there are about 15 companies a year that will be really successful. Although a lot of investors unconsciously treat this number as if