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Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

(www.bloomberg.com)
563 points jonknee | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.257s | source
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haaen ◴[] No.18079316[source]
Stripe is the second most valuable YC company. Total valuation of all companies that YC funded (more than 1,900) now exceeds 100 billon dollars.

Airbnb has a private valuation of 31 billion. Stripe has a private valuation of 20 billion. Dropbox has a public valuation (DBX) of 11 billion.

So the two most valuable companies account for about half the total value of all the YC companies. This is what a power law looks like!

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chadash ◴[] No.18080137[source]
And this is why Y Combinator may not be right for your startup. The 100 billion dollars of valuation listed on YC's website may not be up to date, but it's clear that the top 10% of companies make up the overwhelming majority of their portfolio. So they go for moonshots. And they also invest in multiple competitors in the same space in the hopes that one will pan out.

So if you're building the kind of company that might be worth $100 million someday but won't ever be worth $100 billion, VCs and startup incubators might not be right for you, but just remember that a rejection from them doesn't necessarily mean you aren't on to something great.

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1. thegeomaster ◴[] No.18081307[source]
It appears to me that almost all companies theoretically have a chance of growing that big. You never know what area they'll pivot into and if they'll find unexpected growth along the way. And so I think that there wouldn't be YCombinator's top 10% without the long tail of lesser-valued (and even longer tail of failed) startups. A lot of it comes down to the people who run them and pure chance. So it doesn't make much sense to say that a startup will not be worth $SOME_VALUATION at some indeterminate point in the future. We see these 180° changes a lot when looking at successful companies in retrospect, and they can deliver order of magnitude differences in market cap.

Of course, if you're not building a startup but an "ordinary", self-sustainable company (37Signals is a widely known example), then VCs and YCombinator are not for you. But that kind of follows from the definition.