If this is true, maybe there's something particularly interesting about the '84/'85 generation.
These people were about 10 years old when the Web happened and 15 years old when Napster and digital cameras took off, so they probably haven't written too many snailmail letters, bought CDs or taken photos on film.
Perhaps that gives them a perspective that's more "digitally native" than older people, yet they have more experience than the '90s-born generation.
(I'm one of those "old" people I guess, being born in 1980...)
It'd be nice to see this data as a distribution. Would tell us a lot more than a median. This might help older founders decide if it's a good fit, or if we'd be outliers there.
Why would you not assume the opposite? I would assume the most experienced people with the most knowledge, contacts, and money to be in their 40s and 50s.
Warning, I'm about to make a couple of massive generalisations...
I would guess that most 40-50 year olds who already have knowledge, contacts and money don't apply to YC, probably because they don't feel that they need it.
I expect that founders at that age are more likely to be coming from a position of experience within their target industry, i.e. solving a problem that they've seen/experienced. They may not be trying to become "X for Y" but solving problem Z that a limited number of clients will pay good money to have solved.
Older founders may have more to risk, so the "go big or go home" model may not be as attractive to them.
As I said, this is a huge generalisation with a lot of guesswork thrown in. I would love to see some more detailed data so that we could draw some conclusions.
Silicon Valley culture is inherently ageist. The median age is by far the most surprising statistic to me. I would have thought it'd be at least 5 years younger. To me the ageist aspect is part of the idea that only young people should be building products for young people.
This is perhaps an insight into the types of companies YC is funding. They may just have a larger pool of B2B and enterprise companies this session.
Well, a big point of YC is that it provides the "contacts and money". And of course anyone who is further along in their career has more at risk by going to a startup.
In my case (I'm 48) I've been applying to YC (third time lucky) because I have plenty of experience, but don't have the contacts. I suspect most people outside Silicon Valley or the US don't have the kind of contacts that YC can provide, or the kind of money that is necessary to scale their business.
I think the median age reflects the types of companies in the batch. I think in general, younger entrepreneurs take on Consumer, maybe marketplace, and perhaps some dev tools and hardware.
The remaining categories will likely have older, more experienced people
I'd like to know more about the biomedical companies. There's a lot more of them than I would have imagined. They have to be relatively capital intensive to get going, at least compared to a software startup.
That would have been my guess as well. For many B2B problems you kind of have to understand the right hand side B which means some industry experience. Same for something like aerospace and finance I'd guess.
That being said I also intuitively assumed a younger age. Most certainly bias on my side since it's the youngest founders I tend to read about online.
We've historically reported companies versus individuals, so we wanted to stay consistent. But that's fair -- we'll put it in those terms next time we release stats.
> As a side note, even though it will break backwards compatibility, we are considering changing how we look at this to the percentage of all founders that are women instead of the percentage of companies with a female founder.
After being told by dozens of people how obviously misleading this statistic is. It was beneath YC to ever release such a phony stat, but it's downright unethical to continue propagating it.
I think the rising age of founder trend is a good one. Probably means the snapchat/whatsapp/instagram gold mine is nearly dry and some actually difficult-to-implement and domain-knowledge requiring ideas are starting to come into focus again.
It could also be a sign of many different things. My "gut guess" is that founders with some startup experience that now are heading out on their own are being selected for.
Is "Countries represented" only from W15 or overall? If it's only from W15, could it be possible to know the list of all countries represented since the beginning of YC?
This is only representative of W15 companies. We don't have a list of countries overall, since it's not something we've always tracked. But that would certainly be interesting to see.
It would be great to have stats on the applicants as well. It would be good to know whether to bother applying given various info (single founder, no customers yet, sector, etc).
Enterprise is a subset of B2B cos. While this isn't an exact science and the very concept of 'Enterprise' has been disrupted by companies such as box.net, I would say that typically: Enterprise = B2B cos with annual contract values > $100k, which usually means a different sales model, too.
Enterprise has nothing to do with only 500 companies in the US.
There is no real difference.
Though some might say if you charge thousands and have dedicated salespeople, you're enterprise, even if you sell to a 25 person architect firm. Sales force is definitely though of as enterprise. While basecamp or twilio is more B2B. It's fuzzy, if there even is a difference.
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These people were about 10 years old when the Web happened and 15 years old when Napster and digital cameras took off, so they probably haven't written too many snailmail letters, bought CDs or taken photos on film.
Perhaps that gives them a perspective that's more "digitally native" than older people, yet they have more experience than the '90s-born generation.
(I'm one of those "old" people I guess, being born in 1980...)
I would guess that most 40-50 year olds who already have knowledge, contacts and money don't apply to YC, probably because they don't feel that they need it.
I expect that founders at that age are more likely to be coming from a position of experience within their target industry, i.e. solving a problem that they've seen/experienced. They may not be trying to become "X for Y" but solving problem Z that a limited number of clients will pay good money to have solved.
Older founders may have more to risk, so the "go big or go home" model may not be as attractive to them.
As I said, this is a huge generalisation with a lot of guesswork thrown in. I would love to see some more detailed data so that we could draw some conclusions.
This is perhaps an insight into the types of companies YC is funding. They may just have a larger pool of B2B and enterprise companies this session.
The remaining categories will likely have older, more experienced people
That being said I also intuitively assumed a younger age. Most certainly bias on my side since it's the youngest founders I tend to read about online.
For example, say X% of the people are female, etc.
Deleted Comment
> As a side note, even though it will break backwards compatibility, we are considering changing how we look at this to the percentage of all founders that are women instead of the percentage of companies with a female founder.
http://blog.ycombinator.com/diversity-and-startups
After being told by dozens of people how obviously misleading this statistic is. It was beneath YC to ever release such a phony stat, but it's downright unethical to continue propagating it.
Deleted Comment
I can think of AirBnB, Dropbox, Stripe, ...
[1] http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579091/0001579091140...
[2] http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/05/instacart-2b-kleiner/
[3] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/12/instacart-a-grocery...
[4] http://graphics.wsj.com/billion-dollar-club/
Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/07/16/newest-hit-game-maker...
E.g., something that is vertical specific may be more "Enterprise" than B2B
There is no real difference.
Though some might say if you charge thousands and have dedicated salespeople, you're enterprise, even if you sell to a 25 person architect firm. Sales force is definitely though of as enterprise. While basecamp or twilio is more B2B. It's fuzzy, if there even is a difference.