A year ago I posted that YCombinator (YC) companies didn’t seem to be growing faster since the release of ChatGPT in 2022. I reran that experiment and found that 2023+ YC companies are arguably growing a bit faster than pre-2023 companies (including AfterQuery, YC’s fastest-ever unicorn), but the difference isn’t large relative to the underlying variance.
It’s worth noting that YC has somewhat fallen from grace: the most valuable AI startups are generally not incubated by YC. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to note that the benefit of AI hasn’t outpaced YC’s secular decline.
A year ago I posted that YCombinator (YC) companies didn’t seem to be growing faster since the release of ChatGPT in 2022. I reran that experiment and found that 2023+ YC companies are arguably growing a bit faster than pre-2023 companies (including AfterQuery, YC’s fastest-ever unicorn), but the difference isn’t large relative to the underlying variance.
It’s worth noting that YC has somewhat fallen from grace: the most valuable AI startups are generally not incubated by YC. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to note that the benefit of AI hasn’t outpaced YC’s secular decline.
Data and methodology here and explained in the previous post.