In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, many companies and organizations have embraced remote work on a permanent basis.
Count Y Combinator among those that still value face-to-face contact. While the Mountain View startup accelerator went virtual during the pandemic, it's starting to get back to in-person operations.
It held some of its just-completed summer program live in the real world. As part of that, it urged its latest batch of participants to move out to the Bay Area to take part in its accelerator, Michael Seibel, group partner and managing director of YC's early stage programs, said in a blog post Wednesday. The result: About 30% of participants moved to the region for its three-month program. Around 23% were already here.
"The program was still remote friendly with office hours and batch talks online, but we encouraged all teams who could to move to the Bay Area to participate," Seibel said in his post.
The 240 startups and founders that took part in YC's summer session will be pitching their businesses this week at its latest Demo Day event. Despite YC's return to in-person activities, the presentations — to be made Wednesday and Thursday — will be virtual.
Some 19,000 companies or founders from around the world applied to participate in YC's latest program, Seibel said. Citing a tight funding climate, the accelerator cut the size of its program this summer. It admitted about 40% fewer companies and founders than the number that took part its winter batch this year. The summer session cohort is the smallest one YC has hosted since its summer 2020 session, which had 198 startups.
This is Ralston's last batch
Here are some other facts about YC's summer startup batch, according to Seibel:
- 50% of participants had applied at least once before.
- 43% were accepted with only an idea that they wanted to develop.
- 36% had raised money before joining YC.
- 71% had no revenue before being accepted.
- 7% had more than $50,000 of monthly revenue when accepted.
- 140 startups or founders in the group are from the United States. Another 19 are from India and 11 from the United Kingdom. All told, the startups represent 34 countries.
- 29% of participants identify as white. Some 15% identify as South Asian, 13% as Asian, 8% as multiracial, 6% as Hispanic or Latino, 5% as Middle Eastern or North African and 3% as Black.
- 15% of the companies have a woman founder, and 9% of all founders in the batch are women.
This program is the last one that will be overseen by Geoff Ralston. Ralston, who took over as YC's CEO from Sam Altman in 2019, is stepping down at the end of this year. The accelerator announced last week that Garry Tan, a founder who later became partner at the accelerator before starting his own venture firm, will become CEO at the start of next year.
This week's Demo Day event is the 35th since YC launched its original accelerator program in Massachusetts in 2005 with eight startups. Among the companies that have graduated from its program are Airbnb Inc. (Nasdaq:ABNB), Coinbase Global Inc. (Nasdaq:COIN) and DoorDash Inc. (NYSE:DASH).
Watch for more coverage of this week's YC pitches and startups from Bay Area Inno reporters Sonya Herrera and Sara Bloomberg.
