At the beginning of 2020, the world was on the verge of huge changes: a pandemic swept the entire planet and changed the way we live in the blink of an eye. We at YC, like most other companies, were forced to leave our office. We also had to revise the end of the Winter Batch 2020 and bring our demo day online .
At first, none of us knew how long we would spend on the remote, although we suspected that the new regime could last for quite a long time. Today, after almost ten unprecedented months of working from home, we are beginning to adapt to it and even enjoy some of its aspects: although we no longer meet with colleagues in person, we undoubtedly see many benefits of these new conditions. We stopped wasting time on the road - now, to get to work, you just need to go from bedroom to study. Our pets are in a wild delight that we are always with them. From now on, we are almost free to choose a work wardrobe - put on what you like. Even special "pandemic" hairstyles and beard styles have appeared. I'm really not surewhether the last point is a real benefit or just a very noticeable side effect of this new working reality.
2020 has proven to be an unusually challenging year for many sectors of the economy, but most digital-focused companies have done quite well during this challenging time. This year has been particularly significant for YC with a string of successful graduates. Machine Zone (W08) was acquired by AppLovin in May. Twilio completed a $ 3.2 billion purchase of Segment (S11) in October, and in the same month Stripe (S09) announced its acquisition of Paystack (W16). In November, Discovery Education bought Mystery Science (S17), and Airbnb (W09) and Doordash (S13) had impressive IPOs in December. Also in December, Coinbase (S12) applied for S-1. There have been many other successful alumni in the YC community this year, but I will not list them all - I just want to congratulate the founders, employees, and all the investors in these companies from the bottom of my heart.
Many YC healthcare companies have taken up the challenges of COVID-19 by joining in vaccine development, therapy, and other medical projects. A list of such companies can be viewed on our COVID hub.... Other YC startups have adapted remarkably well to the new environment and moved to a remote format without any problems. Undoubtedly, companies like Zapier (S12) and Gitlab (W15) found it much easier to transition to the new mode, since both organizations were committed to telecommuting from the beginning. All startups have made changes to their product strategy as required by the new market realities. Many YC companies initially found themselves on the winning side - the digital revolution has always been their main mission. For example, Doordash, Instacart (S12) and Stripe are thriving at a time when our lives are increasingly moving online. Others had to adapt and move their business on a new track. So, for example, after the cancellation of offline events across the country Faire (W17),online supply chain for boutiques and other small retailers, responded quickly and organized a virtual trade show with live broadcasts , thus providing value for both brands and retailers.
At the beginning of the year, we made the decision to conduct the Summer Batch 2020 completely online, and, as I will tell you in more detail later, we radically revised our program, including a demo day. The summer batch went great - more than 200 founders dared to build their companies in a pandemic. I note that this is already the 15th year of YC's existence - during this time we have funded more than 2,500 startups represented by more than 5,000 founders, and whose total market value has exceeded $ 200 billion.
It is important to say that every part of our fund has had to undergo changes in order to withstand the threats of a pandemic. Next, I will tell you in more detail what has changed in our work this year.
The batch program that YC was based on runs twice a year - in winter and summer. For three months, YC partners have been working with startups to improve their chances of success: we help founders develop their ideas, test the viability of a startup, develop a strategy and their “story”, and hold pitches to investors, clients and employees. The program ends with a demo day - a two-day event where founders present their products to investors.
What changed when the epidemic broke out?
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Winter demo day 2020, like the entire summer batch, was conducted online. Our summer demo day 2020 was extremely successful and even surpassed many offline demo days of the past - over 28,000 founder-investor meetings took place. Thanks to the changes we made, described above, both demo days, like the entire summer batch, were at the highest level.
The YC Admissions Committee guides our critical process in which we select startups to fund. Typically, this procedure involves submitting an online application, followed by face-to-face interviews at Mountain View and several other locations around the world. In 2020 we:
- We completely switched to the remote interview format and conducted more interviews than in any previous year.
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Thanks to these measures, the process of entering the accelerator in 2020 is in no way inferior in efficiency to any other in the ten years that I have been at YC - despite the huge growth in the number of applications submitted over the past two years. Of course, accepting applications is just the beginning: the success of the startups that we end up funding is much more important. It will take time to measure this success, but so far everything indicates that the participants in this year's batch have great prospects.
Other YC programs have adapted to the pandemic in different ways. These programs include Startup School , our free online entrepreneurship course, Work at a Startup to help you find employees, Series A Program, which aims to help founders prepare for their Round A presentation, and YC Continuity , our investment fund that supports founders as they scale up their startups.
So what are the results of each of these programs?
In 2020, Startup School:
- Has worked with 90,000 ambitious startup founders.
- Relaunched as a lifelong learning program so founders can get more value by working flexible hours.
- Added to the program a course for founders who are just starting to build their company - more than 30,000 people have already completed the course.
In 2020 Work at a Startup:
- Held the How to Hire conference for W20 and S20 founders, where we discussed topics such as searching, interviewing, hiring new employees, and many others. We also met in person with over 100 founders.
- Organized six other recruitment-related events (just one in 2019) with over 1,000 applicants.
- Helped recruit over 240 people at YC, double the success of 2019.
In 2020 the Series A Program:
- Raised over $ 650 million in 61 rounds from 54 different investors including a16z, Sequoia, Lightspeed and Accel.
- Published YC's Guide to Raising a Series A , which has received over 120,000 unique views and has been translated into Japanese, Russian and Korean.
- Launched the first ever “Scaling from A to B Program” - a five-week training course aimed at preparing startups that have already passed Round A for the next stage.
In 2020 YC Continuity:
- Celebrated Segment's first growth stage as well as DoorDash's IPO.
- Invested in Podium, Snapdocs, and Groww (our first major growth investment for an Indian startup).
- Held its first online batch of the YC Growth Program - a ten-week series of meetups for founders who lead fast-growing companies with about 50 employees - even founders from Singapore and Lagos took part in the program.
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I am proud of the way YC has met the challenges posed by COVID-19, but of course this is far from the only event that will affect us this past year. Our entire YC team was overwhelmed by the news of the assassination of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests across America, so we began to think about how we can help achieve racial and social equality in the United States.
The first thing we decided to do was to collect a list of organizations with a large contribution to achieving this goal. Our YC community has found over 75 of these organizations, and our partners, staff and alumni have donated to each one.
We also pay a lot of attention to what is happening in our own ecosystem and think about what we can change for the better. So, we started cooperation with two organizations - ColorStack and CodePath , which are developing educational courses in the field of computer science for social minorities and the poor.
In addition, we have launched separate pageson our site dedicated to founders of racial and gender minorities. We hope this new directory will be a useful resource for investors looking to fund startups founded by African Americans, Hispanics, and women. We would also be happy if the experiences of the founders in this directory inspire other potential YC members from these social groups.
The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic will undoubtedly go down in history as one of the largest disasters to befall our planet. It has been a challenging and stressful year that has been a tragedy for countless families around the world. However, at the same time, it was a year of new knowledge and change, and I am proud of how the staff and members of YC spent it, despite not all the difficulties. YC and our entire community remain strong and united, and as we see off 2020 we are only looking forward with optimism. I want to wish the same to all of you.
Thanks to Pauline Verigo for the translation.
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