Paul Buchheit on Lessons Learned from Investing in 200 Startups

Re:Paul Buchheit on Lessons Learned from Investing in 200 St... by plinkplonk on Thursday June 01, 2017 @12:22PM (#14461656)

"Sam Altman has said that the only criterion Y Combinator uses to evaluate applying companies is, “Can this be a $10 billion plus company?” like Airbnb and Dropbox. "

I would have thought there would be no way to predict this when looking at the initial barebones product from a few hackers building something that barely works.

If Sam can do this consistently he is a genius. Except maybe Amazon, I can't think of a single company I would have identified as "having the potential to grow into a 10 billion dollar company" in its initial form. :-(

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Re:Paul Buchheit on Lessons Learned from Investing in 200 St... by the_economist on Thursday June 01, 2017 @12:31PM (#14461760)

Potential is defined pretty loosely as "1/200 chance of being worth 10 bil plus" based on their track record so far.

You might be able to do that if you had enough amazing people / companies offering you equity.

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Re:Paul Buchheit on Lessons Learned from Investing in 200 St... by beal on Thursday June 01, 2017 @03:48PM (#14463848)

I think what he's saying is that there are a subset of companies that no matter how successful they get, they are not in a market to ever be worth 10 billion.

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