They weren't necessarily the hottest company from our batch with investors at the time, and they weren't the odds-on favorite to be among the biggest YC exits. There have been, what, maybe a half dozen bigger exits in all of YC history, thus far, if that many? I haven't really kept up with YC companies that I don't know personally, and I'd guess that in five-to-ten years this may seem like a quaintly small exit by YC standards, but for now, that's a lot of money.

I liked them based on their execution and pragmatism, not on their credentials or merely being smart (everybody in YC was wicked smart...it's the first time I'd been in a room where I was pretty confident that most of the folks in it were smarter than me), and I think investors may have been occasionally looking first at the companies out of Stanford/MIT/CMU/etc. I doubt they had trouble raising money but I never recalled them being widespread favorites among the Valley's cognoscenti either.

But, Google would work with the `site:news.ycombinator.com` feature.