CB Insights - top 15 Y Combinator founders

Hi there, 

Yup — we’re ranking founders.

Today, we unveiled the first-ever algorithm that rates a startup’s founders and management team — Management Mosaic. 

Our goal is simple.

Make the highly subjective and labor-intensive process of assessing founder/team quality easier and more objective.

Easier said than done, of course.

But as the number of startups continues to explode, there are now tens of thousands of companies that buyers of technology products or buyers of equity need to evaluate. 

And so our data science team built an algorithmic shortcut to do this for you.

More on our founder quality algorithm below, plus some data on the best Y Combinator founders and more. 

Read more about Management Mosaic and how the algorithm works here. 

Not so small change

Coinbase’s venture arm has quickly climbed the ranks of the most active corporate VC investors. In H1’21, it doubled its 2020 deal total to become the third most active CVC. 

Check out the rest of the top 10 most active CVC investors in this report. 

Back to the drawing board

Beyond fraud (looking at you, Theranos), why do startups fail? 

We dug into the data, analyzing 110+ post-mortems to map out the top 12 reasons startups go bust. See them in founders’ own words here. 

15 best Y Combinator founders

Back to our founder ranking algorithm.

So how’d we build it?

We analyzed ~5000 successful technology company outcomes and the teams behind them to determine the attributes of the most successful founders and teams.  

We learned which attributes to include and how much to weigh them.

For example:

• Is your educational degree more important than where you’ve worked?

• Is your educational network more important than your professional work network?

• How much does the stage at which you joined a company impact your likely success as a founder? (Said another way, is a product manager who joined Airbnb as product manager before its Series B more likely to be a successful founder than a product manager who joined Airbnb before its Series D?)

By analyzing and synthesizing these signals, Management Mosaic determines the likelihood a team will be successful (as measured by an IPO, M&A, etc.).

With Management Mosaic, corporations and investors can quickly identify the most promising technology companies. 

In other words, it gives you an algorithmic shortcut to engage with only the best startups. 

To give you a taste of what this algorithmic shortcut can do, we dug into the data to determine:

• The 15 most impressive Y Combinator founding teams of the past year

• The 15 top seed-stage founding teams (these are folks likely to be raising soon)

One day more

We're giving you one more day to save on your ticket to the Future of Health (Dec. 8-9). All ticket prices will go up on Friday at 10 am ET.
 

With a focus on both healthcare and pharma, this year’s event features:

• A Tech Marketplace connecting buyers and sellers in healthcare
• 40+ demos introducing healthcare institutions to technologies that can transform their businesses
• CB Insights signature fireside chats with leaders across healthcare and pharma
• CB Insights research presentations on the most important trends in healthcare
• Roundtable discussions addressing key challenges in healthcare
• Unlimited 1:1 video networking

Register here.

I can see clearly now

Demand forecasting platforms are improving retailer profits and reducing food waste.

Companies like Walmart and specialty grocer The Fresh Market are already rolling out these solutions to improve their forecasts and streamline inventory management. 

We surveyed the players in the space and mapped them using our ESP vendor assessment methodology. They include:

• Afresh

• Crisp

• Impact Analytics

• Invafresh

• RELEX

• SAS

• Shelf Engine

If you’re selecting demand forecasting vendors, see where they are positioned in our ESP matrix here.

Mirror, mirror on the wall

Artificial intelligence is impacting every stage of the beauty industry’s value chain.

From research & development to supply chain management to product selection, clients can see how beauty companies are using AI to give the industry a makeover here. 

Wall Street Journal. Sharon Terlep (@sharonterlep) looks at CVS Health’s plans to offer counseling services and cites CB Insights research.  

Retail Dive. Maria Monteros (@MariaMonteros_) covers Walmart’s hiring push and cites the CB Insights State Of Retail Tech Q2’21 report.

Bloomberg. Saritha Rai (@SarithaRai) reports on Prosus’ acquisition of BillDesk and mentions CB Insights data.
 

P.S. Join us for our webinar on September 15 to ask our senior lead retail analyst your questions about what’s next for retail tech. Register here.