"The W23 batch lasted from January to early April 2023, and each startup received $500K in investment, divided into $125K at fixed terms (7%) + $375K on a SAFE MFN, totaling $132M in invested capital for Y Combinator."

"8% of the founders are women (down from 9% in S22, 10% in W22, and 12% in S21, still laughable numbers 😔), while 17% of the companies have a woman founder 👎"

"195 SaaS (73.8%, higher than ever!), 112 Machine Learning/AI (obvious!), 86 Developer Tools (more than doubled since last batch), 53 Fintech, 29 Consumer (cut in half since last batch)."

"First, we “widened the net” during the initial selection process, deciding to meet with more startups and then tightening the filter when choosing which ones to invest in"

"Second, in this batch, many startups were closely aligned with our main investment interests (such as dev tools, open source, APIs, etc.), which caught our attention more than usual."

"Many startups arrive at demo day with their round full or their valuation increases by $5–10M before a new raise."

"2) Valuations Didn’t Really Lower, Despite the Market 🚀"

"So, once again, the general trend of pre-seed and seed rounds appearing unaffected by the market situation is confirmed."

"77% with 0 revenue, 52% with just an idea"

"As Garry Tan said during the demo day: a staggering 86% of the batch's companies were present in San Francisco for the duration of the batch."

"Where are the companies based? Of the 238 companies focused on the US market, 158 are based in the Bay Area (with the majority, 140, in San Francisco), 49 in New York, 10 in Los Angeles, and 11 in Seattle (more than doubling since the last batch)."

"There were very few solo founders, with most teams comprising 2 or 3 members. We did not come across any teams with 4 members."

"I read on the Internet (so it must be true) that only 1.7% of VC-backed startups are founded by women. The percentage of female hackers is small, but not that small. So why the discrepancy?"

"A possible explanation emerges when you realize that successful startups tend to have multiple founders who were already friends. People’s best friends are likely to be of the same sex, and if one group is a minority in some population, pairs of them will be a minority squared."

"The most common structure had initial co-founders/team in the same room (SF/NYC) and then a distributed team to scale up."

"While I don’t have exact numbers, based on my personal observations, I can say that at least 30% of the batch pivoted in some way at some point (some even made a 360-degree turn)."

"Pivoting, usually within the same space or general vision, is entirely normal, if not expected, in the pre-seed stage."

"Many tools were inspired by internal tools built within big companies, developed by teams from those companies, and supported by angel investors from the same companies."

"Is the “Palantir Pack” the new “Paypal Mafia”? Who knows, but for sure, it’s a good one."

"Few biotech, space, health, climate, food, and ag-tech startups."