“Generative AI is not causing YCombinator companies to grow more quickly than usual (yet)” by Xodarap

Author: LessWrong ([email protected])
Published: Mon 01 Sep 2025
Episode Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hxYiwSqmvxzCXuqty/generative-ai-is-not-causing-ycombinator-companies-to-grow

Epistemic status: I think you should interpret this as roughly something like “GenAI is not so powerful that it shows up in the most obvious way of analyzing the data, but maybe if someone did a more careful analysis which controlled for e.g. macroeconomic trends they would find that GenAI is indeed causing faster growth.”

Some people have asked me to consider going back to earning-to-give, and so I am considering founding another company. A major hesitation is that startups generally take 6 to 10 years to be acquired or go public. This is unfortunate for founders who believe that we are less than 10 years away from all human labor being automated.
It's possible that the advent of generative AI will make startups grow faster, which could provide a faster exit path. YCombinator CEO Garry Tan has publicly stated that recent YC batches are the fastest growing in their [...]

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Outline:

(03:26) Methodology

(04:01) Identifying GenAI startups

(04:55) Sources of error

(06:42) Results

(06:45) The most valuable companies 2 years after doing YC

(07:10) The most valuable companies 1 year after doing YC

(07:34) Average Growth

(08:25) Discussion

(08:29) Garry Tan's comments

(09:24) Has YCombinator just lost the mandate of heaven?