Forbes released its annual 30 Under 30 lists yesterday and a stunning 15 of the 30 companies that people on the “Tech” list work for are Y Combinator alumni companies. Because multiple people from the same company are counted as a single entry on the list, Y Combinator actually counts 23 of the 40 people, rather than entries, on the tech list as alums.
Nate Blecharczyk, CFO of Airbnb; Adora and Aaron Cheung, cofounders of Pathjoy; Patrick and John Collison, cofounders of Stripe; Dave Fowler, founder of chart.io; Eric Frenkiel, cofounder of MemSQL; Adam Goldstein and Steve Huffman, cofounders of Hipmunk; Daniel Gross and Robby Walker, cofounders of Cue; Victor Ho and Matt Doka, cofounders of FiveStars; Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, cofounders of Dropbox; Alex Mittal and Boris Silver, co-founders of The FundersClub; Alexis Ohanian, cofounder of Reddit; Joshua Reeves, CEO of Zenpayroll; Blake Ross, who is listed on the Forbes list as senior director of product management at Facebook, but cofounded Parakey and went through YC before being acquired by Facebook; David Rusenko, CEO of Weebly; Zach Sims, cofounder of Codeacademy; and Dan Siroker, cofounder of Optimizely are all YC alums.
In addition, Apoorva Mehta, founder of Instacart; Suhail Doshi, CEO of Mixpanel; Matt Schlicht, Mazy Kazerooni and Ben Parr, cofounders of tracks.by; and Emmett Shear, CEO of Twitch (Justin.tv when in YC) made the Games & Apps list and are YC alums. Seth Bannon and Ben Lamothe, founders of Amicus, made the Social Entrepreneurs list as well. Update: Kathryn Minshew, founder of The Daily Muse, made the Media list and is a YC alum.
Now, obviously we should take this with a grain of salt, as these lists are obviously subjective and PR plays a role in the selections, but when you consider YC’s mind-boggling statistics (alums have raised over $1 billion) and sterling reputation, it’s not hard to see why it’s currently the most revered startup incubator in the world.