Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we

unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. I am Natasha Masqueriness and I am

joined by the one and only Alex Wilhelm. Alex how are you? You know I knew this week was going to be like standing in the

middle of a sandstorm while not wearing clothes and it's been roughly that and I feel

fine actually. I feel like I've gotten through the hard bits and life's good now.

I think this is growth because in the past I think we

would have defined our value as being like busy, productive people, killing it on

traffic and right now we're doing all those things but we're kind of like tired

so I think it's growth and we are

expanding our definition of success. Natasha just described getting older and

calling growth which I think is perfectly fine. It's reasonable.

But I will say I am slightly less tired

this YC demo day because there were strictly fewer companies.

It was less of a marathon and more of a two-thirds marathon,

if you will. Yes, I'll be honest, this was the reason I was more excited than usual to cover YC2 demo day this year.

It had about 240 companies, which is around 40% less than the winter 2022 batch.

So I think there was a little bit more signal in this batch as well as like what I would say is like a perfect

storm of other factors. It was the second batch to get a bigger check from YC.

They recently expanded their deal to 500K.

And it was the first back in person

or back primarily in person with around like 60 to 70 percent of founders being in the Bay Area for the

three month accelerator.

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