The analysis is clearly slanted, but the quoted numbers are based in reality.
YC indeed only invests enough money to keep the founders from starving for the first few months, and offers all kinds of support and advice to help them get going. After that, lots of other investors are willing to invest more dollars, but YC does not.
The billions figure is an estimate of the aggregate value across all companies. Most of which is concentrated in a handful of stellar successes like Airbnb and Dropbox.
Attributing value is hard to do. Obviously not all of these billions are the result of YC. But without YC, much of these billions in value would not have been created. So the quoted figure is an upper bound for the value of YC investment.
If you want a lower bound, YC itself takes just a few percent of the company, which can get diluted in later rounds. It would not be worthwhile to be in YC if YC did not provide more value than that. That figure is ballpark likely somewhere around $100 million (could be off by a substantial factor either way).
There is a wide range between, and many, many values in that range could be argued for. In fact many people not in YC claim to have received value from trying to get into YC, and from reading about YC. So one could even argue for figures above the upper bound that this article uses. (Not very tenably in my opinion, but the argument can be made.)
YC indeed only invests enough money to keep the founders from starving for the first few months, and offers all kinds of support and advice to help them get going. After that, lots of other investors are willing to invest more dollars, but YC does not.
The billions figure is an estimate of the aggregate value across all companies. Most of which is concentrated in a handful of stellar successes like Airbnb and Dropbox.
Attributing value is hard to do. Obviously not all of these billions are the result of YC. But without YC, much of these billions in value would not have been created. So the quoted figure is an upper bound for the value of YC investment.
If you want a lower bound, YC itself takes just a few percent of the company, which can get diluted in later rounds. It would not be worthwhile to be in YC if YC did not provide more value than that. That figure is ballpark likely somewhere around $100 million (could be off by a substantial factor either way).
There is a wide range between, and many, many values in that range could be argued for. In fact many people not in YC claim to have received value from trying to get into YC, and from reading about YC. So one could even argue for figures above the upper bound that this article uses. (Not very tenably in my opinion, but the argument can be made.)