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?

(10:52) Stripe data disagrees, showing that AI companies are growing revenue more quickly

(12:56) Carta's data agrees, showing that companies aren't growing faster

(14:12) You can still get rich quick though

(15:00) Further Research

(15:42) Conclusion

The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
September 1st, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hxYiwSqmvxzCXuqty/generative-ai-is-not-causing-ycombinator-companies-to-grow

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

Line graph showing percentage of YC startups mentioning

Graph showing days between startup funding rounds from Q2 2023 through Q2 2025.

Graph showing Series A-D funding rounds and total cash raised, Q2 2024-2025.

Graph comparing AI vs SaaS companies' time to reach $5M annual revenue.

The image shows two trend lines, with AI companies (in gradient blue-pink) reaching the milestone in 24 months versus SaaS companies (in blue) taking 37 months.

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

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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