Domain Preferences of Y Combinator Companies

Y Combinator (YC) is a seed funding company that was launched in 2005. Since then it has funded more than 2 thousand companies including some popular ones such as Dropbox, Stripe, Airbnb, Reddit, Zapier, Coinbase, and Twitch.

We have analyzed the domain names of Y Combinator companies to see what kind of domain names they use.

Y Combinator on a Glimpse

The valuation of Y Combinator companies was over $150 Billion as of October 2019, totally. In their own words:

 “Twice a year, we invest a small amount of money in a large number of startups. We have two batches per year – one from January through March and one from June through August.” 

This batch took place 30 times until now. The latest one was in Winter 2020. We analyzed 2,212 companies funded by Y Combinator from 2005 to 2020. 

Investments of Y Combinator by Years

Having invested in more than 2,000 companies since its establishment, Y Combinator has increased the number of companies it has invested, especially in recent years. They invested 280 companies in 2018, 360 companies in 2019 and 172 companies in 2020 (as of May 2020).

Y Combinator’s Investment Categories

Y Combinator invests in 26 categories. B2B, consumer, and marketplace are the leading categories of the investment. 478 B2B (business-to-business) companies have been funded until now. Consumer category with 428 companies, and marketplace category with 163 companies are the second and third most funded categories.

Most Visited Websites

The most visited companies’ websites are as below:

As seen on the list, 9 out of 10 companies preferred the .com extension. The only company that does not use a .com domain as the main website is Twitch. Although the company uses the .tv version, they also own twitch.com. 

(Most popular websites data was taken from Alexa.)

Most Funded Companies

The most funded companies backed by Y Combinator are as follows:

All of the top-funded companies are using .com domain names. 9 of them are using the exact-match .com domain name. Only Cruise uses a prefix: getcruise.com

(Most funded companies data was taken from the Y Combinator Database)

Domain Statistics

Extension Preferences

1,734 companies out of 2,212 prefer .com extension (78.5%).

.io is the second most preferred extension with 128 companies (5.8%). 21 of the 172 companies funded in the last year use the .io extension.

Third, fourth and fifth most used extensions are .co, .ai and .org, respectively. .ai is often preferred by artificial intelligence (AI) companies such as Lofty.ai and People.ai.

gTLD – ccTLD Distribution

Although generic top-level extensions (gTLD) are preferred more, we also see lots of startups use country-code extensions (ccTLD) such as .co (Colombia), .io (British Indian Ocean Territory), and .ai (Anguilla). Companies use country extensions because of their popularity or potential of being an abbreviation of their business area: .co (abbr. of “company” – similar to .com), .ai (artificial intelligence), .io (popular among startups) etc. 

85.76% of companies preferred gTLD and the rest of the companies (14.24%) use ccTLD. 

Domain Creation Dates

391 companies registered their domains and were funded by Y Combinator in the same year. When we look at the year difference between funding and registration year, there are 809 domains whose difference is 2 years. We can say these domains are hand-registered. 

Not all 2,212 domains have websites. 1,671 of the domain names have active websites (with at least one page). The remaining companies no longer exist.

Domain Length

We said “Don’t choose your domain name too long” in our article Don’ts of Choosing a Domain Name. Domain name length of  Y Combinator companies is as shown in the chart.

There are 372 companies whose domain length is 8-letter. There are no domain names on the list with more than 25 characters.

Domain Purchases of Y Combinator Companies 

At least 131 of the 2,212 companies backed by Y Combinator purchased their domain names from the previous owners, according to Namebio records. 90% of these domain purchases are .com and the remaining ones are .io, .co and .me. 118 out of 135 companies preferred the com extension.

Fintech company Cover, funded in 2016, paid $825,000 for cover.com. You can find the story of that purchase on this blog post written by the co-founder of Cover. 

Presto, B2B service for restaurants, paid $150,000 to buy the exact match .com domain name.  

The other fintech company Handle paid $95,378 for Handle.com. The fourth most expensive sale is fountain.com, which was sold for $95,000. 

Top 10 Domain Registrars

There are 128 registrars used by the Y Combinator companies. The first 10 registrars are as shown in the chart. GoDaddy is the most preferred registrar by Y Combinator companies. Namecheap is the second and Google is the third one.

.COM Preference by Years

.com, the king of domain extensions, is the most preferred extension with 78%. But it seems that .com preference is declining in recent years. As seen in the graph; the preference of .com, which was almost 100% in companies funded in 2005, has decreased to 57% in companies funded in 2020. This is mostly because of “all good .com domain names are taken”. Therefore, the startups have to choose other extensions than .com if they can’t purchase the .com domain.

Conclusion

• .com is by far the most preferred extension by Y Combinator companies.
• The preference rate of extensions other than .com increases year after year. However; companies that get funded with high figures upgrade their domain names to their exact-match .com domains.
• .io extension is gaining popularity among startups that founded in the last years. 
• Almost 60% of Y Combinator Companies Uses Exact Match .COM Domain Names.
• 24 of every 100 companies funded by Y Combinator, on average, no longer exist.

What do you think about the domain name choices of companies funded by Y Combinator?

You may also want to check Fortune 500 Companies and Crunchbase Top 1000 Companies analyses to see their domain preferences.

Domain Names of Top Y Combinator Companies by Valuation

(Source: https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies)