January 6, 2026
Who’s your startup daddy?
Show HN: Foundertrace – chain of YC startups founded by its employees
Meet the YC startup family tree everyone’s arguing over
TLDR: FounderTrace maps how employees at YC-backed startups later start new YC companies, turning startup history into a family tree. The crowd loves the concept but is split over data accuracy and transparency, with calls for raw data and fixes to mislabeled timelines—fun, useful, but show the receipts.
YC’s new obsession: FounderTrace, a playful “family tree” that maps how employees of Y Combinator–backed startups later start their own YC-backed companies. Inspired by PG’s tweet, it’s the Silicon Valley version of ancestry.com, and the crowd is buzzing. Fans love the receipts: Airbnb supposedly “spawned” 83 founders, Stripe 67, Twitch 46—complete with claims of four‑generation chains. But the community immediately zoomed in with red pens. One user cheered “awesome!” and then slammed the wrong batch years (someone in Summer 2024 mislabeled as Summer 2019), calling it a family drama with mislabeled cousins. Another eagle-eyed commenter noticed the site is “Powered by Crustdata,” and grilled: did you buy this data, and where’s the raw dataset for graph nerds to poke with pyvis and networkx? Translation: transparency or bust. A spicy comment got flagged and vanished, which only stoked the “what are they hiding?” memes. Meanwhile, people joked about “YC DNA tests” and “who’s your startup daddy?” while dropping names—PayPal, Palantir, Affirm—and debating whether this is history or hype. The vibe: fun toy, real insights, but fix the errors and show the receipts. Until then, it’s a genealogy chart with a side of soap opera.
Key Points
- •FounderTrace, powered by Crustdata, maps YC startup genealogy by linking employees of YC companies who later become YC-funded founders.
- •The site highlights a 4-company YC chain: Auctomatic (W07) → GoCardless (S11) → Duffel (S18) → Vizzly (S22), as noted by Paul Graham.
- •Users can search over six thousand YC companies; hundreds currently have founder trees, with 234 second‑generation YC startups tracked and 30% of founders identified as engineers.
- •Leaderboards rank companies by founders spawned (Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Justin.tv, Twitch) and by founders per year (Airbnb, Stripe, Faire, Twitch, Brex).
- •“Hot Right Now” shows recent founder output leaders: Stripe, Justin.tv, Scale AI, Alpaca, and Typedream; fuller founder trees are coming soon.