Y Combinator is one of the most successful startup incubator today. It has funded over 200 companies since its inception in 2005. I have done a mini-survey from a list of companies funded in 2009 and 2010 to find out where these companies are located.

It turns out the largest group do not have an office address. They are probably very small company without employees, working out from home or someplace. Otherwise the top location is San Francisco where about 1/3 companies are located. Mountain View, the home base of Y Combinator, comes in a distant second at 7%. Not counting those without an address, there are 29 companies in San Francisco versus 22 in the rest of the countries.

Location	Num	Pct
Unknown	41	44.6%
San Francisco	29	31.5%
Mountain View	6	6.5%
Other	6	6.5%
Palo Alto	4	4.3%
Sunnyvale	3	3.3%
Other Bay Area	3	3.3%

Finding the address is harder than it sounds. For example, for a company that has already received 5M in funding, Hipmunk still does not list an office address. I searched for the information from crunchbase first, then from the company's website. One of the best place to find its location is actually in the company's jobs page. You ready have to tell people where your office is if you are asking them to come to work for you.

Data Source

• http://yclist.com/
• Raw output data

2011.03.25 [business] - comments

I have received data for the 2011 SFUSD school assignment. The table in the appendix breaks down assignment by ethnicity. I have been interested in the racial distribution among the San Francisco schools. So I created the chart below to see the observe the pattern.

Each school is shown as a ring. The length of the color arc is proportional to the percentage of the corresponding ethnic group in the school. And the size of the ring is proportional to the size of the school. The school with similar racial make up move close to each other.

See the full chart

San Francisco Unified School District is a very diverse district. The three main groups - white, Chinese, Latino each represent about a quarter of the population. The list of schools below are the most well mixed (i.e. most similar to the overall distribution)

• Sheridan
• Starr King
• Muir
• Ortega
• Lakeshore

On the other hand, there are also a number of schools that has a dominant racial group. You can easily identify them as Chinese schools, Latino schools, etc.

P.S. -- Updated chart to include 6th and 9th grade data. There aren't a strong pattern like the Kindergarten. The big story is really that white, the largest group in Kindergarten assignment, is only 13% here. Asian constitute 50% in 6th and 9th grade. (3/27)

Data Source

SFUSD STUDENT ASSIGNMENT
MARCH 2011 SCHOOL ASSIGNMENT OFFERS
March 18, 2011
Appendix E: School Offers

Five Year Comparison of Round 1 Demand
March 12, 2010
SF Montessori opening is estimated

2011.03.21 [school, design] - comments

I have switched this blog's commenting system from a basic open source plug-in to Disqus. I feel ambivalent for outsourcing my data to third party services. But hosting my own comment system takes maintenance. Disqus also has nicer UI and more features like email notification. Let's hope the Disqus service will remain available for a long time.

Installing its javascript to the web page is fairly simple. Importing old comment is lot more difficult. The documentation is minimal. I have to resort to many rounds of trial and error. It takes me several hours to import all comment, even through there are actually not too many of them.

Incidentally while I'm working in the Disqus integration, Facebook has rolled out their own commenting web services. Facebook is becoming the new Microsoft. I'll rather support competitions.

2011.03.05 comments