My back of the envelope calculation over all YC acquisitions so far has them at ~$12million returned. (Over half of that is from Heroku.) That could arguably be anywhere from $5-$20million based on your dilution assumptions, though.

And direct investment costs for 208 startups is <$500k. Even if you add in all the other costs of running the program, YC is pretty f-ing successful.

Then you start thinking about the other startups yet to exit (ie, Loopt, Dropbox) and you see the YC team is truly kicking ass.

Damn, I'm an idiot. Make that direct investment costs of 208 startups is <$5million. (Order of magnitude error; shouldn't have been multitasking when I wrote the comment!)

Still, YC has still returned (and potentially as much as quadrupled) direct costs already, without a number of companies still to exit.

I don't think pg will consider an exit a home run until it exceeds 1B.

Since people seem to dislike my comment, I will explain my point. "A home run" means "ultimate success", you can not expect to do any better than that. Since pg has openly stated that he is looking for the next Google/Facebook type company, 212 million is not "a home run". Its still pretty good!

I think the phrase you are looking for is "grand slam."

That wouldn't be the first time I mix up my metaphors, thanks for the correction!

A walk-off grand slam even.