Startup Culture Insights Report

What's in an edition

• A defined sample of Y Combinator companies, and how many of them publish any values at all.
• Every value we could find, in the company's own wording, with its published order preserved.
• A category coding, so the same idea can be counted across companies that use different words for it.
• The questions each edition answers: which values are common, which are absent, how they change with size, and how much vocabulary companies borrow from each other.
• A full methodology box (sample, collection, coding and limits) on the edition page itself.

Editions

How it's made

Each edition starts from a defined list of Y Combinator companies and crawls each company's own website: homepage, about, careers and culture pages, including careers subdomains and hosted job boards. First-party sources only: no aggregators, no LinkedIn, no press coverage.

Whatever set of values a company publishes is captured verbatim, in the order published, and coded against a category taxonomy so that "customer first" and "customer obsession" can be counted as the same idea. Companies whose sites we could not read are recorded separately from companies that publish nothing. The first is our failure, the second is a finding, and they are never pooled.

The full sample, collection method, coding scheme and known limits are stated on each edition page, and the counts are open to inspection: the 2026 edition ships every value we found in a searchable table so you can check the numbers rather than take them on faith.

The editions are not a time series. The category definitions changed between them, so differences between years are partly measurement rather than change in the world. Read each edition on its own terms.