A billion dollar software tech company is founded every 3 months *in U.S.
Ron Conway once said: “There's a billion company created every 3 months. Now, it is every 2 months”. I finally got the chance compile “The Billion Dollar” list. I tried to limit this list to only software tech companies.
Context & Ripple Effects
Min Ming Lo's compiled list is an attempt to put numbers behind a claim Ron Conway has been making on the circuit: that a billion-dollar software company used to be created every three months in the U.S., and by his own telling now every two. It lands in an angel market Conway himself helped shape — he and DST Global's Yuri Milner launched the Start Fund in 2011 to invest in every new Y Combinator startup, a bet that batch-scale early access beats pick-and-shovel selectivity.
First-order effects
- For SV Angel-style seed investors, the list functions as validation of the volume thesis behind the Start Fund: if billion-dollar outcomes form on a two-to-three-month cadence, breadth of early positions matters more than any single pick, which is exactly how Conway has described his decision-making — founding team plus current tech trends.
Second-order effects
- Rival super angels face pressure to match the Y Combinator access model or accept worse entry prices; the AngelGate episode of 2010, where Conway circulated a scathing email after the Bin 38 meeting surfaced, already showed how contentious coordination on deal terms had become among that group.
Third-order effects
- If the formation rate Conway cites holds, the billion-dollar mark stops functioning as a scarce signal and becomes a screening threshold — pushing sophisticated capital either earlier into seed batches or later toward proven decacorn-scale winners, and hollowing out the middle.
The trend: Billion-dollar outcomes are becoming frequent enough that early-stage capital is reorganizing around access to entire startup batches rather than individual company selection.