Most of the bad ones IPOd in 2021, when there was a huge overvaluation of speculative tech companies... Marking performance since IPO is also a bit weird since it's kind of arbitrary date in the firm's history.

They have collectively had a return of -49% when the S&P 500 have had a return of 58%. It shows that all of the value went to the VCs and the public markets were the “bigger fools”.

It's surprising to me that investors have been so wrong about combinator IPOs. I wonder if this has been driven my retail, or by the expectation of a small probability of enormous success.

Oklo seems to have recovered thanks to the AI boom and they made a deal with Meta to deliver power fir their data centers. It looks like the best performing YC stock

Is going public the ultimate goal of every startup?

The goal of the startup doesn’t matter once they take VC funding. The goal of the investors is the exit - either via acquisition or going public.

The most likely outcome is failure, the second most likely outcome is an acquisition. Going public is a distant third