Yes, it's way off. It's based on Crunchbase, which is very incomplete about funding unless investors make a deliberate effort to log rounds there. The actual median up to w2012 seems to be 850k. (We don't have fundraising data from the summer batch in our system yet.)
Exactly; where the majority of startups in an accelerator don't have funding data in Crunchbase, it defaults to the funding that startups get from the accelerator itself. (This is why the list of accelerators defaults to sorting by average funding versus median funding.)
There were a few different ways I could have calculated median funding. The first is just looking at the values of startups with funding data, but this would have only identified the median funding of the "winners" of a program and thus isn't as valuable. So I calculate median by using funding data from Crunchbase for each startup, and where there's none I use the original funding from the accelerators.
If anyone has any questions, comments or feedback, my e-mail is plastered all over the site. ([email protected])
Personally, I would just list the funding provided automatically to each company (complicated in the case of YC since it varies with team size). I'd almost exclude the START and YC VC notes from YC, as they're not mandatory.
A more useful stat is "able to raise follow on funding" or "still in business after a year", I think.
I import each company's funding data from Crunchbase, whether that's a convertible note or an equity round. My comment above was just regarding the algorithm for calculating median funding.
I've been thinking about ways to figure out if a company is still in business, and will be implementing them over the next few months. (This is still a nights/weekends project for me.) One of the easiest ways is just to display a company's twitter/blog feeds on their Seed-DB entry. If they haven't been updated in a long time, that implies they're no longer in business.
