I couldn't resist calculating the answer to your rhetorical question. It depends how many startups get started each year in SV of course. If the answer is 1000 and we continue to expand at 1/3 per year, then 12 more years. But since we could never get all the startups, what this calculation really proves is that our growth rate is going to have to slow down at some point within the next 12 years.
Unless of course there start to be a lot more startups, which is a real possibility.
But it's alarming to think what sort of monstrosity we'd have to evolve into in order to fund 1000 startups a year.
You won't have to. Your alumni network will do it. A more interesting question: how long will it be before YC, or its alumni, are involved in a majority of SV startups?
Hmm, interesting question, but so much harder to calculate, however bogusly. Paradoxically enough, the answer there would be the fewer, the better, because the spread of YC alumni to companies they didn't found tends to happen through startups dying or getting acquired in small, early acquisitions. Ideally all the startups we funded would go public and the founders would still be working for them 10 years later, like Larry & Sergey are. In that ideal scenario the number YC alumni were involved with would reduce to the number we funded.
That already happens. The Reddits and Zenters have made angel investments in later YC funded companies. They make great investors. They're completely trustworthy, because they're all part of the network, and they understand the founders' situation better than any other investor could.
Unless of course there start to be a lot more startups, which is a real possibility.
But it's alarming to think what sort of monstrosity we'd have to evolve into in order to fund 1000 startups a year.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/B-24_Libe...
I doubt I'd want to run it.