[zapita]

When your job is to help startups, your experience of failure is much more valuable than your experience of success, because it’s much easier to learn from your mistakes.

In any case, YC partners quickly accumulate enormous experience from the failures of all the startups they’re helping. I bet Aaron has personally seen hundreds of startups fail, and has learned from every single failure in order to better help his next batch of startups. That experience probably eclipses whatever else he did before YC.

To me that’s YC’s biggest competitive advantage: they aggregate the learning experience of thousands of startup failures, and use it to keep their success rate above market.