[snowmaker]

This is off-topic for the Atomic Alchemy post, and I don't want to distract from that, but I'll just briefly answer your question about YC.

Roughly half of the companies that join YC are new companies that are just getting started (< 6 months old), and roughly half are more established companies. There are even a significant number of companies each batch that are pretty large (say, > 20 people).