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by herdrick 7021 days ago
"7. Projects vs. Businesses: Personally, I think YC is... not really concerned with selecting what may... become "real" companies... I think YC leans a bit too heavily towards the "build it and they will come" model..."

I'm not sure he understands the YCs' insight that startups with lots of happy users almost always succeed financially, one way or the other - the only things that kills them are founder fights, and major blunders, etc.

1 comments
dshah 7021 days ago
Well, I could argue (and will) that the two are not mutually exclusive. Startups that think at least a wee bit about how to build a business may earn themselves more runway and hence have higher chances of ultimately building something users will love.
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paul 7021 days ago
I have never met a YC company that wasn't thinking about how to build a business.

The key thing to understand is that if problem A is 100 times harder than problem B, and problem A is critical to success, then you should spend a lot of time worrying about problem A. In this case, problem A is building something that people will want to use. If you fail at that, then none of the other problems matter, because you have failed.

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