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As a YC founder, I'm really sorry you had such a bad experience with other YC startups. I don't think your experience is generally true of YC companies, though. They vary in so many ways, including those unrelated to success. The biggest problem seems to be communication. None of the things you discovered were inherently enough to make them toxic -- but not learning those things sooner was bad. (I suspect even the best company would have a hard time raising an A in certain markets). The "VCs doing vetting for you" with a Series A has a big cost -- if you're otherwise the same and going into the same job, you get a lot less equity, and on much less favorable terms, after an A. Assuming you're in a position to take the risk, being one of the first employees is ideal, or being an employee in a later stage company which is already knocking it out of the park (if I had to get a job today, I'd be looking at employee 1-5, or going to a place like Tesla or Apple or CloudFlare or whatever, where success is already apparent, and the team is obviously already awesome.) And, manifestly, VCs fund shitty companies at Series A (and later!), too, so it's not even great vetting. Once you "satisfice" on hard location, cash, and stability requirements (which, for many people, especially those who want to startups themselves, can be pretty easily met), probably picking for "how awesome are the founders and how much do they like me" is probably the next thing to optimize for. "How much responsibility and room to grow/learn will I personally have", too. Then just make sure "if the company is super successful, I will be super successful too", and then focus on maximizing the odds of the company being super successful. |