[nkangoh]

I find this paragraph interesting:

"From the outside, it might have looked like I was crazy to feel this way. I had graduated from Stanford, I had a CS degree, and I knew how to play the startup game. In college I had started an ed-tech company, ClassOwl, that raised nearly a million in seed funding."

Pardon my ignorance, but if a startup is a game, wouldn't knowing how to play be knowing how to win, i.e. an exit? I feel like getting venture capital would be the equivalent of prolonging the game, which is a +0 type of action. Is raising money really "playing?" From what I've read raising money just results in needing to raise more money.

[thoman23]

I was going to make a similar comment. There is an undercurrent of "raising money = success" in this posting. The whole concept of throwing money at 21-year olds and hoping they find an idea still seems bizarre to me, but obviously it has paid off for the YC guys.

[cheepin]

"For the first time in my life, I had impostor syndrome: I convinced myself that I did not deserve the success I had achieved."

This particularly struck me as ironic. Maybe he felt like an imposter because the other people had an actual plan and he didn't.