What I’ve learned from users

I liked this one a lot better than I usually do of PG's blog posts!

Yeah, I think it's a combination of some of this stuff is common knowledge now, rather than surprising, and people were looking for concrete examples of mistakes startups made (so they can avoid it themselves)

Rather, this is an essay about what was surprising to him about startups in YC. And I think it's fair to say that these were all surprising, and I wouldn't have inferred them if someone told me about YC as an idea back in 2005.

Or put in another way, if someone came to you and told you about the idea for creating YC back in 2005, when the only model of investing in startups was how large institutional VCs and angels invested in startups, would you have been able to tell them the following insights about how it would work and what the value add of the advice is? Remember, when YC started, lots of people thought 7% for $15k (I know they give more now) was a joke.

    - Most startup problems are the same, but in different forms. It makes advising tractable for a single person to do.
    - Advising a lot of startups in batches has the advantage of learning about all these problems faster.
    - And yet, startup advising has to stay individualized (presumably to keep things concrete), so in order to scale, they had to shard. Limit was somewhere between 60 and 80 per individual advisor.
    - Identifying problems and ranking their severity are two different skills. You'd think they're the same, but they're not. As an advisor, if you can help startups do only these two things, it'd go a long way. Lots of advisors try to help with other things, but these are the two most important, because if a startup died, all other problems are moot.
    - Despite this, founders don't listen to advice about how not to die. And they don't listen because the advice is counterintuitive. It's like how there are more skiing instructors than running instructors. Skiing is more counterintuitive.
    - A big headwinds to advising startups on how not to die is that due to the educational system, founders have all learned how to hack the system. The skills that got them to where they are stops working when trying to build a company. 
    - Beyond helping startups not die, advisors likely know less about the product/strategy in any domain, but they can increase focus, which increases speed of iteration, which indirectly helps startups with their product/strategy through iterative greedy algorithm.
    - A follow-on value-add of YC is the alumni network. Like clusters of painters in Paris during the impressionist period or musicians in Vienna, and Xerox Parc, lots of great work is done when great people do it in clusters along side each other. At the time, people thought the price of independence of is loneliness, but turns out it's not true.

I was curious to see what companies were part of the S12 batch, and who were the most notable. Among the 80 or so in that group, big winners were Coinbase, Instacart, and Zapier.

https://techcrunch.com/2012/08/21/yc-demo-day-s12/

It definitely is strange to repeat over and over that startups are counter-intuitive, and that the best advice isn't easily believable, and not give even a single demonstrative example.

Agree, this sounded like a Tony Robbins style pitch where you don't get to hear any of the magic until you've paid for the seminar.

It could just be part of a broader trend of negative posting. Maybe some sentiment analysis could be applied.