Great post. I got the impression from three YCombinator companies last year that they thought they would be big. I witnessed entrepreneurs excited about creating an Outlook plugin, a video sharing site, and a PDF posting site. But, it was exciting and the entrepreneurs felt they will have tons of users. Look where they (you) are one year later--Xobni, Justin.tv, and Scribd, grown from 2-4 full-time people to 10+ each. Adam Smith especially seemed very confident, and must have believed in the company to bring you and other smart people along. ;)
Paul Graham said that 57 of the 80 startups they
funded are still alive, for some value of alive.
PG was also including companies that have been acquired or merged as "not alive", so the number that have outright gone out of business is lower than 23.
True if you have access to capital. I think one message that I didn't get when at the 2005 Startup School is that you're not learning nearly enough if you try to bootstrap, because capitalization is important at every stage of the business. I also could have used the frame of mind in The Equity Equation more than the VC horror stories, which I already knew having been laid off from a dot-com in 2000.
At the time I figured, hey, I had more money than YC would give me and although I knew that the money was not the valuable part, I didn't fully grok the implications.
So I discovered this the hard way. Now instead of an entrepreneurship career, which I would love, now it's more like the end of a brief career.
you don't start a startup to get rich. you start a startup for any number of reasons but the primary one should be that it makes you happier than working for some company. if you do really well? bonus.
