A small communication breakdown is enough for everyone to be working on slightly different things. And then you loose focus.

In YC's case, the number one cause of early death for startups is cofounder blowups.

A small communication breakdown is enough for everyone to be working on slightly different things. And then you loose focus.

We've seen a lot of data at YC now, and the most successful companies and the ones where the investors do the best... end up giving a lot of stock out to employees- year after year after year.

You can have a startup and one other thing, you can have a family, but you probably can't have many other things.

Even though plans themselves are worthless, the exercise of planning is very valuable and totally missing in most startups today.

We pretty much won't fund a company now where the founders don't have vested equity because it's just that hard to do.