The subtext may not be in Jessica's piece, but YC's strategy implies that only a few of their investments need to go big for them to win. While certain aspects

The subtext may not be in Jessica's piece, but YC's strategy implies that only a few of their investments need to go big for them to win. While certain aspects of YC do standardize startup growth, a lot of parts of the process can't be standardized. What you have left is a numbers game. If all YC startups succeeded, that would be a sign of failure, because it would indicate that YC itself was not taking sufficient risk.