Yes. I told him the following in person earlier tonight, at the last YCS10 dinner, and I think it's the consensus among the other founders I've talked to from o

Yes. I told him the following in person earlier tonight, at the last YCS10 dinner, and I think it's the consensus among the other founders I've talked to from our batch. For the first month of Y Combinator, Paul Graham will tear you and your startup apart on a weekly basis (when you meet with him during office hours). If you're doing your job as a founder, though, you are the world expert in your particular field. So there should be times when you are right, and he's wrong, and you know that this is the case because of specific domain knowledge. There may even be times when you try to explain this to him and are unable to communicate it successfully. However! There are also times when you think you have a problem specific to your startup that is actually a problem most startups have. In this case, PG is the domain expert, and you should probably listen to him. The hard thing to do, obviously, is to distinguish the two cases. I have some thoughts on that, too, but they basically boil down to "you should appropriately mix cautious thought with bullheaded stubbornness", and you already knew that if you read anything anyone wrote about startups ever. Edit: Didn't mean to speak for the rest of the founders. Feel free to disagree.