I strongly agree with your sentiment that going the YC and/or VC route requires careful consideration. However, I have a slightly different take on Series A com

I strongly agree with your sentiment that going the YC and/or VC route requires careful consideration. However, I have a slightly different take on Series A competitiveness. The # of Series A's hasn't grown as quickly as the number of seed rounds, but strong companies still have good chances of getting Series A funding. One way to think about this is that years ago maybe there were 5k seed rounds/year and 1500 Series A's. And today maybe it's 20k seed rounds and 2000 Series A's. But those 1500-2000 Series A's are still mostly distributed among the 5k top seed companies, not the 15k additional ones that wouldn't have been funded years ago. So if you have a company that you think could've been funded 5 years ago then you probably have similar odds of a Series A as you did 5 years ago. I don't have data to back this up, but this has been my anecdotal experience. FWIW, the seed fund I'm at has had a consistent 65-70% seed-to-Series-A graduation rate for our entire 8-year lifetime, even though the number of seed rounds during that period has grown dramatically.