I was also in the W22 batch. While I don't know Oleksii (to his point!), I'm left thinking that he might not have understood and acted on YC's advice. YC coach

I was also in the W22 batch. While I don't know Oleksii (to his point!), I'm left thinking that he might not have understood and acted on YC's advice. YC coached us on all the things that Oleksii thought were portrayed as a waste of time: talking to investors, hiring, content, etc. The trick here is timing. It's harmful to talk to investors early in YC when you have the leverage of demo day far ahead of you, but it's priority #1 closer to the end of batch. YC clearly guides founders through this process, if you listen and follow their advice. The founders I know who were repeatedly told the generic advice of building and talking to users had a bad product that wasn't improving quickly (including us for a while!). I don't know if that was the case here, but many founders spent more time thinking about investors and selling a story vs. building something for their users. It seems like YC understands this, and it was refreshing to see group partners dissuade trying to raise on hype and a story, and instead pushing founders to build something great for their users. There are certainly things that could be improved, but at the end of the day we raised with a 8x higher valuation post-YC vs. pre-YC and intentionally built strong relationships with other YC founders who shared our same problems and interests. While I'll hopefully work on my startup for years to come, I would apply to YC again in a heartbeat.