> ” I can't afford to rely on 26 lifetimes. But maybe you think you’re special. You’re not like those 3,950 dummies who failed. Maybe you are in fact special, b

> ” I can't afford to rely on 26 lifetimes. But maybe you think you’re special. You’re not like those 3,950 dummies who failed. Maybe you are in fact special, but I wouldn’t rely too much on that. Business is much more random than it seems. If business was predictable, YC wouldn't have a measly 1.25% success rate, or thereabouts.” This argument is very disappointing and dishonest. The piece repeatedly implies and assumes that every YC-funded company that isn’t currently valued at over a billion dollars is a failure for the founder. This ignores the fact that many companies are still growing and will cross that threshold in a few years. It’s also not an honest representation of all the smaller acquisitions to call them “failures”. Twitch’s acquisition wasn’t quite for a billion, but it was a massive success for its founders. There are many other companies that exited in the 9-figure range, for which this is true. Plenty of others excited in the 8 figure range and were still better outcomes than if the founders had just remained employees. Even those whose startups went to zero usually end up fine in terms of career. What percentage of Daniel’s students have built unicorns? Have any or are they all, by his own metric, “failures”?