I don't think his time (or really, all 4 YC founders' time) was the reason YC started small. YC is an experiment, and you don't want to fund 100 startups at on

I don't think his time (or really, all 4 YC founders' time) was the reason YC started small. YC is an experiment, and you don't want to fund 100 startups at once if you're not quite sure what you're getting into. Now that they've learned from several cycles, they can start to scale up responsibly. At the same time, you don't want to start too small and inhibit the learning process.