Can I ask you what is the point in airing this dirty laundry ? Even as a learning experience, it comes off pretty sour. Do you really want to be known forever a

Can I ask you what is the point in airing this dirty laundry ? Even as a learning experience, it comes off pretty sour. Do you really want to be known forever as "creo ? oh those guys who trash talked yc ?" , because that's what happens. Lemme air some clean laundry instead that might actually be useful to you guys. 2012 - am driving with a company co-founder who has just been accepted into YC. He points at an elephant logo on a building and says - "those guys! ridiculous! they have a billion dollar valuation! what did they do - put Notepad on the web ? what we are doing is a million times more complex." He was ofcourse pointing to Evernote. I gently told him that his company may be solving a problem million times more complex, but how many people wanted such a complicated solution ? 10 ? 1000 ? 1000 ? Maybe 10,000 ? There is a ceiling on any supercomplicated niche product you are building. Its now 2015, his company has about 5000 customers. So in 3 years they got to 5000. But Evernote has upwards of 100 million users, with its supersimple Notepad on the web product. So this yc company has now pivoted to building a specialized social network, and they already have a million+ users on that front. They'll probably keep the 5000-user supercomplicated business running, because its good money, but the focus will be on now growing the supersimple million user social network business. A long time ago, we had a guest from Microsoft visiting our compiler theory class. He bemoaned that more people were using something called Microsoft Flight Simulator, which was just a stupid toy, compared to what his team was working on - the Microsoft Visual C Suite, which was such a sophisticated state of the art compiler. Once again, how many people have a need for such a compiler, versus how many people want to just play video games ? Focus also on customers, not just on the complexity of your technical problem space.