You know, maybe I didn't make it clear enough that I thought we had a great thing going right up to the end. But what happened when we landed YC was that a lot of stuff came to the surface that hadn't been addressed well enough before, including a partner's belief that a lot of my effort up to that point had been worthless and he didn't trust me to do any better going forward. That was a pretty rough pill to swallow, especially after being responsible for most of the YC application, leading the three interviews we did to get accepted and building the front end for what we demoed.
I certainly may have killed the startup by emphasizing things that I thought were important, but it doesn't make any sense to think I was actively trying to kill it. My point was that I was blindsided by what happened in the end, so now I've gone back to think about how we got there and, you know, these are some of the conclusions I've drawn and of course they could still be wrong.
I got the impression you thought you had a good thing. I guess my key question would be this: Given everything the startup had going for it, do you think the conflict points (networking, time commitment, and a few others) were sufficiently important to stake the startup on?
On the one hand you could feel in retrospect that the conflict points were important enough that the startup could never have succeeding without the direction you were pushing - so you were lucky it ended swiftly. On the other hand if you think your startup had a good chance of success even if you hadn't won those battles, then you may want to look at your conflict resolution.
No, the conflict points that are being discussed here a lot were not sufficiently important to stake the startup on at the time when we were faced with having to walk away. The real point was that by the time we went to Boston to meet with PG and get some advice, my partner had decided he could no longer trust me or my judgment and wanted to leave, and I felt the same way about him. While I wish that could have been avoided, I don't think anything that could have been done at that point would have changed the ultimate outcome for this team.
After spending a few months thinking "okay, so how did it get to that point, and I didn't even realize it" I wrote my reflections. I still think the startup has a good chance of success, but not with the dynamics that were at play then.
I certainly may have killed the startup by emphasizing things that I thought were important, but it doesn't make any sense to think I was actively trying to kill it. My point was that I was blindsided by what happened in the end, so now I've gone back to think about how we got there and, you know, these are some of the conclusions I've drawn and of course they could still be wrong.