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In YC's case, the number one cause of early death for startups is cofounder blowups.

Sam Altman

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Number
Cause
Cases
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Team
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Death
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Early

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In addition to relentlessly resourceful, you want a tough and a calm cofounder.
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You certainly don't need to have everything figured out in the path from here to world domination.
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Momentum and growth are the lifeblood of startups. This is probably in the top three secrets of executing well.
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Developing a personal connection with anyone you're trying to do a big deal with is really important.
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Growth and momentum are what a startup lives on and you always have to focus on maintaining these.
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I believe in fighting with investors to reduce the amount of equity they get and then being as generous as you possibly can with employees.
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Aim to be the best in the world at whatever you do professionally. Even if you miss, you'll probably end up in a pretty good place.
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You can have a startup and one other thing, you can have a family, but you probably can't have many other things.
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You should be able to describe any employee as an animal at what they do.
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One thing that founders always underestimate is how hard it is to recruit.
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In general though, if you look at the track record of pivots, they don't become big companies.
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If you don't need it yourself, and you're building something that someone else needs, realize you're at a big disadvantage.
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Remember that the idea will expand, and become more ambitious as you go.
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You can basically change everything in a startup but the market.
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... you can think about that for everyone you hire: will I bet the future of this company on this single hire? And that's a tough bar.
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The thing that kills startups at some level, is the founders giving up.
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In general, it's best if you're building something that you yourself need.
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These all sounded really bad, but they turned out to be good. If they had sounded really good, there would have been too many people working on them.
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If it takes more than a sentence to explain what you are doing, it's almost always a sign that what you are doing is too complicated.
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... you want to be proud of how much you can get done with a small numbers of employees.
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