There are very few truly hard problems in starting a tech startup; the hardest of those is product-market fit. Put another way, it's successfully solving a problem that a lot of people have.
The other hard problems are hiring/growing a team to be effective at scale, and finding distribution for your products.
Some things seem really hard but aren't: Finding a lawyer, drafting or negotiating contracts, getting incorporated, adding full time employees to payroll, getting health insurance for the company, getting an office, generating financial statements, finding mentors, raising money. They're all orders of magnitude less difficult than the above 3 hard problems.
About raising money: It's hard but it's not the hardest problem you will face. If you have successfully solved a problem a lot of people have, you will have proof of that (traction). A company with a great solution to a problem in a large market with traction will not have a hard time raising money. And in fact, YC helps you do so with Demo Day, once you have spent time focusing on the really important stuff.
So, if you spin it as "Look at all the things TechStars does for you that YC doesn't!", it sounds like a better deal. But if you look at it as "YC helps you focus on your #1 problem", it sounds quite different.
I agree, except I would say "web startup" instead of "tech startup". Tesla is a tech startup, and they have some damn hard engineering problems. Twitter didn't have engineering problems until they had to scale.
Definitely, although generally you could lump the engineering problems under the "product-market fit".
You need to (a) think of a problem and solution, (b) create that solution, (c) validate your solution in the marketplace, (d)iterate successfully -- not necessarily in that order.
I don't think I'd call YC isolationist. We did something almost every week outside of YC with other groups. I still talk to the people from our batch. I don't think I'd want to work in a shared office space personally, it would encourage too much work/life separation for that stage of the company.
I don't think spending my first month in meetings with mentors sounds very good either. You enjoy your mentor dating, I'll stick to working on my product. Your customers will tell you far more than any mentors ever could, I'd rather spend the extra time with them.
We left Silicon Valley. I don't regret having made the decision at the time, it allowed us to stay afloat until we raised money and then hit profitability. Now that we're scaling (19 people and growing) though it makes it very, very hard to find good programmers. We often ask ourselves if we should possibly open up out there too. I'm not really sure if Tech Stars being located somewhere else is a good thing or a bad thing on the whole.
You might get more "attention, focus, and exposure" from/to the Tech Stars founders, but from the press and investors you're way better off in YC. I don't think I can even name one Tech Stars company, seriously. As far as I know nobody is giving Tech Stars companies convertible notes sight unseen.
I don't know where he got the impression that YC doesn't focus on demo day. I can't tell you how many times PG said it would be the defining moment of our entire lives. (I'm exaggerating but only slightly.)
They certainly aren't interchangeable. One is Harvard, the other is Sheboygan Community College.
