I'm not usually one to think in these terms, but this somehow still strikes me as a caricature of white middle-class privilege:
"Having to take considerable financial risk definitely sucked, but it was also was a great filtering function. If you didnt have conviction in yourself or your product theres no way you would have been there. For those who made the leap, it made success the only option."
Based on the responses in this thread, you're not alone. It's not often that a series of arguments is so thoroughly undermined by just one spectacularly bad one, but that's really the comment that's been driving all the discussion. His point about batch sizes is maybe something worth actually discussing, but there's nearly no discussion on that (and maybe a couple comments on how YC should stop funding everything but consumer companies which is also IMO ridiculous).
"Having to take considerable financial risk definitely sucked, but it was also was a great filtering function. If you didnt have conviction in yourself or your product theres no way you would have been there. For those who made the leap, it made success the only option."