I really don't think this is the case anymore unfortunately, at least in my experience.

My anecdote: I worked at a startup for 4 months and I was basically playing it straight, ie, a loser. My CEO constantly kept pushing the idea of releasing a shitty product which just barely worked. His justification was that there were giant foreign competitors that raised millions of $ with admittedly very shitty products. Like I'm talking about forms that barely worked in their shitty React Native mobile apps. Anyway, our product was shitty and our users did not use the damn thing (poor retention). However, there was an easy/cheap way to grow quite quickly due to the nature of the service. It was all too much for me and I quit.

Anyway, it really dawned on me during the last few months that my boss didn't actually care about the product - he was playing the game of growing at all costs, put the nice numbers on a chart, and raise the next round of funds from VCs (a lot of them showed interest from the outside). And to be really frank, if he was honest with me that this was the actual game, that he wanted to get acquired or do an IPO purely based on growth metrics, it would be easier for me to understand. Instead, he kept talking about revolutionizing education with technology and that left a lot of us absolutely baffled.

what happened? Did he eventually realize you can't just pour in top of the funnel, and any reasonable person would look at 1mo 3mo or 6mo retention

I remember that essay too. I think at the time, he was probably correct but now (at least as an outsider, from a distance) it has become as much a game as the corporate world. The idea of being a founder eventually became as much a trope as being a company man, so I'm not so sure its a viable solution anymore.

Then again, I've never been in a startup or a founder so what do I know?

I have seen former employees of mine join companies started in YC, and the ethos I've seen around YC in that way reminds me of how my great grandmother talked about working at General Electric. It's a decentralized Empire in vibe, with all the games and politics. It was really difficult to deprogram people once caught by the allure. People think in terms of their programs, like cookie cutters.

Structuring SAFEs, doing mentoring and creating batches, and creating a kind of orthodoxy based on unorthodoxy done better, definitely hit a stale point. I think it's even to the point the founders could return and do it again based on what they learned, with more "stay hungry, stay foolish" again, albeit with veteran wisdom now, and it would be revolutionary all over again, upending its own past.

The Lesson to Unlearn http://www.paulgraham.com/lesson.html (I think)

I'm pretty sure that's the one! Takes a bit to get to the punchline but the idea that you want to look for tests that are unhackable is the big idea (and making a good product to get lots of users is the exemplar for an unhackable test).

Thanks for finding that!

Yeah i recall that essay. But getting a startup financed as a founder is a different story altogether. When you're asking people to invest on faith ( regardless of your MRR or what have you ), politics if back in the picture.