Actually Amir's company is still operating. But even if it weren't, you'd be mistaken. People who fail have some of the most valuable insights. I learned YC's motto "Make something people want" from failing to do it myself.
I agree. However, people who fail also have terrible insights; for some, that contributed to their failure. And there's no reason to believe the specific reasons for their failure will be applicable to you. In the NFL, teams which lose tend to keep losing even though they have plenty of opportunity to learn. Teams are salary capped, so there is no intrinsic advantage.
All successful companies are alike. Each failure fails in its own way.
I really disagree. I think people learn more from failures. In many cases it seems the successful ones don't really truly know why they were successful.
Of course they did a lot of things right and it's worthwhile to listen to how they accomplished that, but if you were to duplicate exactly what they did you wouldn't necessarily be successful. So clearly there is something more to it.
In any case, there will be bad advice coming from both successes and failures. To eliminate all the "failures" as having "terrible insights" is short-sighted.
PS: I'm NOT a YC alum. And my bootstrapped company is running with revenues.
I think people learn more from success than from failure, but they learn more from failure than from doing nothing. Since typically your choice is between trying and not trying and not between succeeding and failing, your dominant strategy should be to try and let the cards fall where they may.
Aside from that, most of the people reading are in the "doing nothing" category (I'm largely in this category myself when it comes to startups, though I have tried and failed before), and so it behooves them to listen to the failures. :-)
