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.
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.