It reminds me of the "but you fuck ONE goat" story: one misstep like this surely can and should have more impact than all the good steps.
None of us has any idea what was presented in the application form and interviews, but given YC prizes its reputation above anything else, we can reasonably presume it wasn't obviously a scam.
This is the moment in an online discussion where we all lose 50 IQ points, so thanks for that.
"Scam" has a well understood meaning in modern legal and economic systems, and that's obviously what I'm addressing, not some other ideologically-charged alternative definition that you're now invoking as a debating move that amounts to little more than trolling.
(As for middlemen - for as long as commerce has existed, middlemen have been derided for inserting themselves into transactions that were already happening, by people blithely handwaving away the fact that those transactions were not, in fact, already happening.)
Your insinuation was that YC trains the founders it invests in to deliberately build long-term money-losing companies, which is demonstrably false and also highly implausible.
Philosophical discussions about the deeper nature of things are also of great interest to me, but not like this.
Though it took us a while due to engineering challenges, our company survived and became profitable by minimizing spend and focusing on revenue/profit, just as YC advised.
This notion that YC backs/encourages companies to flush money down the drain is a mistakenly applied stereotype spawned from a combination of different eras, different companies and different investors. Notably, YC has never been involved with companies like Uber, WeWork or Theranos, or any other company that SoftBank has tried to artificially pump up by pouring billions of dollars into.