Adding too many users, too quickly, led to painful outages and failures I won’t ever forget.

One of the things you see with gifted kids -- and this goes double with twice exceptional kids -- is that they tend to find their limits by metaphorically crashing into a wall at a hundred miles per hour. There is a cost to that and it leaves a lot of scars and results in a lot of baggage.

The reason they do that is because their abilities are so far outside the norm that pushing it to the point of failure is the only meaningful test for what their abilities and the limits of those abilities really are. Finding those limits can be enormously valuable.

If very talented kids only do as much as most people predict is possible based on averages, then those kids leave a lot on the table, so to speak, and they tend to have very frustrating lives. They long for more and they tend to become a case of "idle hands are the devil's workshop." They miss out on opportunities by underestimating themselves and their own capacity and end up, instead, aggravating the hell out of people around them and directing their brilliance and energies into petty and often unconstructive pursuits out of boredom.

But catastrophic failure can leave permanent limits that are more impairing than underestimating themselves. It can do so much harm that the person never really recovers and they will leave a wide berth around X because they never want to be that badly burned again.

So the challenge -- and this was something I was good at as a parent -- is finding ways to help extraordinary kids hit their own natural point of failure without it being catastrophic.

Metaphorically, you can think of it as putting a net below the high wire act. There's something to catch you when you fall. You learn from the fall instead of being broken and crippled because of it.

So startups, which grow rapidly, are kind of the business world equivalent of that and what I see in reading about how YC manages its own growth is that, most likely, they are doing for businesses what I did as a parent: Helping people with extraordinary potential to find their limits while avoiding catastrophic failure and mitigating the costs involved in actually finding their limits.

Learning to "Fail fast" but not catastrophically. To have smaller failures that teach you where you need to quit.

There's a book called Seeing like a state and it talks about recipes that say "Heat it until the smoke point" which means "heat it until just before it would burn" and this implicitly means you've burned it a few times. You know where the smoke point is and what that looks like without it actually burning because you have gone too far at some point.

Being too afraid of failure is actively problematic in designing functional systems. Being not afraid enough of the consequences of catastrophic failure can result in the business going bankrupt, never recovering and simply dying.

It's actually really, really hard to help people learn how to fail well. It's hard to teach people how valuable failure is to comprehending real world limits -- what flies and what doesn't -- while simultaneously helping them not learn that at such a high cost that they will never try again or never succeed again if they do screw up their courage to try.

For many people, having that modeled for them will, itself, be enormously valuable and it's something that is likely implicitly taught by example more than explicitly taught. I say that because the fact that I do that well as a parent is one of the reasons I began blogging and I've never really felt that any of my parenting blogs gelled and they didn't gel in part because people don't know how to measure the disasters that didn't happen, so if you tell people "I did X and I did it brilliantly well and the evidence is the lack of catastrophes." people respond to that dismissively. They don't give you credit for mitigating the catastrophes that should have happened but didn't.

I imagine that factors into why some people seem so willing to scoff at YC and be dismissive. Yes, you can succeed at a business without going through YC and if you can pull that off, you may even be better off having not given up any equity, etc.

But lots of people aren't going to succeed on their own efforts with no mentoring and it's the mentoring more than the money that is the make or break for a lot of YC companies.