I have really come to appreciate the need for regular retros on a team. That a team needs a very safe space to explore failures and difficulties. It helps to have someone who can facilitate, but cam be successful without. It should be long enough to feel slighty awkward, so that people have time to articulate thoughts, and there should be no manager for at least half an hour, so that grievances about them can be aired.
I’ve seen teams really come together and vastly improve with regular safe meetings. I’ve also seen teams start to fall apart when the retro format changed to make it harder to delve into some of the emotional parts.
Yes, sorry I replied to a different interpretation of your question I guess.
I was trying to say that YC may be looking past the solution to the real underlying issue.
To me this would make sense. We often start out with a problem that bugs us, and then come up with a half baked solution.
Even if the proposed solution isn't valid the founder may have identified a valid problem. In our crowded marketplace, a unique and unmet need is much harder to find than a technical solution.
In his pitch the founder conceived/pitched the solution as a veiled way to talk about his real problem.
I see it at my job all the time, we talk about technical problems and their solutions as a way of trying to share our fears, anxieties and feelings.
All the heady technical talk is just a proxy for what we really wish we could say.
I know this because I'm often the only one on the team brave enough to state the subtext openly, and have I often been thanked for that.
Every team needs a therapist, it would seem.