Interesting article - I agree with a lot of what you say.
>> YCombinator has made it a successful business model to take founders and virtually catapult them far away from their idea reach, and succeed anyway through a combination of exceptional founder selection and world-class mentoring
Actually, I think what Y Combinator is very good at is recruiting decent hackers. They're then encouraged to build prototypes very quickly within what you call their "idea reach" and talk to users to iterate & improve. In fact, almost all the YC companies that spring to mind are very much within the "idea reach" of the founders. Both the "success stories" (Airbnb, Dropbox, Heroku) and the more recent ones - (Codecademy, Parse, Mongo HQ, Verbling etc etc) all fit this mold.
Non-technical founders are very occasionally accepted, but almost always required to find a technical co-founder to extend their idea reach to including something software-focussed.
>> YCombinator has made it a successful business model to take founders and virtually catapult them far away from their idea reach, and succeed anyway through a combination of exceptional founder selection and world-class mentoring
Actually, I think what Y Combinator is very good at is recruiting decent hackers. They're then encouraged to build prototypes very quickly within what you call their "idea reach" and talk to users to iterate & improve. In fact, almost all the YC companies that spring to mind are very much within the "idea reach" of the founders. Both the "success stories" (Airbnb, Dropbox, Heroku) and the more recent ones - (Codecademy, Parse, Mongo HQ, Verbling etc etc) all fit this mold.
Non-technical founders are very occasionally accepted, but almost always required to find a technical co-founder to extend their idea reach to including something software-focussed.