&gt; The startling thing is how often the founders themselves don&#x27;t know. Half the founders I talk to don&#x27;t know whether they&#x27;re default alive or default dead.<p>This accurately reflects my own experience. Most common pitfall: converting VC capital to users at a rate that will not sustain the company once the VC capital runs out. So many companies fall into this particular trap that it should have a name of its own.<p>Bought growth is only worth it if the users remain long enough to make back the money you pumped into them at the time of acquisition <i>in net profits</i> otherwise you might as well do without them.<p>I&#x27;m not sure if the reference to airbnb helps, whatever they did, they&#x27;re an outlier and simply doing what they did without carefully evaluating your reasons is going to work about as well as any other cargo-cult strategy to success, it would be (a lot) more useful to see this point expressed in an alternate form, start-ups funded by YC in cohorts of months from when they started hiring besides the founders compared to their survival rate.