Something that I think a lot of people don't realize about YC is that it's not very fun. Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of great YC memories, but the pressure was enormous. We had yet to raise and so we were operating on shoestring. My co-founder and I fought more during YC than any other time, before or after (and often over nonsensical and petty stuff).
That being said, you don't go through YC because it's fun. You go through it because it's good for your company. It gave us exposure to investors who probably wouldn't have given two first-time-entrepreneur yokels from Minnesota the time of day. We met a lot of people who had been through the pain of building a company before.
More than anything YC forced us to take a hard look at our company and a hard look at ourselves and decide that we could do this thing even when it wasn't always fun.
This gets to a critical question about incubators -- what is the value you actually get from the process? (the followup is, how does it compare to what was promised?) As you point out, "You go through it because it's good for your company," and that mainly means meeting the right people and figuring out where your company is going.
Martin, was YC ultimately good for your company even though Rapportive was in a different stage than your batchmates? Would you do it again?
YC was (and is continuing to be) very valuable for us. Sachin Rekhi has written up a good summary, which I broadly agree with: http://www.sachinrekhi.com/blog/2009/02/26/the-value-of-the-... -- and I would add to the list of benefits the massive network of the YC partners, who will happily make valuable intros.
Many other companies in our batch soon launched too, so we soon all ended up at pretty much the same stage.
That being said, you don't go through YC because it's fun. You go through it because it's good for your company. It gave us exposure to investors who probably wouldn't have given two first-time-entrepreneur yokels from Minnesota the time of day. We met a lot of people who had been through the pain of building a company before.
More than anything YC forced us to take a hard look at our company and a hard look at ourselves and decide that we could do this thing even when it wasn't always fun.