Your sadness is based on incomplete information. Many YC companies flame out every year far all sorts of reasons, even with all the advantages that come from participating in the program. If you want to make your thing work badly enough you can make it work, competition or no.

Go on being that better prepared YC startup then.

I was delighted to discover one of the startups is doing what I'm about to be doing. So they are ahead of me and they have gone thru YC. So they are primed for success, while I'm still busting my butt to get to the point where I can apply to the next round of accelerators.

But they have taken what I consider to be the wrong approach, and seem to be missing a tidal wave of disruption. They are aiming for a where the puck is going to be in a year, not where it's going to be in 5 years (the first one is a lot easier than the second)

Plus going thru YC and getting on that SV ... path ... has its own costs and risks. Taking VC starts a clock and limits your options and in some ways, opportunity, to what the VC can see. For example how much revenue you have in a year has a huge impact with whether you can raise revenue a year from now. If you really have a better view of the market and future and technology than VCs and Accelerator Mentors (and you should, after all, because you're an expert in this area- and if you aren't you will be in 6 months) those limitations are not to your advantage.

In my experience in an accelerator so many of the companies were still trying to figure things out. They didn't know things well enough to confidently know the difference between the good and bad advice they were getting from the mentors. (mentors even giving good advice can be wrong, simply because their expertise isn't what you're doing-- if it were, the market you're attacking would already be taken.)

In the case of the competitor to what I'm starting, I can see how they have made some bad choices already (just from the TechCrunch article, haven't even clicked thru to their site) because they are already practicing the cargo cult dance, building paper maché airplanes hoping for VC money to rain down from the sky. That's fine, they may win that way, but I still like my chances.

If you read these articles every demo day and watch the YC and TechStars startups, eventually you get to where you can tell which ones have something and which ones don't (though of course there are some outliers.)

None of these companies have it made, so don't lose heart.

YC startups are not the 'end all'. It's a special program, but it's not that special. Go and build your thing and make it good.