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I don't know about the stories of failures, but you can view the list of yc companies at http://yclist.com/ it shows the status of some companies as Dead.

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This is a fascinating list. If you start from the bottom, you can see how few really survive a anything close to a decade. The "Dead" tag is not updated as a lot of the companies not marked are actually dead or never really took off.

Shows that if you are on the YC rocketship, you either go big and get acquired or die out trying.

You can submit issues/PRs on GitHub for data that needs updated.

https://github.com/linrock/yclist

I don't really know much about how YC funding works, but some of the startups listed on there are for simple things like browser extensions, which surprises me.

Browser extensions can start out as very simple but quickly turn into very complex pieces of software. Have a look at postman(https://www.getpostman.com/) for example.

Or https://www.grammarly.com

It's a fallacy to think that just because a product is a browser extension it must be very low-tech easily-imitable app. I know there are some browser plugins that are quite sophisticated and have a complex programs in the backend. For example: Ad-blocker, LastPass, etc.

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