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.