I wrote up my failed YC startup here: http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down...

It was definitely a good move. More people read that blog post than heard about my startup in the first place, it got covered in loads of tech press, and people still ask me about it 2 years later. I get an email every few months thanking me for writing it, and I'm asked to do the occasional interview about it too.

It also allowed me to introspect a lot of what went wrong, and what I could have done better. One of the major reasons my current startup (https://circleci.com) is doing well is what I learned from the deconstruction.