A month ago I moved to SF to join a YC startup. Here's some of the things I've picked up on and how to tell if you’re really cut out for the startup ecosystem.

San Francisco Really Is Different: Inside the 10x Tech Bubble

First and foremost, San Francisco actually lives up to the hype. Coming from Canada, the tech scene here feels like a different universe. The density of talented engineers, the speed of iteration, and the sheer amount of capital poured into AI is hard to overstate. Everything moves at 10x speed. Every second matters, because when you're wasting time is the exact time another company is racing to take your market share.

You feel it in the smallest details. People are white boarding ideas in coffee shops at 7 a.m., shipping code at midnight, and casually talking about raising a multi-million dollar seed round the way people elsewhere talk about what they're eating for lunch. You're constantly surrounded by people who genuinely believe they can bend reality with code and capital, and that belief is weirdly contagious.

There's also this background hum of competition. You'll overhear three different teams in the same cafe all working on the same problem but convinced they're each doing it in a unique/better way. You start to internalize that you're never the only one with your idea, so the only real edge you have is speed: how fast you can learn, ship, and iterate. That pressure can be exhausting, but it's also what makes being here feel so different from anywhere else.

Where every line of code makes or breaks million dollar deals. -me

"YC-Backed" Doesn’t Mean Unique: Competing Clones

Expanding on that background hum of competition, one of the first things that surprised me is how often YC startups are basically competing clones of each other. From the outside...especially in the LinkedIn and X posts announcing new YC launches, it can look like each company has magically discovered a fresh problem and is the only one working on it. On the inside, you quickly realize that's almost never true.

You'll see multiple teams in the same batch building variations of the exact same product: three different AI agents for sales, four flavours of "customer support but with LLMs," or yet another "Notion but for X." Sometimes they even pitch to the same investors, talk to the same customers, and ship the same features within days of each other. It feels less like a lineup of one‑of‑a‑kind startups and more like a controlled experiment: given a similar problem and similar timing, which team can out‑learn and out‑ship everyone else?

The wild part is that YC is fine with this. In fact, I think it's kind of the point that people miss all the time. I was always on the side of "why did they fund X company, they're doing the same thing as Y company ."

What I learned is that they're not trying to curate a portfolio where every idea is orthogonal and non‑overlapping. They're trying to maximize the odds that at least one team in a hot space becomes huge. If that means funding five companies attacking the same wedge from slightly different angles, they'll do it. From their perspective, backing multiple competitors in the same niche is rational. Stumbled upon something that Garry Tan said back in late 2024 which sort of went under the radar...

"More choice is good, people building is good, if you don't like it don't use it." - Garry Tan (CEO & President, YCombinator)

Being "YC-backed" can also create a false sense of security. It’s easy to think, "we’re in YC, we must be special." But when you're in the room with founders (s/o Rohan and Faraz) building eerily similar products and they're smarter, faster, or just more obsessed, the badge starts to feel less like a moat and more like table stakes. The market doesn't care that you share an investor. Your users don't care that your competitors are in the same batch. The only thing that matters is: are you solving the problem better, and are you doing it faster?

What I think this forces you to confront to is whether you're actually differentiated or just cosmetically different. Something I started thinking about when building, is if you took the logo off your product, would anyone be able to tell it apart from the other YC startup building near-identical stuff? If the answer is no, then "YC-backed" isn't a moat, it's just a louder starting gun in a race you might not win.

This environment can be brutal even for an intern like me but it's also clarifying. It strips away the romance of "the idea" and exposes how much of this game is about execution, focus and learning speed. YC does an incredible job of believing in founders, but also curating a place where speed is above all and a place where your degree and where you went to school often holds 0 value.

Work-life balance? Does it even matter?

One of the biggest shocks for me after moving to SF and joining a YC startup was realizing how fake the phrase "work-life balance" feels out here. It's not that people don't talk about it, they definitely do but not in a complaining sort of way. Before I came I was told by almost all my friends and family, "it's a startup, you're going to get overworked", "make sure to enjoy your time in SF", "create a work-life balance", the list goes on. In reality, I didn't care about any of this. The line between work and life doesn’t blur. It basically disappears. For me, it started subtly. At first, I told myself I was just "excited" and "trying to learn fast." I'd wake up, check Slack and our dashboards before I even got out of bed, and then justify it as "just seeing what happened overnight." Evenings stopped being evenings and turned into "one more experiment," "one more prompt tweak," "one more bug fix"...I didn’t decide to give up balance, it just quietly dissolved as the stakes started to feel higher, proportional to how the work I was doing was valued much higher.

There's also this constant feeling that you're standing on the edge of something massive. AI right now feels like the internet in the early 2000s compressed into 8 months. New models drop overnight, entire product categories appear and disappear and startups get crushed when a mainstream company like OpenAI or Anthropic releases a new feature. That environment of "clocking out" at 5 p.m. feels almost delusional. How do you tell yourself, "I'm done for the day", when your competitors are literally shipping when you're out for dinner?

Obviously some may argue as an intern it makes no sense to have this sort of mentality. For me and I'd assume for a lot of other people, to succeed in this sort of high-stakes environment it makes even more sense to care deeply about this. There's like an internal voice that says "you're the most inexperienced person in the room, you're lucky to even be here, so you better prove you deserve it". That motivation doesn't respect weekends, it doesn't care that it's 1:30 a.m. and you've already been staring at a screen for 12 hours. I think this is the exact type of psychological reasoning you have to have in yourself to excel in this space.

Working for a YC Startup: Is it worth it?

The honest answer is: it depends what you're looking for, and over what time horizon. On paper, the career upside of being here this early, in this specific moment of AI, is insane. I've had random weekday afternoons where I'm in a room with founders talking about things that will probably end up in future case studies or conference talks. I've seen product decisions get made in minutes that could end up being worth millions if they're right. I've watched people my age or a few years older raise more money in a seed round than the average household income will make in a decade. Being close to that changes your calibration for what's "normal".

From a career perspective, putting yourself in that kind of environment is almost unfair leverage. You're learning at a speed that's hard to recreate in any big company. You see the full stack: user interviews, infrastructure decisions, go-to-market experiments, investor dynamics, hiring tradeoffs, and all the weird emotional stuff in between. As an intern, I'm getting reps on problems that would probably require a "senior" title somewhere else. That's the upside, compressed learning, network density, and stories that make your next opportunity easier to get. But obviously none of that comes for free.

The personal cost is subtle at first. It's not like someone sits you down and says, "you will now sacrifice your hobbies, your sleep, and some of your relationships". It's more like a slow erosion. You tell yourself you'll take a real day off after X milestone but you know there will be another one lined up. Your identity starts to narrow until "the person who works at this startup" becomes the primary way you see yourself.

There are also the emotional swings that nobody posts about. When things are going well, when users are happy, growth is up, investors are replying, the high is ridiculous. However when operating at such a high level and when things don't go well, it gets dark fast. A bad week of metrics, a bug in production, a competitor launch it all takes a toll on you. There's also this long-term cost that's harder to measure: what you don't build while you're building this. You're not building a broad social life, you're not exploring ten different interests, you're not travelling just for fun. You're just betting that narrowing your focus now will open more doors later. That might be true, but it's still a bet. For me, it's a bet that I'm willing to take.

Takeways: Y Combinator, Startups, Personal Progression

Overall, if there's one thing that this past month has made clear, it's that none of this is as glossy or as clean as it looks from the outside. YC isn't a magical filter for unique ideas, it's a pit that puts talent together, obsessed teams against the same problem and lets execution decide who survives. San Francisco isn't just "where tech happens" it's a place where the default setting is 10x speed, and you either adapt to that pace or get left behind. Also, "work-life balance" isn't a perk you negotiate, it's a trade you consciously make, whether you admit it or not.

For me, being dropped into this environment as an intern has forced a level of honesty I probably wouldn't have reached otherwise. I've had to ask myself questions: Am I okay with tying this much of my identity to what I'm working on? Am I actually learning at a rate that justifies the cost? Do I really want to be around people who treat this like their life's main bet..and I can just show up at that level myself?

Right now, my answer is yes. I'm willing to be in the middle of all this because I care more about learning how to build than being seen as original. I'm okay with the long nights and the obsessive thinking because I know I wouldn't be anywhere else at this moment in AI.