Competition has a way of adjusting to shared advantages - how will that play out here? I think it will mean that the key ingredients will become more valuable. And here, that's founders (technical ability to make things happen; business vision to know what is worth doing and how to adjust to it; and of course intelligence, flexibility and stamina) and connections (for promotion; integration with other services etc).
I guess the "Yuri bonus" is just the beginning of this. Accurate gatekeepers, like YC, that can recognize the above qualities in founders (and have connections), will also become more valuable. A key advantage YC has at this point is experience in recognizing these qualities, having gone through the cycle severals, which enables trial-and-error learning. Even if another group had more raw talent at the task, YC would be very hard to beat, because so much of success is practical know-how that only comes with exposure to the details of reality.
Capital used to be a source of competitive advantage: capital was needed for success, so having access to it was an advantage. I think Google's server farms distributed around the world fall into this category (they enable lower latency, faster responses).
But there are many other sources of competitive advantage, such as a network effects (but this didn't save MySpace) Perhaps the two most important ones are marketing (both how well known it is when growing and its PR image once established) and continuous improvement (facebook keeps adding features). If you are ahead, and you keep improving, then it's difficult for competitors to catch up.
It's seems odd, but this means that a perfect product is one of the worst things that can happen to you. Since it's perfect, you can't improve it, and competitors will catch up. It's far better to have a product that is valuable to customers, but if it was a bit better, they'd value it even more.
Another terrible thing that can happen is that, although you can improve the product, customers don't care about that improvement. Like a man dying of thirst in the desert, he'd like some water; but at a some point he'll say, "that's enough", and shift his concern to something else (e.g. faster google responses are valued, but at some point, the latency will be small enough that people won't be annoyed by it, then they won't notice it, then they won't even be able to perceive it.)
Competition has a way of adjusting to shared advantages - how will that play out here? I think it will mean that the key ingredients will become more valuable. And here, that's founders (technical ability to make things happen; business vision to know what is worth doing and how to adjust to it; and of course intelligence, flexibility and stamina) and connections (for promotion; integration with other services etc).
I guess the "Yuri bonus" is just the beginning of this. Accurate gatekeepers, like YC, that can recognize the above qualities in founders (and have connections), will also become more valuable. A key advantage YC has at this point is experience in recognizing these qualities, having gone through the cycle severals, which enables trial-and-error learning. Even if another group had more raw talent at the task, YC would be very hard to beat, because so much of success is practical know-how that only comes with exposure to the details of reality.