I'm sad that the summer is over too. I'll miss the Tuesday dinners quite a bit. I obviously don't have much time to dwell on it, and I'm excited about the future, but I'll always look back fondly on the Y C experience. The atmosphere there was something I'm pretty sure I'll never encounter anywhere else.
I'll probably drop by the dinners in Mountain View so frequently that half of the new founders will think I'm in their batch.
It's gonna be crowded. I've been missing the dinners all summer. Most fun I had in months was when YC was back in town (I think I got less done that week, though...so maybe that's a negative).
When you say goodbye to someone with the expectation that you'll never see them in the same way, it's sad. Parents will never have their kids back when the kids go off to college. They'll trade the kids in for adults. The empty nest feels empty in part because parents know it will never again be filled with children.
But business isn't like that. People that fail can and should continue to go off and try to do other great things. It's cyclic.
Even if all the companies in the current batch die, all the founders can continue to go and do good things.
They might be a bit less wide-eyed and optimistic, but that is probably a good thing. You only really die off when you stop working.
The mathematician Paul Erdos took this a bit too literally, and would lament the death of colleagues who retired. He also called children epsilons.
I'll probably drop by the dinners in Mountain View so frequently that half of the new founders will think I'm in their batch.