Not a lot new here but upvoting anyway just for this line:

"UX is something that always evolves and gets better and better with data, user feedback and just availability of more time and is inherently an iterative process, just as is the core product development process."

Seems obvious but definitely is something I run into often - treating UX/Interaction Design as a standalone one-time thing you do, like taxes, rather than an ongoing process.

Thanks.

You are right that its not new per se, but I am not sure if founders are leveraging all the knowledge one can gain from archives of successful sites to learn from them. For example, I was looking at Etsy's homepage when they launched and I think it was very clever for a community/marketplace site that has the classic chicken and egg problem.

I'm not sure they are either, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I also lean towards the approach of learning from others and studying the ecology of existing designs, but I think that betrays a designer's bias:) The YC ethic seems to be more on the side of agile programming and prototyping in code and it's an alternative approach that can also work well, given an extremely capable set of coders.

By the way, I like your focus as a product incubator, that's a good differentiator. I recently changed my linkedin title to "an interaction designer specializing in early stage startups" and am slowly finding an underground culture of bay area designers in the same scene - it's good to see we're not all snapped up by ad agencies and big companies.

Good point, I guess there's stuff you can learn from the past and the rest is really dependent on your particular scenario where iterative development is the best way to find a version that "works".