ReadWriteStart

When startups fail and are forced to shut down, often times one of the co-founders will offer a short blog post about what happened and why the company wasn't able to succeed. Not everyone does however, as reveling in your own failure isn't the most fun thing to do. In the case of the failed individual journalism platform NewsTilt, co-founder Paul Biggar penned a 7,000 word essay last week that painstakingly details how and why his company ultimately failed, providing a must-read set of lessons for any entrepreneur.

Silicon Valley-based startup incubator Y Combinator (YC) announced today that is has raised $8.25 million with which it plans to provide funding to a larger group of startups this summer. Leading the funding was Sequoia Capital along with several angel investors, including Ron Conway, Paul Buchheit, Aydin Senkut, XG Ventures, and Geoff Ralston - many of same investors which provided YC with $2 million in March of last year.

Being a resident of the Phoenix area, which is a significant distance from Silicon Valley, I wasn't able to attend the Demo Day show-and-tell pitch-fest at the end of Y Combinator (YC), but luckily, other reporters were there and have been slowly releasing stories about the companies and the event. Peter Kafka of All Things Digital published a video interview Thursday with YC co-founder Paul Graham from Demo Day in which he provides some interesting insights into how the investment community is rebounding and possibly how incubators are beginning to have influence on the larger VC firms.