How did the YCombinator deal work out for the devs?

It was more than ten years ago. We were in the Winter of 2007 batch.

It was great, but YC is a very different organization now, much much larger, with a lot more capital behind them. YC is still great, but you'd probably be better off asking someone who has been through the program more recently. Based on what I know, I would definitely recommend it for new companies, sure. It was a great experience, though it'd be a very different experience today. I went to a ten-year reunion party a few months back (I happened to be in the area), and also stopped in on one of the YC dinners, so I've seen what they're up to, and I mostly really like what Sam and Michael and the rest have done with YC in the time they've been in charge.

When we did YC, the money offered was very small ($15,000 in our case), while they invest ~$120,000 today, and the number of companies they invested in each batch was also pretty small. There were ~20 companies in our batch. The current batches have ~100 companies in them. But, when we did YC Paul Graham cooked the dinners personally and did regular office hours, so that was cool. These days, though, some of the folks from our batch are now YC partners and doing office hours and the like. It's a cool thing to see, and a lot of great companies have come through YC.

We didn't get as much out of it as we probably should have...in hindsight, I wished we'd raised money when it would have been easy to do. We'd probably be on a very different course today if we'd pursued more rapid growth. If we'd had a bigger team earlier we would have been able to more aggressively pursue opportunities for growth. But, the network is awesome and bigger than ever. And, I can't think of any early stage investor that has more clout in the valley.

So, yeah, it was worth it, I learned a lot. And, if I was to start a new company, I'd probably do YC again if given the opportunity.