Y Combinator Gets Hardcore About Hardware | Hacker News Reader

Y Combinator Gets Hardcore About Hardware

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I know a lot of these companies are at the MVP-ish stage, but I'm extremely excited about Luna and Nebia. I'll probably be willing to buy those two, along with Pepper [1], and some smart coffee/tea maker by the end of this year.

I would be more interested in Luna if they partnered with some mattress company or something similar, and if I can buy cover + mattress combo. From experience, it is an extreme nightmare to get a size match on covers. I'd be more confident purchasing it knowing that they specifically built it for a mattress that I can also buy. Maybe they can list supported mattresses or the ones they tested on?

The interesting thing is all these products (Luna, Nebia, Pepper) are actually in decently affordable range, especially for cutting edge.

[1] Pepper - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a4sZnLRvqk

I'll be honest, I don't see these products as all that compelling. They all seem kind of gimmicky to me. Who exactly is the target market for the sandwich-making machine or bicycle cafe? Is it for restaurants? If I owned a deli, for instance, you're going to have a hard time convincing me that your newfangled robot can make a sandwich faster or better than human employees.

I would think both have a place next to Vending Machines.

Sandwiches -- especially anything containing meat -- need fresh ingredients to be actually compelling. Seems like it'd be difficult to beat restaurants, especially with the "yuck/cheap factor" that comes with vending machines.

Plus, going out for lunch is 25% about food and 75% about getting out of the office and walking around in the world.

I'd imagine the primary market for such a vending machine would be the small population of workaholics who are too far gone to take a 30 minute break in the middle of the day, or McDonalds competitors in high-minimum-wage areas. But honestly, it seems like McDonalds would be able to beat any comer (maybe even without having to license any IP).

Tough market :-)

I generally agree with your assessment. However, I am imagining the sandwich machine in places like McDonalds where there is no art to the sandwich, where it is simply about squirting predetermined amounts of condiments (and other ingrediants) on.

I certainly don't doubt it is possible, but I think it'd be pretty easy to under-estimate the difficulty of building a sandwich making machine that keeps up with rush-hour demand and costs less than 7-8/hr to run.

As Seen on TV is a product line of crap that sells millions of dollars every year. Even without being compelling.

Is that really what you want YC to be about now? I'm all for live and let live, esp. in terms of making a living, but actually using that as an excuse/somethign to shoot for seems pretty stark.

Does it matter what I think? YC has grown without me, and to be honest, I would probably make it worse. They've funded crap products before. I mean, that's their whole approach. Even airbnb was crap when the founders started. They say it themselves. YC is in the business of making businesses that make money. They do fund projects like Watsi that make a positive difference. At the end of they the metric is money and how much they make. I'm not saying that's bad. Just saying that what I think won't make Sam Altman pick up the phone and tell everyone to change their approach. When you make stuff, you will mostly make crap. But every once in a while you'll make good stuff.

Edit: I upvoted you after people started to downvote you. Not sure why they are doing it. Your point is valid.

I could see a future where there is an automated restaurant or cafe. In those cases, if optimized a bit more, you could have cheaper/better long term returns and also scale to locations without changing the experience. Many chains seem to have a manual to keep the experience constant. Robots won't have that issue.

There are obvious tradeoffs, but I could see it happen

I read your comment and immediately thought of the Asian market. I've never been to Asia but when friends post pictures they always include vending machines, robot restaurants, food on conveyor belts etc. I could see these being popular in Asia.

Noodle-slicing robots already exist in China:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukNkCnNJuR8

I think the cheaper/better proposition you mentioned here is the key thing, buy why would we keep the cafe/restaurant 'format' to deliver this?

Assuming the machines are too expensive at first for an 'everyone buys their own' model to scale at all, seems a better way would be to do away with the (massive) cost of keeping premises in prime locations, and still hiring at least some staff to take care of things like security and cleaning, and switch to a 'machine makes food in small cheap warehouse, food is delivered to people's homes, or very small outlet points in cities' model.

In fact it makes me wonder why this model isn't more widespread already (there are takeout restaurants, of course, but they're all still in relatively expensive locations that you can always walk into). This would work fine with people cooking the food, obviously, but somehow it seems a bit odd. Maybe the cooking being automated is enough of a shift from tradition to make another big change like this seem more natural?

Could low income individuals benefit from a sandwich making machine that could (theoretically) produce a sandwich at a lower cost than human labor?

No, it would benefit owners of sandwich-making machines, who wouldn't have to pay for relatively-expensive labor any more. The owners themselves would have to be wealthy enough to afford the machine in the first place. The effect would be to centralize wealth further, as the owners of capital get more money, while those without capital are left unable to make money through their labor.

You're right, but that's done by providing value to the payer. In this case, cheaper, faster food.

Exactly. And it would be more popular in countries with higher labour costs (e.g., Australia).

I agree, here's probably what's going on:

oh shit, startups that people thought were bad ideas are unicorns.

Some time later .....

I don't get it. Hmm ... UNICORN FUND IT!

Jokes aside: I think some of these are interesting, rather than gimmicky. But it all lies in the execution.

The bicycle cafe is a job on wheels. Would you rather drive an Uber? If the hourly rate is similar it would be a less stressful job. I suspect this could pay much better if you pick your locations cleverly.

Park it just a little way's down from a Starbucks and watch the money roll in.

So is a hot dog cart. Hot dog carts attached to bicycles have existed forever. Job on wheels, maybe even better than driving for Uber. I guess.

You do realize that your comment could be about Uber itself, right? Cabs have existed forever too.

I think this is the most ambitious YC batch in recent memory. The ideas you've mentioned above are potentially huge. (sandwich making robots, anyone can start their own coffeeshop business)

I interpreded this article as a sign of YC decline. I wish there was a mechanism to short private stock ;)

YC's stated before that numerically, there's at most one startup in any given batch that has any worthwhile effect on their returns. The rest are just a cost of doing business.

http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html

Personally, my bet is that Nebia is that startup this batch, and the vast majority of the other ones fail.

The timing is certainly right to take off with the ongoing California drought.

From a marketing perspective, sure, but are showers a major portion of the water used in California? Spend that $400 xeriscaping.

Think about all of the special events that go on every weekend. Yeah, Joe's Sandwiches isn't going to replace employees with a sandwich machine, but something like the local Rotary Club would buy and/or rent one to help supplement their food stand. A cafe cart likewise is something that's useful in getting great spots for special events where it used to be a pain in the butt to lug all the food prep equipment to and from. Sometimes, you want to change the world, others, you just want a sandwich.

Is that really easier than just hiring Joe's Sandwiches to cater the Rotary event?

Just send a cooler full of sandwiches.

Have you ever been to an event in a city park or similar where breakfast/brunch is provided/for sale and the price point is $3-10? It's hour old greasy food, hard bagels, and stale donuts. A way to churn out fresh sandwiches / bagels / eggs / etc. on demand would be a game changer.

As soon as you're paying over $10 (or really over $6-7) it's hard to imagine a massive benefit from today's robots. But I could definitely see cooking robots dramatically change quality of food available in the $1-9 range, especially in locations without a full kitchen available, and especially breakfast / brunch stuff.

Maybe all they do is make a couple people a few million dollars. Other people see them get rich then they start hardware companies. Other companies spring up to support these new hardware startups...

You get the idea, right?

I assume the pitch wasn't "we're going to make a sandwich-making machine," but rather "we're going to automate food production and revolutionize the world economy." If I understand correctly, the intended path of many of these companies is to use some narrow case as proof-of-concept. Start with helping conference attendees share air mattresses, then build towards replacing the hospitality industry. You can't judge these companies by the scope of the MVPs.

That's fair. But surely, somebody had to have judged those companies by something, where somebody is presumably a venture capitalist.

Another thought: It could be the beginning of a self driving food truck.

If the MVP isn't compelling, why even spend time and money developing it? Why not spend those resources building something closer to the "real" product?

There's a long history of big things starting as small things. http://www.paulgraham.com/altair.html

People actually wanted to use those things, though, even though they sounded silly and small. That's why they were able to grow into something larger. Microsoft's customers weren't thinking, "well, Altair Basic isn't that useful, but you can't judge them by the scope of their MVP -- Microsoft told their investors they'll build a whole OS someday."

That sounds tautological to me, but maybe I'm not following your argument. I do sense a bit of hindsight in it, though. The initial market for Altair BASIC was as small as it gets.

I agree, and I'm surprised. It sounds like the stuff that Quirky does.

Keep in mind that most of these companies have to work just as hard once they finish YC. It generally takes a few more years after YC to really make something of themselves. Adding on to that, some companies take awhile to develop an efficient revenue stream. From what I hear, Reddit still has a hard time making money even though it raised $50 million in investments and was bought out by Conde Nast. Sometimes the investments made are seen as a promise for the long-term rather then revolutionizing the way we live tomorrow.

It made a hummus, fresh sliced cucumber, sriracha sandwich in ~12 seconds so it's probably faster than a human.

"I don't see these products as all that compelling. They all seem kind of gimmicky to me."

Came to a similar conclusion in the past but looking through the current batch I was impressed with the sheer number of projects and their applications. Makes software only companies look somewhat lame. Remember a lot of these hardware startups start off looking "toy-like" at the start, and will evolve.

Particularly interested in the sandwich robot. Lots of problems to solve there involving supply and safe storage of edible materials.

Lots of people commenting on that here....one thing to keep in mind is that many people frequent restaurants because of the experience, and how a robot affects the experience needs to be considered when thinking about the value of such a product. Sandwich making is pretty much already automated at the industrial level for making packaged food. The question is how will consumer like going to a sandwich restaurant to buy something that was made by a robot behind the counter? Can it match the higher level of quality provided by a local restaurant?

"how will consumer like going to a sandwich restaurant to buy something that was made by a robot behind the counter?"

Bank tellers, petrol attendants, supermarket cashiers and packers are all examples of where machines have replaced people. Where time, cost and convenience are concerned it appears people are redundant with the exception of services with very high level social interactions.

"Can it match the higher level of quality provided by a local restaurant?"

Nutritional match: Let's face it, no machine will ever match the quality of of favourite pâtisserie [0] in terms of taste, style and presentation. However a machine with a suitable API and focus would be able to outdo out-scale the best trained chefs with individualised nutrition.

Given the western world has a glut of cheap, fast and fatty foods, a machine able to build a menu selection given the individual nutritional and taste of thousands of individual customers can excel in terms of choice, cost and diet.

[0] Although you cannot see sandwiches, baguettes, they are available: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/albums/72157622498559...

I was referring more to how going to a restaurant is as much about the experience as it is about the food, and a human trumps a machine in terms of experience every time. In the examples you listed above, experience matters much less. Personal touch/restaurant experience = perception of higher level of quality.

> I don't see these products as all that compelling.

Much the same reactions pop up after every batch [1], including the "sign of YC decline" comment elsewhere in this thread. Maybe they're right, but we won't know for a few years.

There's one big factor here for sure though: nascent things seem trivial, so it's easy to dismiss them. That's the null hypothesis about dismissals—most are fully explained by it. It's also the #1 problem of early-stage investing. pg has written about this a ton, most memorably (to me) at [2].

Little things are easy to belittle. Their value is hard to see, their triviality is obvious, and the vast majority turn out worthless anyhow. If your goal is to be right as often as possible, it's a sure bet. But startup investing is all about detecting that hard-to-see value, and for that it would be a bad sign if these reactions didn't pop up after every batch.

I do wish the HN discussions could be a little more varied, though; at our worst (or maybe our median) we mostly emit versions of "No wireless, less space than a nomad, lame." But this may not be possible. Dismissals have statistics if not economics on their side, "wait and see" is not a compelling message board argument, and the discussions invariably have incomplete information—launch stories don't come with the complete vision and plans of the startup nor the thought process behind the investment.

The habit of looking for ways that things could work instead of reasons they probably won't is too rare to hold its own in a public discussion. That's sad, though, because it's so intimately related to the creative process, and if there's one thing I could change about HN's culture it would certainly be to enrich it with more of that.

1. https://twitter.com/sama/status/595993931906551808

2. http://www.paulgraham.com/altair.html

I like ShapeScale. As someone going through an intense regimented workout program, I would love to see the micro changes going on in my body. I wouldn't buy one but could definitely see myself going to a local gym to use it every so often.

From the headline to the article itself, I prefer to think of it as "Entrepreneurs Get Hardcode About Hardware." YC vets and funds -- the innovation belongs to the teams.

Offtopic, but the magic piece of hardware will be a washer / dryer that is actually competent at both tasks.

The magic will be when my hamper contents gets emptied / sorted / washed / dried / folded without my intervention. Bonus points for refiling in my closet and bureau.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/19/407736307/robot...

I think we're a ways away from that, unfortunately.

100% agreed. This and dishes are two things that would leave so much time in my life for things I would rather be doing. Like building a sandwich machine haha

I can't find a reference to it anywhere, but there is a guy in the SF Bay area who is working on that. He has a proof of concept that he put together and claims it dries better than the ones available with closed-loop drying systems.

What bothers you about the current options? I'm curious because - while admittedly my demands are pretty simple - I'm quite happy with my washer/dryer and can't think of anything I'd want to improve.

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