Here Are the 52 Startups That Launched at Y Combinator Summer 2015 Demo Day 2 | Hacker News Reader

Here Are the 52 Startups That Launched at Y Combinator Summer 2015 Demo Day 2

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46 pointsawwstn65 comments

TL;DR Can someone give me an advice on how to prevent myself from degrading my own ideas in order to create a startup?

I do not see how these startups and/or others companies created during the last years are solving real problems. People in the country where I live have a saying for the people of my city: "They are so recursive, they could sell you a hole and make you buy it". If I am literal to this statement and try to think the same way the founders of these startups think I could create a company to dig holes in the grown as a service, maybe a telecommunication company could see this useful considering that (at least in my city) they put their cables underground (mostly). But you do not see people here selling holes, that is stupid.

Now, to my question again, can anyone give me an advise of how to change my mind about these things in order to prevent myself from degrading my own ideas? Because they may be silly but may also work and produce a revenue, but I am too negative to see them flourish.

It's better to submit the question separately on the Ask HN section. It's too off-topic with this submission/article.

Sometimes software solves a problem you didn't know you had. Both Facebook and Twitter for example.

Also, "real problems" is pretty subjective.

Here is another side of the coin. Some ideas might seem silly. In fact, some actually are! But let's say a couple of them make it and turn a profit. Did the idea change the world? Maybe a little. If that much. Here is the kicker: The idea will probably have changed someone's world for the better. You don't need to go out and change the world itself. Sometimes its enough to improve somebody's world. Who knows? Maybe its one of those uber drivers Ive met who have fallen into hard times and are driving a car around to support their families. Not world changing, but important. And uber, when you think about it, is a simple app where you request a car to pick you up. It has not resulted in world peace. But is definitely keeping some people from going hungry.

If someone voluntary and without deceit pays for your service, you are solving a real problem. It may be not important, but it is real.

E.g.: Does Netflix solves important problem? No. Does it solve a real problem? Yes.

There are a lot of things I love about HN, but seeing the hate on ambition, hard work, and potential success is always disappointing.

Serious question: How are the opinions of a couple of internet commenter an attack on ambition, hard work, and potential success? I mean, big successes are treated the same way! Trolls will he trolls. Never mind the website.

I'm going to challenge you to apply the Principle Of Charity here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

Instead of "hating", what's the best possible motivation for these kinds of comments?

Alternatively, what emotions are behind them? What reaction can you have to those emotions that help the people who have them?

Disclaimer- I find middlebrow dismissal as disappointing as anyone. But I've found value in considering what underlies it.

This is one of the most supportive forums on the internet for your projects. Take it back.

Do a poll where you ask people something it seems inconceivable anyone would disagree with. "Should we teach and protect our children?". 20% will not want it. It's either internet hanging chads or trolls. Neither are worth reflecting on.

The root cause of the things you love about HN is that people are honest. Praise on HN is genuine because condemnation is genuine. If you want people to be truly passionate about changing the world, about disrupting entrenched inefficiencies that are bad for people, about seeing Silicon Valley be the best that Silicon Valley can be, they will call you out when you fall short of that.

If you don't want to be disappointed, fund better startups.

> The root cause of the things you love about HN is that people are honest.

I've been here a while and that's never made HN great. HN is supposed a welcoming place for smart folks with an interest in the small intersection between tech and business.

It's always felt like an implicit rule, but it's pretty simple: don't be a dick, and don't discourage people from exploring ideas they think are interesting. What positive outcome could that possibly have?

Honest != being a dick. You can be honest whilst respecting the other person. Being a dick just shows that you are a dick.

When you say better startups, what do you mean?

Hush now. Criticism isn't hate. Disappointment isn't hate either. Being a back-patting "good-job" for everything forum seems like the ultimate sad ending to HN. Maybe you like to live in the lala land of yes men, and cronyism sponsored happy endings so even mild internet posts cut? :(

Anyway, this is the internet: people will have a problem with anything you do so don't take it personally.

> Hardware was the clear cut theme of Day 1...

> L. Condoms — “Condoms That Women Want”...

Do the condoms count as hardware, or software? Or perhaps both, depending on how long they are worn.

https://youtu.be/ObpcGNCU944

This article is a recap of the startups included in Day 2

"Vive — Classpass for hair blowouts"

I'm trying to think of a better "X for Y" startup parody, but am failing.

You may not be in their market (yet), but that company is going to make a lot of money if they execute well.

I haven't considered the economics of salons, but not sure they would have the same low variable costs that allow Classpass to succeed in fitness. I certainly wish the team (and all the other YC companies) the best though considering the guts and determination it takes to give it a shot, and you are correct that I am decidedly not in their target market so I may be missing something about the idea that is gold.

Pretty sure blow drying hair has very low variable costs. Electricity to run a hair dryer.

Everything else is to some extent fixed (including operator). What it doesn't have is SaaS style scalability (1000 users costing the same as 1), and it's not like a yoga class where you can probably do 30 in the same space as 15, but the variable costs are just the electricity.

Not necessarily. The long tail of integrating with the management systems those salons use is really long and it's basically a non-starter without management system integration. Add to that that those management systems have started to wise up to the need for scheduling and it's a very difficult nut to crack.

And no, those businesses will not copy appointments back and forth themselves. Small business scheduling is hard. Very hard. This isn't speculation, I've worked on a product that has pretty good traction doing exactly what they're doing. It would surprise me greatly if they've yet discovered why this problem isn't solved yet, and it isn't for lack of trying or that previous attempts haven't been executed properly.

"... if they execute well."

Yes...my point was that even if they execute well, there's still a ton that can torpedo their success. They're going to need to execute phenomenally and get a ton more cooperation from the small businesses than we've ever found them willing to give.

I think it's an intentionally silly description, thank God

It's a bad "x for y" because I've never heard of classpass and I don't know what a hair blowout is. The "hair blowout" part might be commonly known among investors, and definitely among the target market, but I don't think classpass is a household name. ("blowout" would be bad; "hair blowout" is probably ok.)

It's not necessarily a bad startup (from a few minutes googling, it's probably a good market, and a solid team; haven't looked at the product).

You can play a fun game by looking at these lists and speculating which of these companies would still be included if YC was a $200m fund with 10-20 bets to make.

I'm totally excited about heroic labs. Is there any other company providing this service (that isn't part of a closed eco system that is)?

AppCanary sounds great. I've been working on a tiny prototype that makes use of a dockerfile to check on software that should be updated and sends a mail/SMS when an update is needed. Connects to various RSS feeds and vulnerability DBs to figure out when to notify the user. I guess AppCanary can be a drop in replacement for that.

On a separate note, and I hope I'm not putting negative fuel here, would anyone be interested in a quick and dirty website to place bets on whether a company will grow or fail and maybe how long it will take to go big/fail? Point here isn't to hate on any company. It would just be an experiment that would yield some interesting results in a couple of years as to how good our individual abilities are in predicting success/failure.

"Everything you can do with a frown, you can do with a smile."

I think you can give a positive spin to your site. That is people can say why they think a certain product will succeed (break market & competitors analysis/overview, team strength, product strength, etc....). They can also state what problems they may face etc.. And please delete and do not allow negative comments that add nothing to the feedback.

Cheers,

On a site like that, I don't think I'd ever want to allow comments :D . Thanks for the feedback

Edit - After reading this I just realised it could be taken as loaded with snark. Really did not want it to come across as that. Just to clarify my statement, a website which allows for people to comment on the highly polarizing issue that is "what value, if any, does this new Silicon Valley funded startup X bring to the table?" would probably be filled up with thoughtless/cruel comments right at the start. I'd never be able to control that on my own, so would just never build a site like that that allows for comments.

Again, sorry if my initial statement came off as snarky.

No problem, I did not read as such.

Can someone who knows something about farms explain how Picktrace is different from FarmLogs? Are they direct competitors?

I think FarmLogs is more about collecting (and making useful) data at the geographic level (rainfall levels, soil types, yieldmaps, etc), and Picktrace is more about collecting data at the operational level (payroll, productivity levels for high labor farm tasks, etc). The agricultural segments they are targeting only slightly overlap as well - Picktrace seems to be built for farms that require large amounts of labor to operate, such as orchards and vegetable farms, while FarmLogs targets high yield row crops, such as corn, soybean, and wheat farms that are highly mechanized.

Whoa, AppCanary looks really sweet now! I'm also really happy they added a lot more information about themselves to their website :) I think there's a huge market for really simple security products like this, as most people don't realize how much work keeping even an LTS Ubuntu image up to date is (hint: unattended updates aren't automatically installed, and you'll often have to restart the box to get essential kernel security fixes!)

I love it. Some of the start ups have the potential to be huge.

Her and Jopwell are really, really cool and much needed but I can't see them getting to $100 million in revenue or whatever the threshold for VC funding is. And frankly that's depressing.

On a related note how profitable is Grindr?

There is lack of disruptive companies in my opinion in this batch.

The ones that can grow in to something huge are Vive, Paribus, Bitmovin, Scentbird and AppCanary, but still a long road ahead of them.

If you are truly disruptive, it is in your best interest as a startup to not appear as such.

While I agree, but Ycombinator among others says they are looking for disruptive (one way or another) startups.

Curious about Gigster. They say they aren't a marketplace, but if they only have vetted devs and PMs how do they plan to scale up?

"They argue that the market for software development is $407 billion compared to $93 billion for gaming."

Seems crazy. Anything to back it up?!

I'd be curious to know how Gravitational works if the founders are here? How would one take a public service and make it private?

I’m not sure how the gravitaional guys are doing it, but we launched a related company a few months ago. We basically leverage the portability of Docker containers so that SaaS vendors (like NPM, Code Climate, Travis CI) can use the same product in the cloud that they use to ship on-prem. You can see a quick demo on our website: www.replicated.com

As a minority[0]: I hate the idea of Jopwell. Fewer things have, in my opinion, done more harm for the professional perception of a minority person as the affirmative action debacle[1]. Anything that says "hire more minorities, it's a good thing!!" automatically gets a black mark from me.

[0] I don't presume to speak for us all :)

[1] Edit: removed anecdote coz I don't want to spend the next hour talking about affirmative action.

This isn't directly about hiring, however (as a white person) it shifted my perceptions significantly:

https://www.reddit.com/comments/3du1qm/

In a few years, I want Jopwell to not exist anymore. Not that I'm rooting for them to fail, but rather that I hope every job site is equally diverse. But for now, we need to be intentional about this.

Most companies hire from within their networks. So, this problem will solve itself eventually, as minorities start bringing their networks of potential hires to companies and the companies start naturally hiring from that new pool. However, it's a chicken-and-egg problem that needs a kick start.

I agree it's a problem, but there must be a better solution than simply excluding white males.

Better education for all has been previously mentioned as the ideal solution, and it's the one I stand behind and support.

Where have you worked where it was easier to get hired as a white man? Everyone in tech is already tripping over themselves trying to hire women and minorities.

This 'company' is blatantly discriminatory and unnecessary and taints the success of their hires by making it appear they took a shortcut into their positions via their race/sex .

Anecdotally, judging from my friends in both categories, it's easier to get hired and promoted (implicit disclaimer: in the US tech scene) as a competent white man than as an equally-competent woman or racial/ethnic minority, if you are job-hunting.

One of the side effects of entrenched racism and sexism is that competent women and minorities tend to be underemployed more than competent white men, and so as the biases are being broken down, you'll see way more women and minorities (compared to the ratios in the general population) being hired or promoted to the right place compared to white men. Out of people who are competent to be senior developers, way more white men than women or minorities already have a good job fit, and in turn, way fewer of them are on the job market or easily poachable.

So the market, as a whole, can be biased in favor of hiring and promoting women and minorities without it being any easier for the individual developer who happens to be a woman or minority.

The market as a whole is getting purpotedly pushed to hire minorities. Apparently. Is it working(in the tech sector)? Or, are they just making the white guys resentful and so making it harder in the long run?

Not sure. But I don't think it's helping.

If you don't mind me asking, what minority group do you belong too?

Hmm. One that prefers to not have to hold up a specific minority flag :)

Think for a second: why does it matter what specific minority I am? Am I black? A woman? A black woman? Or one of those that doesn't get anywhere close to the media attention these do?

Doesn't matter. Hire me for how I do the job. That's how prejudices are broken. Not by re-affirming prejudices by giving me handicap points.

Ok, I was not asking to try and undermine your point. Just curious...

No problem: I wasn't trying to insinuate anything like that. My first inclination was to tell you, but then this is the internet: I could easily be Donald Trump or Barack Obama :)

So, that made me consider why it would even matter, given the source isn't really trustworthy. But really, it probably matters because it gives people a reference point/image in their heads which makes thinking about such things a little easier. But, I'd rather not have readers think reflexively and instead think about how they might react. Not sure if that made sense :)

tldr: I wasn't trying to insinuate anything underhanded in your comment :) I just thought that it might lead people to think a little more if my exact minority wasn't disclosed, rather than (however subconsciously) pattern matching me into a bucket.

I love these companies... such a great/fun read.

"Their claimed profit margin is 94%"

So they're totally ripping the consumer off then...

Or they have high fixed costs.

That would create a high 'contribution margin.' A profit margin usually includes fixed costs. :)

I argue that "ripping off" is based on the value that a consumer receives relative to the price of the product or service.

Imagine you say: "I will tell you a joke, if you laugh then you must pay me 100 dollars"

If I give you 100 dollars, and you just run off with it, I got ripped off.

If I give you 100 dollars, and you tell me a really funny joke, then I was not ripped off.

Your problem seems to be that telling jokes is virtually free, and the profit margin might be 94%.

Yep I get it but it seems like an incredibly naive and almost arrogant message to relay...

"Hey customers, buy our product for $16 even though it actually cost $1 to make"

The audience for the message is investors, not customers.

It was posted on a customer facing website...

If spoon costs $0.10 to make, and you cannot make a solid business selling it for $0.30, while at $2.00 per spoon the market is willing and you get to create jobs, what shall you do?

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