Startups that demoed at Y Combinator W16 Demo Day 2 | Hacker News Reader

Startups that demoed at Y Combinator W16 Demo Day 2

techcrunch.com

89 pointscjbarber47 comments

Looks like a much stronger batch to me, I take back some of what I said yesterday. I would be hard pressed to choose between some of these!

I love that we are seeing less fad apps and more healthcare / farming / energy / third world tech. It's encouraging.

Personally farming tech and third world mobile payment are areas that I've been thinking about reading up on for a while. Perhaps the time is now!

As a side note it seems like there are a lot of teams right now working on chat / chat bots / chat ai in a very overlapping way. It makes me wonder what the root of this bot/ai/virtual assistant trend is and if they would be attacking the problem the same way without slack-colored glasses.

Probably slack and ryver and facebook for work - there's a lot of companies out there. And other companies are throwing money into it too.

Cisco just put out a $150mil fund to fund similar things for their chat & video platform as well:

https://developer.ciscospark.com/fund/

Disclaimer: I do work for Cisco

Here is the clean list of YCW16: https://startups.watch/yc-w16-startups/

Lots of biotech/medical device companies in this class. Historically this has not been a good category to invest in (unless you like to lose money), nor one that is easy to get right. The FDA is a real pain to deal with and trying to "do things that don’t scale" has you end up like Theranos. I do give YC kudos for trying.

The FDA also provides a HUGE barrier to entry. Once a company makes it through the approval processes (if they make it), they will have a monopoly on that corner of the medical market for many years. I agree its difficult, but the rewards are higher.

You can still fail at the marketing level even if you make it all the way through the approval process (Affezza comes to mind as a good example of this [1]). My background is in biotech and I feel the risk/reward ratio is too great in this area. Still a gutsy move from YC.

1. http://www.fiercepharma.com/story/sanofi-tried-and-failed-af...

My very first angel investment was in a medical device company. They had FDA approval, patent protection, all the manufacturing in place, rave reviews from users, clear benefits over the competition... and they still failed because they couldn't get distribution.

Ten years later I made another medical device investment. Again, good IP protection, FDA approved, clear data showing life-saving benefits. This one failed because the technical founders decided to go off the ranch and have a turf battle with the CEO.

The Murphy factor in this sector seems pretty high to me.

Yes the bar in this area is very high as there are so many things that can go wrong.

I think the difference is with pure software you are just dealing with human created complexity - with biotech you also have nature’s complexity to deal with too. Mix the two together and spice it up with some unbelievably stringent regulations and you have a recipe for a lot of heartburn.

Perhaps it would be possible to attack this market using a different approach. The classic startup path is approximately --> geeks hammer out MVP product, get some funding and try to grow as quickly as possible, and either go big or fail.

I got this idea after watching the Vice interview with Martin Shkreli (obviously not a role model)[1]

Shkreli made the leap from hedge funds (betting against pharma companies) into becoming the CEO of a pharma company, which apparently does research in addition jacking up the prices of HIV drugs (Shkreli actually gives out chemistry lessons on youtube[2]).

So maybe some geeks could try getting funding, buy up some underappreciated, undervalued but already FDA approved drugs, and using the cashflow to do further research, or develop cool new products or services in the healthcare space instead of the traditional, risky route. (I'm not advocating jacking up the prices of critical lifesaving drugs obviously).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PCb9mnrU1g

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQljHkKuC2I

For low risk medical devices, startups can use a FDA 510(k) [0] to get approval if the device has a comparable (predicate) device already approved. This is how some startups get devices approved with relatively little red tape from the FDA.

This may also work for some healthcare software apps.

[0] http://www.emergogroup.com/resources/articles/fda-510k-clear...

I wonder if this has something to do with PG stepping aside. I heard a talk from him years ago and it didn't sound like he was to interested in getting into the health care domain. I can understand his position. It is a bureaucratic nightmare.

And you have a lot of powerful players that don't like to see you succeed. (read: big pharma)

Big pharma buys startups all the time.

Big pharma sues startups as well.

I find the proposition of "Spinal Singularity" strange: why would you need a connected urinary catheter??

The things on your body, being on your body, are easily accessible. If I ever need a urinary catheter I'd rather control it with a manual pump than a cell phone. Does everything need to be connected??

Does this thing require you to have your cell phone with you in order to take a piss? And can you go if your phone dies? Also, if your cell phone can control it, it's only a matter of time before it's hacked (fun in the board room!)

I agree wholeheartedly. It seems this device just creates more points of failure (e.g. lost/dead phone, urinary tract infections, interference, etc.) for a little convenience.

Self-cathing isn't that difficult once you get the hang of it.

I think the founder would disagree. He's working on this specifically because he finds self-cathing difficult and cumbersome.

Having family with catheters they would have loved this / love this.

The external valves, and associated bags, are all additional causes of infection — and this would cut those out.

It's really hard to change those bags without spillage. This cuts that out.

The external pipework getting caught on things and causing pain. Solved.

You have to adjust the kind of clothing you wear so that you can have space for the catheter bag. This would cut that out.

The location of catheter bags means that people with certain kind of mobility problems can't change them themselves - this would cut that out. This one directly affects a friend of mine right now. Four times a day that have to be around somebody who is willing to change a catheter bag with them. They cannot get up at night without somebody to disconnect/reconnect the night bag.

The whole issue of not knowing how full the bladder is - this would cut that out.

Never being able to go swimming. Never being able to have a bath. Solved.

If this can be made to work well, and it's a big if I'm sure, it is a game changer and a major quality of life improver.

Since number 1 is a catheter, I want to repeat a long time complaint. Why can't technology help urinals stay clean? There are puddles in literally every male bathroom. Some one please solve this.

Edit: At my age, the last sputters go in every which way. So missing is unavoidable and we need some kind of self cleaning floor.

It is a user error not a technology problem :)

If you did want a technology solution I would suggest electrifying a zone area around the urinal - 5000V should get even the most haphazard user on the straight and narrow.

Except the stream is not continuous, as the the liquid speeds up it tends to separate into droplets.

I suggest you try urinating on an electric fence - I have seen it done and the result is both horrifying and very amusing.

An electric fence is much closer than the floor, the stream may not have broken yet. It does depend on the distance -- for example you could pee from a subway platform onto the third rail and live to tell the story.

I have a better solution: just don't drink. Ever.

Stimpy, don't whiz on the electric fence!

At 5kV, you're likely to get air dielectric breakdown between droplets (roughly 3MV/m dielectric breakdown over a few mm)

At least they didn't bury the lede.

People just need a reason to aim, not more technology. [1]

[1] http://images.dailykos.com/images/214735/story_image/Trump_U...

There is a full length urinal, I don't know why they aren't more widely used.

Cost.

The urinals I see in Japan that go all the way down to the floor do a pretty excellent job at containing those puddles.

Wet-mopping Roomba-type robots cleaning floors when there's no one in the room?

A lot of these links are broken. For example, http://www.getaccept.com/%E2%80%9C

Luckily, it's easy to parse this out but it's a bit jarring.

Well it is TechCrunch (where it's and its are seemingly interchangeable).

"Spinal Singularity wants to tap into the $2 billion urinary catheter market ..."

Well played, TechCrunch. Credit where due.

I can't help but wonder how DeepGram is impacted by Google opening their speech API.

Google's API translates a sound sample to text. DeepGram's API uses the sound sample to search other audio.

NSFW warning.. there's a catheter/penis combo.

I feel bad for anyone who can't view an animated medical diagram of a penis at work for fear of it being NSFW.

Tell that to my boss. I personally don't give a shit.

Why be condescending?

There's also the possibility of someone not wanting to have an animated medical diagram of a penis on their work monitor, even if the bosses don't care, so I see no problem with the warning.

PaveIQ looks pretty interesting. There has to be a big market of customers willing to hand over money to learn how their website is performing but aren't currently investing the time to learn GA's more advanced features or to learn how to mine insights from all that clickstream data.

I'm not so sure. There's a lot you get can from simply running basic analytics and an NPS survey. You should also be constantly talking with customers. Ideally you'd already know where the site/app is failing purely based on those interactions.

If they can pull in data from various sources (Stripe, SFIQ, etc), that's where this product could be really exciting.

So what is up with all the Chatbots? Between the two days there was at least three companies that seemed to be pushing some sort of generic chatbot. Is this really lucrative? I guess it could replace call centers with online automated help.

It's just that voice is going to become more and more prevalent as an user interface.

I'm amazed at how big the batch is. It seems like there are some clear front-runners, but the batch itself seems quite deep.

Disclaimer: Haven't payed a lot of attention to YC batches since '13.

Boom wants to build the next Concorde—how can YC help?

Physio Health: "Time for a nice strecth!"

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