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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

TBH none of these look like unicorns in the making, so the only meaningful choice is really Pinboardy McPinboardface.

In 1998, Larry and Sergey took their Page Rank algorithm to the top minds of the big search engines at the time -- Yahoo, Alta Vista, and Excite -- where they tried to explain why Page Rank was better and offered it for one million dollars. They were turned down every time.

They were told it was not a unicorn in the making. Don't be dismissive until you can see the future.

Yeah, I guess I was a bit too negative, sorry.

Still, Pinboard is pretty much the only one of them that could significantly improve my life in 2016, hence it gets my pedestrian vote.

But to be a unicorn you have to be in a billion dollar market. How many of the start-ups listed can say that?

It doesn't work that way. Brodlist is not in its final market, for example -- it's in its first market.

I agree, it isn't always so obvious, but you need to be able to expand into larger markets or at least have your eye on larger markets. I think that is a challenge to get across in the application.

This probably again leads back to a strong team picking a good market (or having a better/unique view on how 'their' market will grow/progress).

Since no one is around in this thread anymore but you and me, I'll talk about this. I specifically didn't want to talk about it in my application; I felt (rightly) that it smacked of being too dreamy. Just describing our existing technology meant many of the comments were already along the lines of 'fantasy' and 'too ambitious'. And that was for what we're using today, what our first customer is using. One person referred to it as making the Tesla of databases: "Everyone wants a faster, lighter, more energy efficient, and reliable car, am I right?"

So, using our imagination, what would happen if someone had the Tesla for databases? Something so much better that it would do for databases what Page Rank did to all those search engines in the 1990's -- obviate them. Could you imagine that taking off and eating a large portion of the market?

OK, now let's take a random situation: You have a business that makes widgets. You have customers, suppliers, parts, etc. Do you store all that information in a Word document as text? Of course not. You either have a spreadsheet or database, right? Text is great for a novel or a poem... but not for data. That would be crazy. But imagine trying to use search in Word to find the right part. It wouldn't be fun.

Currently, the web is still a big collection of text documents. What is not clear to us right now because we're knee-deep in it is is how deeply sub-optimal that is. The number of people going to the Google homepage is declining because people are now just going directly to the database that represents what they're looking for. Looking to buy a home? You go to Zillow or Trulia and query their database. People want data, not text. 95%, almost all, of the web wants to be data. It's instant, discrete, and truly searchable.

Now imagine if that company mentioned before gains that significant market share. It's all RESTful. The authentication/API(language) is common across all of these databases, so that they can actually appear as one giant database to each user. Do you see? You can look at individual databases or have it appear as one large database of everything. That's the fate of the next web. The next Google won't be better text search but instead something completely different: it will be data search: instant, discrete, and truly searchable. And the web will become essentially a massive database.

Google knows this and has been working hard to get there, but they're missing the technology to do it. It's my honest opinion that Brodlist has the technology they're missing. Does it have the team? I don't know. Every single big hit was made by a college student/dropout without experience: Experience reassures, it doesn't predict. We entered this contest for fun, not because we thought we had investor-appropriate answers for every question -- and certainly not to get grandiose on "what could be". My point isn't that we can do this, but that its absence in the application is not indicative that it's absent in general.

Great write-up. I think what you're saying is clear enough that it can or should have been in your application. You've done a decent job (I think) of explaining it.

I wasn't responding to your application in either of the previous points. Now that I hear what you're doing I hope you never to offense to my previous comments.

Now, my 2cents about your database.

In some ways, Google IS the database you are referring to, just that it is a secondary repository of that information (don't ignore Google's Cached results, etc).

Google can do an amazing amount of slicing and dicing on metadata too.

I STILL think you have something. It doesn't have to be The Database for all the Internet, but it may be.

You sound like a very smart guy, so I'm assuming you've done the homework and know what niche you can serve first which can help you grow.

On that note :) I too didn't get too deep in the larger opportunity for my product, but in the next few weeks (probably early next month) I'll start taking data from a group of open data sensors. Would that be a good fit for broadlist? I'll drop you an email in a couple of weeks and see where you're at.

Siris rooms is. Airbnb dont work in Asia and Africa because of law and order concerns.

India already has multiple billion dollar unicorns in this space. OyoRooms (Lightspeed, Sequoia, Softbank) is the biggest example.

I would personally invest in Siris if I could.

I fully expect Krewe to become a unicorn. Who wouldn't want a group of great friends in their neighborhood they could see all the time and build a tight-knit community around? The most valuable thing any of us has is the close relationships with the people we know. If Krewe succeeds in helping you have more of those relationships, then that's worth more than anything you could ever buy in a store. Your best friends are worth far more to you than your iPhone.

I admire your optimism, but statements like "Who wouldn't want X?" are inherently naive. When you ask people if they'd want X, they generally answer yes. What matters is what people will actually do, and I don't think it's possible to build a product like yours without a very keen understanding of that.

I'm well aware. I don't often pitch it like that. It's only in the context of whether Krewe can be a unicorn do I bring it up. There are 60 million people in the US alone who say they're lonely. I think it's safe to say that those people could use a few more friends they have access to. But I haven't found it to be a hard convince any one else how much better their life would be if they had many more close connections. The problem is just getting enough people to listen.

I feel like facebook could create such a thing without effort. They should already know whee you are when you're at home, so they could make groups that cluster people by location.

Cue mainstream media going wild on "Facebook wants to dictate our friends! OMG SO UNCOOL!!". It would need some careful branding, easier done by another company.

I beg to differ. Infection Resistant materials could be used on any number of surfaces. It's has a real chance at being a Unicorn ;)

... But I'm biased...

How is it different than the infection resistant surfaces we already have? Say microban which is found on most shopping carts as an example.

From a technology standpoint: they are a chemical additive, we are a nanotextured surface. Microban (Triclosan) can only prevent the bacteria from growing, we prevent the bacteria from adhering.

From a business standpoint: they don't own the product supply chain, they simply provide one component to existing chains. Nice for getting to revenue but not for big growth. We make (or intend too) the entire product, an application that is anti-microbial and can be placed on any existing surface, and for polymer based products we'll nanotexture those ourselves.

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