Startups that have just raised their first big institutional round | Hacker News Reader

Startups that have just raised their first big institutional round

yodas.com

57 pointsNirDremer37 comments

I'm happy to introduce you all to Yodas Hyper - a list of silicon valley startups that are about to grow fast.

Working with hundreds of fellow developers we discovered a common trend: There are many talented individuals with deep desire to make a significant impact but struggle with how to put their desires into action. A common theme is the openness to take a small risk for an exciting mission and take a meaningful role in the creation of something new.

Hyper is a list that get updated on a weekly basis with companies that match the following criteria:

- Raised Series A funding - 25 employees or less - Based in San Francisco Bay Area

To dive deeper to the thinking process behind the criteria, check this post - https://labs.yodas.com/the-story-behind-yodas-hyper-47d3151d...

Happy to answer any questions anyone has. Also, I would love to hear what kinds of companies lists you think would be interesting .. ?

Nir

Interesting! How does it work behind the scenes? How do you discover new companies?

That's a great question.

The relatively easy part is to find who recently raised money and we do it mostly through monitoring the press and limiting what we present only to companies that fit the criteria.

Behind the scenes we do much more complex stuff in order to evaluate the companies and a hint for that can be seen in the badges below the company description. In essence, we built search engine that profiles companies in depth by looking at the companies website, github activity any anywhere we could find information about the founders, investors, team, product and even the code itself.

This is being developed mostly for our discovery engine - Yodas (www.yodas.com) and we benefit from it for Hyper.

Do you have a way to backtest the algorithm? Would be interesting to be able to verify accuracy without needing to wait 1-2 years (or whatever the time period meant by "about to go into hyper growth").

The reason I ask is I tend to be pretty cautious about these types of predictors of "business success" given that VCs nor research teams ("Good to Great" by Jim Collins) don't exactly have a strong track record.

An interesting test would be to make it time bound and run it on something like Clinkle circa late 2013.

I don't like the San Francisco-only bend. Your title is "Smart Career Bot for Developers," it doesn't mention anything about how location-specific it is (same with the name of this HN thread). Not everyone can relocate and there are plenty of hyper-growth startups worth promotion that are not in SV (Boston, New York, Austin, LA come to mind).

you're totally right and we're making steps in that direction..We definitely want to support more tech hubs.

Long Beach and Costa Mesa are in Southern California.

Any way to look at other areas? The Bay Area is a decent place to find startups, but it's not a strong quality indicator. Or maybe it is! I'd still like to see the data on it, and I'd still like to see you consider anywhere else on earth in addition to the Bay Area regardless of the data.

Maybe a business query service would be a better fit, on further thought.

I agree. The level of activity here is the highest so we decided to start here and expand. Expect to see additional locations soon ....

Would love to see companies that are open to hiring remotely specifically.

Two questions:

(1) "Solid Academic Background" is defined... how, precisely?

(2) And the predictive power of "solid academic background" with respect to "about to grow fast" is based on... what, precisely? (Other than something vague like: "everyone knows that solid academic credentials correlates with success").

These are great questions:

1. Solid academic background is done by analyzing the team track record and experience together with the open source activity

2. We do not pretend to predict success.. Any company that appears on the list comply to three simple roles: raised large series A, below 25 employees and in SF bay area. The tags are there as an additional analysis that each user can decide how to interpret.

Makes sense now ?

To learn more on the thinking process behind the scenes check this post - https://labs.yodas.com/the-story-behind-yodas-hyper-47d3151d...

Makes sense now?

Actually, no. In fact you didn't answer my questions at all.

> Massive, multiplayer video game technology meets the indoor cycling community.

So that's how episode 2 of Black Mirror started.

How does Verse differ from Venmo? I'm sure there's something substantial (due to the ~10MM in funding) but I couldn't find it.

Edit: just found it - it's pretty much the same thing but targeting the European market because Venmo hasn't expanded there.

they pay more for native advertising

I wonder if it's really so simple.. I'm asking Verse founders to join and comment..

  I'm sure there's something substantial (due to the ~10MM in funding)

Heh.. Right.

While this list made me fear for the future of humanity, it also made me click over to the Crunchbase list, which is more useful and less soul-crushing.

https://www.crunchbase.com/app/search/funding_rounds

Hey Biztos, why do you think it's better? I would love to know so we would do better in the future...

Check the logic behind Hyper as it might explain the list better - https://labs.yodas.com/the-story-behind-yodas-hyper-47d3151d...

Hey Nir, late reply but: based on the names and (self?) descriptions of the startups I found it a bit of a downer to think of these being the hot new pre-unicorn wondercompanies. And the Crunchbase list, while a bit annoying with its upgrade hard-sell, has a lot more information that would be useful in figuring out what a company's about, where its money comes from, and how useful it might be for a serious hacker to ask them about jobs.

As to the Hyper-Yoda idea itself: I'm sure your selection is quite useful to some people -- junior developers? programmers having trouble finding jobs? the recently laid-off?

My only criticism of your site per se is that you use a lot of hand-wavy buzzwords while not showing a lot of useful data.

"Crazy" growth? "Solid" engineering/academic background?

Good luck with the list, in the best case it could be an important connector between these young companies and the programmers they hire.

Wow...$1499.00 for a „tea infuser with advanced algorithms“ (Teforia). I love my Darjeeling tea very much...but...not sure if that much...

It's the solid academic background you're paying for.

Love it :)

Don't forget the courage.

Kind of shocking that the tea startup is the first result... after waiting for like 10 seconds for 20 entries to load.

Hmm, let me check this tea thing out... 10 clicks later... $1499! Yikes! Uh, it doesn't even come with an emoji touchbar, 4 usb-c ports, or anything.

How does that even work? How is there a market for that? How did they convince investors there is a market for that? How much CAN they grow?

It's 20x as expensive as the highest cost item any tea stack should have, and that'd be the Cuisinart CPK-17 Perfect Temp Kettle at $67.71 on Amazon right now. And that is one fancy kettle.

Might make more sense for a boutique tea shop than personal use. see: espresso machines, starbuck's drip coffee maker.

Edit: it makes a single cup at a time. I was incorrect.

No matter if the predictions are correct or not. This is an clever way to look for startups to join as an early employee (if you want to do that is a different discussion).

@creator: i would also include the next round afterwards for more risk aware people. Alternatively you could look into size of funding vs team size.

@andreasklinger - that's a great point of view. We're definitely thinking about creating a similar list for post later funding rounds..

Thank you for the kind words!

This reminds me of The Breakout List https://breakoutlist.com/q2-2015, which has unfortunately not been updated since 2015. The filters were broader than the ones you picked: geography was US (though predominantly SF and the bay area), and they focused on companies' revenue run rate, which I would favor versus receiving money from investors.

Half of thay sounds too niche to grow, the other half too vague to ensure success.

Facebook was too niche to grow too :)

I try to keep this in my mind when evaluating startups (especially as my potential employer): http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

Do you have an RSS feed? On mobile - couldn't check

No, Due to the relativel low volume of updates we have a weekly digest. Good enough?

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