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Comment by gamache | Hacker News Reader

Aside from the Donations section (YC's nonprofits), having much of the YC portfolio collected like this really deflates a lot of the cachet about YC, its companies, and its place at the Silicon Valley cool-kids table.

I look at this list and I see problems that never needed solving, middlemen -- sorry, curators -- reselling cheap Chinese crap, and a cult of jamming Bluetooth and USB into just about anything that holds still long enough because IoT.

There is no magic, "man I wish I'd thought of that" moment here, just a few "that makes sense" products in a sea of Valley bullshit.

Perhaps YC was always like this, but they hadn't presented that information in such an easy-to-consume list before.

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You are looking at a holiday shopping list which is the epitome of consumerism. You shouldn't find things that are elevating the human spirit you are looking for stuff that you would find in skymall or the home shopping network.

There are plenty of yc companies tackling interesting problems - you just wouldn't find them on a holiday list. For example:

Triplebyte - trying to take a data driven approach to make recruiting for more scientific

Gitlab - building cool open source software to host your code

Higherme - building customized education software to help kids learn math and science

Priceconomics - they have some of the most interesting content coming out of tech (opposite of huffpo/buzzfeed/etc)

Zapier - ifttt for the enterprise / lots of cool tools for companies

Mixpanel - power modern analytics for companies

I think it's unfair to judge all of yc based on a holiday shopping list which by its definition should cater to our consumerist desires. The most interesting companies shouldn't be on this list since most wouldn't have a product that is bought by consumers.

I think we agree that gitlab is awesome and tossing money at something that can lead to exponential growth in productivity and therefore exponential financial return is a wise strategy. As long as the market is not saturated and there's a path to growth, etc. But at least they're on the right track.

However every dollar spent on "candle of the month club" and every hour spent working on it is a dollar and an hour that can't be applied to exponential returns from actual tech companies.

Perhaps there's something sneaky or non-intuitive about "candle of the month club" such that they're operating a redundant array of inexpensive candles, or they have a containerization or virtualization strategy for candle wick storage, or their database is prototyping quantum secured financial data, and the candles are just placeholders to test real technologies and workflows. Probably not, but I'd like to hope so.

This was pretty shocking.. I didn't know YC had gotten so far into "As Seen on TV" or "As sold on the radio" type products. If tech valuations are going to some of these companies I'd be pretty concerned that they might just be trying to rub-off bubble pricing on top of as many product categories as they can with any tenuous tech link they can manage ("it is sold on the internet!").

YC has funded 1500 startups. You're generalizing from a narrow selection, which is clearly bogus. (Did you expect quantum computing on a Christmas list? Well I guess this is HN.)

Also bogus is drawing conclusions about companies' long-term strategy ("problems that never needed solving") from a holiday gift guide.

Just because some of us aren't big on consumer goods is no reason to throw out basic logic!

I mean perhaps.

But I think those of us that lived through tech in the late 90's have a right to be a little suspicious, for example, of the long term business strategy of a company whose sole business model appears to be sending someone three glasses of wine a month surrounded by overbearing packaging.

I'm sure someone will come along and inform me that it's all a ruse to generate the worlds best wine AI and disrupt our palates with algorithms or something but I remain fairly certain said business is about as technologically advanced as Pets.com, with a similar prognosis.

I am commenting on the narrow selection that YC itself assembled.

I realize there are many YC companies missing from this list, and from the consumer goods and services industry in general. But if this [ahem] curated list leads to the kind of generalizations I made, the list itself may share some blame for that.

If appeals to "basic logic" and wait-for-the-pivot are YC's best shot at getting me excited about the 2016 YC Holiday Season as presented by YC, then by all means carry on.

> I am commenting on the narrow selection that YC itself assembled.

That's patently untrue. You commented on YC.

At least the way the comment read to me, gamache's meaning was closer to "this is bad marketing for YC / this dilutes the brand" than "YC doesn't fund anyone solving real problems".

Your interpretation is more charitable than mine. Well done!

Well, I'm sure distance makes it 1000x easier! Your job is one not many could do.

"Yoshi brings the gas station to your gift recipient, refueling their car regularly wherever it's parked. Any commuters on your list will thank you for removing the hassle of the gas station from their lives forever."

I get it, filling up your car is a chore, if your time is super valuable... whatever. It's hard to fill the YC portfolio every year with only companies working on "big problems", I'm sure. But it really does feel like "Valley bullshit". I hope it was pitched as "disrupting the archaic gasoline distribution system - we're going to do to fossil fuels what Amazon did for books & movies".

(I will have a good laugh if this dismissive comment is pulled up years from now as an example of "another negative Hacker News post about a now-hugely successful company")

Ironically the most obvious pivot for the company is anti-EV range anxiety-as-a-service where they'll do something like triple A specifically for EVs by rolling up in a truck with a 500 HP giant diesel generator and fast charge your EV anywhere in a service area, eliminating range anxiety.

Honestly you could probably run something like that without any capital expense at all by just collecting monthly premiums and advertising "$1000 if we can't charge your EV in an hour" and then never paying out due to fine print or paying out $1000 in service gift certificates. If you sell enough plans then you could consider maybe building the truck for real.

I wonder what a 500 HP generator at full battery charging blast sounds like in a residential neighborhood at 2am. Probably similar to a freight train. That alone might be entertaining.

What could be greener than having your EV filled by a diesel generator?

Well, that's exactly what I thought when I read about that service. Since I drive a Leaf, a gas fill-up would be useless to me.

Many EV owners would object to having their car being charged by a dirty diesel generator. Plus, if we are hauling a giant generator, what about a giant battery pack? Someone will have to do the math on that.

As well as a "rescue" vehicle, it could be very useful as a temporary "mobile quick charger" when traveling to underserved spots (say, you want to cross Nevada on EV). Schedule a time and place, meet your "tanker", refuel and keep going.

AAA has service trucks with generators for EVs on them. An AAA membership is something like $100/year.

Too late Silicon Valley! Go growth hack something else!

https://electrek.co/2016/09/06/aaa-ev-emergency-charging-tru...

> I wonder what a 500 HP generator at full battery charging blast sounds like in a residential neighborhood at 2am.

I think you had a good idea with the on-demand EV charging, but I would imagine they'd have a truck with a high-capacity battery (like Tesla's Powerwall) which could be charged via solar panels.

> could be charged via solar panels.

...but would actually be charged via grid power or internal combustion engine generator 99% of the time.

> Honestly you could probably run something like that without any capital expense at all by just collecting monthly premiums and advertising "$1000 if we can't charge your EV in an hour" and then never paying out due to fine print or paying out $1000 in service gift certificates.

That's one of the most succinct examples of a certain patently unethical SV style way of thinking about business I've ever seen. Perhaps Parker Conrad's got the bandwidth to be a cofounder.

I mean, I know it was posted tongue in cheek, but taking money from people and then leaving them stranded is, you know, wrong.

Not to mention the irony in using a diesel generator to re-charge electric vehicles meant to save the environment.

That was actually one of the few services which looked interesting to me. $20 to save at least 40 minutes a month and they also regularly check your tires. Has anyone here used it?

To be fair, the list is only about "gift ideas". I'm sure that doesn't represent the whole YC portfolio. That said, it's a bit weird when a list from a top-tier Silicon Valley "seed accelerator" (as per Wikipedia) is indistinguishable from random stuff you'd find on Groupon.

Perhaps I(we?) should adjust our expectations? From the point of view of "funding smart people" and letting they pivot until they find a market, I see nothing wrong with any of the above. If they are indeed selling "chinese crap" and being middle man adding no value, the market will say so.

The non-gimmicky hardware is usually outside of the holiday-gift price point. Like say YC's http://www.doublerobotics.com/ , I actually eyed it for a holiday gift, but 3000$ is a bit too much.

I spent a large chunk of today looking for gifts and trust me almost everything under 1xxx$ is like what you've described. And quite honestly, I'd guess many of the companies on that list might actually my struggling to be at the "Silicon Valley cool-kids table" because of what they're doing :P

I get that this isn't a comprehensive list of everything YC invested in but seeing all those places listed together shocked me by how much, I don't know how to say with tact but shit YC has invested in. I'm clearly not the target audience so feel free to brush this off as uninformed but a lot of those places aren't very innovative and are just tacky sounding.

There was one listed on there that I'm familiar with, boosted boards. After seeing the Casey Neistat videos of him flying around nyc on one it looked fun but the subreddit for electric skateboards showed it comes with a lot of problems for a $1500 toy. I'm sure soon it will be a great reliable product at a lower entry point though.

And for the record, Boosted was one of my "that makes sense" products.

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