Y Combinator Demo Day Roundup | Hacker News Reader

Y Combinator Demo Day Roundup

techcrunch.com

66 pointsnextmoveone51 comments

I was curious where they were hosted so I thought I'd share. The script is based on an old post by cperciva http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65022.

  Slicehost LLC                   6
  	tipjoy.com
  	baseshield.com
  	mightyquiz.com
  	insoshi.com
  	stanfordturf.com
  	280slides.com
  Amazon.com, Inc.                4
  	8aweek.com
  	webmynd.com
  	deluux.com
  	wundrbar.com
  SoftLayer Technologies Inc.     3
  	snaptalent.com
  	chatterous.com
  	omnisio.com
  Peer 1 Network Inc.             2
  	rescuetime.com
  	addher.com
  HERAKLES LLC                    1
  	mixwit.com
  Hollywood Interactive, Inc.     1
  	yumdots.com

My votes go to:

-RescueTime (So freaking valuable!)

-Kirkland North (definitely going to grow their userbase quickly! (once they launch))

-Chatterous (Because I had a very similar idea)

-------------------------------------------------

My notes are to:

-insoshi (you have an indirect competitor, lovdbyless, it's a rails based opensource social network maker thing)

-deluux (my first interpretation of what you guys do was a single login for every site (like openID or w/e) but then my second interpretation was that I can show my facebook page or elements from it, on my own site? Like a widget(s)? That would be awesome!)

-joberator(i think we simply need more developers, not referrals, because, at least in S. Florida, finding a developer through craigslist, career builder or monster is NOT easy, and my CS major friends dont have any referrals, period and they are in their last year of college, so I have to wait for them to graduate which is not sufficient)

-wundrbar(dont know if this is possible, but if you could simply be an option in the dropdown that accompanies that search box in top right of FireFox and IE7, that would ROCK MY FREAKING WORLD!)

They do have a search box plugin, along with a full fledged toolbar version (which has more functionality). http://www.wundrbar.com/static/extras

-insoshi (you have an indirect competitor, lovdbyless, it's a rails based opensource social network maker thing)

Interesting. Our app is also in Rails, so it could actually help us a lot to have another project with complementary code. Any idea what their license is? There's almost nothing about them yet on Google. (I found the site of the guys who make it, but they don't list lovdbyless yet.)

Hey no problem, I can give you their contact info...I am putting my contact info back in my profile now.

It was supposed to be released under MIT license.. from what they were saying.

LovdByLess is launched! Check out http://lovdbyless.com for more info.

+1 for Rails

If I were a betting man, SnapTalent would be the first I'd put coin on. I didn't actually think much of it (and, in fact, I think when I first talked to them early in Winter08 they didn't even have any useful code written yet...but maybe I'm misremembering), until they'd actually launched. It really looks great, though--a perfect way to handle the tech jobs market, which is a HUGE industry in and of itself. Monster and Dice have been fighting it out for years, and spending millions just marketing themselves. SnapTalent allows the world of bloggers and tech sites to market for them. Recipe for win if ever I saw one.

Hey Joe, Thanks for the comments. We're starting out in tech but will be moving to other verticals eventually. The other key advantage we have is that as the web's traffic is more international and as we add advertisers from different countries we can serve Ip targeted ads on the same publishers and be extremely local at the same time.

We have a global and pretty ambitious vision - its how hotjobs started, we're aiming to be even bigger in this phase of the web.

I was putting myself in the mindset of someone looking for a job, and I was extremely disappointed after viewing both awesome snaptalent ads that I could not click "Browse more". I wanted to see all your listings.

I've been thinking the same thing for awhile. Initially I had just chalked it up to a browser issue since I'm running webkit nightlies. This seems like a pretty easy thing to remedy though.

My favorite is TipJoy. The problem was in the air, PG himself teased everybody with it, but yet nobody took the trouble of actually tackling it. Neat approach, nice execution. Bravo!

Another big one, I think, is SnapTalent. The existing system of finding people to work is pretty much an "offline approach" ported over the net. SnapTalent actually uses the technology to improve the effectiveness of the process. I only hope that their users (companies) will be smart enough to recognize the potential. If I were monster.com (are they still around?) I'd grabbed these guys immediately.

My favorite is TipJoy

I like the basic principle of aggregating micropayments, but I think TipJoy going to be very limited until people can actually get money out (which of course means that TipJoy has to deal with the regulatory issues). So far they've accumulated $1531.54 in tips (assuming their website is up to date), which means that their 3% cut adds up to a grand total of $45.95... which isn't going to make anyone rich in a hurry.

You can't tell much from the numbers of a startup this young. They've generated more revenue than Google had at the same age.

Sure -- my point was just that taking a 3% cut of $0.10 payments means that TipJoy needs to get very very big before it will be making much money.

Can TipJoy get big enough fast enough?

Tipping is just the initial form of micropayment they've implemented. Eventually they plan to support all forms. Could being able to charge people small amounts for digital content be big? Yes.

Tipping is just the initial form of micropayment they've implemented.

Well, that changes things. :-)

I know you might expect this from a cofounder, but I think Tipjoy is going to be huge.

PG is right - we'll be doing much more.

You can give far more than $0.10. That is just the default. It is really simple to give up to $10, and we might raise or remove that limit.

Also, we earn interest on money in our system. That makes the earnings closer to 6%. But we don't take a cut per tip, only on cash-out. This means that if A tips B who then tips C, each of those tips is overhead free. If C cashes out, we take a cut. The potential for a zero overhead transaction system is huge.

"... They've generated more revenue than Google had at the same age ..."

But that's not a really good comparison especially if Tipjoy is dealing directly in money while google was search. Having said that, maybe Tipjoy is onto something because the last micro-payment startup to do something interesting was paypal which started 10 years ago.

That's a faulty comparison, the playing field was TOTALLY different when Google started.

When google started, no one thought you could make money from search. Pretty much everyone agrees you can make a great deal of money from micropayments if you can make them work.

I'm not saying micro payments wont work, I'm simply saying when Google started there were not NEARLY as many internet users as today, so it's definitely A LOT easier to grow a user base/become profitable online now then it was before.

Thanks!

280Slides caught my attention - sounds like Zenter - The Sequel?

In fact, RescueTime & 8AWeek also sound awfully similar, don't they? This raises an interesting question. As number of YC companies increases, the chances of "collision" increases too. How is that handled?

RescueTime & 8AWeek are actually pretty different. I use both. Try them out.

Their first release definitely sounds like Zenter, so I'm very interested in hearing how they might differentiate themselves.

But the main focus of the companyis this Javascript library for writing desktop apps, so that seems very much not-Zenter.

280 North comes at the problem from a different direction. They're building infrastructure for making a new class of web-based apps that really feel like desktop ones. They just happened to pick Powerpoint to build first. But of the 60k LOC they've written so far, I believe 280 Slides is only 20k.

RescueTime and 8aweek are also quite different: RT is for people and groups who want to track their productivity, and 8aweek is an alternative to blacklist-based web filtering.

Our answer to the problem of collisions is that in any large market, which we encourage startups to be in, there is going to be room for several different approaches.

I'm really interested in TipJoy, it sounds like they finally came up with a system for micro-payments that could work.

Tipjoy seems to be gaining in popularity: It's already being filtered out by some enterprise firewalls (unfairly, in my opinion) being labelled as a Pay-to-surf site!

Thanks for that heads up. It's the exact opposite: "pay for what I surf".

Does anyone know if there is some automated reason this might have happened?

Not a lot of love in the techcrunch comments, but I guess that's to be expected.

No better or worse than usual (actually maybe a little less hostile than the last three batches--I know Winter07 had more hostility in the comments, although this one may catch up by the time all is said). TC comments are always full of also-rans and never-was entrepreneurs who are spitting vitriol, and they come out in force for the YC demo day roundup.

i'm not sure that guy wasn't just flamebaiting.

The presentations were awesome. The total value of the tech in the room was huge.

is there any video of the presentations?

on paper some of these seem like hacker projects not startups so I would love to see how they see value in these startups.

nope, no video from the event. i have some pictures i'll post at a point yet to be determined.

This is natural when you abide by "release early and iterate." Most of the companies 11 weeks old. When you release, you haven't yet implemented your entire vision. That takes much more time to develop internally and become obvious to outsiders. But the founders know that the first release is just the tip of the iceberg.

There is pretty much not a single startup in this session that isn't directly attacking a large market or has plans to expand into a market orders of magnitude larger.

There isn't any video. If you're curious about one in particular, contact them. They're all stand up folks.

what percentage of breakout success storieson the Internet did NOT start as hacker projects? Facebook, google, yahoo, etc. All started that way.

As counterpoints, myspace, flickr, and digg were not hacker projects.

edit: removed google from the above list.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google

Hacker project:

"Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page, a Ph.D. student at Stanford.[1] In search for a dissertation theme, Page decided to explore the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph.[2] His supervisor Terry Winograd agreed and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind).[2] In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student and close friend, whom he had first met in the summer of 1995 in a group of potential new students which Brin had volunteered to show around the campus.[2]"

Flickr was sort of a hacker project, in that like Blogger it was a side project of a group who thought they were working on something else.

It depends on how you define a hacker project. That is a fair characterization if you say that a hacker project is something that doesn't come out of a normal business process, regardless of the corporate structure that surrounds the people hacking away on it.

"... is there any video of the presentations? ..."

Asked of previous demo days, and the standard answer has been "no" - probably due to companies not yet ready for release. I thought the purpose of demo day was to allow VC's a sneek look at the latest YC recruits not a general public launch.

Quote: MightyQuiz ...The site is very sticky: the average session lasts 8 minutes (or 19 questions). As a comparison, the founders claim that Slate has an average session length of 4:22 and Wired has 3:34.

Are 3-8 minute sessions any indication of success? My site gets over 10 minutes right now.

I get so excited to see whats coming out next from the YC womb. I'm very excited about InSochi and tipJoy especially. I can see non-profits and charities even using tipJoy . Pretty hip stuff!

Glad to hear you're excited about Insoshi---just be sure to note the spelling! (We own the domains for a bunch of misspellings, just not the one you used. :-)

Many sound like good ideas, but I'm most intrigued by Deluux.

Which company had the best demo?

Nice job guys, wish you all the best. My startup launches in 3 weeks :)

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