How We Got Rejected from YC and Moved into the SpeakerCave

At first I was thinking that youtube's recent sub title mod must of been a bit of a hit to their idea, but then I saw the functionality of quoting and sharing hyper linked quotes.

That's quite a cool feature and could be handy for stopping 'mis quoting' / 'quoting out of context' being used in many media's.

Just you wait for the release of SpeakerText 2.0!

I helped recruit for a 20-person startup at my alma mater in the fall, and found:

- if your brand isn't immediately recognizable as a tech startup, signs like "Seeking CS / Math majors" are tacky but help immensely with capturing the interest of students who are browsing and want to know they won't be sucked into talking to a company totally outside their interests

- we spent much more time pitching our startup and answering questions about "what we do" than I imagine the average recruiter at a larger company has to do

- because the conversation almost always starts with them asking about us, if you're interested, you have to remember to turn the conversation on them to find out more, instead of just being left with a resume

- (more general) knowing which classes are good / hard / produce interesting projects helps a lot in evaluating what a particular candidate has done, and whether it matches with your company's needs.

Even though I was also rejected by YC without an interview - Not "ready" or "prepared", and no co-founder, were the likely reasons, I can accept being rejected.

I still believe that PG's opinion counts for a lot. I doubt many seed programs have partners that loose sleep over missed opportunities.

We're doing machine-augmented crowdsourcing, not straight voice recognition. It's different, and allows us to provide consistent high quality at low cost.

Essentially, we've built a crowdsourcing QA system a la Crowdflower, expect better and more suited to the specific task of video-to-text, and augmented it with speech recognition.

It's pretty fucking cool, if you ask me, but also very different from how people have traditionally approached this problem.

Also, the current site and product will be completely replaced in 8 days with something MUCH much better. So keep you eyes peeled.

-Matt

email us and let's talk: info at Speakertext.com

That'd be very useful for me too...

We move in 8 Days.

Hi, thanks so much! There are so many areas we want to expand into, for now our goal is to provide video publishers with the ability to SEO their videos via transcripts and quotelinks. All that publishers have to do is put one line of javascript and one line of server side code on their webpages and now they can get their videos put on google's radar. Video search would also be interesting long term.

I'm guessing you'll have to read the follow-up post.

I assumed it was their apartment/home base... sort of like the Bat Cave.

SpeakerCave is the rawest form of a startup pad. Four dudes, no ac, shirtless half the time, coding like fiends and having a blast!

We've got a major product overhaul coming soon that will be super-friendly for you. I'll ping you via email.