Companies from the YC Winter 2018 Batch | Hacker News Reader

Companies from the YC Winter 2018 Batch

blog.ycombinator.com

108 pointsdsr1250 comments

YC releases a Requests for Startups list that's part VC zeitgeist, part buzzword bingo, but mostly an interesting summary where they think interesting things are: https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs

Was curious how these companies stack up against that list:

  1. *Energy: none*
  
  2. AI:
  - Cognition IP
  
  3. *Robotics: none*
  
  4. Biotech:
  - Nutrigene ? (stretch)
  
  5. Healthcare:
  - Medumo
  - Nutrigene ? ("these statements have not been approved by the fda")
  
  6. *Pharmaceuticals: none*
  
  7. Education:
  - Juni Learning
  
  8. Human Augmentation
  - Nutrigene
  
  9. *VR and AR: none*
  
  10. Transportation and Housing
  - Statecraft
  
  11. *One Million Jobs: none*
  
  12. Programming Tools:
  - Buglife
  - Storyline
  
  13. *Hollywood 2.0: none*
  
  14. Diversity:
  - tEQuitable ?
  
  15: Enterprise Software
  - Slite?
  - Storyline?
  - Substack
  - tEQuitable?
  
  16. *Financial Services: none*
  
  17. *Computer Security: none*
  
  18. *Global Health: none*
  
  19. Underserved Communities
  - Statecraft
  
  20. *Food and Farming: none*
  
  21. *Mass Media: none*
  
  22. *Improving Democracy: none*
  
  23: Future of Work
  - Slite?
  - tEQuitable?
  - The Lobby (and probably not in the good way)
  
  25: *Water: none*
  
  26: Other:
  - Sheerly Genius ?

I don't really know anything about these companies beyond the 1-paragraph summaries from the article, and yes, you may arrange your Startup Superheroes(TM) trading cards into slightly different piles, but the point of this is that (of the announced companies), it's curious to see where the gaps in the debutants are.

Keep in mind that that this isn't a unbiased random sample. It's selected for companies that launched publicly within 6 weeks of the start of the batch, which usually means they have a working MVP. Companies with long R&D cycles (like most energy, robotics, biotech and pharma companies) are underrepresented in this sample.

Wanting companies that work on these problems is great. But finding ones with unique and interesting value propositions is probably incredibly hard. There is a reason that the Hollywood model for instance, has managed to last 100 years. Yeah there's an absolute shit ton of protectionism going on but also no one has come up with anything better yet, and not for lack of trying. The same is true of a lot of these categories. The issues they have are hard, and expensive. I'd be interested to see the list of companies YC rejects.

> But finding ones with unique and interesting value propositions is probably incredibly hard.

Exactly why the gaps are interesting.

Also: they need to fit the VC timeline and specific VCs' returns model (there are other business models outside of taking SV VC money)

To add one, we launched on HN couple days ago (Supermedium, a full VR browser for Web-based VR content) and missed the blog post. We'd fall into VR :)

That post is from Sept 2016. I would love to see an updated list of requests.

I wonder if Hollywood 2.0 would still be on there.

"Sheerly Genius" looks like a really interesting product for a trillion market, and the presentation video is really well done and funny.

> The Lobby lets candidates buy affordable 1-on-1 calls with company insiders to help them land top finance jobs without needing an inside connection.

This one made me smile. It’s only a matter of time until the employees of these companies directly monetize their connections. It happens indirectly already through hiring bonuses and quid pro quos though the latter is on a much longer timescale.

There’s also the possibility of only losers trying to monetize their connections, thus watering down the overall value.

I’m not sure if the idea will generally pan out as employment agreements may bar this type of practice but it’s either genius or terrible. Best of luck!

Referral bonuses are an existing medium for monetizing connections for a lot of orgs.

Agreed! Companies basically give you incentives to train, coach, and jam your friends down their throat, which in our view is a huge conflict of interest vs. just letting you get paid small amounts just to speak with people who are fascinated by what you do every day, but don't have access to you.

> what you do every day

For the median entry-level hire at a large investment bank, this rounds to... being a high-paid gopher?

I went to an elite school, I talked to my Wall Street contacts (both newer people and older) as I went through school, and I ran the other direction. The new folks were drinking the kool-aid, and the older folks had a nice income but were mostly heavily medicated and/or hated life.

Note that there are some niches in finance that are super cool to work in, but my thought is that you have to be eyeballs deep in the field already before you are likely even to have a clue that these places exist, much less be a strong candidate for a job at one of these places. For reference, it took me quite a few years after graduating to really grok what these places were about and meet some people who worked there (they were decidedly uncool boutique firms... and also stupidly profitable).

Maybe my info is dated. Does anyone have any convincing counter examples to my experience (also shared by quite a few other people I know).

hey koolba! glad it made you smile :). Definitely issues to consider as we scale up, right now it seems to be adding a lot of value to people who are a) trying to figure out if this career path is for them but have no way of understanding what life is actually like until they speak to someone or b) getting the inside tips & tricks that can help you get hired but that you won't access without a close friend or elite school connection.

So basically people who don't know how to search or use forums?

It would be cool after some time to see some abundance of data showing the service works. As someone who went to an arguably elite (or near elite) school, took advantage of numerous opportunities to chat with insiders, and still failed hard at breaking into investment banking, I am skeptical but convinceable.

I bet you could charge (and have people actually pay) 10x or even 100x if you offered a money back guarantee. I would have paid $N,000 (and maybe $N0,000) without even thinking about it if I only had to pay if I got the job.

There's a very long trail of companies that tried to pay people to refer their connections for jobs. They all fail. People don't seem interested in monetizing their connections.

The funny thing is that people keep building companies to monetize their connections because they see no one else doing it, unaware it's a graveyard.

> People don't seem interested in monetizing their connections.

I think people would be happy to monetize their connections if it wouldn't piss off the valuable contacts who are worth monetizing. Unfortunately, that isn't the case.

> Slite is building the first notes app designed for teams.

I don't mind marketing/bragging but that sounds silly. The first, really?

I wonder how Slite is different than Quip. Hopefully it's at least cheaper.

Or Input (https://input.com) - which looks very similar

Better branding?

I mean Slack wasn't exactly novel when it shipped...

Hey @Keats! Probably too marketing & our tagline is ever evolving so thanks for the feedback ;) We do think there are no good note apps that have really been thought for teams & Slite is really good for that. Evernote never did a great job on that in my opinion.

> Slite is building the first notes app designed for teams. It’s like Evernote + Slack

Actually, I believe Evernote Business deserves that title: https://evernote.com/business

there's also Quip

And there is also Nuclino: https://www.nuclino.com

My team uses Evernote Premium, which shares collaboration features with Business, I believe, and it feels like any sort of collaboration is really an afterthought, for example:

* the complete note gets locked when someone simply places a cursor anywhere in the note, just like in the days of carbon/master copies and check-in/check-outs.

* work chat is meaningless, I have hardly seen anyone use it beyond the automatically-generated messaged when you share a note

* notes shared with you are ONLY accessible from the work chat, there is no menu item to access a list of notes that have been shared with me.

I guess spIrr said it all. Evernote's collaborative features are an afterthought to say the least.

The fact of thinking the tool for teams changes entirely the design : in Slite it made us focus on a flawless collaboration with collaborative editing, mentions, comments, notifications system, activity & so on from day 1.

Question for the YC folks: these companies seem reasonably far along. One of them has 300 users already. So would a Dropbox be accepted into YC today? (IIRC dropbox had a barely working prototype and no customers)

Yes, these companies seem far along. But do keep in mind that this is somewhat of a biased sample -- the dozen or so companies that "launch" on HN months before demo day are likely to be the companies that are the most far along.

There are ~100 other companies in the current batch [1] that haven't launched. I imagine many of those companies are not nearly as far along as the ones mentioned in this article, and some are still pivoting / navigating the idea maze.

That said, it does seem like in the most recent batches, YC companies get to demo day with significantly more traction than the early YC companies. I wonder to what extent that's because YC's reputation has gotten better over time (thus self selecting for startups with traction) or because it's gotten easier/cheaper/faster for startups to build a product and gain traction.

[1] I don't know the exact number of companies in the current batch. Last batch had 124 companies so using that as a proxy http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-summer-2017-stats/

Yes, I know one which got into pre-selection and it only has a prototype.

Yes. Most companies in the W18 batch were not launched when they applied to YC. They just move quickly.

I'd love to hear some discussion on the following:

I really like developer focused companies like Buglife. However, what path could Buglife take to reach a $1B dollar company?

The post notes that they are currently in 300 apps. I'd assume the majority of these 300 are on a free plan. Let's assume that they hit a growth spurt and end up in 10,000 apps. Let's also assume that every one of those customers is paying for their Premium plan. That works out to a little over $2 million a month in revenue.

Not only that, but there are already very established companies in this space (Fabric/Crashlytics, Firebase, Sentry, etc.). It's also fairly trivial to switch to another provider.

How do companies like this propose they hit that $1B mark?

1) Does YCombinator only invest in companies with a plan to become $1B?

2) What you're doing right now isn't necessarily the thing you end up doing in the long term. Sometimes it makes sense to create a simple product with a smallish market that people use now, and adapt over time to address or create a larger market. This other discussion today is relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16334035

I think it's a pretty well known fact that YC tends to invest in companies that have the opportunity to be billion dollar ventures.

> What you're doing right now isn't necessarily the thing you end up doing in the long term.

What sort of opportunities do you think a company like Buglife could focus on?

> I think it's a pretty well known fact that YC tends to invest in companies that have the opportunity to be billion dollar ventures.

"Tends to" isn't the same as "always". I expect they'd rather invest in unicorns, but maybe they're willing to invest in a few more modest endeavors for various reasons.

> What sort of opportunities do you think a company like Buglife could focus on?

Beats me. I wouldn't have guessed that Amazon was going to become a cloud provider back when they were just an e-commerce site. I think Paul Graham has said that sometimes YCombinator will accept founders who have an uninteresting idea if they seem like the sort of people who are capable of generating new ideas and changing course as the situations demand.

Flamethrowers.

Crashlytics got acquired for > $100M. It wouldn't be unthinkable for Buglife to reach a similar valuation if they execute well.

I love Crashlytics, it was a great success and continues to be an awesome service. However, this comment highlights my question. Crashlytics was an early "first mover" in this area, has been a goto for developers for years now, and could likely be considered as a "best case" scenario for this type of software. Yet, it was acquired for far less than a billion dollars.

My original comment was in regards to the well known fact that YC tends to invest in companies that have the opportunity to be billion dollar companies. In fact, it's a known question during interviews[1].

So, my question is what do these founders say when asked this question? What possible paths are there to a billion dollars for this type of company?

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/coderpad

Interesting to see how a new YC kind of startup is the company serving the rest of the YC startups.

Buglife, tEQuitable, Slite and Cognition IP all fit that bill.

It takes making shovels to sell to the gold rush seekers to a whole new level.

Not really new. I think of Stripe and Docker as examples.

Heroku and Parse were big examples of this before they got acquired.

Storyline looks cool. Currently watching the tutorial.

Reminds me of the recent beta of Twilio Studio. Both should help when you want to quickly develop some tools.

Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:cJrWf1e...

How does Cognition get investment as a law firm? My understanding was that firms can't receive investment from or share profits with non-lawyers.

Or are they doing what Atrium is doing and really running two entities, a tech company and a law firm?

Bryant here from Cognition. We're running two entities, a tech company and law firm, and the tech company received investment from YC.

I want Statecraft to win. IMO theirs are the most important problems of this list.

Happy to see Ukrainian companies there :)

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