Startups that launched today at Y Combinator’s W18 Demo Day | Hacker News Reader

Startups that launched today at Y Combinator’s W18 Demo Day

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116 pointsmarlonbarz58 comments

Voicery and Storyline are the two that connect with my interests.

I think Voicery does itself a disservice by featuring a "pick the human voice versus pick our machine voice" demo quiz on their website. I got 100%, and it led me to emotionally response "they have failed", but in fact the voice sounded great.

A more useful demo would have been to hear a range of different voices and be able to put my own text in and hear it read back.

But it is not the point that a machine voice can be determined versus a human voice. The important question is "does the machine voice sound good enough".

Instead, their marketing approach has forced me to make a comparison in which my conclusion was that they tech "lost" in some sort of contest.

Reading your comment I just tried and also got 100%. There are more micro-pitch variations, vibrato and harmonics in the human voice; the robot voice kind of sounds the same, but on some short sounds sometimes produces a kind of monocord sound that is not only non-human, but probably impossible for a human to imitate.

It seems some people are more sensitive than others to robot-sounding or robot-looking. I have a very hard time watching modern movies because most special effects completely ruin the experience for me; but other people seem to not mind at all.

California Dreamin' sounds pretty cool, I wonder how it tastes. I like the choice to do 10mg because it's enough for a decent buzz. It would be good if they did a 5mg version too, then you could have 2 or 3 without it getting too intense. If their target market is people drinking alcohol I imagine that being able to have more than one in a sitting will be important.

What's driving impairment like, after this amount?

I'm not sure, I guess it depends on the person. For me 10mg is enough to give me a pretty good buzz and be satisfied with watching anime for the night. 20-25mg and I'm time traveling. I wouldn't drive on either amount. 5mg is probably _okay_ but still I'd rather just take a cab/lyft/uber/transit.

I think if they could do three things (other than be in my jurisdiction which is currently complicated by laws) I would be an avid customer:

1) Make it taste pretty good with food

2) Make it fizzy

3) Make it not terrible for you (vs soda, juice, alcohol) so you could have a couple at the end of the day / with dinner to de-stress.

I’ve tried all the flavors and it’s pretty good! Still tastes a little bit too much like weed for my tastes but they do a pretty good job covering up the weed flavor. I think they’re working on a 5mg version.

"Correlia Biosystems is able to analyze microsamples of blood"

This sounds familiar ...

It's a shame Theranos poisoned the well so badly. There's a lot of good work to be done in the space. But that kind of science just cannot be done by hyper-secretive overfunded outsiders. For the good of us all, try not to let Theranos drag down an entire kind of company - but in that, be critical of science, credentials, and data.

And though science is still hard, signals from the NSF, QB3, Berkeley, UCSF, MIT and Cornell all point towards a much different culture and kind of company than was to be found in Theranos.

I am out of the loop. What's with Theranos ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos#Controversy

Most recently, in particular:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos#SEC_fraud_charge

This is an excellent list. YC will do very nicely with this batch. Modern agriculture is about shift hard and a few of these companies will go far even if they look to be "failures."

  - Bear Flag Robotics

  - Macromoltek

  - Culture Robotics

  - AesculaTech

  - Reverie Labs

  - Ovipost

I can see all of these being positively impacted. I just hope they can capitalize off it in some fashion. Definitely follow these companies for a while.

Congrats to OpenSea! https://opensea.io/

They're one of the best crypto asset exchanges around.

Crypto Racing League is excited to finish integration with them soon! http://cryptoracingleague.io/

Here's demo day #2: https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/20/these-are-the-64-startups-...

Really exciting to see a bunch of startups trying to tackle hard problems like trying to find treatments/cures to cancer

Sourcify is a really interesting outlier. From their case studies they seem like a (barely) tech-enabled service firm that puts real domain-expert human consulting effort behind every customer query for sourcing manufacturers. This is something where costs scale linearly (unlike software), but when the alternative is an opaque industry where only insiders can find good information regardless of price, a “low-tech” startup can still win by being a brand known to give this access at reasonable but linearly-scaling-sustainable prices. Democratization, not virality, is the key. Silicon Valley would do well to look closer at other firms with similar business models. Software isn’t the only way to make money and satisfy a B2B need.

They're pricing significantly higher than e.g. importdojo with less supplier relationships. I don't see what they're doing that justifies something like a 3X premium over incumbents.

So many startups... am looking forward to track their progress using http://yclist.com/

It would be interesting to analyse the categories of startups that succeed and fail.

This reminded me YC World(http://world.ycombinator.com), which probably needs little update.

> "Reverie Labs uses machine learning to scan public molecule research, modify and develop its own molecules, and license the drugs they create to big pharmaceutical companies. The startup claims it can sell molecule licenses for $100 million, and has already signed a milestone deal worth up to $87 million."

I wonder if this is really molecular innovation or does it result in derivative work from a machine learning algorithm pattern matching human successes.

Safety Wing caught my eye (https://www.safetywing.com), but I've been using the same provider for years and would be hesitant to switch for only $30 extra a month, then worry I'd be getting lesser coverage. Does anyone have any experience with Safety Wing, or comments? Reading the coverage document is one of those things I think you need a medical or law degree for..

Same thing, it seems it would be simpler for me than using WorldNomads. I don't really know where I'll be next more than a 2-3 weeks ahead, and every time I finalize my next couple legs and head somewhere new, I need to apply for a new policy with WorldNomads. Also WorldNomads can be pretty expensive, sometimes it's a bit of a turn off. But I sort of trust that they'll cover me since they cater to "extreme" activities, so I still go with them.

Wondering what sort of coverage SafetyWing will do and their policy is way too long and opaque for me to make sense of. If they could have something that's like "You can go canyoneering/scuba diving/mountain biking" like WorldNomads does, and add to this "anywhere in the world with a subscription and we'll cover you for x$/month", I'd be sold. Even if it's the same price as WorldNomads in the end, just for the convenience.

Follow up: since it seems to be rather cheap and why not try it? I'm trying to sign up and the password policy is a bit scary/suggests that the passwords are not stored properly:

    Password contains invalid characters (^, {, >, ?, >, ;)

Something that should be addressed I think. Devil's in the detail and this makes me wonder how my data will be secured on your servers.

[edit] well after sign up, it seems there's no way to get coverage and maybe the product isn't yet working. I guess this is really early days. =P

Looking at the policy doc (https://www.safetywing.com/documents/safety-wing-specimen-po...), it looks like scuba diving is covered as long as you are PADI or NAUI certified and not cave diving.

I also use WorldNomads, they've had my back in the past when I've needed them and they are more affordable compared to local insurers in my country. Trust is more important to me than money when it comes to travelling to difficult places, or maybe needing health care in the U.S. If they can work to make it clearer why their offer is more affordable without losing critical coverage I'll give it a try next time I'm in Europe, maybe.

Beanstalk is an indoor farming startup that grows produce at the cost of outdoor farming.

Sure about that? With no details at all on the website, I will believe this guy first, who in late 2015 estimated USD$400,000 worth of solar energy per acre of land from outdoor growing. https://youtu.be/ISAKc9gpGjw?t=13m26s https://youtu.be/ISAKc9gpGjw?t=21m17s

Veriff really caught my attention. I've had to scan the front and then the back of my drivers license a bunch of times and send the jpeg into a company for verification. Doing it all on a phone would be great.

There are a lot of interesting ones here, but Sheerly Genius is the one where the founders will either make a billion dollars or perish in a mysterious accident.

I'm trying to figure out if I know any women that wear pantyhose. Maybe central coast California is not the target demographic.

Why?

The pantyhose mafia.

Lots to look at, but one that caught my eye was evryhealth. Health insurance, and they're talking to... employers. Employer-provided health insurance is a huge barrier to personal mobility. Might it not have been better to try to tackle the personal market, and help grow that, vs just moving $ around the employer-provided insurance market?

Group health insurance is where all the good risks are, which is why it is cheaper in general than much riskier individual policies. Obama care was basically doomed when they didn’t eliminate the group market like Switzerland did.

Seems like the larger the group the better the overall risk profile. Which seems to me like an argument for single payer.

Well, it depends how the group is defined. Group insurance: educated (they got a job that provides benefits), probably better health. Individual market: everyone else. So if the group is defined as left overs from healthy pickings, it can really suck even if it is very big.

Switzerland eliminated the group markets, so everyone buys in the individual market even if they don’t have single payer.

Excited to see repl.it on the list. Congrats!

Thank you :)

Yeah same ! I use it everyday, such a nice tool

Don't see Nectome mentioned.

Ah, there it is https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/20/these-are-the-64-startups-...

I've worked with and talked to the Molly team. I think they are on track to do something really interesting in the AI space and bring a particular human sensibility that seems to be missing in other AIs that I interact with. If anyone is going to build the AI from Her, it's this team.

Kinda weird that there's 141 companies in the batch and only 3 of them listed in "Show HN".

YC companies go up as "Launch HN".

Veriff looks like a great product but also seems to compete with checkr, another YC company. Is it common for YC to invest in competitors of existing portfolio companies?

Does SafetyWing covers health insurance for families on vacation? It says it is targeted to digital nomads but I wonder how this is different than a vacation insurance.

Travel insurance, now with hip fonts!

Curious, how many startups does a YC batch have?

141 this batch. There's some detailed info in the article.

Am I the only one that thinks "a social network for women (Leap)" is a bit sexist?

Sexist because men aren't welcome? While it would be the case that a social network for men could be considered sexist and maybe this represents a double standard, I'm sure there is a very good argument for why networks like Leap aren't sexist, just as there are good arguments for why pro-diversity hiring policies are not necessarily racist.

> why pro-diversity hiring policies are not necessarily racist

Supreme court has also ruled that opposing them because they are racist is also not racist.

> It has come to this. Called upon to explore the jurisprudential twilight zone between two errant lines of precedent, we confront a frighteningly bizarre question: Does the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment forbid what its text plainly requires? Needless to say (except that this case obliges us to say it), the question answers itself. “The Constitution proscribes government discrimination on the basis of race, and state-provided education is no exception.” Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 306, 349 (2003) (Scalia, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). It is precisely this understanding—the correct understanding—of the federal Equal Protection Clause that the people of the State of Michigan have adopted for their own fundamental law. By adopting it, they did not simultaneously offend it.

I'm sure there are too, I just can't think of any.

I'll bite. At their heart, all antidiscrimination laws are based on the idea of equalizing power.

The law doesn't care if people with one set of genitals doesn't want to hang out with people of another set. What it is concerned about is if a given group has significant power to prevent another group from pursuing life, lib, and happiness.

Viewed from that angle, it becomes clear why antidiscrimination laws favoring AA in traditionally Cauc challenges are legal, but the reverse would not be true.

https://www.acacamps.org/resource-library/campline/single-ge...

Note that, for example, Hooters Rest. lost a discrimination case against males on the grounds that the hiring criteria was unfairly weighted (power applied) towards women (given their ostensible marketing strategy).

if a given group has significant power to prevent another group from pursuing life, lib, and happiness.

Viewed from that angle, it becomes clear why antidiscrimination laws favoring AA in traditionally Cauc challenges are legal

I'm not sure it's a good idea to enshrine the idea that "Cauc" have an inherent power over "AA" into law. This seems close to running afoul of Equal Protection.

I belong to a women's industry group and pay dues, in a very gender-unbalanced industry. We talk about issues that are very specific to women: how to get more of us in the industry, mostly. Men of the industry are always welcome to our social events and I think they enjoy coming along because it's the only place in their own work lives where they get to hang out with women. So we're showing men what a world with women in it, is like. Eventually we won't need the industry group, once we're well-established.

There was a long thread about them two months ago, with the founders answering some questions on that topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16159808

Society only sees it sexist if it's done by the overrepresented gender, just like racism.

>Correlia Biosystems

Theranos but real?

dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16626054

No discussion and few points, so not a duplicate

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