Who are the Y Combinator Companies? (Summer 2006) | Hacker News Reader

Who are the Y Combinator Companies? (Summer 2006)

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21 pointskul24 comments

Scribd, Xobni, and OMGPOP were the ones that made it big from that batch. Jamglue did well too, till they were shut down by legal threats. And while JumpChat didn't last long, founder John Resig later became well known as the creator of jQuery.

Sorry paul... didn't mean to downvote you.

Do you own a smartphone?

He doesn't because he's too addicted to the Internet as it is, so the last thing he needs is to have access to it at all times. He likens smartphones to hip flasks.

Unless that's changed since he wrote that in an essay/HN comment/etc.

I do wonder if at some point they'll become so ubiquitous--and so many YC applicants and companies will be focused on smartphones--that he'll feel he has to to get one so that he can better judge the value of companies focused on mobile and give them advice.

Good final graph.

Hopefully that will convince him to fix this site. It's become too much a testament to how little design matters, and the point is now counterpoint.

It is possible to own a smartphone but not use it as your primary phone. For example: I have an iPhone 4 that I use specifically for development purposes. I've made a grand total of one phone call with it; to cancel the contract.

That will allow him to try out apps (which I'm sure he does on the founders' devices or on YC-owned devices), but it won't make him think like someone with a smartphone.

It won't help him think up RFSes with mobile apps at their core, and it won't allow him to say "wow, that app you're pitching to me would remove the annoying 3-step process that I do whenever I do X on my phone." The importance of him truly thinking like someone with a smartphone will grow over the next few years

Smart phone will come down in price to the point where all phones are smartphones.

s/will come/came

Smart phones are basically free now - you just pay extra for data.

There are now 45M smart phone owners in the US, out of about 250M phone owners, and it will just take a few years to erase the last dumb phones.

Smart phone sales were about 170M in 2009, and 280M in 2010, worldwide. Its going absolutely freaking nuts... biggest computing platform and market opportunity of a generation. Same significance as PCs or the internet. Half a billion new computers, as fast as semi-modern PCs, all in the last two years. Go make some money everyone.

Jessica has an iPhone. I use hers to try out startups' apps.

OMGPOP is not in the list on TC.

It's probably hard to say, but compared with the last group, which on paper looks excellent, did this group similarly look great after the end only for a few clear winners to appear later on or was the gap easy to see even comparing to when this article was written?

The groups of startups have been gradually getting better over time. Since 4 years = 8 batches, they're now significantly better, as far as I can tell. Investors seem to think so too, because they have a much easier time raising money.

OMGPOP started as iminlikewithyou.com

if that helps piece together the tangled history :)

Wasn't OMGPOP from the batch prior to that (W06 as opposed to S06) ?

I thought OMGPOP was Winter 06 by Charles Forman is that wrong?

To save you the trouble, of the websites listed: Pollground now redirects to SodaHead. Xobni is still alive and kicking. The rest are either parked, dead, or offline.

Scribd is unnamed, but is doing more than fine.

They may be doing fine but I haven't seen as much negative writing about any other YC start-up as with scribd.

I hope they can find a way out of the negative perception.

I think the lesson here is to keep away from social media crap. They generally don't work, either make it big or die (and certainly 99.99% would die). For example, what's the point LikeBetter? I think it can be built as a side-project, a simple App and not a startup. Also the monetization would be little hard. (Ads don't pay any more).

However, Xobni happens to provide something useful that businesses need. They have a clear monetization strategy (sell a product) And they seem to be doing well and they have some jobs openings.

> "Ads don't pay any more"

That's a bit of a generalization. They pay well for me :)

Ads don't pay if ads = slap adsense on a page and pray. They still support plenty of sites, companies and even some corporations.

wasn't there a goog spreadsheet floating around with all the exits of all the yc, techstars, etc startups?

well, there was this blog post last year: http://blog.awesomezombie.com/2009/12/analyzing-y-combinator...

Ask and ye shall receive: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkkhSN3vaY4jdF90b1l...

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