YC W20 Online-Only Demo Day

This really makes a huge difference, particularly for Congress you can usually got to 3.4 -> 4x speed easily.

You can edit the speed above 2x on YouTube in the web console (I forget specifics, but easily searchable).

I think Andrej Karpathy’s talk during tesla autonomy day, and any talks by John Carmack are the only ones I enjoy at 1x (they talk fast).

I feel like coffee would make the slow talking seem even worse, maybe beer?

This does work, and I do it, but it's a bit uncomfortable over long periods of time and the video resolution isn't as good as on a normal display.

Two other things I should add:

I use noise-canceling headphones (inexpensive from Taotronics) and the DFX plugin [1] for audio clarity. The plugin has a Dialog Boost setting intended for transcription. It goes a long way to improve muddy audio.

[1] https://www.fxsound.com/uses/transcription

I do at least 2x. For slow talkers, there are Chrome extensions that let you easily bump that number as high as you want on YouTube.

Quite meticulous: what are you using these spreadsheets for?

We found it very useful.

Yeah and not everyone really wants to move to California either due to cost of living or other reasons. Always found it a shame tech is so centralized in a few cities. But it seems even places called the next Silicon Vally like Austin, all the tech people moving there has raised the cost of living too. So similar effect California is struggling with. Seems Dallas is more affordable but not sure if it will go up as tech comes there too and also sounds like you need a car too. I think I’d be cool if some warm paradise walkable, live somewhere close to the office and restaurants and shops. Seems less stressful and also probably be healthier if you are more active instead of driving everywhere.

Yeah, I think virtual world could make a cool virtual office. I know most focus on social and gaming though and I have some ideas in this space. I was thinking if I did end up building something, early on develop it with a business version in mind and actually use it for the company itself developing the world where it can have more account controls and own private space where they can limit access. Then could license and host a business version of it for companies and offer productivity tools when ready to polish it more for that market, However I see going first to market with the consumer version, but that might help too if you got popular and later pitched the business version since people would already be familiar using the virtual world and interacting with it.

Education is another use case too, I know there's already online schools for college and even K-12 has online schools. Florida I guess there's a popular one, Ohio had one called ECOT but they ended up shutting down due to an issue with tracking attendance but some feel it was more political attack on school choice. But usually there's what called a learning management system where you can mail your teacher, view grades, submit assignments like uploading a DOC or Powerpoint, do quizzes, read and watch material. Then once or twice a week there's a live session that was optional which uses software that the webinar people use with chat, voice, screen sharing, whiteboard, etc. So I think a virtual world could replace the meeting software maybe, but I could still see the school wanting to use their own LMS.

However I think some regulations will slow the adoption of working remotely which I commented about yesterday on another post but it was a bit long and not sure if stuff people actually are thinking about. For example if a company in California wants to hire someone in Ohio to work remotely there's extra red tape to deal with. Because the company is then considered doing business in Ohio and not only California so creates paperwork and expenses for compliance. Plus if the business doesn't have an address in the state, that can also complicates things and then other questions come up too since the laws were written considering everyone commutes to work instead of working remotely for a company across the country. So it's not usually worth the extra burden to hire only a single person in a state or even some stuff is county or city by county or city. So sounds like remote would be easier if they report to a regional office instead of being fully remote maybe. So if a company in San Francisco wants to hire people remotely, they might have to limit it to residents of the area they operate in.

I remember reading once on HN but forget where someone was already remote and wanted to move somewhere cheaper but was told no due to legal reasons. Actually wouldn't surprise me if a lot of companies are already breaking these employment laws. Like some startups offer unlimited vacation but expect people to still stay in touch or maybe they'll spend a hour or two doing some work from their hotel room... If the company is based in California and they took a ski vacation to Colorado, the company could be creating obligation to Colorado for different taxes, insurance requirements, etc technically. Same with trade shows or conferences for example worker compensation not every state has reciprocity, and some funds are state ran too without allowing a private insurer. So if you send your team to a conference for a few days, that could complicate things especially if it's not a state you already were doing business in - like someone was doing something in Washington State and some forms online wouldn't let you use a out of state address. There's a list somewhere, some states want you to do this on the first day while other states are more friendlier (maybe they are hoping to attract events and conferences to their state!). Then was reading states like New York will even consider a layover during a business trip, so check your employer email on your blackberry and New York wants a slice of the pie. Sure this is how some lawyers and HR people interpret this stuff, but in reality not sure if NY will really follow up just for checking your email but in theory it's a possibility.

Then a few states like NY, NJ, PA, DE, NE has rules on telecommuting too, apparently someone who worked remotely for a company located in NY from his home in TN ended up owing income tax to NY even though he performed the work in TN. However if the business created Nexus in TN by hiring someone from there, sounds like a huge conflict of law with TN and NY, so maybe those states are bad to base your company from if you want to allow remote. Sounds like though if that company had an office in TN, they could have assigned the employee to report to the TN location instead of NY and wouldn't of been a problem maybe.

If funding is similar or up compared to previous Demo Days, could one not assume some measure of success? And only if funding was lower, the conclusion would be murky (whether "remoteness" or COVID-19 was the cause)?

I've been wondering how WeWork's implosion and several underwhelming tech IPOs will effect seed rounds.

So, yes, it'll be hard to untangle all of the confounding factors.

It's not that I want to read all the decks first and then watch all the pitches, it's that I want to look at the decks in order to decide which pitches to watch. S19 demo day had 197 companies. I don't know how long the pitches were (I didn't go) but if each one was 5 minutes that is 16 hours worth of pitches without a break. I'm not capable of maintaining focus at a presentation for much more than an hour or two at a time. If my attention wavers at the wrong moment during a pitch I might miss something important.

If I can look at a deck, then I can do two things that I can't do during a pitch. First, I can close my eyes and take a deep breath for a minute without missing anything. And second, I can see right away that, for example, this company is in a sector that I am not focused on (because I don't know anything about it) and so I am not going to invest in it even if it looks like a great opportunity. I am an individual investor with a very narrow focus (I look for companies in particular technical niches) so I can eliminate 80-90% of opportunities just by knowing the market segment they're in. A company might be well positioned to revolutionize (say) fashion design, but I'm not going to invest in it because I know absolutely nothing about fashion design, and I don't invest in things I don't understand. With a deck I can figure this out an order of magnitude faster than if I have to sit through a whole pitch.

See my response in the sibling thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22506913

I and several other founders are doing this on the Pioneer livestream next week. It's earlier stage than most YC companies but not afraid of a little transparency https://pioneer.app/livestream

In fact, there are whole communities built around publicly sharing your companies' financial metrics. Eg https://www.indiehackers.com/products

Nice! I kinda figured each startup would have to produce their own, kinda like how some talent shows have you produce your own video to audition. So sounds like they won't have to worry about that all.

I've always had an interest in video production but never had the chance to really express that. I think one thing I'd recommend is when demoing maybe create a fresh separate user account, so less distracting when demoing with other programs or a clutter desktop. Also probably makes it look more professional too. I've figured if I ever made something with video tutorials, that'd be a little improvement maybe.

HackerNoon does something like that.

You could do it. I'm a Latter-day Saint (Mormon) and there is a group called "Leading Saints" https://leadingsaints.org/ that does 'Virtual Summits' since there are many (more) members of the Church outside of the 'Mormon corridor' (Utah, Idaho, Arizona ish areas) than there are in it.

You could reach out to Kurt Francom and ask him what mistakes they've made with their virtual summits to try and avoid and then apply a more tech-knowledgeable approach for a security virtual conference.

I meant streamed live :p Seems like they will be pre-recorded and released.

And ongoing risk of an endemic new virus even after a vaccine is developed. Even though we have flu vaccine, it still takes its toll every year and is probably here to stay.