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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

How is this different than iFixit.com's offering?

Sometimes I wonder about the YC investments on things that I just dont find all that novel, or revolutionary...

I mean - I guess its cool because they expanded/franchised out to college campuses or something, but I don't find this to be particularly interesting.

It would seem that they must have sold a grander vision to YC; "We will be the Geek Squad of college campuses, everyone on campus has a machine and a phone!" -- there is a real business there, sure, but I am not very excited about it.

Even coming from a career IT background, commoditizing helpdesk/repair and deploying an army of iTech's to college campuses just doesn't interest me.

I am sure that this could make a lot of (boring) money in the future though, so good for them.

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Sometimes I wonder about the YC investments on things that I just dont find all that novel, or revolutionary...

That's why it's nontrivial to do what we do. The best ideas always look like bad ideas.

A good test for your reaction to a startup idea is "would I have said the same thing about Dropbox when it was first started?" On the face of it, there was nothing revolutionary about Dropbox. There were already dozens of similar things.

There are a lot of domains where the people with least experience tend to have the most definite opinions, but startups are an extreme case of it. I find that as I get more experience with startups, I am extremely reluctant to dismiss ideas that seem unsexy, or crazy, or (my favorite) "toys." In fact, when we use those terms to describe ideas to one another during YC interviews, we usually mean them as compliments.

I'm reminded of Danny Hillis' description of telling Richard Feynman his idea for the connection machine:

One day when I was having lunch with Richard Feynman, I mentioned to him that I was planning to start a company to build a parallel computer with a million processors. His reaction was unequivocal, "That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard." For Richard a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right. Either way, he was interested. By the end of lunch he had agreed to spend the summer working at the company.

Sam, iFixit is great for people that want to repair their device themselves. iCracked offers an avenue for the other 90% of people that need their device fixed but have no desire to do it themselves. Think changing your oil yourself or dropping it off at Jiffy Lube. I imagine Jiffy Lube makes a lot of boring money as well.

We have some really cool ideas in the pipeline that will be released over the next few months. iPhone repair is just the beginning, not the end.

-AJ Forsythe

AJ,

I think I met you and your crew a while back (last st. patties?) you were with the girl whose dad founded Intuit I believe... (and your friends who had a wine business)...

Anyway - I think that this is a great business, and I wish you the best. If you are going to be the "Campus Helpdesk" then I am sure big things are in store for you.

Sorry I am not excited - I dont mean that to be a personal slant, I guess I am just old :)

Good Luck! and congrats!

Edit: I am the type that likes to fix my own phone. I have had 15 separate iPhones since the first one launched and I have replaced screens on almost every one of them. I have yet to break my iPhone 4 - but I have replaced them on the original, 3G and 3GS.

"...that I just dont find all that novel, or revolutionary..."

As an exercise, try to imagine how big it could get (and what it could morph into) with funding and 5+ years of hard work. Heroku started as a Rails IDE in a browser, by example.

Also, a lot of great companies didn't start with a revolutionary product/feature. They just did what they did REALLY REALLY WELL. Facebook, Amazon, Cisco, Zappos, Dropbox... All entered pretty crowded markets without an obvious differentiator (at first).

> Heroku started as a Rails IDE in a browser, by example.

From the day they launched publicly (like iCracked did today) they were doing the platform thing: http://techcrunch.com/2008/02/07/heroku-lifts-ruby-on-rails-...

Not arguing with your point, which I agree with, just pointing out a problem with that example.

I think your expectation is misguided. YC's goal isn't to invest in novel or revolutionary companies. They're here to invest in startups that they think may eventually become big businesses.

I also abhor the question "how is this different than x's offering"? A startup doesn't need to be meaningfully differentiated from other startups-- it needs to be meaningfully differentiated from what the existing market is currently using.

Actually we love novel, revolutionary companies. But we like it even better when what's revolutionary about them is not immediately visible.

Sometimes I wonder about the YC investments

I just dont find all that novel, or revolutionary... [...] I don't find this to be particularly interesting [...] just doesn't interest me

I am sure that this could make a lot of (boring) money

I think you've answered your own question. I don't remember YC pledging that every idea they sponsor will be a ground-breaking reinvention of the tech landscape.

On the broadest scale, they want ideas that will be successful and give a good return. "Boring" enterprise software, for example, makes one hell of a lot more money than the latest group photo sharing iPhone app.

Yeah, I recognize that. All I was saying is I am not excited by it. Call me curmudgeon.

I'm assuming that they pitched themselves as a 'way to disrupt the Geek Squad,' which is sort of hilarious, seeing how the Geek Squad's founder, Robert Stephens, specifically set out to do the same thing to hole-in-the-wall computer repair shops when he was a college student with $200 back in the 1990s.

Then Best Buy bought them, and started letting in-store management run the show.

I was a Geek Squad Supervisor during college (and worked part-time for a few years after). The guys who wrote all the Geek Squad software and standard practices from the corporate HQ were great. However, over time the store management began to run Geek Squad like just another department.

Sales managers don't know anything about technical service, so eventually we began to focus on new PC customers (upgrades, software installs) instead of the PCs that were in the back waiting on repair. Eventually Geek Squad just became an extension of the PC sales department at most stores.

I was 'Rookie Agent #63' from 1998 - 2000 when I was in high school (see photo link below), and the company was still about 35 employees. It's a pity that the quality of the service has seemingly declined so greatly. I remember when Robert would mock Best Buy's seeming incompetence and declare unequivocally that the Geek Squad would never own a fleet of vans. So much for that.

https://twitter.com/aaronbrethorst/status/175695256233324544...

Eventually the Geek Squad founder did admit it: http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/11/smbusiness/geek_squad.fsb/in...

this is not supposed to be a "good" idea. it's a "money" idea. simple.

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