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Comment by marcusf | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what the value of this post is? Would you honestly expect every company or even every demo day to contain a frighteningly ambitious idea? And if they were frighteningly, scarily ambitious, would TC really hype them? The sane response seems to be to write them off instead as far too ambitious.

I guess I just don't get what the skepticism here brings to the table? I'm open to input about that.

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I've sent the list of companies from the latest batch to several non-tech friends and not a single person has been impressed with anything on the list. That's not a good sign.

With things like Dropbox and Reddit not only did my eyes light up, but the eyes of non-tech friends lit up. Same with Hipmunk. Hipmunk I didn't even have to show someone, I could just say "not shitty airline search" and they were intrigued.

I think the point to this submission and others like it are that a lot of people are scratching their heads over this current batch. Nobody expects every company to be "Wow!" but generally there are a few.

I would imagine that the point is to encourage future entrepreneurs to avoid the two trends pointed out in the post. YCombinator and TechCrunch are both trendsetters, so it makes sense to express skepticism if you have a problem with the types of ideas TechCrunch is covering from demo day.

I don't expect the batch to contain all frighteningly ambitious ideas, but it would be fun if at least one was. I'm sure YC would be receptive to such a plan if the founders were smart.

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