YC: Requests for Startups | Hacker News Reader

YC: Requests for Startups

ycombinator.com

514 pointssarimkx551 comments

To those who think this list will help them get into YC, or lament "why didn't I get into YC when my idea was squarely on this list":

The YC application is a sales pitch, and you're not selling your idea, you're primarily selling your charisma and capacity to spin vision and sell. Second, you're selling your chemistry with your cofounders and stability of your relationship. Third, you're selling your capacity to build, at least some usable prototype, but this a low bar.

At no point are you actually selling the concrete idea, unless you're doing something extremely specific that seems valuable and you're one of the few who can build it. For the rest, the idea is a rhetorical vehicle to sell the other things.

Spot on. Add in an ivy league or similar pedigree as social proof for a better chance.

Having met a bunch of YC companies now, I wouldn't say the Ivies are exactly under-represented but it always seems like there's more Stanford than UPenn and more UWaterloo than Cornell. If school means anything it's the quality of their CS programs.

Don't let your school hold you back from applying :)

Is UPenn particularly good? It’s the first time I hear about it in these discussions. Stanford on the other hand, I always hear about (isn’t that where Page and Brin were at?)

I think GP is saying that YC founders tend to be more techy, entrepreneurial types than Wharton MBA types. I'm not sure though, there's a lot left to the imagination.

going of a tangent but would you say it's worth going to a similarly ranked uni(oxford) if one wants to go into entrepreneurship given its more 'academic' emphasis? as opposed to somewhere like UCSD where it's not as prestigious but close to the tech scene.(bonus points for california weather ha!)

UCSD is not really near the tech scene, so I wouldn't choose it for that. San Diego is a world away from the Bay Area. The weather in SD is definitely the best in the world, though.

The optimal path for someone in your position is to go to Oxford, then get a job/do a master's at Stanford.

Definitely go to Oxford over UCSD. There’s a world of difference in difficulty to get into, and like the other person says, SD isn’t the biggest tech scene unless biotech is your focus. UC schools are also huge and impersonal, part of what lets them offer decently cheap tuition to in-state students; but if you’re not in-state, I don’t think you’re getting the best value for your money. My answer might change if the alternative were Berkeley.

From what I've heard, you also need to build up a lot of hype about yourself.

I don’t think this is true at all. I did YC and neither I nor my cofounders had any hype surrounding us or our idea. Unless if by hype you mean a handful of paying users then sure, that won’t hurt :)

Not true for me. No social media other than HN and got in first try.

You need to be the right idea at the right time, and the right team to do the thing.

Gen AI two years ago was a toy that fit "somewhere" into the "creator economy", which seemed dead.

Now try and you'll get a completely different reception.

I think this is an excellent point. That being said, there are some warm fuzzies that come by seeing my grad school research topic listed here as well (the ML for physics simulations topic). Just some validation that the area I'm spending time in could not only help my specific niche, but be broadly attractive to VC funding to help grow it. Not that I'm anywhere near being ready to build anything (or near graduation, for that matter) but the conversation about it being a possibility came up recently and maybe sometime in the far future it could be a reality.

We've never been accepted, but my experience with application process indicates this isn't strictly true. We're not getting any more charismatic, but they have continued to show interest in us applying. Not sure if that's what everyone gets or not.

They are never going to tell you to not apply. Why would they close that door?

There is no, no. They tell everyone "maybe next time."

Well there’s applying, and then there’s offering the interview.

VC notoriously rarely ever say "no"[1] - just in case.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38677251

Read the thread beyond the top-most comment. It's true that there's a long tail of wannabes who play this game, but reputable VCs don't mince words.

> reputable VCs

Nice oxymoron you got here.

VC's rhyme with feces, and share many attributes.

but if your product works you get more confident, no?

> The YC application is a sales pitch, and you're not selling your idea, you're primarily selling your charisma and capacity to spin vision and sell. Second, you're selling your chemistry with your cofounders and stability of your relationship. Third, you're selling your capacity to build, at least some usable prototype, but this a low bar.

YC is late to the early alpha and is betting on talent/leadership to soak up.

Then again, first movers don't always win.

> We've never been accepted, [...] they have continued to show interest in us applying

You're getting recurring meetings with them (which have significant opportunity cost for them), so it's not just the usual startup investor unwillingness to say "no" with finality?

Yes, and quite often you are selling your company. Investors will try to push you out of the game if they see potential in your products. If you don't have a time-to-market-sensitive product you are usually better off grinding in the basement for a longer time than people wants you to believe.

If however, you have a very narrow window to be able to launch properly, or if your product is mostly visionary you need investors asap. Just don't expect to come out with a Zuckerberg deal, expect 1-2% of the company in the end and make sure you cash out during the entire road.

I spent a great while inside of medical during the pandemic and it was… interesting.

There are some incredibly large interests in the space that wield intense power and control over various markets. There is also a profound degree of inefficiency in a lot of what’s happening.

The question is whether many of those inefficiencies are technology problems or if they are intentionally constructed for the many reasons these things are created.

I feel like there needs to be almost a Walmart size company pushing down on prices with that kind of scale before many of these structures will be broken, and unfortunately that doesn’t appear to be the direction most things are going (oh they exist in scale, just not direction). I was hoping Amazon’s entry into the market would do it. It didn’t.

Might be time for a different direction in health care entirely. Kaiser had it right, but I don’t think they executed well and they are largely a company rooted in past thinking in how they are structured.

Combining health care and subscription with ongoing medical care is definitely the direction of things to come. The fundamental shift needs to be moving the system from fixing problems to keeping people actually healthy, and that means that healthy people need to pay for the system or the entire thing gets it’s incentives inverted (as it is now). This is a fundamental shift, but if it were done right it would be a massive company and really change the world. I’ve been looking in to how to build this over the last year and know I want to go in this direction.

And there is also a ton of interesting businesses in generics.

Just some thoughts from someone who has been in many aspects of the medical industry over my career. Hope it inspires some good discussion with my favorite community.

In many parts of the US, you can only construct a hospital if the other hospitals in the area agree that yes, the area could use another hospital. Imagine how easy it would be to get them to agree to let you open your hospital if they know you are a huge company trying to undercut them in price, through any technological or organizational edge.

Basically every healthcare reform would be positive, either towards single payer or towards markets, as the current equilibrium is just optimizing extraction. See how the ACA, which was attempting to let insurers force prices of medical services down, led to hospitals buying out massive amounts of private practices, as it's easy to bully 5 doctors, but not a hospital system that is at the same time negotiating for a lot of primary care, specialists, and ar least a third of hospital capacity in the city.

This is precisely it. This is how you end up with this colossally large ecosystem where things like surgery centers proliferate — with every specialist operating as an outside extension or even an inside extension and costs skyrocket for customers because you just have some many people involved in the chain of care. To boot, a lot of these networks operate their partner organizations through backend ownership groups.

Obamacare tried to fix this by making the entire chain of care responsible for patient satisfaction and outcome and making rate payment contingent, but it really ended up consolidating so much of the industry into integrated and profit maximized network-of-relationships so that the downside can be managed (and the backend financing consolidated similarly, though in many different ways). All of them, to your point, really optimized for extraction.

I spent some time looking into generic drugs and compounding operations as well and we really don’t have many left in the West. It’s concerning. No money left for the basics and the system isn’t very robustly built for basic operations (read the boring, lower paying part of medicine that keeps us all alive every day).

I can’t edit. Let’s ask this: what does the rebel’s guide to medical care look like?

Operate (most) hospitals as a public service.

ROFL. When you’re right… what commentary.

> And there is also a ton of interesting businesses in generics.

Can you please elaborate on this? We are currently exploring a project in the same space, and I would love to discuss.

Well I met with a company doing surgical supply and viewed their facility, and at the time (2021) they were one of only a few vial generic manufacturers based in the United States. They were mostly supplying GPOs, but there is precious little manufacturing capacity in North America for the stuff.

That’s just one example.

The market for surgical supply is wildly inefficient but there aren’t that many people operating manufacturing domestically right now. I think it’s a r potential opportunity.

Cuban’s Cost Plus drug play really showed another weak spot in generics: the entire business he’s in is simply shortening the inefficient supply chain. That can be done in a lot of ways, and can be bundled with financing in many other ways and that can be a big deal (b2b) in this space. That’s what I’ve consulted on in the past.

https://costplusdrugs.com/

Thanks for this. You're definitely spot on about the huge market opportunity in the US for localized manufacturing, and healthcare is one of those spaces with a really strong moat.

Last time I checked this page was several years ago, given that, my main takes on this list are:

* Crypto currencies are clearly on a decline given their location and volume in the list. It seems that the hype is mostly gone.

* Naturally, AI dominates the list, but the focus is on various applications such as healthcare, robotics, enterprise, and the always-a-hit: traditional industries.

* YC lists three and a half requests with a strong geo-political aspects: army technologies (justified by current global wars), startups manufacturing in the US (the role of the US in the 21st century), space and climatech. Our zeitgeist (and as such YC’s justification) is that large changes occurring in the world and they aims to take part in it. This is both bold and on-point.

* Companies relying on open source as part of their core business. YC identifies such companies as having multiple advantages and would like to see more such companies in their portfolio. This is a valid statement that I truly believe in, but I also think that this is only a part of the criteria and not something that solely holds an investment thesis.

> NEW ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING SOFTWARE

Very curious if anyone knows how to pull this off. There's so much value to be unlocked but it's just impossible to break through.

I've personally met three very talented founders that tried and failed (one was accepted to YC as a mid-market ERP and successfully pivoted into an application tracking system) and failed very quickly.

I'm guessing an important feature would be an integration system that maps data from the current ERP seamlessly into the new ERP. And that assumes you can even get through the enterprise sales process to even get the company to migrate.

ERP market is way too complex and oversaturated for pretty much every vertical imaginable

I’ve met a few people who’ve been on the buyer side of an erp migration. It’s a multi million dollar affair that takes years.

Two approaches I can think of:

1. Target mid market or smaller and grow with customers (will be slow)

2. Take a front-door-wrapper approach

Or 3. Target a small slice of ERP/CRM tooling and gradually evolve into something more fully-featured.

The problem is ERP needs to be incredibly tightly integrated into the whole business from end-to-end.

You can't only offer raw materials tracking, but not accounting and shipping. There's just not a lot of value to the business unless you have everything coupled.

The MVP for an ERP is essentially, a fully featured and battle-tested system which is very expensive and time consuming to build before it's profitable.

Most companies that I know that did it right forked something that was already mostly working, built it in house for a client and then spun it off, or yeah, have billions of dollars and still make a fairly half assed solution.

That's strictly true for standard definitions of ERP, but it's a rare enterprise that doesn't already have adjacent software they've licensed to specifically support parts of their business. This could be freight & logistics, or warehouse management/inventory, or QA/Test, or RMA, or whatever. Convincing someone to move away from Oracle or SAP is a nonstarter for a startup. It worked several years ago for Netsuite, which advertised itself as the first "cloud native ERP" and was widely lauded for being so much more easily customizable than Oracle (so Oracle bought them in 2016).

I don't think starting a new ERP company from scratch makes sense for anyone. The best you would likely do is to become either a minor player (just look at the array of CRMs that aren't Salesforce), tailored to a very specific market niche, or an "ERP adjacent" platform of some kind. That last bit is the obvious play. The bread & butter of Enterprise Applications IT departments around the world is to build custom stuff that inherits data from ERPs or feeds data into ERPs and similar mission critical business platforms. Speaking as a guy who ran one of these departments in an F250 for about ten years, most of what they build is pretty crappy.

> The problem is ERP needs to be incredibly tightly integrated into the whole business from end-to-end.

So you target firms that are not yet at the scale where they likely have or need ERP with something that does something they do need that would be integrated into an ERP when they get to that scale and build out from there.

No one is buying an ERP from a firm that doesn't either already have a deep relationship with the buyer or a track record in the ERP space or a track record in an ERP-adjacent space, and more than one of those is desirable, so be in the position that when you start trying to sell an ERP you have at least the last plus a stable of firms for which you also have the first.

The MVP for ERP is literally excel.

Notice that excel is a huge product.

Ah ok. I'm an interested in this as a topic and would like to take a stab at this as I think it's an almost impossible project. I would like to caveat any opinion first by saying these: I have a great deal of experience customizing and creating little bits of bespoke functionality for various ERP systems (SAP obviously but also some of the smaller ones aimed at niche markets eg construction). I also have similar experience with similarly complicated and sprawling PLM systems. I've spent basically my entire software career around ERP and PLM systems and systems that break out pieces of ERP functionality and try to often do it elsewhere (usually badly), and then usually have to somehow bring everything back into an ERP system anyway, either manually or with at least some level of (but rarely complete) automation.

I am a CS graduate from a 'famous' UK university (UCL). I'm also a qualified CAD engineer, project manager within agile (DSDM agile etc)...ITIL qualified etc. i.e I've spent a lot of time across these kinds of many tentacled systems that really do reach across the entirety of any large business. I've worked with these systems from FTSE 50 businesses to small 50 person manufacturing startups.

I've also been involved in the migration between PLM systems (horrible from a data perspective - all those CAD files etc) and also ERP systems (horrible but largely just the mapping between two different Entity Relationship Diagrams almost incomprehensible to any living human in terms of complexity).

It would be an incredibly ambitious undertaking to compete with one of the major players in either of these spaces. It is not something you could really even do at the scale of a start-up the likes of which YC and the media understand as 'start-up'. You would need so many not just 'early stage' founders with wildly different skillsets, you would need effectively an entire large manufacturing business, from end to end, in terms of personnel because your 'domain expert' essentially includes 'every business function you can imagine'. That's before you could even begin to think about software. It's a fascinating idea but think about it - procurement/purchasing, warehousing and logistics, engineering and design, sales and marketing, finance (very important here), HR, operations, R&D, Q&A...and these are just the ones I can think of that I have come across in my dealings with these systems. They really do touch every department.

The length of time to market would also be such that this kind of project would not really be appropriate to describe as a 'start up'. You'd essentially be creating a 'Unicorn Killer' and that unicorn killer would need insane resources to even have a chance at market success. The number and requirement for specialist migration tools into your new system from existing clients would be a 'massive' undertaking also.

It's such a bold idea but I think to describe an undertaking of that size 'start-up' would be to completely stretch the meaning of the term 'start-up' so far beyond its usage that the term would lose all meaning.

The days for this to work where back when SAP was young and ERPs the latest dosruptive tech. In order to repeat that, one has to wait for a new technology to replace ERP as a whole, developing a new ERP simply doesn't cut it.

I could see where a startup can solve one of these slices in SaaS form with the intent that it could be also sold as installable via containers on premise or in a private cloud for a customer.

Then do the same for another slice, offer it to existing customers and make the completed slices work well together. Then another slice.

And along the way there could be profit to fund the next slice, as well as existing customers you can tap into to solve their problems. It would be simpler to niche down vs. the SAP/Oracle path of ERP-fits-all.

ERP is a tough space to compete in, as you're fighting against SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, etc. I would say that ERP, CRM and Enterprise payments solutions are the few spaces that firms should not compete in - in a few years, these companies will be akin to COBOL for airlines.

Step one is to make sure it's auditable.

Every auditor on the planet is intimately familiar with how Oracle EBS and SAP do certain things.

If you don't have that trust built up, a customer simply won't want to take the risk and additional headache and overhead passing an audit will take.

Sounds like there is the opportunity. An ERP that can eliminate the need for auditors. Then it won’t matter what the auditors think. Auditing isn’t some black magic. It’s a set of rules. Rules a machine can follow.

A machine controlled by the audited company. Audits are there to minimize the risk of companies cooking the books.

You never went through an audit, did you?

> A machine controlled by the audited company. Audits are there to minimize the risk of companies cooking the books

Sounds like the pitch Fujitsu made to the Post Office for Horizon. That worked out so well!

Rounding errors, simple rounding errors. Nothing to see here.

"Auditing isn’t some black magic. It’s a set of rules"

This is not true. Auditing is half assurance and half insurance. It has nothing to do with the actual results of a bunch of rules and checks.

> Sounds like there is the opportunity. An ERP that can eliminate the need for auditors.

You cannot eliminate the need for auditors - the need is for someone to go through the system and make sure that no one is cooking the books.

Hence, an independent third party does the audit.

This makes me wonder. I wonder if the real opportunity is in solutions that help auditors in one way or the other.

If the auditors are sensitive to which systems they are familiar with, it would perhaps be beneficial to the auditors to be able to understand other systems.

I'm sure there are companies that are servicing auditors, creating UiPath flows or whatever for a bunch of auditors. So there's probably already a ton of very specific solutions out there, for auditing various systems.

At least it sounds like a more solvable problem than yet another ERP

another key thing is you need SOC 2 or ISO right out of the gate. We actually had to do that at Arist when they were seed stage because all the customers are literally FANG and fortune 500s which require such certifications to even do business with a vendor

Not a direct answer, but I am targeting data marts from ERPs and other Enterprise applications like CRMs. I think data marts (data warehouses) are very valuable but they are too expensive and hard to build, so an AI that could generate the sql for the marts directly from the apps could be very valuable. What do you think?

You already cannot map data automatically from one SAP instance to another, so forget auto migration. What usually happebs is, to keep the legacy system around for auditing purposes, and the live business happens in the new one. With cut-off dates per function and or department. With manually developed interfaces, and all the crap that comes with those, during the migartion period.

An nothing of this has anything to do with SAP, and everything with ERPs and the messy reality of businesses.

Why is it not entering the realm of possibility for the migration system to function not at an API layer but at the levels of pixels and OCR and RPA to click through every possible interface within the ERP to export and structure the legacy data to complete a total migration? Like humans copying over the data manually?

Because the migration has to be auditable. And the data fields between the systems / databases mapped against business processes, on both systems. If you find a solution to automate that, cudos...

would it be fair to suggest an automated migration solution (therefore less manual) might be more auditable than human driven?

You'd probably start with a human in the loop solution but mapping should be a solvable problem

No, from my experience it wouldn't be fair to say that.

There is a reason why migration projects are yearlong, multi million projects. Go through one, ideally multiple, of those first before looking at automating any of that. Added benefit, jobs at those projects pay incredibly well for the functional consultants involved. And when, when not if, automation doesn't work out, you still don't have to worry about a job ever again.

it's complicated because it's complicated and the pay is good sounds like good white collar jobs about to get automated away

Serious question, what is your experience with ERP systems so far?

Https://pigment.com is an impressive example of a startup managing to address this market successfully.

That's not ERP so.

Start with a niche market and grow from there. For example, ERP for tech startups, so YC can recommend you to their companies.

> Very curious if anyone knows how to pull this off.

I work in this space (small/mid-size).

The good news is that there are several "obvious" ways to pull this off because an ERP is the culmination of everything a company needs and does. So almost anything you can imagine on the software is part of it.

The bad news, and the reason everyone wants a solution, is that is truly a big space, and then you need E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G.

---

My take is to start from the bottom, and build a much better version of Access/FoxPro (https://tablam.org).

Any medium/big ERP end being a specialized computing platform that needs:

- A programming language

- A database engine

- An orchestration engine

- ELT engine

- Auth

- UI/Report builders

And to be clear: NONE of the "programming language", "database engine", etc are a good fit today.

NONE.

This is the big thing, This is the reason (from a tech POW only) that most attempts fail.

This is the secret of why Cobol rule(d): Is all of this! but is too old! (also, this is why SQL still is best: Is almost this).

---

So, to pull this off, you need a team that knows what is "missing" from our current tools, makes a well-integrated package, and adds a "user-friendly" interface in a way that is palatable for the kind of user that uses excel (powerfully).

Is not that impossible. FoxPro was the best example of this kind of integrated solution.

P.D: This is my life's dream, to make this truth!

I spent 8 years buidling and running a crm system as a solo project. (https://web.archive.org/web/20080706045541/http://officezill...). I agree without a programming language and database for users to build their own stuff in like Salesforce does any groupware/crm is doomed.

But I think of the YC requirement more like build a Zapier and make your crm all an API. Use some sort of AI or business logic for users to glue it together.

But at the end of the day you still would need to build out an internal programming language as well because it still would not be enough without it.

The problems with ERP is (1) in order to be a big player you have to cater for so many use cases it starts becoming a glorified development tool without any room for providing actual ROI to the vertical that wants to buy it. (2) it's very, very easy to fall into the trap of saying "well, process x is really no different in industry y, we can adapt the ERP system". In reality there's so many nuances that the platform becomes compromise.

Vertical specific software provides so much more value as you can build things unencumbered by the engine/data structures/way things work.

I've found our niche - ERP's would be hopelessly expensive so save for top tier OE companies no one uses it. In weeks we can develop and roll out features & functionality that our clients just lap up that you would never in a million years build into an ERP platform, but is intrinsic to the delivery of our clients products.

It was inconceivable to me 2 years ago, but now I've had very real discussions with some companies where they're looking at our software going "wow... you're going to give mid tier players better functionality that we could only dream of from our ERP systems.."

Basically ERP platforms are "jack of all trades, master of none".

In my former life we did vertical specific software for the window and door industry. Every time we heard from a prospect "oh we're looking at __some ERP platform__ to do configuration of W&D", we'd immediately list dozens of reasons why they would fail, and fail hard.. countless untold money to consulting teams has been burned learning those lessons.

> In weeks we can develop and roll out features & functionality that our clients just lap up that you would never in a million years build into an ERP platform

Interesting. Just to make sure I understood this correctly, are you taking of a purpose built app/software for each such 'request' as opposed to this being some 'module'/'add-on' in an ERP suite?

Yeah so in an ERP platform, you (well the client) needs to pay for a feature they want to be built ontop of the platform. It may have additional tables/data structures added into the ERP system or outside of it. Sure an ERP might have say an "Field Service Module" add-on you can get. But if you're a Spa Pool shop, there might be a whole bunch of things you do spa pool specific, eg taking water chemistry measurements. With an ERP system to add say a 'chemistry tracker add-on', you're very unlikely to find one off the shelf, so you need to customise the ERP system to do it. By the end of having an ERP system that works for your Spa Pool Empire you've blown $100'000's to $millions.

The alternative is some scrappy startup does a SaaS platform for Spa Pool shops and builds the features natively. Not being hamstrung by the ERP platform, so no compromises - no UI's that look like an ugly duckling. And of course they learn every new spa pool shop that comes onboard, adapts and improves.

Eventually the SaaS software startup will become the Spa Pool system of choice, and will come up against the ERP platforms in sales pitches.

One will be ready to go for a Spa Pool shop, the other will have a team of consultants wanting to do requirements gathering....

That's the problem with ERPs, when a vertical/niche has got dedicated software, the ERPs almost always look inferior*

* Upto a certain business size/throughput/specialised requirements, then Mega Spa Pool corp is okay paying millions to have their own ERP team.

Yeah, this is the way for the small/mid tier (this is also how I do for https://www.bestsellerapp.net)

What make this complicated is that each company turns into a different project. So is like have several branches:

    ERP
       /CompanyA
       /CompanyB

This is high maintenance the more successful you are (and puts a serious barrier to adapting to certain customers).

It gets to a point where after a certain # of customers you can't grow, and now is where you think about making your own DB, programming language, ... :)

Hi. I'm working on Logkeeper which is an all in one business management platform.

I don't think it will be possible to compete directly with the big players. However, having spoken to a few potential customers, it seems my software can help businesses that are small today but will scale up tomorrow. If I can prove that my software can indeed scale up with them, I will have a good opportunity to tackle the enterprise side eventually. Right now though, I'm just focused on getting the product to a level that helps these smaller folks out. I have been working on it during evenings, and this is my first week moving forward focusing on it full time. Let's see where it goes. I'm really early stage, super fresh to business, but I'm experienced as a swe and consider myself a closer. Cheers!

If you want to know a little about my background, I've worked on massive (many, many millions of dollars) ERP projects from the business side. I've also been a platform engineer/lead on a saas that IPO'd a few years ago. I've seen it from both sides, and I believe that I have an idea of what is missing when it comes to business software in general.

What is the current state as of time of writing? Are you willing to talk about it, warts and all?

I have allways wondered why there isn't a "headless" erp-system.

I have worked with cms-systems. And in this world it is accepted, you need different frontends for different tasks. Therefore a world of systems - calling themselve headless - support only the backend part of cms management. Worked with Strapi that support this kind of thinking.

How come something similar doesn't exist in the ERP world ?

One major reason is that both developers/customers who ask for it think in UI first, all the time.

Most developers I know are at the far-end of development practices (one of the ERPs I integrate has tables like `F0001, F0002, ...` and fields `F00001, F00002`), and this ERPs then uses old tools like Cobol, Fox, (Old) Delphi, (OLD) VB where it has a better UI history.

And it causes to be very hard to build an API (you can't image how much torture is when an ERP vendor says "we have an API!" instead of using plain text or direct SQL)

For this, you need people that know how to do good APIs. And the good API for an ERP is NOT Rest, GraphQL, JSON, ... (ideally, you need a DB!)

Well the UI-first thinking makes more sense, since in most cases you are solving process-problems, which involves "what does who do when?"

It's hard to communicate a process through a REST API. Sure you could document it incredibly well, maybe even have every part of your ui represented by an API endpoint, but ultimately, due to the number of customizations involved with each ERP view, you'd end up with some sort of bastard, which was never quite the same as the real deal.

It's the kind of software where early venture capital funding can be poisonous rather than helpful. Choosing the right abstractions to build a solid, flexible platform requires a lot of user feedback. You don't get the latter unless you have *paying* customers who have switched their critical processes to your product for a while. You need to build, sell, implement, and provide several upgrades. We bootstrapped a low-code BPM platform (pyrus.com) and were lucky to break even in several years. VCs push you to grow, while premature scaling could be harmful in the long term. It takes time before your platform is mature enough to serve inherently different use cases.

Most of those take a lot more time and money than YC usually offers.

There are some opportunities in "New Defense Technology". Something like a low-cost replacement for the Javelin anti-tank missile based on off the shelf phone camera parts ought to be possible. Of course, once that's out there, every insurgent group will have some.

"Explainable AI" is really important.

"Stablecoin finance" is mostly how to make sure the issuers don't steal the collateral. Maybe the people behind the stablecoin have an explosive collar welded around their neck. If the price drops, it detonates. That might work.

"Applying machine learning to robotics" has potential. Get bin-picking nailed and get acquired by Amazon. Many people have failed at this, but it might be possible now.

"Bring manufacturing back to America". Is it possible to build a cell phone in the US?

"Climate tech" - think automating HVAC and insulation selection, installation, and analysis. Installers suck at this. See previous HVAC article on HN. A phone app where you walk around and through the building with an IR camera is one place to start. Map the duct system. Take manometer readings. Crunch. That's do-able on YC-sized money.

> Maybe the people behind the stablecoin have an explosive collar welded around their neck. If the price drops, it detonates. That might work.

I hate crypto, but I love this idea. We should apply this to a lot of systems.

Make stakeholders of anything accountable. 100% skin in the game.

China sometimes does that. Zheng_Xiaoyu, the head of China's equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration, was caught taking bribes to allow tainted drugs to be sold. He was executed in 2007. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_Xiaoyu

Wow and only 40 days from sentencing to execution

Say what you want about the death penalty, but it is hard to feel sympathy for a person who, by approving dangerous pharmaceuticals after accepting bribes,

> caused the deaths of over 800 people in Panama from cough syrup that contained diethylene glycol in place of glycerin.

I agree, just was commented on the swiftness of the system

A pity the USA couldn't do the same to Elizabeth Holmes.

This is a Chesterton's fence situation - we already know the problems of HEAVY, punitive liability and accountability for everything.

But I do think we're leaning way too far towards the no-accountability side currently, and need to shift a bit further the other way.

(But I don't expect THAT to come out of a VC industry where so many prominent people and parters have track records that generally include a lot of "founded unprofitable company but kept it alive long enough to have a good exit" stories... This world lives on the perception of success, not on long-term responsibility.)

Strongly deregulate nuclear power - on condition that CEO of company operating, designer, manufacturer CEO live with families within 15km of power plant.

(unlikely to work for several reasons, may be stupid idea but looks like something that could work in not-so-different world)

> Is it possible to build a cell phone in the US?

Definitely possible, this one is mostly US-built: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/

It's a good sign that Purism can do this at all, even though it's a boutique/fringe product right now.

Note that it's $1,999+ for mostly made/assembled in USA version, vs. $999 for Purism's made in China version.

And China is more capable at scaling, if the product were ever competing on price rather than principle. So still a ways to go to be competitive at manufacturing.

It's definitely more expensive to produce in the US, but I think it's priced at $2000 because this is literally the only option for people who want/need a US-made phone. I don't think it actually costs them double to produce.

I am actually surprised it only costs double. Have you compared wages in china vs US? They went a lot higher in china by now but are still way below.

Robotics? The Japanese way?

"Bring manufacturing back to America". Is it possible to build a cell phone in the US?

I think we should start more basic and work our way up. For example, there isn't a real reason we can't produce all of our domestic iron and steel needs in the USA, but we end up importing a lot right now. Same with aluminum, etc. But this isn't something YC is really going to help with unless they are funding manufacturing and industrial tech that makes it easier/cheaper to set-up and run these types of facilities.

Cost. I don't think America should focus on mining raw materials that can be sent elsewhere so cellphones can be made which America will import back at high costs.

The US currently imports only 17% of its steel, mostly from Canada and Mexico. The US also exports steel, but imports are about 4x exports. So the US steel industry is doing OK.

60% of US steel consumption is now from recycled steel. Nucor became the largest US steel manufacturer by making that work.

US Steel is now Japanese, btw

Depending on the specific concern, I assume what mostly matters is where the facilities are, not who owns the company. (At least so long as it's an ally.)

it should be irrelevant who owns it. regulations ought to be robust enough anyway. technology export controls, worker protections (OSHA, business continuity, financial integrity, audits), market protection (no abuse of market power, ie. no dumping no Apple/platform/gatekeeper shenanigans, etc.)

Not yet. The federal government could still block it or the acquisition could fall through for other reasons.

It takes (up to) 456.23% import tariffs[0] to achieve that 17%.

So you pay china $1 million for some amount of steel (via vietnam) and then pay the us gov $4.56 million for a total cost of $5.56 million.

It’s amazing that so many steel companies are still underperforming in the USA seemingly in spite the intense protectionism.

0: https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-us-vietnam-steel-trad....

So, essentially, we can all become factory workers if we're willing to accept a drastic decrease in our standard of living.

Is the percentage of steel imports relevant, when most of the metal consumer products are coming from abroad?

Simple stuff like pots and pans, cutlery, potato mashers. Then industrial parts. Farm equipment. Eventually, cell phone frames and more sophisticated stuff. I think this is what the parent comment is alluding to.

Ywes, but if we have cheap materials here, it makes it more enticing to manufacture here as well.

We import a lot but we make a lot. I made a living supervising the manufacturing of the rolls used to roll steel in mill. We weren't exporting even the majority of the product.

You can do advanced electronics manufacturing in North America, it just has tradeoffs - primarily cost and process availability. I work for a company that builds high-end electronics over in Canada; Opinions are my own.

Advanced electronics manufacturing never left the US. The problem is that all the consumer-grade stuff left, and what's left is all really high-end military stuff, and is stupidly expensive. It's great if you're a defense contractor building some state-of-the-art weapons system that really needs the performance offered by those process technologies, but if you want to build a simple prototype for your small business, or you want to build some not-so-cutting-edge electronics in high volume for consumers, it just isn't feasible.

We’re not military, but I hear what you’re saying. Generally when I look at the costs of doing stuff onshore vs offshore it’s typically ~2x more expensive to do it here. That blows out any ambitions of competing purely on price pretty quickly for most types of product.

The is no practical reason why javelin costs the $$$ it costs post r&d which was completed in the early 1990s. The matrix and most other electronics in it are extremely basic and could be obtained off the shelve already like 20 years ago. The concept is already outdated anyway - just use a cheap drone

Some of zhe reason why a javelin costs what it costs:

- small production runs

- obsolete components

- obsolete production technology

- certification requirements

- continued support and design changes to account for the above

- the mandatory defence surcharge

From top of my head.

More or less all of these yes. I always found it ironic how the new Javelin is believed to be cheaper because the components are less mechanical and easier to source. The continued support especially. Military systems can be designed (and warrantied) to last decades if maintained properly - and that costs the big bucks.

During wartime, it may be better to design for a short lifespan. Build the seeker with ordinary AA batteries welded in instead of thermal batteries with a standby life of decades. If it's intended for Ukraine or Taiwan, skip the part temperature range that would allow the thing to sit in the sun for a year in Iraq. Seal up the unit and stencil it "NO USER SERVICEABLE PARTS INSIDE" and "USE BEFORE 2026-12-31". It will have been fired at the enemy long before then.

Considering that WW2 artillery shells were used all the way into th 70s and 80s, you might rethink that.

Ukraine is out of ammunition NOW. If the war suddenly ends and they have to dispose of warheads that will expire soon, that is a cost that can be paid. But more importantly for them is ammunition now, if that can be achieved by making the build process simple, it should probably be done.

Yes, you should tell theilitary industrial complex to produce arms and ammunitions during times of peak demand. You know, they might not have gotten the memo that they should get production volumes up.

"You know, they might not have gotten the memo that they should get production volumes up."

They don't want memos, but solid 10-15 year contracts. And since they are not getting that, not much is happening.

Ukraine is out of ammunition NOW

There's no need to be hyperbolic.

They're certainly facing a serious situation. But by all accounts they still have some runway. And if you'll check your current news feeds very carefully: no, the front hasn't collapsed, and no, the Russians aren't on the verge of overrunning Kharkiv and Odesa.

So no, Ukraine is not "out of ammunition NOW".

They have so little ammunition, that they have to think 2 or 3 times about every artillery and even more so every anti air shot they have to take. With resserves are shrinking and less and less on the way. It is hard, waging war this way. Russia on the other hand is now in war economy mode. They produce ammunition and tanks way, way faster, than the west.

So if there would be a startup saying, we can build a automated factory, spitting out cheap javelin alike warheads using off the shelf components, would surely get money, if they have some expertise.

Right, but making statements that are plainly and objectively false (simply for alarmist effect) doesn't help make that happen.

Natural language is not mathematically precise. Effectivly Ukraine is out of critical ammunition, when they have to evaulate every shot.

There is imprecise language, and then there is spin.

I might have done a bit of hyperbole to get the point across, true. But by my understanding, when you are in a war and see the enemy, but cannot shoot at them, then you are effectivly out of ammunition by my definition. Even though sure, more precise would have been, very low on ammo.

I see what you're driving at. Thanks for clarifying.

I was in trench few km from Avdiїvka for 2 weeks few days ago, and I can confirm that our artillery is out of ammunition. The silence of our artillery was horrible to listen. When we cannot use our drones because of fog, heavy snow, or strong wind, Russians are advancing because we have no shells enough to fire at them.

You can't immediately scale up manufacturing. People have to be trained, parts have to be procured, and facilities made available to build the things. Ramp-up takes months, and if you're lucky the product is well established already so you aren't stepping on landmines as you scale. I helped to restart a mothballed process for a military product once and I have stories that you wouldn't believe.

You’re advocating general motors approach over tesla/spacex approach. Tesla is selling millions of evs every year now an gm, boeing and friends are with you making excuses about training people and their process

I'm not advocating any approach. I'm telling you, as someone who has years of experience in the field of defense manufacturing, that one cannot force manufacturing processes into existence through sheer will. My posts on the topic are for the edification of whoever reads them, convincing anyone isn't my concern as ultimately it isn't HN comments that are going to change the situation. Maybe SpaceX should start making Javelins by the millions (:

For context btw: I oversaw the production of hundreds (if not into the thousands) of the Javelins we sent to Ukraine. Two of my coworkers were Ukrainian too. Do not mistake my brutal realism for a lack of caring about the situation.

> that one cannot force manufacturing processes into existence through sheer will

That worked for russia but somehow doesn't work in the west?

I mostly lack experience in defense tech beyond being a user but ime it often doesn't work as well as the certificate (which probably cost a lot of effort to obtain) states it does. I'm of the opinion that we need to radically rethink our approach here if we hope to deter or withstand potential conflict with china in the next 10 years.

And now imagine how that stuff would work if certification requirements were lower.

Regarding China, I thought the same thing. Until Ukraine. Because as it turned out, that being at constant, if low intensity, war for basically all the time since Vietnam and Korea (at least since Gulf War 2 over Kuweit), really has benefits for the warfighting capability of countries. NATO, and especially the US, have that. Russia and China don't. And it shows, Russia didn't walz over Ukraine the way the West did over Iraq. And China has to deal with an amphibious invasion against a country that had decades to prepare for just that. Which leaves the question of supply lines across the pacific for a prolonged conflict. And there my money really is on western navies.

Just as a reminder, Russia is at a war economy by now, and still has to source from North Korea. All the while, NATO countries are just emptying stockpiles and slowly, maybe too slow, replenishing them. And despite that, all Russia got is a stalemate.

"Russia didn't walz over Ukraine the way the West did over Iraq"

Not really the same thing. Iraq was very low on quality military supplies with years of sanctions before that.

And Russia did walz over Georgia in 2008 and Russia would have walzed over Ukraine in 2014 (some russian military was enough to capture lots of ground back then). But much happened between 2014 and 2022.

The Russians certainly did scale up as you say, but there are underlying issues that have remained with them. Captured equipment has shown issues, some of which are potentially fatal to the user. The quality of work is poor and leads to a high failure rate. They do, however, make plenty of them - which has an advantage. Go to the war museum and look at any soviet tank built between 1940 and 1945, the welds look terrible and some are even missing the full complement of armor plating. They made thousands of them though.

The Western powers are not treating the situation as if they themselves were at war, hence no drastic changes in economic output to favor war machines. We have increased production though. Can't say how much, but it would raise eyebrows. I feel we should have been far more generous with the munitions, especially the older aircraft (think F-16, F-18) early on.

The certificates are basically just a paper trail. The aluminium is aircraft grade, the optics in spec, EMI shielding is sufficient, etc. We do extensive testing, but things slip through. Some issues are storage-related, and others are issues that don't show up til years later - such as microscopic ESD damage. Much of what we've been giving Ukraine was in storage for a while.

Out of interest, since you seem really knowledgeable: is there any reason no one ever mentions shipping VT fuzes to Ukraine? They seemed to work really nicely in the Battle of the Bulge, and the US is likely to have a vast stockpile of Cold War era fuzes. If they make the sparse shells even marginally more effective, it'd probably be worth it, yet there is not a whisper of their existence.

It isn't as simple as "make a new design with a shorter lifespan" either. These systems are intended to work the first time every time, and every change introduces numerous second-order consequences. You swapped the batteries? Great the balance of the missile now changed and we have to re-calculate the flight dynamics. Remove some shielding and conformal coating? Now the thermal properties have changed on the control boards and the welds are cracking due to different heat propagation. We certainly could make them cheap and dirty, but their reliability and consistency would suffer. The last thing you want is to shoot a missile and piss off the guy on the receiving end, who isn't dead but is now very motivated to get revenge.

I think this is why we're seeing that the type of founders YC usually funds in these industries aren't going through YC and choosing alternative methods of getting started.

What part of a cell phone do you think we can't make?

Do we have the aluminum milling capacity at scale?

Can we manufacture touch screens at scale?

Can we manufacture Li-ion batteries at scale? (Tesla and Panasonic might be able to, with large new investments, but I don't think there's anybody ready to go)

Do we have 3nm fab capacity? (TSMC is planning to build one, but AFAIK not yet)

Do we have the ability to manufacture various sensors at scale? (Some likely yes - ambient light, inertial - some no)

What about image sensors? (Maybe, Omnivision is probably the best candidate, but I don't think they can currently do 48MP. ON Semiconductor is also a good chunk away from that, AFAIK)

I think that's a sufficient number of parts to claim we currently can't make cell phones, as long as you define cell phone as "current gen cell phone". We could probably retool relatively quickly back to at least cell phones, but even that is AFAIK not a current capacity.

Can we _theoretically_ do all that? Sure. But we can't right now, or within short time frames, and we can't without significant investment.

That aluminum milling scaling problem itself is like, an entire category of hard.

CNC machines are hard to scale anything more than linearly. We need to train up hundreds of thousands to become CNC machinists. An entire support industry for machine maintenance, tooling manufacturing (an even harder problem), consumable commodities needs to be similarly scaled in parallel.

> We need to train up hundreds of thousands to become CNC machinists

What? Are you suggesting that aluminium phone cases nowadays are created by an army of trained CNC machinists? And not programmed once by a (few) dozen engineers per model of the handful of existing phone models and then executed by highly automated factories and an army of "low-skilled" workers.

Completely automated machining cells have been a thing for a long time.

True, but hiring CNC programmers is a significant limiting factor in growing such businesses.

That army of “low-skilled” workers are highly skilled machine operators.

CNC programming isn’t generally performed by engineers—it is currently mostly performed by veteran machine operators.

To get enough veteran machine operators who have the skill and talent to program at the level necessary for high-precision consumer goods, you need quite the workforce pool.

And then add in all the other CNC machinists and manufacturing engineers you need for the auxiliary industries (tooling, molding, the machines themselves) and it starts to add up.

Don’t forget every other industry that is competing for this labor pool.

Modems :D

The chips. Which are... kind of the most important part, arguably. Hopefully Intel's new fabs will help.

Low cost swarm of drones for new defense technology.

We have seen consumer grade DJI drone use in Ukraine-Russia war by both sides.

AI to control a swarm of cheap drones to survey and kill?

The DJI drones are even too costly, the current gen of FPV drones used in the field capable of busting a BMP at 10km distance cost like 400 USD tops.

Longer range systems cost a bit more, but not a whole lot much more.

Improvements that are desirable are generally in terms of range, endurance, sensors and resistance to electronic warfare.

Copying the silent prop design from Zipline would also be neat to reduce the sound signature and give the enemy less time to react…

It’s not like you can hear a drone approaching, while driving APC/BMP, though. For bomber-type quads, sure, it probably can make a difference.

Is this a serious suggestion, or a warning for why there's no place for move-fast-and-kill-things startups in the defense space? No one should be working on this, especially not involving AI in any way.

> No one should be working on this

Well, given the fact that people are working on it, and many of them probably don't like you so much, it's a good idea for "the people you call friendly" to work on it.

"Our doomsday scheme cost us just a small fraction of what we'd been spending on defense in a single year. But the deciding factor was when we learned that your country was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a doomsday gap."

In Ukraine, hundreds of small teams are working on new drones or other military tech, like radars, camouflage, shelters, demining, etc., but they are low on money.

I personally have some ideas based on my own experience in war, but I cannot make them while in a trench.

Fun fact about the Javelin bit. I know it was just a throwaway example but something to tickle your brain about it:

Phone camera parts would be overkill. The Javelin sensor isn't nearly that high-resolution, we're talking low triple digits in "pixels". It does however refresh its readings very fast, a necessity given its speed. The old Javelin used active cryo and a filtered IR imager, the new one is passive like the IR camera in some phone attachments. It is stupidly simple in operation: CLU provides the target "signature" and the imager seeks it. After the initial ascent in top-down mode, a stronger signal on one edge of the sensor pushes the control surfaces in the opposite direction until it strikes its target. I'd give the Wikipedia page a read. It contains a surprising amount of information that informs the design and thought behind the missile. Military systems are cool for how robust yet simple they are.

There's a teardown of a Javelin missile guidance system on Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11_5TB0-lNw

I used to work on the Javelin guidance system "seeker head". It's wild seeing him tear it apart. Questions like "what is this for" make me laugh. It's all seen as dead simple, but a lot of engineering went into manufacturing them even as recently as a few years ago. Funny he thinks the sampler chip was expensive, he should look up the cost of the optics!

One thing I’ve been thinking about re: Javelin (and MANPADS)—would it be better to be able to fire them remotely? ie let soldiers put a set of launch tubes in a bush or behind a rock, then use the targeting system from a separate location. That way, the solders’ location isn’t revealed by firing the missile. Better yet if you can strap the tubes to a robot dog.

Another idea: drone AWACS. I mean, a drone with radar to detect other drones (and other aircraft).

Doing anything remotely means using radio signals to control the thing, and that becomes the main weakness: radio signals can be jammed. You could try other means of communication, like lasers, though, but those too have their own weaknesses.

line of sight laser pulses would work.

Lasers are not all-weather systems.

In fact, as far as I know, they are a one-weather system: clear.

Cables.

Wire guided ordonance exists since th 70s, torpedoes, missiles...

The Germans had wire guided missiles in WW2.

The Stugna anti-tank-guided-missile seems to indeed have this feature:

"...that is connected to the firing unit by a cable, allowing it be used at distances up to 50 metres (160 ft) away"

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skif_(anti-tank_guided_missile...

>If the price drops, it detonates. That might work.

I would hate to cross you. That is scary.

> how to make sure the issuers don't steal the collateral

I think they are looking for a "decentralized" solution where the collateral is held by a smart contract.

> "Bring manufacturing back to America". Is it possible to build a cell phone in the US?

US is offering money, so why not take it?

> I think they are looking for a "decentralized" solution where the collateral is held by a smart contract.

Problem is that unless the asset is virtual, it's going to actually be held by a legal person in the real world, not the smart contract, and it's not ideal to have a stable coin collateralised only by another virtual asset (although makerdao seems to make it work so far).

I think the main innovations here wouldn't be technical but legal, since good solutions to this problem involve the interface between the real world and the blockchain. I remember reading about a legal structure where real assets were held by a trust for the benefit of the owner of an NFT or something, but I'm sure there are other things you could do with the right legal structure, or possibly a central bank or a jurisdiction like Estonia could come up with something that would engender a lot of confidence.

These are all so CapEx intensive it is totally disconnected from YC reality. Which implies if this is really what YC thinks is the direction we are headed, then the approach will essentially be much fewer bets at larger check sizes, for a very small subset. Also the business model for some of these is not exactly obvious. It’s either that or, public equity and/or massive debt heavy capex financing becomes more prevalent earlier on, so some type of high risk debt instrument. Alternatively this is partly a content marketing play to show how forward thinking and visionary they are.

Today I learned that YC not only funds military companies, but encourages new startups to focus on killing machines and spying. And to point to the spy firm Palantir as an example of a model company shows how morally bankrupt YC truly is. Anything for a buck, right? All this while those same defense firms are currently making tens of billions of dollars supplying hardware to kill hundreds of civilians a day right this very instant.

Make bombs people want, I see.

See “American Dynamism”

https://a16z.com/american-dynamism/

It’s a moral stance, explicitly

The founders that work in defense are mission driven. they see nation-state preservation as a moral issue.

They would fail to “make a buck” if that was their only goal, as is the case in most industries/sectors

Respectfully, I’d encourage you to review the HN guidelines. Skepticism is welcome here, but even cursory research will show that the founders in defense have deeply personal reasons for building what they do.

That closing line is hilarious tho

> The founders that work in defense are mission driven

That's not really saying anything, since it doesn't say anything about what their mission is. Sure, you have to be mission driven to get things done and lots of good and necessary things have been accomplished by people who were mission driven, but every villain in history was mission driven too. To point at someone and say "they are mission driven" as if being mission driven is on its own evidence that someone is good is at best naive.

> they see nation-state preservation as a moral issue.

hmm, surely at no time in history was a bad thing done by a leader who believed that nation-state preservation was a moral issue.

> They would fail to “make a buck” if that was their only goal

A somewhat peculiar and unsubstantiated claim about an industry that famously makes enormous amounts of money.

> See “American Dynamism”

I'm not really sure what sort of point you're trying to make here other than "VCs like defense companies".

I think you are asking for clarification?

(If not, I’m not seeking to argue the fundamental point you appear to be making that “if you fund defense you cannot be moral.”)

In the order you present:

>mission Im taking “moral” to mean “for a purpose of doing good.” Assuming the “doing good” is a combo of opinion on what is helpful and some feeling (such as empathy or a sense of honor), my experience with founders who sell to defense that they are moral people.

It’s possible to genuinely disagree about what “doing good” is without assuming the other person is immoral.

>nation-state On this we fully agree. However, I’ve not seen any other form of group identity escape this dilemma. I would be genuinely interested to learn of it.

>making a buck I get that this seems like a strange thing to say. But go to any industry and try to sell a 7 figure deal. Very quickly you will find there are “in group” tests, the tests are significant, and there are certain “sacred cow” values you must ascribe to. “Making a buck” is the job for everyone in business so it’s a poor purity test.

Here’s another way to think of it: if you are buying from a vendor who’s only motivation is to “make a buck,” how can you trust they won’t stick you with a problematic product after they’ve gotten the money? Government purchasing is a massively complicated process precisely to address this issue, but it is still the social fabric between buyers and sellers that is determinant when selecting speculative, new vendors (aka buying from startups).

Respectfully, we are both making unsubstantiated claims here. I’m sharing my personal observations.

>American Dynamism Politics has an outsized role today in the fortunes of companies. There are actually very few VCs with a footprint in defense and many suffered significant paper losses due to public reactions to it.

SWEs have a huge influence on what gets funded. If you can’t recruit tier 1 tech talent, you can’t build great tech companies.

In this case, a VC has built a media company and is going out making the case for investing in American Defense knowing that it will cost them relationship capital with a very large amount of the tech sector.

The reason I’m engaging with you on all of this is that, on HN at least, I think it matters to “pierce the veil” on founder motivations. “Making a buck”is a simplistic, dismissive take on why people found companies and I don’t think our community should accept it as a reasonable assertion. They are far less risky ways for talented people to make money than founding a startup and very few get such a fortunate outcome.

Let me give you a real example - a founder friend of mine helps the Pentagon replace gas powered equipment with EV powered ones.

Enabling the US to have a more mobile & resilient supply chain is a benefit the founder believes in. He considers himself a patriot.

But it’s not the company’s mission. The mission is to take on climate change. The US military is one of the greatest contributors to factors driving climate change, so it’s an important customer in terms of both mission and of course revenue.

If you’ve concluded that money is the only motivation people have for being in a business you disagree with, this probably isn’t a discussion you’ll get much value out of.

My guess is, you think it is wrong that VCs are taking a moral stance that building defense capabilities is something tech companies should be doing. Leaving no room for their humanity is one way to attack that.

But I am no longer willing to accept that tactic. I think it is more dangerous than any other. If we refuse to see the humanity of the people we disagree with, we’ve already set the stage for wanton destruction after our time here on this planet. History is full of such examples.

Apologies if I’ve been ungenerous or missed your point here. I’d be grateful to learn what I’m missing.

This is a very thoughtful and well argued comment and really informative.

I commend you for taking the time and effort to write this so well, despite the original comment being somewhat snarky and clearly opinionated.

I'm personally a pacifist and would like to end all wars, all weapons production, etc, but we currently do not have a way to enforce that over the whole world.

So the realistic view is that given that currently we have wars, need weapons, etc - it does make sense that YC would fund companies that develop new ones or new technologies in the space. Even if nobody really wants to hurt people.

Respectfully, I'm aware of all of the fancy words investment firms hide behind to make themselves sleep at night when they're really building killing machines. I'm sure plenty of them have patriotic stories they tell about protecting the nation they live in. That doesn't mean I need to buy into their narrative.

These war firms will appear whether or not YC funds them. YC chosing to explicitly call for more war firms shows they put the acquisition of even more extravagant wealth over human lives.

> Anything for a buck, right?

So, how would the US defend itself against countries like China and Russia if no one built weapons? Everyone agrees weapons can be used in ethically horrendous ways. It doesn't follow from that, that the US doesn't need a weapons industry.

YC doesn't need to be funding the weapons industry; they're already filthy rich. This shows their greed outweighs any moral quandries around building machines of death.

Move fast and break things*

*By things we mean people.

Travel to foreign countries, meet interesting people, kill them and break their stuff.

Ukraine suffer from daily Russia's drone attack. How about a low cost network that detects, disables or shots down those drones before they can get to their targets? That also, and truly is, a defense system.

Do you have any problems with that?

I don't see anything in YC's call saying they would only fund defensive capabilities (which is itself somewhat of a misnomer since it doesn't take much engineering to turn "defensive" tech into offensive weapons of war). YC looks like it is open to funding all forms of warfare.

I would still like to see RFS 5 "Development on Handhelds" (https://web.archive.org/web/20140428231118/http://ycombinato...) fulfilled. I asked sama about it in 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10361215. The state of the art has advanced since. Termux (https://termux.dev/en/) on Android is a viable development environment. With a Debian PRoot (https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/PRoot), it feels a lot like "normal Linux". What I want to see, though, is something that takes advantage of graphics and touch input. Structural touch-based editing of s-expressions in particular seems like it could be practical and fun. Think Snap! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap!_(programming_language)) but built for multitouch devices.

Something like copilot can really help with bridging the gap created by not having a full size keyboard.

I'm loving my rechargeable bluetooth keyboard & mouse which are really made to compensate for limitations of touchscreens.

The keyboard I have is about the size of an ipad itself so there is no numeric keypad, and it's about as heavy as a tablet too since this one has a slanted slot in the back to slip the tablet or phone into, portrait or landscape, at a good angle for use so the combination acts not much differently than a laptop.

If it wasn't so heavily weighted it would topple over backward when you left the tablet in the slot. There are other bluetooth ones that are lightweight which should be just as useful if you have a different way to support the device.

Sometimes a hardware solution is ideal, other times software, most of the time with digital devices it's good to consider both and have lots of options which parts of the heavy lifting are where.

I love the MX Keys Mini [0]

Solid construction and a sleek feel. Pretty small form factor. But I love the multi-device support. Simple shortcut (Fn+F1, F2, or F3) to switch between devices.

Pair to my laptop, phone, and watch and use it for all my types everywhere.

[0] https://www.logitech.com/en-us/products/keyboards/mx-keys-mi...

> RFS 5 "Development on Handhelds"

I have ideas that I would love to explore given funding.

For the AR/VR space, I'm curious about YCs thinking about the addressable market and the possibility to have a unicorn-scale company developing solely for VR/AR in the foreseeable future (that isn't a device manufacturer).

The devices seem to be getting better and better, but the software seems rather lacking (currently typing this from a gorgeous giant display on my Vision Pro, which I use mostly exactly like how I would use my computer). Even in gaming, where the use-case is a lot more mature, we haven't seen the kinds of investment in AAA content that you'd expect, even though clearly the platforms could benefit from it.

I'm curious what YCs thinking is, and if perhaps they just feel no one has earnestly taken it on yet?

Augmedix was built off Google Glass, and is a public company. Not a unicorn though.

Hi there, I wrote this RFP. We like to back strong technical founders, and some may be interested in working in AR/VR like I did years ago. You are right that the software is lacking which is more of an opportunity. Wrt with the market, yes, it is still very nascent, so founders working on this space have to be be very excited and inherently believe in it in the long run.

Technical founder in the VR/AR space here. Not in a rush so have discounted YC in the past, still may be worth a short chat. Use the "Apply" link on the RFS page?

I think the larger dev ecosystem has created a bit of backlash against the big players for some time and aren't quick to adopt the new tech they are dishing out. I would guess taking a 30% cut, lawsuits, and unfair terms has left a sour taste in everyone's mouth.

And it wasn't until competition stepped up with an indie dev, aka a YouTube VR app called Juno made for the Vision Pro, that even Google decided to jump into developing YouTube for the Vision Pro.

So now we are back at the chicken and the egg problem and few big devs want to support the giants. It'll happen probably eventually when monetization becomes a reality for devs embracing the tech but I don't see it happening any time soon.

Eliminating middlemen in healthcare

In the spirit of Jeff Bezos’ “your margin is my opportunity”, we believe it’s possible to build a highly profitable business and make the system more efficient at the same time.

Didn't Amazon try this and is now shutting down part of its healthcare (pill selling) play?

Health Care is one field where nobody can seriously compete with state or state navked players, aka public health care or single payer.

Especially not VC backed start-ups...

What's the reason for this? Is this because of extensive regulation due to insurer/hospital lobbying and patient safety laws?

Patient and health care regulation, for good reasons, but basically the number of shoulders to spread individual risks across (aka insurance). The latter is much easier when backed, directly or indirectly, by nation state households and budgets. Nothing beats the ability of controlling your own currency.

There is plenty of space for VC backed start-ups to compete in healthcare. It would be foolish to go head-to-head with a company like HCA or UnitedHealth Group. But there is a lot of opportunity to sell them better software which improves the experience for everyone in the system. Or build better medical devices or improve efficiency in the drug development process or a zillion other niche areas.

Someone needs to tackle Epic in the EMR space and overthrow their closed system.

Y Combinator has already funded several Epic competitors in the EHR space including DrChrono, Medplum, and Akute Health. Always room for more. The requirements for an EHR that can work in any provider organization are so overwhelming that no startup could directly compete against Epic. But a startup could initially target a particular medical specialty or facility type that Epic doesn't support very well, then expand out from there.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/healthcare-it

Epic is no longer a closed system. They now support a wide range of open standard APIs.

https://open.epic.com/

There needs to be anti-trust action taken against Epic.

Amazon partnered with Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan on that project. They had a built-in base of employees larger than the population of Wyoming. Still failed.

They didn't go big enough: they should have become a payer/insurer. If they started with their ~1M US employees and then applied the flywheel to HC insurance, they could have essentially created a single-payer system by default.

Slightly scary to think about Amazon having a near monopoly on healthcare, but ask yourself whether our current reality is better or worse…

Amazon is already an insurer, and has been for years. They are self-insured for the health plans they offer to employees, and only rely on third-party payers for network management and claims administration. They could take that part in house but it's a low-margin business where they would have no particular advantage.

You mean they provide self-funded insurance, or are literally underwriting plans? It's quite common for companies to be self-funded/"self-insured," but rely on a large payer like Aetna to do all the work.

If they cut out the middleman, they could negotiate directly with providers and Pharma, lowering the "fully loaded" cost of their payroll. It would be a massive savings.

Once they did it for 1M people, the hard work would be over, and they could sell Amazon plans to the public.

They use Premea Blue cross for administration of the plan.

They created a joint venture with JP Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway several years ago called Havaen to try and fix insurance; however, it was shut down. https://hbr.org/2021/01/why-haven-healthcare-failed

There's no real underwriting per se. My understanding is that Amazon just pays claims as those come in. They rely on large payers to do all the network and formulary management including negotiating rates with providers. There's no reason to expect that Amazon could negotiate lower rates than Aetna, which already covers 22M lives.

In order to achieve any real savings, Amazon would have to build up a captive provider organization with practitioners as direct employees. Which all of the large payers are also increasingly doing. Basically the industry is consolidating and converging on the Kaiser Permanente business model. Eventually most US residents will obtain healthcare from a handful of huge nationwide "payvider" organizations.

Yes, and Amazon could have jumped in. They already had providers via Care and One Medical. It would have been a small leap to buy whole hospital systems.

ELIMINATING MIDDLEMEN IN HEALTHCARE

by creating another middleman in healthcare. This was first proposed by Jim Clark's Healtheon. "We want to empower the doctors and the patients and get all the other assholes out of the way." … "Except for us. One asshole in the middle." — The New New Thing, Michael Lewis.

The reason we spend so much is that public healthcare is a public good and private companies aren't good at managing public goods. They're good at making money which is a different purpose (which has probably served most people reading this very well). We need Single Payer. Indeed we have Single Payer in Medicare and TriCare and other areas. It works pretty well. We need to eliminate middlemen in healthcare by actually eliminating rent seeking middlemen in healthcare.

Yeah, this one is weird, the middlemen are there because we allow rent-seeking behaviour whether by insurance companies, complex corporate structures that have taken over practices, PBMs, etc. etc. Those aren't going away if we make things "more efficient" with technology, there is too much money to be made in the inefficiencies.

There’s only one way to ‘eliminate the middle man’, and that’s universal health care

So there are no middle(people) in Medicare? Or the defense industry? Single payer may just as likely future calcify the structures.

> So there are no middle(people) in Medicare? Or the defense industry?

Sooooo close to getting it.

I checked out "How does Medicare work?" [1] and, wow, that's so much more complicated than healthcare in Canada. A big part of the problem is that Medicare has to work within the current broken structure of the US health care system and pay those same middlemen.

> Single payer may just as likely future calcif[ied] the structures.

But what the US has is so much worse than the how the rest of the developed world has "calcify the structures".

[1] https://www.medicare.gov/basics/get-started-with-medicare/me...

Healthcare is not a public good. It is both excludable and rivalrous. In fact, it is the exact opposite of a public good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)

Single Payer would go a long way towards making our healthcare system non-excludable and non-rivalrous. What we have, the MIDDLEMEN which the post complains about, are rent seekers.

No it wouldn’t. That makes no sense. You have no idea what “excludable” and “rivalrous” mean. Please read a few Wikipedia articles.

Good to know.

Maybe you can rephrase in a way us peasants understand your point as well without a dictionary?

Excludable = you can exclude people from benefiting from it. (E.g., Fixing global warming is not excludable while temperature control in your own house is.)

Rivalrous = more people getting it leads to less for others. (E.g., Software is not rivalrous, but hardware is.)

I wanted a rephrased statement, not a dictionary extract. Because I still have no clue what your piont is.

My point is just that the words this guy is using have commonly-accepted meanings and he’s using them wrong.

>The reason we spend so much is that public healthcare is ... We need Single Payer.

Lots of countries do not have single payer healthcare, and have an insurance system that resembles America's, yet they don't have America's ridiculous prices.

> Lots of countries do not have single payer healthcare, and have an insurance system that resembles America's,

No, they don't, beyond “private insurance exists”. The US has the largest share of the population uncovered by health insurance in the OECD besides Mexico, and that's after improving considerably because of the ACA.

>No, they don't, beyond “private insurance exists”.

Yes, they do. Here in Japan, everyone is covered by either government insurance, or private insurance that's partially paid by their employer. Sound familiar? Germany's system is similar. These are not single-payer systems.

The healthcare industry will never be "revolutionized" by just a few million dollars in venture funding. The core revenue backbone of healthcare is not healthcare itself, but rather "bureaucracy as a service." A true revolution in healthcare would involve a brutally simplified exposure of costs and impact, divided between each individual element and organization in the invoice.

No country in the world can address this without a government organization. You start by telling patients where their money goes in a transparent way and which organizations benefit from it. That is it.

The problem is the trust aspect of this level of transparency. There is so much money (large insurance and healthcare groups) and chaos (biotech stocks), making it extremely difficult for businesses to be reliable to individuals as a business. To run a business, you need money, and to operate a business like this, you need an unconditional amount of money for the long term. VCs can take care of the unconditional giving of money, but they are never long-term. They will badger the investee to join the darkside of healthcare because they need an answer in 5 years of series A whether the startup is going to be a unicorn or not.

It does sound strange to me. Other countries have much lower healthcare costs per capita than the US. They achieved that without any need for groundbreaking VC-funded startups. Perhaps there are some lower-hanging fruits here.

The US has a lot higher labor costs than nost other countries and healthcare is labor intensive, per capita costs should be higher ib the US.

OTOH, US costs are higher than that would explain, much higher than most other countries on a share of GDP basis even. So, yeah, there's some low hanging fruit, much of it in public policy around healthcare financing.

>New defense technology

If you want to build machines that kill people, you should at least be willing to say it clearly. If it makes you uncomfortable to talk about, maybe that should tell you something. And it's not a very good excuse to argue that you didn't build a weapon, you just built something that makes it easier to use weapons.

Arms races are not the way. The biggest threat to the West isn't somebody else's weapons, it's that Indonesia's elections today went to a candidate who doesn't want to align with the West, relations with India are increasingly strained, and even Brazil and Turkey are starting to lean out. Geopolitics is politics, and politics requires appeal. Our brand image is significantly worse than two decades ago, as far as I can see.

If the West can't gain allies on friendly terms and maintains power through the development of ever-more advanced military technology, then what kind of world have we built, exactly?

It's extremely disappointing to see this.

Countries need to defend themselves, and sometimes defend their allies, and not having had to defend yourself in the recent past does not mean you won't need to defend yourself in the near future. Having a robust, capable network of defensive technologies requires a lot of investment and a lot of people, and decades to build. You can't spin up a national defense overnight. The difference between defensive technology and offensive technology is very, very blurry even among people extremely familiar with the topic, which 99% of us here are not.

Pretending any of these objective truths are wrong is folly and ignores a dozen millennia of human history.

There will always be individuals/organizations/countries that don't the "the West" as an ally. Some subset of that will be outwardly hostile to Western ideology, and some subset of that will be willing and able to use violence as a means to their end. The fact that some Western countries have impressive militaries doesn't somehow mean they should stop investing in that technology.

> If you want to build machines that kill people, you should at least be willing to say it clearly.

Well maybe that's not at all what they're saying.

Perhaps you could share what you consider the least extreme version of "building machines that kill people." Building missiles - OK yeah obviously. Improving satellites which are used for information gathering which could be used for missions where people are killed? Does that fall within "building machines that kill people?" What is the mildest example of something that constitutes "building machines that kill people?"

It’s funny how morally bankrupt you are. It’s wrong to spend on defense but you want us to smile and embrace autocracy? If India assassinates our citizens you want us to smile and hug them?

People making returns for YC are now directly funding future startups which will be used to facilitate genocides.

Sad day for YC.

This is the first YC request for startups I’ve seen in a long time that I’ve found inspiring

I’m not sure the companies who actually have a shot at solving any of them can benefit from YCs approach or even network

Most of the industries are won through long standing insiders partnering with exceptional engineering talent

Not really YCs model

I wasn't sure if it was intentionally misleading, or just impossibly naive. ERP software loved by its customers for its flexibility and ease of use.... For decades, everyone has known that robots are the future... Eliminating middlemen in <anything>... Apple Vision Pro is the key to unlocking "Spatial Computing"... For society to reap the full benefits of AI, more work needs to be done on explainable AI...

Some of these are "necessary but not sufficient", others just plain platitudes.

That may be the best summary of “app startup practices to real life” in one sentence I’ve seen. Kudos.

Of course YC can't compete with the latter hence why the vast vast majority will not succeed, but it's the select few that do succeed that covers the cost of the rest.

Education related efforts are missing from your list and it's one that stands to benefit the most from the current AI gold rush.

> We have a fair chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change if startups offer commercial solutions to decarbonize society or remove carbon from the atmosphere.

Either this is sloppily phrased, or the SV techno-optimist kool-aid is way stronger than I would have thought plausible. Does anyone seriously believe that a reasonable solution to climate change has exactly one thing on the list and it's "more climate tech start-ups"? Of course climate tech has to play a role (we need everything we can throw at the problem), and start-ups will certainly provide a subset of that tech, but claiming that this alone provides "a fair chance" is extremely revealing of certain bias (and ignorance)

What point are you trying to make exactly?

I believe startups can still make it if they can crack making solar + battery cheaper than $0.15/kwh, or bio fuels cheaper than gasoline.

The sun is free 1.3kw / meter energy for ~5 hours in the sun belt states.

While I agree the phrasing could be better from YC, there is also truth to that statement. A lot of solutions to decarbonize have fallen flat on their faces to become a commercially viable solution. Ideas and new technology are needed as companies everywhere have shown they will not take the necessary action if it impacts the bottom line.

Doesn’t that just mean that maybe we should drop the requirement for commercial viability? Everything looks like a nail and all that.

Indeed. On the other hand there is absolute certainty that very, very large sums of money will be made mitigating the current and future impact of change. Maybe decarbonization matters and a maybe not, but rising seas and changing weather aren’t getting better anytime soon and there are real, human centric problems to be solved now and for the foreseeable future.

YC is simply missing the boat here. Pun intended.

Oh it is already happening. There is an enormous amount of innovation, and "clean tech" is getting more efficient and less expensive by the day. You just barely hear about it because it gets muffled by all the screaming of a handful of activists who'd rather see us living in caves again.

There is a pretty big middle ground between “tech will solve every climate related problem on every axis” and “wanting to see us living in caves again”. Polar extremes are just childish.

There is an unfulfilled niche for rapid defense applications. If you have ever used a military information system you are already fully aware of the many constraints imposed for security. I have always bypassed these limitations by writing my own applications in JavaScript because they simply execute in the browser.

I have always found it interesting that JavaScript is one of the most consumed programming languages in the world and nobody can write in it, especially in the browser. When I say write in it I mean without abstraction libraries (React, Angular, jQuery, and so on) and doing something other than CRUD apps. Until last year I was writing JS full time and met only 3 or 4 other people who do this and of them had security clearances.

There is a huge opportunity there that nobody is filling. While the talent for it is completely absent the surprising thing is that it’s ridiculously easy to train for provided the candidates are smart enough to follow simple instructions and write original code.

Writing your own programs in the browser can be great fun, I enjoy loitering in the Javascript console as much as the next guy (did?). I’m surprised to hear that’s not common anymore.

But it doesn’t sound like bypassing the “constraints imposed for security” is the desired outcome for the bosses, so who are you selling to?

Who are you selling to? Anybody with a budget. That could be other contractors. Any enduring units. Any commands.

A JavaScript application could be anything that loads in a webpage but not necessarily from a server or domain. That could mean pasted into the console as you suggested, a SharePoint utility, any web page that does not sending data to the server, as well as pages opened from the local file system.

The primary considerations for success are high portability, data saved in the browser’s localStorage, applications that execute in the browser as opposed to on a server, no dependencies, and high performance.

The primary requirement outside of the necessary JS skills would be a security clearance I assume, correct?

That is certainly helpful when working in the defense sector and in some will absolutely be required.

As a follow up comment I would say let the business requirements of a given client dictate the need for clearance. However, it takes so long to achieve a clearance it costs less to simply hired cleared people or pay for the clearance as a part of employee on-boarding.

If I were to do this as a real business I would always impose formal language training in the JavaScript language, so prior JavaScript experience is a largely irrelevant indicator of compatibility. That is because experiences writing the language professionally vary wildly in the market place and quality of code authorship is exceedingly rare. Producing high quality output is not challenging, but most people doing this for a job completely lack proper guidance or shouldn't be there in the first place.

Therefore the most ideal candidates are people who can be trained to a very high standard. I would filter for that first and then optionally filter for clearance secondly. You will be investing in these people so be choosy by potential, intelligence, writing skills, and organizational capacity.

Anybody interested in talking to a potential customer for:

* Developer tools inspired by existing internal tools

* LLMs for manual back office processes in legacy enterprises

Feel free to message me. Having worked in-house for the last 15 years, I've seen a variety of these, have built more than a few of them myself, and am in the middle of building some new ones using LLMs right now — all within large enterprise legal departments.

I won't be able to share any confidential data, but I'm happy to answer questions about patterns I've seen across a few different organizations and where the unmet needs seem to be.

Hi, I'm interested in learning more, let's chat - onepaulmbw@gmail.com

Hey - can you shoot an email to seth@skysight.cloud? Curious what you've seen.

I am interested too! https://yzena.com/contact/

Hi there, I would be interested in a chat about those back-office patterns and use cases. Could you send an email to a2V2aW4gQCBkZW94eSAuIG5ldA==

Would love to talk about the back-office processes. Let's connect via sam@instance.co.jp

interested - @arach in twitter or arach@tchoupani.com

Am interested to chat about back office processes in legacy enterprise. Can you pls drop me a note at ramkris@getflavor.ai ?

I'd love to chat as well if you've still got bandwidth — I'm at alex@kolch.in

Thanks, appreciate it!

It's surprising to me that Tech never seems interested in conflict resolution. A lot of issues in the world are basically negotiation problems, yet they get treated as competitive ones. A better world is probably one in which conflicts are defused early, not one in which arms races are treated as the default.

Why is that? Is conflict resolution too much of a non-tech thing and more in the realm of politics? Or is there simply no money to be made in reducing warfare and hostile nation-state competitions?

I don't have an answer for your questions but this comment really stood out to me. Maybe it's just my years in tech, but I have never thought of conflict resolution in the context of a tech problem to solve. The only format of this I can think of is anonymous forums or communications tech. Otherwise, it's very out of the box thinking which is great to see.

One example that came to mind was providing information on various sides of an issue (I’m thinking of alternative media, Wikipedia in some sense, although it’s still a bit biased.) Essentially the internet as a communication medium allows for more viewpoints to be distributed and understood. Unfortunately in practice, no one is really using it to try and understand each other and solve conflicts. Instead, they’re still trying to push certain viewpoints and exclude others.

When PG wrote this essay (last year?) about climate tech, it was a deep dive into what the problems were, what the potential solutions and roadblocks could be, and who they're looking to fund in that space. This essay is "Solve cancer," "stablecoin finance," and "ml in robotics." Like, thanks for the insights, lol.

which essay is that? having trouble finding it

Small comment about the "Stable Coins":

> $136b worth of stablecoins have been issued to date but the opportunity seems much more immense still. Only about seven million people have transacted with stablecoins to date, while more than half a billion live in countries with 30%+ inflation. U.S. banks hold $17b in customer deposits which are all up for grabs as well. And yet the major stablecoin issuers can be counted on one hand and the major liquidity providers with just a few fingers.

This is not entirely true. There has been a stable coin for over 50 years now, and most billionaires should be familiar with it because it's used to pay for satphone calls.

SDR (Special Drawing Rights) is IMF's stable coin. US$935.7 billion SDR are currently allocated. It has been called paper gold and an international reserve currency.

Thanks for the note. Did not know about SDR.

Lyn Alden (a noted bitcoiner) has talked about SDR in a few interviews. Here’s one I can find right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aUwtxMw-D0&t=882s.

Can SDR really be traded on demand by civilians with a smartphone or computer at any time of day anywhere in the world with internet? It doesn't seem so from a quick Google search, but I don't know. If not, it seems pretty clearly quite different from stablecoins operating on blockchains.

One sure can cash in on crypto, even today! Or so I am told in various YouTube get rich quick adds. And since YC is following the strategy of selling shovels during a gold rush, them promoting stablecoims makes perfect sense!

You can't buy them as a normal person afaik. I learned about them during some boating / radio exams. They're (also) used to pay for satellite calls at sea, which I thought was interesting.

A stablecoin (or any 'coin' for that matter) does not need a blockchain to fulfill its purpose.

The interesting parts for me are:

- It was created 2 years before the dollar officially lost the gold standard

- It's a product of the IMF

- It is seen as a reserve currency

- It's 'stable' the sense that it's a basket of currencies

- I don't think I've ever heard anybody talk about this during any blockchain / crypto / stablecoin event.

I didn't look into how "stable" the coin actually has been over time. But I think it's good to look at the policies and thoughts from IMF's point of few as well as how countries deal with it. They have smart people there, so there's probably something we can learn from them.

I can’t help wonder what advantage a blockchain brings to this. At the end of the day if you’re takings deposits and issuing claims on those deposits you’re a bank. You can wave your hands all you want, regulators are going to catch up with you

Further, I don't know that I'd want to use a finance product from a backer that mixed up $17b and $17T.

Fixed. Thanks!

Lyn Alden (a noted bitcoiner) has talked about SDR in a few interviews. Here’s one I can find right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aUwtxMw-D0&t=882s.

SDR is fairly well known among people who study reserve currencies. While most people take for granted the US dollar as the global reserve currency, those who study it are aware of alternatives (SDR, gold, bitcoin), even though those are too tiny (right now…) to seriously get the “reserve currency” title.

FWIW, Facebook’s stablecoin (Libra/Diem) was designed as a basket of currencies like SDR. In fact, it’s not too far off to explain Libra/Diem as SDR on blockchain, but backed by its own association instead of the IMF. If you understand the geopolitical challenges facing SDR (even with its IMF backing), you can imagine why Libra/Diem got such pushback.

I had no idea you could pay for satellite calls with SDR. (I don’t roll like that…) I’d love to learn more.

The satellite call use case is interesting though. I’ve heard rumor/speculation that Starlink may accept crypto for payment. The use case makes sense. If you’re bringing internet access to parts of the world that don’t already have it, you can’t assume those users have easy access to traditional payment rails.

And this is not a unique problem for Starlink. Many internet companies I know or have worked with have users from all over the world, but in many countries those users are stuck in the “free” tier because there are too many hurdles for them to pay (or in some cases, get paid) for online services. I know of small businesses in SE Asia that would set up a company (and bank account) in Singapore just to pay (get paid) for online services. There’s a huge gap between the inexorable rise of the internet economy and the fossilized global payment system. In fact, I’m founding a startup to use stablecoin to bridge that gap.

One interesting thing about this is that this what investors want you to make for them to invest in, not necessarily what you want to make. Investors are very happy with moonshots (1% chance of you succeeding, but 10,000x return if you do). But I don't think any rational founder should be.

Not all of these are moonshots, but some of them are (e.g. securing defense contracts seems lower risk). Also I imagine getting that defense contract may be a very different value proposition depending on what connections that investor has.

I don't know how other investors operate but if YC sees a good founder working on something they don't care about, just because they think investors want them to work on it, they'd almost certainly tell them to switch to something they do care about.

pg's most frequent advice to founders about ideas is to ask themselves what they themselves wish would exist, then make that—i.e. solve a problem you yourself have. Another thing he and Jessica say a lot is that you need to be passionate about what you're working on in order to make it through the arduous haul of a startup.

That's even more true of the 'moonshot' startups, since they're harder and take longer. If you look at the hardest startups YC has invested in, you won't find many founders who aren't personally obsessed with what they're working on, and have been for many years. That's one of the things YC would be looking for before funding somebody to work on such things.

Interesting, because on existing startups I've seen them build features/products solely because they believe VCs will like it.

Just look at AI and the amount of useless chatbots and other half-baked "AI" solutions several startups built in a rush after the topic became the latest fad and VCs were saying it's hot.

I wouldn’t count out the thought that there are many brainless people who convince themselves what’s “VCs will like” is “what they wish would exist”.

VC is for moonshots. Bootstrapping and debt are for everything else.

>Bring manufacturing back to America

That one is interesting in that I wouldn't naturally think of manufacturing as a common start up idea.

Manufacturing is capital intensive to begin with. An dgiven how little the average HN crowd, assuming the average HN applicant is somehwat similar, knows about manufacturing, well, the answer to that can inly be AI? Right?

Yeah the AI line in there is interesting, it feels more than a little tacked on.

I can't help but imagine some startup with limited manufacturing knowledge ultimately offering what is at best some incremental improvement in some process that isn't enough to support the start up.

Or at least that's what I've seen from start ups entering areas that I've had experience in.

They really talked about ML-automated robotics in that blog... I swear, I dodn't read it before commenting.

This line

>> Companies like SpaceX and Tesla have trained an entire generation of engineers in how to build an American company that makes physical products but operates like a startup.

is sending chills down my back so. After all, Tesla was almost bankcrupted by their drive to automate everything. And Tesla's robot is a guy in a spandex costume.

After that, I refused to see what they have to say about their goal to de-thron SAP, aka their call for new ERP systems (nice touch to include the full name in the link and not kust the accronym, I am sure people able to theoretically build a new ERP from scratch appreciate the clarification...).

Edit: Ok, I did click on the ERP link. No idea how they came to that conclusion here

This type of software is so valuable and important that we can imagine that there is the opportunity for dozens of new massively successful vendors.

considering they wrote the first sentence if it... At least they don't mention AI, LLM or ML...

Whatever you say about the rest of that, dethroning SAP would be a noble goal.

I know that sentiment. Usually comes from people who either never worlkd with something else or only know SAP as some kind of hour booking and expense tool.

If that is what you know about SAP and ERP systems, sure, you can come up with something like YC Call for Start-Up section on ERP systems.

I'd settle for an LLM that can navigate it properly. We can predict protein folding with some kinda q* thing, SAP can't be that much quirkier.

The answer is a lot simpler, but takes a lot of grunt work and hard selling.

It's very wide, most US HW startups could probably apply under this RFS

Cool list! I hope yc will also fund creative consumer companies. Ways to have fun, enjoy life, build healthy habits, cherish memories, dream about the future, and deepen relationships with friends. This is 100% selfish - I want more fun and meaningful products to use.

Maybe it's more difficult to make a "request for startup" because it's more difficult to see what's "broken" in the consumer space?

I was going to say... All so serious and grownup and utilitarian. Whatever happened to 'the next big thing will start as a toy'?

And we'll still see the next batch of YC companies being 90% SaaS and/or devtools (but this time with AI)!

> A new startup model has emerged as an alternative to PE ownership: the MSO (Managed Service Organizations) model.

> The MSO model enables doctors to run their own clinics by (1) providing them software that can handle back office tasks such as billing and scheduling and (2) channeling patients to them.

> These functions are largely what PE ownership provides. Doctors who are part of an MSO model can continue to run small, physician-owned practices while competing successfully with large, PE-owned conglomerates.

I feel this is building off a false hypothesis. PE isn't out-competing independents. Sure, there is a tiny bit of synergy and some bargaining power that comes with the scale of having a portfolio of clinics. But most independents concerned with that have joined one of the numerous GPO/networks that exist. What's really happening is there is a huge generation of providers reaching retirement age and PE is a well capitalized buyer for them to sale their practice. New doctors are more likely to be employees versus being entrepreneurial in the past. I think for this to work, you would want to find ways for new providers to own a practice which means taking on debt that would out bid PE. It might be that the startup that gets this right, provides said financing with the management fee income as an addition to the debt service/income for risk. This could be interesting and new doctors might see this as an attractive path towards practice ownership; but getting the financial model for all constituents to be attractive is going to be tough IMO.

MSO for back office synergies is possible, but from what I've seen it's usually more cost effective to have your under-utilized receptionist wear many of these hats and that's what independents tend to do.

"ELIMINATING MIDDLEMEN IN HEALTHCARE"

I honestly am game for this even though I have zero experience in healthcare but as a consumer, where do I start how bad it is. I would do anything to change our shitty healthcare system where there are so many middlemen b/w me and my doctor.

Recent event: Went to ER because my toddler son spilled hot coffee on him (thankfully he is ok and wasn't as terrible as it could have been). There was a pediatrician on call who looked at him for like 2 mins and then left. A nurse came in and most of her questions were about "insurance details".

Then they didn't tell me what the heck was going on and after pressing, they said "we are getting stuff for him. wait". Then after almost 1.5 hours of waiting where my son is wailing, they got some bandage (I kid you not) with some Over the counter stuff (bacytracin) and applied it on the burn. Then we went home.

Bill = $2000 after Insurance coverage. Our premium for family is $1800+/month btw . Then there is the deductible. Supposedly, the insurance company only partially approved the claim. Whatever the f that means.

If you don't see a problem with this whole cycle of experience, I don't know what else to say. And no, don't tell me to get better insurance. I want to get rid of all these middlemen mafia.

This is almost certainly not a healthcare issue, but a political/lobbying issue. Solutions will happen in the political/lobbying space. We will need to fix shit like:

* very fast, arbitrary disapprovals of healthcare-- requiring 6 weeks of physical therapy before ordering a test of what is almost certainly a torn ligament or other thing is stupid and directly harms patient outcomes;

* enforcement of mental healthcare equality-- hospitals should have equal beds, equal availability, equal pay for workers, and insurance companies should also be paying equally for mental and body health;

* forcing the hands of drug price fixers-- that's right, it's not just insurance, or pharmaceuticals, it's a shitty middleman between them all that rolls up and sets prices on both sides, things like e.g. medicare negotiating drug prices directly will disrupt these fuckos

* DOCTOR OWNED HOSPITALS MUST COME BACK-- no more vulture finance that literally made this illegal

* hospital geographic monopolies must be eliminated-- that's right, hospitals can ban competition! No more of this!

* SAFE STAFFING RATIOS

* releasing the budget on residency-- that's right, the government sets how much money they are willing to put towards new doctors!

* jail time for negligent insurance decisions-- we know that insurance companies will slow-walk bureaucracy lifesaving healthcare to desperately ill, disabled people in the hopes they will die before the approval goes through

I agree that it is more of a political issue at this point because the middlemen are way too powerful and would fight tooth and nail to keep raking in the moolah.

Yes, I think some kind of technology that explicitly targets/disrupts the way lobbying works would be huge. I just don't think this is healthcare-specific unfortunately.

Let me pitch an idea that I've long been noodling on that I think gen AI finally enables -- automated healthcare patient billing support for individuals. In essence, when you get that bill in the mail, you can fight with the hospital to decrease it, fight with your insurer to cover more of it, or not pay it and fight with a debt collector down the line. Maybe there's an alternative world where an AI agent does this for you, helping you negotiate down your medical bills and in return taking some percentage cut of the savings? There have been businesses like this before but hit some issues with 1) cost of employing humans to fight these bills, 2) customer acquisitions costs, 3) heavy churn/non-recurring customer base which goes along with 2

This is called a robo lawyer, there was an YC startup (whose name I don't remember any more) who tried this and basically had to shut down for obvious reasons.

Companies don't want poor people to have easy access to this stuff.

Fully agree with the experience, but I don't understand this call to action from a logical point. If you build something to make this better for patients, then... you are the middleman. Sure you might start off with morally good ambitions, but your company has to turn profit to keep running, I feel like you end up in the classic "grow big enough to see yourself become the villain" situation.

The fundamental problem is that the facilitator cannot be a for-profit entity, which is why universal healthcare in other countries are run by the government.

SO I am not totally against Universal healthcare idea Heck, anytihng will be worth tyring compared to what we do today. But US is a very large country and we already have Medicare program which is full or fraud and abuse and pork. I am not one of those "GOvt is bad in everything" but I am suspicious of Govt. being able to run most things efficiently.

I personally think if you calculate the cost of healthcare paid by an individual/family to Insurance companies and take most of that way by getting rid of insurance in EVERYTHING, even paying out of pocket for most visits will be cheaper overall. Keep Insurance only for catastrophic stuff like a major illness, accident, surgery, cancer etc.

A good compromise/balance would be "get rid of insurance premiums/deductibles/copays for general stuff" and let people pay out of pocket. Govt can subsidize those who cannot afford even the lower out of pocket costs (may be baswed on income etc).

> SO I am not totally against Universal healthcare idea Heck, anytihng will be worth tyring compared to what we do today. But US is a very large country and we already have Medicare program which is full or fraud and abuse and pork. I am not one of those "GOvt is bad in everything" but I am suspicious of Govt. being able to run most things efficiently.

US Health care is so massively inefficient (results per dollar per capita) that this reluctance to switch to single payer like the rest of the developed world is a level of cognitive dissonance that continues to flabbergast me.

I'm also interested in this one, though I lack specific experience in the healthcare industry to understand the problems.

Does anyone have good resources to understanding the bloat of the industry as well as the regulatory constraints? I realize that the complexity here is almost infinite, but I do think you can potentially find inroads and compete along those.

I also don't think being a more efficient "middleman" is a bad thing. There are always going to be providers of services that are incentivized by making money. The key in my mind is to keep it in a respectable/realistic place for customers, as well as eliminate toil/confusion. It feels like you could get both outcomes and also align for better patient care/experience. For example everyone loves Costco, yet they still are a "middleman" between you and the goods you want.

Developer tools inspired by existing internal tools... they often don’t realize that the internal tools they had at prior jobs are a great place to get inspiration from.

Interesting that YC is willing to toe the IP theft line on this one. I think plenty of us do in fact realize that homegrown corporate ideas / apps could likely be turned into external new businesses, but then the blurred ethics and legality of doing so occurs a few thoughts later.

An F100 I worked for had an entire corporate group for the purposes of spinning off their IP so that it could be done ethically/legally and give the employees' new startup the boost it needed. Several of these startups have gone on to $MMM/$B valuations. If you're at Boring BigCo and thinking of ripping one of their developed ideas for a small YC check, I'd advise against it.

Not to underestimate the power of evil, but ideas are cheap and execution matters. One never reproduces an idea as-is, if only because your service should be multitenant. On the other hand, going to BigCo’s legal department to beg for a spin off of an activity you’ve seen, is as risky as the next 10 stages of your startup.

Especially since the first stage of your startup is to test the waters with an MVP, which leads to a quasi-immediate pivot from the initial idea. Example:

> web application which would combine a project manager, contact manager, and to-do list

became Blogger and was sold to Google in 2003 (by Jack Dorsey).

APPLYING MACHINE LEARNING TO ROBOTICS

Exactly what I thought would be absolutely terrific: a robot commanded by voice that poses floor tiles. That's v1. V2 builds a house.

I can't think of any "toy" as exciting as this atm. Plus you pose the first tile of this and you're a trillionaire.

Tesla's robot shoupd be able to do just that already! Well, depebding on who's wearing the costume that is...

thank god someone mentioned elon's companies, it had been about 5 seconds and i was starting to worry it wasn't cool to blindly hate him anymore

Come on, the spandex robot presentation was so cringe it was almost hilarious. Even the dancing was bad.

Dalton Caldwell explained in Bloomberg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGKKI1JIlPc&t=2201s 36:42

Man, it's pretty sad looking at this list. I feel the world's just rocketing out of reach of understandability.

My background's in education. I always wonder whether a solid bet would be on overhauling the system totally so the foundations of these new 'future trades' are solidly grounded from 4 years old somehow.

It seems our knowledge is an abstraction layer upon an abstraction layer upon... There's just so much shit to know, and it feels all muddied. I feel what I learnt at school hasn't equipped me for anything in the 21st century whatsoever.

Just wait until LLMs decide everything and you find yourself without recourse, help or justice because the LLMs say so, and nobody can reason why ... but statistically they're more right than a human!

(Tangentially related to, “A WAY TO END CANCER”)

After seeing how my doctor iteratively ordered up different sets of tests for me over the course of a few months, I got to thinking about improving decision trees for blood testing (and maybe others).

However, when I spoke to a (first year) med student about this he suggested that doctors actually don’t want something like this. I don't think I followed the thought process completely but it was something along the lines of, “we’ll always find something.”

Would be interested if someone could elaborate on this line of thinking.

Can you elaborate? Im not following but it sounds interesting. What problem did you see and what alternative did you propose? I take it that the doctor was performing an inefficient search.

I've had similar conversations (another one is classifying ECGs as normal or whatever variety of abnormal rhythm, for example) with my wife, who's a doctor, and it's always some combination of 'yeah, that kinda does happen' (just more manually/lower tech, or human-driven, etc. than we're imagining) and 'we don't want that' like you say.

What they do want afaict is more fundamental, should-be-so-much-easier stuff like case management software that doesn't suck, and like, a chair to sit on while using that computer.

I think he was describing the fact that they already operate with decision framework that they already understand. Implicit in the results received from a particular test is the fact that there was a particular observation made that suggested they get such a test.

If they get results from a test, but without the compelling observation, they're then operating outside their well established statistical framework, and they can't confidently evaluate the meaningfulness of the test results.

To me, this doesn't mean the extra information is bad, or unhelpful, it's just they are not yet properly calibrated to use it properly.

I've heard this sentiment from medical professionals before and this was my conclusion.

That makes sense. Explainability would be a big issue/requirement with any attempted automated decision framework. I don't know if I would want my doctor to just order up tests based on the output of some app without understanding why they're ordering them up.

Most of these seem aspirational for YC to produce them and less of something that they can offer value to the entrepreneur. They can offer very little outside of SAAS style company that is tech for enterprise or tech for consumer. If you are looking space, arms, robotics, GovTech etc you are better looking for some corporate VC or another specialized accelerator. No one is truly a generalist.

But don't expect a corporate VC to be as fun or cool as YC.

Have YC applications always required a LinkedIn? Why not my personal site which has served as my LinkedIn, instead of the actual LinkedIn I deleted over a decade ago?

Some of these are not like the others.

Also some are way more achievable by software-type engineer-types and the financial associates in their ecosystem, due to extreme familiarity with that particular landscape. Some also require a little more commitment than starting a small software company.

If I was going to split the combined vision into only two categories it would be like this:

  -  Applying machine learning to robotics
    
  -  New defense technology
    
  -  Bring manufacturing back to America
    
  -  New space companies
    
  -  Climate tech
    
  -  A way to end cancer
    
  -  Foundation models for biological systems

and then the less moonshotty efforts:

  -  Using machine learning to simulate the physical world
    
  -  Commercial open source companies

  -  Spatial computing

  -  New enterprise resource planning software (ERPs)
    
  -  Developer tools inspired by existing internal tools
    
  -  Explainable AI
    
  -  LLMs for manual back office processes in legacy enterprises
    
  -  AI to build enterprise software
    
  -  Stablecoin finance

  -  The managed service organization model for healthcare
    
  -  Eliminating middlemen in healthcare
    
  -  Better enterprise glue
    
  -  Small fine-tuned models as an alternative to giant generic ones

Interestingly, #1 rose to the top of my list well over 40 years ago when I had a chance to do a little machine learning to guide automated systems. Was very lucky to have such powerful advanced equipment under my complete control in the laboratory at such an early time. Needed custom gear to bump it to the next level though. Figured all kinds of people would be doing things like that once "personal" computers were no longer a rare curiosity.

The remaining things in the first group are some other things I (and I'm sure many others) have had in mind since before personal computers became accessible.

"Too bad" my ambition has grown with age and it would take about a $10 million company to build my prototype hardware, and that's before any deployable machine learning can commence.

So it's been an interesting 43 years keeping in mind how I would apply automation and machine learning to almost everything all the time, and refining my intended approach for a greater number of decades the earlier I had the idea.

I'd move "Foundation models for biological systems" to Moonshotty efforts. Foundational models for biological systems are hard, and honestly I think require a degree of patience that is at odds with VC funding.

The defense-tech one is interesting. I wholeheartedly agree that more people should be involved in the space and it is critically important -- I think the war in Ukraine clearly shows the need for the Western world to be prepared to fight for freedom and democracy -- but as far as venturebackable business models go I don't really understand how many defense tech co's will fit. Most defense firms, other than perhaps Palantir which has a unique position as a commercial provider trade at extremely low multiples to revenue on public markets, whereas tech stocks usually have a relatively large boost. Perhaps not as much concern at early stages but not sure how the financials work out long term.

If I'm not mistaken the 'monetization model' (for founders / investors) in defense related investment looks significantly different due to the blurring of the line between public and private sector funding.

Lockheed/Boeing buys you and applies cost plus pricing.

I assume that's how Anduril is going to end up.

Palantir started with as much "seed capital" as OpenAI did, strong founder reps in tech - the one thing National Intel lacked back then, good contacts in the intelligence community and defense sector, and a practically untamed space back then. Same for Anduril. I don't see how YC's model is applicable to any of these spaces.

Palmer Luckey and Anduril have about a 6 year head start.

I agree that superiority is one of the best deterrents.

Based on how much time he spends picking fights with randos on Twitter, perhaps so.

https://twitter.com/josephpolitano/status/175797569920841756...

https://twitter.com/palmerluckey/status/1757896863884444053

https://twitter.com/uticaeric/status/1757927405124030852?s=4...

That's true. But I don't think revenue multiple is the right metric to look at.

If you just look in terms of aggregate market cap, defense companies are some of the larger companies in the world - i.e., Lockheed Martin is valued over $100B. That's a good sign that it's possible to build a big company in the space, which is all you need.

Every single defence company today is the result of decades of mergers and decades of Cold War peak defence budgets. Not even SoftBanknhas that amount of dough to repeat that.

Lockheed Martin used to be Lockheed and Martin, MDD used to be McDonnel and Douglas, Northrop Gruman, well, you get it. Those companies were built, the were merged. And they are the first on the big defence budgets, and honestly also the only ones being able to deliver modern defence and weapon systems (regardless of delays and cost over runs).

> Lockheed Martin used to be Lockheed and Martin

Lockheed Martin was formed by the merger of Lockheed and Martin Marietta and Martin Marietta was formed by the merger of Martin and American-Marietta, and American-Marietta was formed by the merger of American Asphalt Paint Company and Marietta Paint and Color Company.

Thanks! Going down the rabbit hole of defence mergers is always fun!

I couldn’t tell if this was because of the stable revenue stream or because they care about changing things. Not sure Palantir is the best example here as they probably need a competitor already. Palantir was also funded by the intelligence community to solve a problem for them…

> Occasionally we gather up all of these ideas and share them in what we call a Request for Startups, or RFS — a Y Combinator tradition that goes back over a decade.

I wonder how many YC startups joined due to a past RFS and went on to be successful.

My impression is that YC emphasizes the quality of the startup founders over the quality of the startup idea, so I find it interesting that this RFS tradition persists.

Seems perfectly fitting. These ideas give a good team "permission" to believe in themselves. People who think they need "the right idea" might be stuck in the Alignment Trap, from which any execution engine is the exit.

Lookong at some of the stuff on the YC list, well, ignorance is bliss I guess. But whatever helps you to get running and successfully pivot to something actually realistic.

This list variously refers to AI, LLMs, and models. Any idea why it would use different terms where it does, and what each means?

I doubt there's much thought behind it, and just the fact that each "Request" is written by a different person.

It’s used mostly correctly in each case, and they have different meanings.

AI is a marketing catch-all that encompasses technologies of a certain level of “how did they do that” automation that are generally understood to leverage machine learning models under the hood (but not always).

LLMs are one class of ML models that operate in a text-in-text-out fashion.

“Models” are more of a statistical/mathematical term that generally mean “anything that can make a prediction” - it’s broader than just ML (eg climate models that are first-principles-based, not learned from data).

"Robotics hasn't yet had its GPT moment, but we think it’s close"

From what I have been reading from those who run top-tier research labs in the field most agree that we are really far away. Why would people casually quote 30y away? https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/02/robotics-qa-with-metas-dhr...

It is because core issues remain unsolved, has nothing to do with some old engineering process that can be disrupted and more so with the fact that science isn't there yet. Most of the GPT wrappers that are used as reasoning still sit on top of classical low-level control. Personally, as someone who works in AI specifically around robotics I believe there is headway to make here.

Correct me if i’m wrong but no company has acquired enough robotic data to train an AI on it and test whether it works or not. Is there a more fundamental obstacle i’m missing?

Most of the stuff on the list is either so far out of achievable reach from its current stages, or just generic America-first proselytizing. What all of them have in common is that they require massive amounts of capital, the kind that most VCs don't have/aren't ready to invest. Those who have the capabilities to start a company targeting these problems are not the YC crowd of young college students and techies under 40 looking for cred - they are either folks who have massive amounts of dry powder to deploy, or have the connections who have that kind of capital to combine with their experience. In both cases, none of those guys are stupid to give away 7% of their company (effective 15%) for $500k.

It's kind of laughable how YC is now requesting for startups in these lines when 10 years back, they rejected us (DefTech) on exactly the above premise. While we didn't manage a multibagger exit, we did manage a non-acquihire exit, which is more than what most YC companies can manage. The right time to invest in these problems was 10 years ago, when all the low-hanging fruit still existed.

Great that they are looking at Stablecoins, and by extension blockchain / crypto. The unwarranted hate on HN for this tech is a very interesting mirror on perspectives of economics and finance. The crypto economy advances year after year, as does the tech, but you would never know it perusing HN.

Do you have some ideas for this request? What’s a stablecoin development that’s needed?

With USDC and local fiat-crypto exchanges available in nearly every country, it is now possible to hire a truly global workforce and pay them with a crypto-payment vendor. If some company systematically went country by country, learned the local HR laws, partnered with the most trusted exchange, and then handled all accounting and taxes, a truly global HR and payment system could be built to make onboarding and paying everyone 10x simpler.

Even better is the employees could keep most of their money in USDC and only convert to fiat when they need to pay bills. Now they have a dollar bank account and avoid local inflation.

So, you want a centralised trusted (trusted by whom?) entity to go in, do all that stuff and handle it in a centralised fashion, and work with centralised trusted (by whom?) entities to provide payment to people around the world.

Definitely needs crypto. What a novel idea.

Your general attitude is exactly the know-nothing, anti-crypto sentiment I was advocating against. I really don’t want to get into a debate, the point of my business idea above was to solve a pain point around paying a global work force considering the costs of global wire transfers vs. instant USDC settlement.

Your response is exactly the trouble with all the crypto-proponents.

As soon as their next idea is described in proper terms, they immediately devolve into insults, "you know nothing" and other "oh you're just a blind hater".

> the point of my business idea above was to solve a pain point around paying a global work force considering the costs of global wire transfers

How much do you think it will cost to "systematically go country by country, learned the local HR laws, partner with the most trusted exchange, and then handle all accounting and taxes"?

Even more to the point: what does crypto add in this scenario? Would the company be just as effective doing all that regulatory work, then handling settlement in local currency? (Or just using USD as the “stablecoin”?)

The best business ideas I’ve heard for crypto inevitably don’t need crypto.

Countries want US dollars. They want dollars to use to buy goods, which are usually priced in USD, and for debt interest payments.

Countries sell services (tourism) and goods (products and commodities) to earn dollars. However another major source is by creating their own local currency (i.e. Brazilian Reals), inflating it (5 to 10% common in Brazil), and banning citizens from holding foreign currency (i.e. citizens cannot hold USD). So if you want to pay someone in Brazil from the US, you send them USD, which is then stolen by the government and converted into shittier local currency (Reals).

A better option, as employees I have in Brazil will attest, is you pay them in stablecoins (i.e. USDT or USDC) which they then convert at their own leisure to Reals when they need to pay bills. This allows them to earn interest on the stablecoins and protects them from the shitty local fiat currency.

This theft of wealth from citizens via the local shitty fiat currency is a global phenomena. See Argentina, Lebanon, Venezuela, Turkey, and on and on. This is a major driver of global stablecoin demand, because everyone wants USD, especially retail, but until crypto the ability to receive and store USD was very limited by governments.

Could employers just pay USD to foreign workers who have something like a Wise account (i.e. to keep it in USD and convert it to their local currency at will)?

The US is blessed with stable laws, individualism as an ethos, and a culture that asks for forgiveness over asking for permission. Corruption is less overt here.

In less developed countries, it's the opposite. Wise and other centralized money transmission platforms are ripe targets to apply government pressure, with capital limits, currency conversion games, freezing accounts, and so on.

Cryptocurrency inverts the whole process. Having a crypto wallet is like having an offshore bank account, or perhaps a vault in your house. You can also send money peer-to-peer over the internet very quickly. It's just like cash, except you can make purchases (even huge purchases) without needing the danger of physically holding a lot of money.

Of course there are many downsides. You can be hacked, you can forget your password / seed phrase, you can send money to the wrong place, the whole thing is cumbersome. These downsides are being worked on in various ways, but there are some permanent downsides to holding bearer instruments that fiat accounts held by regulated financial institutions don't have.

The downsides of countries like Venezuela, Lebanon, and Argentina for trying to build businesses and accumulate savings are larger than the downsides of cryptocurrency. Entrepreneurs and normal, everyday citizens are embracing crypto from the bottom-up because governments obviously hate the freedom crypto provides their citizens. It makes collecting taxes and doing the fiat-inflation theft game harder. It requires citizens to self-report rather than automatic-deduction, which reduces government revenue.

Argentina is a de facto USD-based economy. All property purchases are conducted with United States $100 bills, with entire companies whose job is to safely transport a life savings' worth of cash to the real estate closing, where the cash is then scrupulously assessed for counterfeiting. In an economy like this, you can imagine how stablecoins can be useful, despite the cumbersome and risky nature. It's still 10 to 100x safer and better than suitcases of cash.

> In Argentina, most transactions are conducted using cash, primarily in the form of $100 US bills. This may seem somewhat traditional, but it's the prevailing practice in this country.

> Particularly when purchasing property, you typically need to make your payment in US dollars because property prices are consistently quoted in this currency.

> You can opt to bring cash or utilize a financial service to obtain the required US dollars in cash, although this may involve a fee.

> So, if you're planning a purchase, be prepared to carry a substantial amount of US dollar bills into the country, possibly up to $500,000. However, keep in mind that this process isn't straightforward, and you will likely incur a commission fee.

https://thelatinvestor.com/blogs/news/buying-process-propert...

> Having a crypto wallet is like having an offshore bank account

> It makes collecting taxes ... harder.

How does that mesh with "If some company systematically went country by country, learned the local HR laws, ... and then handled all accounting and taxes"?

So it' snow been over 24 hours, and we still haven't seen the answer to two questions about this business-plan. But I guess we'll hear about "unwarranted hate on HN" or some such very soon.

> the point of my business idea above was to solve a pain point around paying a global work force considering the costs of global wire transfers

How much do you think it will cost to "systematically go country by country, learned the local HR laws, partner with the most trusted exchange, and then handle all accounting and taxes"?

> Having a crypto wallet is like having an offshore bank account

> It makes collecting taxes ... harder.

How does that mesh with "If some company systematically went country by country, learned the local HR laws, ... and then handled all accounting and taxes"?

Every human is motivated by the same human desires, from thousands of years ago to now. Race is meaningless, we are all human. So why are some countries decrepit basket cases while others are successful?

The answer is government, laws, and culture. The governments of Argentina (until things got so bad they elected a self-described anarcho capitalist libertarian!), Venezuela, Cuba, Lebanon, etc. have created terrible environments for their citizens. Crypto is allowing their citizens to break laws that are hurting them. I support the citizens fighting against their socialist and communist governments that are robbing them. That's the core function of empowering citizens with decentralized money.

None of this answers the questions about your business-idea.

These are two descriptions you started with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39371127 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39371520

It literally is this:

""" If some company systematically went country by country, learned the local HR laws, partnered with the most trusted exchange, and then handled all accounting and taxes, a truly global HR and payment system could be built to make onboarding and paying everyone 10x simpler.

the point of my business idea above was to solve a pain point around paying a global work force considering the costs of global wire transfers vs. instant USDC settlement. """

So. Given all this, here are the questions:

1. Given that wire transfers cost money, and you want to make them cheap/free and instant, how much do you think it will cost to "systematically go country by country, learned the local HR laws, partner with the most trusted exchange, and then handle all accounting and taxes"?

2. Given that, by your own words, crypto is like having money in offshore accounts making tax collection more difficult, how does this mesh with your proposal of having a company do accounting and collect taxes?

----

Note: I'm not in the least surprised that you can't answer these questions even if the first one of these I asked very early in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39372364

That's the reason there's so much "unwarranted hate" on HN: because people are not stupid, and they don't fall for demagoguery and grand proclamations. 99.9999999999% of all crypto proposals fall down immediately under the lightest of scrutinies: they are inevitably self-contradictory, unworkable, costly, don't do the job advertised, better implemented other technologies, or any or even all of the above.

Sorry, I thought the answers to those questions were obvious.

The reason a business will exist and have value is because they did the work of figuring out how to pay workers in each country. My company does this now for Brazil, so it is possible to do legally.

The offshore bank account comment is to envision what it is similar to. For example it’s possible for an Argentinian to fly to the US and open a bank account in Miami, it’s just cumbersome to then get USD out of it and into Argentina. With a crypto wallet it’s similar to this but much more streamlined. The proposed business will figure out the intricacies of each country.

So you want to pay in dollars, but at the same time "figure out local laws and taxes" even though at the same time local laws and taxes don't allow payment in dollars...

What does this part mean? “Now they have a dollar bank account and avoid local inflation.” Because they have USDC as their payment currency?

You can see my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39372942

Crypto exchanges are not work around for lical tax laws and visa requirements. It is true so, crypto solves that problem, the same way it solves embargoes and money laundering problems.

A lot, or at least some, of the "hate" comes from the speculative, exploitative and get-rich-quick schemes, rather than the underlying technology behind it or any advancements. If you were able to separate the two, the socioeconomic and the technological aspects, I don't think the typical HN negative attitude would be as negative.

As a concrete example, if someone posts an article about Merkle tree, it would get maybe 10-50 votes and 5 comments, and probably not much hate if any. Yet (according to wikipedia, I'm not into cryptocurrencies) it's a part of the underlying technology of "the Bitcoin and Ethereum peer-to-peer networks"

> The unwarranted hate on HN

It's only "unwarranted" if you're willing to be blind to the entire history of crypto.

> The crypto economy advances year after year,

Yes, the speculation and scams in crypto grow year after year.

> but you would never know it perusing HN.

People don't only peruse HN. We've yet to see that amazing growing economy grow beyond speculative trading and scams [1]

[1] Yes, there's a small part of crypto that helps people send money to sanctioned countries

We get it, you don't like crypto. You would be better off leaving the snark and sarcasm at home if you want to get your points across without sounding bitter. Your last line completely contradicts the previous point you were trying to make-- it's clear to anyone that's paying attention that crypto economy has objectively grown beyond speculative trading and scams.

ad hominem, ad hominem, ad hominem, "it's clear to anyone".

nope. it's not clear. and crypto-proponents who can't even show this beyond kindergarten-level name calling don't help

"Eliminating middlemen from healthcare" is probably the most ambitious one.

Indeed. Many efforts that start with the goal of eliminating middlemen inevitably devolve into more middlemen. It's like the xkcd trope about standards: "Situation: There are 14 competing standards. Rediculous! We need to extablish one universal standard! Situation: There are now 15 competing standards."

https://xkcd.com/927/

That section reads like we are going to replace one middleman with a more “efficient” one, not eliminating one altogether.

On the other hand, this is listed below “cure for cancer”, so maybe it’s an ambitious one…

If you do this by building a business you will end up the new middlemen, financially motivated to keep the system from receiving the complete overhaul it needs.

Ooh, I’d love to know how the HN community reacts to YC’s own words on this. Will HN’s very strong anti-crypto anti-blockchain sentiment continue when it’s their own mothership accelerator contradicting them?

STABLECOIN FINANCE

- Brad Flora

Stablecoins are digital currencies that peg their value to some external reference. This is typically the U.S. dollar, but it can be other fiat currencies, assets, or even other digital currencies. Their transactions are recorded on a digital ledger, usually a blockchain. This means they can be traded at any time of day between any two wallets on the same network, transactions settle in seconds, and fees are a fraction of what you see in traditional finance.

There’s been much debate about the utility of blockchain technology, but it seems clear that stablecoins will be a big part of the future of money. We know this because YC companies have been effectively incorporating stablecoins into their operations for years now – for cross-border payments, to reduce transaction fees and fraud, to help users protect savings from hyperinflation. This utility is so straightforward it seems inevitable traditional finance will follow suit.

In fact we’re seeing signs of this. PayPal recently issued its own stablecoin. Major banks have started offering custody services and making noise about issuing their own.

It all looks a bit like digital music’s transition from the realm of outlaw file sharing in the early 2000s to becoming the norm as players like Apple entered the market. Importantly, those major players were all outmatched in the end by Spotify, a startup founded during that same transition moment.

$136b worth of stablecoins have been issued to date but the opportunity seems much more immense still. Only about seven million people have transacted with stablecoins to date, while more than half a billion live in countries with 30%+ inflation. U.S. banks hold $17T in customer deposits which are all up for grabs as well. And yet the major stablecoin issuers can be counted on one hand and the major liquidity providers with just a few fingers.

We would like to fund great teams building B2B and consumer products on top of stablecoins, tools and platforms that enable stablecoin finance and more stablecoin protocols themselves.

> Will HN’s very strong anti-crypto anti-blockchain sentiment continue when it’s their own mothership accelerator contradicting them?

I mean, it's sandwiched in-between such moonshots as "A.I. TO BUILD ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE" and "A WAY TO END CANCER". YCombinator wants money, and stablecoins are a good way to make it if you're crafty and quick on the uptake.

If anything this is wholly unsurprising given YC's opportunistic attitude and fits in well alongside their other pipe-dream investments.

Jared Friedman and Gustaf Alströmer want to make it easier to kill other human beings, and turn a profit while doing it. Shame on them and anyone else who works on "defense technology."

> I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (p. 19)

In your opinion, should we not have any defense technology?

There's probably some middle ground between no defense tech whatsoever, and trillion dollar illegal wars and genocides.

Every American - and the rest of the world too - is paying that very real debt. We're all paying the opportunity cost too, and the societal cost. It will be paid for generations, and many of the true costs are incalculable.

Some very few people are making a tonne of money, and here, YC is saying they want a piece of that. I feel like they're not getting dragged enough for it tbh.

Right this moment the US is being investigated by the world's highest court for complicity in genocide. And YC is openly asking to invest in companies that directly enable and support such action.

> There's probably some middle ground between no defense tech whatsoever, and trillion dollar illegal wars and genocides.

There is obviously middle ground. Which is why categorically condemning defense spending is indefensible.

What are you referring to as genocide?

> Which is why categorically condemning defense spending is indefensible.

That doesn't actually follow.

> What are you referring to as genocide?

Take your pick.

>> Which is why categorically condemning defense spending is indefensible.

>That doesn't actually follow.

It does. If some defense is OK, then some defense spending is OK. In order to categorically reject defense spending as the original commenter did, then you must categorically reject defense.

> Take your pick.

Of what?

This sort of blanket condemnation of war is ridiculous. Statecraft, even in the modern day, revolves around what each country's power projection capabilities are. To say that nobody should participate in building defense technologies is to say that we should cede a significant amount of leverage when it comes to international diplomacy.

I don't like working on killing machines either. But we shouldn't forget that the internet and basically all of computation originated out of defense research. That might be good or bad, but arguably the field was more innovative when that was the funding source than it is today.

> “All of modern high tech has the US Department of Defense to thank at its core, because this is where the money came from to be able to develop a lot of what is driving the technology that we’re using today,” said Leslie Berlin, historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University. https://archive.ph/PY5sT

Sorry, but I don't think this comparison really makes sense. Yes, duh, there's military research and a lot of things come out of it, especially because they have huge budgets for funding all sorts of research.

But the topic here is both about private companies, not some research fund and it's explicitly about creating products (not doing research) for military use.

Things like DARPA are even more complex, because in a way, intentionally or not it is used by the US to have essentially government funded research and infrastructure development while bypassing the whole "but that's communism!" discussion and also simply not having to publicly discuss it other than "let's raise military spending!".

So in other words what you say makes sense and I agree, but it might not necessarily apply here. Like your quote states this is about money for research coming from the US DoD, not about private capital investors wanting to make money by telling you to do R&D for the military.

You can believe in a world without conflict if you want. It'll serve you well right up until the time you get put up against the wall and killed by someone who doesn't share your beliefs.

>It'll serve you well right up until the time you get put up against the wall and killed by someone who doesn't share your beliefs.

Better be killed by someone with your belief? Or being sent to war by someone with your belief?

Or is that the whole "defend our values" bullshit all over again? Personally I'd much prefer a whole country to surrender, than even one human being killed.

For thousands of years borders have moved, tyrants and light towers of freedoms have ruled, but what really brought misery was war, not who happens to be the country's leader in a certain point of time. Yes, there have been to occasional ethnic cleansing, but it rarely (ever?) was that another country instilled the hatred just by moving a border. Anti-semitism was widespread in Europe, if it wasn't it would have been much harder for the Nazis to have concentration camps even in Poland.

A government taking over a population needs to also take care of the population and rarely does it work out to just control by force. It didn't even work for East Germany.

And while speculation I wonder what would happen if a country like Nazi Germany was or Russia today would take over the large parts of the world without much resistance. I think the outcome would either be that the countries split up, or are reasonably independent (think special zones in China) or there would be reforms bringing values of the occupied country.

But regardless of all of that hypothetical stuff, that might as well be completely wrong, the idea that values are defended or spread by military means is ridiculous, as is the idea that any values or things like freedom depend on the existence of individual countries. The idea that it's worth to die for them is just as dumb as the idea to die for a god. It's just propaganda and romanticism. At the end of the day it always boils down to send a ton of young people to their death, and when they actually end up in a situation where they actually see eye to eye they oftentimes realize how ridiculous they is and actually for the most parts, for the part where values really matter they would be best friends in another world. That's why history is filled with lethal enemies having a good time together at the fronts until some form of governments comes along and tells people to kill each other again. Things like the Christmas truce of 1914 happen then. And while with drones, and such this becomes harder, look about how all the drone fighters get mental diseases, and all the still mentally sane veterans end up becoming anti-war.

In a non-war environment, and on surrender people rarely get put up against the wall.

Does that mean you have no right to defend yourself? No, of course not. But the reality is that the outcome of "the bad guys winning" momentarily, might be less bad than millions of dead people, an industry fueled by arms manufacturing, a situation where generations might grow up learning to hate another country, ethnicity, etc. Because even if you technically win the war, look what Iraq brought us. Racism against Arabs, White People, hate of countries, religions, curtailing of freedoms that were claimed to be defended (on both sides actually), huge amount of propaganda material on all sides, renewed hatred in the area, spread of radicalism on both sides.

And then there's people arguing that it is all okay, because it brought technological progress.

Yes, it's not a black and white thing, it depends on circumstances, etc., but the idea that somehow "beliefs", "values", etc. are being defended is just ridiculous and means you are gullible. I mean look at how much lying there is always from all sides, how the fronts always happens to be around areas where the rich and powerful want to get resources from, how people that actually live freedoms are the first criminalized. Any values that might be worth defending die with war.

And looking at the US in particular. The US has two major borders with Canada and Mexico. Also they speak the world's language, they make the world's movie. You really think that there's someone coming from outside, does something that has never been successfully done before and do a land invasion under such geographical conditions, probably doesn't even speak your language too well, but still magically take your beliefs? Yup, then you're very gullible.

It doesn't matter if you believe in a world without conflict here. The idea that your beliefs are being protected by a startup producing military products is just outrageously ridiculous, regardless how you twist and turn it.

If military was about beliefs, East Germany/fall of the Berlin wall and reunification, the current situation of Palestine, the IRA, the outcome of American Inexpedience, etc. would never happen, because of the involved strong military. And regarding "being put at the wall". That did happen in France, but while you might hold any opinion on France in WW2, I think whatever the outcome of more military defense I am pretty sure more people would have been "put at the wall". Oh and as we all know they all became Germans and only the US made them French again.

The only belief you might fight for in military conflict between two countries is that the border should be in a certain way for some amount of time. Most beliefs that people talk about you kill as soon as you kill someone, enemy or not. And what you create is hatred. So yeah, if you belief that's your goal and worth developing weapons for, go ahead and do so.

Every war kills millions of people, ask the people in China, Korea, phillipines, Cambodia, Myanmar if they were ok with Japanese occupation murder of millions and enslavement and rape of their women. Your argument makes no sense, don’t defend your country cause nothing bad happens. It’s been proven time and time again , bad stuff happens. When someone has a gun at your daughters head let’s see if you didn’t wish you have better defenses

> I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres

I do believe the majority of humans involved with massacres are not doing so by choice.

Slight tangent - but I feel that our need for "explainable AI" might lead to us missing out on some fundamentally different ways of thinking and reasoning that AI could provide. Machines might reach conclusions in ways that simply can't be "dumbed down" to human reasoning. That doesn't mean that these means are esoteric or outside of logic, but it just takes a few levels of derivations and statistic to make something really hard to comprehend for us.

I call this "machine metaphysics" and I think it's an extremely interesting area of speculation. A whole lot of human metaphysics are based on our (very limited) sensory inputs – which machines/AI have infinitely more of.

As a quick example, it seems to me that an AI may not need the concept of a universal, in the philosophical sense, because it is capable of handling a near-infinite number of particulars.

There are a LOT of natural numbers, even for an AI.

I had in mind more concrete aspects of "human" reality. A lot of the divisions we make between objects seem dependent on our language, which is dependent on our sensory abilities.

The concept of species is maybe a good example – it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, if you think about it. It's merely a linguistic placeholder to describe a step in a process, because the idea of constant evolutionary change is too difficult to encapsulate in a single concept. An AI would have no issue with this, as it is capable of taking in and holding much more data and conceptualizing the concept of a process.

That's super interesting. Are there any books/articles/further reading on this you can recommend?

Unfortunately I haven't come across much writing of this sort, as most of the philosophical writing about AI centers on the reverse topic: how humans will be changed by machines.

>"1. Introduction

2. Applying Machine Learning To Robotics

3. Using Machine Learning To Simulate The Physical World

4. New Defense Technology

5. Bring Manufacturing Back To America

6. New Space Companies

7. Climate Tech

8. Commercial Open Source Companies

9. Spatial Computing

10. New Enterprise Resource Planning Software

11. Developer Tools Inspired By Existing Internal Tools

12. Explainable A.I.

13. L.L.Ms For Manual Back Office Processes In Legacy Enterprises

14. A.I. To Build Enterprise Software

15. Stablecoin Finance

16. A Way To End Cancer

17. Foundation Models For Biological Systems

18. The Managed Service Organization Model For Healthcare

19. Eliminating Middlemen In Healthcare

20. Better Enterprise Glue

21. Small Fine Tuned Models As An Alternative To Giant Generic Ones"

If I may suggest one:

22. Help The Growing Number Of Homeless People In Our Country

The first priority should be, "BRING MANUFACTURING BACK TO AMERICA", as that will create a sustainable and strong economy, but in my view, A.I. will takeover that job sector along with many others. So, the question is, when AI takes over the world, who will hire humans to work so that they can pay for goods and services. The answer to this of course depends on whether money will still be in use. Just a thought :)

This "glue code" — ETL pipelines, integrations, and custom workflows — is the dark matter of the enterprise software universe.

Hmmm...solving glue code, the "dark matter of [enterprise] software". Maybe I should apply? ;-)

https://blog.metaobject.com/2021/06/glue-dark-matter-of-soft...

YC is too influenced by marc Andreessen. Not a good thing.

> Robotics hasn't yet had its GPT moment, but we think it’s close.

Hmm Tesla is using end to end GPT-style model for FSD V12. It actually works surprisingly well.

For actual robotics, Electric Sheep is doing something similar for their lawnmower [1]. However, I am a lot more skeptical about that than Tesla's FSD.

[1] https://sheeprobotics.ai/technology/

I’ve been looking to join or co-found a startup for a while now but I never come across anyone interested in these type of problems. It’s always things like options research platform, medical records service, fitness app, etc.

I thought I was just being overly picky but this request shows that there are lots of exciting ideas out there.

Why do I see such a disconnect?

Perhaps the amount of capital available to fill the new commercial niches opened by the internet has led both entrepreneurs and investors alike to pick the low hanging fruits for the last three decades?

Lots of smart people are yearning for opportunities to tackle more ambitious problems, but many I speak to, mention that they don't believe capital is available for high risk companies. Contrary, like we see here, I hear investors yearn for more ambitious startups.

My take is that there's a mechanism missing somewhere between these groups. You don't just bootstrap and MVP a fusion reactor, to raise capital, you don't even go about doing meaningful due diligence beforehand, as these paradigm shifting technologies comes with a kind of event horizon, where projections become as meaningless as asking Edison for the ROI on utility electricity, prior to inventing the lightbulb.

I don't want to plug anything from our gracious host, Y-combinator, but we have started Unbelievable Labs, to make headway on exactly this Catch-22 problem.

My "RFS" includes: Electron-beam drilling, Nuclear Isomeric Energy Systems, Industrial-scale nuclear transmutation, Systems Biology for nano-scale structural assembly of macroscopic structures, Telekinetic manipulation (EEG+actuators), Electro-Hydrodynamic Air-Space Drive and similar "unbelievable" concepts.

We have concluded that funding for these concepts requires at least proof of a new technological principle, and we are scraping together a pool of capital from dreamy angels, as well as a cadre of possible scientists and entrepreneurs, and then instead of waiting for "somebody" to form a startup, and hope they will allow us to invest in them, we are funding the pre-seed, setting the team and getting them started. If we can convince larger corporations and nations to fund this as a kind of "Bell Labs" for the post-monopolistic world, we would have succeeded in our dreams. I don't think anything less can generate the kind of progress requested here.

Let's hope YC and others can accomplish this pivot from easy-apps to hard-progress soon.

I'd be curious about YC's thoughts on founders breaking into manufacturing/robotics from a normal SWE background

I imagine you need someone who's technical in the hardware/robotics space. There's also the route of doing a masters perhaps, or working at a robotics startup before you start your own company. I am curious about YC's thoughts here as well as someone who's enthusiastic about this space. I feel this is the next trillion dollar industry.

One of the interesting potential futures is one in which every software engineer can build awesome robotics systems.

What really unlocked ML was when you didn't need to have a deep academic background in ML to be able to use it. Now that the primitives exist, every software engineer can build a compelling ML app.

I'm not sure if robotics is there yet, but if not it probably will be.

I think there is a germ of an idea in

- antithesis - topless computing - programmable company

I was surprised to see ERP as a real option - interesting

I created an open sauce project called propertywebbuilder for creating real estate websites many years ago. I got distracted with other projects, but recently I've started looking for someone to work with to life again. If anyone is interested please reach out to me.

> Developer tools inspired by existing internal tools

Is something I'm working on right now - it's all Open Source but I'm looking at what could make it Commercial Open Source or what additional offerings would make sense to businesses

> The UK became the world's richest country in the 19th century by being the workshop of the world

Ahh.. haha. Yes it was certainly the innovation and industrialism of the UK that did it, not the inevitable result of centuries of imperialism, conquest and subjugation.

Ya I think the whole industrial revolution made them capable of colonizing everything. So I guess in a round about way.

Massive navy + Ideology/ethic of feeling justified dominating others and a sense of superiority to go with it + A couple centuries of practicing on the Irish

Profit!

To be fair the English did teach the world categorization which made everything standardized and reusable.

Huh? Spain and Portugal were also huge empires yet they never became industrial powers. Germany had very few colonies, yet achieved rapid industrialization in the 19th century.

these are great. if anyone is interested in or already exploring the enterprise + AI opportunities shared, message me

alternatively find me on the founder matching platform: https://www.startupschool.org/cofounder-matching/candidate/t...

for reference these are the ideas: 1/ New enterprise resource planning software (ERPs) 2/ AI to build enterprise software 3/ Better enterprise glue 4/ LLMs for manual back office processes in legacy enterprises

Are there any open-source tools or charts for modeling the tax liability for a pre-revenue startup that primarily is doing software development R&D with some number of employees and some amount of investment?

I’ve mentioned this one before but I would really like to see a startup make an attempt at prison reform. It’s not completely a technology problem but I do think there are ways in which a combination of technology and smarter segmentation of types of prisoners can work more toward rehabilitation and careers post-incarceration, while also supporting families and relationships.

I think this was actually an idea that Palmer Luckey was exploring before Anduril took off. I also agree that there should be something done in the space but have no clear idea on a venture scale biz that doesn't end up being exploitative.

https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey/status/1530604281732116481?...

If you follow Palmer Luckey's business plan, wouldn't you need a huge initial investment to stay afloat during the first years before getting paid?

(Not sure how long you would need to wait before getting paid?)

I wonder if this is a case where you could really facilitate a better outcome when government policy is not in your control?

You can't make prisoner's lives better / post prison lives better IF the voters and politicians don't wish to / pay you to do so...

https://www.ameelio.org/ sort of followed this route with prison communications. Non profit startup, but needed policy as rocket fuel to nuke entrenched for profit incumbents. Prison reform feels much more weighted towards policy work, but perhaps I'm missing a path.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ameelio

https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/hy70st/i_am_zo_orchin...

https://www.npr.org/2023/01/01/1146370950/prison-phone-call-...

> When the law goes into effect next month, Massachusetts will join Connecticut, California, Minnesota and Colorado in eliminating prisoner phone call fees.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38454743 (citations)

Commissary Club (formerly 70 Million Jobs) tried on the post incarceration jobs topic, but did not obtain traction (casualty of the pandemic).

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/commissary-club

(some solutions simply cannot succeed when profit is a requirement; they require systems you throw money in and outcomes come out instead of profit)

CTO of Ameelio here. Yes we are still working on it! You are right that policy is highly important. One of the biggest challenges we have faced with getting our video call system adopted, is the kickback system. Basically, for-profit incumbents charge outrageous rates to incarcerated people and/or their family members, and then "kick back" some amount to the DoJ. In some cases, this is an important part of their budget, so even if they want to switch to a non-profit provider like us (who doesn't charge families or incarcerated people at all), they can't without inducing a budget crisis. That's a pretty tought sell, and the only way to fix that is with policy, which fortunately some states are doing.

That said, there's still plenty that can be done without policy work, but it's a hard slog and requires a lot of legal work. Reviewing RFPs, submitting RFPs, integrating with the existing systems, implementing regulatory requirements, all while trying to keep the codebase and tech stack manageable with a small team and when contract periods can be multiple years long.

It's going to take some time, but we're still going and still growing.

> AI to build enterprise software

One idea is getting rid of backroom office workers, the other is to replace developers. Plenty of underlying sadism here.

Who will peruse Hacker News if no one is a software engineer?

The OpenAI web scraper.

Intellectually curious people.

pg's 3 gholas

> A way to end cancer

What they’re proposing here seems so doable. Certainly not EASY, but POSSIBLE. Companies tackling this problem could legitimately change the world.

They do already as we speak.

The idea is basically “MRIs for all, so that we can consistently catch early stage cancer before it spreads.”

They don’t go into specifics, but it seems to me like this means making MRIs cheap enough, with low enough false positive rates, that every day ppl can get them frequently. Probably ~twice a year, given how fast cancer spreads.

I’m aware of companies doing proactive MRIs that cost ~$2K/scan, that aren’t covered by health insurance. Great for the wealthy, but seems infeasible for every day ppl. I’m not aware of anyone legitimately trying to make this affordable/scalable enough that most people can get scanned frequently. Maybe they’re out there and I just haven’t heard of them? Or were you referring more to the ~$2K/scan companies?

Look up all the mRNA research going into fighting cancer for example. Or tailor made treatment. Fighting cancer is so much more than just early detection, which isbincredibly important for sure.

Yeah agreed, early detection isn’t a panacea, but it does seem like a pretty promising approach to have a big impact.

[dupe]

Announcement post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39369766

The fact that YC overlooks the dire need for next-generation cybersecurity solutions is quite shocking. In the coming years, cybersecurity, trust, and safety will be essential needs of every customer and enterprise application. For example, the whole fiasco with the spread of fake Taylor Swift's nude images is just the beginning of the exploitation of internet data on an industrial scale. We can already see attempts to commercialize services similar to ransomware-as-a-service that, for a small amount of money, generate atrocious content about every possible person and spread it online automatically. We are on the edge of a new revolution that will bring malicious tools and services even closer to regular consumers and make them more affordable. I think that our cybersecurity tool chain is far from ready for what is coming.

You can't buy (or sell) cybersecurity. It's a property of things, not a thing in itself.

The same will certainly apply to the intra-head security you want against fake content and propaganda.

I apologize, but I don't understand your point. Could you please explain to me what you mean by that or how the fact that you "can't buy cybersecurity" contradicts what I wrote?

The cyber security market was valued at USD 153.65 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow from USD 172.32 billion in 2023 to USD 424.97 billion in 2030, so apparently people are buying cybersecurity solutions.

Almost the entirety of that market does not actually improve the security of anything.

The rest looks much more like services than products.

I understand and agree with your point that you can't just "buy" cybersecurity by throwing money at the problem. It's more like building a well-defended castle, where multiple elements work together to create true security. Cybersecurity is a company-wide process that needs to be powered by specialized tools.

The fact that one of the fastest-growing markets is omitted by YC is shocking to me. The opportunity to build $1B companies, which seems to be one of YC's acceptance criteria, is enormous.

I don't know how far or close you are to the security field, but I do share your sentiment that many tools and so-called security solutions are useless and don't solve the problem. So it's now even more necessary to go and build new solutions. The problem persists and grows.

I can agree with the opportunity analysis, but my argument is that it's understandable for people to feel uncomfortable to operate on that market at all. That said, I'm not sure there's any consideration for "comfort" on that list, so I may indeed be completely wrong here.

Anyway, I do agree there's plenty to work on the solutions. But those will probably come from areas like "correctness", "user empowerment", and etc. The closest I see to it is "policy enforcement".

There's actually at least a few cybersecurity related companies in the current batch. Not to mention Reality Defender (https://realitydefender.com/) from a couple years ago who have been doing well. YC is absolutely interested in the space. If anything, they may not have included cybersecurity in the RFS because they're already seeing and funding founders tackling it!

“ L.L.MS FOR MANUAL BACK OFFICE PROCESSES IN LEGACY ENTERPRISES”

That one sounds more like a salesperson + consultant rather than a software startup.

Stablecoin is a solution in search of a problem.

"Eliminating middlemen in healthcare"

Unless YC is looking for a startup that lobbies against for-profit health insurance this is more like "eliminating middlemen and replacing them with our own in healthcare"

"Uber for healthcare" now pivoting to "OpenAI for healthcare"

Healthcare has been "solved" already in many countries, it's just the USA that can't deal with it.

You don't need "disruption" or a technological revolution to fix healthcare, you just need socialism. Just look at what Cuba is doing for once and learn something.

I felt so inclined toward startups in my 20, now in mid 30 I'll just start a GitHub repo if theres interest

I’d love to work on any of these. Please get in touch if you want to team up. (email in profile)

Does no 4. include startups that are developing systems to protect innocent civilians from US weapons and drones used by Israelis to conduct their genocide? I'm certain it will have many sales and be a viable business or do they have to be in line with American and Israeli imperial aims?

Defense startups should not be normalized. If you are going to forcibly normalize it then don't pick sides as that's not good for business.

Regard Explainable AI ,I'm building a prompt sharing platform https://www.thepromptsquare.com.

The idea is to provide a square where users can discover ,share, collaborate discuss on various chatGPT prompts and their corresponding outputs .

what startups have followed these requests and succeeded in previous years?

I submitted an application for w24 that fits in the "Developer tools inspired by existing internal tools" category but wasn't accepted. I suspect my pitch probably needed work, and I also haven't started building at all yet and submitted as a solo-founder which it seems has less chance of being accepted.

Here's the pitch and some details, in case anyone else is interested in the idea:

> Supportal uses AI to generate internal tooling for startups that enables founders to scale customer-support without having to rely on engineering resources.

> Given some simple input context like tech-stack and a database schema, Supportal uses AI to auto-generate internal tools which allow customer-support to easily answer questions about and take action on customer-data without needing help from an engineer.

> Supportal offers founders a fully-featured self or cloud-hosted web UI.

Retool (https://retool.com), Zapier (https://zapier.com), Airtable (https://www.airtable.com), Superblocks (https://www.superblocks.com), and Google AppSheet (https://about.appsheet.com) would likely be primary competitors, although their products require heavy user interaction to build internal tools either through composition in a WYSIWYG editor, low/no-code solutions, or integrations expertise using a full programming language.

Although I'm no longer there, we actually evaluated and/or used all of these tools at Pulley, so I've had first-hand experience with their friction and where the gaps exist that Supportal would fill.

These tools are also all targeted at integrations-experts who have the technical knowledge to write code and spend time building the tool they want.

Supportal aims to generate the tooling you need intelligently via AI introspection and get you up and running with useful command and query tools to help your customer-support team take action and gain insights without help from engineering right out of the box.

My most recent experience comes building internal tools for Pulley; I built the initial version of the internal tools in ~3 weeks and added features to it within Pulley over ~2 years. Roughly ~2-3 months of full-time work spread over that time period.

Features were added as we identified gaps in our support agents ability to answer questions and take action, which often required dedicated engineering resources to help with, leading to a productivity loss for both groups.

That said, I haven't actually built out anything that would _generate_ tools like this yet, but I've done enough adjacent work in the codegen/AI space in the last couple years that I feel confident I could put the pieces together.

Anyone else shocked the elephant in the room, AGI, wasn’t mentioned? First mover advantage on that announcement is going to be unspeakably potent, just culturally speaking. I imagine many on this path share my thoughts that early venture capital is a little unnecessary/outmoded in this context, but it’s still disheartening to be forgotten.

Did the YC folks have a falling out with OpenAI and disagree that AGI is here? Or maybe the opposite - they’re letting OpenAI take the industry uncontested… What’s the hacker news policy on casually floating (ill-informed) accusations of cartel activities? ;)

PS big laughs from me on seeing “cure cancer” halfway down a list of otherwise fairly capitalist short-term priorities. I’m sure they made that decision for a reason but I think the end result is a Freudian slip on behalf of our entire culture

Glad to see YC supporting US-based manufacturing. Kudos

Is ycombinator the new arpa I hope so...

In the back-office automation example is:

- Assessing applications for a mortgage or a business loan

Really? Are we really giving these things as prime examples of what LLMs can automate.

I do not want my mortgage application or business loan rejected because some un-auditable, non-deterministic, inference decided so.

The tech upper classes really are sheltered from the real impact on real people that trusting IT can have.

There's countless scandals of faulty algorithms (which are tractable) causing people real pain, often with suicides resulting.

Using a black-box inference machine instead is MUCH worse.

I find it strange that they would write "The hollowing out of US manufacturing has led to social and political division and left us in a precarious place geopolitically." And then suggest the answer to that is robotics and ML, which does nothing but exacerbate the social and political divisions - unless government and enterprise make the hard choices to provide a real safety net. And then, if we do that, it doesn't matter if the US is excelling in manufacturing as a source of revenue or not - providing revenue to fund these programs is coming in from somewhere, the source is far less important.

Well, the point isn't to stop the social and political division. The point is stop the geopolitical precariousness.

> My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.

I would suggest that our geopolitical precariousness comes from our social divisions. I doubt Russia, China, or anyone else will ever be able to invade.

But if the losers of globalism keep getting purposefully shortchanged I can more easily foresee them deciding to change the system by force.

I don't think that's a terribly likely outcome, but much more likely than Red Dawn.

Our social divisions means they don't have to invade in order to unseat the U.S. as a global superpower.

There are two factors to consider though.

On the one hand, you're correct that it does nothing for the American worker to bring manufacturing back if it means huge buildings with skeleton crews and machines that effectively run themselves. I don't particularly have a solution for this. Americans have gotten used to the price of goods being artificially low because of inexpensive labor in impoverished countries. Unless we want to take a manufacturing approach akin to Germany or the Nordic countries, focusing on high quality precision built or luxury items, we simply can't produce goods at commodity prices while both paying people enough to live well on and producing the kind of profit that is required by investors. So that's where YC sees machines as solving that conflict, at no benefit to working people.

That said, there is the advantage that we have seen how fragile the global JIT supply chain is to disruptions. Either political, environmental or just plain Acts of God like COVID. Having goods produced much closer to where they're consumed is something I think every country needs to invest in. Especially for goods that aren't just nice-to-haves but necessary for basic functioning of society. Things like construction and repair materials, medicines, medical devices, etc. I support building up a greater local resilience over global dependence, especially what with climate change on the horizon.

I wish we could do this in a way that meant good blue collar jobs with strong benefits and union wages. But you can't ever expect a investors YC to take that path.

> On the one hand, you're correct that it does nothing for the American worker to bring manufacturing back if it means huge buildings with skeleton crews and machines that effectively run themselves.

This seems analogous to the transition from bespoke manufacturing of goods to mass production.

I think what we need is leadership that can get people excited, in good faith, about a future where small groups of people can produce goods for orders of magnitude less capital, effort, etc. with robotics, ML, and other tech.

Today a popular dystopian narrative of tech is that it’s being deployed by the elite to enrich themselves and build moats around their fiefdoms. Feudalism doesn’t get pluralities excited. How can that mainstream narrative be changed in a manner that makes people clearly understand how they can be a beneficiary instead of an exploit?

> Feudalism doesn’t get pluralities excited, so how does that mainstream narrative change in a manner that feels like everybody is part of the journey instead of an exploit?

The problem is not the need for a narrative change. The need is actual change.

"Actual change" implies that all tech is complicit in feudalism, which isn't categorically true. That doesn't matter though because enough tech companies have engaged in activities that lead to the narratives we regularly see today.

Yes, there is "actual change" that's needed by a lot of actors in tech, but that alone won't be enough. Ideally we see both "actual change" and "narrative change" happen in tandem that get people excited about the future.

Is the narrative incorrect though? I feel like the underlying situation is described pretty well by that narrative in most cases. Inequality has increased pretty massively since tech has taken over the economy

Maybe take a crack at it, what is incorrect with the "feudalism" narrative? what is the better way of framing it that you're implying exists?

It's both correct and incorrect at the same time and both "sides" are "right".

Let's look at "Inequality has increased pretty massively". One anecdote paints a picture of billionaires getting richer and wages of the working class stagnating. Another narrative paints the opposite picture that tech has brought billions of people out of extreme poverty over the past few decades. Both are true and can be supported by data.

I haven't quite put it into words yet, but I think the key to a narrative that gets people excited about the future is one that makes it very concrete how people will benefit.

I do regularly see gaps that I find unsatisfying, which I think is a better place for me to start so I'll take a crack at that:x

Often I see tech people saying things like, "in the future we'll be doing amazing things that we can't even imagine yet". This scares the hell out of people who don't understand tech. We need more people to understand tech, but I'm not sure how. Education seems like a logical place to start, which gets into very complicated socioeconomic factors.

Another thing I've seen lately is e/acc disparaging opponents as "deccels". Regardless of that being true or not, it's not going to get people excited about the future and instead builds up a group of antagonists. That said, I'm not sure if e/acc is trying to be a diplomatic or political movement, but I think improving the messaging here would be helpful.

I think about this a lot and hope to one day put into words a more satisfying answer to this problem.

I see what you mean, I will say that in people's lived day to day experience and happiness relative wealth matters a lot. I'm not sure it's fair to say both are "right" in the sense of you're just talking about different groups of people.

If people are more wealthy on some kind of absolute scale but they can no longer have the financial security to compete and secure a mate they're probably not going to be happy about it regardless of what underlying material net increases have been.

For example, I think if you're a white man in US (probably true for other groups just don't want to speak on things I don't have much experience with) and you aren't into education or computers you're _correct_ to be anti-tech. All it will mean is continuing degradation in your quality of life and feelings of self worth

I think this is an interesting take and something I've been relatively close to personally. I have a family member who owns one of those 100k Brother CNC machines, a robotic arm and some vice clamps and is starting a small manufacturing business with it out of his garage. While this isn't something that an average American can do, it can allow distribution of manufacturing to places that don't need a 500 acre lot, and with more small time manufacturing operations popping up competing with each other, can bring down the price of creating purely made-in-America products.

Mass manufacturing is cheap because of economiea of scale, that means large volumes. The best a small shop can achieve, and that can be highly profitable if done right, is small batches, prototyping or serving as a sub-contractor for the big ones.

None of which actually drives final product prices dibe, and is already done extensively.

This is only true with the current level of technology adoption. The economic lot size will trend towards a single unit as technology adoption improves.

There is no technology that makes lot size one economically viable so. TPs has it as a goal, but hardly ever achieves that.

And even then, we talk about the lot size of one production order. Economies of scale apply to the overall output of a plant, not individual production orders...

This is actually going to go the other way. Too many people did this. The median job shop size in the US is 9 people. The capital equipment is very inefficiently utilized and the industry is generally technologically behind. It will soon consolidate around the firms that can apply technology effectively.

> it does nothing for the American worker to bring manufacturing back if it means huge buildings with skeleton crews and machines that effectively run themselves

I don't think that right. It still means goods are being produced in America, which means:

1. Greater security of production against geopolitical threats, and

2. More goods being produced overall, meaning cheaper goods.

Even without significant employment, those are good things!

> Greater security of production against geopolitical threats

I address this in the second paragraph.

> More goods being produced overall, meaning cheaper goods.

I'm not convinced cheaper, more abundant goods are the top problem to solve right now. Especially as wants get cheaper, needs are getting much more expensive. And low and stagnant wages at the bottom means survival becomes increasingly difficult, despite cheaper candy and toys.

These things don't live in a vacuum. Those big skeleton crew shops open the door to innovation at higher levels of abstraction in the supply chain.

Namely, it requires more of a model basis - materials and tolerances in the 3D model. That enables better design automation and things like defined mechanical interfaces in a machine readable format. Think DARPA FANG/AVM. It also includes a mathematically sound definition or approximation of GD&T.

End result is fewer firms, fewer employees, more productivity and lower lot sizes. That means more efficiency and adaptability with higher wages and more intense training.

It also means that designing, making and selling things becomes less capital intensive. In theory every mechanically inclined person can be creating solutions. Hardware gets a little closer to looking like software because open source can be a real thing. Etc.

Manufacturing today (even overseas) is very different than what it was in the great off-shoring. The status quo has changed & won't be coming back -- automation is now the norm. But still, the multiplier effect for manufacturing is massive: For every $1 of economic output, it generates somewhere between $2-$3 of GDP -- and that is heavily centered in the community housing the factory. It's much better for a distributed society than many other sectors that tend to exfiltrate GDP.

I'm going to guess that whatever is able to heal social and political (ie economic) divide won't come from capital lol—maybe the next depression might put the work in.

> And then suggest the answer to that is robotics and ML, which does nothing but exacerbate the social and political divisions

Maybe it does those things. But clearly it doesnt do “nothing but” those things. It brings manufacturing back which is the entire point. I really think you’re ignoring the whole point to go off on a highly partisan political tangent.

>It brings manufacturing back

It is completely unsurprising to me that those making this nonsense claim never accept the burden of proof. If they did, it would only further reveal that they are pushing total bullshit.

I don’t understand what you are trying to say but “bringing manufacturing back” is the starting premise. He already begets bringing it back.

Its not that automation necessarily brings back manufacturing, its that if it does its not only going to increase social and political division.

> It brings manufacturing back which is the entire point.

If the point is to bring back manufacturing salaries in the quantity and amount previously available, it's not the entire point.

I should have gotten into AI

What's stopping you?

It's bizarre to me that Tesla gets cited as an exemplar for operating as an American manufacturer for physical goods, given that it's been the subject of numerous scandals regarding quality control of the physical components manufactured there, many of which I've found out about through this very site. If manufacturing comes back to the US in the form of more companies that operate like Tesla, I would guess that American-manufactured goods would come to be distrusted more

Of course, to put this solely on Tesla isn't completely fair. A lot of the problems with how Tesla does business are symptoms of the larger crisis in how businesses are run here, but I think that trying to bring manufacturing back without solving the corporate governance problems that make doing it well infeasible (and indeed caused a lot of the offshoring in the first place) is likely a fool's errand. Most businesses face little discipline on quality in the form of either regulation or competition (which tends to be eaten by mergers even when it arises), and intense pressure from investors to cut corners at every turn

Tesla has done fantastic R&D and marketing for EVs but you're right that their cars themselves has always defective rolling off the lot. I know a good number of people who have had or currently have a Tesla and every single one had to take it in after buying it to get something fixed.

What scandals (honest question)? Is it more than comparable companies?

I think a big problem is that modern American firms outsource practically all required expertise to suppliers so they are left with no core competency apart from marketing, lobbying and financial engineering. Its my impression that Tesla does more stuff themselves so they were quicker to innovate and experiment. But not sure if that's just their marketing and cult that leads me to believe this. But I do know that electric cars were long thought impractical and dead, and their sudden rise in popularity coincided with Tesla creating a good electric car

Off the top of my head, there was a story on here about cars crashing due to axles failing months after they rolled off the lot, and a more recent story about the bodies of cybertrucks rusting from small amounts of rain exposure

This is just on the physical components side. Tesla is also continuously dealing with scandals about data provenance, transparency, the false promises and dangerous consequences of its pushes toward autonomous driving, and of course the same nickel-and-dime nonsense other tech companies do like trying to charge subscriptions for every little feature, gradually rolling out user-hostile behavior in a proprietary software ecosystem, litigation threats toward victims of accidents who seek any remedy or even accountability for harms caused by many of these issues, etc.

It serves as a better exemplar of how much hype and marketing to attract investment drive the success of an American company in the current environment than of how onshore manufacturing could work

EDIT: Also, comparable in what sense?

>given that it's been the subject of numerous scandals regarding quality control of the physical components manufactured there

They're very young as far as automotive manufacturers go, and this is a pretty normal part of the 'figuring out how to build a car' learning cycle. South Korean car companies had dismal quality issues decades after they were founded, and now they're much better. Manufacturing complex goods at scale is just really really hard and takes a ton of process knowledge and human capital. Tesla it at a normal part of the automotive manufacturing lifecycle

Consistent quality control is a much harder problem to solve than product design.

Some real bangers on here, such as "new ERP" and "new defense technology" (ew) ... also seems crypto bros aren't quite dead yet.

Interesting to see that overall the VC ghouls seem a bit out of ideas on how to squeeze more cents out of a dollar.

The one thing on that list that remotely makes any sense is leveraging LLM tech to automate legacy manual processes. Scalability on that though, whew.

“YC request for things they would like someone to spend their life on while they get rich making enterprise SaaS”

sad to see no neuro-ai , is it too early?

I am building a company that falls under two categories (commercial Open Source and developer tools based on internal tools), but I would never take YC money for it.

Because of that stake, they want an "exit" in some form, and the drive to that exit will pave the road to user-hostile software and make it the path of least resistance.

I'll bite, I'm interested in the OSS dev tools field and I agree with your stance on investment money tending to corrupt good products. It's a big trade off. What are you working on? Do you have a website to share? Is it just you right now or do you have partners or employees?

I am surprised at the interest, thank you!

One note: technically my software isn't quite Open Source; it's source available. [0]

I will have my first release in less than two months, hopefully. It will include a scripting language and a build system.

If the language gets interest, I'll expand it and build the standard library.

If the build system gets interest, I will expand it. The end goal is Nix for mere mortals.

If neither gets interest, I will have to move to my next idea: VCS with project management and that handles large, binary files.

Beyond that, we'll see.

I have a business website, but not yet for those projects. I will at release, including tutorials.

You can read an old commit of design docs at [1], [2], and [3].

It's just me; I want to run my business like Hwaci, the SQLite guys. That also reduces overhead and will let me provide excellent support [4] for paying clients.

[0]: https://gavinhoward.com/2023/12/is-source-available-really-t...

[1]: https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/src/branch/master/docs/yao

[2]: https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/src/branch/master/docs/rig

[3]: https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/src/branch/master/docs/yar

[4]: https://github.com/gavinhoward/bc/issues/66

Why would anyone pay for what you’re building? SQLite is not a business model anyone in the world could meaningfully replicate, don’t hope for it.

You may be right.

However, there are rumblings that standards and liability will be imposed on the industry.

In that case, I would be well-positioned as someone who could accept that liability for a price. Your run-of-the-mill build system created by volunteers? Not so much.

I don't know, I would argue that YC might be the best place for Open Source and Dev Tools, because you start along with a large cohort of former and current YC startups who will be willing to try out your product. Plus the YC partners actually have experience in working with successful companies in this space, so that's actually equity that they would deserve.

That being said, dev tools is one of the sectors they have stopped funding, seemingly.

I actually agree with you that YC is a good value for their founders. That network and experience are worth their weight in gold.

I am just different; I don't want gold. I want:

* Sufficient money for my needs and no more.

* To change the industry towards professional standards. [1] [2]

[1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2023/11/how-to-fund-foss-save-it-fro...

[2]: https://gavinhoward.com/2022/10/we-must-professionalize-prog...

For good reason: most of the dev tools companies have been commercial duds. Lots of traction/GitHub stars maybe, but none of those amounted to real sales.

There's often good money to be made in dev tools, but it's not always VC-level money.

I was in one of the recent batches and they definitely didn't stop funding devtools. In fact, it felt like we were encouraged to pivot into the devtools space by some of the group partners.

> Because of that stake, they want an "exit" in some form

Every single entity who invests in your company wants an exit.

You are absolutely right.

I am bootstrapping. I own 100% of the company.

Morally I agree with you.

My wallet unfortunately does not.

And I don't blame you!

Bootstrapping is hard, and I know that I am lucky to be able to...thus far.

If the world would still be net better off with the VC-backed software, and it wouldn't get made any other way, I don't think it would be immoral to take it, so long as effort is made to follow the harder path.

This depends on type of stock, old-fashioned stock had dividends, so investors were interested in profit rather than liquidity event.

You don't think you're cutting off your nose to spite your face? Maybe all those user-hostile features are a small price to pay for the resources to ship the "vital few" that are positively game-changing for your customers. For me, it's an open question.

You have a point. May I give my experience?

I have spent years building my stack. This stack gives me extreme velocity.

For example, I built my own localization. I query the OS for the locale, but beyond that, everything is mine. This allows me to make more assumptions and move faster.

In addition, this allows me to cull tech debt aggressively. [1] After years of this, when other codebases are molasses, mine is clean and easy to extend.

In other words, I did the hard work upfront, before getting clients. I hope this will give me the ability to add the "vital few" with few resources.

[1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2023/12/code-is-not-technical-debt/

I've been thinking about whether investors should be consumer brands, to develop a reputation accross different companies, to encourage the companies they invest in to put ethics above profit to maintain that reputation.

I'll just put my two cents as a YC alum here — I never felt pressured to "do an exit", and YC is probably one of the least pushing investors in that field by a margin.

Though, a lot of advice given to YC companies is on how to build big companies that scale (unicorn+), so if you don't plan on doing that, you may not get very much out of the program.

That is good to know.

I do admit that I don't want a unicorn either, so YC wouldn't be a good fit.

Yeah. YC acts like they are doing you a favor? Come on. They basically give these companies nothing in exchange for a huge stake.

YC's idea is to optimize for helping founders. That means supporting what the founders want If they don't want to exit, YC's not going to pressure them.

This works out well because it's the global optimum. YC has much more success optimizing for helping founders than it would by trying to squeeze individual lemons.

I hope that is true, and a sibling comment to yours suggests it is.

That said, that sibling comnent suggests that YC is for potential unicorns, and I don't want that either. So YC is not for me.

Though I will say nothing wrong with unicorns per se.

Just plain marketing. In reality they will invest in incremental startups of serial entrepreneurs or well known people in silicon valley.

They became traditional corporate long ago. Shows in their recent portfolio.

Seeing as I just recently talked to two young students who got in and also know someone from my college days who was accepted for the W24 batch this doesn't seem very correct to me.

Notably neither of those two groups of people are SV based, both NYC affiliated.

Yep, already got rejected couple of times, even before the AI boom, with my company which clearly falls under "Using Machine Learning to simulate the physical world" and "Explainable A.I." and have the potential to fall under most of the rest...

A lot of YC's material about their selection process centers around the founders instead of the idea. They openly admit that they choose a team and expect you to pivot a few times.

Obviously I don't know anything about you or your ideas and I don't mean to offend but I've typically assumed that a YC rejection means they disqualified the candidate for one reason or another.

Do they give feedback in their rejection? I'm considering applying.

They give zero feedback, so there are way better places to apply if that's all you're looking for.

The truth is the applicants have to have a story that resonates with whoever reviews your submission. Sometimes people jive over a shared problem space, sometimes they just like people who remind them of themselves or who come from "trust networks" they respect. The latter cases are where the bias keeps seeping in.

And just because they don't pick you for an interview doesn't mean you were disqualified forever. A lot of people reapply and have success. There are just so few slots compared to applicants that most don't hear anything.

No individual feedback, I am not offended at all as this is 2 way street, why would I accept money from someone who does not believe in me :-)

Do no evil unless there are massive profits.

YC is seeking startups for

"NEW WAR TECHNOLOGY" Killing is our business. and business is good.

Yes, what we need are startups focused on killing people in ever more efficient ways, with the least amount of threat to our own people.

Hopefully, we can invent a even more efficient way of genocide by inventing something much stronger than a hydrogen bomb, but with less radiation. Friendly and looks good on TV.

The future so bright. I gotta wear shades.

Many years ago, when the state was more honest the US had a "Department of War".

Which it ought to have kept given that few wars ( or "military conflicts") that the US engages in is about Defense of our home country. Our patch of dirt. Easy to see since they usually take place on a different continent.

In 1984 they call it "Department of Peace".

--------------

>NEW DEFENSE TECHNOLOGY - Jared Friedman and Gustaf Alströmer

The US is now engaged in large-scale conflicts in several regions that threaten to change our world. While the US has historically led the world in defense technology, the defense contractors it depends on have grown slow and inefficient, bloated by decades of cost-plus contracts.

SpaceX showed the world that a private space company could be vastly more effective than the publicly-funded United Launch Alliance. New companies that sell to the DoD like Palantir and Anduril are showing that the same thing is true for defense tech.

Silicon Valley was born in the early 20th century as an R&D area for the US military. Early Silicon Valley companies were largely funded by the DoD and played a key role in WWII by building military radar, code-breaking equipment, and components for the atomic bomb.

This decade is the time to return Silicon Valley to these roots.

great!

@Dang, and @SAMA

In this list without a single request for managing corruption in .gov, the senate, how we address world situations which difficulties are FN COMPOUNDED by the very tools youre asking for -- AND the fact that you claim Alignment is an important feature...

Palantir muc, inqtel much, every fn defense thing

Your list is literally CONfinment.

2. AI for defense == We can profit here.

5. Are you fn daft: East India Company, do you speak it? Show me how many hands you have. "The UK became the world's richest country in the 19th century by being the workshop of the world. Death, murder conquer brought this, not some hipster Build a Startup They Said.. meme claim"

10. Enterspiese resource mgmt ; so HR on AI jax? FUCK that.

15. DC much?

19. Ive built more hospitals than you can shake a stick at. This is a nuanced comment:

Eliminating the middleman in healthcare, your startup list will ONLY be medical records "disruptors" against EPIC and such and a boon to insurance - you cant kill the Pharma PornStars slinging pills. If you want to eliminate 'middlemen' - KILL PHARMA ADVERTISING AND PHARMA PILL PUSHING. (Source, I have designed built, implemented, commissioned and GO-LIVE more hospitals than you have been admitted to in your life. (this is a political issue, not a tech/pharma issue, per se -- the middlemen are the political policy makers and this is just a money hole)

Your RFS is written by grifter VCs who have no soul.

Prove me wrong.

I want technological improvement, but the nuanced self-serving focus of this RFS makes me want to puke (its not the what, its the how, and the complete abrogation of any sense of historic context on all the technological platforms that brought us here, and the lack of awareness by these requests...

These requests are NOT to inspire you - they are to feed their input....

When we heard AI was dangerous... think of a single one of the RFSs that do not include @sama.

-----

@Dang, and @SAMA

In this list without a single request for managing corruption in .gov, the senate, how we address world situations which difficulties are FN COMPOUNDED by the very tools youre asking for.

---

Where EXACTLY do YOU think we should be plannig for and that includes

SERIOUSLY

What are HN's motives.

------

Seriously

"dont be evil"

I can't believe that there's a US-supported genocide in Palestine and YC is advertising for "New defense tech". The most tone deaf thing I've ever seen

models != startup

how about models + a tailwind SaaS boilerplate? /s

Valuable ones do.

Merged hither. Thanks!

YC wants a more direct hand in genocides I guess. Shouldn’t be surprised

Some cool ideas here, but Garry Tan really can't be leading this organization after his death threats at elected officials.

If picking investors is a bit like a marriage, it's a bit scary. Who'd want to commit to having Garry in their cap table for the next 10 years? I say this as a potential applicant.

Everyone who values what Garry can bring to the table, so probably 99% of applicants. ;-)

I don't entirely disagree generally, but I suspect the answer is "people who want money" and that might be enough for many of them to bypass any potential concerns.

"die slow" was just a request for more startup ideas to disrupt medicine

If you believe that these elected officials have facilitated the deaths of 100s of people and the suffering of many more then... (btw I think they pretty much have fueled the drug and lawlessness epidemic in SF)

Ironically, people like Garry have actually fueled said epidemic, by contributing to ever-rising inequality, driving people to the streets, where they turn to crime and drugs.

How much drug deaths in Singapore again?

They were lyrics from a Tupac song. Clearly you are just not happy with the political environment in SF changing even slightly

New defense technology

Bring manufacturing back to America

New space companies

Careful not shooting yourself in the foot there …

YC has a solid brand that enables it to get capital and talent from all over the world - venturing into areas that are deeply divisive for a hot dollar may just cut that off.

20 categories of innovative startups, primarily centered around the technological breakthrough of putting the letters A and I next to each other...

> Every week the YC Group Partners meet and discuss the current batch. One common area of discussion is ideas — what kind of ideas are these founders having the best luck with? Which ones are they pivoting away from?

How about: do you have any path to profitability, or you're still on the path to lose hundreds of millions of dollars per year or get sold to the highest bidder?

YC is about making something users want. That's the trailhead for all paths to profitability. So there's no conflict here.

If you haven't made anything users want, then you might need to change your idea, and that's what that sentence is referring to.

> YC is about making something users want.

Okay, let's assume that is true

> That's the trailhead for all paths to profitability.

You can open a list of YC's companies, and then find profitable ones. An eye opener.

For those who are profitable now, you can also look at how long they have existed, how long they have been profitable, and how long it will take them to break even considering those losses.

> BRING MANUFACTURING BACK TO AMERICA

That explains the admin on this forum throwing a "you're a nationalist!" at me recently, turns out I was ahead of the game on that (only that I was doing it for the wrong geo-political bloc)

> NEW DEFENSE TECHNOLOGY

Ooo, that certainly explains lots and lots of stuff, including the "warnings" whenever the comments don't support the correct geo-political bloc mentioned above.

All in all very interesting, turns out that YC and the money behind it has smelt where things are going and are following the likes of Eric Schmidt. Let's see what the time will tell.

> That explains the admin on this forum throwing a "you're a nationalist!" at me recently

Are you referring to this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39315543 If so, it seems wildly unrelated to "BRING MANUFACTURING BACK TO AMERICA".

Interesting, I have never seen this chinamod list before and it's undocumented[0][1][?].

https://news.ycombinator.com/chinamod

Are there more?

[0]https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/lists

[?]https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...

I put lists like that together sometimes to answer specific user questions—primarily when I can't use an HN Search link because there's no search query that's precise enough.

That one stuck around because the perception that it corrects (of HN moderation being against $COUNTRY, where $COUNTRY = China in this case) shows up semi-regularly—as does the opposite perception, of course. These things always come in opposing pairs.

As a side note, it's interesting to see how different users react to reading such a set of comments, i.e. comments that contradict their assumptions about how HN is moderated. In some cases the reaction is something like, "Wow, I had no idea - thanks for the information" and the person presumably goes on to adjust their priors. In other cases the reaction is a complex explanation of how none of that matters and the original perception remains intact, even though it's inaccurate.

Ah that makes sense, as “see: ‘by:dang [$topic]’” is a pretty frequent sight, thanks for the explaination.

>It’s interesting to see how different users react to reading such a set of comments…

I’ve noticed this myself and I’ve always been surprised at the wide variety of users that fall into either of these buckets. You sort of expect this from new(er) accounts. But some of the arguments from created: ~2000’s, karma: 20,000+ accounts in detached threads are wild.

I suspect this comes from a lot of moderation actually being quite transparent, but not obvious. If one has any interest they can actually go learn a lot w.r.t. moderation. But zero information is forced unless one goes looking or eventually runs afoul.

In the lack of a story, it’s easy to invent a lot of assumptions about what is done and why. People inevitably see the invented assumptions of others and repeat them.

Or perhaps there are some topics where its so close to home that any slight, real or perceived, makes it impossible to be reasoned with.

Yes, and yes, economic autarky (which is what this “let’s bring industry back to America” thing actually is) is usually associated with nationalism and other such stuff (I personally call it Mussolinian, but someone may come and mention List, who was a 19th century German, so to each his own)

> I personally call it Mussolinian

Named after somebody better known for other ideas?

I hadn't any idea that YC was going to say this when I replied to your comments the other day. Moderating HN doesn't leave any time to be plugged in on YC's internal plans.

People often reach for an exotic explanation in their own case, but anyone who's familiar with HN's rules can see how your comments have been breaking them. It's just that simple.

We don't care about your, or any other commenter's "geopolitics". It's all endlessly more tedious and obvious than that.

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