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Comment by latchkey | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, these companies are springing up left and right. Software solutions to a hardware problem. It looks like most of the available compute is allocated, so they are going to have to get a bunch more providers onboarded.

I wonder why y-combinator is stuffing their investments with multiples of these similar companies... https://www.shadeform.ai/ is another one.

A few quick comments:

Reading the source of their install script:

https://gpudeploy-public.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/join_clu...

It doesn't start off with set -e, which could result in an incomplete install, yet appear to finish.

It also installs some binary "instance-server"... who knows what it does... would you trust this on your server on your network?

It is nvidia specific... sadly, don't expect AMD gpus anytime soon.

Feels like a MVP, let's see how this grows over time.

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Is there any way to monitor for sales of hardware if/when any of these companies dies so that I can get 1xH100 for personal use at a deep discount?

Ebay?

Is that where they really go? I feel like buying anything for several thousand dollars on Ebay is sketch. What if they ship me an empty box?

Back in my crypto asic mining days, I'd hear stories of people receiving boxes of cement blocks.

Looks like you can get a MI210 on ebay for $6500, with 30 day warranty. heh.

Oh, there are a bunch of H100's there...

https://www.ebay.com/help/buying/returns-refunds/returns-ref...

File a dispute with PayPal? And then with your credit card?

As the post points out, this is a pivot from a company that was a consumer of this kind of service in its original incarnation; YC had presumably nothing to do with it.

That an interesting presumption. If a startup is "Backed by Y Combinator", and it pivots, you don't think that Y Combinator would have some sort of opinion on that?

I would expect some sort of conversation like: "Oh hey, we have another company, in our portfolio, that is far ahead of you, doing exactly the same thing. Maybe you should do something else?"

But of course, this is AI... plenty of space for gpu marketplaces.

YC partners might have an opinion and might offer advice but they're always going to support what the founders want to do—that's kind of the core principle of YC.

As for "other company in portfolio", that's unavoidable when funding thousands of startups and almost always turns out to be a non-issue.

Awesome, makes perfect sense. Thanks for the clarity @dang.

I'm curious now, if you can say. Was advice offered in this case? If so, what was it?

I'm not part of such discussions so I'm afraid I have no idea!

People here think you _are_ YC. Little do they know you're far more perceptive and capable than YC.

That's definitely not true, but thanks for the support :)

Truth is a spectrum. I will leave my opinions on YC unpublished. Thanks for all you do.

That's not how YC works. We're YC W20. We have a GPU offering. Guess how many conversations we had with YC about it.

What's YC going to do? They have a tiny stake in your firm. That's the point; that's what "founder-friendliness" means. They're not your board.

Cool, thanks for the info Thomas. I honestly have never looked into YC at all, so I'm definitely not aware of how these things work. I was posting from an honest curiosity.

why does ycombinator invest in companies that will compete against each other, isn’t that a conflict of interest

Nope. That allows them to control the market. Find new ideas that could threaten the big 5 status quo. Fund them. Get them bought by one of the big five (making a good amount of money off that). Let the big five shutdown the competition.

Conflict of interest only applies if you think they’re concerned with the public good. There is no assumption of that here. Every man for himself.

Absolutely not. Why would it be?

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