YC West Coast Demo Day Roundup | Hacker News Reader

YC West Coast Demo Day Roundup

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41 pointsjamiequint10 comments

I'm always fascinated by the folks who flip a U-turn on their startup like Cloudant. I have to assume it happens far more often in the YC environment. When you're just kind of holed up in your bunker and spring something on the world after you've brought it to alpha, I don't think it's so common to throw out what you're working on even if it's for the best.

I had a half-year-long entrepreneurial experience when I was 23, but it was basically just me, in the spider hole, coding, and never finishing the product. I was trying to make something technologically cool and didn't know (or care to know) a thing about the business aspect. It was a huge waste from a learning perspective, much less a money perspective, although I did enjoy it. I lacked a co-founder, investors, much of a clue about the market and guidance, but what was fatal was that I was missing feedback and a deadline.

I think startups are painfully difficult to assess without a structure that provides honest feedback and a real deadline. I think it's greatly to YC's credit that they have teams that radically alter their focus like Cloudant did, however it turns out.

Cloudant is cool, just hope that router doesn't get you banned from those sites that specifically ban IP's for using download accelerators (IE making too many simultaneous requests).

That's a valid worry. I know for a fact that using Fasterfox will get you banned on many sites (I got banned for using it myself). I hope Cloudant guys expose some settings to help with that.

Y'know, after seeing "Cloudant" a few times, I'm starting to want to pronounce it en francais. Clou-dant. Clooo-dahhn. Okay, sorry.

Damn, I am working on a python script to do simultaneous range requests and 'am hoping to release it as open source by October. @work, lots of ISOs get transferred over the network all the time; even on a fast network, it's a pain with uncached images. @home I download OS iso's quite often. This is a great source of pain for me and I am pretty sure for a lot of other people as well - hope the Cloudant guys pull it off. But they need a way to figure out how to throttle bandwidth usage.

BTW, is there such a thing as universal mind ? How come you think about something and very soon you find out someone else doing something with more or less the same idea ;-)

It is because, for each problem/annoyance you have, there are certanly many other people in the world who have it too.

In addition, many of them are exposed to a similar environment so it is probable that they come up with similar solutions.

Anyway, it doesn't matter how many are they, but how many have the will to make it happen. That is what makes all the difference.

Tip for Cloudant: market your product in countries outside of the US. In Japan, Korea, and some parts of Europe people have very high bandwidth connections but high latency to the US. A high bandwidth delay product means multiple connections is a massive win for largish files. I'd go so far as saying you should totally ignore the US entirely. Market it to foreigners as a way to download faster from the US, where so much content is hosted.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/11585518@N04/sets/7215760148516...

The photos on this page have a few interns - Does YC take interns ?

I think you're referring to the TechCrunch interns.

My winners are Anywhere.fm and Dropbox. The minute anywhere goes mobile they will truly change the way we listen to music or anything audio. If you think about it one day people will laugh about the Ipod. I never really grasp the concept of putting all your songs in a box. It is like carrying all your savings in a briefcase rather than a debit card. Anywhere will soon ( i hope) start streaming your tunes using edge, gprs or wifi enabled phones. wacth out Jobs.

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