Today Is Y Combinator W13 Demo Day | Hacker News Reader

Today Is Y Combinator W13 Demo Day

ycombinator.com

75 pointsjcr37 comments

Is today going to be the first test of the handshake protocol?

I've heard people have already started using it actually.

I saw these all during Alumni Demo Day last night, and if you're an investor, I would strongly suggest going to Demo Day this time.

Why?

The quality of the companies is quite good, even compared to S11, W12, S12. So, good investment opportunities, and even if you don't invest, I think it sets or exemplifies a lot of the greater trends in Silicon Valley. (I don't want to comment on the specific companies until after they present, though.)

Agree. Quality of ideas an founders was quite high this time around (my 3rd Alumni Day). General themes: marketplaces, kickstarter-derivatives, and big data. In general, lots of companies that have high probability of making money.

:-( I don't think we met last night. Pity, I would've liked to meet the person behind "rdl". Perhaps we could meet sometime after DDay craziness dies down?

You stole the Computer History Museum from my kids today! They flew out from Chicago to see it!

We're picketing.

There's something wrong with this picture... You're trying to tell me an "Internet Famous" security pen tester is unable to get into the Computer History Museum?

Well, I made it in here. I showed up yesterday and locked myself inside a running CRAY overnight. The burns were worth it, but I still haven't managed to get out yet...

Fun fact; if you look at the robots.txt file for ycombinator.com, this page (dday.html) is the only one that's disallowed.

I wanted to wish everyone the best of luck, and I figured most people here would appreciate the reminder, but unfortunately I got a "posting too fast" message when trying to use a temp/throw-away account to avoid karma gaming.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tmp_w13

Anyhow, I'm going to make popcorn and start relentlessly reloading techcrunch.

YC should organize a mini-demo day the day after demo for all of these exciting companies to give small presentations on what they're working on. It would be very interesting for other startups to watch, and would give a lot of very much needed publicity to these companies.

I think a "YC-Demo Day" youtube video would generate a fairly enormous amount of traffic and publicity (and be interesting to watch)!

The day after demo day is usually spent frantically setting up meetings with investors... probably not the best timing. But I do think some sort of "Show HN: YC W13" would be awesome!

It would be fun to get ~all of the YC companies to do video clips for Startup School or something, though.

Wish https://angel.co/y-combinator had a better portfolio by batches.

I'm not sure how complete it is, but HN user citizenkeys keeps a nice index of YC companies listed by batch.

http://ycuniverse.com/ycombinator-companies#ycw13

Here is one that seems to be pretty accurate

http://yclist.com/

I have been keeping an index of companies from the current batch as they launch, with short descriptions and web traffic stats. Right now 27 of the 47 companies have already publicly launched (mostly on TechCrunch). I will update this throughout the day: http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/03/preliminary-yc-index-...

At the moment (before today's Demo Day starts), 30 of 47 are public.

I have updated to include Bitnami, Goldbely and Paytango. Is there anyone else I missed?

diff against the ycuniverse link I posted.

Really helpful Danielle - thanks!

Check out my site: Seed-DB (http://www.seed-db.com). In addition to Y Combinator, I have data on 150+ accelerators around the world.

(YCList gets data from Seed-DB, for example)

Is there a live feed of this? Or is there a video of it I can watch after work?

No, YC have never to my knowledge published or recorded video of the pitches. I doubt they would either - it would increase the stress on the participants, and often the investor pitches include commercially sensitive information.

Ah, you're right about the commercially sensitive information.

I wonder about "commercially sensitive" as much as "National Security". I often assume they are catch-alls that in a transparent world would be unremarkable, or cause for pressure to fix from stakeholders - I would guess there are very few things a competitor would be able to take advantage of that you could make public about a startup.

Its business model? Made public to every customer.

Its financial status? Its a start up - the status is terrible by default.

Its customer list? If Google is my customer, I am letting you know for sure.

Its source code? Yes, but I am not sure that a) that is what most people consider commercially sensitive information (ie its more an asset such as IP) and b) even if we gave the main competitor of WuFoo their git repos, the competitor would probably have to use all of the code to make much use of any of the code. Except maybe grep for swear words in the comments

The YC Demo Day is a private gathering. From descriptions I've read, it's essentially just the founders of the given batch and "accredited investors" (in US legal parlance, I believe "accredited investor" means having a net worth greater than 1 million or a yearly income in excess of 250K, but I'm not a lawyer so I might be wrong). On past Demo Days, at least there was one, trusted, member of the "press" from techcrunch at the event. One of the problems with Demo Day is not all of the companies are publicly announced when it happens and they want to keep working in "stealth mode" while raising capital. Said trusted person from the press is told which companies they can and can't write about.

Though the world could probably learn a lot from videos of the pitches on Demo Day, I sincerely doubt they will ever be released to the public.

Good luck to the current batches, you've been preparing for this so you'll be fine. I look forward to reading about you guys doing big things soon.

Good luck demo day startups!! I used to be behind the scenes, and it was always a nerve wracking time for me, so I figure if I times my nerves by 1000, that's what it would be like for the startups. :)

Good luck to all! Hope the new size works out well too.

It'd be need if somebody ran a YC Hedge Fund. I'd happily pay 2% and 20% management fees! :D

Yuri Milner and SV Angel pretty much do exactly that though the Start Fund.

Although I doubt it's that easy to buy in. Ha.

maybe wefunder can get in on the YCVC program :) all they need is ~$1m

Haha - maybe we'll do something like that for the next batch, we'll see!

We do have a few batchmates on our platform, you can always create your own index and invest in all of them. :) (Unfortunately due to regulations we can't publicly say who they are, and viewing/investing is limited to accredited investors only... for now!)

I've been looking for the right place to ask for this very thing. There's no savvier investor than YC itself, and they allocate their money in a very specific and consistent manner: equally across all startups in a batch. Full coverage is more important than doubling down on a winner. For anyone with X to invest, it's hard to argue that investing X/n in all n YC startups is not the best approach.

Do it!

I ran such a fund for the S08 batch. It did quite well (>60% annual IRR, which was very good for an '08 fund). I wanted to make it a regular revolving fund (i.e. a new fund for every YC class), but there wasn't enough interest. Most people who angel invest want to be in control of the investment decisions, so a fund is a hard sell. Administering such a fund is non-trivial, but I would happily do it again if I could find enough interested investors. It's a great way to get started and/or diversify a relatively small investment.

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