Y Combinator Winter 2013 Demo Day, Batch 1: Meet Wevorce, FlightCar, Thalmic | Hacker News Reader

Y Combinator Winter 2013 Demo Day, Batch 1: Meet Wevorce, FlightCar, Thalmic

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76 pointszaveri29 comments

Wow, this definitely is the strongest looking batch in recent memory. Interesting to see a few companies in the group that are or will be competing head-on with previous YC alums.

Airware is particularly exciting. There are a lot of parallels between today's hobby UAV market and the hobby PC market of decades past.

I love Circuitlab, but "the founders estimate their market to be $500 million, because of CircuitLabs’ influence over which components the developers using the platform choose" (emphasis mine) is annoying.

Fivetran seems pretty ambitious, but it will be very cool if they can make it work.

Fivetran looks very cool, although I'm only worried that it's web based tool.

Advanced Excel / SPPS/ Matlab is used by professionals, who want very fast and responsive, something that is hard to replicate in web based app.

I wish them good luck though!

1010data provides a web product for performing transformation on large sets of data and it's quite nice. We used it when we used to do analysis of mortgage pools etc.

Actually, TechCrunch misheard the pitch. CircuitLab's founders are pursuing a $500 million market in circuit simulation software, and a market in the billions that might come from recommending ideal component choices at the CAD level.

Now that's more like it!

I'm worried about Airware. Checking out their site, they list (prominently) among other advertised features "Free of ITAR restrictions". First of all, I'm not sure such a thing can be claimed (due to the nature of the decisions as to whether specific technology or scientific arts count as arms).

It also looks like none of their products are particularly innovative in this space. 3D robotics, Ardupilot, Micropilot, Openpilot, ZeroUAV, VeiYu Tech have dozens of different products in this space. http://diydrones.com does a pretty good job tracking all of those.

Compared to the big commercial players: CloudCap's Piccolo and Kestrel APs, I don't see the value add. Major consumers of APs (>100 units) tend to choose these because they're consistent and trusted. Building up clients trust in an AP is a very hard thing to gain (why should I risk my $250,000 experimental aircraft on your dinky little AP) and a very easy thing to lose.

I'm also curious how will AirWares OS and "Apps" will fit in the current airworthyness certification model, which has whether DO-178B compliance is on their roadmap. Maybe the answer is "that doesn't apply to us" just like ITAR? :)

Good luck to them, and good luck getting a CoA for anything with one of their products in it.

I've been using Bitnami VMs for years. Surprised to see them in a 'new startup' batch.

So I went down through the list, curious about what this batch looked like, figuring most of it would be social networking junk or suchlike but hopefully there should be a few gems in the list.

... and as far as I can see, it's actually pretty much all gems! Most of these are solving real problems, and even the print on demand T-shirts is something for which there seems to be an actual market.

So, congratulations to everyone involved and hopefully in a few years we'll be going "oh yeah, it was back in 2013 I first heard about..."

I think buildzoom is going to be big. I'm remodeling a condo in Florida, and it has been a nightmare to find contractors.

In fact on the flight on the way home I penciled out some ideas to improve this that aren't too different from what buildzoom is offering.

Edit: After reviewing my notes, one thing I considered was that for better or worse, a lot of the industry is under the table and transient. Maybe buildzoom will force the industry more into the open.

What about Redbeacon (squarely aimed at the same place), or Thumbtack or Yerbid?

This isn't a particularly new space, although I'm sure BuildZoom can do well in it.

I've never heard of these, which is part of the benefit of YC I guess. What that said, none of them seem to offer what BuildZoom does which is a list of all the contractors in my area sorted by reputation. Even if their reputation metrics are questionable at this point, at least they are making an attempt at it.

I just contacted a painter through buildzoom. Let's see how it works out. Contractors in my area (Tahoe) are notoriously hard to track down.

Tahoe has been a little tricky. You need a contractor who is regulated in CA however a lot of the contractors near Tahoe are licensed in Nevada (although a number are licensed in both states).

One of our advisors has a house up there and we've been working with him to create a better experience in that region. If you want to let us know a bit more about your project, I'll make sure we get a great contractor out.

There are several players in this space. Perhaps the largest are HomeAdvisor (formerly ServiceMagic) and Angie's List.

There are some distinguishing factors: one of the biggest is that we use a heavily data driven approach. One of our goals is to consider every single licensed contractor in the United States. In most areas, the actual number of contractors who are licensed to practice is an order of magnitude (or two) higher than what is considered by most sites. We actually just look at the actual population of contractors to help a homeowner determine the right choice.

I am wondering how they are already getting 500k uniques per month & 1000 contractors a week signing up:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/14/buildzoom-connects-homeowne...

I mean, how on earth do you that? Some kind of mystical SEO? Befuddles me...

This is one of our goals: mitigating the information asymmetry in the remodeling sector (georgewfraser's articulation). If you are interested in comparing notes, I'd be happy to chat.

I see 4 very strong, smartly chosen brand names in this list: wevorce, fivetran, simplyinsured, errplane. But, wevorce wins this round.

Why do you say that these are strong brand names? I think all of the names are difficult to remember and spell. I know that finding a name is difficult, but the names of these startups are probably the least impressive aspect.

Wevorce - I doubt that people would remember this name

Startups can use a systematic method of determining if a name is memorable. I think the ability to remember the name and write it down and spell it correctly is the best indicator of a strong name.

I've done this previously by getting a short list of 15 names, then stating them several times in a video (in different orders), then using a crowdsourcing site such as amazon turk, get the person to watch the video and then write down which names they remember. This tests both their ability to remember the name amongst a crowd of other names AND their ability to spell the name. Certain names come way out on top.

Startups need to think very carefully about their name, because I believe the memorability of the name will have a huge impact on their success.

I think they are strong names based on either the language devices they employ or based on the existing brands they are carefully aligning themselves with, which I believe makes them memorable.

Here is a simple formula for one kind language device used in naming: 1) Find a key term: house 2) Find a word that rhymes with the key term: mouse 3) Find an idiom or common phrase that includes the rhymed term: mouse trap 4) Substitute the original keyword in place of the rhyming word ... result: house trap

Due to all kinds of fuzzy reasons that will never be arguably as good as testing names with real people (kudos for testing your names!), I prefer this method.

Can you elaborate re: fivetran? The name means nothing to me, so I'm wondering if it's something from the States or some other thing I don't recognize.

I imagine it's a pun on "Fortran" ("for-" -> "four" -> "five").

correct

Oh, I didn't realize Bitnami was taking part in YC. Enhorabuena, Daniel!

Thanks David! It has been three very intense months :)

It seems a little strange that the TC article references DOS in two company descriptions (Airware, the "DOS of drones", and CircuitLab replacing "DOS-era tools").

I like this batch.

Getting lots of Apache errors in the listings on Zaranga - http://www.zaranga.com/

As an ecom professional, fivetran is the most exciting to me.

Thanks! We've got a lot of features still to build and things to optimize but we're really excited about what's coming up.

I am of course preparing for the downvotes but the first two companies to me proffer the future of tech start ups.

Wevorce I really had to double check to be sure I was not reading an extended parody of the HN front page. Try saying "tech-powered standard for civilised divorce" without hearing Jon Stewart.

Then airware, already trying to turn UAVs into a app platform - UAVs are a big open frontier - but a hardware led one.

One company that is browser only - and is filling in the gaps left over from Web 1.0 and 2.0. And one that is driven by hardware. And while I cannot comment on the company- boy are they in a growth industry

I suppose I am saying that way back when, connecting the virtual to the physical was simple - music, text, video. We have taken the already connected and transformed it

Now we need to provide the connection to the physical as well as the application to drive the next generation - which means the next big waves need to come with dongles. Pycon beware.

What company would want to waste time and money customizing low-level UAV software?

Uav is still immature - customising implies a standard, whereas most customising of low level stuff is still "getting it working right"

Big new field very open

I would put more money on dirigibles than planes myself

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