Silicon Valley Elite Flock To Y Combinator Demo Day | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley Elite Flock To Y Combinator Demo Day

techcrunch.com

40 pointszaveri33 comments

MixPanel is amazing. I'm using it for a client; and the info and stats generated are extremely useful. It's a great compliment to Google Analytics; and something I would pay for.

Ditto -- and its something I do pay for. ($25 a month, which I quite literally could justify with any one day's improvement in my funnel numbers.)

How do you think it compares to, say, http://www.haveamint.com/ ?

The usefulness of MixPanel (for me) is in the ability to track custom javascript events. Things like changing an advertisement iris (no page refresh) can get tracked without me having to write the tracking code. As far as I can tell, haveamint doesn't do that (in fact, I don't see haveamint doing anything that google analytics doesn't already do).

I wonder if it could also track events inside a flash movie (perhaps even just by making JS calls via AS). That would be huge for us.

If you can make JS calls from AS, then yes I think MixPanel will totally work for you.

> HighlightCam, which we covered last month, is a service that can look through hours of video footage and identify when something happens. The company’s first product involves security cameras — it can take many hours of security footage and then identify the few moments when things out of the ordinary are happening, cutting down the footage to only a few minutes of important content. Soon the company will be releasing its API, which will allow developers to tap into the software to shorten a variety of different kinds of content (including things like wedding videos). The software can produce 20-30 second trailers automatically for any kind of video.

This is actually an interesting one, I think: one of the knocks against [lifelogging](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifelog) is that it will be too hard to search all the hours of video, but condensed videos would be much easier to search.

This batch of YC is impressive. Most are targeting a niche. My favorite is Listia.com.

The group is very substantial this time around. Developing things like a database optimized for solid-state drives involves non-trivial technology. I'm impressed.

I wonder what kind of background these guys had to convince YCombinator that they could pull it off? Many of them aimed quite a bit higher than yet another web app.

It's great to see a technology-based startup like RethinkDB. It is a wonderful opportunity they are targeting, and their marketing looks great. I can see them getting bought out for $100 millions by Oracle etc.

It sounds like a sustaining technology because it sells into existing infrastructure; but because the initial uses of SSD are in devices like iPhones (rather than data centers), that might make it disruptive.

But I agree that actually solving this problem is the difficult part! OTOH, all they need do is achieve some of the potential benefits in a product that actually works, to be wildly successful. Oh, and be the first. One problem is that everyone else is aware of this opportunity, so it comes down to execution... One advantage they have over Oracle and so on is they don't have to worry about existing customers.

Their long-term view is exactly right: http://www.rethinkdb.com/learn-more/

> As data centers switch to solid-state drives, RethinkDB will be ready to let customers take advantage of these upgrades.

It wasn't their background that convinced us. It was just talking to them. They clearly knew what they were talking about.

You can't let yourself care too much about "background" when you're investing in startups, because some of the best startups are done by outsiders.

I guess a person sounding as if he knows what he is talking about is a good indicator that he actually knows what he is talking about.

It certainly depends on who's listening. The catch-22 is the Dunning and Kruger effect. If a person sounds like they know what they're talking about, it's either because (1) they know what they're talking about or (2) you're an idiot. But there's a range of ignorance in which the more confident you are in (1), the more likely (2) is.

reminds me of a quote a VC friend used about overly pompous team slides "we care less about where you're from, and more about where you're going"

Funny how the 3rd biggest mistake that kills startups is targeting a marginal niche (http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html). I know the key is whether its marginal or not. Still funny.

Are there other companies operating in stealth mode?

Yes, 11 of the 24 (according to Dave McClure) http://twitter.com/davemcclure/status/3411897983

TechCrunch only covered the 13 which have launched.

Does anyone know how this number (11/24 companies not yet launched by demo day) compares to past years? I was surprised to see that it was so high.

That number seems pretty typical.

I think only a few in our batch were not launched by demo day. This seems high to me too, tho only PG and JL know for sure. Paul pushed REALLY hard to get people launched.

According to these sources:

http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/08/bosto...

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/16/y-combinator-demo-day-t...

There were only 10 companies launched out of 19 for the summer 2007 round in boston. So it doesn't seem too out of the ordinary for this batch.

I'm working hard so that I can present at the next one :)

Besides the obvious networking and investment potential, I just think it would be a lot of fun to go and talk with everyone there!

read your bio. interesting topic, good luck.

A year is too long to wait for funding, specially for a tech startup. If you have something working, don't hesitate to unleash it into the wild, you might be surprised at what you find.

Good luck.

I thought that Demo Day was held at the end of each YC cycle (i.e. there would be another one around March)?

I've applied to Springboard as well though, as it starts much sooner (in about a month), and I'm pretty close to a working alpha of my software. I hope that I can get into Springboard or YC so that I can share my project with all of you!

Go for it then! I didn't know about the March one.

FWIW, my project was a demo when I sold the first license and now I work on it full time, hired by the client to customize it and maintain it for them.

I like a lot of the startups I've read about in this batch. So many address clear needs that people have, and almost all of them have at least one obvious business model (with presumably some good non-obvious ones too.)

Wow the Techcrunch comments aren't very Techcrunch-like (this is a good thing).

I'm excited to see the 13 startups that were off the record.

Is there a video of demo day online? I'd love to watch it--previous ones too if possible.

I think boston.com had short snippets of a previous demo day.

seems like every single one of the companies listed already launched and had coverage...wasn't demo day in the past the time for that first look?

YCombinator compete among themselves for the attention of the investors to which they present. Launching early and gaining users gives you an edge up on the competition. I would imagine this batch of YC companies (24, bigger than ever before) has learned from past groups and are responding as such.

This is merely a guess -- PG or a current YCer could comment more accurately.

Demo day was never about first look or press. It has always been about investors.

It is unlike TC50 and DEMO in that respect. Though it does give some marginal press.

Edit: I half think press should be banned from the event. I always found it annoying giving details that only investors should hear with press present.

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