Alfred Wins TechCrunch Battlefield SF 2014 | Hacker News Reader

Alfred Wins TechCrunch Battlefield SF 2014

techcrunch.com

25 pointselyrly14 comments

2014 And The Winner Of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2014 Is…Alfred! "Disclosure: CrunchFund invested in Alfred, but Mike Arrington was not a finals judge, nor in the judging room" Of course, it's a "once in a lifetime event" that happened in 2014, a pure coincidence and there is absolutely no conflict of interests)! However, to be 100% sure there is no repeating pattern here let's check...

2013 And The Winner Of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2013 Is… Layer! "Disclosure: One of Layer’s seed investors is CrunchFund, an early-stage VC fund cofounded by Michael Arrington, who also founded TechCrunch." http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/11/and-the-winner-of-techcrunc...

2012 And The Winner Of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012 Is… YourMechanic! Impressive list of investors includes "CrunchFund (disclosure: TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is a general partner of CrunchFund), SV Angel (disclosure: judge David Lee is managing partner of SV Angel)..." http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/12/techcrunch-disrupt-sf-2012-...

2011 And The Winner Of TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 Is…Shaker Disclosure: TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is an investor in Prism Skylabs and is a pending investor in Shaker. http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/14/and-the-winner-of-techcrunc...

As I've predicted, no pattern, you can have any color car win TC as long as it is black (aka backed by, you know...)

Disclosure: I am not trying to mix correlation with causation here, just reporting facts and suggesting to discuss those facts. This comment is meant to start discussion on fair play on the most prestigious global Startup competition, and I have no personal positive or negative feelings or other type of bias to any entities or personalities involved.

PS edited by adding 3 empty lines for better formatting

Apart from Alfred being the only CrunchFund company among the six finalists (and Mike Arrington tweeting it as the winner on Twitter before it was publicly announced), three of the finals judges have already invested in Alfred through SV Angel (David Lee as Managing Partner, Marissa Mayer and Kevin Rose as LPs). Alfred was also the only SV Angel company in the finals.

I'll just leave this here - http://uncrunched.com/2013/10/29/thoughts-on-techcrunch-disr...

For those like me who thought this was about the awesome Alfred app[1]: it's not.

[1] http://www.alfredapp.com/

Am I the only one who's a little disappointed the hottest startups these days are all about helping rich people delegate menial tasks to poor people while minimizing human interaction?

"...the first service layer on the shared economy that manages your routine across multiple on-demand and local services"

Definitely sounds like a line from Silicon Valley.

It's an interesting concept, but $25 a week on top of (presumably) extra money you spend on the sub-services seems pretty expensive just so I can avoid washing my laundry!

In time-poor and income-rich Silicon Valley, the time saved is ostensibly worth enough to make such services viable

Agreed. I thought the runner up, Shipstr, sounded even more satiric:

Shipstr streamlines the complex, opaque, unreliable, time-consuming and expensive international shipping industry through a cloud-based aggregation platform.

All I really wanted to was... which of these apps is going to "help make the world a better place"?

Does Alfred actually have a market beyond "overworked and overpaid techies"?

yes, working families.

> "Alfred will head over weekly... and replace supplies... like putting new paper towels on towel holder"

I find it funny that this is considered a problem these days.

In this so-called shared economy, intermediaries such as Uber, Homejoy, Airbnb, etc. already take a 20% to 30% cut while trying to remain only an app, or technology layer (as they claim when regulators try to intervene). That may or may not be justified. But having yet another app layer take its cut ($100/month!) on top of that seems unbearable. Or maybe bearable just in Silicon Valley.

I actually disagree. It seems crazy - yes. But, in Europe you have many families that have a maid that does a little bit of everything. These maids are super expensive here - only the top 1% have them. So you have an alfred + the different sub-services, and you are good to go. The sum of all of that is less than a European maid, and you don't have to deal with the details. It sounds too much, but for a family with two working parents, it is a luxury that I am sure is hard to do without, once you have tried it.

At least the name is kind of cool. I was hoping they'd be related to a butler service.

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