Companies That Presented at Y Combinator Demo Day 1 | Hacker News Reader

Companies That Presented at Y Combinator Demo Day 1

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108 pointseroo56 comments

Reading these dozens of one sentence summaries gives me an inkling of what it must feel like to be an investor who is pitched to all the time -- a concept really has to stand out to be noticed.

Yes it's really hard as an investor to 1) stay alert through hours and dozens of startups, and 2) actually understand enough of what they do from the presentations to know if you want to know more. Not perfect by any means, but I certainly can't think of a better way for them to do it without taking massive amounts of time from the founders.

Then again, isn't not being able to understand what a startup is doing a good indicator that perhaps they aren't ready for your investment?

Certainly yes, but it usually takes longer than 3 minutes to figure stuff out. What I really need is an hour at least with a startup 1 on 1 to know if I'm really interested. But like I said above, that doesn't scale with so many companies and investors. So you have to trust your instincts, but there's often a herd mentality as investors talk to each other and try to use those signals to help them.

Would they typically hold longer form talks kind of like public company analyst days where they get into more detail over an hour or so and several potential investors who have dialled in grill them on what is being presented? Apologies for the noob question, I don't deal with startups but am curious about the information dissemination process they use.

When a market is deemed 'hot' investors will flock to it regardless of whether or not they understand the companies or the market. This means that your best bet for finding funding usually lies in a market and/or technology that is poorly understood so you can be an 'expert'. If your proposition is easily understood then the decisions will be more rational than if they're hard or even impossible to be understood in a short time-frame.

It's sad, for sure but there is a reason they call it 'dumb money'.

As for YC, just about any company in a YC batch is deemed 'hot' regardless of whether or not the follow on investors think those companies are great they're too afraid to miss the boat and this tends to YC being used as a stamp of approval.

The pressure is high and competition is fierce, great for the start-ups!

It's a bit like an auction, if there are many possible buyers for an item it's easy to get carried away and so people end up investing in companies they might otherwise not invest in, or to invest on terms they normally would not accept. It's one of the reasons why YC is so sought after, once you're 'in' you instantly increase your chances of getting follow on funding on terms favourable to you, the start-up through some source.

I was surprised to learn GitLab was part of the group. At my last company we were using GitLab for quite some time, I had no idea they were in a place to take seed money (figured they'd be looking for a higher round). Either way GitLab is pretty cool.

That surprised me too. I've been using GitLab for what I think is a couple of years. Recently(ish) it's gotten a lot tighter: runs better, much better UI, incredibly easier to upgrade than it used to be.

So, surprised to see them in YC, but on second thought maybe I shouldn't be.

From a recent GitLab blog post[1]:

> At first glance, it might not seem obvious for our company to join Y Combinator since we already have 10 employees and hundreds of paying clients. The reason for joining was learning more about how to grow as a company. We were always really focussed on GitLab and of course we never want to lose that. But we want to avoid as many mistakes made by fast growing companies and to learn from the Y Combinator partners that have seen hundreds of organizations growing fast. There are regular events that feature experts in all facets of building a company, from user retention to enterprise sales. And it is great to hear stories from other startups,what they have overcame and how relentlessly resourceful they have been.

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/2015/03/04/gitlab-is-part-of-the-y-...

GitLab CEO here, thanks for posting this swaroop.

Not involved in the startup scene at all, but isn't "uber for laundry" a punchline at this point? What are cleanly doing (or what aren't they doing) that dozens of failed startups didn't do? This isn't snark, YC are saavy investors and I'm interested to know what they see.

This article, for example, is a year old: http://nymag.com/news/features/laundry-apps-2014-5/

Unrelated, I found it interesting that clean.ly doesn't resolve to Cleanly's website--for that you have to go to getcleanly.com. Do -ly's confer status these days to the point that the URL is unnecessary?

Apparently you didn't read that article or you would see what they are doing...every load of laundry gets a cookie or healthy treat delivered with it. Clearly a game-changer.

The cookie is the secret, they fatten up their customers with the free cookies and in a year pivot into an apparel ecommerce play now that their user base has outgrown their clothes.

The clothes are undersized compared to average so the customer base feels extra obese and they pivot into a social fitness tracker network and an on-demand healthy meal provider with an IOT ordering widget.

Why not a jelly donut with powdered sugar? Boom recurring revenue stream!

Pigeonly (improved inmate to outside world communication) strikes me as interesting. It's not very sexy but I think it's a somewhat interesting problem domain (and sadly a growth market) where connections/talking to people/understanding the market can give you a pretty hard to immitate advantage. Doesn't seem very hard technically but pretty hard non-technically.

This guy's story is great, too. Former inmate, was at $3M+ ARR as of Dec 2014: http://www.crewlab.net/pigeonly/

There was an episode of Planet Money earlier this month talking about Pigeonly: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2015/03/13/392862778/episode-...

The one thing that bumped me was their API for selling customer/prisoner data. I'd like to better understand what their plan is there.

When I saw this post I thought it'd be a report on the very first Y Combinator Demo Day ever and where they are today.

I still think that'd be really interesting.

Same here. I'm hoping TC or even Sam Altman will do a similar post comparing how demo day has changed over the years.

yhat seems really cool. Saw Greg Lamp at papis.io conference late last year demonstrating a beer recommender they built : http://www.slideshare.net/Yhat/building-a-beer-recommender-w...

> Pomello

Fellas, if you are here, - keep in mind the "keming" issue with your name when spelled in lowercase. On the TC website with the body font they are using the name looks and reads like Pornello. Had to re-read it to understand why the brief didn't match the name.

Thanks for the heads up, this is a first for this issue. Not sure there is much we can do about it at this point. Hopefully, it won't be the first thing people's minds jump to.

I can't figure out how Kickback gets around the gambling legalities if they are hosted in the US. They also say they use PayPal for withdrawals which is shocking since gambling is against their TOS.

Surely this has been extensively double-checked and there is an explanation, but I'd be interested into what it is. I get the direction the likes of Uber and Lyft are coming from with the "we're just an app that connects 2 people", but the way Kickback is described on TC makes their "loophole" less obvious. I think they may be more geared towards one betting money against another that they can beat them personally, but it's not immediately clear.

It is legal to put money on it as a participant.

I can enter a Magic: the Gathering tournament with a $30 entry fee and 2 players where the winner gets $50. This isn't gambling since it is considered a game of skill.

It would not be legal for a spectator to put money on the result of this match since their skill is not relevant to the outcome.

It's a game of skill, not a game of chance, and thus isn't covered under the gambling regulations.

Doesn't that have to involve your skill in the performance, e.g. sports betting is still illegal in more than the number of states they say they are operating in, isn't it?

You're playing the video game, so it is your skill.

It just lets Minecraft gamers compete for a pot of money they contribute into. It's actually really far behind the times, since mobile apps already have a library to put this in any game: http://skillz.com/

The idea is that if you compete in a skill based game for a pot of money, it isn't gambling. That said, a lot of the games are about as skill based as Flappy Bird.

Wow, that's a ton of companies compared to "back in the day".

It'd be interesting to have a nice summary of recent batches and where they are to see what kinds of ideas have gotten traction. There are some there that, from the one sentence blurb, don't sound that interesting, but I think the YC folks and the people they invest in are smart, so there's got to be something there.

I'm personally interested in seeing what BookTrope is doing, as it's in a similar space to my own LiberWriter.

Good luck to all of them!

The site http://yclist.com/ has a list of YC companies and where they stand.

cindercooks.com looks cool. I love me a good steak, so I would buy one today if it would ship today. Early 2016 though? Not pre-ordering that far in advance.

I personally feel like being able to cook the perfect steak by sight/intuition is a skill worth learning.

There are now 3 YC companies making temperature-controlled cooking products, with 3 different engineering approaches: Cinder, Nomiku, and Pantelligent (note: co-founder). In each case, the basic tech works, and the result is really delicious, matching and sometimes exceeding what a "sight/intuition" skilled chef can produce. You'll believe it when you taste it!

Cooking: Yet another skill made obsolete by technology.

Sounds nice, but have any of you guys figured out the cleaning part of the equation? Because if not, I'd gather most consumers will stick with their pans. (Pros are a different story, of course.)

Cinder is supposed to come apart (we'll see what they launch), so you can stick the cooking surfaces in the dishwasher.

Nomiku should not really get dirty (it only comes into contact with water).

Pantelligent doesn't make it clear if the handle will be immersible, but it isn't that much hassle to clean a pan without soaking the handle.

Good luck with that... At the very least, probe into waterproofing that pan. You can't afford to fail this, because someone will place it in their dishwasher or soak the handle, and word of mouth will rinse off any early adopter enthusiasm when news of broken pans hit cooking forums. Your pan would then be about as easy to sell as a grown dog with a "moody, dirty, bites" sign around its neck.

Cinders USP from what I gather is not only cooking a perfect steak, but holding a perfect steak until ready to serve. No idea if it works, but that seems to be the feature they are selling.

A group of TechCrunch bloggers posted their favorites for the first day as well. http://techcrunch.com/gallery/our-10-favorite-companies-from... I found it interesting because none of the companies I had internally thought of as potential breakout hits made their list.

Hesitate to post an AskHN about this, but which company has the 66 year old (co-)founder? [0] Glad to see this diversity.

[0] http://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/xlarge_YC-...

Will somebody please sum up which ones are LO-MO-SO and which ones are MO-SO-LO [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-GVd_HLlps

"like comments, but they automatically follow your code as it’s moved around in your program"

Wait, don't comments do that?

(edit: oh, they mean like forum comments, not like source-code comments?)

That's kind of a low-resolution summary of what we were saying -- you can annotate code on omniref, and we'll carry those annotations forward/backward in time, until the code changes.

It's part of our way of dealing with the problem that happens on StackOverflow all the time, where the top-rated answer is completely out-of-date.

Happy to see Nomiku on the list - they ran a fantastic Kickstarter campaign, and I hope they get the help they need to scale up into everyone's kitchen.

Have Apple relaxed their restrictions about duplicate functionality in apps produced by the same developer? GroupAhead are cloning their own apps with a seemingly fixed set of features (membership, calendar, forum, links). A friend had his app denied with Apple saying that the new app should be rolled into another app he had already created.

Has anyone made a "March Madness pool" style game for YC demo day?

First glance: the ratio of features to products to businesses is astounding.

I had the same first impression. I see many cool products, some cool ideas/concepts, but....very few real businesses. That's how it goes though, 5 years from now, one, maybe two of these 'companies' will be around still. It's a fun game.

Fair comment for typical accelerators but not really true in the case of YC. There are far more alive or exited than dead companies in YC's alumnus.. http://yclist.com (out of date but it's the old data that's relevant here).

Do you have insight into the financial operations of every company on that list?

There are a fair number of zombie startups in Silicon Valley that haven't yet exhausted their funding. Some even have enough revenue to keep the lights on. But it doesn't mean they're anywhere close to having a thriving business that will be able to sustain itself and grow meaningfully over time.

When evaluating startups, alive/dead is a lazy means of analysis. This is particularly true in today's funding environment, where companies can raise seven figure seed rounds and establish a fairly long runway very early on. The real question is how many of the startups funded today will ever realistically be in a financial position to return capital, and how much, to their investors.

Exactly, I do not count, 'Hey we've made it five years now, but can hardly break even and have no clear vision of where to go from here' as 'alive'. In fact, by that time, the investors have probably written them off and will be trying to figure out if they can salvage some talent from it before their runway ends. In the end, YC or not, less than 10% of these guys will become real companies. It's just statistics. YC may get you the seven figure round, but if you keep your, 'product', or 'feature' as such for a few years, you're dead.

Edit: Not trying to discredit what these start ups have done so far, it's very hard getting to that point alone.

It's early seed stage for many :)

That's what people said about Dropbox.

You'd have to know their grand vision to decide whether they can become real businesses. And even then, you'd have to buy into it.

I'm confident YC is not investing in any company without a shot at becoming a multi-billion dollar business.

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