kevinwong

Inspired by a banner ad I saw and remembered, made a Chrome extension to show a random POV: you're a pringle cat gif every few minutes.

Let's bring back whimsy in this age of AI slop and doomposts :)

Open source here if you want to BYO cat gifs: https://github.com/k-wong/cats-appear

It's more of an art than a science but you can triangulate depending on what you have and what you're trying to do.

If looking into existing markets and figuring out your angle into those - firms like Gartner, Forrester, as well as research arms of banks/consulting firms (Deloitte, JPM, BAML, etc) will have pretty good reports that you can purchase/search for (filetype:pdf can give some great results). I find these to be a good high level starting point and you can go deep on individual topics. "Value added research" can involve customer interviews, public surveys, hands on research (visiting a location), etc.

By 'timeline' you can think "list whose order is determined by an algorithm", or however you so choose to interpret your automagical categorization of stuff.

Email has been one of the last holdouts of "services that purely distribute", in an era where Facebook, Twitter, search results, job postings are all tailored/processed by an algorithm before reaching the end user.

In addition, of the things that dominate the finite amount of our "attention" (FB/IG/Google), only email hasn't been fully monetized.

When Inbox first launched, there was a lot of discussion on the end of email as a commodity. However, email's customer today is no longer the user (you and I) but the advertisers' (e.g. context-driven ads in Gmail).

With Inbox, instead of passively showing context-driven ads, Google can take it to the next level similar to what Facebook has done with its newsfeed. From inserting ads/call to actions within the Inbox 'timeline', to forcing advertisers/publishers behavior when it comes to how Inbox interprets/filters/classifies an email (remember the addition of the "Promotions" tab?).

I'd also like to recommend a recent article which talks about how Inbox is the trojan horse for your personal AI which goes into some other points: http://solveforinteresting.com/inbox-is-the-trojan-horse-for...

Instead of embedding ads into GIFs, I think that Giphy can leverage its image tagging data to help brand owners track social media brand mentions. For example, Giphy could theoretically help Disney track usage and context of Mickey Mouse gifs, providing Disney insight into current public perception of their characters, allowing Disney to react if necessary.

Before this drop they were trading at 14x forward revenue; now they're at 7x. Splunk was at 12x, now at 9.7x. We'll have to revisit what the typical multiple range is for BI/enterprise saas companies.

Seems like quite the correction for an earnings beat and the removal of a ~50M deferred tax asset though, especially since people already had negative expectations before the earnings release.

Agreed on the technicalities. The easiest way to capture the 80% of technicalities that prospective founders care most about might be to have FAQ section where YC portfolio companies can weigh in on things like "Wish I knew to [take certain action] [during time period]. Here's a resource I found [link]".