nwenzel

Only if you take the first step. YC S14 applications are still open.

Congrats! Pinterest is a great place filled with great people.

In software there are usually multiple places to accomplish the same thing. I usually ask, "where do I put the work?" I'm usually thinking of the database vs. the framework on the server vs. the client.

The post is a great explanation of the choices and why the API resource was the way to go. Inspired us to take a look at how we put our API together.

Right after reading the pg essays, any startup founder should read everything Jason has written. Cuts right to the points that many are too uncomfortable to talk about.

Google hires Prof Hinton. Facebook counters. There was a subtle point in the article referencing the fact that this challenge has both a software and hardware component. Add in complexities of parallel processing and running on GPUs and you have a pretty limited talent poop to pick from.

Glad to see the interest in deep learning even if it is sensationalizing it a bit. More interest and a bigger community will be helpful for startups like us.

Pretty accurate assessment. I almost certainly would have not gotten in had I not had a chance to talk to a few YC alums.

Side Note: Jason was absolutely the reason I got in. YC should do whatever it takes to get him to become at the very least a part-time partner. They and all future YC companies will be better off with him involved.

From my own experience, the OP is absolutely right about the no BS part. Just explain what you're doing. You don't need to sell it or exaggerate (doing so will actually hurt your chances). I think the most important thing to explain is why people/companies want what you're making. The next most important thing you can do is teach them something. If they are able to learn something new about a market from you, you're chances of acceptance go up.

The in-person interview day is pretty exciting. It's sort of like the first day at the dorms (which for me was in 1995). It's perfectly acceptable to walk up to someone, say hi and and just start talking.

If you're thinking about applying, you should.

Billing partners hate reviewing bills. First year associates write some interesting narratives in their time entries.

We are working on the best way to provide this service. Most likely working through a partner. We like the idea of an "Approved by" label. But we want to avoid any conflict of interest.

I like your thinking! We believe that billing should be fixed, not just reduced.

We're starting on the side where we have the most experience and have been able to get the most traction. We see providing evidence-based billing as an important part of the move to flat fee billing (or alternative fee arrangement).

Our end goal is to fix the process. We want to make sure legal billing doesn't become the joke that is medical billing.

Great write-up. My big concern is that legal billing goes the way of medical billing where the whole thing becomes a game. Our goal is to get to clean and fair bill where the client is happy to pay for services rendered and the law firm feels well compensated for a job well done.

Not sure if this link is behind a paywall, but this visualization of Profit per Partner for the top 200 law firms show why people may feel legal billing has gotten out of control: http://www.americanlawyer.com/PubArticleTAL.jsp?id=120260182...

Co-founder here. Great points about bigger businesses. I have worked for 10 years with insurance companies, captive finance firms, and other financial institutions with their legal data. Our pricing should be only slightly better than incumbents. For companies >$50k/yr in legal bills, we charge 1% of billed.

We're piloting now with a company with $1.1B/yr in legal bills. They're not so interested in the dashboard, but in access to our algorithms.

And yes, the existing products to review legal bills are crap (note: I'm waaaaay biased, obviously.)

The actual example was .5 hours to prepare a 1-page form and .5 hours to mail the form. It probably did require return receipt.

That's one expensive stamp.

The lawyer probably didn't intend to bill that much, but filing out a time card at the end of the week results in problems like this.

I'd love to see law firms publish total hours billed by lawyer. I think that would solve a lot of over-billing if they did.

Word frequency is in use at many larger insurance companies today. You can certainly find problematic bills with word frequency and the hours billed, but you end up with a lot of false positives so you still have to manually review everything. We get in deeper than word frequency.

And, yes! NLP + statistics is fun!

You know your way around a legal bill!

As bradleyjg points out, some charges make their way onto a bill when they shouldn't. It's usually not malicious.

The problem is that legal bills don't get enough attention from the law firm. They rely on the client to tell them when something is a problem. We make that process easier. And hopefully everybody, even the law firm, is happier.

As for the privacy concerns, we use data to train our machine learning models. The outcome of those models includes categorization by activity (internal meetings, phone calls, legal filings, etc.).

The "shared" component is for training purposes. At no point do we share invoice content. The key to convert a numeric vector back into a partial view of the original text changes every day. Security and confidentiality of customer data is a big area of concern for us. We also provide our customers with a named list of people with access to the content.

Co-founder here. Legal bills are not considered "work product" so the client can share them if they choose.

The content of legal bills is very important to protect. We have technical safeguards as well as management/process safeguards. The most important of which is limiting the number of people with access to actual content.

We have data and can price compare across geographies and law firms. But it is important to remember that each transaction is unique. That's why we don't release any of that information currently. If we find the right way and the right venue to share that aggregated information, we will do so if we think it is in the best interest of our customers.

Co-founder here. Charing a percent of savings is an interesting model. We approached customers with it and they pull back from it fairly quickly. It sets up a conflict of interest in that there is an incentive to reduce more than is appropriate. Our goal is not simply "less." We believe customers should pay what they owe, but not more.

We also believe that the relationship with your law firm is important. Just cutting a bill doesn't help that relationship.

Co-founder here. Thanks!

We just saw a ton of money being thrown at a problem that looked like it needed some help being solved. We're seeing growth in insurance, banking, patent heavy companies (hardware), and startups raising money. Even had a VC ask about becoming a customer!

Fantastic post. Just saw an interview on TC talking about the two types of sales. I'll reach out to you to chat. We're definitely top down, but we're hoping to find ways to get our product in people's hands. We do the free trial and super easy sign-up, but we know that a sale always comes down to shaking hands in-person.

We're SimpleLegal. We developed software that reads legal bills and figures out what lawyers are actually doing. Simplelegal.com

If there's anything begging to be fixed, it's the benefits administration process. After using the traditional vendors for my last company, I'm ecstatic to find something better. Think I'm going a little overboard over back office software? Then you've never had to add dental coverage to an existing employee.

A few lawyers have reached out to me with questions about our service. First, let me say that I fully understand your concerns and distaste for current bill review and eBilling platforms. I understand and appreciate your point of view. We're hopefully part of the solution, not the problem.

We don't create yet another system that creates more overhead for your firm. We can accept invoices in any of the LEDES formats via email. We accept secure, encrypted direct uploads as well for those that prefer that process.

We believe that law firms provide a valuable service. You're an insurance policy against bad decisions, an advisor through unchartered waters.

If you're an attorney, Please do reach out to me. I'm happy to talk to you about any questions you have.

Cat's out if the bag... We haven't launched publicly, but we have customers on our beta application now. We've analyzed over $1.1B in legal bills.

If anyone here is from NJ, you've probably read the news stories about your school boards and local governments getting outrageous legal bills. Your state Comptroller, Matthew Boxer, is actually doing an outstanding job of putting a stop to the worst of it.

We're still in private beta, but drop me a note if you want to see how your bills stack up.

Great story of compassion and triumph. So... How do we make it scale?

Is it mandatory insurance? Insurance doesn't make everything affordable, but it probably wild have been helpful. Though maybe the co-pay would have been $50k.

Universal tax-payer funded insurance? The term "tax payer" is interesting because politicians and pundits forget that we're all tax payers in one form or another. Granted some pay more, some are net consumers of govt services. But tax payers mean us, and those with more earned income more than those with less. I think the main difference between taxes and donation is choice.

Single-payer or government provided healthcare? Pretty sure that no one would identify the government as the picture perfect example of efficiency. Plus, putting elected officials or their appointees in charge of handing out goods and services doesnt seem to be sustainable. Not that putting profit seeking entities in charge has yielded the ideal result.

Making drug providers, healthcare providers and everyone else in that supply chain non-profit? Profit has enormous motivational powers. Not always for good. But it is pretty amazing what can be accomplished by organizations setup to create wealth.

Big Data? Sorry, I couldn't resist. Well, lets use that as a proxy for innovation. It would seem that greater opportunity for innovation would help. Lower barriers to trying new drugs, procedures, diet, treatments would allow for potentially lower cost solutions to be created.

Separating health care from your job? Of your insurer only needs you to be healthy until you find a new job, there's not much in incentive for long-term healthcare and preventative screenings to identify tumors and other problems before they become an expensive problem. Though that would seem to be an arguement in favor of a single payer system.

Sorry, I don't have an answer. Hopefully, great stories like the OP continue. But if we don't make it scale then we haven't really done all we possibly can do.

Pretty sure this could be part of the answer to the pros/cons debate of working remotely... productivity vs collaboration.

My inner-management-consultant-child just shed a little tear thinking about how many times I've had to redo work lost to coworkers editing the wrong emailed version.

Sounds like what we need... a way to enable a payment from one of our customers to another. Not a wire, not a credit card transaction, can't require anything more than a regular bank account on both sides of the transaction.

Is this an effort to take the pg investing trends essay to an extreme? Or an effort to quickly fill the deal pipeline for a new VC?

I'm a big believer in finding the candidate you're not supposed to find. Meaning, if you find the person you're supposed to find, then everyone else will as well. Plus, they probably already have the job you're offering. So, you compete on salary.

If you can find and take a chance on the right student from the "wrong" school, you can get some great employees.

Large companies in particular love butt-in-seat time as a predictor of value. Sure 6 months experience is probably better than 3. But 6 years doesn't buy you much more than 3 years.

The other thing big companies love is prior experience in the industry. I have never understood that tendency. You already have 10 people with 10 years experience... Why is adding more of the same important? Years in industry isn't anywhere on my framework for hiring.

"but most of all because I don't want to."

Like a boss.

pg - I know you mentioned increading idea conflicts in the essay, but in your comment you touched on it again in a slightly different way. VCs can only invest in one of a given type of company. The increasing ease of starting a company should result in more startups in more obscure markets where previously would-be founders only saw employment and academia as their two paths. These new investable markets should present VCs with new and less saturated opportunities.

Are VCs and other investors going to be ready to jump into previously uninvestable markets? Feels like they weren't with hardware. Do you expect it to be different this time?

Stripe knows how to innovate. Simplify knows how to copy. Go with Stripe.

Academia is really pushing the boundaries of neural networks and getting machines to perceive visual and auditory input. Great to see commercial ventures step in to create value from those advances. Google is hiring in that field because [0] voice and sight would seem to be the two most natural inputs (vs typing and clicking).

Interesting that Grok is not trying to push the boundaries of neural network size in the same way that new Google employee Geoffrey Hinton has stated as his goal. Grok's approach would likely create huge value to the Honeywell's and GE's of the world. There are lots of turbines, thermostats, generators, and robots to improve.

Will the day ever come that your coffee maker has a Nest-like capability to determine when you're up, a Google Now-like function laity to know if you have time for coffee, and a Grok-like capability to know when to have your coffee ready?

Seems ridiculous, but there's a chip in just about everything. So, why not?

[0] My own speculation.