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You are looking at a holiday shopping list which is the epitome of consumerism. You shouldn't find things that are elevating the human spirit you are looking fo

You are looking at a holiday shopping list which is the epitome of consumerism. You shouldn't find things that are elevating the human spirit you are looking for stuff that you would find in skymall or the home shopping network. There are plenty of yc companies tackling interesting problems - you just wouldn't find them on a holiday list. For example: Triplebyte - trying to take a data driven approach to make recruiting for more scientific Gitlab - building cool open source software to host your code Higherme - building customized education software to help kids learn math and science Priceconomics - they have some of the most interesting content coming out of tech (opposite of huffpo/buzzfeed/etc) Zapier - ifttt for the enterprise / lots of cool tools for companies Mixpanel - power modern analytics for companies I think it's unfair to judge all of yc based on a holiday shopping list which by its definition should cater to our consumerist desires. The most interesting companies shouldn't be on this list since most wouldn't have a product that is bought by consumers.

VLM 10y ago
I think we agree that gitlab is awesome and tossing money at something that can lead to exponential growth in productivity and therefore exponential financial return is a wise strategy. As long as the market is not saturated and there's a path to growth, etc. But at least they're on the right track. However every dollar spent on "candle of the month club" and every hour spent working on it is a dollar and an hour that can't be applied to exponential returns from actual tech companies. Perhaps there's something sneaky or non-intuitive about "candle of the month club" such that they're operating a redundant array of inexpensive candles, or they have a containerization or virtualization strategy for candle wick storage, or their database is prototyping quantum secured financial data, and the candles are just placeholders to test real technologies and workflows. Probably not, but I'd like to hope so.

VLM 10y ago

I think we agree that gitlab is awesome and tossing money at something that can lead to exponential growth in productivity and therefore exponential financial return is a wise strategy. As long as the market is not saturated and there's a path to growth, etc. But at least they're on the right track. However every dollar spent on "candle of the month club" and every hour spent working on it is a dollar and an hour that can't be applied to exponential returns from actual tech companies. Perhaps there's something sneaky or non-intuitive about "candle of the month club" such that they're operating a redundant array of inexpensive candles, or they have a containerization or virtualization strategy for candle wick storage, or their database is prototyping quantum secured financial data, and the candles are just placeholders to test real technologies and workflows. Probably not, but I'd like to hope so.