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Startups that debuted at Y Combinator W17 Demo Day 2

155 points by tyre 10y ago

booh 10y ago
I personally know the team trying to build the first production electric plane. One of the team members is an ex-engineer from NASA who was fired after trying to resuscitate one of the former kan-jis. Kudos to them !
- jgrahamc 10y ago
  > resuscitate one of the former kan-jis What does that mean?
- orb_yt 10y ago
  I was just about to ask about them. I'm curious how YC works with companies like them and Boom Supersonic. They get in, and are given $120k in seed funding. Then what? You can't build aircraft with $120k. Im interested in hearing some insight on this.
  - tyre 10y ago
    For most teams, YC's financial investment is the least valuable part of the program. Much more valuable: - 3 months of intense focus on product and growth with feedback - access to and advice from YC partners - community of other founders in the batch who are going through similar issues - access to other YC founders (partnerships, advice, etc.) - social proof to investors, press, customers of having done YC
    - orb_yt 10y ago
      Sure, but they still need to build a plane, and not just any plane, but an aircraft never before built. What do you think their game plan is moving forward?
      - tyre 10y ago
        The team needed to build such a plane might be far removed from the network or knowledge needed to raise the money necessary to build such a plane. In that case, YC is tremendously helpful in giving the platform to raise enough money to do all of the hard things involved in building a plane that's never been built. Time is the most precious resource in startups. One way to get more time is to have a phenomenal team, so you do things faster (either by building the right things faster, having the expertise to not build the wrong things, etc.) Another way is by having more money, so you have a longer time to figure things out. When I say that the $120k isn't what is valuable about YC, I don't mean money in general. The fiscal benefit just tends to come indirectly, from access to platforms (Demo Day, press), investors, and pitch advice.
      - onion2k 10y ago
        Not immediately. Businesses that have these immense goals are about research, discovery and innovation in smaller elements of something. It's an incremental process with additional investment along the way, each step going a bit further to proving your team can do what you've set out to do, until eventually you have the whole product.
ganeshkrishnan 10y ago
He tried to bring kan-jis back.
- jgrahamc 10y ago
  I know what resuscitate means; I don't understand kan-ji here.
- dang 10y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13928300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13928300 and marked it off-topic.
sergiotapia 10y ago
Out of all of these the only one that really interests me is Fibo. https://www.fiboapp.com/ https://www.fiboapp.com/ I was in line for the Nintendo Switch and I got to talking with a contractor who deals with and hires carpenters, tile guys, plumbers, etc - and you wouldn't believe the shit this guy had to put up with to finish a project. His workflow was all over the place out of necessity and he paid around $500/month on software alone, not to mention the wasted time. I was thinking of building something like Fibo for these guys, this is gold! Best of luck to them for real. They can change the quality of lives for contractors and for their clients.
- zsalim 10y ago
  Thank you for that comment. Means a lot! I'm one of the founders of Fibo and would be happy to chat more about what we're doing anytime. zane @ fiboapp.com
  - nojvek 10y ago
    My dad and brother are in construction and plumbing. They talk about this all the time. Tech industry has a lot of bullshit apps because most developers don't know how other industries work. Kudos for you to find a under-represented industry and make a dent.
usaphp 10y ago
> "Tress – A social community for black women’s hairstyles" I wonder what would black women say if there was an app "Social community for white women's hairstyles", would not it be considered racist?
- mc32 10y ago
  I'm not sure. Forget black and white. Just imagine an underserved market, it makes business sense to highlight the difference: Car insurance vs. Electric car insurance. To me it would make sense to highlight that the new company is targeting a particular market.
- untog 10y ago
  This is simply a play for a specific, smaller market that isn't adequately covered today. To be clear (and I will own up to being not fully knowledge on this topic myself): many black women have very different hair than women of other races. The way they style it is different, the treatments they get are different, the products they use are different, and the issues they face are different. All of this is underepresented in most media today. Most social sites about hairstyles are white women's hairstyles sites by virtue of what they cover, even if it isn't their stated aim. This is a totally uncontroversial concept in most situations and markets, but somehow when race is involved people start behaving very oddly. A site specifically targeting white women isn't automatically racist, no. But such a site is not logical by any assessment of the current market. So absent that logic, people look for other reasons, and when you're targeting a specific race, and the economically dominant one at that, you're opening yourself up to such questions.
- laser 10y ago
  There's an asymmetry you're not recognizing. Focusing on a subgroup is a niche, while focusing on the majority while excluding a subgroup is discriminatory. Which even then, might be okay, were it not for the history of oppressive discrimination.
  - mistermann 10y ago
    Very well said.
tabeth 10y ago
I wish you could bet on the odds of some of these succeeding in 3 years or so. Someone should start a startup that does this and get into Y Combinator to be super meta. random commentary below: * FloydHub – Heroku for deep learning * It's unlikely in my eyes that a company with enough data worth doing deep learning for is going to outsource the actual model building. I'd be interested to hear counter examples. * Tetra – Automatic notes for business meetings * I think this is worthless. Meetings important enough to warrant for "paid notes" will have people taking notes, on their own (company) dime anyway. Not to mention taking notes will improve your engagement in the meeting. Not to mention the privacy implications. * Collectly – Stripe for medical debt collection * Pretty interesting. Hard to comment without knowing what the success rate is for an average debt collector. I fear there's some selection bias in the stats techcrunch shared. * Indigo Fair – Amazon for local retailers* Unfortunately I think local retailers are slowly dying. I do think this is an interesting niche that could be successful. * Lively – Modern healthcare savings account (HSA)* This too could be successful. Most people who'd do this probably have an HSA that's offered by their employer, unless they're trying to replace that. * KidPass – One pass for “amazing activities for kids”* I'm surprised at the success this is seeing. I do think parents are a good group to exploit though. Overworked parents want the logistics of spending time with their kids to be outsourced these days. Plenty of rich parents in NYC too. * Upcall – Outbound calls as a service* Not a huge fan of spamming services. * Niles – Conversational wiki for business * It's cheap enough, I guess. * Sycamore – Onboarding drivers for on-demand jobs * Looks interesting, but don't see how it'll address the drivers making so little part techcrunch mentioned.
- pilingual 10y ago
  I had the idea for upcall several years ago around the time a similar enterprise service that went through YC (elasticsales?) was starting up. So I am biased but it is a good idea. Sales and marketing is about targeting the appropriate customer so no one on either end wants to waste time. Spam would be calling everyone and hope someone buys what you are selling. So upcall is great for B2B startups without a budget for sales hires. (Maybe startups will also focus on sales from the beginning rather than shying away from it like VCs complain about.)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
a_d 10y ago
"Enterprise sales" is a very interesting problem. There are 4 companies in this batch that are attacking it from different sides: (1) Scribe – Automating sales development representatives (2) Upcall – Outbound calls as a service (3) Clover Intelligence – Voice analytics for sales (4) Riley – Lead qualification as a service B2B businesses rely heavily on sales - a great sales team can make or break the company. But for folks with a predominantly technical background, sales as a function, remains at best a mystery, and at worst something they make fun of (because sales people are often different from technical people - there is a lack of understanding between the two). It is great to see more technical people entering "sales" and are trying to understand it. Sales is often (mis)understood as a slick-smooth-talking meeting/phone call that magically convinces an unwitting customer into paying for a product. Companies like the 4 mentioned above, and several others that are playing in this space, are attempting to bring data and rigor to this space. It would be a net better outcome for everyone -- less annoying calls for a prospect and more focused approach for the seller. I am fascinated by the intersection of analysis, software, and sales. I wish the best to these companies! edit: formatting
- Radim 10y ago
  It's generally much harder to poo on professions, after you've had to walk in their shoes. Personally, I found that ML consulting gave me a valuable perspective on this process. So many hats to wear: research & development, lead gen & marketing, sales, support, product management, legal & IP, administrative & taxes. Consulting definitely teaches you humility. You will no longer be "that researcher" who thinks whatever happens after their precious math formula or the 5-line Matlab prototype is "unworthy stuff for code monkeys". Or that engineer who thinks "the suits" are out to ruin your perfect towers of code and logic, with their silly deadlines and requirements...
- rfrank 10y ago
  It's a super interesting space, and it feels like there's new companies every day. Definitely tons of promise. One thing I think is particularly challenging is the inherent variability in the size and structure of sales & marketing teams. Big players in the space try very hard to be one stop shops, which makes it hard for newcomers to find a niche to really dominate or a price point to compete on for a given segment. For context I'm marketing guy in electronics manufacturing, where the sales cycle is extremely long (~6 months), and involves a huge number of decision makers. One new customer a year is par for the space, one a quarter is performing very well. Our sales team is small, and our marketing team is smaller, but that's fine because the set of companies we're a good fit for is a small target to shoot at in the scheme of things. Given all that, the two huge priorities are lead qualification, and time management. The former is pretty straightforward, I'll throw money at anyone who can give me good info on decision makers at the companies active on my site at any given time. As you mention, B2B relies on sales, and at least for EMS where I work, anyone who's based in America and survived '08 is probably good at it. In that regard, things like AI generated scripts/nurturing lose appeal because proven strategies exist, knowing who to call (and more importantly, when) is the name of the game. My favorite in that regard is Mattermark. Their sales team is really good, by the way, interested people should sign up for their trial to at a minimum pay attention to what they do. There's two parts to the time management aspect as I see it. The first is that upkeep of a CMS/CRM becomes a big task in itself, and nobody wants to do it. I want to be working on scripts/nurturing flows for the sales team or making X piece of marketing content, not staring at dashboards all day. Sales wants to be reaching out to their leads. Some new tool that adds a slight twist to functionality that exists in a more all in one system becomes hard to adopt. If something isn't very obviously better at a given function than part of a big CMS/CRM, or provide some new functionality I'd like to have and can't use with my primary tool, it becomes hard to adopt. For me right now that's Mailmunch for newsletter subscription pop forms (sorry world, I'll stop using them when people stop filling them out insanely frequently). The second aspect to the time problem is the increased adoption time that will happen across generations in the office. For instance, a senior saleswoman where I work (who's awesome/great at her job) gets thrown through a loop by HubSpot UI changes, and basically doesn't touch Slack. From that perspective, new tools that a salesperson interacts with need to be super smooth to adopt, nor not be very 'user facing'. And please, dear god, don't make me schedule a 30 minute demo of the product for trial access. > But for folks with a predominantly technical background, sales as a function, remains at best a mystery, and at worst something they make fun of I think spending more time on something like Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, etc. would help here. Which may, and probably does happen, I just don't know how common it is. Either way, having a good understanding of what the big tools can do in terms of automation, prospecting, analytics, and all that is valuable. Of the 4 in this batch I like Riley the most because of their mention of nurturing/drip campaigns, which are critical in industries with big contracts and long sales cycles. Scribe is a close second, but I'm skeptical it's that much better than functionality of bigger CMS/CRMs to justify onboarding/upkeep time. Upcall makes me uncomfortable, but my industry is extremely niche so I'm biased. Clover might be cool, but that landing page to watch the demo vid isn't very nice. Best of luck to all of them though, it's a great space to be in.
iloveluce 10y ago
The ones that debuted on Demo Day 1 https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/20/yc-demo-day-winter-2017/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/20/yc-demo-day-winter-2017/
mintplant 10y ago
As podcasts become bigger and bigger I've been afraid of something like Breaker succeeding. Thanks to RSS/Atom it's currently a very open medium. Anyone can start putting out content and I can consume it on any device and app I choose, download episodes for on-the-go and offline listening, transfer the files easily between devices—even to "dumb" MP3 players that never had an app ecosystem—and move my subscriptions around with the common OPML format. There's no tracking or analytics peering over my shoulder, unlike so much of modern media that's become enslaved to data: as a listener I consider this a feature. I'm quite willing to pay for podcast content, and I do. I've been a paid subscriber to The NoSleep Podcast ever since they started offering the option, at $20 a season. They use a service called Nanacast, which collects my payment and gives me a unique RSS feed URL that I can add to any podcast app. No arbitrary centralization or gatekeepers required.
- gkop 10y ago
  Isn't it just a matter of time?
- haraball 10y ago
  Breaker's app looks good, but I agree in that I hope they won't succeed. Their monetization strategy is to "own" podcasts and have people pay for access, if I understand correctly. Which podcasts do they have lined up for this? Will those podcasts still have ads in them? When will they start charging? Too many unanswered questions for me at this point which stops me from switching from my current podcast setup, and to advocate my friends to switch to this new "social" platform which might shut down when money runs out. I pay for Spotify, Netflix etc. to avoid ads. Some podcasts manage to incorporate ads tastefully with respect for the listener. Others are not done that well, and produces the same horror as when you're used to Netflix and suddenly see how a show looks with frequent commercial breaks on a hotel TV. Here's an idea: Crowdsourced ad-filtered podcast RSS streams you have to pay to access, where the profits go back to the podcasts themselves. Users mark the start and end of the ads in the podcast audio, and a podcast player skips those parts. That's something I would pay for, and hopefully would generate more money to the producers of podcasts than ads.
  - 10y ago
saycheese 10y ago
>> "YC’s recently developed Investor Match system" Here's a YC blog post on this: https://blog.ycombinator.com/investor-day-software/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/investor-day-software/
anilgulecha 10y ago
Peer5 - This is malware on your browser, and they are abusing the webrtc protocol for their business usecase. Until they provide a clear opt-in usage behavior, this opinion will not change. Clearly if their proposition is about better streaming service/quality, this is trivially testable by how many users opt-in to their network when viewing videos. Their endpoints should be added to easylist. This is very big concern for metered users, who'll see their usage spike. Is there a list of peer5 endpoints?
- joshfraser 10y ago
  WebRTC allows you to connect directly to the IP addresses of other people viewing the same video as you (no fixed list), but their JavaScript could easily be detected & blocked. The value prop isn't a better streaming experience. It's that their customers don't have to pay hardly anything to serve their content and it's distributed so it's far more resilient to network outages. It shouldn't be tough to tell if someone is on a metered connected by looking at their ASN. I'm hoping they do that.
  - anilgulecha 10y ago
    I understand their value-prop well enough (saving broadcasters CDN $$). I just find it shitty that their bottom-line is based off of the end-user's bandwidth without their opt-in consent. The only way to tackle this is public denunciation of their model, hand in hand with browser based blocks -- either easylist/uBlock, or Chrome/Firefox/et-al modifying the browser protocols/UX to disallow this leeching without the user's knowledge.
- huancle 10y ago
  At Peer5, our customers are the broadcasters who operate streaming services throughout the world. The users are theirs, not ours, and it is up to the broadcasters to decide how they want to message / roll-out p2p services. Some choose to opt people in by default and allow them to opt out. Others choose the opposite approach. Our job is to give our customers the tools they need to create and enforce whatever business rules they feel are appropriate. This includes looking at ASN numbers to identify ISPs that operate metered services and turning off upstream sharing for such users. No one is forced to participate in a Peer5 mesh network. And the value proposition is most definitely better streaming, especially for the biggest / most popular streams as these benefit the most from a p2p solution. We have plenty of data from users all over the world to support this.
adamnemecek 10y ago
> with the worldwide black hair care market estimated at $500 billion a year Did they mean million? No way it's billion?
- vuyani 10y ago
  And whats so unbelievable about this stat?
  - prawn 10y ago
    Seems high to me too. Even accounting for it being an expensive and complicated service, what would hairdressers in Africa really be charging that wouldn't cause the global average spend to drop? It's saying that half a billion people are spending $1000/year each. I wonder if they've extrapolated from an optimistic figure?
  - nandemo 10y ago
    According to this [0] the sum of black population, plus australoid (for the sake of the argument, let's say they will be part of the target audience regardless of how they self-identify ethnically) and mixed caucasian+black, caucasian+australoid etc is about 27% of world population. Let's round that up to 30%. Also, let's round up the world population estimate to 7 billion, and assume men are part of the target audience too. So total target audience is about 2.1 billion. Which is probably a huge overestimate but it doesn't matter... A U$500 billion market then means the average person spends about U$240 per year on hair care. Which is ridiculously high. [0] https://www.quora.com/Can-anyone-break-down-the-racial-demographics-of-the-human-race-population-by-percentage https://www.quora.com/Can-anyone-break-down-the-racial-demog...
    - neilk 10y ago
      $20/month? That wouldn't be enough even for most white women. Black women's hair appointments are more expensive; many hair salons charge a premium. Plus they use a lot of products and elixirs to change the nature of their hair. Plus, many of them wear a wig-like accessory, often of real human hair, every single day. The process of 'weaving' that into their natural hair can cost hundreds or even thousands, at the high end. Source: black friend in college wrote an essay about this for a journal I was editing at the time, plus, common knowledge. There are some interesting cultural questions about how in North American society, natural black hair is deemed unacceptable, and this has generally been internalized by black women. If you choose to just be natural (as my friend did) you get a lot of flak from other black women. I don't know if you can get this to work out to $500B; other industry numbers I could find are like $10B, which would be about $50/month for every black woman in the USA.
justinzollars 10y ago
I will get down voted for this but its how I feel. I have not been excited for an app or a new website in a very long time. I think we are in a rut. None of these ideas sound very interesting or exciting to me.
- lurkervizzle 10y ago
  I think this is more a result of the increase in acceptance of entrepreneurship as a career option. Adding to the list of predictors of a tech correction, when you have a bunch of investment bankers and management consultants coming into consulting, you know you've peaked. I have to wonder, what's the catchet of YCombinator when you have so many new startups being churned out every quarter? YC is always going to be fine - they get their 7%. They're simply increasing the bandwidth and they'll get a few hits, but we should be prepared for the average quality of YC start-ups to fall with volume.
- WesternStar 10y ago
  Ehh they aren't super interesting but there are good businesses in there. Out of the ones I saw from both days AON3D, InnaMed Vinsight, Cowlar, MarketFox, Trade, BulkMRO, Hogaru and SuprDaily all seem to have good market niches and achievable goals.
- cheriot 10y ago
  Most businesses are boring. I'm actually a fan of how so many of these companies are taking proven tech to industries that operate like it's 2005 or even 1995. That's what it will take for tech to make the world more efficient and productive.
1ba9115454 10y ago
"Wright Electric hired a team that had been previously funded by NASA to investigate the potential for electric planes, which its co-founder Jeff Engler says puts the startup years ahead of the competition." Airbus already have an electric prop engine fully tested as well as experience building prop planes with traditional fuel engines. So to say Wright is years ahead is misleading.
lurkervizzle 10y ago
Regarding "Niles – Conversational wiki for business" The article says: "It’s a $27 b market and claims 700,000 teams signed up in one week." I believe this is a typo - they actually have 700 teams that signed up.
frik 10y ago
* Regarding "Pied Piper", funny that some refer to it * "massively democratizes" is the new "disrupt"
- frik 10y ago
  Who coined the "democratize" and "disrupt" words? (the usage/meaning of the words in the startup scene) (maybe the first usage is well know, like "Web 2.0")
  - nandemo 10y ago
    The term "disruptive innovation" was coined by Christensen in his book "The Innovator's Dilemma". Then it was shortened to "disruption" and its meaning was quickly diluted by indiscriminate usage by the press and blogs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
dayaz36 10y ago
Did YC just fund a debt collection agency?...
- the-dude 10y ago
  And a hedgefund.
Rainymood 10y ago
First off, I absolutely LOVE these write-ups. That being said I chuckled at this one: >Tetra – Automatic notes for business meetings >A lot of meeting notes are taken in Evernote but Tetra takes call notes for you by automatically dialing you to merge into the call and then sending you a fully searchable record of the entire conversation. It comes in auto speech only or human edited using a fast transcription feature for 50 cents a minute from humans. There may be some ethical challenges around recording others and each person using the service will need to inform those on the call they are being recorded but with two billion hours of conference calls a year, Tetra plans to take on that market using it’s AI and data. The startup launched on Product Hunt a week ago and now has two paid monthly users. >The startup launched on Product Hunt a week ago and now has two paid monthly users. >two paid monthly users. Yes, two. But still, any traction is better than no traction! I love a lot of the ideas but am sceptical about most of them. Good luck to each company!
- jgoldsmith 10y ago
  thanks! try us out https://asktetra.com https://asktetra.com and maybe we'll get to 3 :)
  - martalist 10y ago
    Your answer made me chuckle in a good way - great way to turn a potential negative into something funny and positive! I'm sure I'm not the only one checking out your site because of this.
    - nojvek 10y ago
      When Dropbox first came out, I remember a similar Comment. "Why would anyone use this when you have rsync". They don't have any paying customer. Speech -> annotated searchable text is a humongous market. I really hope you guys and gals kill it.
- GFischer 10y ago
  My wife has some hearing problems and pays for an automatic speech to text in her voice messages. There are some hilarious errors but it's surprisingly readable. So it's necessary for some people. I definitely wouldn't mind such a service in our meetings provider, but the company currently uses either Skype or Go2Meeting (EDIT: I see it can dial in. I might try it :) ). I worry about confidentiality as well (the CSO would have my hide if some of the future projects are leaked due to such a service). It's an extra I could provide in my very own startup though :) (we're still struggling with core features so not for version 1).
kriro 10y ago
So I guess pitching anything that's dataviz as "Palantir for X" is a thing now? I need to update my Ys in my Y for X list. Uber for X and Palantir for X are the new hotness it seems.
TuringNYC 10y ago
>> Paragon One – Career coaching from real professionals >> Families spend a fortune on sending their kids to college......Families pay $7500 up front, and the kids get coaching over video chat. Paragon One says 100% of students who completed the program got job or internship offers. Wow, so the for-pay college application coaching is now becoming for-pay jobs&internships "coaching?" I suspect this will be limited coaching and more so selling access. Wouldn't this essentially incentivize insiders to "sell" internship opportunities at prestigious firms? Certainly families paying $7500 up front are going to want results, even if it is a for-show internship at Google reviewing release notes that gets morphed into entry level resume gold. I'll be surprised if companies dont ban this outright (but then, TeamBlind seems to be successful...)
- sushid 10y ago
  Also, the 100% received an internship offer seems like a disingenuous statistic at best. It's trivial to receive "an internship" if you count scammy, unpaid ones.
kriro 10y ago
The "black hair care market" is one of the curious things I've pondered about since spending some time in Africa. I think they are onto something and I think it's one of the markets where you can build a nice lead without really being noticed. I (as a Caucasian man with not exactly a lot of hair) had some very interesting discussions about hair pieces for example. I wish them the best of luck, the capitalist in me is always very happy if these "curious sounding" markets finally get attention :) There's something very satisfying about seeing such a company in a batch with enterprise sales focused companies and an e-plane company.
- puranjay 10y ago
  I chuckled when I read the "social community for black hair dressers" line. Then I realized this is a pretty massive niche market and these guys are smart for focusing on it
- sumedh 10y ago
  You should check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Hair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Hair
aestetix 10y ago
Did they actually do anything besides donate money to the ACLU? I didn't see anything on the ACLU's website about it, which is strange given the arrangement YC usually has with companies they "fund." Did anyone from the ACLU go to YC and participate? Is there a "demo day" presenation from the ACLU? I'm very confused.
- binaryorganic 10y ago
  The ACLU will be part of the winter batch of companies in YC, where it will receive mentorship, a network of powerful connections in tech and a chance to present itself to investors on Demo Day. Y Combinator will also provide some funding, though it won’t take an equity stake in ACLU because it’s a nonprofit. ACLU will not pay to participate." SOURCE: https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/31/ycaclu/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/31/ycaclu/
  - aestetix 10y ago
    I've read as much, but it is dangerously vague to me. Here is why. The ACLU has at least publicly stood for decades for a lot of positions that seem to fundamentally go against what some YC companies do. For example, the ACLU is a clear proponent of the Civil Rights Act, which among other things guarantees that hotels must not discriminate when providing lodging to guests. Meanwhile, in recent years there have been several documented cases where AirBNB renters have suddenly run out of vacancies for one rentee, only to be suddenly free again a day later. Given situations like this, I'm not sure what ACLU seems to think they can get out of a YC "mentorship." If this creates a chance for a larger public discussion on issues like this, it could be a good thing, but at the moment I am extremely skeptical.
    - nojvek 10y ago
      There's one thing about some renter on Airbnb being a boofhead and another when governments are being run by boofheads ACLU need to choose their wars and if YC can help them hone their skills so they win more meaningful wars for the masses then that's a good thing.
pavlov 10y ago
How is Vize different from Tableau?
- randusr 10y ago
  Co-founder here. Vize caters to use cases beyond the sales/marketing/BI ones where Tableau is used. If you have millisecond time-series data, want to run simulations, or need more performance, Vize would be great tool :)
  - pavlov 10y ago
    Thanks for the info!
bambax 10y ago
> Voodoo Manufacturing I have been using a French company that seems to do the exact same thing, for low volume and prototyping: sculpteo.com However, for mass production (still low volumes, <10,000) I manufacture in China, and the reason is not only the cost, it's that "manufacturing" is not enough. We need finishing (polishing, printing) and packaging, and those on-demand manufacturing services usually don't provide this, which is a shame.
_pmf_ 10y ago
I'm hoping that something like the product Volt Health produces can one day be used in correcting anterior pelvic tilt.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
davidddavidson 10y ago
What does MDAcne do/solve for the consumer that PocketDerm/Curology isn't doing already?
- skin58 10y ago
  Hi, David. The success in acne treatment is based on three things. Matching the best anti-acne products to the user specific condition, helping the person with acne commit to her/his treatment and monitoring the skin 24/7 to change/improve the routine. MDacne beats curology on all three. It uses computer vison to assess the skin (actually better than any dermatologist /or curology nurse can do), suggests anti acne products (such as benzoyl peroxide) that are much more effective for acne than curology’s “prescription” products. (Azelaic acid, retinoids) and 3; provides 24/7 skin monitoring with its selfie tracker system. The image analysis, AI based system monitors skin improvement and helps motivate the user to commit to her/his treatment which is key to success (N/A in the curology’s solution).
cjbenedikt 10y ago
Pit.AI It's obvious what they do but what exactly are they offering? Nothing on their website explains.

155 points by tyre 10y ago

booh 10y ago

I personally know the team trying to build the first production electric plane. One of the team members is an ex-engineer from NASA who was fired after trying to resuscitate one of the former kan-jis. Kudos to them !

jgrahamc 10y ago
> resuscitate one of the former kan-jis What does that mean?
orb_yt 10y ago
I was just about to ask about them. I'm curious how YC works with companies like them and Boom Supersonic. They get in, and are given $120k in seed funding. Then what? You can't build aircraft with $120k. Im interested in hearing some insight on this.
- tyre 10y ago
  For most teams, YC's financial investment is the least valuable part of the program. Much more valuable: - 3 months of intense focus on product and growth with feedback - access to and advice from YC partners - community of other founders in the batch who are going through similar issues - access to other YC founders (partnerships, advice, etc.) - social proof to investors, press, customers of having done YC
  - orb_yt 10y ago
    Sure, but they still need to build a plane, and not just any plane, but an aircraft never before built. What do you think their game plan is moving forward?
    - tyre 10y ago
      The team needed to build such a plane might be far removed from the network or knowledge needed to raise the money necessary to build such a plane. In that case, YC is tremendously helpful in giving the platform to raise enough money to do all of the hard things involved in building a plane that's never been built. Time is the most precious resource in startups. One way to get more time is to have a phenomenal team, so you do things faster (either by building the right things faster, having the expertise to not build the wrong things, etc.) Another way is by having more money, so you have a longer time to figure things out. When I say that the $120k isn't what is valuable about YC, I don't mean money in general. The fiscal benefit just tends to come indirectly, from access to platforms (Demo Day, press), investors, and pitch advice.
    - onion2k 10y ago
      Not immediately. Businesses that have these immense goals are about research, discovery and innovation in smaller elements of something. It's an incremental process with additional investment along the way, each step going a bit further to proving your team can do what you've set out to do, until eventually you have the whole product.

ganeshkrishnan 10y ago

He tried to bring kan-jis back.

jgrahamc 10y ago
I know what resuscitate means; I don't understand kan-ji here.
dang 10y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13928300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13928300 and marked it off-topic.

sergiotapia 10y ago

Out of all of these the only one that really interests me is Fibo. https://www.fiboapp.com/ https://www.fiboapp.com/ I was in line for the Nintendo Switch and I got to talking with a contractor who deals with and hires carpenters, tile guys, plumbers, etc - and you wouldn't believe the shit this guy had to put up with to finish a project. His workflow was all over the place out of necessity and he paid around $500/month on software alone, not to mention the wasted time. I was thinking of building something like Fibo for these guys, this is gold! Best of luck to them for real. They can change the quality of lives for contractors and for their clients.

zsalim 10y ago
Thank you for that comment. Means a lot! I'm one of the founders of Fibo and would be happy to chat more about what we're doing anytime. zane @ fiboapp.com
- nojvek 10y ago
  My dad and brother are in construction and plumbing. They talk about this all the time. Tech industry has a lot of bullshit apps because most developers don't know how other industries work. Kudos for you to find a under-represented industry and make a dent.

usaphp 10y ago

> "Tress – A social community for black women’s hairstyles" I wonder what would black women say if there was an app "Social community for white women's hairstyles", would not it be considered racist?

mc32 10y ago
I'm not sure. Forget black and white. Just imagine an underserved market, it makes business sense to highlight the difference: Car insurance vs. Electric car insurance. To me it would make sense to highlight that the new company is targeting a particular market.
untog 10y ago
This is simply a play for a specific, smaller market that isn't adequately covered today. To be clear (and I will own up to being not fully knowledge on this topic myself): many black women have very different hair than women of other races. The way they style it is different, the treatments they get are different, the products they use are different, and the issues they face are different. All of this is underepresented in most media today. Most social sites about hairstyles are white women's hairstyles sites by virtue of what they cover, even if it isn't their stated aim. This is a totally uncontroversial concept in most situations and markets, but somehow when race is involved people start behaving very oddly. A site specifically targeting white women isn't automatically racist, no. But such a site is not logical by any assessment of the current market. So absent that logic, people look for other reasons, and when you're targeting a specific race, and the economically dominant one at that, you're opening yourself up to such questions.
laser 10y ago
There's an asymmetry you're not recognizing. Focusing on a subgroup is a niche, while focusing on the majority while excluding a subgroup is discriminatory. Which even then, might be okay, were it not for the history of oppressive discrimination.
- mistermann 10y ago
  Very well said.

tabeth 10y ago

I wish you could bet on the odds of some of these succeeding in 3 years or so. Someone should start a startup that does this and get into Y Combinator to be super meta. random commentary below: * FloydHub – Heroku for deep learning * It's unlikely in my eyes that a company with enough data worth doing deep learning for is going to outsource the actual model building. I'd be interested to hear counter examples. * Tetra – Automatic notes for business meetings * I think this is worthless. Meetings important enough to warrant for "paid notes" will have people taking notes, on their own (company) dime anyway. Not to mention taking notes will improve your engagement in the meeting. Not to mention the privacy implications. * Collectly – Stripe for medical debt collection * Pretty interesting. Hard to comment without knowing what the success rate is for an average debt collector. I fear there's some selection bias in the stats techcrunch shared. * Indigo Fair – Amazon for local retailers* Unfortunately I think local retailers are slowly dying. I do think this is an interesting niche that could be successful. * Lively – Modern healthcare savings account (HSA)* This too could be successful. Most people who'd do this probably have an HSA that's offered by their employer, unless they're trying to replace that. * KidPass – One pass for “amazing activities for kids”* I'm surprised at the success this is seeing. I do think parents are a good group to exploit though. Overworked parents want the logistics of spending time with their kids to be outsourced these days. Plenty of rich parents in NYC too. * Upcall – Outbound calls as a service* Not a huge fan of spamming services. * Niles – Conversational wiki for business * It's cheap enough, I guess. * Sycamore – Onboarding drivers for on-demand jobs * Looks interesting, but don't see how it'll address the drivers making so little part techcrunch mentioned.

pilingual 10y ago
I had the idea for upcall several years ago around the time a similar enterprise service that went through YC (elasticsales?) was starting up. So I am biased but it is a good idea. Sales and marketing is about targeting the appropriate customer so no one on either end wants to waste time. Spam would be calling everyone and hope someone buys what you are selling. So upcall is great for B2B startups without a budget for sales hires. (Maybe startups will also focus on sales from the beginning rather than shying away from it like VCs complain about.)

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

a_d 10y ago

"Enterprise sales" is a very interesting problem. There are 4 companies in this batch that are attacking it from different sides: (1) Scribe – Automating sales development representatives (2) Upcall – Outbound calls as a service (3) Clover Intelligence – Voice analytics for sales (4) Riley – Lead qualification as a service B2B businesses rely heavily on sales - a great sales team can make or break the company. But for folks with a predominantly technical background, sales as a function, remains at best a mystery, and at worst something they make fun of (because sales people are often different from technical people - there is a lack of understanding between the two). It is great to see more technical people entering "sales" and are trying to understand it. Sales is often (mis)understood as a slick-smooth-talking meeting/phone call that magically convinces an unwitting customer into paying for a product. Companies like the 4 mentioned above, and several others that are playing in this space, are attempting to bring data and rigor to this space. It would be a net better outcome for everyone -- less annoying calls for a prospect and more focused approach for the seller. I am fascinated by the intersection of analysis, software, and sales. I wish the best to these companies! edit: formatting

Radim 10y ago
It's generally much harder to poo on professions, after you've had to walk in their shoes. Personally, I found that ML consulting gave me a valuable perspective on this process. So many hats to wear: research & development, lead gen & marketing, sales, support, product management, legal & IP, administrative & taxes. Consulting definitely teaches you humility. You will no longer be "that researcher" who thinks whatever happens after their precious math formula or the 5-line Matlab prototype is "unworthy stuff for code monkeys". Or that engineer who thinks "the suits" are out to ruin your perfect towers of code and logic, with their silly deadlines and requirements...
rfrank 10y ago
It's a super interesting space, and it feels like there's new companies every day. Definitely tons of promise. One thing I think is particularly challenging is the inherent variability in the size and structure of sales & marketing teams. Big players in the space try very hard to be one stop shops, which makes it hard for newcomers to find a niche to really dominate or a price point to compete on for a given segment. For context I'm marketing guy in electronics manufacturing, where the sales cycle is extremely long (~6 months), and involves a huge number of decision makers. One new customer a year is par for the space, one a quarter is performing very well. Our sales team is small, and our marketing team is smaller, but that's fine because the set of companies we're a good fit for is a small target to shoot at in the scheme of things. Given all that, the two huge priorities are lead qualification, and time management. The former is pretty straightforward, I'll throw money at anyone who can give me good info on decision makers at the companies active on my site at any given time. As you mention, B2B relies on sales, and at least for EMS where I work, anyone who's based in America and survived '08 is probably good at it. In that regard, things like AI generated scripts/nurturing lose appeal because proven strategies exist, knowing who to call (and more importantly, when) is the name of the game. My favorite in that regard is Mattermark. Their sales team is really good, by the way, interested people should sign up for their trial to at a minimum pay attention to what they do. There's two parts to the time management aspect as I see it. The first is that upkeep of a CMS/CRM becomes a big task in itself, and nobody wants to do it. I want to be working on scripts/nurturing flows for the sales team or making X piece of marketing content, not staring at dashboards all day. Sales wants to be reaching out to their leads. Some new tool that adds a slight twist to functionality that exists in a more all in one system becomes hard to adopt. If something isn't very obviously better at a given function than part of a big CMS/CRM, or provide some new functionality I'd like to have and can't use with my primary tool, it becomes hard to adopt. For me right now that's Mailmunch for newsletter subscription pop forms (sorry world, I'll stop using them when people stop filling them out insanely frequently). The second aspect to the time problem is the increased adoption time that will happen across generations in the office. For instance, a senior saleswoman where I work (who's awesome/great at her job) gets thrown through a loop by HubSpot UI changes, and basically doesn't touch Slack. From that perspective, new tools that a salesperson interacts with need to be super smooth to adopt, nor not be very 'user facing'. And please, dear god, don't make me schedule a 30 minute demo of the product for trial access. > But for folks with a predominantly technical background, sales as a function, remains at best a mystery, and at worst something they make fun of I think spending more time on something like Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, etc. would help here. Which may, and probably does happen, I just don't know how common it is. Either way, having a good understanding of what the big tools can do in terms of automation, prospecting, analytics, and all that is valuable. Of the 4 in this batch I like Riley the most because of their mention of nurturing/drip campaigns, which are critical in industries with big contracts and long sales cycles. Scribe is a close second, but I'm skeptical it's that much better than functionality of bigger CMS/CRMs to justify onboarding/upkeep time. Upcall makes me uncomfortable, but my industry is extremely niche so I'm biased. Clover might be cool, but that landing page to watch the demo vid isn't very nice. Best of luck to all of them though, it's a great space to be in.

iloveluce 10y ago

The ones that debuted on Demo Day 1 https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/20/yc-demo-day-winter-2017/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/20/yc-demo-day-winter-2017/

mintplant 10y ago

As podcasts become bigger and bigger I've been afraid of something like Breaker succeeding. Thanks to RSS/Atom it's currently a very open medium. Anyone can start putting out content and I can consume it on any device and app I choose, download episodes for on-the-go and offline listening, transfer the files easily between devices—even to "dumb" MP3 players that never had an app ecosystem—and move my subscriptions around with the common OPML format. There's no tracking or analytics peering over my shoulder, unlike so much of modern media that's become enslaved to data: as a listener I consider this a feature. I'm quite willing to pay for podcast content, and I do. I've been a paid subscriber to The NoSleep Podcast ever since they started offering the option, at $20 a season. They use a service called Nanacast, which collects my payment and gives me a unique RSS feed URL that I can add to any podcast app. No arbitrary centralization or gatekeepers required.

gkop 10y ago
Isn't it just a matter of time?
haraball 10y ago
Breaker's app looks good, but I agree in that I hope they won't succeed. Their monetization strategy is to "own" podcasts and have people pay for access, if I understand correctly. Which podcasts do they have lined up for this? Will those podcasts still have ads in them? When will they start charging? Too many unanswered questions for me at this point which stops me from switching from my current podcast setup, and to advocate my friends to switch to this new "social" platform which might shut down when money runs out. I pay for Spotify, Netflix etc. to avoid ads. Some podcasts manage to incorporate ads tastefully with respect for the listener. Others are not done that well, and produces the same horror as when you're used to Netflix and suddenly see how a show looks with frequent commercial breaks on a hotel TV. Here's an idea: Crowdsourced ad-filtered podcast RSS streams you have to pay to access, where the profits go back to the podcasts themselves. Users mark the start and end of the ads in the podcast audio, and a podcast player skips those parts. That's something I would pay for, and hopefully would generate more money to the producers of podcasts than ads.
- 10y ago

saycheese 10y ago

>> "YC’s recently developed Investor Match system" Here's a YC blog post on this: https://blog.ycombinator.com/investor-day-software/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/investor-day-software/

anilgulecha 10y ago

Peer5 - This is malware on your browser, and they are abusing the webrtc protocol for their business usecase. Until they provide a clear opt-in usage behavior, this opinion will not change. Clearly if their proposition is about better streaming service/quality, this is trivially testable by how many users opt-in to their network when viewing videos. Their endpoints should be added to easylist. This is very big concern for metered users, who'll see their usage spike. Is there a list of peer5 endpoints?

joshfraser 10y ago
WebRTC allows you to connect directly to the IP addresses of other people viewing the same video as you (no fixed list), but their JavaScript could easily be detected & blocked. The value prop isn't a better streaming experience. It's that their customers don't have to pay hardly anything to serve their content and it's distributed so it's far more resilient to network outages. It shouldn't be tough to tell if someone is on a metered connected by looking at their ASN. I'm hoping they do that.
- anilgulecha 10y ago
  I understand their value-prop well enough (saving broadcasters CDN $$). I just find it shitty that their bottom-line is based off of the end-user's bandwidth without their opt-in consent. The only way to tackle this is public denunciation of their model, hand in hand with browser based blocks -- either easylist/uBlock, or Chrome/Firefox/et-al modifying the browser protocols/UX to disallow this leeching without the user's knowledge.
huancle 10y ago
At Peer5, our customers are the broadcasters who operate streaming services throughout the world. The users are theirs, not ours, and it is up to the broadcasters to decide how they want to message / roll-out p2p services. Some choose to opt people in by default and allow them to opt out. Others choose the opposite approach. Our job is to give our customers the tools they need to create and enforce whatever business rules they feel are appropriate. This includes looking at ASN numbers to identify ISPs that operate metered services and turning off upstream sharing for such users. No one is forced to participate in a Peer5 mesh network. And the value proposition is most definitely better streaming, especially for the biggest / most popular streams as these benefit the most from a p2p solution. We have plenty of data from users all over the world to support this.

adamnemecek 10y ago

> with the worldwide black hair care market estimated at $500 billion a year Did they mean million? No way it's billion?

vuyani 10y ago
And whats so unbelievable about this stat?
- prawn 10y ago
  Seems high to me too. Even accounting for it being an expensive and complicated service, what would hairdressers in Africa really be charging that wouldn't cause the global average spend to drop? It's saying that half a billion people are spending $1000/year each. I wonder if they've extrapolated from an optimistic figure?
- nandemo 10y ago
  According to this [0] the sum of black population, plus australoid (for the sake of the argument, let's say they will be part of the target audience regardless of how they self-identify ethnically) and mixed caucasian+black, caucasian+australoid etc is about 27% of world population. Let's round that up to 30%. Also, let's round up the world population estimate to 7 billion, and assume men are part of the target audience too. So total target audience is about 2.1 billion. Which is probably a huge overestimate but it doesn't matter... A U$500 billion market then means the average person spends about U$240 per year on hair care. Which is ridiculously high. [0] https://www.quora.com/Can-anyone-break-down-the-racial-demographics-of-the-human-race-population-by-percentage https://www.quora.com/Can-anyone-break-down-the-racial-demog...
  - neilk 10y ago
    $20/month? That wouldn't be enough even for most white women. Black women's hair appointments are more expensive; many hair salons charge a premium. Plus they use a lot of products and elixirs to change the nature of their hair. Plus, many of them wear a wig-like accessory, often of real human hair, every single day. The process of 'weaving' that into their natural hair can cost hundreds or even thousands, at the high end. Source: black friend in college wrote an essay about this for a journal I was editing at the time, plus, common knowledge. There are some interesting cultural questions about how in North American society, natural black hair is deemed unacceptable, and this has generally been internalized by black women. If you choose to just be natural (as my friend did) you get a lot of flak from other black women. I don't know if you can get this to work out to $500B; other industry numbers I could find are like $10B, which would be about $50/month for every black woman in the USA.

justinzollars 10y ago

I will get down voted for this but its how I feel. I have not been excited for an app or a new website in a very long time. I think we are in a rut. None of these ideas sound very interesting or exciting to me.

lurkervizzle 10y ago
I think this is more a result of the increase in acceptance of entrepreneurship as a career option. Adding to the list of predictors of a tech correction, when you have a bunch of investment bankers and management consultants coming into consulting, you know you've peaked. I have to wonder, what's the catchet of YCombinator when you have so many new startups being churned out every quarter? YC is always going to be fine - they get their 7%. They're simply increasing the bandwidth and they'll get a few hits, but we should be prepared for the average quality of YC start-ups to fall with volume.
WesternStar 10y ago
Ehh they aren't super interesting but there are good businesses in there. Out of the ones I saw from both days AON3D, InnaMed Vinsight, Cowlar, MarketFox, Trade, BulkMRO, Hogaru and SuprDaily all seem to have good market niches and achievable goals.
cheriot 10y ago
Most businesses are boring. I'm actually a fan of how so many of these companies are taking proven tech to industries that operate like it's 2005 or even 1995. That's what it will take for tech to make the world more efficient and productive.

1ba9115454 10y ago

"Wright Electric hired a team that had been previously funded by NASA to investigate the potential for electric planes, which its co-founder Jeff Engler says puts the startup years ahead of the competition." Airbus already have an electric prop engine fully tested as well as experience building prop planes with traditional fuel engines. So to say Wright is years ahead is misleading.

lurkervizzle 10y ago

Regarding "Niles – Conversational wiki for business" The article says: "It’s a $27 b market and claims 700,000 teams signed up in one week." I believe this is a typo - they actually have 700 teams that signed up.

frik 10y ago

* Regarding "Pied Piper", funny that some refer to it * "massively democratizes" is the new "disrupt"

frik 10y ago
Who coined the "democratize" and "disrupt" words? (the usage/meaning of the words in the startup scene) (maybe the first usage is well know, like "Web 2.0")
- nandemo 10y ago
  The term "disruptive innovation" was coined by Christensen in his book "The Innovator's Dilemma". Then it was shortened to "disruption" and its meaning was quickly diluted by indiscriminate usage by the press and blogs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

dayaz36 10y ago

Did YC just fund a debt collection agency?...

the-dude 10y ago
And a hedgefund.

Rainymood 10y ago

First off, I absolutely LOVE these write-ups. That being said I chuckled at this one: >Tetra – Automatic notes for business meetings >A lot of meeting notes are taken in Evernote but Tetra takes call notes for you by automatically dialing you to merge into the call and then sending you a fully searchable record of the entire conversation. It comes in auto speech only or human edited using a fast transcription feature for 50 cents a minute from humans. There may be some ethical challenges around recording others and each person using the service will need to inform those on the call they are being recorded but with two billion hours of conference calls a year, Tetra plans to take on that market using it’s AI and data. The startup launched on Product Hunt a week ago and now has two paid monthly users. >The startup launched on Product Hunt a week ago and now has two paid monthly users. >two paid monthly users. Yes, two. But still, any traction is better than no traction! I love a lot of the ideas but am sceptical about most of them. Good luck to each company!

jgoldsmith 10y ago
thanks! try us out https://asktetra.com https://asktetra.com and maybe we'll get to 3 :)
- martalist 10y ago
  Your answer made me chuckle in a good way - great way to turn a potential negative into something funny and positive! I'm sure I'm not the only one checking out your site because of this.
  - nojvek 10y ago
    When Dropbox first came out, I remember a similar Comment. "Why would anyone use this when you have rsync". They don't have any paying customer. Speech -> annotated searchable text is a humongous market. I really hope you guys and gals kill it.
GFischer 10y ago
My wife has some hearing problems and pays for an automatic speech to text in her voice messages. There are some hilarious errors but it's surprisingly readable. So it's necessary for some people. I definitely wouldn't mind such a service in our meetings provider, but the company currently uses either Skype or Go2Meeting (EDIT: I see it can dial in. I might try it :) ). I worry about confidentiality as well (the CSO would have my hide if some of the future projects are leaked due to such a service). It's an extra I could provide in my very own startup though :) (we're still struggling with core features so not for version 1).

kriro 10y ago

So I guess pitching anything that's dataviz as "Palantir for X" is a thing now? I need to update my Ys in my Y for X list. Uber for X and Palantir for X are the new hotness it seems.

TuringNYC 10y ago

>> Paragon One – Career coaching from real professionals >> Families spend a fortune on sending their kids to college......Families pay $7500 up front, and the kids get coaching over video chat. Paragon One says 100% of students who completed the program got job or internship offers. Wow, so the for-pay college application coaching is now becoming for-pay jobs&internships "coaching?" I suspect this will be limited coaching and more so selling access. Wouldn't this essentially incentivize insiders to "sell" internship opportunities at prestigious firms? Certainly families paying $7500 up front are going to want results, even if it is a for-show internship at Google reviewing release notes that gets morphed into entry level resume gold. I'll be surprised if companies dont ban this outright (but then, TeamBlind seems to be successful...)

sushid 10y ago
Also, the 100% received an internship offer seems like a disingenuous statistic at best. It's trivial to receive "an internship" if you count scammy, unpaid ones.

kriro 10y ago

The "black hair care market" is one of the curious things I've pondered about since spending some time in Africa. I think they are onto something and I think it's one of the markets where you can build a nice lead without really being noticed. I (as a Caucasian man with not exactly a lot of hair) had some very interesting discussions about hair pieces for example. I wish them the best of luck, the capitalist in me is always very happy if these "curious sounding" markets finally get attention :) There's something very satisfying about seeing such a company in a batch with enterprise sales focused companies and an e-plane company.

puranjay 10y ago
I chuckled when I read the "social community for black hair dressers" line. Then I realized this is a pretty massive niche market and these guys are smart for focusing on it
sumedh 10y ago
You should check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Hair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Hair

aestetix 10y ago

Did they actually do anything besides donate money to the ACLU? I didn't see anything on the ACLU's website about it, which is strange given the arrangement YC usually has with companies they "fund." Did anyone from the ACLU go to YC and participate? Is there a "demo day" presenation from the ACLU? I'm very confused.

binaryorganic 10y ago
The ACLU will be part of the winter batch of companies in YC, where it will receive mentorship, a network of powerful connections in tech and a chance to present itself to investors on Demo Day. Y Combinator will also provide some funding, though it won’t take an equity stake in ACLU because it’s a nonprofit. ACLU will not pay to participate." SOURCE: https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/31/ycaclu/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/31/ycaclu/
- aestetix 10y ago
  I've read as much, but it is dangerously vague to me. Here is why. The ACLU has at least publicly stood for decades for a lot of positions that seem to fundamentally go against what some YC companies do. For example, the ACLU is a clear proponent of the Civil Rights Act, which among other things guarantees that hotels must not discriminate when providing lodging to guests. Meanwhile, in recent years there have been several documented cases where AirBNB renters have suddenly run out of vacancies for one rentee, only to be suddenly free again a day later. Given situations like this, I'm not sure what ACLU seems to think they can get out of a YC "mentorship." If this creates a chance for a larger public discussion on issues like this, it could be a good thing, but at the moment I am extremely skeptical.
  - nojvek 10y ago
    There's one thing about some renter on Airbnb being a boofhead and another when governments are being run by boofheads ACLU need to choose their wars and if YC can help them hone their skills so they win more meaningful wars for the masses then that's a good thing.

pavlov 10y ago

How is Vize different from Tableau?

randusr 10y ago
Co-founder here. Vize caters to use cases beyond the sales/marketing/BI ones where Tableau is used. If you have millisecond time-series data, want to run simulations, or need more performance, Vize would be great tool :)
- pavlov 10y ago
  Thanks for the info!

bambax 10y ago

> Voodoo Manufacturing I have been using a French company that seems to do the exact same thing, for low volume and prototyping: sculpteo.com However, for mass production (still low volumes, <10,000) I manufacture in China, and the reason is not only the cost, it's that "manufacturing" is not enough. We need finishing (polishing, printing) and packaging, and those on-demand manufacturing services usually don't provide this, which is a shame.

_pmf_ 10y ago

I'm hoping that something like the product Volt Health produces can one day be used in correcting anterior pelvic tilt.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

davidddavidson 10y ago

What does MDAcne do/solve for the consumer that PocketDerm/Curology isn't doing already?

skin58 10y ago
Hi, David. The success in acne treatment is based on three things. Matching the best anti-acne products to the user specific condition, helping the person with acne commit to her/his treatment and monitoring the skin 24/7 to change/improve the routine. MDacne beats curology on all three. It uses computer vison to assess the skin (actually better than any dermatologist /or curology nurse can do), suggests anti acne products (such as benzoyl peroxide) that are much more effective for acne than curology’s “prescription” products. (Azelaic acid, retinoids) and 3; provides 24/7 skin monitoring with its selfie tracker system. The image analysis, AI based system monitors skin improvement and helps motivate the user to commit to her/his treatment which is key to success (N/A in the curology’s solution).

cjbenedikt 10y ago

Pit.AI It's obvious what they do but what exactly are they offering? Nothing on their website explains.