7 ms·

How We Got Rejected from YC and Moved into the SpeakerCave

86 points by MediaSquirrel 16y ago

byoung2 16y ago
I didn't see a link in the post to http://speakertext.com/ http://speakertext.com/. I checked it out, and it looks like a really useful app! Best of luck to these guys!
- PaulJoslin 16y ago
  At first I was thinking that youtube's recent sub title mod must of been a bit of a hit to their idea, but then I saw the functionality of quoting and sharing hyper linked quotes. That's quite a cool feature and could be handy for stopping 'mis quoting' / 'quoting out of context' being used in many media's.
  - byoung2 16y ago
    And it would eliminate the need to say "skip ahead to 4:25 to hear where he talks about such and such"
- ScotterC 16y ago
  Just you wait for the release of SpeakerText 2.0!
pclark 16y ago
what is the speakercave?
- pixelbath 16y ago
  I'm guessing you'll have to read the follow-up post.
- rjett 16y ago
  I assumed it was their apartment/home base... sort of like the Bat Cave.
- kaelswanson 16y ago
  SpeakerCave is the rawest form of a startup pad. Four dudes, no ac, shirtless half the time, coding like fiends and having a blast!
ndimopoulos 16y ago
Indeed. This is going to be a really useful app especially to those that have disabilities (mainly hearing impairments). Best of luck!
javery 16y ago
I would love to be able to use this for TekPub - being able to have people quote our videos and share it would be awesome marketing.
- MediaSquirrel 16y ago
  We've got a major product overhaul coming soon that will be super-friendly for you. I'll ping you via email.
brianmwang 16y ago
Matt, You're still planning on moving out to Mountain View (based on your Twitter feed), right? When are you planning on doing that?
- MediaSquirrel 16y ago
  We move in 8 Days.
  - siruva07 16y ago
    will we see a post on why you aren't staying in NYC? too expensive? not enough early stage investors?
blueberry 16y ago
Is there a technical reason preventing the big guys (youtube/yahoo /vimeo etc.) from developing this kind of thing? I always thought running voice recognition on user submitted videos would require massive infrastructure. How are you guys planning to solve that? Congrats & best of luck with the rest!
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- MediaSquirrel 16y ago
  We're doing machine-augmented crowdsourcing, not straight voice recognition. It's different, and allows us to provide consistent high quality at low cost. Essentially, we've built a crowdsourcing QA system a la Crowdflower, expect better and more suited to the specific task of video-to-text, and augmented it with speech recognition. It's pretty fucking cool, if you ask me, but also very different from how people have traditionally approached this problem. Also, the current site and product will be completely replaced in 8 days with something MUCH much better. So keep you eyes peeled. -Matt
davi 16y ago
With my alumni discount, I had setup a booth at the Columbia Engineering Job Fair, looking for fresh talent. Good idea. Has anyone else here ever recruited for a startup or a small company at a university job fair? How did it go?
- cyen 16y ago
  I helped recruit for a 20-person startup at my alma mater in the fall, and found: - if your brand isn't immediately recognizable as a tech startup, signs like "Seeking CS / Math majors" are tacky but help immensely with capturing the interest of students who are browsing and want to know they won't be sucked into talking to a company totally outside their interests - we spent much more time pitching our startup and answering questions about "what we do" than I imagine the average recruiter at a larger company has to do - because the conversation almost always starts with them asking about us, if you're interested, you have to remember to turn the conversation on them to find out more, instead of just being left with a resume - (more general) knowing which classes are good / hard / produce interesting projects helps a lot in evaluating what a particular candidate has done, and whether it matches with your company's needs.
tomjen3 16y ago
>“Your team hasn’t know each other long enough,” he told us––or something like that. But they’d be happy to talk to us again, later, in the fall, assuming we hadn’t self-destructed already. Oh man had that been me, I would properly double my efforts to get the startup to be the next facebook, just to mail PG and tell him he missed the boat...
- neurotech1 16y ago
  Even though I was also rejected by YC without an interview - Not "ready" or "prepared", and no co-founder, were the likely reasons, I can accept being rejected. I still believe that PG's opinion counts for a lot. I doubt many seed programs have partners that loose sleep over missed opportunities.
  - thaumaturgy 16y ago
    I think it's easy for a lot of people to forget that VC and seed-stage investors aren't in business to help you; they're in business primarily to help themselves, in the form of sexy portfolio companies, talent acquisitions, and investments that pay back later. The relationship is at best symbiotic, so as long as they're healthy, I'm certain that they don't lose any sleep at all over the "opportunities" that they pass up.
    - zackattack 16y ago
      I think pg really regrets not funding smanek. :)
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
etagwerker 16y ago
What a great product! Congratulations, guys! This product makes all of the videos out there indexable by its entire audio content. You could start crawling, processing videos and indexing them right? Is that in your roadmap? To become one of the best video search tools out there?
- kaelswanson 16y ago
  Hi, thanks so much! There are so many areas we want to expand into, for now our goal is to provide video publishers with the ability to SEO their videos via transcripts and quotelinks. All that publishers have to do is put one line of javascript and one line of server side code on their webpages and now they can get their videos put on google's radar. Video search would also be interesting long term.
camwest 16y ago
Offtopic: I'd like to see an API for SpeakerText where I can point to my own video asset on an Amazon S3 bucket along with an API endpoint that I specify and you would send me a POST with the transcribed text whenever it's finished processing. I'd purchase that service tomorrow.
- MediaSquirrel 16y ago
  email us and let's talk: info at Speakertext.com
- gommm 16y ago
  That'd be very useful for me too...
dmoney 16y ago
tl;dr: SpeakerText is their startup, the SpeakerCave is their house or apartment, and no mention is made of it being cave-shaped or made of speakers (bummer).

86 points by MediaSquirrel 16y ago

I didn't see a link in the post to http://speakertext.com/ http://speakertext.com/. I checked it out, and it looks like a really useful app! Best of luck to these guys!

PaulJoslin 16y ago
At first I was thinking that youtube's recent sub title mod must of been a bit of a hit to their idea, but then I saw the functionality of quoting and sharing hyper linked quotes. That's quite a cool feature and could be handy for stopping 'mis quoting' / 'quoting out of context' being used in many media's.
- byoung2 16y ago
  And it would eliminate the need to say "skip ahead to 4:25 to hear where he talks about such and such"
ScotterC 16y ago
Just you wait for the release of SpeakerText 2.0!

pclark 16y ago

what is the speakercave?

pixelbath 16y ago
I'm guessing you'll have to read the follow-up post.
rjett 16y ago
I assumed it was their apartment/home base... sort of like the Bat Cave.
kaelswanson 16y ago
SpeakerCave is the rawest form of a startup pad. Four dudes, no ac, shirtless half the time, coding like fiends and having a blast!

ndimopoulos 16y ago

Indeed. This is going to be a really useful app especially to those that have disabilities (mainly hearing impairments). Best of luck!

javery 16y ago

I would love to be able to use this for TekPub - being able to have people quote our videos and share it would be awesome marketing.

MediaSquirrel 16y ago
We've got a major product overhaul coming soon that will be super-friendly for you. I'll ping you via email.

brianmwang 16y ago

Matt, You're still planning on moving out to Mountain View (based on your Twitter feed), right? When are you planning on doing that?

MediaSquirrel 16y ago
We move in 8 Days.
- siruva07 16y ago
  will we see a post on why you aren't staying in NYC? too expensive? not enough early stage investors?

blueberry 16y ago

Is there a technical reason preventing the big guys (youtube/yahoo /vimeo etc.) from developing this kind of thing? I always thought running voice recognition on user submitted videos would require massive infrastructure. How are you guys planning to solve that? Congrats & best of luck with the rest!

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
MediaSquirrel 16y ago
We're doing machine-augmented crowdsourcing, not straight voice recognition. It's different, and allows us to provide consistent high quality at low cost. Essentially, we've built a crowdsourcing QA system a la Crowdflower, expect better and more suited to the specific task of video-to-text, and augmented it with speech recognition. It's pretty fucking cool, if you ask me, but also very different from how people have traditionally approached this problem. Also, the current site and product will be completely replaced in 8 days with something MUCH much better. So keep you eyes peeled. -Matt

davi 16y ago

With my alumni discount, I had setup a booth at the Columbia Engineering Job Fair, looking for fresh talent. Good idea. Has anyone else here ever recruited for a startup or a small company at a university job fair? How did it go?

cyen 16y ago
I helped recruit for a 20-person startup at my alma mater in the fall, and found: - if your brand isn't immediately recognizable as a tech startup, signs like "Seeking CS / Math majors" are tacky but help immensely with capturing the interest of students who are browsing and want to know they won't be sucked into talking to a company totally outside their interests - we spent much more time pitching our startup and answering questions about "what we do" than I imagine the average recruiter at a larger company has to do - because the conversation almost always starts with them asking about us, if you're interested, you have to remember to turn the conversation on them to find out more, instead of just being left with a resume - (more general) knowing which classes are good / hard / produce interesting projects helps a lot in evaluating what a particular candidate has done, and whether it matches with your company's needs.

tomjen3 16y ago

>“Your team hasn’t know each other long enough,” he told us––or something like that. But they’d be happy to talk to us again, later, in the fall, assuming we hadn’t self-destructed already. Oh man had that been me, I would properly double my efforts to get the startup to be the next facebook, just to mail PG and tell him he missed the boat...

neurotech1 16y ago
Even though I was also rejected by YC without an interview - Not "ready" or "prepared", and no co-founder, were the likely reasons, I can accept being rejected. I still believe that PG's opinion counts for a lot. I doubt many seed programs have partners that loose sleep over missed opportunities.
- thaumaturgy 16y ago
  I think it's easy for a lot of people to forget that VC and seed-stage investors aren't in business to help you; they're in business primarily to help themselves, in the form of sexy portfolio companies, talent acquisitions, and investments that pay back later. The relationship is at best symbiotic, so as long as they're healthy, I'm certain that they don't lose any sleep at all over the "opportunities" that they pass up.
  - zackattack 16y ago
    I think pg really regrets not funding smanek. :)

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

etagwerker 16y ago

What a great product! Congratulations, guys! This product makes all of the videos out there indexable by its entire audio content. You could start crawling, processing videos and indexing them right? Is that in your roadmap? To become one of the best video search tools out there?

kaelswanson 16y ago
Hi, thanks so much! There are so many areas we want to expand into, for now our goal is to provide video publishers with the ability to SEO their videos via transcripts and quotelinks. All that publishers have to do is put one line of javascript and one line of server side code on their webpages and now they can get their videos put on google's radar. Video search would also be interesting long term.

camwest 16y ago

Offtopic: I'd like to see an API for SpeakerText where I can point to my own video asset on an Amazon S3 bucket along with an API endpoint that I specify and you would send me a POST with the transcribed text whenever it's finished processing. I'd purchase that service tomorrow.

MediaSquirrel 16y ago
email us and let's talk: info at Speakertext.com
gommm 16y ago
That'd be very useful for me too...

dmoney 16y ago

tl;dr: SpeakerText is their startup, the SpeakerCave is their house or apartment, and no mention is made of it being cave-shaped or made of speakers (bummer).