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Companies from the YC Summer 2018 Batch

123 points by Sreyanth 8y ago

ArtWomb 8y ago
Congrats! These all look really great ;) Biocontainment solutions (Synvivia) that prevent environmental contamination of genetically modified organisms looks to be a very high demand market.
- joering2 8y ago
  Say what??
lefstathiou 8y ago
Nice batch. I think the concept federacy is tackling has huge potential. We lose a lot of sleep thinking about security and I like the idea of being able to tap a hive mind to help us plug security gaps our team is unaware of (and we would pay a lot for it).
- wsul 8y ago
  Appreciate the kind words! Reaching out now -- would love to get you into our beta and work from any of your feedback. Finsight seems like a perfect use case and we're excited to dig in.
phkahler 8y ago
Personalize testimonials to the person reading them? Did I read that correctly? Fake reviews taylored to the reader?
- jadk157 8y ago
  They're not doing fake reviews. They're choosing which user reviews to show depending on the audience (e.g if the person visiting the website is from a company in the hotel industry, the website might show testimonials from other hotel companies like Hilton as opposed to software startups)
  - dahdum 8y ago
    It’s going to be a bit more difficult to pull it off with the recent crack down on privacy and 3rd party cookies. I wonder if they’ll be using data brokers or focusing only one first party data.
  - phkahler 8y ago
    Ok, so not changing them. Hopefully ordering and not actually filtering.
- reikonomusha 8y ago
  I take it as: “See the reviews which will skew your perception positively.” Doesn’t sound enticing as a consumer. I just want the facts.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - ethbro 8y ago
    Devil's advocate. A ML service offering being viewed by two users -- an engineer and an executive. Even with 100% truthful reviews, they're interested in different things and need very different language.
- tozeur 8y ago
  Such a minimal marginal improvement on human lives... kinda disappointed with this company.
chiefofgxbxl 8y ago
Cool batch, particularly LemonBox which provides personalized vitamin packs to buyers in China. There's a huge user base right there, and I imagine the U.S. market is largely saturated / competitive already. I must respectfully express my concern over: "Grabb-it Inc. turns rideshare cars into digital billboards." There's probably a market for it as online advertisers face an uncertain future with possible regulation, and at least scrutiny, of social media companies, but is this really the future we want to build? Where the only goal of some of these companies is to unrelentingly cover every square inch of the world with ads? Surely there are lawsuits waiting to happen when drivers, distracted from these eye-catching ads on all the cars around them, kill people. I am worried that our public spaces are turning increasingly hostile to our citizens. Won't this trend continue to make the public space more unpalatable?
- greglindahl 8y ago
  All we need is a YC-backed AR startup that removes ads from your personal visual space. Although it might be difficult to get that tech safe enough to be used while driving.
  - anoncoward111 8y ago
    hahahahahahah.... classic mafia extortion techniques. Create a problem, then demand people pay you to remove it.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  Totally agree. Coming up with an idea to serve even more ads is not something to be proud of. Take your money and develop some new technology instead.
  - goatherders 8y ago
    Why? This hits at the heart of startup porn. It's about money. It's only about money. It's only ever been about money. This is a good way to make money so it exists. I'm happy for startups that don't hide behind their capitalist mission.
reikonomusha 8y ago
CSPA [1] sounded interesting, and is something similar to what I’ve been wanting to do, but after looking at the sample exam, I was pretty disappointed. I thought it would be about computer science and engineering fundamentals. It has some of that (e.g., representation of integers, memory access speeds, etc.) but I also noticed it’s full of completely inessential things, like escaping XHTML, identifying valid JSON payloads in HTTP, and alignment rules in CSS. There was heaps of JavaScript, HTML, CSS, SQL, and drawn out shell exercises. To be clear, I’m not claiming that’s all useless knowledge. It’s not! But, as a hiring manager, I’d rather look for strong critical thinking skills and strong foundational knowledge. Remembering that keys in JSON must be quoted strings is not at all a demonstration of that. The exam seems to be more of a “well rounded full-stack engineer” rather than what they suggest. [1] https://cspa.io/ https://cspa.io/
- cspa 8y ago
  Great feedback -- thanks! We're constantly improving the CSPA questions, and our latest iteration has quite a few changes. Some of the examples you mentioned assess how detail-oriented the candidates are. We're interested in how this data correlates with how bug-prone someone is. That said, we trimmed some of those down in our latest version and replaced it with more substantial questions. - james
- codingdave 8y ago
  I would hope that the scoring differentiates between core CS knowledge and skills vs. details and trivia of web development, as well as any other categories of questions. That way, the exam is useful for multiple hiring philosophies, and the hiring manager can decide how much they care about specific types of questions. After all, different roles at different companies have different needs, and I'd hate to have a biased scoring algorithm take those decisions away from a hiring process.
  - cspa 8y ago
    Excellent points -- this is something we discuss extensively. After talking with so many employers, we found that each of them look for something different. Adaptive scoring algorithms and ways to let employers create custom projections of our multidimensional data is something we're thinking about. If you have ideas on how to build this, I'd love to hear them! james@cspa.io
vyrotek 8y ago
I like the idea of Grabb-It but it also does seem like it would very distracting to have those ads playing all around me on the road.
Jemaclus 8y ago
The CSPA thing is interesting to me because the founder/CEO was formerly the head of engineering at Crunchyroll, and interviewing at Crunchyroll was one of the worst interviewing experiences I've ever had. Let's just say I'm skeptical. I hope it works out, but... MacD looks interesting... but I'm kinda surprised YC would invest. A Mac n Cheese company? Very strange. I'm very excited about the biotech space, so looking forward to seeing how that shakes out.
- krackers 8y ago
  >Interviewing at Crunchyroll was one of the worst interviewing experiences I've ever had Can you elaborate?
  - Jemaclus 8y ago
    I was a Senior Software Engineer at the time. I thought the coding challenge was fun. They basically give you a URL, and the URL contains a list of numbers, which you append to the URL. Visiting each URL+number returns either a list of other numbers (which you keep traversing), a FAIL message (dead-end, of which there are many), or a SUCCESS message (only one). You task is to traverse the entire tree, determine how many dead-ends there are, which number is the successful end, and which path is the shortest path from your starting node to the success node. It was pretty fun, and the solution wound up being basically a breadth-first search or a depth-first search (pros and cons for each). (You can do the challenge here, if you want: http://www.crunchyroll.com/tech-challenge/roaming-math/yourname@email-domain.com http://www.crunchyroll.com/tech-challenge/roaming-math/yourn...) I submitted my answer and got set up with a phone call. I don't remember anyone's names, but this guy was touted as a PhD and a genius, so I was excited to talk to him. Over the phone, he gave me another challenge: "Imagine you're Photoshop, and someone selects a pixel with the Fill tool. How do you know which pixels to fill?" As you can imagine, this turned out to be another breadth-/depth-first search problem. You look at the surrounding pixels, decide whether they're the same color or not, and then proceed to the next level and repeat. I was offered an on-site, which I accepted. I arrived and sat in the lobby. They have a giant big-screen TV that was showing anime. Makes sense, since CrunchyRoll is an anime streaming service. The current show had a woman eating in a restaurant with some men. I couldn't understand the words, but it was clear that she was having orgasms while eating, and the men were watching. At the time it was mildly amusing, but in retrospect, it was quite inappropriate. Eventually, I was shown to a room with a whiteboard. The first person (an engineer) comes in, says "Hi, I'm Jack. So you have M trains and N stations..." and starts writing on the board. No idea who this guy is or why he's talking to me. I, being nervous, tried to follow along. His question was ultimately another search problem. Due to poor time management, I didn't have time for questions. He nodded and walked out to get the next person. Second engineer comes in. "Hi, I'm Brad. You have M dogs and N cats..." and jumped right into his problem. No context, no anything. Yet another search problem. At the end, there was no time for questions. Third guy comes in, same thing. Fourth guy comes in, he actually introduces himself. He's the head of Product (or at least some Product Manager). He asks me a couple of questions, then gives me a coding challenge on the whiteboard. Another search problem. Fifth guy comes in, the PhD guy comes in, says "Hi, I'm Kevin. You have..." and launches into yet another search problem (again!). Having done six of them by this point, I breezed through it and finally had time for one question. I said, "You guys must do search problems a lot here at CrunchyRoll." He cocks his head to the side, looks at me like I'm crazy, and says, "No, never." The sixth guy comes in and gives me something different! "You have a box and a bunch of random objects. What's the most efficient way to pack it?" which, of course, is the Knapsack Problem, which I believe has not been fully solved. But I do my best. At this point, I'm over it. I know CrunchyRoll does not fill boxes. I know they don't do any of the things they're quizzing me on. I don't know anything about the business other than what I've read online. I don't know what any of these people do. I haven't been given any context about anything, and when I did manage to ask some questions, I got nonsensical answers. I don't know which team I'd be working on or what role I'd take over. I don't know which of these alleged geniuses would be my coworkers (or god forbid, my boss). I don't know what problems CrunchyRoll's engineering team is trying to solve. I don't know their tech stack, their culture, or their company strategy. I was not offered a position, but even if I had been, I would have turned it down. It was pretty bad across the board. Ironically, the next company I worked for did some work on behalf of CrunchyRoll in the data engineering space. Thought that was funny. I had a similar experience at Zenefits the next day, but halfway through the interview I declined to proceed further once I realized it was the same thing. On the positive side, I've interviewed with a dozen other companies in the intervening years, and most of them have been fairly positive.
jboggan 8y ago
Has anyone used Optic yet? I'm not a Javascript developer but I'm interested in the concept.
- appdrag 8y ago
  It's seems very interesting, but to be honest after watching the demo video, most of the thing "automated" (I don't see any AI here) are related to poor practices... Some other features seems interesting, let's see how the product evolve.
  - addcn 8y ago
    Hey, founder here, thanks for checking us out. The demo video is a couple months old and since then we've gotten much closer to figuring out the best use cases after talking to users. Do you have any suggestions on the use cases you'd like to see the 'interesting features' put towards? This is definitely the kind of product that takes several iterations to get right so thank you for following our journey.
    - jaxn 8y ago
      Not the person you are replying to, but I have a use case that I think optic would be good for. I'd like to have a two-way sync between business logic code and a flow chart for documentation. Something like the slack push notifications decision: https://m.imgur.com/gallery/0p5bV https://m.imgur.com/gallery/0p5bV
shawn 8y ago
For example, Mutiny can dynamically change a website’s customer testimonials to match the visitor’s industry. Clever idea!
sattoshi 8y ago
Cutting edge biotech and a mac n cheese company in the same list. Wow.
- halfjoking 8y ago
  If only they combined their tech... they could become more powerful than anyone could possibly imagine.
  - jxub 8y ago
    I'm sure you're only half joking... The potential synergy might be a meat idea for a eco-friendly lab-grown patty.
UncleEntity 8y ago
> Synvivia develops biomolecular ON-OFF switches to make synthetic biology safe for use outside of the laboratory. Yep...then the on-off switch jumps species and the only way to survive is to consume a particular (patent pending) brand of parsnip which can't be grown from seed. Pretty much the only place I could reasonably be accused of being a luddite is in releasing GM organisms into the wild.
- pazimzadeh 8y ago
  I definitely agree about the wild. But what about designing gut bacteria that target parasites in your poop? Amongst many other possibilities. You can use oxygen, temperature, and light-sensitive gene promoters and toxin-antitoxin plasmids to make ON-OFF switches that would hobble bacterial replication in the wild. It's a tough problem, and my guess is you'd want to use several of these switches together. There's no guarantee that stressed bacteria will 'run' your programs. And you're right that the gene could move horizontally, so you'd have to be very clever with your kill switches, and keep up with evolution. Apart from the last resort of antibiotics, you can also selectively deplete particular bacteria from your poop using adhesion inhibitors such as mannosides and galactosides (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5654549/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5654549/ - research from my lab).
abhisuri97 8y ago
I found CSPA to be an interesting proposal. I'm currently studying CS and Biology and found that the comparison of the exam to the "SAT" of computer science is a bit of a misnomer. The SAT requires minimal prior knowledge to take (albeit if you want to score well, you end up needing to study for it through test prep books etc). I think perhaps it may be more likened to an MCAT equivalent (or any professional school exam equivalent) because of the need to know about certain subject fields. Someone also brought up a point regarding the validity of testing for skills in web development if test takers won't end up in those fields anyway. However, when looking at similar exams (e.g. MCAT), you can make the argument that the majority of doctors won't use Organic Chemistry or won't need to know about the minutiae of Psychology & Sociology to be successful. The MCAT becomes a successful discriminator of good vs bad test takers because of the amount of work and critical thinking skills that is needed to cover the litany of subjects tested. Similarly, the CSPA could follow a similar pattern as the MCAT by testing a range of subjects as a means of measuring one's ability to learn a large sample of topics. The only thing I can really think of that CSPA can improve upon is providing more preparatory materials. Additionally, it'd be useful to see how people end up performing on the exam and if there is an actual "Bell Curve" like distribution of scores that results.
- cspa 8y ago
  Great feedback! We do have a distribution of scores for our latest exam session here: https://medium.com/@cspa_exam/july-2018-cspa-results-509ace9dd9bb https://medium.com/@cspa_exam/july-2018-cspa-results-509ace9...
AriaMinaei 8y ago
Optic [0] caught my eye. They seem to have made possible a new kind of abstraction in code. Something that's different from both functions and macros. It's a kind of abstraction that can be arbitrarily customized at each call site, yet retain its identity across all of them. Example: foo = do_a() bar = do_b(foo) Example 2: foo = do_a() bar = do_z(foo) baz = do_b(bar) Example 3: foo = do_a() bar = foo + 10 baz = do_b(bar) The three examples have strong similarity in their first and last statements. There is a pattern there, but that pattern cannot be abstracted into a single macro or a function. So this pattern does exist, and is recognizable to the human eye, but the language does not allow one to express it. What Optic seems to do is to recognize the pattern, create a single model out of it, and allow you to re-use that pattern elsewhere, or even transform it into new ones and re-use those new patterns elsewhere. Again, this would be a new kind of abstraction. One whose leaks are easier to fix. You can have your cake and eat it too! [0] https://useoptic.com https://useoptic.com
- addcn 8y ago
  Hey -- thanks for checking us out! You're definitely understanding the premise of our parser. It evaluates a regex-like set of rules on an AST tree to match different forms of code. These rules can be recursive as you can see in the first example of our home page [0]. In that example Optic matches an express js route and the headers, parameters and responses inside it. The result is a nice json object with shape {method, url, parameters: [], headers: [], responses" []}. OOTB the JS interpreter couldn't do this because it doesn't encounter the calls to req.query.param_name until that code runs. PG wrote about building the language/abstraction to fit your problem [1]. In an ideal world we all would do this, but in practice there's always a gap between our program and the abstraction we describe it in. Today that gap is only bridged by a human understanding the code. Until now...Optic is allowing us to programmatically deal with these implicit abstractions. We believe most of the dev tools created over the next decade will be built on top of your code in a way that allows them to collaborate with real developers. To realize this world we need a programatic interface to read, generate and mutate code so we created Optic. [0] https://useoptic.com https://useoptic.com [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/progbot.html http://www.paulgraham.com/progbot.html
Fomite 8y ago
"Customers pick a cheese sauce, a pasta base, add unlimited toppings like roasted broccoli and mushrooms, and top it off with anything from truffle oil to Hot Cheetos." - So basically Noodles and Co.
Fomite 8y ago
The concept of HappiLabs calls to me, and while spendy for a new lab, is definitely less than a qualified lab manager would be. Sadly, really only useful for wet labs.
- mmt 8y ago
  > Sadly, really only useful for wet labs. I'm not an insider on the terminology, but it seems a "wet lab" is what a lay person, like myself, thinks of when we hear "a lab" (in the physical sciences context). What's the "dry" (or is the term of art different?) lab situation you wish it would be useful for? There could be a different startup opportunity, if it's scalably computer-heavy [1]. I'm aware of computer-controlled instruments for wet labs being a very underserved market (and presumably with high margins for the computer portion), but that seems like a consulting/services/labor-intensive business. [1] Around HN, that usually means software, but my background is Ops, so I actually consider commodity hardware quite scalable, too, despite the hardware-is-a-nightmare-we-have-to-do-cloud mythology.
  - Fomite 8y ago
    Yeah, "wet lab" is what most people thing of as a "lab". Some fields (lots of the biology and biology-adjacent ones) use "lab" as a logical unit of organization. So Professor So-and-So and their graduate students, postdocs, etc. is "The So-and-So Lab". "Wet lab" is useful to distinguish people with actual labs vs. my lab, which is just a bunch of people with laptops. The situation I'm dreaming of, is, for example, it not being my problem when a grad student is having trouble getting software installed on the server. That would be something I'd love a lab manager or dedicated programmer to deal with, but for a small lab, I don't have nearly that level of funding.
    - mmt 8y ago
      > my lab, which is just a bunch of people with laptops. OK, so it's something akin to Wikipedia's description of "dry lab". > The situation I'm dreaming of, is, for example, it not being my problem when a grad student is having trouble getting software installed on the server. That would be something I'd love a lab manager or dedicated programmer to deal with This sounds very much like IT/Helpdesk support, of the kind a programmer or a lab manager typically wouldn't want (and might not be qualified) to deal with, either. Is there something unique to your lab environment that you couldn't use some kind of shared/general IT helpdesk service, perhaps focused on scientific software users? If not, there may well be an unmet need that a startup could fill, especially if everyone in each lab needs identical support and they can combine it with some kind of cloud-based service with basics pre-installed. However, if you're looking for unlimited, individualized user support for a limited, flat fee, that's not sustainable. > I don't have nearly that level of funding For a service provider, the question then becomes, do you have enough funding for the amount of service you'd require (plus the provider's overhead/profit), even if it's not nearly enough for a full-time person (which can be remarkably expensive in popular tech hubs)? Reasonable IT support to user ratios are somewhere in the 1:20-1:100 range, which is the same range (for a 3-person lab) as HappiLab's pricing.
l33tbro 8y ago
I think companies like Grabb-It Labs only make the world more hellish. I really don't understand why you would start a company like this. On my commute each day they've started video advertising on my local bus and also in the subway. It just really SUCKS to be bombarded with more shitty ads for banks and big box stores. I'm not trying to scold the founders. It just confounds me that people would start companies like this when there's clearly no net value to social capital.
- briandear 8y ago
  It isn’t that someone starts this sort of company, it’s that respected people still fund them. Do we actually need more advertising companies?
JustARandomGuy 8y ago
MAC'D sounds like an interesting idea. If some of the options were healthy (perhaps you could pair mac'n'cheese with tomato soup) I could definitely see myself eating here. Open up in Chicago please!
person_of_color 8y ago
Good luck to all. But for those who want to join Rocket Ship companies any unicorns here?
syntaxing 8y ago
Saddens me that there are not many mechanical hardware companies from any YC year/season and this year is no exception.
- starky 8y ago
  Yeah, it is always disappointing that there aren't more startups around doing hardware. I think a large portion of that is that hardware is quite expensive to develop and requires a lot of space. From the YC perspective it doesn't really work with the 3 month rapid iteration schedule, that is barely enough time to get tooled prototypes.
- mmt 8y ago
  Does anyone know how many apply (or have applied historically)?
- boxcardavin 8y ago
  I interviewed, I've talked to several other robotics companies that interviewed for S18. Absolutely dumbfounded that none of them made it, some of these in the batch seem like they could never be worth $10b.
  - syntaxing 8y ago
    Do you know of any open opportunities for Mechanical Engineers on the East Coast at these robotics company?
    - boxcardavin 8y ago
      Sorry no, I'd have to dig up my notes from the interview and I'm slammed working on my startup. You don't wanna move to the west coast? You like bicycles and robots perchance?
wolframhempel 8y ago
I have to admit that I'm missing the take-over-the-world/crazy-moonshot kind of company among the entries. I appreciate that Y-Combinator is a commercial institution with commercial goals and that personalized daily vitamin packs, better SaaS conversion and AI-powered programming are all sensible iterations on existing themes - but wouldn't there have been space for at least one next-gen Googe/Space X/Hyperloop sort of venture? Surely someone applied that'd fit that bill.
- Findeton 8y ago
  They don't announce all companies from the batch, only the ones that are ready to go "public".
  - eaenki 8y ago
    Looking at previous, recent batches, you'd be hard pressed to find startups that look seemingly undoable/like a joke (which are usually the ones with huge potential). For me, only Boom and a couple biotech companies make the list.
- donkeyd 8y ago
  Didn't Google just start to 'build a better search engine'? It wouldn't have seemed like a crazy moonshot at the start.
countryqt30 8y ago
MAC'D combines the customized font of Dunkin' Donuts (Dunkin Brands) and the name of McDonalds. I see lawsuits coming in from left and right. ;D
jxub 8y ago
The downside to Web MD might be that any charlatan may pretend to be a doctor. When you've got the answers for common diseases from the doctor who gets them from an app, the doctor himself is a repleacable middleman and can be anybody with enough confidence, even if faked.

123 points by Sreyanth 8y ago

Congrats! These all look really great ;) Biocontainment solutions (Synvivia) that prevent environmental contamination of genetically modified organisms looks to be a very high demand market.

joering2 8y ago
Say what??

lefstathiou 8y ago

Nice batch. I think the concept federacy is tackling has huge potential. We lose a lot of sleep thinking about security and I like the idea of being able to tap a hive mind to help us plug security gaps our team is unaware of (and we would pay a lot for it).

wsul 8y ago
Appreciate the kind words! Reaching out now -- would love to get you into our beta and work from any of your feedback. Finsight seems like a perfect use case and we're excited to dig in.

phkahler 8y ago

Personalize testimonials to the person reading them? Did I read that correctly? Fake reviews taylored to the reader?

jadk157 8y ago
They're not doing fake reviews. They're choosing which user reviews to show depending on the audience (e.g if the person visiting the website is from a company in the hotel industry, the website might show testimonials from other hotel companies like Hilton as opposed to software startups)
- dahdum 8y ago
  It’s going to be a bit more difficult to pull it off with the recent crack down on privacy and 3rd party cookies. I wonder if they’ll be using data brokers or focusing only one first party data.
- phkahler 8y ago
  Ok, so not changing them. Hopefully ordering and not actually filtering.
reikonomusha 8y ago
I take it as: “See the reviews which will skew your perception positively.” Doesn’t sound enticing as a consumer. I just want the facts.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ethbro 8y ago
  Devil's advocate. A ML service offering being viewed by two users -- an engineer and an executive. Even with 100% truthful reviews, they're interested in different things and need very different language.
tozeur 8y ago
Such a minimal marginal improvement on human lives... kinda disappointed with this company.

chiefofgxbxl 8y ago

Cool batch, particularly LemonBox which provides personalized vitamin packs to buyers in China. There's a huge user base right there, and I imagine the U.S. market is largely saturated / competitive already. I must respectfully express my concern over: "Grabb-it Inc. turns rideshare cars into digital billboards." There's probably a market for it as online advertisers face an uncertain future with possible regulation, and at least scrutiny, of social media companies, but is this really the future we want to build? Where the only goal of some of these companies is to unrelentingly cover every square inch of the world with ads? Surely there are lawsuits waiting to happen when drivers, distracted from these eye-catching ads on all the cars around them, kill people. I am worried that our public spaces are turning increasingly hostile to our citizens. Won't this trend continue to make the public space more unpalatable?

greglindahl 8y ago
All we need is a YC-backed AR startup that removes ads from your personal visual space. Although it might be difficult to get that tech safe enough to be used while driving.
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  hahahahahahah.... classic mafia extortion techniques. Create a problem, then demand people pay you to remove it.
maxxxxx 8y ago
Totally agree. Coming up with an idea to serve even more ads is not something to be proud of. Take your money and develop some new technology instead.
- goatherders 8y ago
  Why? This hits at the heart of startup porn. It's about money. It's only about money. It's only ever been about money. This is a good way to make money so it exists. I'm happy for startups that don't hide behind their capitalist mission.

reikonomusha 8y ago

CSPA [1] sounded interesting, and is something similar to what I’ve been wanting to do, but after looking at the sample exam, I was pretty disappointed. I thought it would be about computer science and engineering fundamentals. It has some of that (e.g., representation of integers, memory access speeds, etc.) but I also noticed it’s full of completely inessential things, like escaping XHTML, identifying valid JSON payloads in HTTP, and alignment rules in CSS. There was heaps of JavaScript, HTML, CSS, SQL, and drawn out shell exercises. To be clear, I’m not claiming that’s all useless knowledge. It’s not! But, as a hiring manager, I’d rather look for strong critical thinking skills and strong foundational knowledge. Remembering that keys in JSON must be quoted strings is not at all a demonstration of that. The exam seems to be more of a “well rounded full-stack engineer” rather than what they suggest. [1] https://cspa.io/ https://cspa.io/

cspa 8y ago
Great feedback -- thanks! We're constantly improving the CSPA questions, and our latest iteration has quite a few changes. Some of the examples you mentioned assess how detail-oriented the candidates are. We're interested in how this data correlates with how bug-prone someone is. That said, we trimmed some of those down in our latest version and replaced it with more substantial questions. - james
codingdave 8y ago
I would hope that the scoring differentiates between core CS knowledge and skills vs. details and trivia of web development, as well as any other categories of questions. That way, the exam is useful for multiple hiring philosophies, and the hiring manager can decide how much they care about specific types of questions. After all, different roles at different companies have different needs, and I'd hate to have a biased scoring algorithm take those decisions away from a hiring process.
- cspa 8y ago
  Excellent points -- this is something we discuss extensively. After talking with so many employers, we found that each of them look for something different. Adaptive scoring algorithms and ways to let employers create custom projections of our multidimensional data is something we're thinking about. If you have ideas on how to build this, I'd love to hear them! james@cspa.io

vyrotek 8y ago

I like the idea of Grabb-It but it also does seem like it would very distracting to have those ads playing all around me on the road.

Jemaclus 8y ago

The CSPA thing is interesting to me because the founder/CEO was formerly the head of engineering at Crunchyroll, and interviewing at Crunchyroll was one of the worst interviewing experiences I've ever had. Let's just say I'm skeptical. I hope it works out, but... MacD looks interesting... but I'm kinda surprised YC would invest. A Mac n Cheese company? Very strange. I'm very excited about the biotech space, so looking forward to seeing how that shakes out.

krackers 8y ago
>Interviewing at Crunchyroll was one of the worst interviewing experiences I've ever had Can you elaborate?
- Jemaclus 8y ago
  I was a Senior Software Engineer at the time. I thought the coding challenge was fun. They basically give you a URL, and the URL contains a list of numbers, which you append to the URL. Visiting each URL+number returns either a list of other numbers (which you keep traversing), a FAIL message (dead-end, of which there are many), or a SUCCESS message (only one). You task is to traverse the entire tree, determine how many dead-ends there are, which number is the successful end, and which path is the shortest path from your starting node to the success node. It was pretty fun, and the solution wound up being basically a breadth-first search or a depth-first search (pros and cons for each). (You can do the challenge here, if you want: http://www.crunchyroll.com/tech-challenge/roaming-math/yourname@email-domain.com http://www.crunchyroll.com/tech-challenge/roaming-math/yourn...) I submitted my answer and got set up with a phone call. I don't remember anyone's names, but this guy was touted as a PhD and a genius, so I was excited to talk to him. Over the phone, he gave me another challenge: "Imagine you're Photoshop, and someone selects a pixel with the Fill tool. How do you know which pixels to fill?" As you can imagine, this turned out to be another breadth-/depth-first search problem. You look at the surrounding pixels, decide whether they're the same color or not, and then proceed to the next level and repeat. I was offered an on-site, which I accepted. I arrived and sat in the lobby. They have a giant big-screen TV that was showing anime. Makes sense, since CrunchyRoll is an anime streaming service. The current show had a woman eating in a restaurant with some men. I couldn't understand the words, but it was clear that she was having orgasms while eating, and the men were watching. At the time it was mildly amusing, but in retrospect, it was quite inappropriate. Eventually, I was shown to a room with a whiteboard. The first person (an engineer) comes in, says "Hi, I'm Jack. So you have M trains and N stations..." and starts writing on the board. No idea who this guy is or why he's talking to me. I, being nervous, tried to follow along. His question was ultimately another search problem. Due to poor time management, I didn't have time for questions. He nodded and walked out to get the next person. Second engineer comes in. "Hi, I'm Brad. You have M dogs and N cats..." and jumped right into his problem. No context, no anything. Yet another search problem. At the end, there was no time for questions. Third guy comes in, same thing. Fourth guy comes in, he actually introduces himself. He's the head of Product (or at least some Product Manager). He asks me a couple of questions, then gives me a coding challenge on the whiteboard. Another search problem. Fifth guy comes in, the PhD guy comes in, says "Hi, I'm Kevin. You have..." and launches into yet another search problem (again!). Having done six of them by this point, I breezed through it and finally had time for one question. I said, "You guys must do search problems a lot here at CrunchyRoll." He cocks his head to the side, looks at me like I'm crazy, and says, "No, never." The sixth guy comes in and gives me something different! "You have a box and a bunch of random objects. What's the most efficient way to pack it?" which, of course, is the Knapsack Problem, which I believe has not been fully solved. But I do my best. At this point, I'm over it. I know CrunchyRoll does not fill boxes. I know they don't do any of the things they're quizzing me on. I don't know anything about the business other than what I've read online. I don't know what any of these people do. I haven't been given any context about anything, and when I did manage to ask some questions, I got nonsensical answers. I don't know which team I'd be working on or what role I'd take over. I don't know which of these alleged geniuses would be my coworkers (or god forbid, my boss). I don't know what problems CrunchyRoll's engineering team is trying to solve. I don't know their tech stack, their culture, or their company strategy. I was not offered a position, but even if I had been, I would have turned it down. It was pretty bad across the board. Ironically, the next company I worked for did some work on behalf of CrunchyRoll in the data engineering space. Thought that was funny. I had a similar experience at Zenefits the next day, but halfway through the interview I declined to proceed further once I realized it was the same thing. On the positive side, I've interviewed with a dozen other companies in the intervening years, and most of them have been fairly positive.

jboggan 8y ago

Has anyone used Optic yet? I'm not a Javascript developer but I'm interested in the concept.

appdrag 8y ago
It's seems very interesting, but to be honest after watching the demo video, most of the thing "automated" (I don't see any AI here) are related to poor practices... Some other features seems interesting, let's see how the product evolve.
- addcn 8y ago
  Hey, founder here, thanks for checking us out. The demo video is a couple months old and since then we've gotten much closer to figuring out the best use cases after talking to users. Do you have any suggestions on the use cases you'd like to see the 'interesting features' put towards? This is definitely the kind of product that takes several iterations to get right so thank you for following our journey.
  - jaxn 8y ago
    Not the person you are replying to, but I have a use case that I think optic would be good for. I'd like to have a two-way sync between business logic code and a flow chart for documentation. Something like the slack push notifications decision: https://m.imgur.com/gallery/0p5bV https://m.imgur.com/gallery/0p5bV

shawn 8y ago

For example, Mutiny can dynamically change a website’s customer testimonials to match the visitor’s industry. Clever idea!

sattoshi 8y ago

Cutting edge biotech and a mac n cheese company in the same list. Wow.

halfjoking 8y ago
If only they combined their tech... they could become more powerful than anyone could possibly imagine.
- jxub 8y ago
  I'm sure you're only half joking... The potential synergy might be a meat idea for a eco-friendly lab-grown patty.

UncleEntity 8y ago

> Synvivia develops biomolecular ON-OFF switches to make synthetic biology safe for use outside of the laboratory. Yep...then the on-off switch jumps species and the only way to survive is to consume a particular (patent pending) brand of parsnip which can't be grown from seed. Pretty much the only place I could reasonably be accused of being a luddite is in releasing GM organisms into the wild.

pazimzadeh 8y ago
I definitely agree about the wild. But what about designing gut bacteria that target parasites in your poop? Amongst many other possibilities. You can use oxygen, temperature, and light-sensitive gene promoters and toxin-antitoxin plasmids to make ON-OFF switches that would hobble bacterial replication in the wild. It's a tough problem, and my guess is you'd want to use several of these switches together. There's no guarantee that stressed bacteria will 'run' your programs. And you're right that the gene could move horizontally, so you'd have to be very clever with your kill switches, and keep up with evolution. Apart from the last resort of antibiotics, you can also selectively deplete particular bacteria from your poop using adhesion inhibitors such as mannosides and galactosides (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5654549/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5654549/ - research from my lab).

abhisuri97 8y ago

I found CSPA to be an interesting proposal. I'm currently studying CS and Biology and found that the comparison of the exam to the "SAT" of computer science is a bit of a misnomer. The SAT requires minimal prior knowledge to take (albeit if you want to score well, you end up needing to study for it through test prep books etc). I think perhaps it may be more likened to an MCAT equivalent (or any professional school exam equivalent) because of the need to know about certain subject fields. Someone also brought up a point regarding the validity of testing for skills in web development if test takers won't end up in those fields anyway. However, when looking at similar exams (e.g. MCAT), you can make the argument that the majority of doctors won't use Organic Chemistry or won't need to know about the minutiae of Psychology & Sociology to be successful. The MCAT becomes a successful discriminator of good vs bad test takers because of the amount of work and critical thinking skills that is needed to cover the litany of subjects tested. Similarly, the CSPA could follow a similar pattern as the MCAT by testing a range of subjects as a means of measuring one's ability to learn a large sample of topics. The only thing I can really think of that CSPA can improve upon is providing more preparatory materials. Additionally, it'd be useful to see how people end up performing on the exam and if there is an actual "Bell Curve" like distribution of scores that results.

cspa 8y ago
Great feedback! We do have a distribution of scores for our latest exam session here: https://medium.com/@cspa_exam/july-2018-cspa-results-509ace9dd9bb https://medium.com/@cspa_exam/july-2018-cspa-results-509ace9...

AriaMinaei 8y ago

Optic [0] caught my eye. They seem to have made possible a new kind of abstraction in code. Something that's different from both functions and macros. It's a kind of abstraction that can be arbitrarily customized at each call site, yet retain its identity across all of them. Example: foo = do_a() bar = do_b(foo) Example 2: foo = do_a() bar = do_z(foo) baz = do_b(bar) Example 3: foo = do_a() bar = foo + 10 baz = do_b(bar) The three examples have strong similarity in their first and last statements. There is a pattern there, but that pattern cannot be abstracted into a single macro or a function. So this pattern does exist, and is recognizable to the human eye, but the language does not allow one to express it. What Optic seems to do is to recognize the pattern, create a single model out of it, and allow you to re-use that pattern elsewhere, or even transform it into new ones and re-use those new patterns elsewhere. Again, this would be a new kind of abstraction. One whose leaks are easier to fix. You can have your cake and eat it too! [0] https://useoptic.com https://useoptic.com

addcn 8y ago
Hey -- thanks for checking us out! You're definitely understanding the premise of our parser. It evaluates a regex-like set of rules on an AST tree to match different forms of code. These rules can be recursive as you can see in the first example of our home page [0]. In that example Optic matches an express js route and the headers, parameters and responses inside it. The result is a nice json object with shape {method, url, parameters: [], headers: [], responses" []}. OOTB the JS interpreter couldn't do this because it doesn't encounter the calls to req.query.param_name until that code runs. PG wrote about building the language/abstraction to fit your problem [1]. In an ideal world we all would do this, but in practice there's always a gap between our program and the abstraction we describe it in. Today that gap is only bridged by a human understanding the code. Until now...Optic is allowing us to programmatically deal with these implicit abstractions. We believe most of the dev tools created over the next decade will be built on top of your code in a way that allows them to collaborate with real developers. To realize this world we need a programatic interface to read, generate and mutate code so we created Optic. [0] https://useoptic.com https://useoptic.com [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/progbot.html http://www.paulgraham.com/progbot.html

Fomite 8y ago

"Customers pick a cheese sauce, a pasta base, add unlimited toppings like roasted broccoli and mushrooms, and top it off with anything from truffle oil to Hot Cheetos." - So basically Noodles and Co.

Fomite 8y ago

The concept of HappiLabs calls to me, and while spendy for a new lab, is definitely less than a qualified lab manager would be. Sadly, really only useful for wet labs.

mmt 8y ago
> Sadly, really only useful for wet labs. I'm not an insider on the terminology, but it seems a "wet lab" is what a lay person, like myself, thinks of when we hear "a lab" (in the physical sciences context). What's the "dry" (or is the term of art different?) lab situation you wish it would be useful for? There could be a different startup opportunity, if it's scalably computer-heavy [1]. I'm aware of computer-controlled instruments for wet labs being a very underserved market (and presumably with high margins for the computer portion), but that seems like a consulting/services/labor-intensive business. [1] Around HN, that usually means software, but my background is Ops, so I actually consider commodity hardware quite scalable, too, despite the hardware-is-a-nightmare-we-have-to-do-cloud mythology.
- Fomite 8y ago
  Yeah, "wet lab" is what most people thing of as a "lab". Some fields (lots of the biology and biology-adjacent ones) use "lab" as a logical unit of organization. So Professor So-and-So and their graduate students, postdocs, etc. is "The So-and-So Lab". "Wet lab" is useful to distinguish people with actual labs vs. my lab, which is just a bunch of people with laptops. The situation I'm dreaming of, is, for example, it not being my problem when a grad student is having trouble getting software installed on the server. That would be something I'd love a lab manager or dedicated programmer to deal with, but for a small lab, I don't have nearly that level of funding.
  - mmt 8y ago
    > my lab, which is just a bunch of people with laptops. OK, so it's something akin to Wikipedia's description of "dry lab". > The situation I'm dreaming of, is, for example, it not being my problem when a grad student is having trouble getting software installed on the server. That would be something I'd love a lab manager or dedicated programmer to deal with This sounds very much like IT/Helpdesk support, of the kind a programmer or a lab manager typically wouldn't want (and might not be qualified) to deal with, either. Is there something unique to your lab environment that you couldn't use some kind of shared/general IT helpdesk service, perhaps focused on scientific software users? If not, there may well be an unmet need that a startup could fill, especially if everyone in each lab needs identical support and they can combine it with some kind of cloud-based service with basics pre-installed. However, if you're looking for unlimited, individualized user support for a limited, flat fee, that's not sustainable. > I don't have nearly that level of funding For a service provider, the question then becomes, do you have enough funding for the amount of service you'd require (plus the provider's overhead/profit), even if it's not nearly enough for a full-time person (which can be remarkably expensive in popular tech hubs)? Reasonable IT support to user ratios are somewhere in the 1:20-1:100 range, which is the same range (for a 3-person lab) as HappiLab's pricing.

l33tbro 8y ago

I think companies like Grabb-It Labs only make the world more hellish. I really don't understand why you would start a company like this. On my commute each day they've started video advertising on my local bus and also in the subway. It just really SUCKS to be bombarded with more shitty ads for banks and big box stores. I'm not trying to scold the founders. It just confounds me that people would start companies like this when there's clearly no net value to social capital.

briandear 8y ago
It isn’t that someone starts this sort of company, it’s that respected people still fund them. Do we actually need more advertising companies?

JustARandomGuy 8y ago

MAC'D sounds like an interesting idea. If some of the options were healthy (perhaps you could pair mac'n'cheese with tomato soup) I could definitely see myself eating here. Open up in Chicago please!

person_of_color 8y ago

Good luck to all. But for those who want to join Rocket Ship companies any unicorns here?

syntaxing 8y ago

Saddens me that there are not many mechanical hardware companies from any YC year/season and this year is no exception.

starky 8y ago
Yeah, it is always disappointing that there aren't more startups around doing hardware. I think a large portion of that is that hardware is quite expensive to develop and requires a lot of space. From the YC perspective it doesn't really work with the 3 month rapid iteration schedule, that is barely enough time to get tooled prototypes.
mmt 8y ago
Does anyone know how many apply (or have applied historically)?
boxcardavin 8y ago
I interviewed, I've talked to several other robotics companies that interviewed for S18. Absolutely dumbfounded that none of them made it, some of these in the batch seem like they could never be worth $10b.
- syntaxing 8y ago
  Do you know of any open opportunities for Mechanical Engineers on the East Coast at these robotics company?
  - boxcardavin 8y ago
    Sorry no, I'd have to dig up my notes from the interview and I'm slammed working on my startup. You don't wanna move to the west coast? You like bicycles and robots perchance?

wolframhempel 8y ago

I have to admit that I'm missing the take-over-the-world/crazy-moonshot kind of company among the entries. I appreciate that Y-Combinator is a commercial institution with commercial goals and that personalized daily vitamin packs, better SaaS conversion and AI-powered programming are all sensible iterations on existing themes - but wouldn't there have been space for at least one next-gen Googe/Space X/Hyperloop sort of venture? Surely someone applied that'd fit that bill.

Findeton 8y ago
They don't announce all companies from the batch, only the ones that are ready to go "public".
- eaenki 8y ago
  Looking at previous, recent batches, you'd be hard pressed to find startups that look seemingly undoable/like a joke (which are usually the ones with huge potential). For me, only Boom and a couple biotech companies make the list.
donkeyd 8y ago
Didn't Google just start to 'build a better search engine'? It wouldn't have seemed like a crazy moonshot at the start.

countryqt30 8y ago

MAC'D combines the customized font of Dunkin' Donuts (Dunkin Brands) and the name of McDonalds. I see lawsuits coming in from left and right. ;D

jxub 8y ago

The downside to Web MD might be that any charlatan may pretend to be a doctor. When you've got the answers for common diseases from the doctor who gets them from an app, the doctor himself is a repleacable middleman and can be anybody with enough confidence, even if faked.