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Startups that launched today at Y Combinator’s S18 Demo Day 1

156 points by pestkranker 8y ago

raresp 8y ago
I applied for the S18 and I was rejected. I have to admit that at least 80% of these startups are much better than mine one. I can also notice that almost all of them are in the public beta, whereas my project is still in development. It seems that this is also an important factor in the approvement process. What happened with: "we also invest in ideas", "you don't need a finished product in order to be accepted".. Those days are gone :)
- newman8r 8y ago
  Some of these companies probably launched after they initially applied to the program, but that's just a guess.
- mamurphy 8y ago
  My understanding is that Demo Day projects are near the end of the 3-month Y Combinator experience. They could have been at a similar level of progress to you 3 months ago and gotten stuff done, with YC encouragement, over the past 90 days.
  - semerda 8y ago
    Best use of ones time during YC is to focus on growth, talking to customers and making sure you are building something that is a real pain point than initial development. This also helps in the program when you hold yourself accountable to a metric (user growth, revenue etc) and after demo day raising capital.
- a13n 8y ago
  Agreed. YC has moved "upstream" from the idea stage. Startup growth is a funnel. Idea stage is at the top, and unicorn is at the bottom. The further down the funnel you invest, the more likely you are to end up with a unicorn. YC is in the business of investing in startups that become unicorns. YC's brand, and initiatives like Startup School, have gotten them so many more qualified applications. They no longer have to invest in idea stage companies, unless they're insanely promising.
  - mkagenius 8y ago
    > YC is in the business sadly it has become a business. I guess we need a new old YC.
    - chirau 8y ago
      It has always been a business
    - CPLX 8y ago
      > it has become a business It is, literally, a multi-billion dollar private equity firm.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - dalton 8y ago
    I'm the head of admissions at YC and I can assure you that a huge percentage of the companies that we interview and fund are at idea stage. One explanation I have for why it my appear the startups we fund are "far along" at demo day is that the startups moved so quickly during the batch. For example, the startup Inokyo in the current batch recently put out a video of the autonomous store they built in Mountain View: https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/16/inokyo/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/16/inokyo/ When we funded this startup 3 months ago it was for a different idea and so they quite literally started from scratch. Startups moving fast should hopefully seem far along by demo day, irrespective of their starting point :)
    - adtac 8y ago
      >a huge percentage A hard number would say more than that phrase :)
  - amitutk 8y ago
    YC has moved "downstream"! Upstream is where things emerge and then they travel downstream.
- sama 8y ago
  You are comparing startups at the end of 3 months of intensive work to ones at the beginning. They're totally different. It never stops being amazing to watch a team go from an idea to a profitable, fast-growing business in 3 months.
- hyperpallium 8y ago
  After your third sentence, I thought you were going to say "I really need to get to launch". But instead you blamed YC. So that's two attitudes that undermine you. It requires a tremendous amount of trial and error, as you learn about the market, and the technology. Get data from reality as soon as you can. This requires a kind of courage... and behind it, a pragmatic ability to see how to get that information with minimal work/time, and then personal productivity and energy to get the work that is needed done quickly. Sorry to be critical. If it's any consolation, I'm totally unqualified to be critical. And some projects do require longer deveploment (e.g. the R&D startups in this batch), maybe yours is one of them.
chirau 8y ago
The CSPA looks quite interesting. I wonder, though, if it won't just fall into the categorization of certifications. I know a lot of tech companies, especially startups, have not much use for certifications. They are only most relevant for compliance and other niche stuff like security.
docker_up 8y ago
Good luck to all, except for CSPA. I hope they fail miserably. The idea that they will insert themselves as a bureaucracy/testing service to "gauge" software engineers is simply offensive to me. This is typical bureaucrat thinking, and not what Silicon Valley is all about. They want to collect a toll tax on every programmer going forward. So frankly I hope they truly fail quickly and miserably. I hate whiteboard interviews with a passion, but I don't hate them more than "certification processes", like what this group of people is trying to do.
- chirau 8y ago
  I understand where you are coming from, I shared the same concern in my comment. However, isn't a college degree just another certification as well? And most companies do require it. At the end of the day, both have curriculum and seek to be a validation standard, it's just that you, or at least many employers, prefer one over the other.
  - soneca 8y ago
    I see a college credential as a problem to be solved. Replacing it for a centralized certification doesn't solve that problem, just change the entity that is earning money from the existence of the problem. I agree with the GP. But to not sound too negative, I hope they pivot to more legitimate and beneficial business model that does not perpetuate a problem and succeed only with this pivot :)
- robhunter 8y ago
  Real question - what is the history of the SAT? It has essentially created a toll tax on every student attempting to enter college/university in the US. Is it a private company?
  - eganist 8y ago
    It's run by The College Board, which is essentially a not-for-profit testing and (more recently) data analytics service.
koolba 8y ago
> Mac’d is a build-your-own mac and cheese restaurant that lets customers choose their own adventure from the beginning. Is this for real? I mean I love a good mac and cheese as much as the next guy but it doesn’t strike me as anywhere near the usual markets targeted by start ups.
- matdehaast 8y ago
  Haha yeah I was also a bit perplexed on this choice. But hey the team must be strong as getting past the YC partners is no easy task. My first thought when seeing this was Peter Thiels lecture where he discussed restaurants and why they make bad choices for disruption. Would be really interested to see where/how they go from here.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- jonlucc 8y ago
  I wonder if it's a play similar to the coffee machine startup (whose name escapes me right now). The business is actually about putting excellent coffee robots in places that wouldn't sustain a staffed coffee shop.
  - ryanworl 8y ago
    I think this is CafeX.
    - jonlucc 8y ago
      That's the one! Thank you.
    - ngokevin 8y ago
      Is CafeX just a gimmick, given there have been simple vending machines that can brew and make coffee?
newman8r 8y ago
> Prodigal Technologies wants to improve the ways that lenders collect money from borrowers... If a payor misses a payment, lenders can now reach out on any messaging platform and enable lenders to find borrowers where they are This sounds like it could be bad for consumers. I hope it doesn't lead to people getting shamed on social media for failing to answer bill collector's phone calls - their site is pretty vague about how it works so I'm not sure. Just another reason to delete your social media accounts. I think it's a good business idea though.
- samstave 8y ago
  * people getting shamed on social media* thats the only thing i can imagine is going to come of this
  - jonlucc 8y ago
    When I read it, I assumed it would be private messages. If that's true, then it might be a bit like harassment, but not public shaming.
    - samstave 8y ago
      Both suck.
    - newman8r 8y ago
      Perhaps, but on platforms like twitter where the default behavior is to only allow direct messages to mutual followers, I imagine they might use an @mention which is publicly visible - like "@newman8r - please get in contact with us, we need to discuss your car payment" - and they offer to delete the tweet after payment or something.... I guess that would be the worst case scenario. If it's just private messaging then it's not as big of a deal.
      - swsieber 8y ago
        I think people can demand that debt collectors contact them only through certain types of media (email, print letters, etc.). I wonder if that applies to companies where collection hasn't gone to a debt collector...
40acres 8y ago
Interesting to see that more companies targeting women's health are going through YC. I definitely think there is a gap there.. living with my girlfriend has opened my eyes to what sorts of things women have to go through from a health perspective that men never notice.
- chirau 8y ago
  Well don't just stop there... Do tell
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
antoineMoPa 8y ago
That palm oil replacement thing is a really nice idea. I have stopped eating nutella some years ago because of destruction caused by the palm oil industry.
- kevingrahl 8y ago
  I‘m all for boycotting palm oil but I think you might have misjudged Ferreros efforts to only use palm oil that has been certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil. Even Greenpeace says it‘s alright to buy Ferrero products containing palm oil. [Source](https://qz.com/430450/no-you-dont-have-to-boycott-nutella-for-the-environment-says-greenpeace/ https://qz.com/430450/no-you-dont-have-to-boycott-nutella-fo...)
  - antoineMoPa 8y ago
    Very interesting information!!!
- trumped 8y ago
  Nutella is about 30% fat and 60% sugars [1] by weight... can't be good for you anyways... 1. https://www.nutella.com/en/uk/range https://www.nutella.com/en/uk/range
DogOnTheWeb 8y ago
I'm excited to see all of the animal-alternative food companies coming through the pipeline. This space is really undergoing a renaissance. I think most people would choose alternatives if they had similar taste, texture and price to "the real deal". Best of luck to them.
- neuromancer2701 8y ago
  "Undoubtedly better for the environment than a carnivorous diet" I think this quote is extremely dubious. How many of these companies study what the beyond organic movement is going with restorative agriculture. Having cows eat and poop grass is a really good thing for rebuilding what industrial farming has done to acres of land across the US. This just smells of short cutting a process very similar to industrial farming that got us into this position to begin with.
  - komali2 8y ago
    Would you welcome the scientific challenge, though? A couple new hypotheses to environment improvement?
  - uxcolumbo 8y ago
    Here is a study by the UN that basically says to stop or reduce our meat consumption - as our current meat eating habits destroy the environment. http://www.unep.fr/shared/publications/pdf/dtix1262xpa-priorityproductsandmaterials_report.pdf http://www.unep.fr/shared/publications/pdf/dtix1262xpa-prior...
- alexchamberlain 8y ago
  > I think most people would choose alternatives if they had similar taste, texture and price to "the real deal" I, personally, would not. I like to know that what I'm eating has a known affect on my body; people have been eating beef for a long time, we know what it does and why. Whilst I appreciate this isn't a sweet chemical replacing sugar with little to no study into the long term side effects, do we know what the long term impact is? How does the change in diet need to be balanced with other changes?
justinzollars 8y ago
Names & Faces is similar to a tool Adobe created many years ago - it was my favorite product! A great way to navigate the org chart of a growing startup. Nice design. You should try to sell it to EasyPost. ;)
aaavl2821 8y ago
It doesn't look like they funded many companies under the YC Bio RFP, where companies get $500K-1M for longevity products / treatments for aging related disease. I see one regen med company working on regenerating liver cells (Hepatx), and then a few diagnostics / synbio / research tools companies that don't seem to fit the YC Bio / longevity bucket. Wonder if there will be more tomorrow...
- newman8r 8y ago
  I'd love to work on a medical/biotech startup, but the barriers to entry seem so much bigger than a standard SAAS project. It seems like there's some progress towards cloud-labs that could reduce those barriers (https://www.emeraldcloudlab.com/ https://www.emeraldcloudlab.com/ looks interesting) - and that's something I want to learn more about.
  - aaavl2821 8y ago
    The barriers to entry are certainly different, and maybe bigger, but I think there's a lot of misconception about what it takes to get a biopharma company started (i say biopharma rather than biotech bc biopharma is where the vast vast majority of VC money in healthcare goes). You usually need: * a team made up of a few molecular / cell biologists (analog to needing engineers for a SaaS) * solid early-stage science (could be nothing more than a few experiments to validate / build on a publication) * a well thought out experimental plan -- details of the initial work you'd do to validate your core hypotheses, why you chose those experiments and not others, and feedback from other smart scientists and investors to validate your design (this would be the analog of early product development, culminating in product-market fit over 12-24 months) * funding for your initial experiments: a few hundred thousand up to a few million The main difference is that 1) iteration cycles are much longer and more expensive in biopharma and 2) value inflection is more binary. So you need to be really thoughtful about every detail of your initial work. In recent years, biotech startups have actually been able to grow really big faster than tech startups. Kite and Juno were acquired for $12B and $9B less than 5 years after Series A -- getting to decacorn status faster than pretty much any software co I think including dropbox, snap, etc A lot of the initial work is done as a "virtual" company with no lab. There is a massive network of outsourced research groups that can do pretty much any experiment you want at high quality and reasonable cost
sculper 8y ago
> The company wants to make debt collection, if not kinder or gentler, then certainly more efficient. Yikes.
Shorel 8y ago
Skydrop seems like a simple idea but for us in South America this is actually a huge issue. I hope they get successful.
samstave 8y ago
The price slider on the Aola beam selector is broken https://shop.aalo.co/collections/parts-library/products/standard-beam-a?variant=12706919579691 https://shop.aalo.co/collections/parts-library/products/stan... It will quote $12 for 2 inches, then $4 for the same, then $15 for 30 inches and then $12 for 47 inches... Every time it is moved it quotes a different price. I would never use that to order anything. Why can't I build a BOM - or specify the size of a bench and specify the frame design and have it spit out the bom? Horrible UX/UI for the idea that I can buy-by-the-inch materials for my hipster ikea furniture.
- syntaxing 8y ago
  The idea is interesting but I'm not sure how economically feasible it is. It seems like something I can put together with some PVC pipes and 3D printed brackets. Though time may prove me wrong.
mattmaroon 8y ago
The range of these things always astounds me. There's one that's like "it's a social network but with avatars" and then there's one that's like "we can repair damaged livers by turning fat cells into healthy liver ones to replace the damaged ones."
syntaxing 8y ago
jitX seems pretty neat though I have a feeling AI is used in more a marketing sense rather than a technical sense...Nevertheless the pricing is pretty competitive. I have a couple hardware ideas but always stopped because of the electrical part of things. Wiring and coding something that works for prototypes is pretty easy but drafting something that is producible gets pretty tough. I would love to see more customer use cases from this company.
- contingencies 8y ago
  I also found them interesting. However, regarding costs I found the direct opposite: the pricing is far too high. Might make sense in SF, not globally. I emailed their team expanding on this. We pay less than half those rates for design, fabrication, testing, high quality English documentation and delivery inclusive. I suggested they generate high quality documentation as well as the PCB and consider lead times to different parts of the world.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
It's interesting how few companies are in the classical tech stack in any way, and how few are in the more retail/consumer oriented techie things like social media. Many of these are just regular businesses quite far from the ostensible advantages of having rockstar technologists etc., obviously the medical tech notwithstanding, but that's another field altogether. It's also interesting how many of these I don't think will every fit the mold of 'high growth' kind of startup, as opposed to more along the lines of 'great new businesses'. Aalo parts are considerably too expensive - basically they are quite a bit more expensive than IKEA, but they don't like quite as 'finished' and don't quite have the 'finished/unfinished' look to suit putting even in a modern living room, I feel it still looks like utility stuff. And at those prices ... I've just personally had to deal with a lot of brick and mortar stuff, and the reality of 'price sensitivity' hits home really hard. People don't have money for expensive, unnnecessary stuff, 'retail' is not at all like Kickstarter. Love people trying to make fake meat taste great. I have yet to see anything available that really works well. I suggest that once a fast-food chain picks up on it and 'regular folks' get a try, it might fly.
- baxtr 8y ago
  I personally don't buy into the fake meat trend. Fake meat is highly processed, you have to add a lot of stuff to make it look, feel and taste like meat. So it's far away from being a "natural food". After spending a bit of time in the space, I've come to the following conclusion: Live mostly (!) vegan, eat fish 1-2x a week, eat chicken once in a while (both have very good feed to food conversion ratios [1]). Try to avoid beef as much as possible - I do eat it when I crave really badly (every 2-3 months?) [1] http://ib.bioninja.com.au/options/option-c-ecology-and-conser/c2-communities-and-ecosyste/feed-conversion-ratio.html http://ib.bioninja.com.au/options/option-c-ecology-and-conse...
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    I understand it's not there yet ... but in your experience were you able to live through a couple cycles to the point wherein you feel it might get there someday in terms of nutritional value and taste? Also, should add ... I think most people don't care that much about the nutritional value of fake meat. A lot of fast-food meat is already processed and crap. Anyone who can make something that's 'not steak' simply taste like 'steak' will do really well - it's going to be a cost consideration before anything. Consider the 'meat' in Taco Bell is 75% 'filler/chickenfeed' already. I think huge chunks of people wouldn't mind eating vegan so long as they could eat stuff that tasted like meat, even if there were some extra processing. That's why I think it will be a fast-food chain that will make it mainstream: they are cost conscious (as their consumers are), they have the reach and marketing power to change consumer behaviour, and their consumers don't have high-nutritional 'real food' expectations. So a 'McNotBeef' would do really really well even among regular folks, even traditional meat eaters.
pacuna 8y ago
Pretty excited to see Fintual on that list. It's the first Chilean startup that got accepted.
no1youknowz 8y ago
Oxygen definitely interests me. I will be monitoring their progress with interest. I have a requirement for credit facilities on a global basis and I haven't found anyone close to what bitbond [0] has offered. They are based in germany and would much rather deal with a US based company. If anyone has come across such an entity, especially with revenue sharing for those who white-label their offering. Definitely let me know! [0]: https://www.bitbond.com/ https://www.bitbond.com/
- tonyhb 8y ago
  While Nova Credit is not specifically tackling lending, they are an awesome team (hi Loek!) that make it easy for you to access international credit reports to offer credit: https://www.novacredit.com/ https://www.novacredit.com/ This significantly eases the burden of obtaining credit for immigrants.
  - no1youknowz 8y ago
    You ROCK! Thank you. This is exactly what I was looking for!
    - tonyhb 8y ago
      Welcome, happy to help. They're great people.
orb_yt 8y ago
I was surprised to see Alpha Vantage[0] on this list. As far i'm aware, they provide real time access to stock prices, and their service is free. Additionally, other services [1] exist that do the same, which are also free. How might they turn their service into a viable business? [0]: https://www.alphavantage.co https://www.alphavantage.co [1]: https://iextrading.com https://iextrading.com
- lettergram 8y ago
  Lol literally just posted the same thing. I recently had my regular pull go down and ask for a pretty hefty sum
lettergram 8y ago
I was wondering why alpha vantage suddenly decided to start charging. Sure they have 100,000 users, but the 3 people I know (including myself) are no longer using it.
chris_va 8y ago
Does "Grabb-It" seem like a public nuisance to anyone else? Tracking conversions must be pretty creepy.
pkaye 8y ago
To all the animal-alternative food companies, please put phosphorus on your nutrition labels. That way those of us with kidney failure can watch their phosphorus levels while consuming the large amounts of protein we need daily due to our treatments.
person_of_color 8y ago
Any of them hire REMOTE?
sAbakumoff 8y ago
Vegan sh*t does not really help to prevent the upcoming apocalypse. I am wondering if any of those startups is working on band-aid solutions for this? Personal isolated bunkers, satellites that would allow living on the orbit, etc..?
0898 8y ago
Momentus confused me. It uses water to propel space craft. "Using water has several benefits, the startup says. One, it’s a fuel source that’s abundant in outer space." Wait, what?

156 points by pestkranker 8y ago

I applied for the S18 and I was rejected. I have to admit that at least 80% of these startups are much better than mine one. I can also notice that almost all of them are in the public beta, whereas my project is still in development. It seems that this is also an important factor in the approvement process. What happened with: "we also invest in ideas", "you don't need a finished product in order to be accepted".. Those days are gone :)

newman8r 8y ago
Some of these companies probably launched after they initially applied to the program, but that's just a guess.
mamurphy 8y ago
My understanding is that Demo Day projects are near the end of the 3-month Y Combinator experience. They could have been at a similar level of progress to you 3 months ago and gotten stuff done, with YC encouragement, over the past 90 days.
- semerda 8y ago
  Best use of ones time during YC is to focus on growth, talking to customers and making sure you are building something that is a real pain point than initial development. This also helps in the program when you hold yourself accountable to a metric (user growth, revenue etc) and after demo day raising capital.
a13n 8y ago
Agreed. YC has moved "upstream" from the idea stage. Startup growth is a funnel. Idea stage is at the top, and unicorn is at the bottom. The further down the funnel you invest, the more likely you are to end up with a unicorn. YC is in the business of investing in startups that become unicorns. YC's brand, and initiatives like Startup School, have gotten them so many more qualified applications. They no longer have to invest in idea stage companies, unless they're insanely promising.
- mkagenius 8y ago
  > YC is in the business sadly it has become a business. I guess we need a new old YC.
  - chirau 8y ago
    It has always been a business
  - CPLX 8y ago
    > it has become a business It is, literally, a multi-billion dollar private equity firm.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- dalton 8y ago
  I'm the head of admissions at YC and I can assure you that a huge percentage of the companies that we interview and fund are at idea stage. One explanation I have for why it my appear the startups we fund are "far along" at demo day is that the startups moved so quickly during the batch. For example, the startup Inokyo in the current batch recently put out a video of the autonomous store they built in Mountain View: https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/16/inokyo/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/16/inokyo/ When we funded this startup 3 months ago it was for a different idea and so they quite literally started from scratch. Startups moving fast should hopefully seem far along by demo day, irrespective of their starting point :)
  - adtac 8y ago
    >a huge percentage A hard number would say more than that phrase :)
- amitutk 8y ago
  YC has moved "downstream"! Upstream is where things emerge and then they travel downstream.
sama 8y ago
You are comparing startups at the end of 3 months of intensive work to ones at the beginning. They're totally different. It never stops being amazing to watch a team go from an idea to a profitable, fast-growing business in 3 months.
hyperpallium 8y ago
After your third sentence, I thought you were going to say "I really need to get to launch". But instead you blamed YC. So that's two attitudes that undermine you. It requires a tremendous amount of trial and error, as you learn about the market, and the technology. Get data from reality as soon as you can. This requires a kind of courage... and behind it, a pragmatic ability to see how to get that information with minimal work/time, and then personal productivity and energy to get the work that is needed done quickly. Sorry to be critical. If it's any consolation, I'm totally unqualified to be critical. And some projects do require longer deveploment (e.g. the R&D startups in this batch), maybe yours is one of them.

chirau 8y ago

The CSPA looks quite interesting. I wonder, though, if it won't just fall into the categorization of certifications. I know a lot of tech companies, especially startups, have not much use for certifications. They are only most relevant for compliance and other niche stuff like security.

docker_up 8y ago

Good luck to all, except for CSPA. I hope they fail miserably. The idea that they will insert themselves as a bureaucracy/testing service to "gauge" software engineers is simply offensive to me. This is typical bureaucrat thinking, and not what Silicon Valley is all about. They want to collect a toll tax on every programmer going forward. So frankly I hope they truly fail quickly and miserably. I hate whiteboard interviews with a passion, but I don't hate them more than "certification processes", like what this group of people is trying to do.

chirau 8y ago
I understand where you are coming from, I shared the same concern in my comment. However, isn't a college degree just another certification as well? And most companies do require it. At the end of the day, both have curriculum and seek to be a validation standard, it's just that you, or at least many employers, prefer one over the other.
- soneca 8y ago
  I see a college credential as a problem to be solved. Replacing it for a centralized certification doesn't solve that problem, just change the entity that is earning money from the existence of the problem. I agree with the GP. But to not sound too negative, I hope they pivot to more legitimate and beneficial business model that does not perpetuate a problem and succeed only with this pivot :)
robhunter 8y ago
Real question - what is the history of the SAT? It has essentially created a toll tax on every student attempting to enter college/university in the US. Is it a private company?
- eganist 8y ago
  It's run by The College Board, which is essentially a not-for-profit testing and (more recently) data analytics service.

koolba 8y ago

> Mac’d is a build-your-own mac and cheese restaurant that lets customers choose their own adventure from the beginning. Is this for real? I mean I love a good mac and cheese as much as the next guy but it doesn’t strike me as anywhere near the usual markets targeted by start ups.

matdehaast 8y ago
Haha yeah I was also a bit perplexed on this choice. But hey the team must be strong as getting past the YC partners is no easy task. My first thought when seeing this was Peter Thiels lecture where he discussed restaurants and why they make bad choices for disruption. Would be really interested to see where/how they go from here.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
jonlucc 8y ago
I wonder if it's a play similar to the coffee machine startup (whose name escapes me right now). The business is actually about putting excellent coffee robots in places that wouldn't sustain a staffed coffee shop.
- ryanworl 8y ago
  I think this is CafeX.
  - jonlucc 8y ago
    That's the one! Thank you.
  - ngokevin 8y ago
    Is CafeX just a gimmick, given there have been simple vending machines that can brew and make coffee?

newman8r 8y ago

> Prodigal Technologies wants to improve the ways that lenders collect money from borrowers... If a payor misses a payment, lenders can now reach out on any messaging platform and enable lenders to find borrowers where they are This sounds like it could be bad for consumers. I hope it doesn't lead to people getting shamed on social media for failing to answer bill collector's phone calls - their site is pretty vague about how it works so I'm not sure. Just another reason to delete your social media accounts. I think it's a good business idea though.

samstave 8y ago
* people getting shamed on social media* thats the only thing i can imagine is going to come of this
- jonlucc 8y ago
  When I read it, I assumed it would be private messages. If that's true, then it might be a bit like harassment, but not public shaming.
  - samstave 8y ago
    Both suck.
  - newman8r 8y ago
    Perhaps, but on platforms like twitter where the default behavior is to only allow direct messages to mutual followers, I imagine they might use an @mention which is publicly visible - like "@newman8r - please get in contact with us, we need to discuss your car payment" - and they offer to delete the tweet after payment or something.... I guess that would be the worst case scenario. If it's just private messaging then it's not as big of a deal.
    - swsieber 8y ago
      I think people can demand that debt collectors contact them only through certain types of media (email, print letters, etc.). I wonder if that applies to companies where collection hasn't gone to a debt collector...

40acres 8y ago

Interesting to see that more companies targeting women's health are going through YC. I definitely think there is a gap there.. living with my girlfriend has opened my eyes to what sorts of things women have to go through from a health perspective that men never notice.

chirau 8y ago
Well don't just stop there... Do tell
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

antoineMoPa 8y ago

That palm oil replacement thing is a really nice idea. I have stopped eating nutella some years ago because of destruction caused by the palm oil industry.

kevingrahl 8y ago
I‘m all for boycotting palm oil but I think you might have misjudged Ferreros efforts to only use palm oil that has been certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil. Even Greenpeace says it‘s alright to buy Ferrero products containing palm oil. [Source](https://qz.com/430450/no-you-dont-have-to-boycott-nutella-for-the-environment-says-greenpeace/ https://qz.com/430450/no-you-dont-have-to-boycott-nutella-fo...)
- antoineMoPa 8y ago
  Very interesting information!!!
trumped 8y ago
Nutella is about 30% fat and 60% sugars [1] by weight... can't be good for you anyways... 1. https://www.nutella.com/en/uk/range https://www.nutella.com/en/uk/range

DogOnTheWeb 8y ago

I'm excited to see all of the animal-alternative food companies coming through the pipeline. This space is really undergoing a renaissance. I think most people would choose alternatives if they had similar taste, texture and price to "the real deal". Best of luck to them.

neuromancer2701 8y ago
"Undoubtedly better for the environment than a carnivorous diet" I think this quote is extremely dubious. How many of these companies study what the beyond organic movement is going with restorative agriculture. Having cows eat and poop grass is a really good thing for rebuilding what industrial farming has done to acres of land across the US. This just smells of short cutting a process very similar to industrial farming that got us into this position to begin with.
- komali2 8y ago
  Would you welcome the scientific challenge, though? A couple new hypotheses to environment improvement?
- uxcolumbo 8y ago
  Here is a study by the UN that basically says to stop or reduce our meat consumption - as our current meat eating habits destroy the environment. http://www.unep.fr/shared/publications/pdf/dtix1262xpa-priorityproductsandmaterials_report.pdf http://www.unep.fr/shared/publications/pdf/dtix1262xpa-prior...
alexchamberlain 8y ago
> I think most people would choose alternatives if they had similar taste, texture and price to "the real deal" I, personally, would not. I like to know that what I'm eating has a known affect on my body; people have been eating beef for a long time, we know what it does and why. Whilst I appreciate this isn't a sweet chemical replacing sugar with little to no study into the long term side effects, do we know what the long term impact is? How does the change in diet need to be balanced with other changes?

justinzollars 8y ago

Names & Faces is similar to a tool Adobe created many years ago - it was my favorite product! A great way to navigate the org chart of a growing startup. Nice design. You should try to sell it to EasyPost. ;)

aaavl2821 8y ago

It doesn't look like they funded many companies under the YC Bio RFP, where companies get $500K-1M for longevity products / treatments for aging related disease. I see one regen med company working on regenerating liver cells (Hepatx), and then a few diagnostics / synbio / research tools companies that don't seem to fit the YC Bio / longevity bucket. Wonder if there will be more tomorrow...

newman8r 8y ago
I'd love to work on a medical/biotech startup, but the barriers to entry seem so much bigger than a standard SAAS project. It seems like there's some progress towards cloud-labs that could reduce those barriers (https://www.emeraldcloudlab.com/ https://www.emeraldcloudlab.com/ looks interesting) - and that's something I want to learn more about.
- aaavl2821 8y ago
  The barriers to entry are certainly different, and maybe bigger, but I think there's a lot of misconception about what it takes to get a biopharma company started (i say biopharma rather than biotech bc biopharma is where the vast vast majority of VC money in healthcare goes). You usually need: * a team made up of a few molecular / cell biologists (analog to needing engineers for a SaaS) * solid early-stage science (could be nothing more than a few experiments to validate / build on a publication) * a well thought out experimental plan -- details of the initial work you'd do to validate your core hypotheses, why you chose those experiments and not others, and feedback from other smart scientists and investors to validate your design (this would be the analog of early product development, culminating in product-market fit over 12-24 months) * funding for your initial experiments: a few hundred thousand up to a few million The main difference is that 1) iteration cycles are much longer and more expensive in biopharma and 2) value inflection is more binary. So you need to be really thoughtful about every detail of your initial work. In recent years, biotech startups have actually been able to grow really big faster than tech startups. Kite and Juno were acquired for $12B and $9B less than 5 years after Series A -- getting to decacorn status faster than pretty much any software co I think including dropbox, snap, etc A lot of the initial work is done as a "virtual" company with no lab. There is a massive network of outsourced research groups that can do pretty much any experiment you want at high quality and reasonable cost

sculper 8y ago

> The company wants to make debt collection, if not kinder or gentler, then certainly more efficient. Yikes.

Shorel 8y ago

Skydrop seems like a simple idea but for us in South America this is actually a huge issue. I hope they get successful.

samstave 8y ago

The price slider on the Aola beam selector is broken https://shop.aalo.co/collections/parts-library/products/standard-beam-a?variant=12706919579691 https://shop.aalo.co/collections/parts-library/products/stan... It will quote $12 for 2 inches, then $4 for the same, then $15 for 30 inches and then $12 for 47 inches... Every time it is moved it quotes a different price. I would never use that to order anything. Why can't I build a BOM - or specify the size of a bench and specify the frame design and have it spit out the bom? Horrible UX/UI for the idea that I can buy-by-the-inch materials for my hipster ikea furniture.

syntaxing 8y ago
The idea is interesting but I'm not sure how economically feasible it is. It seems like something I can put together with some PVC pipes and 3D printed brackets. Though time may prove me wrong.

mattmaroon 8y ago

The range of these things always astounds me. There's one that's like "it's a social network but with avatars" and then there's one that's like "we can repair damaged livers by turning fat cells into healthy liver ones to replace the damaged ones."

syntaxing 8y ago

jitX seems pretty neat though I have a feeling AI is used in more a marketing sense rather than a technical sense...Nevertheless the pricing is pretty competitive. I have a couple hardware ideas but always stopped because of the electrical part of things. Wiring and coding something that works for prototypes is pretty easy but drafting something that is producible gets pretty tough. I would love to see more customer use cases from this company.

contingencies 8y ago
I also found them interesting. However, regarding costs I found the direct opposite: the pricing is far too high. Might make sense in SF, not globally. I emailed their team expanding on this. We pay less than half those rates for design, fabrication, testing, high quality English documentation and delivery inclusive. I suggested they generate high quality documentation as well as the PCB and consider lead times to different parts of the world.

sonnyblarney 8y ago

It's interesting how few companies are in the classical tech stack in any way, and how few are in the more retail/consumer oriented techie things like social media. Many of these are just regular businesses quite far from the ostensible advantages of having rockstar technologists etc., obviously the medical tech notwithstanding, but that's another field altogether. It's also interesting how many of these I don't think will every fit the mold of 'high growth' kind of startup, as opposed to more along the lines of 'great new businesses'. Aalo parts are considerably too expensive - basically they are quite a bit more expensive than IKEA, but they don't like quite as 'finished' and don't quite have the 'finished/unfinished' look to suit putting even in a modern living room, I feel it still looks like utility stuff. And at those prices ... I've just personally had to deal with a lot of brick and mortar stuff, and the reality of 'price sensitivity' hits home really hard. People don't have money for expensive, unnnecessary stuff, 'retail' is not at all like Kickstarter. Love people trying to make fake meat taste great. I have yet to see anything available that really works well. I suggest that once a fast-food chain picks up on it and 'regular folks' get a try, it might fly.

baxtr 8y ago
I personally don't buy into the fake meat trend. Fake meat is highly processed, you have to add a lot of stuff to make it look, feel and taste like meat. So it's far away from being a "natural food". After spending a bit of time in the space, I've come to the following conclusion: Live mostly (!) vegan, eat fish 1-2x a week, eat chicken once in a while (both have very good feed to food conversion ratios [1]). Try to avoid beef as much as possible - I do eat it when I crave really badly (every 2-3 months?) [1] http://ib.bioninja.com.au/options/option-c-ecology-and-conser/c2-communities-and-ecosyste/feed-conversion-ratio.html http://ib.bioninja.com.au/options/option-c-ecology-and-conse...
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  I understand it's not there yet ... but in your experience were you able to live through a couple cycles to the point wherein you feel it might get there someday in terms of nutritional value and taste? Also, should add ... I think most people don't care that much about the nutritional value of fake meat. A lot of fast-food meat is already processed and crap. Anyone who can make something that's 'not steak' simply taste like 'steak' will do really well - it's going to be a cost consideration before anything. Consider the 'meat' in Taco Bell is 75% 'filler/chickenfeed' already. I think huge chunks of people wouldn't mind eating vegan so long as they could eat stuff that tasted like meat, even if there were some extra processing. That's why I think it will be a fast-food chain that will make it mainstream: they are cost conscious (as their consumers are), they have the reach and marketing power to change consumer behaviour, and their consumers don't have high-nutritional 'real food' expectations. So a 'McNotBeef' would do really really well even among regular folks, even traditional meat eaters.

pacuna 8y ago

Pretty excited to see Fintual on that list. It's the first Chilean startup that got accepted.

no1youknowz 8y ago

Oxygen definitely interests me. I will be monitoring their progress with interest. I have a requirement for credit facilities on a global basis and I haven't found anyone close to what bitbond [0] has offered. They are based in germany and would much rather deal with a US based company. If anyone has come across such an entity, especially with revenue sharing for those who white-label their offering. Definitely let me know! [0]: https://www.bitbond.com/ https://www.bitbond.com/

tonyhb 8y ago
While Nova Credit is not specifically tackling lending, they are an awesome team (hi Loek!) that make it easy for you to access international credit reports to offer credit: https://www.novacredit.com/ https://www.novacredit.com/ This significantly eases the burden of obtaining credit for immigrants.
- no1youknowz 8y ago
  You ROCK! Thank you. This is exactly what I was looking for!
  - tonyhb 8y ago
    Welcome, happy to help. They're great people.

orb_yt 8y ago

I was surprised to see Alpha Vantage[0] on this list. As far i'm aware, they provide real time access to stock prices, and their service is free. Additionally, other services [1] exist that do the same, which are also free. How might they turn their service into a viable business? [0]: https://www.alphavantage.co https://www.alphavantage.co [1]: https://iextrading.com https://iextrading.com

lettergram 8y ago
Lol literally just posted the same thing. I recently had my regular pull go down and ask for a pretty hefty sum

lettergram 8y ago

I was wondering why alpha vantage suddenly decided to start charging. Sure they have 100,000 users, but the 3 people I know (including myself) are no longer using it.

chris_va 8y ago

Does "Grabb-It" seem like a public nuisance to anyone else? Tracking conversions must be pretty creepy.

pkaye 8y ago

To all the animal-alternative food companies, please put phosphorus on your nutrition labels. That way those of us with kidney failure can watch their phosphorus levels while consuming the large amounts of protein we need daily due to our treatments.

person_of_color 8y ago

Any of them hire REMOTE?

sAbakumoff 8y ago

Vegan sh*t does not really help to prevent the upcoming apocalypse. I am wondering if any of those startups is working on band-aid solutions for this? Personal isolated bunkers, satellites that would allow living on the orbit, etc..?

0898 8y ago

Momentus confused me. It uses water to propel space craft. "Using water has several benefits, the startup says. One, it’s a fuel source that’s abundant in outer space." Wait, what?