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Startups from Y Combinator’s S19 Demo Day 1
- bruceb 7y agoHow does http://www.nomadmoments.com/ http://www.nomadmoments.com/ survive the massive war chest and tech advantage of Uber/lyft? The $25 a month fee seems easy to get drivers to pay as they can pay that to uber/lyft everyday in commissions. I suspect the subscription will not stay at that rate for long.
- kart23 7y agoSorry, this is kind of off topic, but why the hell is such a simple website 7MB? I instinctively dont trust companies that cant even deploy a simple website. The massive background image doesnt even look right on mobile, its scaled to fill.
- bruceb 7y agofunny you say that, it was behaving a bit weird on FF desktop for me.
- TylerE 7y agoIt's way worse than that. It's served 25.9MB to me. They are using ginormous background images, and loading multiples. 8000x4000 jpgs. 32 fuckign megapixels. For a background image.
- bschwindHN 7y agoI had it even worse: https://imgur.com/XctFp8c.png https://imgur.com/XctFp8c.png 32.6 MB And I have to agree with the OP, simple things like this instantly drive away my trust that they know what they're doing.
- andrewstuart 7y ago>>> simple things like this instantly drive away my trust that they know what they're doing It inspires me with confidence that they are focused only on things that get them launched.
- TylerE 7y agoThat works great until it doesn’t? What else have they ignored that is going to bite them in the ass?
- quickthrower2 7y agoBounce rates and load times are important if you want people to try the product.
- bschwindHN 7y agoYeah okay, forget first impressions. It's such a basic thing, who knows what else they've screwed up.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y agoSorry about this, but we haven't figured out how to scale images to different dimensions, so get in a car with one of our drivers who we didn't background check and is probably drunk.
- JamesAdir 7y ago"Do things that don't scale" Paul Graham
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago> things that don't scale > drunk driving You're not wrong.
- andrewstuart 7y agoThey're trying to get to market. The team is probably the founder and his little brother and the cat helping out when it can although its paws slip off the keys on the keyboard. They have more important things to do although I do concede it's a pretty big glitch. They'll get around to making it awesome.
- ec109685 7y agoNot secure either…
- hazz99 7y agoThis is really not the important thing here. The hard part is going to market and carving out a niche for yourself (not to mention the endless customer validation and following synthesis), especially in a crowded and rapidly commoditising market like this. Spending a long time on your site in the early stages is a completely irresponsible and wasteful use of time, when you can be developing or outside validating.
- ericd 7y agoLyft and Uber are public now, so they have a bit less latitude to engage in an even more aggressive price war, at least without making some painful cuts. They’re already under pressure to demonstrate that they can be long term going concerns. So, I think Nomad is coming out at a perfect time. Also, it’s much cheaper to jump in and piggyback on the existing supply of drivers and riders than it was to create that market. It’s one more app to run/check, and many drivers already run two, and many riders check two. If Nomad runs super lean and they offer drivers and riders more income and cheaper rides, respectively, without singing the experience too much, I think they have a shot. In any case, I’m rooting for them, it seems like it’ll put some more power in the hands of the drivers, away from Uber.
- Jommi 7y agoYeah I really do not see the benefit of a fixed fee as a starting point competing against a %. Doesn't make sense at all. Why switch to a new service and be 100% likely to pay something, yet not 100% likely to get paid yourself at all? Would rather start out with a 0e/month and get it up to, say, 50$ (or more) based on a rolling basis based on your revenue per month. The app looks like a thousand other ride-hailing attempts as well. What the hell is the secret sauce here?
- dalbasal 7y agoOne ride at a time. The "tech advantage" is not insurmountable. These are, at the core, just apps that let users hail a ride and pay. Uber-Lyft competition has already demonstrated that ride-sharing doesn't come with an automatic moat. Both drivers and passengers are willing to use multiple apps and both respond to prices. Hence price wars. The big problems are network effect chicken-egg problems. You need enough drivers and passengers simultaneously. But, this only needs to be solved in one locale at a time. Uber & Lyft put all their efforts into scale, assuming that winner-take-most dynamics will fix the economics eventually. They didn't. It's not a terrible idea to start a competitor building a low cost/fee model from day one. Flat fees for drivers might be interesting because once the fee is paid drivers have an incentive to get their money's worth. It's not an easy win to go after, but not impossible either. Ride sharing is not an airtight market.
- rficcaglia 7y agoNothing targeting climate change? Hopefully day 2... Edit: mea culpa, Holy Grail is a play here of sorts.
- dang 7y agoAlso Wren, which did a Launch HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20461577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20461577
- rficcaglia 7y agoFrom a comment there about planting trees or preventing deforestation...isn’t the problem now that climate extremes will make it harder to expand forests with droughts and fires? Seems like it may have worked 50 years ago but too late now. I think we need to start investing in ideas that remediate actively and aggressively. Like “oh my god there’s a killer asteroid about to hit us” level of motivation. I mean the planet will do just fine without us, but if we want to stay the dominant species (and not jellyfish), we had best do as inventors/investors what politicians and governments cannot. Like: * Make totally off the grid solar easier and cheaper than PG&E (remarkably hard to do today) * zero petroleum scalable ag * zero petroleum mass consumer packaging * recycling that actually recycles * economically profitable global scale carbon capture that can work in deserts and fires and extreme cold Etc Edit: Because this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20745486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20745486
- matallo 7y agoAlso, Wren previously on Launch HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20461577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20461577
- ec109685 7y agoMighty is interesting, though I wonder if they do anything fancy to avoid being a trivial MIM proxy for your traffic? E.g. do they somehow prevent themselves from logging onto your VM / VPN?
- riser9 7y agoNothing to fight global heating.
- titojankowski 7y agomake the heat go away!
- DoingIsLearning 7y agoIf you haven't read it yet please try to read the section 'In Comments' from the 'Guidelines' at the bottom of the frontpage. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- cbanek 7y ago> Epic Aerospace: Epic is manufacturing inexpensive space tugs to deliver satellites into geostationary orbit. The 21-year-old founder has been building rockets since he was 16, and is now managing a team of seven aerospace engineers with Epic Aerospace. The founder describes propulsion as one of the biggest problems for satellite companies, in that it can take up to two years to qualify new satellite systems and can cost up to $30 million. The problem they’re solving is moving satellites from low Earth orbit directly into geostationary orbit. Epic’s tug is half the cost of the competition and is reusable. They’re currently working with Satellogic, and chasing what the founder says is a $3.1 billion geostationary insertion market. So, uh... what's the big propulsion breakthrough? They have no website (well, they have this: http://epic-aerospace.com/ http://epic-aerospace.com/) and I can't find any search results. They don't list the founder's name, and the only person I can find or other mention other than the ycombinator article is this: https://github.com/OmarBessa https://github.com/OmarBessa I agree it's a big market, and it costs a lot more than $30 million to prove out a new propulsion system, especially one that can repeatedly take satellites from LEO to GEO. If it's some reusable tug, I'm guessing it's able to be refueled in orbit? That'd be pretty epic indeed, because I'm not sure of anyone doing that these days. Though transferring fuel in zero g is a real interesting problem.
- gibolt 7y agoProbably is no breakthrough, other than solving a common problem with a reusable approach. It is wasteful to have every satellite carry the weight of its own propellant and engines. Having a single device that can deliver quite a few satellites to their orbit through clever planning and efficient fuel use could save significantly on weight, design, and launch, costs and complexity.
- cbanek 7y agoWell delivering multiple satellites could be a thing, it's still basically the same cost by mass, you're just splitting the monetary cost up among different customers. If you are delivering multiple GEO satellites, you also have to have them be the right place in their orbit, over their target, since they are stationary with respect to the earth (which is why you don't have to move your satellite TV dish). This means all your satellites for that bunch have to basically be near each other. That also doesn't feel like it is reusable given this definition. I'd assume reusable means you can use it now, and then use it next month on a completely different mission. So let's explore that. GEO satellites are also generally a lot bigger than your typical cubesat / nanosats that are all the rage in the bulk launcher configurations, because you need a big dish, and a lot of power to transmit and receive signals. > It is wasteful to have every satellite carry the weight of its own propellant and engines. Even if a satellite was delivered to GEO without using an engine, satellites need engines to do stationkeeping and keep their orbit, which is the critical factor for the operational lifetime of a satellite. It's more wasteful to have to have your orbiting tug do an orbital rendezvous with a satellite in LEO (takes fuel to rendezvous), go to GEO (the normal cost, but more expensive since you have to carry the fuel for the return trip), then come back from GEO to LEO (takes fuel). Following this delta-v map, it looks like it takes about 4000m/s of delta-v to go from LEO to GEO, then the same the other way back down. https://external-preview.redd.it/U5iH7huE5qKth7ZFvipXt8vzaFOO99qHFh9o9_SkLLk.png?auto=webp&s=d145ac9ae496abe35fae86fc11a584d62fe42592 https://external-preview.redd.it/U5iH7huE5qKth7ZFvipXt8vzaFO... I don't know of any clever planning or efficient fuel use that can get over the raw amount of delta-v you'd need. Fuel use isn't really efficient, it's the engine that has to efficiently use the fuel, which is why I think there must be some breakthrough here. Fuel also has to eventually be delivered up to the tug for refuel, so really it seems like all the mass savings is the dry mass of the 3rd stage.
- SkyMarshal 7y ago>Juno College of Technology: JCT is creating the technical university of the future. The startup operates a coding bootcamp, expected to do $3 million in revenue by the end of 2019. Similar to Lamda School, they offer income-share agreements, but “the similarities stops there,” explained the founder. Juno says it places 87% of founders who complete their nine-week long program. How is it different from Lambda School? It’s not apparent from their website other than it’s based in Canada and they have a physical campus in Toronto. https://junocollege.com/why-juno https://junocollege.com/why-juno
- andyjsong 7y agoLambda School is 6 months vs. 9 weeks with Juno.
- sdan 7y agoI think it was Make school who said they did 12 weeks and that wasn't enough so they expanded to a 2-4 year bachelor program
- rficcaglia 7y agofor my kids’ university I’m assuming 8+ years...and that’s if they don’t follow Mom’s path through multiple PhDs! All so they can program the robot caregivers that will swaddle me someday.
- sdan 7y agoI'm almost going to graduate in HS and hopefully can either get picked up by YC or theil instead of going to college. Given the high chance I do go to college, I'll just be doing whatever I'd be doing at YC anyways. I also thought about doing academia for a long time, but realized its just a sticker mark on your resume. Given that I graduate from undergrad, I'll hopefully get a good sticker doing masters.
- tastroder 7y agoWait, so people actually pay 17% of their income over two years for a 9 week course? What on earth is the upside of this over picking up a few books/online courses and attending a couple of networking events?
- probably_wrong 7y ago> As privacy-conscious consumers speak up against the proliferation of facial recognition tech (...) Traces is building computer vision tracking tech that relies on cues other than facial structure It seems that Traces has slightly misunderstood the concerns of privacy-conscious consumers, so I would like to publicly make the following clarifications: 1. If your technology can track me as effectively as face recognition does, then it is not in any way "less invasive". You are still invading my privacy. 2. STOP. FUCKING. TRACKING. ME!
- tomashertus 7y agoI’ve been wondering recently - why there are almost no security startups in the YC? Cybersecurity is one of the biggest problems in the 21st century, the market opportunity is huge and solutions require to solve hard engineering problems, yet there are no cybersecurity companies funded. Does anyone have the same feeling? Why it would be this way?
- new_here 7y agoCheck out https://cylonlab.com/ https://cylonlab.com/ From participating in that, my experience was that it’s really hard to disrupt in cybersecurity because businesses are skeptical about using young companies with no reputation and a beta product. So it’s hard to start showing revenue or traction to get funded. The hunt for revenue then also forces you to focus on things like phishing protection instead of discovering zero days.
- andy_ppp 7y agoMy opinion; it has nothing to do with YC... in my experience (worked building software at a security firm) people who are good a breaking things are generally bad at building them.
- hkmurakami 7y agoAre no cyber security companies (1) being founded, (2) applying to YC, or (3) being accepted by YC?
- timothy-quinn 7y agoWe exist, but we're just not in the right country :) From my experience working with a number of companies, the challenge seems to just come down to a lack of people in the industry.
- alltakendamned 7y agoMost security companies seem to fall in one of two categories: - consulting - appliances (aka blinky boxes) Consulting seldom requires venture capital and cannot scale at the level VCs expect. Blinky boxes can, but customers are slowly catching on to the fact that adding another blinky box to the network is really not improving their resilience all that much. On top of that, it's not always easy to identify the real economic buyer in an organisation, and e.g. a CISO might not have the authority to decide on installing new appliances but needs to collaborate with e.g. IT. It all makes for convoluted and longer sales cycles.
- brainless 7y agoDoes anyone here feel the need for PopSQL? I am asking this because I was building on a similar idea a couple years back as a side project. I lost track but got curious seeing PopSQL.
- cellis 7y agoWe use BigQuery where I work, it has a "saved queries" feature. I suppose this could be like a poor man's BigQuery?
- mjfisher 7y agoI got quite excited by that entry. My immediate reaction was 'oh, that's really cool'. But after thinking a little further, I can't think of an audience that both uses SQL frequently and also couldn't use a git repo. What kind of user demographic did you have in mind?
- brainless 7y agoMy target audience was basically every non-programmer in a team who wants to see/track any kind of data for their own product. The SQL building would be for programmers to setup say a few initial queries. But anyone can change (there would be a changelog) and share new things to track.
- mjfisher 7y agoThanks; I've yet to meet any sql-wielding non-programmers in the wild. Perhaps it's worth releasing after all?
- vharuck 7y agoJust an anecdote, but my dad learned SQL 10 years before retirement. It helped him do his work, which was not software development, without burdening the professional programmers. Of course, there are plenty of free and slick GUIs offering the basics of Git. I'd like to see how this is better. Maybe customer service?
- mcthrowaway123z 7y agoEvery time I read one of these my heart freezes up at the possibility someone has beat me to market. Then I remember why I spent 3 years in R&D.
- lnsru 7y ago3 years in R&D sounds very normal for hardware projects. That scares me a lot to start something really complicated alone. I persuaded myself, that it’s just hobby and crawling slowly forwards. 3 years for software is enough to 3 times succeed of fail.
- treggle 7y agoWhat are you building? Don’t reveal all, just a hint, like the industry.
- sdan 7y agoI'm interested as well...
- mcthrowaway123z 7y agoIn short, a non-static, continuous, non-deterministic neural network that can span infinite state by estimating an NP-hard convex optimization problem.
- bathMarm0t 7y ago3 years in r&d is called a masters. 5 years a PhD. Not trying to be glibe but get your business house in order.
- mcthrowaway123z 7y agoI already sold 3 companies doing the agile thing, I'm quite aware of the known problem/unknown solution approach. This time I'm more interested in the unknown problem/unknown solution space and, for this particular project, that meant inventing a new branch of mathematics to solve a particularly hairy problem.
- amsilprotag 7y agoOnly one crypto mention, and it's a company selling banks tech to detect crypto fraud. TRM Labs: Banks are required to trace the source of their customers’ money. TRM helps banks identify and trace cryptocurrency fraud. They charge $20K per user seat. Though they couldn’t say the name, TRM says they recently signed a top-five global bank as a customer.
- pontifier 7y agoI went through the list and these are the ones that intrigued me. lumineye: I think this sort of technology can be very useful and I'm interested to see how it is used in the real world. safely deposit: I like the simplicity, instant value to users, and the way it transitions physical documents to virtual ones. I think the price is a bit steep though. puzzl: This seems like it erases a huge headache for its customers. I think about this one as provisioning people like VMs to be a physical presence. Why hire when you can rent on demand... million marker: There are many people who are caring more and more about toxins in their environment, and this plays directly to their growing paranoia. nomad: I personally don't use ride sharing, but this one seems like it could be competitive. It doesn't seem like there's much difference between the current options. earth-ai: Of course! If they have a good solution then they may be able to find a lot of resources that we haven't fully exploited yet. This is the big one I think.
- jatsign 7y agosafely deposit: Does seem convenient, but I'm not sure I could get over my privacy concerns.
- Balgair 7y ago> Nomad: In a two-month illegal trial period, the company facilitated 5,700 rides at Indiana University before the startup had to shut down, but they say they’re legal now and ready to try new markets. Yes, this is a good look for a legitimate business.
- prdjr 7y agoEasier to ask for forgiveness than permission
- jandrewrogers 7y agore: Earth AI Discovery of unexploited mineral deposits is relatively easy already, this is not a big driver of commercial viability or mining economics. That will be a difficult part of the value chain in which to make money, the nominal value of extractable mineral is very weakly connected to market value of a deposit. A rich concentrate of valuable metals does not imply economic value in practice. Extraction economics, on the other hand, is everything and can vary widely. Most mining companies already have a huge back catalog of unexploited deposits that they do not count against reserves (and most mining companies are incentivized to lowball reserve estimates in any case).
- _hardwaregeek 7y ago> Gold Fig Labs: The startup is building a tool for version control on settings pages. The founders come from Firebase, where they were both early employees. The company has signed up 60 companies in the last five weeks, including “multi-billion-dollar tech companies. I've been setting up some pipelines at work. I was thinking recently, "huh, these pipelines aren't easily version controlled at all". Unless you use something that is completely configurable by text, which is pretty hard to accomplish, then it's basically impossible to get a snapshot of your services. It's even harder to roll stuff back. Or branch it off and test out a new configuration. I'd wager that a lot of issues in production are configuration related, simply because it's harder to introspect and code review versus code changes. Hopefully that can be fixed.
- KptMarchewa 7y agoMaybe I don't understand what you're trying to achieve, but doesn't Gitlab CI fulfill that role? Your versioning system is essentially git. Branching is done trivially, rolling stuff back is running deploy pipeline from older branch or tag.
- _hardwaregeek 7y agoI'm talking about versioning infrastructure. So let's say you have a setup with a load balancer, three compute VMs and two database instances. You modify the config to make it three compute VMs and three database instances, but suddenly something goes wrong! Can you roll back your infrastructure easily?
- lazyant 7y agoThis is a standard "infrastructure as code" task for devops/SREs/whatever , for ex using Terraform
- GordonS 7y agoAssuming you mean CI/CD pipelines, with at least Azure DevOps, Travis and AppVeyor, pipelines are configured using YAML files, which are themselves checked into source control (e.g. git), so they are versioned just the same as any other files. Azure DevOps supports both a graphical UI and YAML files. Pipelines created with the UI are versioned within Azure DevOps, rather than source control. I get the impression that the UI is considered deprecated, even if Microsoft haven't explicitly said so.
- panabee 7y agoif you could invest in one startup from demo day 1, which one would it be and why?
- vmurthy 7y ago> The startup operates a coding bootcamp, expected to do $3 million in revenue by the end of 2019. Similar to Lamda School, they offer income-share agreements, but “the similarities stops there, I'm interested in learning how this can be VC scale. From what I understand, it is a very people-intensive business (look at the student:teacher ratio for one of their courses)[1]. How is it different from,say,a consulting firm in terms of scalability? [1] https://junocollege.com/course/web-development https://junocollege.com/course/web-development
- Dwolb 7y agoShort answer is to build a business that’s product-led and incentive-aligned. As long as operationally they’re trying to use technology to reduce friction at every step (student experience, instructor experience, and curriculum) they’ll be able to scale better than an organization that bills for time (and is incentivized to use always consume and bill for more time!)
- MarkMc 7y agoCan't some people-intensive businesses scale to huge size? Look at Walmart
- gadders 7y agoScared to comment in case I end up like the guy that slagged off DropBox. Maybe I should do a separate comment for each startup saying "Great Idea! Guaranteed success!" so I can refer to it in five year's time and look really prescient.
- seren 7y agoHoly grail, sounds like a moon shot. It got AI, robots, if it wasn't vetted by YC I would think it is some sort of vaporware. On the other hand, if they can pull off automatic research and experiments at scale, it seems to be a real game changer.
- tastroder 7y agoCould somebody explain the thinking behind startups like yummy? This seems to be quite common in the last few years. Do these "robot barista" type installations really take in significantly more revenue than a traditional vending machine that justifies this level of engineering / cost? https://www.yummy-future.com/ https://www.yummy-future.com/
- Judgmentality 7y agoLooks like Cafe X (https://cafexapp.com/ https://cafexapp.com/) Seems like a gimmick to me. But who knows, maybe their sales are great? Also the real question isn't the upfront (or potentially distributed) engineering cost - it's real estate. Can the robot justify the larger footprint of a typical coffee vending machine by increased sales? My guess is they're targeting the place between vending machines and Starbucks, which seems like a pretty big void in the coffee market. I still don't understand why a robot arm would do anything other than add to the novelty.
- the-dude 7y agoApparently the YC interview days are quite exhausting for the interviewers : because of this in every YC batch there is at least one coffee startup. It is subliminal stimuli.
- gadders 7y agoWhat I think would be cool would be a prediction market for each year's YC startups, limited to people with HN logins. Be interested to see how the cumulative wisdom of people here compares to reality.
- ArtWomb 7y agoCongrats to all the startups making it to the end! This was quite a diverse array of verticals: from rare earth mining to mail-in sperm tests ;) Green Tiger. The "Robinhood of India". We hear a lot about how private wealth management is an untapped goldmine in Asia. To the tune of $100T+. And I'm wondering if the barriers aren't more customer development oriented than a lack of actual trustworthy services? How Asia Can Protect It's Crazy Riches https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-08-17/asia-must-protect-its-wealth-to-survive-the-next-financial-crisis https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-08-17/asia-m...
- 19ylram49 7y agoFrom a privacy and security standpoint, can some help make Mighty make sense? I just don’t see it. Yes, Chrome does hog my RAM and CPU, but my browsing experience is simply not bad enough to just throw in the towel and give in to a MITM
- carlosdp 7y agoI mean, I agree. It seems like a backwards-facing technology. Smartphones and netbooks are getting better and better processing power, that power should be harnessed, not just ignored. Besides the obvious privacy and security issues, I can see how you could get customers in the short term with savvy sales and marketing, but trends in development and tech don't seem to support this being a sensical approach for the future. I mean, one of the examples given is Slack. Slack is already web-based, if you run it as a browser tab, you don't use much extra CPU/memory. But many run it in the Electron "desktop" app. Why? Because it's more integrated with the operating system and more like a first-class citizen app. That will be solved now with PWAs and the new Web APIs being worked on, it's just a matter of time imo. When all these electron-based apps can just re-use the already running Chrome browser's rendering engine, and still look like a standalone app, who cares how much CPU Chrome uses? It'll be basically the only UI app running on the whole machine.
- 19ylram49 7y agoDashblock and Actiondesk look pretty slick!
- Oras 7y ago<Breadfast> Interesting to see that they got 10,000 paying customers in 2 years.
- vharuck 7y ago>Kern Systems: This startup wants to store information in DNA. Just imagine the complicated algorithms necessary to prevent literal virus injection attacks.
- mdorazio 7y agoSome surprisingly interesting companies this round, including quite a few leveraging hardware and robotics in cool ways. That being said, two stuck out to me: I can't see Lumineye as something other than military and police state tech pretending it's going to help first responders more than it will help special operations units kill people and police/FBI violate privacy even further. This should be disturbing, not cool. I like what Well Principled is trying to do, but having worked in the consulting space for a long time, the disruptable segment of the management consulting market is not that big. A lot of clients don't hire McKinsey for actual insights or results, they hire for the brand name, someone to point the finger at when things go wrong, and as trusted outsider confirmation of what executives wanted to do in the first place. I have a feeling this will pivot into the financial engineering segment of the market pretty quickly or get bought out by one of the big 4.
- seren 7y agoRegarding Lumineye, there is a market for elderly people at home, which are already monitored by bracelets or some other devices they are suppose to wear, that they usually forget, to detect fall, or other adverse events. No one want to have a camera installed at home to be monitored 24/24. However, something that could check your pulse or maybe if you have moved in the last 30 minutes remotely would be much more acceptable. It is probably a much bigger market than law enforcement. In more institutional places, it could probably be used in hospital, nursing home, psychic wards or prisons.
- mdorazio 7y agoI'm not sure why you need to be able to track bodies through walls to accomplish that. A simple ultrasonic sensor array in a room with some software could accomplish the same thing without the dystopian potential. I just can't see this not getting horribly abused.
- chichikid 7y agohere are all S19 companies http://app.crunchdex.com/s19 http://app.crunchdex.com/s19