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Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?

368 points by impostervt 6y ago

gtCameron 6y ago
“Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a backup app you can already build such yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem”
- monkey_monkey 6y ago
  Sure, the Dropbox comment will never stop being a meme. But in a world where, for example, a competing product like Fantastical already exists, costs less and does more, it does seem valid to be wondering what is going on.
  - 2cb 6y ago
    As others have said, investments in startups are based a lot more on the potential of the team behind them than their existing products.
- senko 6y ago
  I don't think it's fair to compare a way to seamlessly move data around with "We’re building a calendar app for the Mac menu bar."
  - stinkytaco 6y ago
    I think the point was that Dropbox was not at the time viewed as "seamlessly moving data around". We see it in retrospect as revolutionary, but that was certainly not the view at the time since many of us had already seen online storage platforms come and go (xdrive, anyone?). I will not comment on whether this calendar app is revolutionary, it might not be, but it's also possible it is something that will make an impact. There's lots of untapped potential in the calendar and event space, in my opinion.
- afavour 6y ago
  "People were too cynical about one YC startup, therefore any future cynicism is invalid" doesn't really make a lot of sense.
- blackrock 6y ago
  Is there an opportunity to make a cheaper Dropbox? Their paid service is very expensive.
  - aparsons 6y ago
    OneDrive?
the-dude 6y ago
Although I had similar thoughts, one always needs to keep an open mind about what it can grow into. In the thread, it was obvious that for some people it would alleviate a pain : keeping track of synchronous events across multiple platforms.
- lvs 6y ago
  > one always needs to keep an open mind about what it can grow into. Why? There's no shortage of more serious and productive problems to solve.
  - the-dude 6y ago
    Those are for you.
  - pbronez 6y ago
    Personally I love seeing a funded company that's focused on client-side software to improve the productivity of general knowledge workers. It's a nice counterpoint to SaaS everything. Yes, there's a subscription fee. But that ensures ongoing development. Looking at this product, I'd expect it to grow into a powerful, personal RPA product. They could build a high quality, MacOS-native view into all the APIs in your life, with automation tooling and a great mobile story. But it has to start somewhere. :)
- sitkack 6y ago
  Step 1, get into the menu bar Step 2, ads! Though in seriousness, YC has said it is more about funding people than specific projects. And who knows where this lands on the path to the destination.
RicoElectrico 6y ago
My conclusion also, judging from a few latest Launch HN's that are prone to be featurized by the competition instead of building an ecosystem. Or being a good idea, but without a unicorn potential even if you strech your imagination. But I guess they only care about successful exits at a valuation that will make return on their investment. Or they may see what we mere mortals can't see.
- pietrovismara 6y ago
  > But I guess they only care about successful exits at a valuation that will make return on their investment Modern innovation at its finest
KMnO4 6y ago
Linked HN discussion, in which people were already (IMO rightfully so) very critical of the product: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26425318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26425318
s_dev 6y ago
Paul Graham: Startups at the begginning are alot more fragile than people think. It may be the case they've very little to show. I'm not seeing some tipping point here. YC has always had startups that were a bit funny or outright weak sounding -- their investment strategy pretty much means the idea must initially sound bad in the pitch. They're aiming for things that are counter intutitive to give them an advantage.
- jack_riminton 6y ago
  Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin.tv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin.tv which became Twitch And has some pretty successful alumni!
  - mattnewton 6y ago
    I’m not sure I would use this as the example, Justin.tv was doing something a bit weird and different. Even if it didn’t pan out (which it didn’t before their pivot), it wasn’t clear at the time why it would work or not work. This product has many competitors in a crowded space, and the risk of being sherlock-ed.
    - jack_riminton 6y ago
      Right, which was exactly what was described in the grandparent comment
beervirus 6y ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/m2ypbx/has_y_combinator_lost_its_way_as_a_leading/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/m2ypbx/has_y_... Fixed link.
onion2k 6y ago
Literally every time you see a startup release a product that seems trivial it's because that's not the full story. You're judging without complete information. For example, the public face might be a simple Mac calendar widget, but that could be the gateway to calendar sharing, native office apps, meeting booking, event management, ticket sales, corporate flight sales etc. Building an audience with a cheap tool that solves a tiny pain point for a lot of people is a great way to build a direct relationship with a market that you can then sell other services to. I'm not saying that's the case here. Maybe their business is actually a widget. I'm saying that most businesses do far more than you can see from the outside.
- nvrspyx 6y ago
  When they started YC they were "a video lecture platform for professors"
  - onion2k 6y ago
    They pivoted. It happens. That doesn't tell you anything about what their plans are now.
    - rvz 6y ago
      Just ask AstroPad and f.lux who both have been targets of being 'sherlocked'. I can only see that these guys are at risk of being sherlocked by Calendar.app, Google Calendar and Calendar.exe. Wonder what their answer to YC was when they were asked about that risk.
      - the-dude 6y ago
        For the curious : https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sherlocked https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sherlocked
        harperlee 6y ago
        Thanks a lot! Could you paste it here? Work firewall blocks that site.
obayesshelton 6y ago
“No more looking for the Google calendar tab in Chrome.” Gustaf Alströmer Said nobody ever! It is literally three clicks away... 1. New Tab 2. Click dotted square 3. Click cal button
- pietrovismara 6y ago
  Or CTRL/CMD + T and type cal...autocomplete will do the rest
  - kylecordes 6y ago
    Or "pin" a handful of tabs to keep them always available at the left edge of the list, one click or keypress away.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- sebdufbeau 6y ago
  And now it's only 1 click away. I use Itsycal which is sensibly the same thing, and it really changed my relationship with my calendar. I would never pay a subscription for such a widget, but for the value is provides I would gladly pay a fixed price.
rvz 6y ago
In ~2016: Something was going to get sherlocked by a big fruit company or reinvented by a Chrome Extension for free or integrated into their own taskbar by a trillion dollar software company. Am I right f.lux? I don't think we'll get an answer from this company if the 'competition' decides to go the way on what they did to f.lux.
jrumbut 6y ago
Realizing a meeting is starting right now and then struggling to extract the Zoom link because the invite writer put it in some non-standard field or there's a surprise and it's some other meeting software happens often enough it's close to $10/month worth of pain. I guess what I would worry about is can they handle strange link placement, different meeting software, and times when I'm double or triple booked with different meetings?
- sjg007 6y ago
  I agree... so many times I click on a zoom link in the location field and it opens apple maps..
the_cat_kittles 6y ago
did y combinator ever find its way to begin with? besides making money, have any really useful things been funded by them? airbnb is the only one i can think of that is something im actually glad exists
- pietrovismara 6y ago
  > airbnb is the only one i can think of that is something im actually glad exists If you leave aside the fact that it destroyed housing in many cities, like the one I live in. A handful of landlords got richer, turists could travel cheaper (not necessarily a good thing overall), but an entire class of citizens got kicked out of the city as now no landlord wants to regularly rent their flat. If you ask for disruption, that's what you get. When you disrupt a market, you also disrupt many lives, even indirectly.
  - 2cb 6y ago
    There's also the "ghost hotels." https://www.wired.co.uk/article/airbnb-scam-london https://www.wired.co.uk/article/airbnb-scam-london
  - the_cat_kittles 6y ago
    that is true and bad. i was mostly just thinking superficially selfish perspective of things i like using.
- tim333 6y ago
  Reddit, Dropbox and Stipe are all quite good. I think they're doing pretty well.
exabrial 6y ago
I haven't seen a lot of "hard" startups, more like "lets chuck money at this and see if people buy it and then get out after 3 years" companies of late.
- minikites 6y ago
  The only purpose of wealth these days is to create more wealth. These accumulated assets are not serving any productive purpose, directly or indirectly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization#Roots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization#Roots >In the United States, probably more money has been made through the appreciation of real estate than in any other way. What are the long-term consequences if an increasing percentage of savings and wealth, as it now seems, is used to inflate the prices of already existing assets - real estate and stocks - instead of to create new production and innovation?
- choxi 6y ago
  YC seems pretty committed to hard tech startups, there's a big list here: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/4r-yc-and-hard-tech-startups https://www.ycombinator.com/library/4r-yc-and-hard-tech-star... It'd be interesting to see their % of investments in hard tech startups versus the entire VC industry. Ten years ago the entire VC industry was almost exclusively investing in software startups where many of them were sort of gimmicky social media apps or just taking a traditionally offline business and putting it on the cloud, I'd argue that YC was one of the first ones to buck that trend, Sam has a handful of posts just on hard startups. YC made 398 investments in 2020 and I estimated that at least 33 of them could be considered "hard tech" [1]. It's hard to judge what startups are "trivial software" versus "hard tech" without looking through each one, so I tried to just filter out anything software-related, even though many of those (maybe even most) are probably as non-trivial as a hard tech startup. 1. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?batch=S20&batch=W20&industry=Diagnostics&industry=Industrial%20Bio&industry=Drug%20Discovery%20and%20Delivery&industry=Medical%20Devices&industry=Manufacturing%20and%20Robotics&industry=Drones&industry=Automotive&industry=Aviation%20and%20Space https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?batch=S20&batch=W20&i...
alexhutcheson 6y ago
YC and other seed investors are betting more on people than on the specific business plan. If a founding team seems really smart, skilled, and driven, but is working on an idea that doesn’t seem to make immediate business sense, then it can still be worth betting on that team, because one of two things is reasonably likely to happen: 1. The team realizes that the business plan isn’t viable, and they pivot to something else, which might be. 2. The team was actually perceiving an opportunity you didn’t understand, and the idea ends up being a big success. This doesn’t have to work out all the time, or even most of the time - if you fund even one team that ends up pivoting into a runaway success, it pays for all the “bad” (in hindsight) bets that didn’t pay off.
- 2cb 6y ago
  Indeed. Don't invest in ideas invest in people.
- giu 6y ago
  There's even a third option when you bet on people: The company can get acqui-hired by a bigger fish who's already a big presence within the almost same problem space.
  - alexhutcheson 6y ago
    An acquisition doesn’t really score as a win for the seed investors in most cases, although it’s often a win for the team.
mbreese 6y ago
Doesn’t YC normally invest in the team rather than the idea? From their Launch HN post: > We started YC as a video lecture platform for professors but realized it was a horrible idea. We needed a new problem. Based on the how it started / how’s it going, it looks like they started in YC with one idea and realized they needed to pivot. The fact that this is what they came up with isn’t great, but at least it’s something. It wasn’t their first idea and it probably won’t stick, but that’s not terrible. I don’t think this one single company is a valid criticism of the entire system. Failure is the default end state for startups, so you take the not as good with the unicorns. And at least this one is still going!
- beaconstudios 6y ago
  Apologies in advance for the nitpick, but if you're just dropping your product and doing something else that's not really a pivot. Pivoting is more like changing your plan than throwing it out - targeting a different audience, changing your product plan based on feedback, that sort of thing.
  - randallsquared 6y ago
    Their product is the company they're building, not any of the software or services, so "pivot" seems applicable after all. :)
    - beaconstudios 6y ago
      I think if you change both the product and the market then it's just giving up and doing something else!
  - mbreese 6y ago
    I’d call changing the entire plan a “hard pivot.” I mean Slack started out as a video game (and Flickr - same game IIRC). But as the counter point, here’s an article that argues against doing that in favor of simply shutting down (including comments from a YC partner no less)! https://www.reforge.com/brief/why-hard-pivots-in-startups-are-deadly https://www.reforge.com/brief/why-hard-pivots-in-startups-ar... In this case though, the company is brand new. There aren’t a lot of employees involved. The valuations are low and most of the costs are sunk. There isn’t much to lose by trying something different. And they went from a video conferencing platform to managing scheduling for video conferences. It’s at least in the same ballpark. I guess what I’d say is that it is completely fair to criticize the team for the product they made. It isn’t something I’d spend money on and is in a crowded market with existing players (both free and paid). Not the best plan. But don’t criticize them for switching tracks. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. But at this stage, I don’t see much downside in them trying.
uptown 6y ago
I'm more interested in their privacy policy: "SHARING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION: We share your Personal Information with third parties (analytics tools) to help us use your Personal Information, as described above. We use analytics tools to track our users to improve our product and provide a better experience." Calendars, like contact lists, like emails, like all of the other personal content people produce everyday is sensitive. In lieu of saying how this is protected, apart from just saying it's simply used to make things better, I'm reluctant to link any accounts containing sensitive personal data to startups in search of a revenue-generating business model.
- 2cb 6y ago
  And this is for a paid product as well. Bit of a pisstake when they charge you for the product and spy on you through it. It's like when you pay for a streaming service and it still shows you ads (looking at you, Amazon).
- blackrock 6y ago
  Does Google’s Calendar app share your personal information like this?
  - uptown 6y ago
    Share like this? They are this.
Invictus0 6y ago
It's hardly the dumbest thing to come out of YCombinator. I think the other thing to remember is that these guys started with a videocall platform for professors, which is what won the pitch with the partners. Then they got cold feet and pivoted to this. I also don't think a single bad investment ruins the YC brand.
eitland 6y ago
2 observations: - I happily paid for a very similar product about 10 years ago (it was full screen width and had a brilliant timeline feature but otherwise very similar. It was broken when Snow Lion or something was released. I still look for an equivalent.) - Monthly payments forever for standalone apps is a big no no in my book. I get annoyed even just writing about it. Monthly payments for feature upgrades, perpetual license for last pud release (and some discount to encourage people to not jump on and off) is however totally OK with me. In this case however I think the price is generally too high anyway - for now.
- acjohnson55 6y ago
  As a monthly payment, it doesn't make sense for individuals. But I think that's fine for selling to businesses.
- 2cb 6y ago
  > Monthly payments forever for standalone apps is a big no no in my book. I get annoyed even just writing about it. Same. I often see good software then see they run on a subscription model and nope right out of there. If it was a one-off reasonable price I'd pay. Sometimes I am happy to pay a small yearly fee if it's real nice software and I wanna support the dev. But monthly subscriptions is stupid to me.
  - bombcar 6y ago
    A subscription has to provide SOMETHING that I consider “ongoing” to be of value to me - 1Password syncing for example, or email - before I’ll consider it. Otherwise I’m looking for another option as I can’t be five and dimed to death by little subscriptions.
    - alex_g 6y ago
      Do you consider "ongoing" to be synonymous with "server costs"? As someone trying to figure out a pricing model for a currently-local-only app, I'm genuinely curious.
criddell 6y ago
Maybe they are investing more in the founders than the product?
artembugara 6y ago
The product itself might not be a huge thing, right. However, it might be just a little tiny thing that they want to do. They launched ASAP. They've got some feedback. Etc. Next thing might be that they will reinvent the way we use calendars. Who knows? Not YC. But they will give it a shot. You start small (even if you have a trillion dollar ambitions), you grow.
beaconstudios 6y ago
... and Tesla started out selling small-batch sports cars to rich people. Long-term strategy often involves stepping stones.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  Tesla started selling electric cars, and its still selling electric cars.
  - beaconstudios 6y ago
    "Microsoft started out selling software and they still sell software. They haven't changed at all!" "Facebook started with a social network and they're still a social network! They haven't changed at all!" You're completely missing the point. You can do the same or similar things while starting with a small audience and scaling. Target a small pool to get product/market fit and gradually expand your target audience until you're a billion dollar company.
  - colinmorelli 6y ago
    This comment is made with the hefty benefit of hindsight in which you can see what they've done since, and can now generalize to "electric cars" so that their whole arc has a cohesive narrative. Fast forward 3 years with this company and if they build their unified notification inbox product, with the benefit of hindsight you could say "Superpowered started selling productivity software, and its still selling productivity software" I have no idea if this company will pan out or not. But I do know it's very easy to craft historical narratives that seem so clear after the fact. I have watched many founders do it.
shp0ngle 6y ago
Nah, I don't think they should micro-manage all companies in their portfolio whether they fit their "brand image". This app is ridiculous, but maybe they had a good pitch or whatever, who knows. And if you have such a giant portfolio, they cannot all be diamonds.
drcode 6y ago
Well I guess the first order narrative around ycombinator is that they were successful by seeing opportunities that other investors missed. They think that you're like one of those investors, dismissing a company because they "are only creating a widget". (Though certainly your assessment could be accurate, regardless)
koluna 6y ago
Kind of a ridiculous product to find. When asked why a user needs to pay $10/mo, the answer was “We'd like to fall into the category of other consumer SaaS products” That’s the reason? Just shows how jokes become reality - everything is a subscription because you can squeeze more money that way, not because of actual value.
- anonuser123456 6y ago
  You can only squeeze more money when there is actual value...otherwise people simply don't pay.
adenozine 6y ago
Was there ever a time where YC only boosted deeply meaningful companies that were focused on uplifting humanity? I mean, no disrespect on yc, but it performs what it says on the tin. It's a business for businesses. Idk. I have tempered expectations moreso than some I guess. You've got a point, I just wonder how egregious is TOO much.
- thinkingemote 6y ago
  Is it possible for any investment arm to invest in endeavours to uplift humanity?
  - adenozine 6y ago
    Yes, you might read about Socially Responsible Investing. Also, you can always contribute to charitable organizations. It's not an investment in the traditional sense, but changing the world to be 0.01% nicer is still a good investment.
  - majani 6y ago
    Yup. Right now there is a rush to invest in African loan apps that have finally found ways to scalably extend credit to poor people in African countries. Hits a sweet spot between doing good and making business sense. There are also big investments in Africa into IOT companies that enable hire purchase for solar-powered home devices. Same sweet spot
- aetherson 6y ago
  I didn't read the objection as being that this company doesn't do enough for the common good of humanity, I read it as, this company doesn't have a large potential market.
- aquadzn 6y ago
  Bayes Impact
ThomPete 6y ago
A widget is just one way to express the business. If you are lucky enough to solve a complex problem and deliver value expressed in a simple widget, that is a perfect starting point for a much bigger business.
secondbreakfast 6y ago
I clicked through thinking I'd agree this is silly, but this is an incredibly compelling app. Downloaded and got it set up in less than 2 minutes. Already in love. Weighing if $10/mo is worth it and my immediate reaction isn't "No"
- w3designer 6y ago
  Itsycal does the same thing, for free: https://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/ https://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/
  - secondbreakfast 6y ago
    Looks cool, thanks for the link. Sounds weird but the "join zoom"/"join hangout" button is really the most helpful part of this plugin. Perhaps Mowglii can add. I'm always 60 seconds late to meetings, finding my calendar, finding event, finding mtg link
ghiculescu 6y ago
I agree this product seems a bit uninspiring, but it is ironic that this complaint was posted on Reddit, which you could probably have made similar complaints about back in the day.
- fortran77 6y ago
  How is Reddit different from "hacker news?" It seems to be about the same thing.
colinplamondon 6y ago
I couldn't disagree more. I absolutely LOVE VimCal, and one of the reasons for that is the menubar functionality. Showing a countdown to my next meeting in my menubar, with one click video join, is super useful. The app itself shows how much room for improvement in calendar apps there is - their availability sharing and time travel features are consistently deeply helpful This is all to say, I think this product approach has a lot of merit. I primarily use Vimcal in its "App Mode", not its "Menubar Mode", but its menubar mode is super valuable. I happily pay Vimcal $15/mo, and love seeing in the space. Google Calendar and iCal are fucking terrible. I hope the SuperPowered guys crush it.
philip1209 6y ago
You can question YC's process, but its results are indisputable.
dave_aiello 6y ago
I'm going to repeat that Fantastical does 95% of what Superpowered claims to do. And Fantastical has features that Superpowered clearly does not have, such as a really good natural language mechanism for event and task creation. And subscription costs are less. https://flexibits.com/fantastical https://flexibits.com/fantastical
- 1123581321 6y ago
  Flexibits' weakness is engineering, though. They could get eaten by a competitor that works its way up to a full calendar with a stronger foundation. Fantastical 3's move upmarket in response to Calendar.app improvements hasn't been easy for them so I don't know how much further they could push themselves. That's not to say that a new competitor will put Flexibits out of business, but if the market for calendar management expands, I wouldn't expect Fantastical's share to grow proportionally. So there's an opportunity.
  - dave_aiello 6y ago
    I think part of the reason they evolved this way is because iOS has a shared calendar database which is surfaced by the API called EventKit, https://developer.apple.com/documentation/eventkit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/eventkit. This also exists on macOS and WatchOS, but I think it existed in iOS first.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  To just get the menu bar widget there is https://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/ https://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/ It's free. No paid upgrade or subscription. Just installed it.
  - human_error 6y ago
    There's also MeetingBar (https://meetingbar.onrender.com https://meetingbar.onrender.com). Free and open source. Unlike these guys it doesn't collect data (https://meetingbar.onrender.com/privacy/ https://meetingbar.onrender.com/privacy/).
tosh 6y ago
big things have small beginnings
sharker8 6y ago
I know someone who raised over 50M to improve technical presales. If anyone has ever worked in this context they'll know it's inefficient. First product: a chrome extension that does time tracking. The question is will this succeed because of the money raised, the domain knowledge of the founders, or the quality of the product? Or some combination of the above.
fallingknife 6y ago
People misunderstand YC's business model. They invest 125K for a 7% stake in the company. That's a <$2 million valuation. If this company sells a couple thousand (at $120/y), YC breaks even. If they sell a couple million, YC gets back 1000x on their money. It's a great investment.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  I dunno if you've got the math right here. A thousand units is enough to pay one junior engineer on an ongoing basis (assuming tier 1 or tier 2 US city). You still have to pay marketing and other costs. AFAICT you probably need a minimum of 3k subscriptions to break even. If they can't break even then their business isn't worth much, even if it has a couple thousand subscribers. No shot they are selling millions of these. But tens of thousands seems within the realm of possibility, and it would be a very profitable small enterprise if they managed it without a huge marketing budget.
- utborin 6y ago
  And if they sell four? Wish I still had a copy but there was a brilliant story printed years ago called something like "there are numbers smaller than 1%." It illustrated the fallacy in the thinking behind saying things like, "even if we only sell 1%, we'll be rich." Just because you pick some arbitrarily small number as your minimum sales doesn't mean it's actually the minimum, or even the most likely minimum. You could sell a couple hundred. You could sell ten. You could sell zero.
  - mrkurt 6y ago
    If they sell zero, YC's investment is worth $0 just like it is for half of the companies they invest in. The success rate for hope-to-be-unicorn startups is very low.
  - cbsks 6y ago
    This is probably the story you are thinking of: https://sive.rs/1pct https://sive.rs/1pct It was discussed on HN at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=847334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=847334
llaolleh 6y ago
Jesus Christ people. Give it a break. I hate this Reddit post. You're not going to build the next Apple today by making your first product a full fledged competitive modern computer. Remember that Microsoft started with a BASIC interpreter. Apple themselves started with a niche computer back then that sold to less 500 hobbyists at a hobbyist computer shop. The next Apple would also have to build something extremely niche that no one is paying attention to. Something like this.
- antoniuschan99 6y ago
  It’s not a knock on the product but moreso on ycombinator. It’s questioning why such a product is being funded (at least at this stage when it’s so niche and only available on mac) and if there’s a bigger issue in the ycombinator system funding “trivial” startups The other side of the coin could be they’re getting funded because yc likes the founders :)
  - ryneandal 6y ago
    > The other side of the coin could be they’re getting funded because yc likes the founders :) I think you're entirely correct. It's akin to hiring, sometimes the best prospect isn't the one with the most relevant experience.
  - llaolleh 6y ago
    If you want a crazy win, then you have to invest in some crazy things. Crazy simple also makes sense. YC is doing what they were created to do. To invest in extremely early stage startups no one is willing to bet on. But maybe their product is questioning a fundamental assumption that is outdated that has not been thrown out yet, given current technological advances. Who knows. You could be right on founders. Founders are hungry people. If there is one thing I've learned in my short time on Earth is do not underestimate hungry people.
    - andreilys 6y ago
      Investing in a calendar widget is not a “crazy idea nobody will bet on” This is something that’s easily bootstrapped and which can be run as a lifestyle business at best.
908B64B197 6y ago
As pointed out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26435782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26435782 there's already a free mac utility that does exactly what they are doing. https://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/ https://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/ Syncs to Google Calendar and just... works?
gpjanik 6y ago
It's an MVP. MVP of Stripe was a HTML form and a bunch of guys on the phone. The Author definitely should apply to Y Combinator to understand how startups can leverage small products to get off the ground in the pursuit for a bigger idea.
TomAnthony 6y ago
Offtopic: I despair that a calendar widget for my Mac is now a pay monthly thing. It is becoming widespread that things that were previously just a piece of software you could buy (then optionally upgrade in the future) are now a monthly cost. It makes sense for high ticket pieces of software (Office, Photoshop), where it makes it more accessible for regular users. However, for a calendar widget or many similar examples that come up nowadays, it just turns me off immediately.
- hntrader 6y ago
  It also makes sense when the software has high recurring marginal costs per user (so, not calendar software), such as with high ongoing data egress costs (Dropbox, Netflix, YouTube). The model there needs to be subscription or advertising.
- tschellenbach 6y ago
  Engineering salaries have increased quite a bit. Pay once doesn't seem very sustainable, unless the volume is extremely high.
- dormento 6y ago
  This is not offtopic at all. Remember when a certain company wanted to make us pay monthly for... _squeezing fruit juice packs_ ? The startup/invest world follows some weird-ass rules, to be honest.
aseerdbnarng 6y ago
This is a bad take! The joys of markets are you don’t know upfront what will or won't work and weirdness needs to be celebrated not looked down upon.
haolez 6y ago
Maybe the Y Combinator board invested in the team, and not the idea/product? I'd be on that.
ajsharp 6y ago
This is an MVP, v1 of the product and v0.1 of the company. Judge it as such, with the understanding that things will evolve and grow, or not. 2 thoughts on YC, 1 on the company. ON YC: YC's model is: place lots of small bets. They have presumably grown considerably in the last 10+ years, and are likely now managing a lot more capital than they were initially, which means they need to place many more tiny bets than they initially were. YC accepts many teams who just apply as a team. In other words, YC is not really in the business of evaluating ideas; they evaluate founders and give them money depending probably 80% on the founding team and 20% on the idea. ON THE COMPANY: On the company/product, calendar-ing is a relatively high leverage problem. Everyone on the (digital) planet uses a calendar every single day. Scheduling stuff is a nightmare. Being on time for stuff is a nightmare. Apple Calendar sucks. Google Calendar sucks. I assume Microsoft Office calendar also sucks. If you solve this problem in a better way to the extent people are willing to pay for it (not to be underestimated, see Superhuman), there is a large direct and indirect market for such software. Now, if you have a successful calendar app, you could do something like calendly, which is already a billion dollar company. Try to remember, a lot of companies that come out of YC are in MONTH 3 of their lifecycle. The initial footprint can look small, but dig a little deeper and a lot there. Small footprint, big ideas.
peterthehacker 6y ago
I think that this is an important question and I disagree that “YC has lost its way”. I think that we’re seeing more and more companies come out of YC that have a bottom up, Growth/Product focus instead of the traditional Sales/Tech focus B2B companies have historically had, which makes companies like this look like nothing special tech-wise, but look at their love on PH . They’re onto something. Martin Casado, from a16z, has a great post/talk about this trend. https://a16z.com/2019/08/09/video-growth-sales-and-a-new-era-of-b2b/ https://a16z.com/2019/08/09/video-growth-sales-and-a-new-era...
mathattack 6y ago
I will believe YC has lost its way when every idea they back seems obvious up front.
draw_down 6y ago
“No more looking for the Google calendar tab in Chrome.” - Gustaf Alströmer “I just joined a meeting 3 minutes late instead of 5 because of Superpowered, which is a resounding success in my book.” - Jeff Barg Well, I must admit this is not the most compelling sales pitch in the world. It almost seems like satire. I understand the utility, but the calendar tab is ok.
realmod 6y ago
I think people are overlooking the third sentence in the post, which clearly states that they were accepted to build a video lecture platform but then later pivoted to this productivity tool. I don't think YC would invest in a trivial product like this, even if the team had higher aspirations, but that is going off the very basic knowledge I have of YC.
lnanek2 6y ago
As a developer 70% of my time is in XCode and Github. Guess where the rest is? Google Calendar and Google Hangout. I discount Gmail because I just use my phone for that, swiping away messages while compiling. Want to know where my boss is from 7am to 7pm every day? Google Calendar and Google Hangout. Calendar is a really bad product that needs disruption as well. I imported my victor ops on call schedule the other day and it imported wrong, so then I had to go through an entire year of two meetings a day fixing it, something that would have taken 10 seconds if they let you search and delete results. Re Mac only, the first stage of a startup is finding product market fit. It isn't about making your product work on every platform. In fact that's counter productive. The goal is to have the shortest build-release-learn cycle, if you are porting to multiple platforms, you just increased your build time, which increases your cycle time, which means you will take longer to reach product market fit. Once you do, you can go port to every platform, but it's harmful to do it early.
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growt 6y ago
After a brief search, because I like the functionality and dislike the price point I found this: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1532419400 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1532419400 Open source, free (both as in beer and freedom), small memory footprint. Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23991111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23991111
krm01 6y ago
According to OP, YC would have lost its ways had it invested in TheFacebook. Why would anyone invest in a harvard exclusive social network.
- rchaud 6y ago
  Exclusivity sells. A social network of thousands of engaged Harvard students and alumni can be monetized in all sorts of ways, even today.
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nkotov 6y ago
I went through YC S20 and it's been amazing. It opened up a whole new world to me that I previously didn't have access to. I come from a poor, immigrant family with no fancy college background. I'm located in a non-tech hub city. This was my first startup and getting to partake in YC essentially put me and my company on the map. The internal network itself is also fantastic and the value of having group partners (mine were founders of several companies that you all used) who have experience. I think a lot of people miss the fact that YC at the end of the day doesn't care about the actual idea / product but if there is a way it could be used by millions and if there is a path from this widget to something bigger. It's just the MVP and seems to be pretty successful considering it has paying users already. At the end of the day, YC funds people, not companies. If they think you have some potential and can prove it with a little bit of traction or some background or having the right team. There were numerous companies in our batch that pivoted once they started the batch.
- Comevius 6y ago
  Unpopular opinion: Bootstrapping a profitable software company has never been easier, you don't usually need venture capital for it. It can even hurt you, because VCs tend to fund growth at all cost, so you can end up acquiring users at a loss without a chance for a sustainable business model.
snarkypixel 6y ago
Why invest in Microsoft back then? It was just a Basic compiler. Need to start somewhere before leaping to the next step, and momemtum creates momemtum. Amazon started with books. Paypal started with Ebay sellers or something. Airbnb started with couch sharing. Etc.
- rchaud 6y ago
  > Amazon started with books. Bezos would not have needed YC's measly $125K when the bank of Mom and Dad were offering double that.
lacker 6y ago
It sounds less trivial than an app that lets you put filters on your photos.
dillondoyle 6y ago
Wow this is relevant to me right now and I would love any (probably a bit blind to you) opinions: We are thinking of applying for a political accelerator. Probably a long shot but who knows and IDK even know if I want to spent near 100% of my time on something like this. But this is exactly my concern - that maybe we don't have enough of an 'app'? Right now the functionality sits inside a plugin on a 3rd party service. It's pretty full featured though replicating features of another standalone organizing app but within a different context. This is also building tools on top of cross-platform messaging so that's also relying on more 3rd parties - FB particularly i think probably could get rid of Messenger API they keep restricting it gradually. But the others are more stable and email/sms/chat will always be open. Read hear all the time don't base 100% of your business on FB... Which this isn't but still it's a big value of it. I also built other organizing tools that work together with this that might expand features to be more of a multi-product, but again probably 50% of that is built to work with another 3rd party SaaS!
spamizbad 6y ago
My guess is they made an investment in the team rather than the product. Nothing wrong with that.
brhsagain 6y ago
Did nobody bother to read the original post and OP’s responses? They are clearly aiming to be more than just a calendar, but rather a centralized place and improved UX for all of your notifications, including apps that don’t currently support easy notifications (e.g. Github). You may not think that’s valuable, they may not succeed at realizing that vision, but it is clearly not a case of “Mac only calendar menu bar app gets YC funding.” The lack of intellectual humility here is alarming. I don’t see the value in this thing selected by a 16-year investor, who actually has skin in the game to pick successful startups? Maybe there is something I’m not seeing. No, that can’t be it, YC must just be stupid.
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jeffreyrogers 6y ago
This is like asking if Toyota has lost its way because they make a crappy car one year. Except even sillier because the whole model of YC is to fund speculative things knowing that most won't be that valuable. Also, tough to judge a company by its earliest incarnation. I thought Facebook was pretty dumb when I first heard about it, but they turned out fine.
newusertoday 6y ago
Because they are betting on founders not the product, product will change based on market response to it remember segment?what it was when it was initially funded and what it became after pivot. In a way it is similar to asking why do you want to hire developer who does not have experience with xyz tech? this doesn't looks outrageous as we know experienced developer will eventually be able to learn and that is why we are hiring him/her. This is similar essentially we are betting on person not product/technology.
AlexandrB 6y ago
Y Combinator lost its way when it started funding predatory lending companies like LendUp. This is trivial by comparison.
- sjg007 6y ago
  Lend up is probably the nicest one. But I agree.
bernardv 6y ago
The whole industry is overhyped. But until investors keep throwing money at it, it will continue. Until it investors turn-off the tap.
- airhead969 6y ago
  I guess you're not a programmer if you don't know the diff between while and until.
jedberg 6y ago
I think this is actually a perfect example of YC finding its way again! They found a team they believed in, said, "Go build" and let them run. Then they dropped what they were doing and did something else. That's exactly how YC should be, and used to be. My complaint with YC lately is the exact opposite -- they keep investing in companies that have product market fit and profits. Those are great derisked investments, but not at all what YC used to do, which was investing in people, sometimes without any company at all. They've done a good job of moving back towards those types of investments, but Demo Day is still filled with, "Hi, we're the top experts in our field and we started a company a few years ago and have $1MM+ ARR and are profitable but we want investment to grow faster". And a lot of those companies look like they'll settle into a nice low 9-figure valuation, which is great for the company and YC, but boring for someone looking for the moonshots YC used to be known for.
theonemind 6y ago
They're in the business of making bad looking bets with limited downside and unlimited upside and losing most of them. Judging them for making stupid looking bets misses the point entirely. You can only judge the final results by percentage of winners and losers in the end and how big the winners are. That's what they do. They make stupid looking bets. That's the business. If that hurts their brand with anyone, then that person didn't understand what they're doing anyway.
bitwize 6y ago
A Mac-only widget sounds like a profitable enterprise. Mac users still buy their software, like the old days.
- airhead969 6y ago
  Far more people use mobile and tablets than Macs. And, this tabletization of Macs with iOS compatibility is its own undoing. Apple may want to kill desktop computing for all but the very rich. A widget for all would be a larger addressable market.
  - bitwize 6y ago
    Maybe, but how much could you charge per widget? Or do you have to embed adtech into it to turn a profit from it?
starwatch 6y ago
> The question to ask about an early stage startup is not "is this company taking over the world?" but "how big could this company get if the founders did the right things?" http://paulgraham.com/ds.html http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
ninenines 6y ago
It also is very disheartening to see few launch HN's not even getting 20-30 up votes. I can't even dare to imagine how demotivating it can be for the founders. I really wish YC can cater to as many startups as it can and hope the reason for this is not the growing batch sizes.
sjg007 6y ago
They said they pivoted from a video lecture platform which isn't a bad idea. There's plenty of opportunity in that space as well. I have kids distance learning and I have suggestions to improve things massively. That we have a vaccine now probably means that distance learning will end except in the cases where people like it. But there's a massive amount of opportunity around interactive whiteboarding. So the question is what does the status bar enable? That's the opportunity. I think of and want zapier in my status bar. I don't work for these guys but rather than dis the company let's figure out how to make them successful. I'd give a basic product away for free and focus on integrations.

368 points by impostervt 6y ago

“Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a backup app you can already build such yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem”

monkey_monkey 6y ago
Sure, the Dropbox comment will never stop being a meme. But in a world where, for example, a competing product like Fantastical already exists, costs less and does more, it does seem valid to be wondering what is going on.
- 2cb 6y ago
  As others have said, investments in startups are based a lot more on the potential of the team behind them than their existing products.
senko 6y ago
I don't think it's fair to compare a way to seamlessly move data around with "We’re building a calendar app for the Mac menu bar."
- stinkytaco 6y ago
  I think the point was that Dropbox was not at the time viewed as "seamlessly moving data around". We see it in retrospect as revolutionary, but that was certainly not the view at the time since many of us had already seen online storage platforms come and go (xdrive, anyone?). I will not comment on whether this calendar app is revolutionary, it might not be, but it's also possible it is something that will make an impact. There's lots of untapped potential in the calendar and event space, in my opinion.
afavour 6y ago
"People were too cynical about one YC startup, therefore any future cynicism is invalid" doesn't really make a lot of sense.
blackrock 6y ago
Is there an opportunity to make a cheaper Dropbox? Their paid service is very expensive.
- aparsons 6y ago
  OneDrive?

the-dude 6y ago

Although I had similar thoughts, one always needs to keep an open mind about what it can grow into. In the thread, it was obvious that for some people it would alleviate a pain : keeping track of synchronous events across multiple platforms.

lvs 6y ago
> one always needs to keep an open mind about what it can grow into. Why? There's no shortage of more serious and productive problems to solve.
- the-dude 6y ago
  Those are for you.
- pbronez 6y ago
  Personally I love seeing a funded company that's focused on client-side software to improve the productivity of general knowledge workers. It's a nice counterpoint to SaaS everything. Yes, there's a subscription fee. But that ensures ongoing development. Looking at this product, I'd expect it to grow into a powerful, personal RPA product. They could build a high quality, MacOS-native view into all the APIs in your life, with automation tooling and a great mobile story. But it has to start somewhere. :)
sitkack 6y ago
Step 1, get into the menu bar Step 2, ads! Though in seriousness, YC has said it is more about funding people than specific projects. And who knows where this lands on the path to the destination.

RicoElectrico 6y ago

My conclusion also, judging from a few latest Launch HN's that are prone to be featurized by the competition instead of building an ecosystem. Or being a good idea, but without a unicorn potential even if you strech your imagination. But I guess they only care about successful exits at a valuation that will make return on their investment. Or they may see what we mere mortals can't see.

pietrovismara 6y ago
> But I guess they only care about successful exits at a valuation that will make return on their investment Modern innovation at its finest

KMnO4 6y ago

Linked HN discussion, in which people were already (IMO rightfully so) very critical of the product: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26425318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26425318

s_dev 6y ago

Paul Graham: Startups at the begginning are alot more fragile than people think. It may be the case they've very little to show. I'm not seeing some tipping point here. YC has always had startups that were a bit funny or outright weak sounding -- their investment strategy pretty much means the idea must initially sound bad in the pitch. They're aiming for things that are counter intutitive to give them an advantage.

jack_riminton 6y ago
Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin.tv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin.tv which became Twitch And has some pretty successful alumni!
- mattnewton 6y ago
  I’m not sure I would use this as the example, Justin.tv was doing something a bit weird and different. Even if it didn’t pan out (which it didn’t before their pivot), it wasn’t clear at the time why it would work or not work. This product has many competitors in a crowded space, and the risk of being sherlock-ed.
  - jack_riminton 6y ago
    Right, which was exactly what was described in the grandparent comment

beervirus 6y ago

https://old.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/m2ypbx/has_y_combinator_lost_its_way_as_a_leading/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/m2ypbx/has_y_... Fixed link.

onion2k 6y ago

Literally every time you see a startup release a product that seems trivial it's because that's not the full story. You're judging without complete information. For example, the public face might be a simple Mac calendar widget, but that could be the gateway to calendar sharing, native office apps, meeting booking, event management, ticket sales, corporate flight sales etc. Building an audience with a cheap tool that solves a tiny pain point for a lot of people is a great way to build a direct relationship with a market that you can then sell other services to. I'm not saying that's the case here. Maybe their business is actually a widget. I'm saying that most businesses do far more than you can see from the outside.

nvrspyx 6y ago
When they started YC they were "a video lecture platform for professors"
- onion2k 6y ago
  They pivoted. It happens. That doesn't tell you anything about what their plans are now.
  - rvz 6y ago
    Just ask AstroPad and f.lux who both have been targets of being 'sherlocked'. I can only see that these guys are at risk of being sherlocked by Calendar.app, Google Calendar and Calendar.exe. Wonder what their answer to YC was when they were asked about that risk.
    - the-dude 6y ago
      For the curious : https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sherlocked https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sherlocked
      - harperlee 6y ago
        Thanks a lot! Could you paste it here? Work firewall blocks that site.

obayesshelton 6y ago

“No more looking for the Google calendar tab in Chrome.” Gustaf Alströmer Said nobody ever! It is literally three clicks away... 1. New Tab 2. Click dotted square 3. Click cal button

pietrovismara 6y ago
Or CTRL/CMD + T and type cal...autocomplete will do the rest
- kylecordes 6y ago
  Or "pin" a handful of tabs to keep them always available at the left edge of the list, one click or keypress away.
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sebdufbeau 6y ago
And now it's only 1 click away. I use Itsycal which is sensibly the same thing, and it really changed my relationship with my calendar. I would never pay a subscription for such a widget, but for the value is provides I would gladly pay a fixed price.

rvz 6y ago

In ~2016: Something was going to get sherlocked by a big fruit company or reinvented by a Chrome Extension for free or integrated into their own taskbar by a trillion dollar software company. Am I right f.lux? I don't think we'll get an answer from this company if the 'competition' decides to go the way on what they did to f.lux.

jrumbut 6y ago

Realizing a meeting is starting right now and then struggling to extract the Zoom link because the invite writer put it in some non-standard field or there's a surprise and it's some other meeting software happens often enough it's close to $10/month worth of pain. I guess what I would worry about is can they handle strange link placement, different meeting software, and times when I'm double or triple booked with different meetings?

sjg007 6y ago
I agree... so many times I click on a zoom link in the location field and it opens apple maps..

the_cat_kittles 6y ago

did y combinator ever find its way to begin with? besides making money, have any really useful things been funded by them? airbnb is the only one i can think of that is something im actually glad exists

pietrovismara 6y ago
> airbnb is the only one i can think of that is something im actually glad exists If you leave aside the fact that it destroyed housing in many cities, like the one I live in. A handful of landlords got richer, turists could travel cheaper (not necessarily a good thing overall), but an entire class of citizens got kicked out of the city as now no landlord wants to regularly rent their flat. If you ask for disruption, that's what you get. When you disrupt a market, you also disrupt many lives, even indirectly.
- 2cb 6y ago
  There's also the "ghost hotels." https://www.wired.co.uk/article/airbnb-scam-london https://www.wired.co.uk/article/airbnb-scam-london
- the_cat_kittles 6y ago
  that is true and bad. i was mostly just thinking superficially selfish perspective of things i like using.
tim333 6y ago
Reddit, Dropbox and Stipe are all quite good. I think they're doing pretty well.

exabrial 6y ago

I haven't seen a lot of "hard" startups, more like "lets chuck money at this and see if people buy it and then get out after 3 years" companies of late.

minikites 6y ago
The only purpose of wealth these days is to create more wealth. These accumulated assets are not serving any productive purpose, directly or indirectly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization#Roots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization#Roots >In the United States, probably more money has been made through the appreciation of real estate than in any other way. What are the long-term consequences if an increasing percentage of savings and wealth, as it now seems, is used to inflate the prices of already existing assets - real estate and stocks - instead of to create new production and innovation?
choxi 6y ago
YC seems pretty committed to hard tech startups, there's a big list here: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/4r-yc-and-hard-tech-startups https://www.ycombinator.com/library/4r-yc-and-hard-tech-star... It'd be interesting to see their % of investments in hard tech startups versus the entire VC industry. Ten years ago the entire VC industry was almost exclusively investing in software startups where many of them were sort of gimmicky social media apps or just taking a traditionally offline business and putting it on the cloud, I'd argue that YC was one of the first ones to buck that trend, Sam has a handful of posts just on hard startups. YC made 398 investments in 2020 and I estimated that at least 33 of them could be considered "hard tech" [1]. It's hard to judge what startups are "trivial software" versus "hard tech" without looking through each one, so I tried to just filter out anything software-related, even though many of those (maybe even most) are probably as non-trivial as a hard tech startup. 1. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?batch=S20&batch=W20&industry=Diagnostics&industry=Industrial%20Bio&industry=Drug%20Discovery%20and%20Delivery&industry=Medical%20Devices&industry=Manufacturing%20and%20Robotics&industry=Drones&industry=Automotive&industry=Aviation%20and%20Space https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?batch=S20&batch=W20&i...

alexhutcheson 6y ago

YC and other seed investors are betting more on people than on the specific business plan. If a founding team seems really smart, skilled, and driven, but is working on an idea that doesn’t seem to make immediate business sense, then it can still be worth betting on that team, because one of two things is reasonably likely to happen: 1. The team realizes that the business plan isn’t viable, and they pivot to something else, which might be. 2. The team was actually perceiving an opportunity you didn’t understand, and the idea ends up being a big success. This doesn’t have to work out all the time, or even most of the time - if you fund even one team that ends up pivoting into a runaway success, it pays for all the “bad” (in hindsight) bets that didn’t pay off.

2cb 6y ago
Indeed. Don't invest in ideas invest in people.
giu 6y ago
There's even a third option when you bet on people: The company can get acqui-hired by a bigger fish who's already a big presence within the almost same problem space.
- alexhutcheson 6y ago
  An acquisition doesn’t really score as a win for the seed investors in most cases, although it’s often a win for the team.

mbreese 6y ago

Doesn’t YC normally invest in the team rather than the idea? From their Launch HN post: > We started YC as a video lecture platform for professors but realized it was a horrible idea. We needed a new problem. Based on the how it started / how’s it going, it looks like they started in YC with one idea and realized they needed to pivot. The fact that this is what they came up with isn’t great, but at least it’s something. It wasn’t their first idea and it probably won’t stick, but that’s not terrible. I don’t think this one single company is a valid criticism of the entire system. Failure is the default end state for startups, so you take the not as good with the unicorns. And at least this one is still going!

beaconstudios 6y ago
Apologies in advance for the nitpick, but if you're just dropping your product and doing something else that's not really a pivot. Pivoting is more like changing your plan than throwing it out - targeting a different audience, changing your product plan based on feedback, that sort of thing.
- randallsquared 6y ago
  Their product is the company they're building, not any of the software or services, so "pivot" seems applicable after all. :)
  - beaconstudios 6y ago
    I think if you change both the product and the market then it's just giving up and doing something else!
- mbreese 6y ago
  I’d call changing the entire plan a “hard pivot.” I mean Slack started out as a video game (and Flickr - same game IIRC). But as the counter point, here’s an article that argues against doing that in favor of simply shutting down (including comments from a YC partner no less)! https://www.reforge.com/brief/why-hard-pivots-in-startups-are-deadly https://www.reforge.com/brief/why-hard-pivots-in-startups-ar... In this case though, the company is brand new. There aren’t a lot of employees involved. The valuations are low and most of the costs are sunk. There isn’t much to lose by trying something different. And they went from a video conferencing platform to managing scheduling for video conferences. It’s at least in the same ballpark. I guess what I’d say is that it is completely fair to criticize the team for the product they made. It isn’t something I’d spend money on and is in a crowded market with existing players (both free and paid). Not the best plan. But don’t criticize them for switching tracks. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. But at this stage, I don’t see much downside in them trying.

uptown 6y ago

I'm more interested in their privacy policy: "SHARING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION: We share your Personal Information with third parties (analytics tools) to help us use your Personal Information, as described above. We use analytics tools to track our users to improve our product and provide a better experience." Calendars, like contact lists, like emails, like all of the other personal content people produce everyday is sensitive. In lieu of saying how this is protected, apart from just saying it's simply used to make things better, I'm reluctant to link any accounts containing sensitive personal data to startups in search of a revenue-generating business model.

2cb 6y ago
And this is for a paid product as well. Bit of a pisstake when they charge you for the product and spy on you through it. It's like when you pay for a streaming service and it still shows you ads (looking at you, Amazon).
blackrock 6y ago
Does Google’s Calendar app share your personal information like this?
- uptown 6y ago
  Share like this? They are this.

Invictus0 6y ago

It's hardly the dumbest thing to come out of YCombinator. I think the other thing to remember is that these guys started with a videocall platform for professors, which is what won the pitch with the partners. Then they got cold feet and pivoted to this. I also don't think a single bad investment ruins the YC brand.

eitland 6y ago

2 observations: - I happily paid for a very similar product about 10 years ago (it was full screen width and had a brilliant timeline feature but otherwise very similar. It was broken when Snow Lion or something was released. I still look for an equivalent.) - Monthly payments forever for standalone apps is a big no no in my book. I get annoyed even just writing about it. Monthly payments for feature upgrades, perpetual license for last pud release (and some discount to encourage people to not jump on and off) is however totally OK with me. In this case however I think the price is generally too high anyway - for now.

acjohnson55 6y ago
As a monthly payment, it doesn't make sense for individuals. But I think that's fine for selling to businesses.
2cb 6y ago
> Monthly payments forever for standalone apps is a big no no in my book. I get annoyed even just writing about it. Same. I often see good software then see they run on a subscription model and nope right out of there. If it was a one-off reasonable price I'd pay. Sometimes I am happy to pay a small yearly fee if it's real nice software and I wanna support the dev. But monthly subscriptions is stupid to me.
- bombcar 6y ago
  A subscription has to provide SOMETHING that I consider “ongoing” to be of value to me - 1Password syncing for example, or email - before I’ll consider it. Otherwise I’m looking for another option as I can’t be five and dimed to death by little subscriptions.
  - alex_g 6y ago
    Do you consider "ongoing" to be synonymous with "server costs"? As someone trying to figure out a pricing model for a currently-local-only app, I'm genuinely curious.

criddell 6y ago

Maybe they are investing more in the founders than the product?

artembugara 6y ago

The product itself might not be a huge thing, right. However, it might be just a little tiny thing that they want to do. They launched ASAP. They've got some feedback. Etc. Next thing might be that they will reinvent the way we use calendars. Who knows? Not YC. But they will give it a shot. You start small (even if you have a trillion dollar ambitions), you grow.

beaconstudios 6y ago

... and Tesla started out selling small-batch sports cars to rich people. Long-term strategy often involves stepping stones.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago
Tesla started selling electric cars, and its still selling electric cars.
- beaconstudios 6y ago
  "Microsoft started out selling software and they still sell software. They haven't changed at all!" "Facebook started with a social network and they're still a social network! They haven't changed at all!" You're completely missing the point. You can do the same or similar things while starting with a small audience and scaling. Target a small pool to get product/market fit and gradually expand your target audience until you're a billion dollar company.
- colinmorelli 6y ago
  This comment is made with the hefty benefit of hindsight in which you can see what they've done since, and can now generalize to "electric cars" so that their whole arc has a cohesive narrative. Fast forward 3 years with this company and if they build their unified notification inbox product, with the benefit of hindsight you could say "Superpowered started selling productivity software, and its still selling productivity software" I have no idea if this company will pan out or not. But I do know it's very easy to craft historical narratives that seem so clear after the fact. I have watched many founders do it.

shp0ngle 6y ago

Nah, I don't think they should micro-manage all companies in their portfolio whether they fit their "brand image". This app is ridiculous, but maybe they had a good pitch or whatever, who knows. And if you have such a giant portfolio, they cannot all be diamonds.

drcode 6y ago

Well I guess the first order narrative around ycombinator is that they were successful by seeing opportunities that other investors missed. They think that you're like one of those investors, dismissing a company because they "are only creating a widget". (Though certainly your assessment could be accurate, regardless)

koluna 6y ago

Kind of a ridiculous product to find. When asked why a user needs to pay $10/mo, the answer was “We'd like to fall into the category of other consumer SaaS products” That’s the reason? Just shows how jokes become reality - everything is a subscription because you can squeeze more money that way, not because of actual value.

anonuser123456 6y ago
You can only squeeze more money when there is actual value...otherwise people simply don't pay.

adenozine 6y ago

Was there ever a time where YC only boosted deeply meaningful companies that were focused on uplifting humanity? I mean, no disrespect on yc, but it performs what it says on the tin. It's a business for businesses. Idk. I have tempered expectations moreso than some I guess. You've got a point, I just wonder how egregious is TOO much.

thinkingemote 6y ago
Is it possible for any investment arm to invest in endeavours to uplift humanity?
- adenozine 6y ago
  Yes, you might read about Socially Responsible Investing. Also, you can always contribute to charitable organizations. It's not an investment in the traditional sense, but changing the world to be 0.01% nicer is still a good investment.
- majani 6y ago
  Yup. Right now there is a rush to invest in African loan apps that have finally found ways to scalably extend credit to poor people in African countries. Hits a sweet spot between doing good and making business sense. There are also big investments in Africa into IOT companies that enable hire purchase for solar-powered home devices. Same sweet spot
aetherson 6y ago
I didn't read the objection as being that this company doesn't do enough for the common good of humanity, I read it as, this company doesn't have a large potential market.
aquadzn 6y ago
Bayes Impact

ThomPete 6y ago

A widget is just one way to express the business. If you are lucky enough to solve a complex problem and deliver value expressed in a simple widget, that is a perfect starting point for a much bigger business.

secondbreakfast 6y ago

I clicked through thinking I'd agree this is silly, but this is an incredibly compelling app. Downloaded and got it set up in less than 2 minutes. Already in love. Weighing if $10/mo is worth it and my immediate reaction isn't "No"

w3designer 6y ago
Itsycal does the same thing, for free: https://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/ https://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/
- secondbreakfast 6y ago
  Looks cool, thanks for the link. Sounds weird but the "join zoom"/"join hangout" button is really the most helpful part of this plugin. Perhaps Mowglii can add. I'm always 60 seconds late to meetings, finding my calendar, finding event, finding mtg link

ghiculescu 6y ago

I agree this product seems a bit uninspiring, but it is ironic that this complaint was posted on Reddit, which you could probably have made similar complaints about back in the day.

fortran77 6y ago
How is Reddit different from "hacker news?" It seems to be about the same thing.

colinplamondon 6y ago

I couldn't disagree more. I absolutely LOVE VimCal, and one of the reasons for that is the menubar functionality. Showing a countdown to my next meeting in my menubar, with one click video join, is super useful. The app itself shows how much room for improvement in calendar apps there is - their availability sharing and time travel features are consistently deeply helpful This is all to say, I think this product approach has a lot of merit. I primarily use Vimcal in its "App Mode", not its "Menubar Mode", but its menubar mode is super valuable. I happily pay Vimcal $15/mo, and love seeing in the space. Google Calendar and iCal are fucking terrible. I hope the SuperPowered guys crush it.

philip1209 6y ago

You can question YC's process, but its results are indisputable.

dave_aiello 6y ago

I'm going to repeat that Fantastical does 95% of what Superpowered claims to do. And Fantastical has features that Superpowered clearly does not have, such as a really good natural language mechanism for event and task creation. And subscription costs are less. https://flexibits.com/fantastical https://flexibits.com/fantastical

1123581321 6y ago
Flexibits' weakness is engineering, though. They could get eaten by a competitor that works its way up to a full calendar with a stronger foundation. Fantastical 3's move upmarket in response to Calendar.app improvements hasn't been easy for them so I don't know how much further they could push themselves. That's not to say that a new competitor will put Flexibits out of business, but if the market for calendar management expands, I wouldn't expect Fantastical's share to grow proportionally. So there's an opportunity.
- dave_aiello 6y ago
  I think part of the reason they evolved this way is because iOS has a shared calendar database which is surfaced by the API called EventKit, https://developer.apple.com/documentation/eventkit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/eventkit. This also exists on macOS and WatchOS, but I think it existed in iOS first.
908B64B197 6y ago
To just get the menu bar widget there is https://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/ https://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/ It's free. No paid upgrade or subscription. Just installed it.
- human_error 6y ago
  There's also MeetingBar (https://meetingbar.onrender.com https://meetingbar.onrender.com). Free and open source. Unlike these guys it doesn't collect data (https://meetingbar.onrender.com/privacy/ https://meetingbar.onrender.com/privacy/).

tosh 6y ago

big things have small beginnings

sharker8 6y ago

I know someone who raised over 50M to improve technical presales. If anyone has ever worked in this context they'll know it's inefficient. First product: a chrome extension that does time tracking. The question is will this succeed because of the money raised, the domain knowledge of the founders, or the quality of the product? Or some combination of the above.

fallingknife 6y ago

People misunderstand YC's business model. They invest 125K for a 7% stake in the company. That's a <$2 million valuation. If this company sells a couple thousand (at $120/y), YC breaks even. If they sell a couple million, YC gets back 1000x on their money. It's a great investment.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
I dunno if you've got the math right here. A thousand units is enough to pay one junior engineer on an ongoing basis (assuming tier 1 or tier 2 US city). You still have to pay marketing and other costs. AFAICT you probably need a minimum of 3k subscriptions to break even. If they can't break even then their business isn't worth much, even if it has a couple thousand subscribers. No shot they are selling millions of these. But tens of thousands seems within the realm of possibility, and it would be a very profitable small enterprise if they managed it without a huge marketing budget.
utborin 6y ago
And if they sell four? Wish I still had a copy but there was a brilliant story printed years ago called something like "there are numbers smaller than 1%." It illustrated the fallacy in the thinking behind saying things like, "even if we only sell 1%, we'll be rich." Just because you pick some arbitrarily small number as your minimum sales doesn't mean it's actually the minimum, or even the most likely minimum. You could sell a couple hundred. You could sell ten. You could sell zero.
- mrkurt 6y ago
  If they sell zero, YC's investment is worth $0 just like it is for half of the companies they invest in. The success rate for hope-to-be-unicorn startups is very low.
- cbsks 6y ago
  This is probably the story you are thinking of: https://sive.rs/1pct https://sive.rs/1pct It was discussed on HN at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=847334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=847334

llaolleh 6y ago

Jesus Christ people. Give it a break. I hate this Reddit post. You're not going to build the next Apple today by making your first product a full fledged competitive modern computer. Remember that Microsoft started with a BASIC interpreter. Apple themselves started with a niche computer back then that sold to less 500 hobbyists at a hobbyist computer shop. The next Apple would also have to build something extremely niche that no one is paying attention to. Something like this.

antoniuschan99 6y ago
It’s not a knock on the product but moreso on ycombinator. It’s questioning why such a product is being funded (at least at this stage when it’s so niche and only available on mac) and if there’s a bigger issue in the ycombinator system funding “trivial” startups The other side of the coin could be they’re getting funded because yc likes the founders :)
- ryneandal 6y ago
  > The other side of the coin could be they’re getting funded because yc likes the founders :) I think you're entirely correct. It's akin to hiring, sometimes the best prospect isn't the one with the most relevant experience.
- llaolleh 6y ago
  If you want a crazy win, then you have to invest in some crazy things. Crazy simple also makes sense. YC is doing what they were created to do. To invest in extremely early stage startups no one is willing to bet on. But maybe their product is questioning a fundamental assumption that is outdated that has not been thrown out yet, given current technological advances. Who knows. You could be right on founders. Founders are hungry people. If there is one thing I've learned in my short time on Earth is do not underestimate hungry people.
  - andreilys 6y ago
    Investing in a calendar widget is not a “crazy idea nobody will bet on” This is something that’s easily bootstrapped and which can be run as a lifestyle business at best.

908B64B197 6y ago

As pointed out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26435782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26435782 there's already a free mac utility that does exactly what they are doing. https://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/ https://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/ Syncs to Google Calendar and just... works?

gpjanik 6y ago

It's an MVP. MVP of Stripe was a HTML form and a bunch of guys on the phone. The Author definitely should apply to Y Combinator to understand how startups can leverage small products to get off the ground in the pursuit for a bigger idea.

TomAnthony 6y ago

Offtopic: I despair that a calendar widget for my Mac is now a pay monthly thing. It is becoming widespread that things that were previously just a piece of software you could buy (then optionally upgrade in the future) are now a monthly cost. It makes sense for high ticket pieces of software (Office, Photoshop), where it makes it more accessible for regular users. However, for a calendar widget or many similar examples that come up nowadays, it just turns me off immediately.

hntrader 6y ago
It also makes sense when the software has high recurring marginal costs per user (so, not calendar software), such as with high ongoing data egress costs (Dropbox, Netflix, YouTube). The model there needs to be subscription or advertising.
tschellenbach 6y ago
Engineering salaries have increased quite a bit. Pay once doesn't seem very sustainable, unless the volume is extremely high.
dormento 6y ago
This is not offtopic at all. Remember when a certain company wanted to make us pay monthly for... _squeezing fruit juice packs_ ? The startup/invest world follows some weird-ass rules, to be honest.

aseerdbnarng 6y ago

This is a bad take! The joys of markets are you don’t know upfront what will or won't work and weirdness needs to be celebrated not looked down upon.

haolez 6y ago

Maybe the Y Combinator board invested in the team, and not the idea/product? I'd be on that.

ajsharp 6y ago

This is an MVP, v1 of the product and v0.1 of the company. Judge it as such, with the understanding that things will evolve and grow, or not. 2 thoughts on YC, 1 on the company. ON YC: YC's model is: place lots of small bets. They have presumably grown considerably in the last 10+ years, and are likely now managing a lot more capital than they were initially, which means they need to place many more tiny bets than they initially were. YC accepts many teams who just apply as a team. In other words, YC is not really in the business of evaluating ideas; they evaluate founders and give them money depending probably 80% on the founding team and 20% on the idea. ON THE COMPANY: On the company/product, calendar-ing is a relatively high leverage problem. Everyone on the (digital) planet uses a calendar every single day. Scheduling stuff is a nightmare. Being on time for stuff is a nightmare. Apple Calendar sucks. Google Calendar sucks. I assume Microsoft Office calendar also sucks. If you solve this problem in a better way to the extent people are willing to pay for it (not to be underestimated, see Superhuman), there is a large direct and indirect market for such software. Now, if you have a successful calendar app, you could do something like calendly, which is already a billion dollar company. Try to remember, a lot of companies that come out of YC are in MONTH 3 of their lifecycle. The initial footprint can look small, but dig a little deeper and a lot there. Small footprint, big ideas.

peterthehacker 6y ago

I think that this is an important question and I disagree that “YC has lost its way”. I think that we’re seeing more and more companies come out of YC that have a bottom up, Growth/Product focus instead of the traditional Sales/Tech focus B2B companies have historically had, which makes companies like this look like nothing special tech-wise, but look at their love on PH . They’re onto something. Martin Casado, from a16z, has a great post/talk about this trend. https://a16z.com/2019/08/09/video-growth-sales-and-a-new-era-of-b2b/ https://a16z.com/2019/08/09/video-growth-sales-and-a-new-era...

mathattack 6y ago

I will believe YC has lost its way when every idea they back seems obvious up front.

draw_down 6y ago

“No more looking for the Google calendar tab in Chrome.” - Gustaf Alströmer “I just joined a meeting 3 minutes late instead of 5 because of Superpowered, which is a resounding success in my book.” - Jeff Barg Well, I must admit this is not the most compelling sales pitch in the world. It almost seems like satire. I understand the utility, but the calendar tab is ok.

realmod 6y ago

I think people are overlooking the third sentence in the post, which clearly states that they were accepted to build a video lecture platform but then later pivoted to this productivity tool. I don't think YC would invest in a trivial product like this, even if the team had higher aspirations, but that is going off the very basic knowledge I have of YC.

lnanek2 6y ago

As a developer 70% of my time is in XCode and Github. Guess where the rest is? Google Calendar and Google Hangout. I discount Gmail because I just use my phone for that, swiping away messages while compiling. Want to know where my boss is from 7am to 7pm every day? Google Calendar and Google Hangout. Calendar is a really bad product that needs disruption as well. I imported my victor ops on call schedule the other day and it imported wrong, so then I had to go through an entire year of two meetings a day fixing it, something that would have taken 10 seconds if they let you search and delete results. Re Mac only, the first stage of a startup is finding product market fit. It isn't about making your product work on every platform. In fact that's counter productive. The goal is to have the shortest build-release-learn cycle, if you are porting to multiple platforms, you just increased your build time, which increases your cycle time, which means you will take longer to reach product market fit. Once you do, you can go port to every platform, but it's harmful to do it early.

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growt 6y ago

After a brief search, because I like the functionality and dislike the price point I found this: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1532419400 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1532419400 Open source, free (both as in beer and freedom), small memory footprint. Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23991111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23991111

krm01 6y ago

According to OP, YC would have lost its ways had it invested in TheFacebook. Why would anyone invest in a harvard exclusive social network.

rchaud 6y ago
Exclusivity sells. A social network of thousands of engaged Harvard students and alumni can be monetized in all sorts of ways, even today.

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nkotov 6y ago

I went through YC S20 and it's been amazing. It opened up a whole new world to me that I previously didn't have access to. I come from a poor, immigrant family with no fancy college background. I'm located in a non-tech hub city. This was my first startup and getting to partake in YC essentially put me and my company on the map. The internal network itself is also fantastic and the value of having group partners (mine were founders of several companies that you all used) who have experience. I think a lot of people miss the fact that YC at the end of the day doesn't care about the actual idea / product but if there is a way it could be used by millions and if there is a path from this widget to something bigger. It's just the MVP and seems to be pretty successful considering it has paying users already. At the end of the day, YC funds people, not companies. If they think you have some potential and can prove it with a little bit of traction or some background or having the right team. There were numerous companies in our batch that pivoted once they started the batch.

Comevius 6y ago
Unpopular opinion: Bootstrapping a profitable software company has never been easier, you don't usually need venture capital for it. It can even hurt you, because VCs tend to fund growth at all cost, so you can end up acquiring users at a loss without a chance for a sustainable business model.

snarkypixel 6y ago

Why invest in Microsoft back then? It was just a Basic compiler. Need to start somewhere before leaping to the next step, and momemtum creates momemtum. Amazon started with books. Paypal started with Ebay sellers or something. Airbnb started with couch sharing. Etc.

rchaud 6y ago
> Amazon started with books. Bezos would not have needed YC's measly $125K when the bank of Mom and Dad were offering double that.

lacker 6y ago

It sounds less trivial than an app that lets you put filters on your photos.

dillondoyle 6y ago

Wow this is relevant to me right now and I would love any (probably a bit blind to you) opinions: We are thinking of applying for a political accelerator. Probably a long shot but who knows and IDK even know if I want to spent near 100% of my time on something like this. But this is exactly my concern - that maybe we don't have enough of an 'app'? Right now the functionality sits inside a plugin on a 3rd party service. It's pretty full featured though replicating features of another standalone organizing app but within a different context. This is also building tools on top of cross-platform messaging so that's also relying on more 3rd parties - FB particularly i think probably could get rid of Messenger API they keep restricting it gradually. But the others are more stable and email/sms/chat will always be open. Read hear all the time don't base 100% of your business on FB... Which this isn't but still it's a big value of it. I also built other organizing tools that work together with this that might expand features to be more of a multi-product, but again probably 50% of that is built to work with another 3rd party SaaS!

spamizbad 6y ago

My guess is they made an investment in the team rather than the product. Nothing wrong with that.

brhsagain 6y ago

Did nobody bother to read the original post and OP’s responses? They are clearly aiming to be more than just a calendar, but rather a centralized place and improved UX for all of your notifications, including apps that don’t currently support easy notifications (e.g. Github). You may not think that’s valuable, they may not succeed at realizing that vision, but it is clearly not a case of “Mac only calendar menu bar app gets YC funding.” The lack of intellectual humility here is alarming. I don’t see the value in this thing selected by a 16-year investor, who actually has skin in the game to pick successful startups? Maybe there is something I’m not seeing. No, that can’t be it, YC must just be stupid.

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jeffreyrogers 6y ago

This is like asking if Toyota has lost its way because they make a crappy car one year. Except even sillier because the whole model of YC is to fund speculative things knowing that most won't be that valuable. Also, tough to judge a company by its earliest incarnation. I thought Facebook was pretty dumb when I first heard about it, but they turned out fine.

newusertoday 6y ago

Because they are betting on founders not the product, product will change based on market response to it remember segment?what it was when it was initially funded and what it became after pivot. In a way it is similar to asking why do you want to hire developer who does not have experience with xyz tech? this doesn't looks outrageous as we know experienced developer will eventually be able to learn and that is why we are hiring him/her. This is similar essentially we are betting on person not product/technology.

AlexandrB 6y ago

Y Combinator lost its way when it started funding predatory lending companies like LendUp. This is trivial by comparison.

sjg007 6y ago
Lend up is probably the nicest one. But I agree.

bernardv 6y ago

The whole industry is overhyped. But until investors keep throwing money at it, it will continue. Until it investors turn-off the tap.

airhead969 6y ago
I guess you're not a programmer if you don't know the diff between while and until.

jedberg 6y ago

I think this is actually a perfect example of YC finding its way again! They found a team they believed in, said, "Go build" and let them run. Then they dropped what they were doing and did something else. That's exactly how YC should be, and used to be. My complaint with YC lately is the exact opposite -- they keep investing in companies that have product market fit and profits. Those are great derisked investments, but not at all what YC used to do, which was investing in people, sometimes without any company at all. They've done a good job of moving back towards those types of investments, but Demo Day is still filled with, "Hi, we're the top experts in our field and we started a company a few years ago and have $1MM+ ARR and are profitable but we want investment to grow faster". And a lot of those companies look like they'll settle into a nice low 9-figure valuation, which is great for the company and YC, but boring for someone looking for the moonshots YC used to be known for.

theonemind 6y ago

They're in the business of making bad looking bets with limited downside and unlimited upside and losing most of them. Judging them for making stupid looking bets misses the point entirely. You can only judge the final results by percentage of winners and losers in the end and how big the winners are. That's what they do. They make stupid looking bets. That's the business. If that hurts their brand with anyone, then that person didn't understand what they're doing anyway.

bitwize 6y ago

A Mac-only widget sounds like a profitable enterprise. Mac users still buy their software, like the old days.

airhead969 6y ago
Far more people use mobile and tablets than Macs. And, this tabletization of Macs with iOS compatibility is its own undoing. Apple may want to kill desktop computing for all but the very rich. A widget for all would be a larger addressable market.
- bitwize 6y ago
  Maybe, but how much could you charge per widget? Or do you have to embed adtech into it to turn a profit from it?

starwatch 6y ago

> The question to ask about an early stage startup is not "is this company taking over the world?" but "how big could this company get if the founders did the right things?" http://paulgraham.com/ds.html http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

ninenines 6y ago

It also is very disheartening to see few launch HN's not even getting 20-30 up votes. I can't even dare to imagine how demotivating it can be for the founders. I really wish YC can cater to as many startups as it can and hope the reason for this is not the growing batch sizes.

sjg007 6y ago

They said they pivoted from a video lecture platform which isn't a bad idea. There's plenty of opportunity in that space as well. I have kids distance learning and I have suggestions to improve things massively. That we have a vaccine now probably means that distance learning will end except in the cases where people like it. But there's a massive amount of opportunity around interactive whiteboarding. So the question is what does the status bar enable? That's the opportunity. I think of and want zapier in my status bar. I don't work for these guys but rather than dis the company let's figure out how to make them successful. I'd give a basic product away for free and focus on integrations.