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I have some sympathy for the difficulty evaluating tech plays when "an RSS search engine" turns into twitter. These ideas are the starting point, but it's diff
by new299 5y ago
I have some sympathy for the difficulty evaluating tech plays when "an RSS search engine" turns into twitter.
These ideas are the starting point, but it's difficult to tell what they might turn into. Quite possibly they evaluate the ability of the founders to shape the company into something interesting during the program.
But more than that, they're probability are trying to figure out how well the founders will perform at demo day, after they've helped them polish the play.
- wearywanderer 5y ago"Invest in the team" makes some sense when you're talking about bright people with a lame idea (RSS search engine, or whatever.) But in this case the idea isn't merely lame; it's a scam, and the team being invested in are a team of con-artists. What might they pivot to, if not another scam?
- aidenn0 5y agoA key skill of con-artists is being able to make yourself resemble someone competent. If you go back to 5 years ago, YC probably wasn't on the radar for con artists yet, but starting about then, it was becoming clear that VCs had more money than there were good companies to fund. We are now seeing the results.
- api 5y agoUnfortunately the con artists make funding harder for people who are not con artists. A con artist can spend 100% of their time and effort on polish and marketing, while someone trying to actually do something often has to make those things an afterthought. I’m sure the con artists have much better decks and web sites.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- RapidFire 5y ago"Invest in the team" gets you Juicero. Great ambition; they raised a bunch of money. Great production; watch a tear down of the Juicero product itself, it is a mechanical work of art. Great potential; a SaaS for a fruit drink? Lots of people love fruit drinks! They can buy our packets of delicious pre-made juice, people drinking juice is a huge Billion Dollar Market™! Stupid Idea! You can just squeeze the juice out of the bag by hand, no fancy device needed. It is less convenient than pouring from a bottle! Does it really taste better than the delicious organic juice you can buy at any grocery store in every city for a lower price? Lets put one hundred and twenty million dollars behind it and find out. Hahahahahahahahaha big swing and miss! Survey said? No. You can of course have a great team with the smartest best credentialed people working on the idea motivated by tons of money. If the idea is bad they still fail, maybe they can pivot, but probably not.
- ALittleLight 5y agoYCombinator doesn't put in that much money though. I'm sure they don't intentionally fund scams or juiceros, but if they do, that's not the end of the world. It's a bigger deal to miss the dumb thing that turns out to be good then to accidentally fund a few dumb things.
- RapidFire 5y agoTotally agree not trying to be critical of YC. Situations like Juicero, Theranos, this topic, et al scams, are interesting to observe.
- wearywanderer 5y agoThe Juicero was very overbuilt, I know because I watched the AvE video, but isn't that a sign of amateur engineering? I'm thinking of the old saying that anybody can make a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to make one that barely stands.
- RapidFire 5y agoHah! It's totality overbuilt for a product that squeezes a bag of Juice! That being said the idea did work for Coffee: e.g Keurig; just not juice. >it takes an engineer to make one that barely stands. Engineers do not build bridges that barely stand. They build bridges that they reason will stand for an amount of time in the conditions they predict the bridge will be subject to versus the cost required to build said bridge. They build realizing that no bridge will stand forever but it must stand for a specified amount of time. They build to "Correct", Not "Perfect"