7 ms·

Six best start-ups from Y Combinator demo day

93 points by polvi 18y ago

ibsulon 18y ago
The one thing I'm not sure about foodoro is... I understand paying one shipping price if I'm buying from a food catalog. However, buying six things from six vendors gets expensive pretty quickly. (Ten dollars of shipping for three fairly lightweight items?)
- gcheong 18y ago
  Probably not the weight so much as the need to have items shipped quickly to maintain freshness. Even so, when you pay almost as much in shipping as the food item the value add drops off rather quickly for me.
- diN0bot 18y ago
  Plus, I'd rather see a company encouraging people to buy local and depend less on high-energy infrastructure. I suppose specialty food shops could themselves buy local and avoid supporting mega-corp farms, and there are likely other 'goods' I'm not seeing right now. Nonetheless, this strikes me as the wrong direction. Maybe I'm temporarily blinded by recent 'rebuild better over the recession' optimism.
  - patio11 18y ago
    Plus, I'd rather see a company encouraging people to buy local and depend less on high-energy infrastructure The high-energy infrastructure is the car trip to "local", not making additional use at the margin of mail trucks which would travel the same streets regardless of whether they had another case of organic blueberry jam on them or not.
  - browser411 18y ago
    Shipping has gotten to be very efficient. There are studies that show that someone driving to a store (~15 miles roundtrip) produces a lot more carbon emissions than UPS delivering a package to their door.
- KWD 18y ago
  Not everyone gets the Amazon shipping rates. Shipping is actually one of the toughest areas to try and compete in for a small ecommerce site, and it's probably the number one complaint received since people have come to expect free or extremely low cost shipping. If using UPS/Fedex, you get the fuel surcharges, residential charges, and rural charges that can make a small profitable order become unprofitable (and cuts into profit margins of others). It can even be almost $10 to ship a 1-lb package in-state if to a rural area. And then you have to consider box cost, and void fill cost. I switched to USPS last year for 90% of my shipping, and it's still a loss at times from what I charge for shipping.
  - jonknee 18y ago
    > Not everyone gets the Amazon shipping rates. No, but almost everyone can take advantage of Amazon's discounted rates. http://www.amazonservices.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon.htm http://www.amazonservices.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon.... It won't work for shipping food, but it can be a real money saver for non-perishable items. You don't even have to pay shipping costs if you sell the items on Amazon.com, just pay the fulfillment fee and the customer can use Prime or Super Saving shipping.
gojomo 18y ago
The writeup describes Wattvision as being "whole-house only". For all I know, that's true. However, if it's got sufficient resolution to give "15 second" updates, it seems you could train it to recognize certain draws: holding everything else constant, turn individual items on at exact cues given by the software. (The software might even be able to form hypotheses about individual draws before they're exactly named. Then the user just goes in and recognizes certain steps on the constructed timeline: "oh, yeah, that's the hallway light I turn on when I get home from work, and that's obviously the electric dryer, and this random thing must be the refrigerator compressor coming on and off through the night.")
- lutorm 18y ago
  Wattvision sounds cool, but I'd be worried about their business model since PG&E are replacing their meters with digital ones that report back to PG&E. I seem to remember hearing that they are rolling out a similar service, too.
  - gojomo 18y ago
    Any startup should consider itself blessed to compete with PG&E. (And if Wattvision's tech is superior, the big utilities are far more likely to become customers than competitors.)
    - enjo 18y ago
      There is also existing competition that does some REALLY cool things (like Tendril, http://www.tendrilinc.com/ http://www.tendrilinc.com/)
    - lutorm 18y ago
      Why would that be a blessing? If PG&E comes and puts in a digital meter for which their little gadget doesn't work, they're back to page 0.
      - gojomo 18y ago
        PG&E is a big, slow, regulated utility unlikely to rush in executing anything. And even if PG&E did rush to digitize, that would only mean more pressure on other utilities (even in other markets) to adopt a cheap ready-to-go solution, and more opportunities for software innovations that can take the data from any source (digicam or utilityco meter).
old-gregg 18y ago
Am I the only pessimist here? After being bombarded with "ideas are cheap" nonsense all I can see is the same old "share, sync, discover, publish" stuff re-packaged and re-wrapped with different version of rounded corners, peppered with the same old&boring punches like "groundbreaking", "easy to use" and "disruptive" over and over again? I mean come on, does anyone really believe that sharing a photo on the net is an unsolved problem? Hey, here's an unsolved problem for you: endless signups everywhere - every single person who owns a computer will tell you that they're fucking tired of logging into gmail or yahoo mail or whatever, and "remember me" checkboxes work only for a little while. But sharing a photo online? I never heard anyone complaining: we all have multiple "Share!!!" buttons staring at us in iPhoto, Picasa, Vista, whatever and we don't give a flying fuck. And how about millions of people screaming in pain who sit in front of their half-dead Windows machines, overloaded with spyware, malware, bloated slow registry and 8174 useless "services" running in background, slowing everything down, showing marketing messages from Logitech and overall ruining their everyday experience? Who's smart enough to solve that mess in 3 months? Those obvious, screaming-in-your-face issues remain unsolved because they are HARD and, therefore, fall into a problematic category of problems that work against conventional "release often, release early" wisdom. After all, it seems like sending 140 characters to a list of subscribers can pass as a billion dollar technology, why bother with stupid Windows users? Actually I believe that great, ambitious ideas are very, very rare and are, by far, the most important ingredient for a true innovation, for a true sustainable business. Great idea, more than anything else, separates Googles, Microsofts and Yahoos from thousands of tiny "widget" startups, focused on minimal coding and fastest time-to-flip, created and sold-or-died within two years, leaving everybody but the founders with nothing but lesser quality of personal lives, which makes their "change the world with us" hiring songs look kinda hilarious. Ideas are priceless. If you are a programmer and you aren't "plugged" into the bubble money, a great idea is your only chance. Crappy-idea-great-execution companies are usually examples of networking/salesmanship skills, something programmers aren't terribly good at. In the end, not a single YC-funded startup can compete with something like Mongrel, a one-man non-commercial effort which, when measured in value it brought into this world, or how much people wanted it, is what defines wealth, according to PG's own writings. I've been following YC-backed companies for more than 2 years and not a single one produced something I wanted. Come on, I am a computer-savvy, technology-loving, ad-blocking geek with a huge PC-per-capita ratio and a hefty tech gadget/software monthly budget, how come none of these startups managed to get a single dollar out of me? Am I alone asking myself this question?
inrev 18y ago
Is there any video coverage of the event?
- socmoth 18y ago
  usually it isn't filmed because people haven't launched. it is an investor event, not a publicity event.
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
jacoblyles 18y ago
Foodoro seems most clearly positioned to make money. Some of the others look like it's acquisition or bust. It's nice to see that most are trying to charge for something. It's easy to see how cloudkick could make money, especially since their competitors already charge for similar services. However, they should probably put out a pricing plan soon. It might even draw more interest to their company (a giffen good!) because potential customers might want to do business with a company that looks like it is making money and therefore stable.
saprasad 18y ago
I have an idea. Please comment on it. Idea is about a personal info mgmt site. The system allows user to define any number of entity like Contact (Name,Address, Phone No, ..), CC-Txion Info (...) in easy steps (like online form creator but easier) and add data to it. Allows to download data (Excel) and cleanup the data if needed. Common search feature to search for info across all entities. Basically this system lies between Unstructured wiki (Easy) and Complex website generator (Online form/page builder) (Complex).
Tichy 18y ago
I like thesixtyone. I wish we could start over with music and eliminate all non-free music from the world. Sure, there is the one or other old gem I am still attached to (Radiohead for example), but the sacrifice would be worth it.
- unalone 18y ago
  That's an awful mindset to have. With all respect to TheSixtyOne, the minds in the world that are making the best music aren't putting their stuff into a social commune. They're aware of how talented they are, and as such they're looking for compensation for their ability. In all of history, the vast majority of the best art has come to us commercially. There are always exceptions, and it tends to be that the free breeding grounds lead to the next generation's brilliant artists, but people do things for money. To quote a brilliant actor in a film by a gifted director, both of whom were paid substantially: "If you can do something well, never do it for free."
  - Tichy 18y ago
    It's more complicated than that. I don't pretend to have all the answers, but the best artists also admit that they are standing on the shoulders of giants. A piece of music that I am not allowed to "use", other than passively consume, is worthless to me - as worthless as watching TV 24/7. It might be entertaining, but in the end I would wish that I had not wasted my time in such a way. In that sense I wish the "closed source art" would not even exist, because at the end of the day it is just a pain in the butt. Take photography, for example: say there is a really nice building in a street, an architectural marble. Fine - only now I am not allowed to take a photo of my girl-friend in front of the building anymore and put it on the internet, because the architect has the copyright. I'd rather live in a world where I can take a photograph without having to consult a lawyer first. Ultimately the art is interesting to me because of it's meaning, not because of it's commercial value. I am not at all against artists earning money, but I don't think TheSixtyOne is a piracy site, either.
floozyspeak 18y ago
Another thing people aren't factoring in is the rush YC gets from being the "great uncle" to all these startups. Incubators are in, they are popping up all over the country. They themselves are a biz model thats attractive to investors. Seed money into multiple projects, get a window seat on all the advancements. YC is in the biz of banking potential IP.
dpnewman 18y ago
I would say that no problem is ever "solved". So, while "me too" offerings are ever abundant, it's always gonna be a few that offer something that resonates on a greater level, and offers yet a better way sometimes in arenas that we don't even see as problems. I also think that beyond the login issue -- the whole social network concept ultimately has to be pulled from being site-centric into being web-centric. The web itself in its entirety is my social network; and I bring different friend combos and profiles with me to the different places I go -- gracefully evolving these rather than constantly recreating them. Certainly there needs to be a "lightly branded" API for friendship/profile but beyond that I think the missing piece is a best-of-breed UI that sites can be "inject" to leverage the API. Should only require a few lines of Javascript code to add a friendship system. FB Connect can be learned from in this ... paving that road -- it's limitation in my opinion is the heavy branding and assumption that we only will need 1 set of friends or 1 profile and. Of course ...the challenge is adoption... without the easy add injected UI, complete coverage of friendship and profile management ...a simple API alone or universal login system is not enough.
joanou 18y ago
That's a sad bunch of start ups. Nothing excites me and it has all been done already. If implemented, they'll just add to the noise of little apps that I'd have to invest time in. Oh yea...how are they going to acquire customers and make a profit?

93 points by polvi 18y ago

The one thing I'm not sure about foodoro is... I understand paying one shipping price if I'm buying from a food catalog. However, buying six things from six vendors gets expensive pretty quickly. (Ten dollars of shipping for three fairly lightweight items?)

gcheong 18y ago
Probably not the weight so much as the need to have items shipped quickly to maintain freshness. Even so, when you pay almost as much in shipping as the food item the value add drops off rather quickly for me.
diN0bot 18y ago
Plus, I'd rather see a company encouraging people to buy local and depend less on high-energy infrastructure. I suppose specialty food shops could themselves buy local and avoid supporting mega-corp farms, and there are likely other 'goods' I'm not seeing right now. Nonetheless, this strikes me as the wrong direction. Maybe I'm temporarily blinded by recent 'rebuild better over the recession' optimism.
- patio11 18y ago
  Plus, I'd rather see a company encouraging people to buy local and depend less on high-energy infrastructure The high-energy infrastructure is the car trip to "local", not making additional use at the margin of mail trucks which would travel the same streets regardless of whether they had another case of organic blueberry jam on them or not.
- browser411 18y ago
  Shipping has gotten to be very efficient. There are studies that show that someone driving to a store (~15 miles roundtrip) produces a lot more carbon emissions than UPS delivering a package to their door.
KWD 18y ago
Not everyone gets the Amazon shipping rates. Shipping is actually one of the toughest areas to try and compete in for a small ecommerce site, and it's probably the number one complaint received since people have come to expect free or extremely low cost shipping. If using UPS/Fedex, you get the fuel surcharges, residential charges, and rural charges that can make a small profitable order become unprofitable (and cuts into profit margins of others). It can even be almost $10 to ship a 1-lb package in-state if to a rural area. And then you have to consider box cost, and void fill cost. I switched to USPS last year for 90% of my shipping, and it's still a loss at times from what I charge for shipping.
- jonknee 18y ago
  > Not everyone gets the Amazon shipping rates. No, but almost everyone can take advantage of Amazon's discounted rates. http://www.amazonservices.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon.htm http://www.amazonservices.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon.... It won't work for shipping food, but it can be a real money saver for non-perishable items. You don't even have to pay shipping costs if you sell the items on Amazon.com, just pay the fulfillment fee and the customer can use Prime or Super Saving shipping.

gojomo 18y ago

The writeup describes Wattvision as being "whole-house only". For all I know, that's true. However, if it's got sufficient resolution to give "15 second" updates, it seems you could train it to recognize certain draws: holding everything else constant, turn individual items on at exact cues given by the software. (The software might even be able to form hypotheses about individual draws before they're exactly named. Then the user just goes in and recognizes certain steps on the constructed timeline: "oh, yeah, that's the hallway light I turn on when I get home from work, and that's obviously the electric dryer, and this random thing must be the refrigerator compressor coming on and off through the night.")

lutorm 18y ago
Wattvision sounds cool, but I'd be worried about their business model since PG&E are replacing their meters with digital ones that report back to PG&E. I seem to remember hearing that they are rolling out a similar service, too.
- gojomo 18y ago
  Any startup should consider itself blessed to compete with PG&E. (And if Wattvision's tech is superior, the big utilities are far more likely to become customers than competitors.)
  - enjo 18y ago
    There is also existing competition that does some REALLY cool things (like Tendril, http://www.tendrilinc.com/ http://www.tendrilinc.com/)
  - lutorm 18y ago
    Why would that be a blessing? If PG&E comes and puts in a digital meter for which their little gadget doesn't work, they're back to page 0.
    - gojomo 18y ago
      PG&E is a big, slow, regulated utility unlikely to rush in executing anything. And even if PG&E did rush to digitize, that would only mean more pressure on other utilities (even in other markets) to adopt a cheap ready-to-go solution, and more opportunities for software innovations that can take the data from any source (digicam or utilityco meter).

old-gregg 18y ago

Am I the only pessimist here? After being bombarded with "ideas are cheap" nonsense all I can see is the same old "share, sync, discover, publish" stuff re-packaged and re-wrapped with different version of rounded corners, peppered with the same old&boring punches like "groundbreaking", "easy to use" and "disruptive" over and over again? I mean come on, does anyone really believe that sharing a photo on the net is an unsolved problem? Hey, here's an unsolved problem for you: endless signups everywhere - every single person who owns a computer will tell you that they're fucking tired of logging into gmail or yahoo mail or whatever, and "remember me" checkboxes work only for a little while. But sharing a photo online? I never heard anyone complaining: we all have multiple "Share!!!" buttons staring at us in iPhoto, Picasa, Vista, whatever and we don't give a flying fuck. And how about millions of people screaming in pain who sit in front of their half-dead Windows machines, overloaded with spyware, malware, bloated slow registry and 8174 useless "services" running in background, slowing everything down, showing marketing messages from Logitech and overall ruining their everyday experience? Who's smart enough to solve that mess in 3 months? Those obvious, screaming-in-your-face issues remain unsolved because they are HARD and, therefore, fall into a problematic category of problems that work against conventional "release often, release early" wisdom. After all, it seems like sending 140 characters to a list of subscribers can pass as a billion dollar technology, why bother with stupid Windows users? Actually I believe that great, ambitious ideas are very, very rare and are, by far, the most important ingredient for a true innovation, for a true sustainable business. Great idea, more than anything else, separates Googles, Microsofts and Yahoos from thousands of tiny "widget" startups, focused on minimal coding and fastest time-to-flip, created and sold-or-died within two years, leaving everybody but the founders with nothing but lesser quality of personal lives, which makes their "change the world with us" hiring songs look kinda hilarious. Ideas are priceless. If you are a programmer and you aren't "plugged" into the bubble money, a great idea is your only chance. Crappy-idea-great-execution companies are usually examples of networking/salesmanship skills, something programmers aren't terribly good at. In the end, not a single YC-funded startup can compete with something like Mongrel, a one-man non-commercial effort which, when measured in value it brought into this world, or how much people wanted it, is what defines wealth, according to PG's own writings. I've been following YC-backed companies for more than 2 years and not a single one produced something I wanted. Come on, I am a computer-savvy, technology-loving, ad-blocking geek with a huge PC-per-capita ratio and a hefty tech gadget/software monthly budget, how come none of these startups managed to get a single dollar out of me? Am I alone asking myself this question?

inrev 18y ago

Is there any video coverage of the event?

socmoth 18y ago
usually it isn't filmed because people haven't launched. it is an investor event, not a publicity event.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]

jacoblyles 18y ago

Foodoro seems most clearly positioned to make money. Some of the others look like it's acquisition or bust. It's nice to see that most are trying to charge for something. It's easy to see how cloudkick could make money, especially since their competitors already charge for similar services. However, they should probably put out a pricing plan soon. It might even draw more interest to their company (a giffen good!) because potential customers might want to do business with a company that looks like it is making money and therefore stable.

saprasad 18y ago

I have an idea. Please comment on it. Idea is about a personal info mgmt site. The system allows user to define any number of entity like Contact (Name,Address, Phone No, ..), CC-Txion Info (...) in easy steps (like online form creator but easier) and add data to it. Allows to download data (Excel) and cleanup the data if needed. Common search feature to search for info across all entities. Basically this system lies between Unstructured wiki (Easy) and Complex website generator (Online form/page builder) (Complex).

Tichy 18y ago

I like thesixtyone. I wish we could start over with music and eliminate all non-free music from the world. Sure, there is the one or other old gem I am still attached to (Radiohead for example), but the sacrifice would be worth it.

unalone 18y ago
That's an awful mindset to have. With all respect to TheSixtyOne, the minds in the world that are making the best music aren't putting their stuff into a social commune. They're aware of how talented they are, and as such they're looking for compensation for their ability. In all of history, the vast majority of the best art has come to us commercially. There are always exceptions, and it tends to be that the free breeding grounds lead to the next generation's brilliant artists, but people do things for money. To quote a brilliant actor in a film by a gifted director, both of whom were paid substantially: "If you can do something well, never do it for free."
- Tichy 18y ago
  It's more complicated than that. I don't pretend to have all the answers, but the best artists also admit that they are standing on the shoulders of giants. A piece of music that I am not allowed to "use", other than passively consume, is worthless to me - as worthless as watching TV 24/7. It might be entertaining, but in the end I would wish that I had not wasted my time in such a way. In that sense I wish the "closed source art" would not even exist, because at the end of the day it is just a pain in the butt. Take photography, for example: say there is a really nice building in a street, an architectural marble. Fine - only now I am not allowed to take a photo of my girl-friend in front of the building anymore and put it on the internet, because the architect has the copyright. I'd rather live in a world where I can take a photograph without having to consult a lawyer first. Ultimately the art is interesting to me because of it's meaning, not because of it's commercial value. I am not at all against artists earning money, but I don't think TheSixtyOne is a piracy site, either.

floozyspeak 18y ago

Another thing people aren't factoring in is the rush YC gets from being the "great uncle" to all these startups. Incubators are in, they are popping up all over the country. They themselves are a biz model thats attractive to investors. Seed money into multiple projects, get a window seat on all the advancements. YC is in the biz of banking potential IP.

dpnewman 18y ago

I would say that no problem is ever "solved". So, while "me too" offerings are ever abundant, it's always gonna be a few that offer something that resonates on a greater level, and offers yet a better way sometimes in arenas that we don't even see as problems. I also think that beyond the login issue -- the whole social network concept ultimately has to be pulled from being site-centric into being web-centric. The web itself in its entirety is my social network; and I bring different friend combos and profiles with me to the different places I go -- gracefully evolving these rather than constantly recreating them. Certainly there needs to be a "lightly branded" API for friendship/profile but beyond that I think the missing piece is a best-of-breed UI that sites can be "inject" to leverage the API. Should only require a few lines of Javascript code to add a friendship system. FB Connect can be learned from in this ... paving that road -- it's limitation in my opinion is the heavy branding and assumption that we only will need 1 set of friends or 1 profile and. Of course ...the challenge is adoption... without the easy add injected UI, complete coverage of friendship and profile management ...a simple API alone or universal login system is not enough.

joanou 18y ago

That's a sad bunch of start ups. Nothing excites me and it has all been done already. If implemented, they'll just add to the noise of little apps that I'd have to invest time in. Oh yea...how are they going to acquire customers and make a profit?