19 ms·

16 Things

371 points by dannynemer 12y ago

mhd 12y ago
Isn't a bingo sheet supposed to be 5 x 5?
- danielweber 12y ago
  'patio11 is our resident expert on bingo sheets.
- patio11 12y ago
  American or Commonwealth? Most Americans play with 5x5, but in principle you could do 3x3, 7x7, or 9x9. Commonwealth is typically 3x9, often sold in lots of six.
tlogan 12y ago
I have feeling that "16 big things that VC will fund" is different that "16 big things companies/people/users will pay for".
- rasz_pl 12y ago
  VCs dont care about users. They care about exit, and that usually involves bigger sucker buying you out.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
tonyg 12y ago
List of investment trends, or Black Mirror bingo card?
goodcjw2 12y ago
Talking about "Online Video", I'd like to explicitly mention https://www.vessel.com https://www.vessel.com, which Jeff Jordan implicitly mention here: http://a16z.com/2015/01/22/online-video/ http://a16z.com/2015/01/22/online-video/
Schwolop 12y ago
I just want to know who the fuck has $6000 worth of food in their freezer? (See Internet of Things category)
- Cowen 12y ago
  Food suppliers, possibly restaurants.
  - Schwolop 12y ago
    Yep, good call. I didn't think outside of "consumer" headspace...
- gyardley 12y ago
  Restaurants, perhaps?
deleted 12y ago
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fudged71 12y ago
Considering how much is happening in the 3D printing space this year, I'm surprised that it isn't on this list. It is an enabler of IoT and Crowdfunding, drones, and even the "Sensorification of the Enterprise". Cdixon even retweeted this recently: "Holograms are like print preview for 3D printing." Also where is Drones on this list?
- zo1 12y ago
  "Also where is Drones on this list?" I second that, that was the first missing item that popped into my head as I scanned over it.
  - bdcs 12y ago
    Which is weird because A16Z invested in AirWare (and they, as all VCs, love to talk to their book!)
- bestnoodles 12y ago
  Seems to me they are focused on use cases and problem areas than implementations, and 3d printing and drones are means to some end as you've also mentioned. A category for 3dprinting or drones could mislead founders to fetishize technology than to have the problem guide the solution. But at the end of the day, it's still a16z list and subject to their interpretations.
jfernandez 12y ago
In the 'Online Video' section he calls out podcasts as an emerging/trending medium. I'd love to hear more about where people in HN community feel it's moving. Of course there's the obvious Serial momentum, and as a passionate consumer of podcasts I'd love to think through with you guys a little more where we think it'll go. For example a YouTube-like podcast portal seems like a potential option (i.e. moving away from the need for dedicated apps/clients for a more mainstream audience), but I'm sure this isn't a novel idea.
- WestCoastJustin 12y ago
  I run https://sysadmincasts.com/ https://sysadmincasts.com/, which is a weekly bite sized screencast for sysadmins. Also posted to Show HN a while ago [1]. I can tell you that my inbox is flooded with "Thank You" messages, and requests to put out more content, I am struggling to keep up! As patio11 put it, if you can say: "I'll save you 12 hours of Googling and reading Free Information On The Internet (TM) and it will cost you $50" [2], you can make money. There is just so much text content out there, and not very many high quality videos, so there is a major void in the market. Shane Smith (creator of VICE) talks about how he is creating tons of video content, and text is pretty much toast [3], well worth a watch, just think about how this applies to the tech education space. I am not doing anything unique or novel though, there are countless sites that I have learned from, railscasts.com, railstutorial.org, egghead.io, laracasts.com, gorails.com, etc. Granted, so far this has all been free, and I have not started to monetize yet, but I do have traction, and see a clear need. So, take that for what it's worth. Very happy to have any feedback, or answer questions, just shoot me an email (see profile). Also, if you have a talent in a particular area, I would highly suggest thinking about how to share that via video with other people. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8011081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8011081 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8508187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8508187 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qHjln3yZFs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qHjln3yZFs
  - walterbell 12y ago
    Just listened to the ZFS on Linux episode. I was sceptical about watching a command-line narrative, but this was incredibly well executed, with episode transcript and mini-reviews of related sites. As the episode started, the speech pattern was so slow I wondered if it was a TTS robot aimed at non-English listeners, but then the voice quickly picked up speed to reach excited-hacker cadence. How long does it take to write and produce each episode? Would you care to share the toolchain being used for screencasts? I miss the lost promise of SMIL which would have allowed in-context video links to URLs for related sites, or deep-linking to related video snippets in other episodes. If your project continues, you will quickly grow a library which will benefit from cross-indexing. You will also find that a subset of content will need to be refreshed, as tools and environments change. Metadata for modular snippets will improve discovery, reuse and update. Rails Tutorial has generated six-figure revenue from screencasts combined with an ebook, so there is precedent for monetizing self-service video training.
blfr 12y ago
For instance, the cost of an endpoint CPU and memory is a 1000x cheaper than the cost of CPU and memory in the server.[1] What do they mean? How was that calculated? It sounds completely wrong. [1] http://a16z.com/2015/01/22/cloud-client-computing/ http://a16z.com/2015/01/22/cloud-client-computing/
- billconan 12y ago
  I doubt that the trend is moving to the endpoints. I think it is moving towards the cloud.
- jholman 12y ago
  I think this "thing" is insane. First of all, battery life. He specifically calls out phones, and "not just phones, they could be wearables and other...", as targets for this. Every bit of computing you do on my device is battery life I lose. You're welcome-in-theory to use some compute on my CPU, but stay the hell away from my battery life, which in practice means stay off my CPU. So there's that. Second, latency is a big thing in user experience. Go ahead, follow this author's advice, and do your JSON-to-HTML rendering on the client. See how it affects your latency. See how it affects your user experience. See how the latency affects your SEO standings. Try it out. So once you realize you don't want to use client battery life, and you don't want to use client computing anywhere it would make the user experience perceptibly more latent, what're you left with? Yeah, sure, you could use some background computing power in the style of SETI-at-home and so on... but if you want users' explicit consent, you're competing with those existing for-the-betterment-of-humanity projects, and if you don't get explicit consent, you'd better tread mighty carefully.
  - rsp1984 12y ago
    For web stuff and just generally using mobile phones as "dumb" computing devices I agree. However there are other examples where computing on the phone makes more sense than computing in the cloud: A) Whenever data volume is large and it would take forever to shove it up to some server. B) Whenever offline service availability is crucial (i.e. you don't want to be dependent on network service availability) C) Whenever you want to be in control over where your data ends up. For example Computer Vision is an instance where these criteria are usually met.
talles 12y ago
Loved the 'Failure'
- nine_k 12y ago
  Could anybody please explain that to me? It's super hand-wavy.
  - bbcbasic 12y ago
    I think he is saying focus on success rather than failing quickly (i.e. pivoting). Which at a more abstract level means focus on the goal not the process.
deleted 12y ago
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fit2rule 12y ago
Notably missing: drones. This is a seriously expanding new industry.
- Plough_Jogger 12y ago
  The majority of their portfolio companies are based in the US, where regulation will likely stifle the growth of commercial drones, at least during 2015.
  - fit2rule 12y ago
    Another field the US will lag behind the rest of the world, then..
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
HorizonXP 12y ago
Enterprise software is definitely an area where there is plenty of opportunity. They're aching for good software; they pay exorbitant amounts for software that just isn't very good. If someone can find a vertical where they can penetrate and provide real business value, they'll do well.
- eitally 12y ago
  One of the problems is the ingrained mentality that "enterprise" is defined by "if you throw enough money at the vendor, they'll add features and make changes for you." That's bollocks, in general, but because a lot of modern "good" software companies don't work that way, it's hard to make inroads. As an example, according to a software engineer's review on Glassdoor, Concur's web app is about a million lines of classic ASP (and as a user of it, I can vouch for how crappy it is)... yet their mobile app is really slick and user-friendly. Netsuite is another company gaining momentum, with their premise essentially being that companies want an ERP that doesn't require the infrastructure or overhead that Oracle or SAP do. Netsuite, however, doesn't do the same kind of "consulting" as the big guys and you basically get what you get. Big companies tend to be risk averse, and taking a risk on good software that can't be molded to existing business processes can sometimes mean it's not actually good software for that company ... or so the perception goes.
- btilly 12y ago
  The bad state of enterprise software has been obvious for decades. The fact that it has persisted in being bad despite everyone knowing it should tell you that there are reasons why it remains bad. Those reasons have also been widely known for many years. They boil down that enterprise software companies optimize for their ability to sell to decision makers who never actually use the software. See https://www.mail-archive.com/kragen-tol@canonical.org/msg00109.html https://www.mail-archive.com/kragen-tol@canonical.org/msg001... for a detailed description. See http://futureofwork.glider.com/why-enterprise-software-sucks/ http://futureofwork.glider.com/why-enterprise-software-sucks... for verification that this is not simply an isolated disgruntled developer's opinion.
- beat 12y ago
  There's a lot of opportunity in enterprise, but it's really hard. I spent 20 years in enterprise myself before founding my own startup in that space. The sales cycle just kills you. I can have a product that would save enterprises hundreds of thousands a year, but it takes weeks, months, years to make a sale! And modern B2C-oriented startup thinking doesn't get it. The sort of Lean/MVP/failfast thinking doesn't work so well when you're building for a half-dozen meetings spaced out over weeks, to match arcane localization requirements for the target customer. The reason startups rarely penetrate is because it's slow, hard, and painful - the sort of thing where big deep-pockets entrenched companies have a huge advantage. Worse, young startup founders don't have the enterprise experience to grok why everything is so slow and so hard. It's easy to look from the outside and think those silly enterprise people must be stupid and/or malicious to make such an opaque maze of red tape. Hardly! The enterprise is filled with smart, committed, hardworking people who almost inevitably wind up in the same boat, across the many enterprise verticals. Enterprise is valuable because it's expensive. It's expensive because it's really, really hard. Don't forget that. On the other hand, if I can make it work as a founder, it's going to work huge.
7Figures2Commas 12y ago
> Crash or no crash, we should expect a significant increase in the level of institutional adoption this year. Specifically, a large number of companies will put together groups focused on what Bitcoin means to them — and as early as next year we’ll start to hear people ask “What’s your Bitcoin strategy?” in much the same way people asked “What’s your social media strategy?”… This could be great news for social media consultants who have seen their wells run dry. Now these consultants can set their sights on convincing companies to add We Accept Bitcoin buttons to their websites. But I believe a16z is thinking too small. Companies need to look beyond Bitcoin. Personally, I'm tired of the Benjamin Franklin branding on the $100 bill. Bring on the modern brands. I for one am looking forward to the day when I can convert all of my hard-earned money into LouisVuittonCoin and PepsiCoin.
atmosx 12y ago
> http://a16z.com/2015/01/22/digital-health/ http://a16z.com/2015/01/22/digital-health/ LOL, I love these stories, especially when featuring games like these: > [...] Tomorrow? To understand your personal diagnostic data, you might soon depend more upon an iPhone app developed in a garage than on your local MD. <rant> This garage theme is annoying. The fact that Jobs and Woz had a garage ruined garages... Seriously. They literally changed use in the post-jobs era. If your father owned a garage and you didn't come up with (at least) Dropbox, you're a loser!!!! </rant> On a more serious note now.. The author seems to prefer applications written in a garage to measure things like blood glucose levels instead of machine-based lancets. If he were diabetic, I wonder, would he use an iPhone application to measure his blood glucose levels, or the MD?
- freehunter 12y ago
  Well if I were diabetic, I certainly wouldn't go to my doctor every time I needed to check my glucose. That would get really expensive. I would instead rely upon a home glucose checker, which could easily be integrated with an iPhone using Bluetooth or as an attachment ala Square. Even moreso, if it integrated with HealthKit, I could have my glucose levels over time and have them shared with my doctor using the integration with Epic's MyChart app. So, not as silly as you might think.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > If he were diabetic, I wonder, would he use an iPhone application to measure his blood glucose levels, or the MD Actual diabetics I know do occasional in-office tests, but for routine testing use at-home personal testing kits, which one could easily imagine syncing to devices and online services the way personal fitness trackers do. With severe diabetes, you need monitoring more frequently than is practical with in-office-only testing.
tptacek 12y ago
Their "Security" section is a bit naive. The questions it poses go all the way back to the 1990s. If the Jericho Forum had started a VC fund, this page would be their investment thesis. The 2000s saw a wave of companies try to capitalize on "deperimiterization", some with huge capex requirements (one NAC startup had designed and contract fabbed their own MIPS core). They all flopped. Maybe it's true that firewalls are less effective in 2015 than they were in 1998. The problem is: customers don't buy on effectiveness, they buy on cost-benefit. Firewall effectiveness can drop by 90% and they will still have a better cost-benefit than the alternatives. There's a reason for that: firewalls are the most straightforward network implementation of Saltzer & Schroeder's principles, and those principles are probably Right. Everywhere. In code. On the network. In identity and access management. Why is 2015 different? "The cloud"? If "the cloud" is what's changed, that should be the thesis: we need security solutions for the cloud. Unfortunately, that is also a tired thesis. Similarly: the shift from prevention to recovery seems like a manifestation of the narrative bias. Sure, there are lots of newsworthy cleanups, and one very successful consulting- to- product- to- consulting pivot company in that space. But customers don't derive the same value from recovery as from prevention. The dirty secret of "recovery" work --- forensics, attribution, &c --- is that it's driven largely by legal compliance concerns, and probably doesn't have a great intrinsic ROI. Maybe there's an opportunity for a "full stack" vertically integrated insurer informed by a compliance and forensics practice. There are markets that seem to work the way VCs want security to work. For instance, mobile happens, and all the sudden you can build and 10+x a company that just does for mobile apps what Google Analytics does for web pages. Security just doesn't get valued by customers that way. Also: "if you fight fire with fire, you're just going to get burned"... what does that even mean? P(burn|fighting-with-fire) ≥ P(burn|fighting-without-fire).
- dsacco 12y ago
  Yep. Information security is a nonalgorithmic problem. Much as people might like to disagree or pretend otherwise, it is fundamentally at odds with a service that can scale to meet the needs of clientele in an automated manner. The most successful companies in that space are consultancies that can deliver personalized results to every client on every engagement, and while they are very successful, they will never be what venture capitalists want. It feels good to try and form a business model on prevalent security themes like, "Think like an attacker" and "How do we develop preventative measures before we get hacked?" but that doesn't actually stop incidents from happening. There's no perfect security, just good enough security based on what a company can invest and how much risk it wants to manage. This is something I've found most startup folks are really resistant to, because it means that they can't commercialize security services in the same way you can commercialize web hosting. That's understandably upsetting to them, when you see how trendy security has become in the media, and how successful a company could become by capitalizing on it. I think the section any VC or investor has on security potential is going to remain naive for a long time. Semantic desires like "I don't want my mail to be read by other people" simply don't map very well to purely mathematical operations encapsulating privacy and security in software. Organizing security vulnerabilities into neat taxonomies makes security folks sleep well at night and gives the appearance of an ordered checklist you can build a product on, but in practice that's never the case. Personally, I don't think security should be the sole product or service anyone tries to base a startup on. I am really excited about virtual reality and machine learning companies, however. I'd really love to see some hard innovations and improvements in that space. It'd be nice to have more hardware companies in general.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
briantakita 12y ago
I'm not sure what they want to accomplish with this edict(?). Maybe it's an attempt to influence entrepreneurs to create ideas in those 16 areas. I mean, only those 16 areas? We are in the middle of some unprecedented cultural shifts, and those are the 16 areas to focus on?
- walterbell 12y ago
  Those 16 are likely to be strategically aligned with existing/planned a16z investments. It would be interesting to see potential tech investment areas related to your list of unprecedented cultural shifts.
- dinkumthinkum 12y ago
  For we, the readers, I think we should look at it more as kind of a brainstorm, something to get us thinking. I think looking for more in it than that is not what is most useful for us. Just my two cents.
sparkzilla 12y ago
No mention of media, which seems odd considering their investments in Buzzfeed and Genius.
- walterbell 12y ago
  Buzzfeed is mentioned in Full-Stack Startup.
  - sparkzilla 12y ago
    Barely mentioned
    - walterbell 12y ago
      Can a single VC fund more than one full-stack startup in the same market?
bbcbasic 12y ago
I don't know why these 16 things are more important than the other 16000 things start-ups could be working on. Bitcoin is the interesting one, as I would love to know in 10 years time if we look back at that with a wry smile as a fad, or if it ends up being something everyone uses.
- onewaystreet 12y ago
  > We don’t invest in themes; we invest in special founders with breakthrough ideas. Which means we don’t make investments based on a pre-existing thesis about a category. That said, here are a few of the things we’ve been observing or thinking about. The list is nothing more than some of the things they find interesting.
  - bbcbasic 12y ago
    > The list is nothing more than some of the things they find interesting. If that is true, I don't see the point of the article or that it warrants much discussion. I don't think that is the intent of the article though. I took it as they expect these 16 themes to yield a lot of the new ideas they will invest in. If that is the case then these 16 are quite arbitrary and I don't see why these were chosen.
    - dudurocha 12y ago
      That would be PG point on his RFS https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs The majority of VC companies have investiment thesis. In those thesis they put the kind of market and companies they would like to invest and why. It helps to guide the new associates and partner on where and what to look.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
dxbydt 12y ago
I think putting Big Data & ML in one Bucket is a Big Mistake, pun intended. From where I am (DS at a sv startup), I see a few discrete Big Buckets - 1. Offline Big Data - This is mostly the ETL crowd - Scalding, Cascading, Spark & associated novel startups, who provide technology to run Map Reduce jobs on TBs & PBs of data. This isn't going away anytime soon. Investment Banks & enterprise, financial institutions are the big customers with risk analysis( Var, CVar) & large scale monte-carlo scenarios on diverse financial instruments being commonplace. 2. Online Big Data - Storm, Summingbird & friends - continually ingesting high volume realtime data streams to provide realtime insights, which can be substantiated by #1 later, as and when those jobs run. For eg. say you ingest tweets realtime via a Storm pipeline & give me a running time series of how many tweets were from which city. Meanwhile, you squirrel away these tweets in hdfs so the offline MR job runs later & gives you exact counts. 3. Small-data ML - The result of #1 is typically a dataset of modest size ( few MB - few GB ) that can be ingested into your favorite ML solution ( too numerous to mention) for predictive analysis & BI purposes. 4. Soft "AI" - Using #2 + #3 in intelligent ad serving, traffic routing, realtime pricing to match inventory ( eg. there are several hotels in Las Vegas who reprice rooms based on number of passengers from commercial flights arriving into Vegas, local weather (sunny,rainy etc.), industry convention dates & such - all the ML + AI done out of a tiny office in SF), electricity regulation (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8280315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8280315) etc. 5. AI without the quotes - tiny startups using rnn's to predict time series, using cnn's for image captioning & other really nifty AI applications not currently commercially exploitable at scale but definitely primed for acqui-hire.
- dsacco 12y ago
  I agree. I don't care so much about grouping different disciplines of big data together, so much as putting it into the same category as machine learning. The two definitely complement each other, but they are not the same.
AndrewKemendo 12y ago
I wonder if they are including Augmented Reality with their Virtual reality "Thing." Y Combinator breaks the two out as two parts of the same RFS [1] [1] https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#vrar https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#vrar
collypops 12y ago
I don't see selfie sticks anywhere in that list.
actuary 12y ago
It's probably not the section that most of you will be focusing on, but the "Insurance" section seems to be written by someone who doesn't know the industry. Insurers are absolutely already starting to monitor driving habits[1] and offering discounts for home monitoring devices[2]. Large property/casualty insurance companies are sophisticated competitors that don't hesitate to invest in promising new technologies or techniques many years before they pay dividends. The industry is anything but "stodgy". The idea of a crowdsourced insurance company is not a good one (to put it mildly). The expected returns of an insurer are highly correlated with the returns of the broader market[3], because a typical large insurance company makes little to no money writing policies and generates most or all of its income from investments[4]. But maybe he's thinking about crowdsourcing the insurance risk itself, not the whole insurance company with its massive portfolio of stocks and bonds (although that's not what he said). In that case, you get an investment that yields X% a year until and unless the underlying insurance contract is triggered, in which case you lose your principal. These securities actually exist[5], but as you might imagine they are not typically purchased by individuals. I do think the insurance industry can be disrupted. It's harder for a startup to gain traction because economies of scale work differently in insurance than they do in other industries, but a Google or an Amazon could do some real damage if they wanted to invest the resources to do so. There are a lot of interesting problems to solve. But this article totally misses the point. [1] http://www.progressive.com/auto/snapshot/ http://www.progressive.com/auto/snapshot/ [2] https://www.statefarm.com/insurance/home-and-property/homeowners/discounts/home-monitoring-offer https://www.statefarm.com/insurance/home-and-property/homeow... [3] http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/totalbeta.html http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/... [4] https://static1.st8fm.com/en_US/content_pages/1/pdf/us/2013-annual-report.pdf https://static1.st8fm.com/en_US/content_pages/1/pdf/us/2013-... [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophe_bond http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophe_bond
- dbfclark 12y ago
  I couldn't possibly agree more in general, though of course I'd quibble with many of the specifics... As to stodginess, I'd say there's a big difference between personal/small commercial lines and the big ticket enterprise-type stuff -- the underwriting process goes from something data-driven to something relationship-driven very quickly indeed. The bigger the commercial line, the more likely it's all about who throws the best yacht parties (reinsurance in particular suffers from this massively). Crowdsourced insurance is indeed a terrible idea, though you could imagine 'web of trust' insurance that almost made sense -- say my ten thousand best friends and I know that we're all great actuarial risks, perhaps because we have some kind of information on which it's illegal to select (that we're all in the same gym, say). We could then try to write ourselves health insurance for cheap, because our plan would select only us gym members. You can sort of make it work, as long as you're prepared to make the regulators hate you. Which is the real problem, of course -- most people buy insurance because they have to, not because they want to. Auto insurance that wouldn't pass muster with the police, or home insurance that wouldn't satisfy the bank holding your mortgage, doesn't solve the problem. Do good problems exist? Sure. A web-based Managing General Agency, for instance, could do very well for itself, but the expressed ideas in this section are pretty terrible.
GigabyteCoin 12y ago
I found a typo on the homepage: "You never need to share the car strangers and we can pick you up and drop you off at your front door." I assume you meant to say: "You never need to share the car WITH strangers..." I love the idea, though. Coming from a smaller town it's pretty hard to fathom a helicopter for hire service ever taking off the ground where I live. So it really made me think! If you can really cut a 2 hour commute to 6 minutes for the cost of $99 USD and make money doing it, I imagine you will do quite well. There are many people in NYC who value their time much higher than $49.50 an hour.
- nhayden 12y ago
  I think you posted on the wrong thread by mistake.
  - GigabyteCoin 12y ago
    That I did indeed! Thanks for pointing it out.
kkotak 12y ago
When you have gotten lucky with a couple of investments, you make a lot of money, when you have a lot of money, a lot of people listen to what you say, they argue with each other about what you say, this keeps them occupied and stay out of troubles like original thinking and such, so you need to come up with things to say, otherwise what will people do?
101914 12y ago
"Cloud-client computing"

16 Things

371 points by dannynemer 12y ago

mhd 12y ago

Isn't a bingo sheet supposed to be 5 x 5?

danielweber 12y ago
'patio11 is our resident expert on bingo sheets.
patio11 12y ago
American or Commonwealth? Most Americans play with 5x5, but in principle you could do 3x3, 7x7, or 9x9. Commonwealth is typically 3x9, often sold in lots of six.

tlogan 12y ago

I have feeling that "16 big things that VC will fund" is different that "16 big things companies/people/users will pay for".

rasz_pl 12y ago
VCs dont care about users. They care about exit, and that usually involves bigger sucker buying you out.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

tonyg 12y ago

List of investment trends, or Black Mirror bingo card?

goodcjw2 12y ago

Talking about "Online Video", I'd like to explicitly mention https://www.vessel.com https://www.vessel.com, which Jeff Jordan implicitly mention here: http://a16z.com/2015/01/22/online-video/ http://a16z.com/2015/01/22/online-video/

Schwolop 12y ago

I just want to know who the fuck has $6000 worth of food in their freezer? (See Internet of Things category)

Cowen 12y ago
Food suppliers, possibly restaurants.
- Schwolop 12y ago
  Yep, good call. I didn't think outside of "consumer" headspace...
gyardley 12y ago
Restaurants, perhaps?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

fudged71 12y ago

Considering how much is happening in the 3D printing space this year, I'm surprised that it isn't on this list. It is an enabler of IoT and Crowdfunding, drones, and even the "Sensorification of the Enterprise". Cdixon even retweeted this recently: "Holograms are like print preview for 3D printing." Also where is Drones on this list?

zo1 12y ago
"Also where is Drones on this list?" I second that, that was the first missing item that popped into my head as I scanned over it.
- bdcs 12y ago
  Which is weird because A16Z invested in AirWare (and they, as all VCs, love to talk to their book!)
bestnoodles 12y ago
Seems to me they are focused on use cases and problem areas than implementations, and 3d printing and drones are means to some end as you've also mentioned. A category for 3dprinting or drones could mislead founders to fetishize technology than to have the problem guide the solution. But at the end of the day, it's still a16z list and subject to their interpretations.

jfernandez 12y ago

In the 'Online Video' section he calls out podcasts as an emerging/trending medium. I'd love to hear more about where people in HN community feel it's moving. Of course there's the obvious Serial momentum, and as a passionate consumer of podcasts I'd love to think through with you guys a little more where we think it'll go. For example a YouTube-like podcast portal seems like a potential option (i.e. moving away from the need for dedicated apps/clients for a more mainstream audience), but I'm sure this isn't a novel idea.

WestCoastJustin 12y ago
I run https://sysadmincasts.com/ https://sysadmincasts.com/, which is a weekly bite sized screencast for sysadmins. Also posted to Show HN a while ago [1]. I can tell you that my inbox is flooded with "Thank You" messages, and requests to put out more content, I am struggling to keep up! As patio11 put it, if you can say: "I'll save you 12 hours of Googling and reading Free Information On The Internet (TM) and it will cost you $50" [2], you can make money. There is just so much text content out there, and not very many high quality videos, so there is a major void in the market. Shane Smith (creator of VICE) talks about how he is creating tons of video content, and text is pretty much toast [3], well worth a watch, just think about how this applies to the tech education space. I am not doing anything unique or novel though, there are countless sites that I have learned from, railscasts.com, railstutorial.org, egghead.io, laracasts.com, gorails.com, etc. Granted, so far this has all been free, and I have not started to monetize yet, but I do have traction, and see a clear need. So, take that for what it's worth. Very happy to have any feedback, or answer questions, just shoot me an email (see profile). Also, if you have a talent in a particular area, I would highly suggest thinking about how to share that via video with other people. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8011081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8011081 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8508187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8508187 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qHjln3yZFs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qHjln3yZFs
- walterbell 12y ago
  Just listened to the ZFS on Linux episode. I was sceptical about watching a command-line narrative, but this was incredibly well executed, with episode transcript and mini-reviews of related sites. As the episode started, the speech pattern was so slow I wondered if it was a TTS robot aimed at non-English listeners, but then the voice quickly picked up speed to reach excited-hacker cadence. How long does it take to write and produce each episode? Would you care to share the toolchain being used for screencasts? I miss the lost promise of SMIL which would have allowed in-context video links to URLs for related sites, or deep-linking to related video snippets in other episodes. If your project continues, you will quickly grow a library which will benefit from cross-indexing. You will also find that a subset of content will need to be refreshed, as tools and environments change. Metadata for modular snippets will improve discovery, reuse and update. Rails Tutorial has generated six-figure revenue from screencasts combined with an ebook, so there is precedent for monetizing self-service video training.

blfr 12y ago

For instance, the cost of an endpoint CPU and memory is a 1000x cheaper than the cost of CPU and memory in the server.[1] What do they mean? How was that calculated? It sounds completely wrong. [1] http://a16z.com/2015/01/22/cloud-client-computing/ http://a16z.com/2015/01/22/cloud-client-computing/

billconan 12y ago
I doubt that the trend is moving to the endpoints. I think it is moving towards the cloud.
jholman 12y ago
I think this "thing" is insane. First of all, battery life. He specifically calls out phones, and "not just phones, they could be wearables and other...", as targets for this. Every bit of computing you do on my device is battery life I lose. You're welcome-in-theory to use some compute on my CPU, but stay the hell away from my battery life, which in practice means stay off my CPU. So there's that. Second, latency is a big thing in user experience. Go ahead, follow this author's advice, and do your JSON-to-HTML rendering on the client. See how it affects your latency. See how it affects your user experience. See how the latency affects your SEO standings. Try it out. So once you realize you don't want to use client battery life, and you don't want to use client computing anywhere it would make the user experience perceptibly more latent, what're you left with? Yeah, sure, you could use some background computing power in the style of SETI-at-home and so on... but if you want users' explicit consent, you're competing with those existing for-the-betterment-of-humanity projects, and if you don't get explicit consent, you'd better tread mighty carefully.
- rsp1984 12y ago
  For web stuff and just generally using mobile phones as "dumb" computing devices I agree. However there are other examples where computing on the phone makes more sense than computing in the cloud: A) Whenever data volume is large and it would take forever to shove it up to some server. B) Whenever offline service availability is crucial (i.e. you don't want to be dependent on network service availability) C) Whenever you want to be in control over where your data ends up. For example Computer Vision is an instance where these criteria are usually met.

talles 12y ago

Loved the 'Failure'

nine_k 12y ago
Could anybody please explain that to me? It's super hand-wavy.
- bbcbasic 12y ago
  I think he is saying focus on success rather than failing quickly (i.e. pivoting). Which at a more abstract level means focus on the goal not the process.

deleted 12y ago

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fit2rule 12y ago

Notably missing: drones. This is a seriously expanding new industry.

Plough_Jogger 12y ago
The majority of their portfolio companies are based in the US, where regulation will likely stifle the growth of commercial drones, at least during 2015.
- fit2rule 12y ago
  Another field the US will lag behind the rest of the world, then..
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]

HorizonXP 12y ago

Enterprise software is definitely an area where there is plenty of opportunity. They're aching for good software; they pay exorbitant amounts for software that just isn't very good. If someone can find a vertical where they can penetrate and provide real business value, they'll do well.

eitally 12y ago
One of the problems is the ingrained mentality that "enterprise" is defined by "if you throw enough money at the vendor, they'll add features and make changes for you." That's bollocks, in general, but because a lot of modern "good" software companies don't work that way, it's hard to make inroads. As an example, according to a software engineer's review on Glassdoor, Concur's web app is about a million lines of classic ASP (and as a user of it, I can vouch for how crappy it is)... yet their mobile app is really slick and user-friendly. Netsuite is another company gaining momentum, with their premise essentially being that companies want an ERP that doesn't require the infrastructure or overhead that Oracle or SAP do. Netsuite, however, doesn't do the same kind of "consulting" as the big guys and you basically get what you get. Big companies tend to be risk averse, and taking a risk on good software that can't be molded to existing business processes can sometimes mean it's not actually good software for that company ... or so the perception goes.
btilly 12y ago
The bad state of enterprise software has been obvious for decades. The fact that it has persisted in being bad despite everyone knowing it should tell you that there are reasons why it remains bad. Those reasons have also been widely known for many years. They boil down that enterprise software companies optimize for their ability to sell to decision makers who never actually use the software. See https://www.mail-archive.com/kragen-tol@canonical.org/msg00109.html https://www.mail-archive.com/kragen-tol@canonical.org/msg001... for a detailed description. See http://futureofwork.glider.com/why-enterprise-software-sucks/ http://futureofwork.glider.com/why-enterprise-software-sucks... for verification that this is not simply an isolated disgruntled developer's opinion.
beat 12y ago
There's a lot of opportunity in enterprise, but it's really hard. I spent 20 years in enterprise myself before founding my own startup in that space. The sales cycle just kills you. I can have a product that would save enterprises hundreds of thousands a year, but it takes weeks, months, years to make a sale! And modern B2C-oriented startup thinking doesn't get it. The sort of Lean/MVP/failfast thinking doesn't work so well when you're building for a half-dozen meetings spaced out over weeks, to match arcane localization requirements for the target customer. The reason startups rarely penetrate is because it's slow, hard, and painful - the sort of thing where big deep-pockets entrenched companies have a huge advantage. Worse, young startup founders don't have the enterprise experience to grok why everything is so slow and so hard. It's easy to look from the outside and think those silly enterprise people must be stupid and/or malicious to make such an opaque maze of red tape. Hardly! The enterprise is filled with smart, committed, hardworking people who almost inevitably wind up in the same boat, across the many enterprise verticals. Enterprise is valuable because it's expensive. It's expensive because it's really, really hard. Don't forget that. On the other hand, if I can make it work as a founder, it's going to work huge.

7Figures2Commas 12y ago

> Crash or no crash, we should expect a significant increase in the level of institutional adoption this year. Specifically, a large number of companies will put together groups focused on what Bitcoin means to them — and as early as next year we’ll start to hear people ask “What’s your Bitcoin strategy?” in much the same way people asked “What’s your social media strategy?”… This could be great news for social media consultants who have seen their wells run dry. Now these consultants can set their sights on convincing companies to add We Accept Bitcoin buttons to their websites. But I believe a16z is thinking too small. Companies need to look beyond Bitcoin. Personally, I'm tired of the Benjamin Franklin branding on the $100 bill. Bring on the modern brands. I for one am looking forward to the day when I can convert all of my hard-earned money into LouisVuittonCoin and PepsiCoin.

atmosx 12y ago

> http://a16z.com/2015/01/22/digital-health/ http://a16z.com/2015/01/22/digital-health/ LOL, I love these stories, especially when featuring games like these: > [...] Tomorrow? To understand your personal diagnostic data, you might soon depend more upon an iPhone app developed in a garage than on your local MD. <rant> This garage theme is annoying. The fact that Jobs and Woz had a garage ruined garages... Seriously. They literally changed use in the post-jobs era. If your father owned a garage and you didn't come up with (at least) Dropbox, you're a loser!!!! </rant> On a more serious note now.. The author seems to prefer applications written in a garage to measure things like blood glucose levels instead of machine-based lancets. If he were diabetic, I wonder, would he use an iPhone application to measure his blood glucose levels, or the MD?

freehunter 12y ago
Well if I were diabetic, I certainly wouldn't go to my doctor every time I needed to check my glucose. That would get really expensive. I would instead rely upon a home glucose checker, which could easily be integrated with an iPhone using Bluetooth or as an attachment ala Square. Even moreso, if it integrated with HealthKit, I could have my glucose levels over time and have them shared with my doctor using the integration with Epic's MyChart app. So, not as silly as you might think.
dragonwriter 12y ago
> If he were diabetic, I wonder, would he use an iPhone application to measure his blood glucose levels, or the MD Actual diabetics I know do occasional in-office tests, but for routine testing use at-home personal testing kits, which one could easily imagine syncing to devices and online services the way personal fitness trackers do. With severe diabetes, you need monitoring more frequently than is practical with in-office-only testing.

tptacek 12y ago

Their "Security" section is a bit naive. The questions it poses go all the way back to the 1990s. If the Jericho Forum had started a VC fund, this page would be their investment thesis. The 2000s saw a wave of companies try to capitalize on "deperimiterization", some with huge capex requirements (one NAC startup had designed and contract fabbed their own MIPS core). They all flopped. Maybe it's true that firewalls are less effective in 2015 than they were in 1998. The problem is: customers don't buy on effectiveness, they buy on cost-benefit. Firewall effectiveness can drop by 90% and they will still have a better cost-benefit than the alternatives. There's a reason for that: firewalls are the most straightforward network implementation of Saltzer & Schroeder's principles, and those principles are probably Right. Everywhere. In code. On the network. In identity and access management. Why is 2015 different? "The cloud"? If "the cloud" is what's changed, that should be the thesis: we need security solutions for the cloud. Unfortunately, that is also a tired thesis. Similarly: the shift from prevention to recovery seems like a manifestation of the narrative bias. Sure, there are lots of newsworthy cleanups, and one very successful consulting- to- product- to- consulting pivot company in that space. But customers don't derive the same value from recovery as from prevention. The dirty secret of "recovery" work --- forensics, attribution, &c --- is that it's driven largely by legal compliance concerns, and probably doesn't have a great intrinsic ROI. Maybe there's an opportunity for a "full stack" vertically integrated insurer informed by a compliance and forensics practice. There are markets that seem to work the way VCs want security to work. For instance, mobile happens, and all the sudden you can build and 10+x a company that just does for mobile apps what Google Analytics does for web pages. Security just doesn't get valued by customers that way. Also: "if you fight fire with fire, you're just going to get burned"... what does that even mean? P(burn|fighting-with-fire) ≥ P(burn|fighting-without-fire).

dsacco 12y ago
Yep. Information security is a nonalgorithmic problem. Much as people might like to disagree or pretend otherwise, it is fundamentally at odds with a service that can scale to meet the needs of clientele in an automated manner. The most successful companies in that space are consultancies that can deliver personalized results to every client on every engagement, and while they are very successful, they will never be what venture capitalists want. It feels good to try and form a business model on prevalent security themes like, "Think like an attacker" and "How do we develop preventative measures before we get hacked?" but that doesn't actually stop incidents from happening. There's no perfect security, just good enough security based on what a company can invest and how much risk it wants to manage. This is something I've found most startup folks are really resistant to, because it means that they can't commercialize security services in the same way you can commercialize web hosting. That's understandably upsetting to them, when you see how trendy security has become in the media, and how successful a company could become by capitalizing on it. I think the section any VC or investor has on security potential is going to remain naive for a long time. Semantic desires like "I don't want my mail to be read by other people" simply don't map very well to purely mathematical operations encapsulating privacy and security in software. Organizing security vulnerabilities into neat taxonomies makes security folks sleep well at night and gives the appearance of an ordered checklist you can build a product on, but in practice that's never the case. Personally, I don't think security should be the sole product or service anyone tries to base a startup on. I am really excited about virtual reality and machine learning companies, however. I'd really love to see some hard innovations and improvements in that space. It'd be nice to have more hardware companies in general.

deleted 12y ago

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briantakita 12y ago

I'm not sure what they want to accomplish with this edict(?). Maybe it's an attempt to influence entrepreneurs to create ideas in those 16 areas. I mean, only those 16 areas? We are in the middle of some unprecedented cultural shifts, and those are the 16 areas to focus on?

walterbell 12y ago
Those 16 are likely to be strategically aligned with existing/planned a16z investments. It would be interesting to see potential tech investment areas related to your list of unprecedented cultural shifts.
dinkumthinkum 12y ago
For we, the readers, I think we should look at it more as kind of a brainstorm, something to get us thinking. I think looking for more in it than that is not what is most useful for us. Just my two cents.

sparkzilla 12y ago

No mention of media, which seems odd considering their investments in Buzzfeed and Genius.

walterbell 12y ago
Buzzfeed is mentioned in Full-Stack Startup.
- sparkzilla 12y ago
  Barely mentioned
  - walterbell 12y ago
    Can a single VC fund more than one full-stack startup in the same market?

bbcbasic 12y ago

I don't know why these 16 things are more important than the other 16000 things start-ups could be working on. Bitcoin is the interesting one, as I would love to know in 10 years time if we look back at that with a wry smile as a fad, or if it ends up being something everyone uses.

onewaystreet 12y ago
> We don’t invest in themes; we invest in special founders with breakthrough ideas. Which means we don’t make investments based on a pre-existing thesis about a category. That said, here are a few of the things we’ve been observing or thinking about. The list is nothing more than some of the things they find interesting.
- bbcbasic 12y ago
  > The list is nothing more than some of the things they find interesting. If that is true, I don't see the point of the article or that it warrants much discussion. I don't think that is the intent of the article though. I took it as they expect these 16 themes to yield a lot of the new ideas they will invest in. If that is the case then these 16 are quite arbitrary and I don't see why these were chosen.
  - dudurocha 12y ago
    That would be PG point on his RFS https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs The majority of VC companies have investiment thesis. In those thesis they put the kind of market and companies they would like to invest and why. It helps to guide the new associates and partner on where and what to look.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]

dxbydt 12y ago

I think putting Big Data & ML in one Bucket is a Big Mistake, pun intended. From where I am (DS at a sv startup), I see a few discrete Big Buckets - 1. Offline Big Data - This is mostly the ETL crowd - Scalding, Cascading, Spark & associated novel startups, who provide technology to run Map Reduce jobs on TBs & PBs of data. This isn't going away anytime soon. Investment Banks & enterprise, financial institutions are the big customers with risk analysis( Var, CVar) & large scale monte-carlo scenarios on diverse financial instruments being commonplace. 2. Online Big Data - Storm, Summingbird & friends - continually ingesting high volume realtime data streams to provide realtime insights, which can be substantiated by #1 later, as and when those jobs run. For eg. say you ingest tweets realtime via a Storm pipeline & give me a running time series of how many tweets were from which city. Meanwhile, you squirrel away these tweets in hdfs so the offline MR job runs later & gives you exact counts. 3. Small-data ML - The result of #1 is typically a dataset of modest size ( few MB - few GB ) that can be ingested into your favorite ML solution ( too numerous to mention) for predictive analysis & BI purposes. 4. Soft "AI" - Using #2 + #3 in intelligent ad serving, traffic routing, realtime pricing to match inventory ( eg. there are several hotels in Las Vegas who reprice rooms based on number of passengers from commercial flights arriving into Vegas, local weather (sunny,rainy etc.), industry convention dates & such - all the ML + AI done out of a tiny office in SF), electricity regulation (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8280315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8280315) etc. 5. AI without the quotes - tiny startups using rnn's to predict time series, using cnn's for image captioning & other really nifty AI applications not currently commercially exploitable at scale but definitely primed for acqui-hire.

dsacco 12y ago
I agree. I don't care so much about grouping different disciplines of big data together, so much as putting it into the same category as machine learning. The two definitely complement each other, but they are not the same.

AndrewKemendo 12y ago

I wonder if they are including Augmented Reality with their Virtual reality "Thing." Y Combinator breaks the two out as two parts of the same RFS [1] [1] https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#vrar https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#vrar

collypops 12y ago

I don't see selfie sticks anywhere in that list.

actuary 12y ago

It's probably not the section that most of you will be focusing on, but the "Insurance" section seems to be written by someone who doesn't know the industry. Insurers are absolutely already starting to monitor driving habits[1] and offering discounts for home monitoring devices[2]. Large property/casualty insurance companies are sophisticated competitors that don't hesitate to invest in promising new technologies or techniques many years before they pay dividends. The industry is anything but "stodgy". The idea of a crowdsourced insurance company is not a good one (to put it mildly). The expected returns of an insurer are highly correlated with the returns of the broader market[3], because a typical large insurance company makes little to no money writing policies and generates most or all of its income from investments[4]. But maybe he's thinking about crowdsourcing the insurance risk itself, not the whole insurance company with its massive portfolio of stocks and bonds (although that's not what he said). In that case, you get an investment that yields X% a year until and unless the underlying insurance contract is triggered, in which case you lose your principal. These securities actually exist[5], but as you might imagine they are not typically purchased by individuals. I do think the insurance industry can be disrupted. It's harder for a startup to gain traction because economies of scale work differently in insurance than they do in other industries, but a Google or an Amazon could do some real damage if they wanted to invest the resources to do so. There are a lot of interesting problems to solve. But this article totally misses the point. [1] http://www.progressive.com/auto/snapshot/ http://www.progressive.com/auto/snapshot/ [2] https://www.statefarm.com/insurance/home-and-property/homeowners/discounts/home-monitoring-offer https://www.statefarm.com/insurance/home-and-property/homeow... [3] http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/totalbeta.html http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/... [4] https://static1.st8fm.com/en_US/content_pages/1/pdf/us/2013-annual-report.pdf https://static1.st8fm.com/en_US/content_pages/1/pdf/us/2013-... [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophe_bond http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophe_bond

dbfclark 12y ago
I couldn't possibly agree more in general, though of course I'd quibble with many of the specifics... As to stodginess, I'd say there's a big difference between personal/small commercial lines and the big ticket enterprise-type stuff -- the underwriting process goes from something data-driven to something relationship-driven very quickly indeed. The bigger the commercial line, the more likely it's all about who throws the best yacht parties (reinsurance in particular suffers from this massively). Crowdsourced insurance is indeed a terrible idea, though you could imagine 'web of trust' insurance that almost made sense -- say my ten thousand best friends and I know that we're all great actuarial risks, perhaps because we have some kind of information on which it's illegal to select (that we're all in the same gym, say). We could then try to write ourselves health insurance for cheap, because our plan would select only us gym members. You can sort of make it work, as long as you're prepared to make the regulators hate you. Which is the real problem, of course -- most people buy insurance because they have to, not because they want to. Auto insurance that wouldn't pass muster with the police, or home insurance that wouldn't satisfy the bank holding your mortgage, doesn't solve the problem. Do good problems exist? Sure. A web-based Managing General Agency, for instance, could do very well for itself, but the expressed ideas in this section are pretty terrible.

GigabyteCoin 12y ago

I found a typo on the homepage: "You never need to share the car strangers and we can pick you up and drop you off at your front door." I assume you meant to say: "You never need to share the car WITH strangers..." I love the idea, though. Coming from a smaller town it's pretty hard to fathom a helicopter for hire service ever taking off the ground where I live. So it really made me think! If you can really cut a 2 hour commute to 6 minutes for the cost of $99 USD and make money doing it, I imagine you will do quite well. There are many people in NYC who value their time much higher than $49.50 an hour.

nhayden 12y ago
I think you posted on the wrong thread by mistake.
- GigabyteCoin 12y ago
  That I did indeed! Thanks for pointing it out.

kkotak 12y ago

When you have gotten lucky with a couple of investments, you make a lot of money, when you have a lot of money, a lot of people listen to what you say, they argue with each other about what you say, this keeps them occupied and stay out of troubles like original thinking and such, so you need to come up with things to say, otherwise what will people do?

101914 12y ago

"Cloud-client computing"