In particular, a lot of super cool next-gen transportation: electric planes (Heart Aerospace), jetpacks/bikes (Jetpack Aviation), hydrofoil cargo ships (Boundary Layer Technologies). Also seems to be a big focus on India, China and Africa, and a big increase in the proportion of bio/med-tech companies. There are even two (2) companies turning CO2 into cool stuff (Prometheus turning it into gasoline and Saratoga Energy converting it into nanotubes).
Feeling very optimistic about the future and looking forward to reading what Day 2 has in store.
Bonus: seems to be a handful of Harry Potter themed company names (not counting Centaur of course).
The founders I know who worked with them before said "They may actually be able to pull this off."
And there it was, right out front on Demo Day.
Wishing them and everyone else the best of luck over the coming months, rounds, and decades
Second, existential crisis time.
I clicked the link and saw "Here are the 85+ startups that launched at YC’s W19 Demo Day 1" and closed the tab.
These used to be some of my favorite articles every six months, kind of a view into what's coming next. But they felt digestible, with a few dozen startups featured each time.
Now it feels like a fire hose.
I'm not convinced there's going to be a YC circa 2007-2012 ever again, but I miss that. Probably not how the ecosystem works anymore.
As a disclaimer, I do take full responsibility for my turning 30 a few years ago and going through a darker, cynical period of burnout that has likely permanently affected my outlook on startups.
Years ago, I would be amazed at all the cool startups and tools people were building. Now, my reaction is more.. "OK, so what? You build AirBnb for X... so what?"
1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
I can't stand this template anymore. There's probably a natural cycle/rise-and-fall for these things.
1) Problem identified, "how do i quickly and efficiently describe the purpose of what we're doing"
2) "[existing popular company everyone knows] for [different market that it can be applied to]" is passed on to others to solve that problem. Phrase becomes popular, more people start using it.
3) Everyone starts using it, phrase becomes overused.
4) People begin questioning whether it still has the same meaning or if it's changed contexts since it was originally suggested.
5) People despise hearing it.
I'm right around step 4 there at the moment, heading towards 5. All I keep thinking is "so you're using the same phrase everyone uses, yet you're telling me you're revolutionary, and groundbreaking."
I get that it's just one phrase, and I'm starting to make assumptions here, but I think at some point it becomes more formulaic. And it's hard for me to believe you're hacking, innovating, and revolutionizing when you're following a formula. It's just more "I'm in-the-club" language now.
This is more like your favorite author writing books on a lot more subjects, than just putting out a longer more rambling book.
For a brief, golden period, startups were new and innovative. You could stand out from the crowd by taking some risk and working hard. Early YC reflected this ethos.
Now, “startups” are so common as to trigger cynicism, and merely starting a company no longer offers differentiation. Every angle that can be explored is being explored, usually by multiple scrappy, identically hustling teams of millenials, and to differentiate, you need to take risks that feel increasingly long-shot to stand out (e.g. nuclear fusion! electric planes! revolutionizing drug discovery!) Even the seed-stage “accelerators” are systematized, large-scale success-mining machines for fairly well-developed companies.
Which is not to say that there won’t be successes; there will almost certainly be “unicorns” from 2019, as there have been in just about every year. But the frontier is closed, the game is clear, and it’s the same as it ever was.
Not sure why they did that to be honest, giving someone $10k to apply is probably the best way to decrease application quality and have more work to sort through. Maybe for more data?
Imagine if the article broke things down by industry and/or tech category and you could expend just the ones you're most interested in and see 3-5 companies in each group.
I worded my original comment poorly.
Like the u/giarc commented. What makes bento so different than all the food delivery services that came before it? There’s nothing unique about it.
I'm saying (poorly) that I miss getting excited about new startups launching. This is probably more of a reflection of my own shift in perception than it is a statement on YC or incubators as a whole.
Is that legal?
I recognize there are different safety concerns for men and women, but I do have a problem with companies like these. At least with safr, their advertised safety benefits for women come down to:
1) App/Tech features that would be beneficial for either gender (like extra monitoring by safr through the phone app, and "thorough" vetting/background checks of drivers).
2) Marketing relies heavily on "It's safer because your driver is a woman." which seems to be part of van go's pitch as well, and as a man i find particularly offensive that i'm being deemed unsafe around children/women simply because i'm a man.
That being said, I'm obviously not the target audience. And I believe it's legal because they don't discriminate against men who apply to be drivers/riders, they simply only target women in their marketing, so the people end up being almost entirely women. I would guess this is what vango will end up doing/saying about the gender split as well.
I doubt VanGo can do that. But they are not big enough to get sued yet. Also as another poster pointed out they cater to women but don't specifically screen out male drivers?
It's probably not legal for them to use sex as a hiring criteria, but it's legal for “all women” to be the outcome if the actual criteria are both facially neutral and sufficiently narrowly linked to job functions. Judging from VanGo’s website, they require 3+ years of childcare experience, with references and clean background check; the childcare experience filter alone, given how female-dominated that field is, is likely to result in an overwhelmingly female potential employer pool, a d their may be further bias in who chooses to apply to VanGo.
Pushing the 85% moms thing (which VanGo does, unlike the all women thing, on their webpage) is potentially problematic ; if they are advertising it, they are likely inclined to favor it, which is illegal (even if it was parents, not “moms").
- Lumos
- Basement
- Ravn
- YourChoice
- Prometheus
- Loonify Space
- Dockup
- Glide
It's a $5 Trillion dollar company.
This, and the 'male contraceptive with no side-effects' are 'magic claims' style companies, where if their claims are true, they immediately massive companies.
Usually, the devil is in the details. A few little things here and there contextualize the claims.
Think of how many smart people we have working on big problems and how few real breakthroughs we have.
These things will mostly be evolutionary. Like 'male contraceptive' but it actually does have the side effect of long-term problems. Or takes a year to wear off. Or is $20 a pop and last for 1 hour. Or is only 95% effective. Etc. etc..
So my complete seat-of-the-pants, duffer-on-the-bench guess is that they have a CO2 capture process (or use CO2 from a nearby industrial combustion process), use the CO2 in their process to separate gasoline in place of a traditional distillation process, then remove the CO2 from the gasoline by precipitating it as ammonium carbonate, which can be sequestered somehow.
Does the $3/gallon include both?
Seems like this would impose some serious limits on ad revenue generation (assuming that's how they plan to monetize). With only close friends the volume of friend-generated content would presumably be much lower than that of Facebook or Instagram (even if those individuals are generating more content), meaning you have a much lower threshold beyond which you start pissing off users with ads due to relative volume.
Kinda like the texting groups friends often have these days. That's market that could potentially use some optimizaiton as texting isn't a great format to communicate with ~5-10 people.
As for the revenue – there are certainly cool opportunities to run relevant ads when you have high levels of attention from someone and their close friends (think group experiences, people buying things at the same time that their friends, etc). That said, we don't like what ads have done to current social platforms. They misalign incentives where the more money the product makes, the worse the product tends to get for users. Snapchat was pretty fun until it went from only seeing friends to seeing celebrity gossip and repetitive ads. Because of that, we're planning on doing a subscription model down the road, similar to what WhatsApp tried out before it got acquired (first year free, then a small fee.) Certainly a new model for a social app, but we think it's the best direction for us long-term.
Straight sexism. Cause a Dad driving his kids to school has gotta be a creep or terrible driver or something?
>Bento Club:
Cheaper than what is already there? Food is a losing business and these guys are going to race harder to the bottom.
> Slapdash:
> Straight sexism.
Oddly, while the TC page has the “85% are moms” and the “all of them are women”, VanGo itself has the same “85% are moms” but “all of them are...prescreened with 3+ years childcare experience, reference checked, fingerprinted & clean background check”.
1) Uber - random dude (most likely)
2) Another mom or at least a pre-screened woman
Not many moms will choose the uber for fear of appearing sexist.
3) Bus
4) Kid Walks/cycles themself
5) Mom drives them herself
With these already being available options, I don't understand why anyone would be trying to solve what appears to me to be a solved problem, getting kids to school.
It bugs me though, that the TC blurb, and the comments here, and the Prometheus website, all say the company is turning CO2 into gasoline. That strikes me as alchemy. I think the company is more likely using CO2 in a separation process that is an alternative to the traditional distillation tower used in oil refineries.
There's a difference between "turning CO2 into gasoline" and "using CO2 to refine gasoline from crude oil".
Unless it's 10x cheaper, I don't see how this is any better than Uber eats, Doordash etc (that actually bring food to your door).
https://sf.eater.com/2017/1/10/14231188/bento-closed-san-fra...
The other bento started out trying to make the meals themselves but couldnt make them cheap enough. They were losing money on every one sold. Eventually, if I remember right, they tried to pivot to a service like this that got meals from restaurants, but didnt fair much better. They were doing last mile delivery though if I recall.
[1] https://www.gimletmedia.com/startup/kitchen-confidential-sea...
If they essentially do "MealPal, but delivered," then I could see it working. Noticeable price point difference from other delivery options, but maintaining a range of restaurant meal options for people to choose from.
But yeah, they look like sink or swim based largely on what price they can offer consumers
Is this really offering an attractive alternative to Bird, Lime, etc. from a customer perspective? It seems like they're solving more of a scooter company problem than a customer problem. As a customer I can't imagine a case where I'd prefer to rent for weeks at a time vs. single-use or buying my own scooter.
If scooters really do become a thing, then this is basically a kind of financing plan for them. They might tweak and pivot to the point wherein the price makes sense.
It's also an option on the 'right' financing model for scooters, as maybe the 'daily/hourly' thing actually doesn't make sense at all, i.e. scooters left all around.
It's possible the daily/hourly scooter businesses may be losing money and so will fall flat.
It's risky but it's a finger in the pie of a big craze, and new trends tend to be where the money is.
So it's not entirely irrational. If scooters become a thing, it will be a big market, room for all sorts of players.
Source: work at an FR startup
Just too many...
We need a top 10 list...