Startups from Y Combinator’s S19 Demo Day 2 (opens in new tab)

You should read http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html

Most startup ideas are non-obvious in their very early phase. If there was already proof one way or another that they were good or bad, they would be already done, or already dropped, respectively.

Also, the founders have much more knowledge about their startup. You have what you got from that one paragraph description you read. That's a huge asymmetry of information.

PG's essay explicitly calls us out:

"At YC we're excited when we meet startups working on things that we could imagine know-it-alls on forums dismissing as toys. To us that's positive evidence an idea is good."

I’ve always felt that for many it’s a hedged situation, the ~75k+ salary, networking, and resume bullet points, represents similar or greater compensation than what they might make alternatively.

A C-level position at a YC startup will grant you a 100k+ salary at a YC company that did manage to make it to a series A afterwards even if your company didn’t make it that far.

It’s a self accommodating industry (IMO).

Even folks working on the problem sometimes think it is non-viable. I question the thing I'm working on, every single day. That's just how it is, even after you commit.

If one can deliver real value to end-users, and the growth takes a phenomenal turn, then different kind of non-viable thoughts would emerge, I'm sure.

I kinda agree. I just don't see the value in 90% of those ideas even if they are well executed. Maybe I'm getting old too but it seems most of these propositions are based on the premise of making something attractive and getting funding from VCs wanting to diversify their investments and play the lottery.

The lowest hanging fruit in tech has already been taken years ago and the human needs haven't changed that much. We need to communicate, we need to listen to music, we need to move around, etc.

I think most look at the ideas and don't see a safe/profitable path. Most are right but with the right person they can take any idea and make it work. Not because of the big idea but by winning the small battles and the non-obvious battles.

Facebook had a similiar idea to others. But they limited it to Harvard. So anyone who joined was part of a social club that they saw in real life. That gave them trust and people more freely posted. Next they rolled out to only ivy league schools. Next all colleges. Then highschools. When they released to the public the colleges still had semi-private networks allowing them more freedom. Then facebook did something no one thought was possible, they allowed you to login to hotmail import your contacts. Now you are friends with people you may not have talk to in years.

The original idea only shaped a broadvision. Each decision really provided the vision and a path for growth.

The original vision is important. If you tried to take a dating app and follow the Harvard facebook roll-out it wouldn't work because people wouldn't want to be seen as looking for a mate. Dating sites try to connect strangers.

I have feeling, that team is most important here, not starting idea. There is chance, that the teams with currently non-viable ideas will pivot and be successful in the future.

> - Where have all the IoT companies gone?

Was talking to some VC folks the other day and asked this same question. The answer I got was under performance, not enough unicorns per investment and the number of companies even hitting profitability was much lower than other sections of their portfolio.

> Where have all the IoT companies gone?

Previous discussion : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18710682

> It's amazing to see that a significant percentage (~30%) of ideas they have come up with have been also thought of by others e.g. from the YC list independently to an uncanny extent.

Imho the concept of multiple discovery [0] applies just as much to innovation as it does to scientific discoveries.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery

A lot of businesses look similar when comparing the basic idea. When you compare on execution things can get dramatically different.

What do you think about their fee and stake?

Looks like it ranges 60-80k [after their fee] for a 10% stake.

That feels pretty expensive for an accelerator, especially one that's new, with little network effect yet.

When I advice folks... I always like to say, for any good idea you have, 100 other people have already thought of it. For any great idea you have had, 1000 people have thought of it.

The core difference lies in the execution. If you can execute on even a marginally “okay” idea, you can build on that, but even the greatest idea in the world has no chance without that execution.

Corollary: don’t worry about protecting your idea, worry about how you can be the best person to execute it.

I recently heard about Antler, how is the programme?

It's because ideas are the easy part. How many people thought of Uber before it existed? Probably everyone that has ever had to book a taxi.

This sounds like what Kevin Kwok was describing[0] in his recent essay, The Arc of Collaboration. Even down to using the Discord metaphor. Kwok says that Slack ended up being more of an exception handler when normal processes break down. Contrast to Discord, which is more of a meta-layer around games and integrates within game platforms. I wonder if Tandem is what will make collaborative communication ubiquitous, i.e. sales talks to engineering talks to design all from within their various environments.

From TC: Tandem provides a virtual office for remote teams, complete with video-chatting and messaging capabilities, as well as integrations with top enterprise tools, including Notion, GitHub and Trello.

[0] https://kwokchain.com/2019/08/16/the-arc-of-collaboration/

I hope not to sound like a jerk or get downvoted for this, but what's the point of quoting the article without adding at least an opinion or thought?

I feel there is also a room for mobile superchargers. They can come to your house and fully charge your car in half an hour, rather than waiting for hours on home voltage.

not for American market. average car tanks takes 30-50 dollars of gas. markup on gas prices is really small around 15%. if sold at market prices profit from each delivery will be 4-6 dollars. cost of delivery will be around $20-30 dollars when you count driver salary, truck lease, fuel, etc. Fuel delivery has been done in US profitably for very long time. its delivery of heating oil to houses but during every delivery they sell a few hundred gallons of oil and thats when the low margins start adding up, $40 delivery won't cut it.

>Basically Discord for work

This was very confusing for me since I use Discord only for chat for various open source projects.

Tandem is voice and video chat - the part of Discord I never use.

It's also big part of networking, with something like that you can apply to different programs, different mentorships that all brings you closer to human capital and money. That's part of the privilege being an american too, you're much closer and easily accessable to all of it.

They did a Launch HN here, if anyone's curious :https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20585810

LinkedIn is so spammy, I hate it. The recruiters don't even read your profile, and you feel like a jungle explorer trying to find how to turn off all the notifications

The older I get the more I find myself browsing LinkedIn. I actually enjoy some of the deep conversations in closed groups.

What if it's not about "dating", but just casual sex, like Grindr?

Tensil founder here. We're a little different from the other ASIC companies because we specialize our chips to individual model architectures on demand. Our value prop is that our chips are smaller and cheaper than high end GPUs while offering the same or better performance on the model you care about.

This is compelling to a lot of hardware companies, where they often have 1 model that represents >50% of their compute workload. Making a Tensil ASIC for that model becomes much cheaper than GPUs at scales of 1000 chips or more.

I'm happy to talk in more detail if this interests you! tom@tensil.ai

Is there even a market for cheap ASICs?

ASIC set-up costs are only a problem on low volume production runs, and in that case generic purpose hardware is probably a cheaper solution anyway.

If you have some high computation or bandwidth requirements that can't be met with of the shelf hardware, then FPGAs are probably still a better solution.

So if you ask me, Tensil is just trying to ride the AI wave.

It seems like they're selling ASICs. It would be useful in something like an embedded system where you train a model beforehand, deploy it, and then let it go. On top of speed improvements, they're generally more efficient, so something running on battery power could last longer.

Tensil founder here: we take fully trained models, training doesn't happen on our chips. The model architecture is hardened but the parameters can be reprogrammed.

I'm assuming it's the later. Some applications require pretty high speed inference, like video.

Yes! This is a great idea!

Signing up with a typical SaaS service these days typically involves 1) a qualification call with an SDR (wastes 30ish minutes), 2) a redundant qualification call with an AE (roughly 30 minutes where they probe you for price sensitivity), 3) a 2-3 day delay while they draw up a really high anchor for your price, 4) two or three iterations of you fighting the price (wastes an hour each time), 5) you sign a contract with a lingering uncertainty you got ripped off.

Repeat for the 20-30 SaaS providers you end up using. It's a huge time suck for a dubious benefit. I would love to pay to make that go away in the future.

It is a strange abstraction that some businesses need, I suppose.

Wouldn't you just need them to arrange and liaise with the vendors at the beginning? Once the plans are finalised, why is Vendr.com still needed?...

Their launch HN may include some answers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20707194

Basically, it saves you at least one potential IT headcount. From my time at Amazon, I remember an internal tool to they had to do exactly this. You put software requests and someone from IT buys it for you and sends you the license and installation instructions.

So if your company is large this becomes a real issue I guess. Also by having a third-party IT vendor, you can buy anonymously. This shields you from unreasonable negotiations and future solicitation.

The same idea was built in Austin and acquired. I had the same thoughts.

http://www.siliconhillsnews.com/2018/05/02/meta-saas-acquire...

Rejuvenation Technologies is based on this paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4415018/

I hope they can get this to work! The issue is their paper uses technology covered by other players in the space who have a decade head start and significant research budgets. Maybe they'll get bought out, but my guess is delivery and CMC are hurdles they'll run up against and then have a hard time getting follow-on investors. FIH for this idea is going to be really hard. If they can get this going, I'd love to see adding in additional components of the telomerase holoenzyme.

Edit - Their IP position is actually pretty strong and they are already thinking about delivering the other holoenzyme components: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20140242155A1

I hope they lean on the exosome delivery idea discussed within, "In highly preferred embodiments, the delivery vehicle is an exosome". That would really differentiate them from the competition. The real test will be biodistribution in non-rodent models. I will be following closely!

>talar: Huge potential here. Cars are on their way out, and scheduled grocery delivery can replace it.

A ton of these already exist. Blue apron, Home Chef, Hello Fresh, Amazon (although I believe amazon is currently pickup only). Does talar do anything different than the already established companies?

>spotless materials: Coatings can make a huge difference in the way we interact with materials... in fact, for the most part, that's all we interact with. better coatings make things better.

Again, there are a bunch of established companies making spray on and dip on coatings for clothing, fabric, tools, and other miscellaneous items that does essentially the same thing. Is there anything new here that the others don't do?

Imagine being asked to deploy highly complex firmware with non obvious failure cases without any software updates. I sure hope that the models with Tensil are not fixed!

Unfortunately a big problem with ASICs is economics/operational issues for the startup cost making a chip. This isn't a traditional engineering problem to solve. I'd be concerned if the founding team doesn't have someone good at that stuff and solving hard technical problems with many years of ASIC experience. Hardware is hard!

Walmart does grocery delivery at zero markup. They have announced but not begun to fridge deliveries. What does Talar have that distinguishes it?

> scheduled grocery delivery can replace it.

Scheduled grocery delivery is an innovation? Seems like the same story, different decade.

Thanks for the shout out for Tensil! Let me know if you're interested in chatting about it tom@tensil.ai

Why not Arpeggio Bio or Asher Bio?

do you need to? I see another business opportunity

The gigantic Our Story section reads like YC Mad Libs.

> ______ is a bloated industry. It is opaque and old-fashioned, and it has not substantially improved through the technological revolution in the way other industries have, in part because there are tremendous barriers to entry for new innovative players.

> ______ is taking a crack at changing ______ for the better by starting with what we know: ________________________. We are building a nimble, transparent, highly effective ______ platform and hope to go live in 2020.

I love the transparency. The team seem to have extremely relevant skills and experience - they just are most definitely not CMOs.

There is this: https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/ Not exactly what you asked, but gives some insight

this is what you are looking for except S19 not yet updated https://www.ycdb.co/

Is getting fuel in India really such a hassle that people are willing to pay a premium to get the fuel delivered to them? How big is this market?

I live in Europe, and have never been to India, so I don't know about the situation there. But personally I can't imagine paying for a service that would maybe save me 5 minutes per week.

In the U.S. there is Yoshi: https://www.startyoshi.com/

They might make good servicing the scooter rental business which is booming in India.

The pivot to MyElectricityPlug seems inevitable.

This can easily pivot to Battery charging / replacement.

A middle east-focused shipping marketplace is potentially infringing on the not-the-same-word trademark of a list/board web application?

Trademark law is not enforced like copyright law is. It is the responsibility of the trademark owner to take infringing companies to court, or risk losing the mark. Maybe someone should tell Linus and co.

What about GitHub? Is it older than Git's trademark?

I was even going to say it was a missed opportunity for gittyup but maybe giddyup is better for TM avoidance!

Amazed you can trademark a slang word: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(slang)