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Companies That Presented at Y Combinator Demo Day 1
- 7Figures2Commas 11y agoFirst glance: the ratio of features to products to businesses is astounding.
- Cshelton 11y agoI had the same first impression. I see many cool products, some cool ideas/concepts, but....very few real businesses. That's how it goes though, 5 years from now, one, maybe two of these 'companies' will be around still. It's a fun game.
- onion2k 11y agoFair comment for typical accelerators but not really true in the case of YC. There are far more alive or exited than dead companies in YC's alumnus.. http://yclist.com http://yclist.com (out of date but it's the old data that's relevant here).
- 7Figures2Commas 11y agoDo you have insight into the financial operations of every company on that list? There are a fair number of zombie startups in Silicon Valley that haven't yet exhausted their funding. Some even have enough revenue to keep the lights on. But it doesn't mean they're anywhere close to having a thriving business that will be able to sustain itself and grow meaningfully over time. When evaluating startups, alive/dead is a lazy means of analysis. This is particularly true in today's funding environment, where companies can raise seven figure seed rounds and establish a fairly long runway very early on. The real question is how many of the startups funded today will ever realistically be in a financial position to return capital, and how much, to their investors.
- Cshelton 11y agoExactly, I do not count, 'Hey we've made it five years now, but can hardly break even and have no clear vision of where to go from here' as 'alive'. In fact, by that time, the investors have probably written them off and will be trying to figure out if they can salvage some talent from it before their runway ends. In the end, YC or not, less than 10% of these guys will become real companies. It's just statistics. YC may get you the seven figure round, but if you keep your, 'product', or 'feature' as such for a few years, you're dead. Edit: Not trying to discredit what these start ups have done so far, it's very hard getting to that point alone.
- edmack 11y agoIt's early seed stage for many :)
- arfliw 11y agoThat's what people said about Dropbox. You'd have to know their grand vision to decide whether they can become real businesses. And even then, you'd have to buy into it. I'm confident YC is not investing in any company without a shot at becoming a multi-billion dollar business.
- andyidsinga 11y agoyhat seems really cool. Saw Greg Lamp at papis.io conference late last year demonstrating a beer recommender they built : http://www.slideshare.net/Yhat/building-a-beer-recommender-with-yhat-papisio-november-2014 http://www.slideshare.net/Yhat/building-a-beer-recommender-w...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoI was surprised to learn GitLab was part of the group. At my last company we were using GitLab for quite some time, I had no idea they were in a place to take seed money (figured they'd be looking for a higher round). Either way GitLab is pretty cool.
- timdev2 11y agoThat surprised me too. I've been using GitLab for what I think is a couple of years. Recently(ish) it's gotten a lot tighter: runs better, much better UI, incredibly easier to upgrade than it used to be. So, surprised to see them in YC, but on second thought maybe I shouldn't be.
- swaroop 11y agoFrom a recent GitLab blog post[1]: > At first glance, it might not seem obvious for our company to join Y Combinator since we already have 10 employees and hundreds of paying clients. The reason for joining was learning more about how to grow as a company. We were always really focussed on GitLab and of course we never want to lose that. But we want to avoid as many mistakes made by fast growing companies and to learn from the Y Combinator partners that have seen hundreds of organizations growing fast. There are regular events that feature experts in all facets of building a company, from user retention to enterprise sales. And it is great to hear stories from other startups,what they have overcame and how relentlessly resourceful they have been. [1] https://about.gitlab.com/2015/03/04/gitlab-is-part-of-the-y-combinator-family/ https://about.gitlab.com/2015/03/04/gitlab-is-part-of-the-y-...
- sytse 11y agoGitLab CEO here, thanks for posting this swaroop.
- NewGitlabCEO 11y agoLook at me. I'm the new GitLab CEO now.
- bumbledraven 11y agocindercooks.com looks cool. I love me a good steak, so I would buy one today if it would ship today. Early 2016 though? Not pre-ordering that far in advance.
- calbear81 11y agoI personally feel like being able to cook the perfect steak by sight/intuition is a skill worth learning.
- compumike 11y agoThere are now 3 YC companies making temperature-controlled cooking products, with 3 different engineering approaches: Cinder, Nomiku, and Pantelligent (note: co-founder). In each case, the basic tech works, and the result is really delicious, matching and sometimes exceeding what a "sight/intuition" skilled chef can produce. You'll believe it when you taste it!
- UweSchmidt 11y agoCooking: Yet another skill made obsolete by technology.
- ddebernardy 11y agoSounds nice, but have any of you guys figured out the cleaning part of the equation? Because if not, I'd gather most consumers will stick with their pans. (Pros are a different story, of course.)
- maxerickson 11y agoCinder is supposed to come apart (we'll see what they launch), so you can stick the cooking surfaces in the dishwasher. Nomiku should not really get dirty (it only comes into contact with water). Pantelligent doesn't make it clear if the handle will be immersible, but it isn't that much hassle to clean a pan without soaking the handle.
- pg_bot 11y agoA group of TechCrunch bloggers posted their favorites for the first day as well. http://techcrunch.com/gallery/our-10-favorite-companies-from-y-combinator-demo-day-day-1/ http://techcrunch.com/gallery/our-10-favorite-companies-from... I found it interesting because none of the companies I had internally thought of as potential breakout hits made their list.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- prawn 11y agoHave Apple relaxed their restrictions about duplicate functionality in apps produced by the same developer? GroupAhead are cloning their own apps with a seemingly fixed set of features (membership, calendar, forum, links). A friend had his app denied with Apple saying that the new app should be rolled into another app he had already created.
- mojoe 11y agoReading these dozens of one sentence summaries gives me an inkling of what it must feel like to be an investor who is pitched to all the time -- a concept really has to stand out to be noticed.
- marrington 11y agoYes it's really hard as an investor to 1) stay alert through hours and dozens of startups, and 2) actually understand enough of what they do from the presentations to know if you want to know more. Not perfect by any means, but I certainly can't think of a better way for them to do it without taking massive amounts of time from the founders.
- thomasfoster96 11y agoThen again, isn't not being able to understand what a startup is doing a good indicator that perhaps they aren't ready for your investment?
- marrington 11y agoCertainly yes, but it usually takes longer than 3 minutes to figure stuff out. What I really need is an hour at least with a startup 1 on 1 to know if I'm really interested. But like I said above, that doesn't scale with so many companies and investors. So you have to trust your instincts, but there's often a herd mentality as investors talk to each other and try to use those signals to help them.
- drited 11y agoWould they typically hold longer form talks kind of like public company analyst days where they get into more detail over an hour or so and several potential investors who have dialled in grill them on what is being presented? Apologies for the noob question, I don't deal with startups but am curious about the information dissemination process they use.
- jacquesm 11y ago
- tericho 11y agoI can't figure out how Kickback gets around the gambling legalities if they are hosted in the US. They also say they use PayPal for withdrawals which is shocking since gambling is against their TOS.
- scrapcode 11y agoSurely this has been extensively double-checked and there is an explanation, but I'd be interested into what it is. I get the direction the likes of Uber and Lyft are coming from with the "we're just an app that connects 2 people", but the way Kickback is described on TC makes their "loophole" less obvious. I think they may be more geared towards one betting money against another that they can beat them personally, but it's not immediately clear.
- danielvinson 11y agoIt is legal to put money on it as a participant. I can enter a Magic: the Gathering tournament with a $30 entry fee and 2 players where the winner gets $50. This isn't gambling since it is considered a game of skill. It would not be legal for a spectator to put money on the result of this match since their skill is not relevant to the outcome.
- jtfairbank 11y agoIt's a game of skill, not a game of chance, and thus isn't covered under the gambling regulations.
- cma 11y agoDoesn't that have to involve your skill in the performance, e.g. sports betting is still illegal in more than the number of states they say they are operating in, isn't it?
- jtfairbank 11y agoYou're playing the video game, so it is your skill.
- cma 11y ago"like comments, but they automatically follow your code as it’s moved around in your program" Wait, don't comments do that? (edit: oh, they mean like forum comments, not like source-code comments?)
- timr 11y agoThat's kind of a low-resolution summary of what we were saying -- you can annotate code on omniref, and we'll carry those annotations forward/backward in time, until the code changes. It's part of our way of dealing with the problem that happens on StackOverflow all the time, where the top-rated answer is completely out-of-date.
- huhtenberg 11y ago> Pomello Fellas, if you are here, - keep in mind the "keming" issue with your name when spelled in lowercase. On the TC website with the body font they are using the name looks and reads like Pornello. Had to re-read it to understand why the brief didn't match the name.
- cspence 11y agoThanks for the heads up, this is a first for this issue. Not sure there is much we can do about it at this point. Hopefully, it won't be the first thing people's minds jump to.
- davidw 11y agoWow, that's a ton of companies compared to "back in the day". It'd be interesting to have a nice summary of recent batches and where they are to see what kinds of ideas have gotten traction. There are some there that, from the one sentence blurb, don't sound that interesting, but I think the YC folks and the people they invest in are smart, so there's got to be something there. I'm personally interested in seeing what BookTrope is doing, as it's in a similar space to my own LiberWriter. Good luck to all of them!
- taprun 11y agoThe site http://yclist.com/ http://yclist.com/ has a list of YC companies and where they stand.
- kriro 11y agoPigeonly (improved inmate to outside world communication) strikes me as interesting. It's not very sexy but I think it's a somewhat interesting problem domain (and sadly a growth market) where connections/talking to people/understanding the market can give you a pretty hard to immitate advantage. Doesn't seem very hard technically but pretty hard non-technically.
- AVTizzle 11y agoThis guy's story is great, too. Former inmate, was at $3M+ ARR as of Dec 2014: http://www.crewlab.net/pigeonly/ http://www.crewlab.net/pigeonly/
- jffry 11y agoThere was an episode of Planet Money earlier this month talking about Pigeonly: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2015/03/13/392862778/episode-610-the-prisoners-solution http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2015/03/13/392862778/episode-...
- davidb_ 11y agoThe one thing that bumped me was their API for selling customer/prisoner data. I'd like to better understand what their plan is there.
- jedanbik 11y agoHappy to see Nomiku on the list - they ran a fantastic Kickstarter campaign, and I hope they get the help they need to scale up into everyone's kitchen.
- mstevens 11y agoWhen I saw this post I thought it'd be a report on the very first Y Combinator Demo Day ever and where they are today. I still think that'd be really interesting.
- mdorazio 11y agoSame here. I'm hoping TC or even Sam Altman will do a similar post comparing how demo day has changed over the years.
- illinx 11y agoNot involved in the startup scene at all, but isn't "uber for laundry" a punchline at this point? What are cleanly doing (or what aren't they doing) that dozens of failed startups didn't do? This isn't snark, YC are saavy investors and I'm interested to know what they see. This article, for example, is a year old: http://nymag.com/news/features/laundry-apps-2014-5/ http://nymag.com/news/features/laundry-apps-2014-5/ Unrelated, I found it interesting that clean.ly doesn't resolve to Cleanly's website--for that you have to go to getcleanly.com. Do -ly's confer status these days to the point that the URL is unnecessary?
- totalrobe 11y agoApparently you didn't read that article or you would see what they are doing...every load of laundry gets a cookie or healthy treat delivered with it. Clearly a game-changer.
- jbigelow76 11y agoThe cookie is the secret, they fatten up their customers with the free cookies and in a year pivot into an apparel ecommerce play now that their user base has outgrown their clothes.
- totalrobe 11y agoThe clothes are undersized compared to average so the customer base feels extra obese and they pivot into a social fitness tracker network and an on-demand healthy meal provider with an IOT ordering widget.
- log_n 11y agoWhy not a jelly donut with powdered sugar? Boom recurring revenue stream!
- yarri 11y agoHesitate to post an AskHN about this, but which company has the 66 year old (co-)founder? [0] Glad to see this diversity. [0] http://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/xlarge_YC-infographic_v4.png http://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/xlarge_YC-...
- jbigelow76 11y agoWill somebody please sum up which ones are LO-MO-SO and which ones are MO-SO-LO [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-GVd_HLlps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-GVd_HLlps
- tdaltonc 11y agoHas anyone made a "March Madness pool" style game for YC demo day?