Question to YC - how representative are these, as a sample of the applications YC typically sees? I've always wondered what YC's raw unfiltered application sets look like. Is this more or less skewed in any atypical ways?
Poll: Apply HN Runoff – Which two startups should YCF fund?
71–80 of 288 posts
Re: Poll: Apply HN Runoff – Which two startups should YCF fund?
#72TBH none of these look like unicorns in the making, so the only meaningful choice is really Pinboardy McPinboardface.
I fully expect Krewe to become a unicorn. Who wouldn't want a group of great friends in their neighborhood they could see all the time and build a tight-knit community around? The most valuable thing any of us has is the close relationships with the people we know. If Krewe succeeds in helping you have more of those relationships, then that's worth more than anything you could ever buy in a store. Your best friends a…
I admire your optimism, but statements like "Who wouldn't want X?" are inherently naive. When you ask people if they'd want X, they generally answer yes. What matters is what people will actually do, and I don't think it's possible to build a product like yours without a very keen understanding of that.
Re: Poll: Apply HN Runoff – Which two startups should YCF fund?
#73I'm really liking the Gresham dollar idea. The main point is that it expires, thus forcing you to circulate it. However, I'd like to see more information like a whitepaper, or even a design.
> I'm really liking the Gresham dollar idea. The main point is that it expires, thus forcing you to circulate it. I like the idea as well, but in the description it said that vendors would be onboarded with a promise to allow g-bucks to be converted back to dollars at par. The obvious outcome is that issuing a g-buck is going to immediately result in depleting USD reserves by a dollar as soon as the g-buck is spent.…
The obvious outcome is that issuing a g-buck is going to immediately result in depleting USD reserves by a dollar as soon as the g-buck is spent.
It's kind of the opposite of that. Every time a GD is spent, it protects our USD reserves by resetting the expiration time on the GD.
Anything that inhibits immediate redemption for USD is going to inhibit adoption.
I don't think adoption is a huge obstacle. The plan is to hand it out as free money to low income people. If someone comes up and offers you free money, are you going to say no?
We go around to merchants (e.g. convenience stores) asking them if they want business from any of the people we're handing free money to. Some of them will undoubtedly say yes.
If we fail, we'll have done the equivalent of taken a bunch of money and handed it out to poor people for a period of time. If we succeed, that money will be circulating on its own, and hence not converting back to USD very fast. We will have established a new currency.
As the currency circulates, we can lower our reserve ratio. In much the same way that banks don't retain enough cash to cover all their deposits, our total USD reserves can fall below the total amount of GD in circulation without breaking the peg.
We're immune to a currency run, because if people panic, they want to get rid of their GD. The only way to do so is to spend it, and spending it protects our USD reserves.
You need a real-world use-case that USD is less than ideal for
People who don't have USD, but still want to buy things.
get real traction as a store of value
We get traction as a store of value by pegging it to USD and backing it up with USD reserves using the resetting timer mechanism that I've previously described.
Re: Poll: Apply HN Runoff – Which two startups should YCF fund?
#74Edit: This may have come across as too terse to pass the not-just-civil-but-nice test so I've added more explanation to my choices I wasn't following the initial wave of submissions so here's my fresh-eyes take on the finalists. I'd particularly like to see other people's assessments of the whole field (vs individual submissions) Not Ambitious Enough: These are in competitive spaces -- even if they delivered on their…
Too Ambitious: Brodlist
Just for clarification, Brodlist is finishing its Alpha version. The money would get it into Beta, and the YCF advice would get it out of Beta.
It would be too ambitious if it was just starting, but it's finishing.
Re: Poll: Apply HN Runoff – Which two startups should YCF fund?
#75Edit: This may have come across as too terse to pass the not-just-civil-but-nice test so I've added more explanation to my choices I wasn't following the initial wave of submissions so here's my fresh-eyes take on the finalists. I'd particularly like to see other people's assessments of the whole field (vs individual submissions) Not Ambitious Enough: These are in competitive spaces -- even if they delivered on their…
[deleted]
Re: Poll: Apply HN Runoff – Which two startups should YCF fund?
#76TBH none of these look like unicorns in the making, so the only meaningful choice is really Pinboardy McPinboardface.
[deleted]
Re: Poll: Apply HN Runoff – Which two startups should YCF fund?
#77Edit: This may have come across as too terse to pass the not-just-civil-but-nice test so I've added more explanation to my choices I wasn't following the initial wave of submissions so here's my fresh-eyes take on the finalists. I'd particularly like to see other people's assessments of the whole field (vs individual submissions) Not Ambitious Enough: These are in competitive spaces -- even if they delivered on their…
Edit: Fair enough. My competition does have an army and a navy. But I still think we can do it. Unless they start providing a basic income in their own currency, I'm confident that my currency will disrupt theirs.
The two I voted for were Brodlist and Gresham Dollar (my own). Why do you feel that they're too ambitious?
Re: Poll: Apply HN Runoff – Which two startups should YCF fund?
#78Edit: This may have come across as too terse to pass the not-just-civil-but-nice test so I've added more explanation to my choices I wasn't following the initial wave of submissions so here's my fresh-eyes take on the finalists. I'd particularly like to see other people's assessments of the whole field (vs individual submissions) Not Ambitious Enough: These are in competitive spaces -- even if they delivered on their…
I can give you a dozen reasons why Krewe IS ambitious. And the competitive space is a joke. Every other company is trying to do a "Tinder for friends," but that model is inherently broken. Krewe is doing something entirely different as it actually replicates the way people naturally make friends (particularly when they're young).
Response to edit: Krewe is not a social network in the same sense as something like Facebook. It's aims to get you to actually meet (in the real world) and get to know people who live near you. It does so in an a way that's both comfortable and convenient, which gives you the best chance of forming real friendships. Everything else fails at either comfort or convenience (or both), which is why no one has been able to make a dent in the (massive) market.
Krewe is bottom up vs Nextdoor which is top down. Krewe places you in a group of five other people and then lets you expand from there. Nextdoor dumps you into a chat room with all your neighbors -- it doesn't exactly encourage you to meet people. It's really more like Craigslist. My neighborhood (which has 60,000 people in it) has no activity in it.
I can go on on how Krewe's different, but rest assured, it is very different from anything that's out there. I have exhaustively looked.
Re: Poll: Apply HN Runoff – Which two startups should YCF fund?
#79A lot of people are evaluating too much based on the ideas, rather than the background of the founders and whether that background gives them the experience to execute the idea.
For example, I liked the Cadwolf idea because the founder has worked as an engineer in the kinds of organizations he wants to sell to. Many of these applications had no info about the founders that I could find. All in all, the vast majority of these apps gave little indication the founders have the necessary background to do their idea.
Just some examples: as far as I could tell, the founding team for Brodlist has no prior experience implementing the internals of database/distributed/operating systems. The Jury Board idea sounds really interesting, but it's an area where I'd like to see the founders have a lot of domain expertise (litigation experience?), and sadly the founder didn't provide any info on that.
Somewhat related, I think it's terrible to vote for Pinboard given the founder's stated dislike of YC (and the founder stating that this is a protest vote). The fellowship should go to founders that sincerely want to make full use of YC's resources for their startup.
Re: Poll: Apply HN Runoff – Which two startups should YCF fund?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Idlewords himself said that he is hoping to attract protest votes in that Apply thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441720 It's necessary to have been around for a decade to understand what the protest vote is, exactly. PG's advice circa 2009 was "get to ramen profitability", which is what idlewords did. AFAIK, PG has never reversed himself on that stance. The protest vote might be something along the line…
Small correction: I am actually now udon profitable.
We're all looking forward with great interest to your progress to tempura, sushi, and eventually (God willing), Kobe beef profitability.