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Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

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121–130 of 200 posts

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#121
post #93
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if they were single founders from the very start or if the team broke during the program?

I know the Notifo guy, Chad, was working by himself. Dude's amazing. :)

The Chad Etzel that was with Twitter (part time, I think)?

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#122
post #12

These seem pretty good overall. Although I am rather unconvinced with the twitter ones, but then again I always thought twitter was a waste of time. But the others seem good. There a couple of surprises: (i) there are two single founders, and (ii) there are a couple of pairs that seem to be in the same space. Obviously embedster and embedly seem to be doing something similar, but there was also a couple of search eng…

There is no competition between embedly and embedster. One is a delivery network the other helps you generate revenue from the videos on your site. If anything we complement each other. (founder of embedly)

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#123
post #2

I'll take the contrarian stance and say I'm not really impressed with the list. There are some that may be good, but there's not much new. Mostly me too products. Perhaps my expectations are too high.

NewsLabs sounds cool. There may be a lot of journalists out there frustrated with the constraints of working with a big media organization and want to do their own thing. NewsLabs could create the next Arianna Huffingtons. Data Marketplace is promising: market research firms charge ridiculous fees for their reports which are usually overkill for what you are looking for. Data Marketplace could solve this problem. Gre…

RE NewsLabs: That is exactly what we're trying to do. Also, that's exactly how many of our journalists feel.

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#124
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greplin looks like an interesting possibility. Some of the others have potential. But, yes, I think you've got the general sentiment.

Greplin does sounds interesting. I actually applied with essentially the same idea - cloud data indexing and search. Check it out and let me know if you want a beta invite: www.nutmegsearch.com Daniel Gross, if you are out there - let's talk.

Yeah, I actually pitched the exact same thing to PG a year ago (in interviews) and YC thought no one needed search beyond e-mail. Then again I hear Greplin was accepted to YC with a completely different pitch :)

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#126
post #49

I should see the site and try out the service and watch the result to judge. Nevertheless, I'll stay disappointed from Startups that are Twitter Apps or Twitter Related. Twitter is a new phenomena, it's hot because it got lot of TV, media coverage: 30% or even less are inactive and also consider the non-real users (Spam bot, feeds, apps...). It's too early to consider Twitter a success to build your startup upon it.

I imagine that this has something to do with RFS 3: http://ycombinator.com/rfs3.html ("Things Built On Twitter")

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#127

My picks for the ones that will be successful from the idea only, without looking at the bios of the founders or the websites: - Notifo - Zencoder (If they drop their prices. Those prices are horrendous for the REAL market they are targeting) - Nowmov (with name change) - Crocodoc (will sell, but will not have too many users) - Gamador - Cardpool - Chromaom - Answerly - Zenedy - Data Marketplace - 140Bets

re Zencoder: thanks for the mostly kind words. We've run a lot of numbers of a few hundred thousand files on representative websites, and we chose that pricing model because it was (1) pretty competitive relative to other options, and (2) it aligns incentives with our customers well.

But we'd love your input, so if you don't mind, I just shot you an email.

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#128
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the team is by far more important than the two sentence summary of the idea, so in that sense it's too early to judge.

Ideas matter too. If you have really smart and capable people working on a product that not many people are going to use, then they're not going to be very successful. Programming smarts != market smarts.

people matter more. good people know how to fail bad ideas quickly and come up with better ones. good people > good ideas.

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#129
post #26

There are a few gems in there that I'd like to see more of (etacts for instance), but overall I'm dismayed by the sheer volume of SV navel-gazing produced twitter junk. I'd love to see more ideas around PG's list of things he'd like to fund being presented instead of yet another "social collaboration because what else is there?" startup.

Yes, indeed. Spot the buzzword: We make social games. a social data request and fulfillment system adding social data leveraging social media identify active social networkers Infoharmoni visualizes the real-time social web social sports (and soon pop culture) betting applications

1985: we make personal computers. 2010: we make social applications.

get on the train or get off it. social, realtime, location etc. are the new technologies of this generation.

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#130

There are a few gems in there that I'd like to see more of (etacts for instance), but overall I'm dismayed by the sheer volume of SV navel-gazing produced twitter junk. I'd love to see more ideas around PG's list of things he'd like to fund being presented instead of yet another "social collaboration because what else is there?" startup.

You know nothing more about most of these startups than a few sentences written for investors. That you dismiss them so summarily and so nastily says more about you than them.

Why don't you just wait and see how they do?

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