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Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

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Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#171

Post by webwright »

fnid2 wrote: post #152
pg wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you have incomplete information, there is another option besides saying things that are, as a result, probably mistaken: to wait till you know more before you express an opinion.

C'mon pg, this isn't that kind of forum. Posts are on the front page for a day at most, mostly a few hours or even minutes. You see a post, maybe read it, then write a comment. By the time I could get to know these companies, this thread will be long gone. If you like, I'll come sit with you for the next YC evaluations and provide my honest and informed opinions of the companies. There were only seven minutes for you…

One way to do your best to "underail" it would be to NOT post a startup by startup list of why you think they are unimpressive.

IMO, the three major problems I have with your opinion are:

1) You assume startups should be tackling new problems. I don't know if you noticed, but "me too" companies win more often than grand new ideas with deep technical problems on the web. Google, Facebook, Zynga, YouTube, Groupon and the iPod were me-too plays.

2) You assume startups should be (or look) technically impressive. There are plenty of great startups that aren't really deep technology problems (until they need to scale).

3) You're looking at 3-5 month old companies, for the most part. Craigslist at that age was a mailing list in SFO. You'd look smarter if you were talking about things like "total addressable market" and "scalability of customer acquisition" than how impressive the companies look right now. Startups of this age are still mostly just potential.

The amount of time you invested in this screams "Troll" to me. The fact that you have had this happen enough that you say, "Usually, at this point, people tell me to just shut up, so that's what I'll do" seems to support that assessment. PG shouldn't be feeding you and neither should I, I guess. I'm mostly disappointed that your initial comment (devoid of any actual content) was upvoted by as many people as it was.

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#172

Post by rokhayakebe »

pg wrote: post #114
fnid2 wrote: 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.

You flatter yourself by saying your expectations are high. Actually you're just not a good judge of very early stage startups. If you saw Google when they were Backrub, or Microsoft when they were making Basic for the Altair, you would have said the same thing. Minor, derivative products.

It is great to see you backup the companies you have funded. Any entrepreneur would love to see their investor fight for them in public. Respect.

However going back and forth about his opinion seems unnecessary. Even if all these companies became successful it does not take away from the fact that he and some other people were not impressed with it. His opinion is just that, an opinion.

Actually I would go further and say, you guys should chat privately. I am sure you have lots of people agreeing with you, so someone saying "Nah PG" could be helpful if he cared to elaborate. "When two people always agree, one of them is not needed in the room".

Cheers.

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#173

Post by pg »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #170
pg wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not so much that you're cynical as that you haven't thought about where the descriptions of these startups came from. They came from an event where startups presented to investors in SV. So of course the descriptions sound like they'd be appealing to that audience; that's what they were trying to do.

Honest question: would tech-savvy investors' opinions of a short blurb really be that different from other technical businesspeople? Or, to put it another way: would it really require two completely different statements to appear attractive to both groups? And more critically: I realize that this is your baby, and you have had a large amount of involvement and personal investment in these projects over the last sever…

Yes, you want a different type of description for investors: you want to err on the side of explaining it in terms of stuff they already know.

In fact, I explicitly tell YC startups to explain themselves to investors as "the x of y" whenever possible. See point 14:

http://www.paulgraham.com/investors.html

The reason I've been so contemptuous of some of the comments on this thread is that I've been seeing the identical comments on web forums for 5 years. That's how I can be sure they're not a sign of a problem. They're just the same type of people making the same type of comments that always get made about newly launched startups.

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#174

Post by pg »

and13 wrote: post #169
pg wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely HN hasn't descended to making fun of startups' names?

That reminds me of you making fun of Wufoo's name in this video (1:07): http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6392191576577272336...

The difference is, I wasn't using it as the basis of a judgment about the company.

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#175

Post by pg »

fnid2 wrote: post #152
pg wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you have incomplete information, there is another option besides saying things that are, as a result, probably mistaken: to wait till you know more before you express an opinion.

C'mon pg, this isn't that kind of forum. Posts are on the front page for a day at most, mostly a few hours or even minutes. You see a post, maybe read it, then write a comment. By the time I could get to know these companies, this thread will be long gone. If you like, I'll come sit with you for the next YC evaluations and provide my honest and informed opinions of the companies. There were only seven minutes for you…

It used to be that kind of forum.

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#176

Post by GFischer »

dskhatri wrote: post #60
fnid2 wrote: 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…

NewsLabs is the most exciting one from the list for me, but probably not the one with the most upside.

The list sounds good. I'd add Notifo to the most promising ones (going just by this short description of course!).

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#177

Post by rmorrison »

zaidf wrote: post #85
rmorrison wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because there have been successful "me too" products, doesn't mean that they are all worthwhile pursuits. It seems that Google is too often played as a trump card to support ideas that don't stand on their own as viable businesses. (Although, I'm not saying that's the case with this list)

doesn't mean that they are all worthwhile pursuits Similarly, just because they are "me too" product doesn't mean they won't succeed. It seems that "me too" product is too often played as a trump card to discard new startups.

Fair enough = )

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#178

Post by run4yourlives »

pg wrote: post #130
run4yourlives wrote: post #4

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?

I'll admit re-reading my comment it is a little harsh and has an insulting tone, which wasn't my intent.

I'm more disappointed; I don't really feel twitter and like applications really add any value in the long term. Their sphere of influence barely extends outside of a very vocal and visible extended SV community.

I respect and value both YC and all your applicants. Everything I've seen highlights the enormous amount of intelligence, creativity, and 'shutzpah' that you all have.

Because of that, I find it very disturbing that a lot of your collective effort goes into problems that are 1) barely issues for 90% of computer users and 2) are insular to SV and the particularities of that community.

There are a whole host of areas where YC and those it funds can make huge inroads. I just find it disappointing that I see one or two offerings to 80% of the market while the majority of funded focus on the 20% - albeit a very investor friendly 20%, perhaps making my disappointed grow - that an insular community has dictated to be the "trend".

ADDED: I'm your typical customer. It's views like mine you should be listening to, not discarding. If I say "Meh, no value add" your response should not be "You simply don't understand how wonderful we are". That's a failure in your message delivery.

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#179

Post by kirse »

pg wrote: post #175
fnid2 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C'mon pg, this isn't that kind of forum. Posts are on the front page for a day at most, mostly a few hours or even minutes. You see a post, maybe read it, then write a comment. By the time I could get to know these companies, this thread will be long gone. If you like, I'll come sit with you for the next YC evaluations and provide my honest and informed opinions of the companies. There were only seven minutes for you…

It used to be that kind of forum.

I would say that what most people are doing in this thread (using all information available to them to make a best initial judgment), is exactly what you should have expected. This is basic human understanding - taking the available information and drawing a conclusion.

I think it's a bit unfair to poke fun at names and such, but the commenters in this thread are performing the exact same process of evaluation and understanding as yourself, except the only difference is their information is quite limited.

Yes, it's stupid and unwise to draw conclusions from incomplete information, but for the most part, that's what people do and (given the information), that's all they can do.

If you want to avoid this in the future, I would say better PR and more information would help people avoid making such silly initial judgments and help to properly manage their expectations.

Besides, if most people have low expectations for these startups, underpromising will only help in the future when they do deliver. And then you can deliver your I-told-ya-sos.

Re: Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

#180

Post by Hexstream »

Shorel wrote: post #41
fnid2 wrote: 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.

The ones I though were good: Zencoder Zenedy The rest are very under promising.

That's a great vaccine against missed expectations!
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