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YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide

ycgiftideas.com

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Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide

#41

Post by ryanlol »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #31
koolba wrote: post #2

Unless there's a significant financial incentive to do so (ex: 2-to-1 match), don't give people gift cards. Gift cards are the biggest scam ever pulled by the retail industry, or more specifically, perpetuating the idea that giving cash is taboo. The one exception would be giving a preloaded credit card to someone who otherwise doesn't have access to one (ex: a niece/nephew that's far away) and only if there are no f…

There are circumstances in which Gift Cards are acceptable. For example, gift cards for online stores (iTunes, Amazon, Steam, etc.). This is particularly acceptable for children, as they are otherwise unable to purchase items from such stores.

Couldn't you just give kids prepaid Visa/MC cards instead?

And I'm not from the US, but the idea of school-age kids not having their own cards sounds a little funny to me.

Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide

#43

Post by CPLX »

dang wrote: post #34
gamache wrote: post #11

Aside from the Donations section (YC's nonprofits), having much of the YC portfolio collected like this really deflates a lot of the cachet about YC, its companies, and its place at the Silicon Valley cool-kids table. I look at this list and I see problems that never needed solving, middlemen -- sorry, curators -- reselling cheap Chinese crap, and a cult of jamming Bluetooth and USB into just about anything that hold…

YC has funded 1500 startups. You're generalizing from a narrow selection, which is clearly bogus. (Did you expect quantum computing on a Christmas list? Well I guess this is HN.) Also bogus is drawing conclusions about companies' long-term strategy ("problems that never needed solving") from a holiday gift guide. Just because some of us aren't big on consumer goods is no reason to throw out basic logic!

I mean perhaps.

But I think those of us that lived through tech in the late 90's have a right to be a little suspicious, for example, of the long term business strategy of a company whose sole business model appears to be sending someone three glasses of wine a month surrounded by overbearing packaging.

I'm sure someone will come along and inform me that it's all a ruse to generate the worlds best wine AI and disrupt our palates with algorithms or something but I remain fairly certain said business is about as technologically advanced as Pets.com, with a similar prognosis.

Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide

#44

Post by nooron »

Super excited to see Watsi on the list of suggested donations. I became a monthly contributor a year and change ago, and every time I get a raise, I raise my contribution. I love the work they do, and the way they'll select the patient for me -- I find the process of combing through each one emotionally a bit too onerous!

Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide

#45

Post by VLM »

throwthisawayt wrote: post #20
gamache wrote: post #11

Aside from the Donations section (YC's nonprofits), having much of the YC portfolio collected like this really deflates a lot of the cachet about YC, its companies, and its place at the Silicon Valley cool-kids table. I look at this list and I see problems that never needed solving, middlemen -- sorry, curators -- reselling cheap Chinese crap, and a cult of jamming Bluetooth and USB into just about anything that hold…

You are looking at a holiday shopping list which is the epitome of consumerism. You shouldn't find things that are elevating the human spirit you are looking for stuff that you would find in skymall or the home shopping network. There are plenty of yc companies tackling interesting problems - you just wouldn't find them on a holiday list. For example: Triplebyte - trying to take a data driven approach to make recruit…

I think we agree that gitlab is awesome and tossing money at something that can lead to exponential growth in productivity and therefore exponential financial return is a wise strategy. As long as the market is not saturated and there's a path to growth, etc. But at least they're on the right track.

However every dollar spent on "candle of the month club" and every hour spent working on it is a dollar and an hour that can't be applied to exponential returns from actual tech companies.

Perhaps there's something sneaky or non-intuitive about "candle of the month club" such that they're operating a redundant array of inexpensive candles, or they have a containerization or virtualization strategy for candle wick storage, or their database is prototyping quantum secured financial data, and the candles are just placeholders to test real technologies and workflows. Probably not, but I'd like to hope so.

Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide

#46

Post by bhalp1 »

xiaoma wrote: post #30

The thing that really strikes me about this list is how nearly everything on it is offered at a premium price. One thing I loved about the tech world while I was growing up was that it was consistently doing more with less. Wikipedia displaced Encyclopaedia Brittanica by being both better and free. Hotmail was a clear win over AOL and Yahoo's offerings and then Gmail was faster and handled spam better while giving mo…

Your point is true, but it's also likely that the model for a lot of these companies is to start with premium so they can focus on a profitable model and get the supply chain and execution worked out while there is still wiggle room, and then move down market. This is what Uber and Tesla did, and I wouldn't be surprised if that is the most fashionable approach these days.

There are probably plenty of exceptions, as well, like Dollar Shave Club.

Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide

#47

Post by VLM »

thaddeusmt wrote: post #40
gamache wrote: post #11

Aside from the Donations section (YC's nonprofits), having much of the YC portfolio collected like this really deflates a lot of the cachet about YC, its companies, and its place at the Silicon Valley cool-kids table. I look at this list and I see problems that never needed solving, middlemen -- sorry, curators -- reselling cheap Chinese crap, and a cult of jamming Bluetooth and USB into just about anything that hold…

"Yoshi brings the gas station to your gift recipient, refueling their car regularly wherever it's parked. Any commuters on your list will thank you for removing the hassle of the gas station from their lives forever." I get it, filling up your car is a chore, if your time is super valuable... whatever. It's hard to fill the YC portfolio every year with only companies working on "big problems", I'm sure. But it really…

Ironically the most obvious pivot for the company is anti-EV range anxiety-as-a-service where they'll do something like triple A specifically for EVs by rolling up in a truck with a 500 HP giant diesel generator and fast charge your EV anywhere in a service area, eliminating range anxiety.

Honestly you could probably run something like that without any capital expense at all by just collecting monthly premiums and advertising "$1000 if we can't charge your EV in an hour" and then never paying out due to fine print or paying out $1000 in service gift certificates. If you sell enough plans then you could consider maybe building the truck for real.

I wonder what a 500 HP generator at full battery charging blast sounds like in a residential neighborhood at 2am. Probably similar to a freight train. That alone might be entertaining.

Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide

#48

Post by gamache »

dang wrote: post #34
gamache wrote: post #11

Aside from the Donations section (YC's nonprofits), having much of the YC portfolio collected like this really deflates a lot of the cachet about YC, its companies, and its place at the Silicon Valley cool-kids table. I look at this list and I see problems that never needed solving, middlemen -- sorry, curators -- reselling cheap Chinese crap, and a cult of jamming Bluetooth and USB into just about anything that hold…

YC has funded 1500 startups. You're generalizing from a narrow selection, which is clearly bogus. (Did you expect quantum computing on a Christmas list? Well I guess this is HN.) Also bogus is drawing conclusions about companies' long-term strategy ("problems that never needed solving") from a holiday gift guide. Just because some of us aren't big on consumer goods is no reason to throw out basic logic!

I am commenting on the narrow selection that YC itself assembled.

I realize there are many YC companies missing from this list, and from the consumer goods and services industry in general. But if this [ahem] curated list leads to the kind of generalizations I made, the list itself may share some blame for that.

If appeals to "basic logic" and wait-for-the-pivot are YC's best shot at getting me excited about the 2016 YC Holiday Season as presented by YC, then by all means carry on.

Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide

#49

Post by dang »

gamache wrote: post #48
dang wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YC has funded 1500 startups. You're generalizing from a narrow selection, which is clearly bogus. (Did you expect quantum computing on a Christmas list? Well I guess this is HN.) Also bogus is drawing conclusions about companies' long-term strategy ("problems that never needed solving") from a holiday gift guide. Just because some of us aren't big on consumer goods is no reason to throw out basic logic!

I am commenting on the narrow selection that YC itself assembled. I realize there are many YC companies missing from this list, and from the consumer goods and services industry in general. But if this [ahem] curated list leads to the kind of generalizations I made, the list itself may share some blame for that. If appeals to "basic logic" and wait-for-the-pivot are YC's best shot at getting me excited about the 2016…

> I am commenting on the narrow selection that YC itself assembled.

That's patently untrue. You commented on YC.

Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide

#50

Post by lmm »

soylentcola wrote: post #18
dpark wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unless there's a significant financial incentive to do so (ex: 2-to-1 match), don't give people gift cards. Gift cards are the biggest scam ever pulled by the retail industry, or more specifically, perpetuating the idea that giving cash is taboo. The problem is that cash often feels like not giving a gift at all. If you exchange fifty-dollar bills with a sibling, it feels pointless. Gift cards can alleviate that fe…

My (to be fair, minor) issue with gift cards is that they're essentially saying "hey, have some money...but you can only spend it at this one place of my choosing, not yours". I'm aware that this is pretty low on the list of problems you'd hate to have but it's there nonetheless. Let's say a relative has heard me talk about some Arduino project I'm messing with or something to do with building a computer. They don't…

Isn't giving someone an actual gift the same only more so though? Like, if the relative gave you an actual specific electronic component, you've likely got something you'd never normally buy, at a heavy markup, and you can resell it but you're going to lose more than $5 on that deal.
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