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YC's latest moonshot bet is a startup building a $380K “flying motorcycle”

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Re: YC's latest moonshot bet is a startup building a $380K “flying motorcycle”

#121

Post by themodelplumber »

dmayman wrote: post #68
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #13

"The Speeder is “at least” two years of development time away from ending up in customer hands." vs. "Joby Aviation has spent the last decade developing their own electric motors and their current VTOL design from the ground up." [0] I'd guess that it's at least two years after development has completed in order to get through final certifications for whichever regulatory agencies have a say in this. [0] https://tech…

The 1/3rd scale prototype is flying. In a number of ways what we’re doing is simpler than JA. We’re confident we can achieve our time goals.

> The 1/3rd scale prototype is flying

I remember this lesson from watching _Flight of the Phoenix_. :-) Congratulations!

Re: YC's latest moonshot bet is a startup building a $380K “flying motorcycle”

#122

Post by billydbones »

estsauver wrote: post #104

One of the excellent things about YC is how they are completely unphased by moonshots. I don't know of any other organization that is nearly as supportive of ideas that would literally be called crazy other places. 3.5 years ago my cofounder were working on what was actually becoming an okay telecom referral business at the YC Fellowship, but my cofounder and I weren't happy. Pretty much every partner there enthusias…

Earl I’m so so glad you did, and it’s been such a fun ride to witness.

+1 to your experience of the role YC plays, and +1 to what y’all are doing at Apollo

Re: YC's latest moonshot bet is a startup building a $380K “flying motorcycle”

#123

Post by [deleted] »

snowmaker wrote: post #40
bitcoinmoney wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You for real?

Absolutely. I work for YC. An artificial kidney would transform the lives of millions of people on dialysis. It's worth trying to build one even if the chance of success is only 1%.

[deleted]

Re: YC's latest moonshot bet is a startup building a $380K “flying motorcycle”

#124

Post by dang »

preyingman wrote: post #91

YC: it's bullshit that you manually pushed this post back to the top of the site after it started dropping down the front page (due to having way more comments than points). It's fine if you're going to treat posts about YC companies as ads that are immune from voting and other site mechanics, but then you need to label them as ads.

I understand the concern, but we don't push YC stories to the top or anything like that. This one set off the flamewar detector, a.k.a. the overheated discussion detector. That triggers an email to moderators, who (assuming they're not all sleeping) review the thread. When it isn't a flamewar, we take the penalty off. It's standard HN moderation, and the overwhelmingly majority of these cases, well over 95% I'm sure, have nothing to do with YC.

The reason we added that review step is that there were lots of complaints about stories getting demoted when they shouldn't. It's hard for software to distinguish between a genuine flamewar and a good vigorous discussion, so we added a human review.

Re: YC's latest moonshot bet is a startup building a $380K “flying motorcycle”

#125

Post by CamperBob2 »

ux-app wrote: post #111
CamperBob2 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did your motorcycle have all kinds of advanced gyros, inertial sensors, radar/lidar sensors, and control loops? Seems like your comment is a bit like someone in the 1900s pointing at an early car and saying, "I fell off a horse once and nearly broke my neck. You won't survive an accident in that contraption." He wouldn't have been entirely wrong , but he wouldn't have been right, either. His comment would have added…

Automobiles were death traps for approx 80 years, it's just that the utility outweighed the risk. Not sure the same can be said about flying bikes.

Sigh. You're right, my mistake. I'm apparently on the wrong site.

Re: YC's latest moonshot bet is a startup building a $380K “flying motorcycle”

#126

Post by Florin_Andrei »

npunt wrote: post #42

These don't look safe, even assuming perfect mechanical reliability, because humans will be piloting them over major population centers. Humans are generally dumb and inattentive, and this particular vehicle looks like it would attract especially dumb humans who'd use them to try dumb things. Since they won't need any piloting certification, this is basically offloading risk onto everyone on the streets below. I'd fe…

People do crazy shenanigans on motorcycles in 2D already. Source: owned sportbikes, have the titanium implants to show as my "credentials".

Can't imagine the stupid s%%t some are going to do in 3D.

Re: YC's latest moonshot bet is a startup building a $380K “flying motorcycle”

#127

Post by antt »

ehnto wrote: post #74
npunt wrote: post #42

These don't look safe, even assuming perfect mechanical reliability, because humans will be piloting them over major population centers. Humans are generally dumb and inattentive, and this particular vehicle looks like it would attract especially dumb humans who'd use them to try dumb things. Since they won't need any piloting certification, this is basically offloading risk onto everyone on the streets below. I'd fe…

That's why I don't think we would ever have flying cars either. We can barely handle driving on flat surfaces and I suspect most people on the road only get by idly emulating simple line following machines rather than actually engaging the whole situation. It takes a third party to orchestrate busy sections of our current flying vehicles, planes, so I can't see any alternative to full automation of a mass of flying c…

I mean cars wouldn't be accepted today if they were just invented. The only reason why we think 30k deaths a year is fine is because "that's the way it's always been", and cars come from an age when one out of three children would die before they turned 5.

In a sane world we would have only segregated rail transport in urban areas and cars in rural areas where the population density is less than 10 people a square mile.

Re: YC's latest moonshot bet is a startup building a $380K “flying motorcycle”

#129

Post by justanotherjoe »

yikes. are we going to see a lot of bootleg elon musk in the future? I don't like these vanity project with 0 utility, spending money just because "muh science fiction". They completely miss the point of doing something useful.

Re: YC's latest moonshot bet is a startup building a $380K “flying motorcycle”

#130

Post by earthshot »

probe wrote: post #114
bredren wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve raised for and run two moonshot concepts that failed. Now I work on an enterprise saa. Much happier with the saas, but maybe it is a life stage thing.

Really fascinating - can you talk a little bit more about your experiences? You always hear about trying moonshots but I’ve never heard someone who went reverse and was happier!

I went the other way. I did a moonshot, made great connections, had a few years of fun, learned tons, but also had horrible years and had no financial security after a decade of unceasing work.

I managed to get a mid level leadership role for a huge tech company. I no longer think about mortgages or tuition, I’m a million times less stressed out, and I enjoy my life.

It’s common but it’s not “sexy” to say fuck it, I want a sure thing for a while.

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