I haven't seen a lot of "hard" startups, more like "lets chuck money at this and see if people buy it and then get out after 3 years" companies of late.
Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
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Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
#22“Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a backup app you can already build such yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem”
"People were too cynical about one YC startup, therefore any future cynicism is invalid" doesn't really make a lot of sense.
Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
#23Literally every time you see a startup release a product that seems trivial it's because that's not the full story. You're judging without complete information. For example, the public face might be a simple Mac calendar widget, but that could be the gateway to calendar sharing, native office apps, meeting booking, event management, ticket sales, corporate flight sales etc. Building an audience with a cheap tool that…
Indeed the founder says:
>We’ve only solved a small part of a bigger problem. The SaaS platforms we use for work don't work well together. It shouldn’t take cycling through ten different apps and Chrome tabs to stay on top of everything.
>We’re now looking to bring Slack and GitHub into a unified notification inbox in the menu bar. We want to better organize everything you use as we’ve done with Google Calendar.
Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
#24YC and other seed investors are betting more on people than on the specific business plan. If a founding team seems really smart, skilled, and driven, but is working on an idea that doesn’t seem to make immediate business sense, then it can still be worth betting on that team, because one of two things is reasonably likely to happen:
1. The team realizes that the business plan isn’t viable, and they pivot to something else, which might be.
2. The team was actually perceiving an opportunity you didn’t understand, and the idea ends up being a big success.
This doesn’t have to work out all the time, or even most of the time - if you fund even one team that ends up pivoting into a runaway success, it pays for all the “bad” (in hindsight) bets that didn’t pay off.
Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
#25Doesn’t YC normally invest in the team rather than the idea? From their Launch HN post:
> We started YC as a video lecture platform for professors but realized it was a horrible idea. We needed a new problem.
Based on the how it started / how’s it going, it looks like they started in YC with one idea and realized they needed to pivot. The fact that this is what they came up with isn’t great, but at least it’s something. It wasn’t their first idea and it probably won’t stick, but that’s not terrible. I don’t think this one single company is a valid criticism of the entire system. Failure is the default end state for startups, so you take the not as good with the unicorns. And at least this one is still going!
Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
#26I'm more interested in their privacy policy:
"SHARING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION: We share your Personal Information with third parties (analytics tools) to help us use your Personal Information, as described above. We use analytics tools to track our users to improve our product and provide a better experience."
Calendars, like contact lists, like emails, like all of the other personal content people produce everyday is sensitive. In lieu of saying how this is protected, apart from just saying it's simply used to make things better, I'm reluctant to link any accounts containing sensitive personal data to startups in search of a revenue-generating business model.
Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
#27It's hardly the dumbest thing to come out of YCombinator.
I think the other thing to remember is that these guys started with a videocall platform for professors, which is what won the pitch with the partners. Then they got cold feet and pivoted to this.
I also don't think a single bad investment ruins the YC brand.
Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
#28Although I had similar thoughts, one always needs to keep an open mind about what it can grow into. In the thread, it was obvious that for some people it would alleviate a pain : keeping track of synchronous events across multiple platforms.
> one always needs to keep an open mind about what it can grow into. Why? There's no shortage of more serious and productive problems to solve.
Personally I love seeing a funded company that's focused on client-side software to improve the productivity of general knowledge workers. It's a nice counterpoint to SaaS everything. Yes, there's a subscription fee. But that ensures ongoing development.
Looking at this product, I'd expect it to grow into a powerful, personal RPA product. They could build a high quality, MacOS-native view into all the APIs in your life, with automation tooling and a great mobile story.
But it has to start somewhere. :)
Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
#29YC and other seed investors are betting more on people than on the specific business plan. If a founding team seems really smart, skilled, and driven, but is working on an idea that doesn’t seem to make immediate business sense, then it can still be worth betting on that team, because one of two things is reasonably likely to happen: 1. The team realizes that the business plan isn’t viable, and they pivot to somethin…
Indeed.
Don't invest in ideas invest in people.
Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
#302 observations:
- I happily paid for a very similar product about 10 years ago (it was full screen width and had a brilliant timeline feature but otherwise very similar. It was broken when Snow Lion or something was released. I still look for an equivalent.)
- Monthly payments forever for standalone apps is a big no no in my book. I get annoyed even just writing about it. Monthly payments for feature upgrades, perpetual license for last pud release (and some discount to encourage people to not jump on and off) is however totally OK with me. In this case however I think the price is generally too high anyway - for now.