The whole industry is overhyped. But until investors keep throwing money at it, it will continue. Until it investors turn-off the tap.
Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
261–270 of 326 posts
Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
$10/month is not a cheap tool. I'm paying $90/year for Intellij Idea which is my main development tool. IMO that cost is extremely prohibitive for most users and it's definitely not a way to get plenty of people on board to monetize it later.
Even in the poorest of countries, $90/year is not too much for any serious (heck, even amateur) software developer. A coffee costs around $1 (in poor countries), that's $365/year and most people drink more than a cup per day. Now that's a tool to actually work, not increase your productivity (or mess with it). So $90 is pretty affordable.
Coffee does not cost 1 us dollar. The poorest countries survive on $500.00 to 2000 us a year. $90.00 isn't even affordable to everyone in the west.
Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
#263I think this is actually a perfect example of YC finding its way again! They found a team they believed in, said, "Go build" and let them run. Then they dropped what they were doing and did something else. That's exactly how YC should be, and used to be.
My complaint with YC lately is the exact opposite -- they keep investing in companies that have product market fit and profits. Those are great derisked investments, but not at all what YC used to do, which was investing in people, sometimes without any company at all.
They've done a good job of moving back towards those types of investments, but Demo Day is still filled with, "Hi, we're the top experts in our field and we started a company a few years ago and have $1MM+ ARR and are profitable but we want investment to grow faster". And a lot of those companies look like they'll settle into a nice low 9-figure valuation, which is great for the company and YC, but boring for someone looking for the moonshots YC used to be known for.
Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the best example is when Dropbox was announced and how many people scoffed at the triviality of cloning data around.
"when Dropbox was announced" This. Whenever someone quips "that's a feature not a product" the reply should be "so why were they able to ship this feature and you weren't". Technical debt, opportunity cost(s), mission focus are all opportunities for arbitrage.
I think the discussion was always sure you can release a feature product and find success. One you reach a certain level bigger players will incorporate your features and you will cease to exist.
Being able to breakout of that feature product into an expanded ecosystem before your product becomes a feature of a bigger platform is the real end game.
Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who has never owned a Blackberry, can you explain what this means? BlackBerry funnelled everything - email, BBM, tweets, Facebook messages, whatever - into a unified interface. Basically you didn’t need to care where a message came from, you saw it all in one place and could just reply from there. You would not need to check one app for email, another for IMs, another for tweets etc.
Isn't this just notification center? I don't think you can reply to say, a slack message from it, but most services have some form of notification support that will redirect you to the proper app context
The point is you didn't need to be redirected.
Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
#266They're in the business of making bad looking bets with limited downside and unlimited upside and losing most of them. Judging them for making stupid looking bets misses the point entirely. You can only judge the final results by percentage of winners and losers in the end and how big the winners are.
That's what they do. They make stupid looking bets. That's the business. If that hurts their brand with anyone, then that person didn't understand what they're doing anyway.
Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
#267Literally 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…
This. From my YC experience, I know that starting with a niche is good advice and advice they likely would have gotten. Looking at the Launch HN [1], I think the question should instead be "has YC lost it's way when its latest company is founded by 4 University of Waterloo students?". When phrased that way, the answer seems obvious, given that YC started out funding current college students in Boston. Having gone thr…
> "has YC lost it's way when its latest company is founded by 4 University of Waterloo students?"
It's interesting to see they are branching out to smaller, lesser known more regional schools. Pretty far from their debut in Harvard/Kendall Square.
Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
#268Jesus Christ people. Give it a break. I hate this Reddit post. You're not going to build the next Apple today by making your first product a full fledged competitive modern computer. Remember that Microsoft started with a BASIC interpreter. Apple themselves started with a niche computer back then that sold to less 500 hobbyists at a hobbyist computer shop. The next Apple would also have to build something extremely n…
You are absolutely right, and personally, I'm a huge fan of these tiny niche products that do one thing really well. However, ask yourself this: is the next Apple applying (or going to apply) to YC? My guess is probably not.
Or if the next Apple did, would YC know it’s the next Apple? I’m sure there are companies rejected by YC due to ignorance of the business line or the reverse, ego blinding the reviewers.
Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve spent almost a decade in the productivity space (founded Shortcuts at Apple, fka Workflow) and everything is always confusing. Everyone is seeking the holy grail of computing (“the computer does exactly what I want and it’s a seamless experience”) and there are a billion and a half ways to attack the problem. Starting with a “hair on fire” problem and expanding to other hair on fire problems is not a wholly unre…
Sure, but saving a click or two when joining zoom meetings for mac users that don't use the native calendar app doesn't really scream "hair on fire"...
The Zoom client has already a built in calendar integration. Once connected, it will show you all upcoming meetings for the day including a button to join the call. It's quite convenient.
Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
#270Literally 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…
Yes, you're right. In fact the founders practically say as much in their Launch HN post. I'm assuming the reddit post is by someone who is just really unfamiliar with YC and modern tech entrepreneurship. Hopefully, their question was sincere and they'll receive sensible answers. As for the question of whether YC has lost its way - most institutions lose their way at some point, so it's a fair question, but I don't th…
I actually posted this on reddit (mainly to get other viewpoints besides the HN echo chamber), and I’m not new to the tech entrepreneurship scene. I’ve launched 3 startups, two bootstrapped that are chugging along quite well and a third one VC funded that is doing just ok.
This is less an attack on Superpowered as it is a critique of YC. I think the idea of a unified Notification Center is interesting but the space is quite simply too crowded. You have slack, plus all of the companies like station trying to solve the same problem with much more features and a much bigger moat. YC used to pick companies that were more or less going to be at least decently successful even if they had never encountered YC, while this one seems like it wouldn’t have been successful without YC.
It seems like YC has fully switched to the shotgun model of fund everything and see what sticks instead of the boutique smaller cohorts of the past. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but that also comes with a reputation change as well.