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Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #9

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #9

#41

Post by chocks »

zurfer wrote: post #5

Hi everyone, my name is Rick and with my co-founders Sven and Théo we are building Snowboard ( https://www.snowboard.software/ ). Snowboard is a fast and automated data catalog for the Snowflake data cloud. It helps teams find, understand and trust their data assets. In past jobs, I (Rick) rolled out Snowflake at a manufacturer with 11000 employees and $2B in revenue, and Théo built the data team and infrastructure a…

Snowboard looks great. Congrats on the launch! At my work we currently use this open source tool https://www.amundsen.io/amundsen/ mostly to search schemas and tables. Curious to see the differences with Snowboard.

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #9

#42

Post by wHtisgoinon »

aakashns wrote: post #3

Hi HN, we're Aakash and Siddhant of Jovian ( https://www.jovian.ai/ ). We run a 6-month program that helps working professionals with a background in programming, statistics or analytics land their first data science job. Four years ago, we quit our jobs and spent several months learning data science and deep learning. We completed several online courses, read some books, and participated in some Kaggle competitions.…

So now, computer courses are being termed as "startups" and require VC investments and money? And YC is handing out money for this? Anything and everything is a VC funded startup these days.

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #9

#43

Post by wHtisgoinon »

ecf wrote: post #22

As with most YC acceptees, most here have “for x country/demographic/race/gender” Is the best path to forming a startup these days to take an already existing product and market it to a very specific niche while taking investment capital that rivals the revenue of pre-existing software? I don’t get it. Really.

I agree. Recently all these launches appear to be driven by the demographics of these founders than any real quality products. I guess in the name of "diversity". In fact, there was a thread here and at reddit sometime back about YC funding some student(s) for a product that shows a calendar in your MacOS dock/taskbar. What stood out there was the demographic of the "founders". When that point was made in the comments, here at HN, those posts were flagged and disappeared.

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #9

#44

Post by wHtisgoinon »

aakashns wrote: post #3

Hi HN, we're Aakash and Siddhant of Jovian ( https://www.jovian.ai/ ). We run a 6-month program that helps working professionals with a background in programming, statistics or analytics land their first data science job. Four years ago, we quit our jobs and spent several months learning data science and deep learning. We completed several online courses, read some books, and participated in some Kaggle competitions.…

> Our 6-month program consists of 7 courses, 14 coding assignments and 4 portfolio projects.

On your website homepage, you claim 160,000+ projects. What's the definition of a project in this context?

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #9

#45

Post by coderintherye »

ismaelbelk wrote: post #40
coderintherye wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say "free delivery" do you mean the distributor is delivering the products to the merchant for free? Is there a minimum order size? You note the idea of them ordering every day, are the goods moving that fast that it makes financial sense for daily orders? Normally these shops are ordering weekly or biweekly. Do you work with the Principals at all (e.g. Coca Cola) or just directly with the Distributors? Did…

We are not a marketplace. We buy goods, stock them, and then deliver. So we are the ones delivering the goods, and we don’t charge for it . We are using a transport management system to optimize our daily delivery routing. Shops are really close to each others , so it makes financial sense to daily deliver the same shops. There is no minimum order , however some elementary SKUs can’t be bought only by themselves . We…

Ahh interesting model! Feel free to reach out if you ever want to chat, we work with merchants and distributors in Southeast Asia, though different business model.

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #9

#46

Post by zurfer »

chocks wrote: post #41
zurfer wrote: post #5

Hi everyone, my name is Rick and with my co-founders Sven and Théo we are building Snowboard ( https://www.snowboard.software/ ). Snowboard is a fast and automated data catalog for the Snowflake data cloud. It helps teams find, understand and trust their data assets. In past jobs, I (Rick) rolled out Snowflake at a manufacturer with 11000 employees and $2B in revenue, and Théo built the data team and infrastructure a…

Snowboard looks great. Congrats on the launch! At my work we currently use this open source tool https://www.amundsen.io/amundsen/ mostly to search schemas and tables. Curious to see the differences with Snowboard.

Thank you!

To give an opinionated position regarding Amundsen:

Amundsen is a great open source project with many cool ideas. However, we found that the experience on Snowflake was quite shallow and much more insights and context on data assets are possible. E.g. data profiles, lineage or usage information are not readily available in Amundsen. You can customize and extend Amundsen to do more, but most data teams should build and innovate in other areas closer to the business. ;) Most companies use Snowflake over the Apache Spark open source stack exactly because of that.

If you are interested to learn more, please reach out: rick at snowboard.software

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #9

#47

Post by ano88888 »

ismaelbelk wrote: post #40
coderintherye wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say "free delivery" do you mean the distributor is delivering the products to the merchant for free? Is there a minimum order size? You note the idea of them ordering every day, are the goods moving that fast that it makes financial sense for daily orders? Normally these shops are ordering weekly or biweekly. Do you work with the Principals at all (e.g. Coca Cola) or just directly with the Distributors? Did…

We are not a marketplace. We buy goods, stock them, and then deliver. So we are the ones delivering the goods, and we don’t charge for it . We are using a transport management system to optimize our daily delivery routing. Shops are really close to each others , so it makes financial sense to daily deliver the same shops. There is no minimum order , however some elementary SKUs can’t be bought only by themselves . We…

Most FMCG companies have their distributor network. The distributors will also have sales team visiting mom & pop stores on a regular basis. So your selling price must be the same or cheaper than the distributor selling price to make a profit which seems difficult to achieve if you're not the distributor. What is your business model and where do you expect to make the money?

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #9

#49

Post by aakashns »

wHtisgoinon wrote: post #44
aakashns wrote: post #3

Hi HN, we're Aakash and Siddhant of Jovian ( https://www.jovian.ai/ ). We run a 6-month program that helps working professionals with a background in programming, statistics or analytics land their first data science job. Four years ago, we quit our jobs and spent several months learning data science and deep learning. We completed several online courses, read some books, and participated in some Kaggle competitions.…

> Our 6-month program consists of 7 courses, 14 coding assignments and 4 portfolio projects. On your website homepage, you claim 160,000+ projects. What's the definition of a project in this context?

We offer several free courses, and at the end of every free course, students build projects. They vary greatly in scope and size. The 160,000 number refers to the total number of projects created by our users.

Students who are part of our 6-month program build guided portfolio projects that require at least 30-50 hours of work and must meet our evaluation criteria.

I see your point though, perhaps we should use different terminology for the two types of projects.

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #9

#50

Post by aakashns »

wHtisgoinon wrote: post #42
aakashns wrote: post #3

Hi HN, we're Aakash and Siddhant of Jovian ( https://www.jovian.ai/ ). We run a 6-month program that helps working professionals with a background in programming, statistics or analytics land their first data science job. Four years ago, we quit our jobs and spent several months learning data science and deep learning. We completed several online courses, read some books, and participated in some Kaggle competitions.…

So now, computer courses are being termed as "startups" and require VC investments and money? And YC is handing out money for this? Anything and everything is a VC funded startup these days.

I know, right?

In all seriousness though, VC funding is mainly a function of market size and scalability of the business model.

There's currently a huge shortage of data science talent across the world, and a sustainable business funded by venture capital can help fill this gap quickly.

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