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YC offers early interviews for AI companies

ycombinator.com

61–70 of 86 posts

Re: YC offers early interviews for AI companies

#61
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but this time with no bank accounts for the end user Moneygram originated with cash or money order in, cash or money order out. No bank account needed. > with Stellar today, it is used by many businesses like Moneygram, and aid programmes You’re linking to a pilot. As it happens, I also worked with UNDP years ago. We similarly launched pilots to try and find uses for novel technologies. (Mine was in mobility data f…

> Moneygram originated with cash or money order in, cash or money order out. No bank account needed. Even better, meaning that the smart decision was to add another rails (crypto) which after choosing something like Stellar and trailing it, they found it was useful for them and their customers, to continue using it. Otherwise it would have been scrapped years ago. > That’s what’s happening here. They are looking for…

> they found it was useful for them and their customers, to continue using it. Otherwise it would have been scrapped years ago

You’re not seeing how something performative can be both profitable and useless?

Maybe it's semantic. I'm not saying crypto is useless as a moral judgement. The bumblebee keychain on my backpack is functionally useless. But I like it, so it's worth something to me. But it has never carried a key, it never well, and its artistic value is objectively passable as best. It's useless but with worth.

If we say MoneyGram's crypto integrations are useful as marketing, I'll agree. But again, as someone familiar with that particular example more than most, if those customers would have given business for money stained with mayo, MoneyGram would be slathering it on.

Re: YC offers early interviews for AI companies

#62
post #22

The AI feeding frenzy in VC land is reminiscent of the early days of the public access internet aka the .com boom. That corrected itself sharply but eventually most of those .com boom dreams came out, just a bit later and lots of VCs lost lots of money because they got the timing wrong. Every time there is a major shift in tech you see this pattern repeat but I don't recall seeing it on that scale again since ~2000,…

Total addressable market and value proposition are key. A specific technology doesn't really change either of these. "I am going to sell pet supplies to people who need pet supplies" Okay, how many people need pet supplies and why would they use you instead of the store down the street (in the 90s)? "I am going to sell books to people who need books" Is obviously a better proposition, even before we get into the fact…

Why is the second one a better proposition?

Re: YC offers early interviews for AI companies

#63
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Moneygram originated with cash or money order in, cash or money order out. No bank account needed. Even better, meaning that the smart decision was to add another rails (crypto) which after choosing something like Stellar and trailing it, they found it was useful for them and their customers, to continue using it. Otherwise it would have been scrapped years ago. > That’s what’s happening here. They are looking for…

> they found it was useful for them and their customers, to continue using it. Otherwise it would have been scrapped years ago You’re not seeing how something performative can be both profitable and useless? Maybe it's semantic. I'm not saying crypto is useless as a moral judgement. The bumblebee keychain on my backpack is functionally useless. But I like it, so it's worth something to me. But it has never carried a…

> You’re not seeing how something performative can be both profitable and useless?

Moneygram and their customers with other organizations using the Stellar network is not performative. It exists and works today, right now and it was that 'something' that was used, tried and tested first before making a decision and it turns out that the use-case was valid for them (and many others).

Henceforth, it is not 'useless' going by the OP's original broad claim.

> Maybe it's semantic. I'm not saying crypto is useless as a moral judgement. The bumblebee keychain on my backpack is functionally useless...

Again, the main use of the Stellar network was serious enough for MoneyGram which out of the thousands of other alternatives used to get on another rails (crypto) for their worldwide customers after assessing that use-case.

But you've only made it clear that to you it is "useless" and no user or business would even bother to use it, if it was found to be as such in the first place.

Re: YC offers early interviews for AI companies

#64
I'm curious whether AI aligns with startups. IMHO it does not well. It aligns with academia where time flow differently.

Business then takes what an academia produces -- i.e. papers / methods / algorithms and implements it to generate value for customers.

It doesn't align with startups as well in case if you have a method and require a lot of compute to produce a model -- you need capital for compute and that's not a typical garage startup.

I'm really curious whether there is any opportunity left for YC-sized startups in AI.

I lot of really cool developments happen on github -- but again that's open source, not ventures to generate money.

Re: YC offers early interviews for AI companies

#66
post #26

Isn’t this the same logic the crypto bulls said during their mania?

The difference is crypto is useless and AI is useful. That’s a pretty important difference.

Please don't take HN threads further into repetitive flamewar hell. Nothing interesting is going to come out of repeating this argument for the n-thousandth time. Worse, when discussions cease to be interesting, they turn nasty.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: YC offers early interviews for AI companies

#69
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Total addressable market and value proposition are key. A specific technology doesn't really change either of these. "I am going to sell pet supplies to people who need pet supplies" Okay, how many people need pet supplies and why would they use you instead of the store down the street (in the 90s)? "I am going to sell books to people who need books" Is obviously a better proposition, even before we get into the fact…

Why is the second one a better proposition?

Because the TAM of people who want books is a lot larger than people who want pet supplies, and there are compelling reasons why people would rather buy books from centralized warehouses than local inventories (namely, that books have a long tail and pet supplies do not).

Re: YC offers early interviews for AI companies

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I developed a SaaS and the functionality is solely based on output from OpenAI. We have several thousand paying users already with ARR above $1.5M

Making $900k in the first 3 week it means monetize on the wow-effects. Is it https://prompthero.com/ ?

Don't know why they're pretending it's not, it's literally in their Twitter profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36197024
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