Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What's working for YC companies since the AI boom

jamesin.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 121 posts

Re: What's working for YC companies since the AI boom

#111

Post by throwanem »

BoorishBears wrote: post #110
throwanem wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't really counting horny chatbots and nudify apps, fair. But I also don't have a book in the space to talk.

I didn't realize Perplexity was a horny chatbot or nudify app. Or Suno. Or Kling. Or... Ah wait, you were talking out of your ass and want to deflect.

Okay, okay, you've got me there, though we should really also talk about Humane and Rabbit. Still. YC's approach in this space thus far is probably the decision of theirs I've respected most in the last half decade, and though it is not surprising to see a Son-style cash binge counseled here instead, I don't really see why I should take that too seriously. Who doesn't love money? Who doesn't love to feel that it's flying around almost as if free for plucking off the wind?

Re: What's working for YC companies since the AI boom

#112

Post by jgraettinger1 »

ck_one wrote: post #72
neom wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sit on an AI evaluation committee for a huge law firm (It's just a regular old consulting gig) - we get so much inbound from (mostly kids) folks trying to build wrappers for some aspect of legal workflow, but behind the scenes thomson reuters is slowly adding everything they're going to need to software they have been using for 10 years now.

In many fields there is no moat. It’s an execution battle and it comes down to question: can the startup innovate faster and get to the customers or can the incumbent defend its existing distribution well enough. Microsoft owns GitHub and VSCode yet cursor was able to out execute them. Legora is moving very quickly in the legal space. Not clear yet who will win.

> Microsoft owns GitHub and VSCode yet cursor was able to out execute them

Really? My startup is under 30 people. We develop in the open (source available) and are extremely willing to try new process or tooling if it'll gain us an edge -- but we're also subject to SOC2.

Our own evaluation was Cursor et all isn't worth the headache of the compliance paperwork. Copilot + VSCode is playing rapid catch-up and is a far easier "yes".

How large is the intersection of companies who a) believe Cursor has a substantive edge in capability, and b) have willingness to send Cursor their code (and go through the headaches of various vendor reviews and declarations)?

Re: What's working for YC companies since the AI boom

#113

Post by cushychicken »

ai-christianson wrote: post #54
cushychicken wrote: post #52

zero… hardware startups in the Series A data I have 15 years of hardware development experience and I would stay far, far away from anyone in the VC space. I simply don’t believe that anyone in VC is capable of aligning their own incentives to the timescale that a hardware based business requires to show a return.

But hardware is super capital intensive, right? So the right kind of investor could add significant value if they were aligned.

True in theory.

Not in practice.

Re: What's working for YC companies since the AI boom

#114

Post by frainfreeze »

ai-christianson wrote: post #54
cushychicken wrote: post #52

zero… hardware startups in the Series A data I have 15 years of hardware development experience and I would stay far, far away from anyone in the VC space. I simply don’t believe that anyone in VC is capable of aligning their own incentives to the timescale that a hardware based business requires to show a return.

But hardware is super capital intensive, right? So the right kind of investor could add significant value if they were aligned.

> But hardware is super capital intensive, right?

Depends on what hardware, who is developing it, and for who. Proof of concept is almost always cheap enough to make. Beauty of HW is that you get PMF straight away - even if you have the worst completely broken product, but it it brings value to someone, they will pay for it. From there you can bootstrap, take on credit etc. Capital intense part can wait - refinement, certifications, patents, packaging, documentation, mass production etc. This is of course all under assumption that the core team knows how to build everything, if you're outsourcing in the prototype phase then you're probably toast anyway.

> So the right kind of investor could add significant value if they were aligned.

I always perceived value of investors to be everything but the money. If you need just the money then get a loan.

Re: What's working for YC companies since the AI boom

#115

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

koolba wrote: post #103
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start here: https://com-courtlistener-storage.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com... The "opinions" are what you want. These are huge files heavily compressed, so they're quite difficult to handle.

Why are they huge? Is it just PDF overhead? The opinions themselves should just be some finite number of pages of text no?

Nah, they're .csv files, not even PDFs. It's just that it's a lot of text. (The valuations of the LLM giants don't seem too crazy when you realize just how much of the US economy is dedicated to creating and shuffling text.)

There's so much text in each of those monstrous .csv files that you can learn quite a lot if you run a statistical analysis on just one of them.

Re: What's working for YC companies since the AI boom

#116

Post by atleastoptimal »

blibble wrote: post #93
atleastoptimal wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is HN’s continual downplaying of AI’s impact and economic potential against all evidence just the new version of the mentality that precipitated the famous Dropbox comment? The comments in anything AI related on this website are so predictable

> Is HN’s continual downplaying of AI’s impact and economic potential against all evidence there's quantitative evidence in this article unfortunately it doesn't support your position

If by quantitative evidence you mean that very few have made it to series A, that doesn’t preclude the overall economic impact or potential of AI, solely that its a crowded field where the exact niches haven’t been ironed out yet. This is the same for all nascent industries, but to assume such implies it is all a scam with no economic viability feels more like wishful thinking than a reasonable inference from trends.

Re: What's working for YC companies since the AI boom

#117

Post by overfeed »

rogerrogerr wrote: post #108
overfeed wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The railroad can’t have individual cars break off from the line to go to arbitrary warehouses, stores, and residences So the hypothetical trucks can't handle freeways but can self-drive on much more complex urban and suburban roads?

I can tell from your tone that you're looking for an argument, but I don't think either of us know what you want to argue about.

It's a rhetorical question highlighting the contradiction of expecting unsophisticated systems that resort to follow-the-human tactics to be capable of self-driving inder more complex conditions in the last mile.

I have zero interest in debating the difficulty of freeway driving vs the last mile involves unmotorized participants and significantly more traffic control- that is settled in my mind.

Re: What's working for YC companies since the AI boom

#118

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #20

Do "AI Startups" even make sense? There appears to be a pattern. Unmet need is identified: "I want ChatGPT -- but able to read PDFs" or "I want ChatGPT -- but able to do research and produce lengthy reports." Startup gets funding for this and, if they're lucky, releases a rough beta that leans heavily on the OpenAI API. Two months later OpenAI launches a better, much more polished and seamless version, which is integ…

"I had briefly considered forming a Legal AI startup (going so far as to download the fulltext of every legal ruling ever made in the US -- something like 400GB) but then o3/DeepResearch got so good that it became apparent that there'd be little point."

Has the download now been deleted

Will it be shared with others

500GB/1TB of storage is not expensive

Were any permissions obtained prior to download

Re: What's working for YC companies since the AI boom

#119

Post by bluesnowmonkey »

xorcist wrote: post #74

I see a pattern with AI companies. They always try to solve a really hard and not very useful problem. It's the same as with self driving car companies ten years ago: If you believe self driving tech is ripe for commercialization, the reasonable thing to do is something capital intensive and a special case where the technology most likely to succeed. For instance, heavy trucks automatically following others in format…

That’s a pretty critical take. You don’t think people should try to innovate because it might turn out the tech isn’t ready?

Re: What's working for YC companies since the AI boom

#120

Post by sushid »

jgraettinger1 wrote: post #112
ck_one wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many fields there is no moat. It’s an execution battle and it comes down to question: can the startup innovate faster and get to the customers or can the incumbent defend its existing distribution well enough. Microsoft owns GitHub and VSCode yet cursor was able to out execute them. Legora is moving very quickly in the legal space. Not clear yet who will win.

> Microsoft owns GitHub and VSCode yet cursor was able to out execute them Really? My startup is under 30 people. We develop in the open (source available) and are extremely willing to try new process or tooling if it'll gain us an edge -- but we're also subject to SOC2. Our own evaluation was Cursor et all isn't worth the headache of the compliance paperwork. Copilot + VSCode is playing rapid catch-up and is a far e…

Windsurf was acquired for $3B by OAI and it's clearly the worse of the two. Cursor is trying to raise at a $10B valuation and has $300MM in ARR in less than two years.

So in short, yes, companies do appear to be showing some willingness to send Cursor their code, even with all the headache associated with getting a new vendor.

Post reply on HN