YC Demo Day, the Morning After • Hacker News Board

Re: YC Demo Day, the Morning After

#61

Post by jacoblyles » Thu, Mar 28, 2013, 3:22 AM UTC

t0 wrote: post #35

colmvp wrote: post #4

From the WSJ article: Don Dodge, a startup investor and well-known “developer advocate” for Google, said today’s startups are more focused than ever on revenue—as evidenced by the large revenue-growth charts most of them showed off during the presentations to investors. In prior years, founders focused more on the number of people using their service, he said. Refreshingly, he said, there are no longer social-network…

That's exactly it. Revenue. I've heard PG say in numerous interviews that he doesn't want to incubate small companies. He said he wants "the next big thing". Has he changed his mind?

Revenue is a great signal of a good business.

Re: YC Demo Day, the Morning After

#62

Post by starmole » Thu, Mar 28, 2013, 4:14 AM UTC

compumike wrote: post #58

colmvp wrote: post #4

From the WSJ article: Don Dodge, a startup investor and well-known “developer advocate” for Google, said today’s startups are more focused than ever on revenue—as evidenced by the large revenue-growth charts most of them showed off during the presentations to investors. In prior years, founders focused more on the number of people using their service, he said. Refreshingly, he said, there are no longer social-network…

It's not meant to be negative. At CircuitLab (Don Dodge's specific example for "solving boring problems that make money"), we're interpreting "boring problems" as a concise way of saying "problems that people have 9am-5pm (at work) and want to solve faster so they can leave at 5pm". That's not a bad place to be. Or perhaps they are problems that are exciting to our users but boring to Don Dodge. :) WSJ direct link: h…

Don't under sell CircuitLab! I thought it was the only cool and useful engineering project of the batch! You actually have deep technical skills that are not easy to replicate. And you can go both ways: web based, educational, makers or go make a native (just use chromium :)) high priced version and go after the incumbent market.

Re: YC Demo Day, the Morning After

#63

Post by rdl » Thu, Mar 28, 2013, 4:58 AM UTC

It's interesting how pretty much everyone I ask about W13 has a different set of favorite startups, and the top one on one person's assessment can be the bottom on someone else's. That means any of the rankings really say more about the evaluator and his/her metrics vs. the startups themselves.

This really wasn't the case with previous batches, or most other groups of startups.

Re: YC Demo Day, the Morning After

#64

Post by mindcrime » Thu, Mar 28, 2013, 4:59 AM UTC

Thalmic and Semantics3 are absolutely working on crazy exciting stuff. I don't see how anybody could consider either of those boring.

The only problem I see with Semantics3 is access to the data they want to index. If they can sell merchants that having their stuff listed in their index is a valuable discovery mechanism and will help sales, it could work. But if merchants decide they don't want to be part of it and close off access to the underlying data, I think they'll have a tough row to hoe.

Re: YC Demo Day, the Morning After

#65

Post by pg » Thu, Mar 28, 2013, 6:05 AM UTC

rdl wrote: post #63

It's interesting how pretty much everyone I ask about W13 has a different set of favorite startups, and the top one on one person's assessment can be the bottom on someone else's. That means any of the rankings really say more about the evaluator and his/her metrics vs. the startups themselves. This really wasn't the case with previous batches, or most other groups of startups.

We noticed that, and it's actually an encouraging sign. If YC reached the limit case where we had all the best new startups, that's what it would feel like: there would be so many good ones that it would be hard to pick the best.

Re: YC Demo Day, the Morning After

#66

Post by doctorpangloss » Thu, Mar 28, 2013, 7:27 AM UTC

pbharrin wrote: post #20

I think what everyone here is missing is that the press is looking for "Tech" companies doing wild, innovative things with technology. -The WSJ article was in the "technology news and insights" section. -TechCrunch has the word Tech in its name. -Demo Day is held at the computer history museum -this is Silicon Valley Sorry I didn't attend demo day, but when I read the summary I felt none of the companies were very hi…

Yeah, I think you're understanding the complaints well. Why even bother with YCombinator if you do something boring that makes money. Might as well call it a small business and borrow at 8%—it would be a lot cheaper than VC.

Re: YC Demo Day, the Morning After

#67

Post by ddodge » Thu, Mar 28, 2013, 9:34 PM UTC

colmvp wrote: post #4

From the WSJ article: Don Dodge, a startup investor and well-known “developer advocate” for Google, said today’s startups are more focused than ever on revenue—as evidenced by the large revenue-growth charts most of them showed off during the presentations to investors. In prior years, founders focused more on the number of people using their service, he said. Refreshingly, he said, there are no longer social-network…

You are correct. It was not meant to be negative. It was meant to convey the importance of the shift from social/consumer apps with no thought of monetization, to startups focused on solving real world problems that generate revenue from day one. This can be boring to investors looking for flying cars, or journalists looking for mind blowing technology.

I mentioned Circuit Labs, great technology that makes money in a boring way by selling parts. I also mentioned Thalmic Labs as an example of cool technology.

My personal favorite was Skip, the RFID checkout company, but I couldn't talk about it because they haven't officially launched. I think there could be an indoor location play using the RFID tag data.

Overall, I was impressed with the focus on solving real world problems and generating immediate revenue. Boring to some, but I liked it.