Lollipuff's Y Combinator Experience

I attended every demo day session (and the practice sessions before demo day) for about 2 years* and the real difference between the audiences depended on time of day. I think a "good" presentation had a lot of people writing things down, vs BlackBerry / iPhone reading.

Also, back when there were more sessions and they happened at YC HQ, the time of day played a big difference. The later sessions (I think they started at 4?) had people actually laughing at jokes, whereas the earlier sessions some of the exact same jokes, seemingly delivered the exact same way missed really badly. (I remember people actually cheering for Hipmunk's presentation. It felt like a home run.)

I don't know what it meant for follow up, but two notable presentations at least generated some memorable notes that I spied over people's shoulders. Jason Shen from Ridejoy did a cartwheel on the way in (he's a former collegiate gymnast) and I saw a lot of people drawing stick figures cartwheeling. Also, during SiftScience's presentation, one of the founders punctuated his presentation by saying something to the effect of "We're going to stop people from fucking with our customers." A lot of people wrote down "fuck" next to their name :)

I don't know what happened to most of the companies post demo day with their applicable raises.

*: I did behind the scenes work with YC as the audio / video guy for a bit, before they went to the CH museum.

Yes, looks great!

It is great to see a YC fashion/e-commerce company getting traction. High fashion authentication makes a ton of sense, and is definitely a valuable service. The sealed auction model is interesting. It is a good model, but misses on all the engagement that real bidding offers. I think it is a good fit for them. Standard auctions are full of tasteless bullshit such as sniping.

Standard auctions offer the best available price. It would be interesting to see if they A/B test vickrey auctions where the price paid is the second highest bid. That prevents buyer's remorse, and could generate higher prices as people would bid higher without worrying about doing something "stupid".

Is there a reason you want/need to be the commerce platform on which these resale transactions take place?

Two-sided markets are generally more difficult to crack, and displacing eBay in particular is going to be challenging. I'd expect your cost of customer acquisition to grow quite significantly once you've tapped out the low hanging fruit.

If your core competency is your ability to detect counterfeits, however, maybe there's an opportunity to convince legitimate vendors to pay you to certify that their items are authentic, something that they then promote to prospective customers in all of their sales channels. You'd probably need to offer a buyer money-back guarantee for this model to be viable, but if you did this, you could try tying your pricing to the vendor's sales price (i.e. it costs more to certify a handbag being resold for $750 than a dress being resold for $250).

If you're wedded to the idea of running your own commerce platform, you could provide vendors that certify their goods with you a free listing on your site, and reimburse the certification fee from the sales commission if their product sells through you. By getting listings this way, you can avoid some of the questions you're bound to be asked if your only proposition is that you're an eBay competitor (think "How many sales do you generate a month?"). And you avoid having to grow your buyer base to make money.