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New Requests for Startups

ycombinator.com

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Re: New Requests for Startups

#11

Post by garry »

anon1385 wrote: post #8

>An important trend is the API-ification of everything. As more and more businesses are accessible with a web API, the Internet becomes more and more powerful. This is a bad thing. Replacing opens standards with proprietary APIs locked behind access tokens hardly makes the internet more accessible. Walled gardens are great for making money though…

The alternative to known and published APIs is no API, not closed APIs. In general the API companies we do fund are of the open sort and they accomplish something useful in the real world, eg Lob, EasyPost, Hellosign.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#12

Post by GuiA »

taigeair wrote: post #7

How far off is singularity? Seems like quite an interesting topic.

About as far off as the second coming of Jesus Christ, the reunification of the Beatles, and Duke Nukem Forever (ah oops, maybe scratch that last one).

Re: New Requests for Startups

#13

Post by thinkingkong »

anon1385 wrote: post #8

>An important trend is the API-ification of everything. As more and more businesses are accessible with a web API, the Internet becomes more and more powerful. This is a bad thing. Replacing opens standards with proprietary APIs locked behind access tokens hardly makes the internet more accessible. Walled gardens are great for making money though…

I think you might be confusing the "scrapability" with openness. If the information was behind a login / paywall to begin with, whats the harm in needing a token to access that API?

Re: New Requests for Startups

#14

Post by DodgyEggplant »

Awesome, ambitious and inspiring list of the challenges humans need to solve to move forward. One huge issue forgotten though: animals and wild life. They also inhibit our planet and part of our lives, but many quickly disappearing.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#15

Post by garry »

Permit wrote: post #3

Very cool to see this list expanded. My own personal interest lies in programmer tools and their inevitable evolution, so it's great to see them listed on there. A few of the accelerators I'd applied to in the past don't see the business opportunity present in developer tools (Who pays for those?) so it's a relief that YC recognizes the opportunity there.

It helps that many of the YC partners are developers themselves.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#17

Post by kevin »

dharbin wrote: post #4

Which ones are the new ones?

Many were slightly tweaked. But these are the new categories:

Pharmaceuticals Government Human Augmentation VR and AR Programming Tools Hollywood 2.0 Diversity Developing Countries Enterprise Software Financial Services Telecommunication

Re: New Requests for Startups

#19

Post by ccozan »

chrisacky wrote: post #6

- INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE "An important trend is the API-ification of everything. As more and more businesses are accessible with a web API, the Internet becomes more and more powerful." I think a POSTman style Zapier, love-child would go down very well. Also products like Mashery where you provide APIs as a service and charge. Notably missing from the list... - Anything related to travel. - Anything related to stora…

Let me reply regarding travel:

- is full 99% of so established players, with lots of money. To enter this marked requires either equally amount of money or something truly truly innovative...which brings to point 2:

- what is left to invent in this area to be so disruptive so that a start-up in this area makes sense? I'd love to be contradicted, but I think all important things in travel have been invented.

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