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New Requests for Startups

ycombinator.com

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Re: New Requests for Startups

#31

Post by Permit »

garry wrote: post #15
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.

Absolutely. The final decision makers at other accelerators were often non-technical and (understandably) did not immediately see the value in developer tools.

Thankfully, companies like Jetbrains, Github and Light Table have made a lot of progress in demonstrating that a viable market exists here.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#32

Post by akkartik »

> What comes after programming languages?

I've been working on this for several years, though a startup seems the wrong vehicle for it. I think the description in the RFS is misguided:

"We’re interested in helping developers create better software, faster. This includes new ways to write, understand, and collaborate on code, and the next generation of tools and infrastructure for delivering software continuously and reliably."

There's a blind spot in prose like this that gets repeated all over the place in our community: it emphasizes writing over reading. I think we have to start with reading. My hypothesis is that we need to reform the representation of programs to address this use case: I download the sources for a tool I use, wanting to make a tweak. How can I orient myself and make a quick change in just one afternoon? This is hard today; it can take weeks or months to figure out the global organization of a codebase.

You can't "deliver software continuously and reliably" until you rethink its underpinnings. Before the delivery problem there's a literacy problem: we programmers prefer to write our own, or to wrap abstraction layers over the code of others, rather than first understanding what has come before.

More on my approach: http://akkartik.name/about

Re: New Requests for Startups

#33

Post by KaoruAoiShiho »

ccozan wrote: post #19
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.

> 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.

Not even close. Travel is sooooo god damn complicated and inaccessible to most people. Even though traveling should be popular, on a population basis basically nobody travels. This can change with better software, I'm sure of it.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#34

Post by jacquesm »

Jun8 wrote: post #28

Two things I think are missing from the list: 1. It has often been commented that the next Google will come from the company who develops a palatable version "next generation TV". Hollywood 2.0 really covers only part of this. 2. A YC generator. YC emerged as an anomaly in the VC field and became widely successful. How can its success be replicated, both for US and in other countries. This was on a 2008 list that pg…

You'd have to replicate Silicon Valley first.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#35

Post by k__ »

atroyn wrote: post #22
vishalzone2002 wrote: post #21

With less than a month left to the deadline, its really challenging to build a decent MVP with some traction in one of these fields. And I think that seem to be at least the minimum requirement to get into YC.

From the post: "Responding to an RFS will never be the deciding factor in who we fund. "

Maybe it's a marketing stunt? I mean, they're in for the money, so they have to fund stuff, that pays out later. BUT they have to appease their critics, who say "all you fund is the next snapchat!!".

With this list, they can say "Oh we wanted to cure cancer, the people who wanted funding for it just got no skills!"

Re: New Requests for Startups

#36

Post by GuiA »

bradleysmith wrote: post #23

Was interested to see nothing mentioned about news & current events information startups. This seemed to be a re-occuring "problem worth solving" on YCombinator lists, and is notably absent.

Do you mean things like Flipboard, Circa, etc.? Not very surprising to see them absent on YC's list. Like the more recent waves of social networks, they don't offer much and just add to the noise.

Who will remember these companies in 10, 20, 50 years? Most likely no one.

Who will remember companies that solve problems related to healthcare, energy, food allocation? A lot more people.

There's much to like about this list. It's ambitious in a tangible and actionable way. YCombinator realizes that if we don't want there to be a second bubble burst in Silicon Valley, we need to reach escape velocity and leave the social networks and iPhone news apps behind. That's a solid trajectory for them to take.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#38

Post by bradleyjg »

wmeredith wrote: post #18

I liked this line: "the government is a very large customer with very bad software." It could also be written like this: the government is a very bad customer with very large software.

Selling to governments is very difficult and time consuming. The company I work for has spent over a year now trying to get approved to sell our software to the NYC schools (not land a sale, just get approved to try to land sales), and it looks like we may have hit a dead end.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#39

Post by jacquesm »

taigeair wrote: post #7

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

By some reasoning we're already past it, in the middle of it, it's just around the corner or it will never appear. It's a totally meaningless question without first defining what the singularity actually is. The world we live in today is already very far removed from the one that I was born in but the linkages are still there to be followed.

To know how far the singularity is 'off' is by definition impossible, it means that you have knowledge of which linkages are required to get to the point that you won't be able to predict the ones after that.

After all when the singularity is here the world we will end up in will have no relationship to the one we are in today.

For the record, I think we will see a period of accelerated progress and then we will either fuck up or things will slow down again, I don't believe there will be a runaway event.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#40

Post by brador »

GuiA wrote: post #27
aresant wrote: post #9

I loved seeing VR on this list as an Oculus enthusiast. The http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus , http://www.reddit.com/r/oculusdev/ , and https://developer.oculusvr.com/ are jam packed with excited hackers cranking out their projects and with the Oculus Connect conference coming up I'd love to see some of this talent pointed towards Y-Combinator

VR can be so much more than what Oculus and its associated acts are about. In fact, they cast a shadow over it that will probably be harmful to it in the long run. The Oculus acquisition by Facebook is possibly the worst thing that could have happened to VR. With the Rift, Oculus had the opportunity to chart a brand new low cost platform accessible to millions, and be the next IBM/Microsoft/Apple/etc of their day. Th…

They took VC money to get Dk1 out and prep Dk2. Then Facebook came knocking and they were forced to sell so the VCs could get their ROI. No one wanted to do it, least of all the top man.
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