New Requests for Startups • Hacker News Board

Re: New Requests for Startups

#211

Post by radicalbyte » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 7:29 PM UTC

randall wrote: post #71

atonse wrote: post #68

While I've always felt a strong attraction to YCombinator (especially the cameraderie that comes from being a part of it) and been very inspired to apply, I can't help but feel that I am in a phase of life that's simply not a good fit for YC, or at least the narrative that's pushed. I'm no longer a mid 20-something that can live on Ramen and 16 hour days. I'm married and have a young child. Are there YC founders in t…

I had a pregnant wife and a kid at home when I went through YC last January. Another friend of mine had 3 kids and a wife he had to leave home. Realistically YC doesn't care what stage of life you're in, they just want you in Mountain View for 3 months so you can significantly improve the chances of your company growing large. It's difficult to make it work, but I promise for me it was totally worth it.

My wife would kill me if I left her alone for 3 months with a baby whilst she was pregnant.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#212

Post by dasmithii » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 7:29 PM UTC

This a surprisingly promising list of ideas, especially for an incubator to suggest. Things like internet infrastructure, ideally, are in the non-profit sector. And though YC does fund non-profits, I can't imagine they'd be happy with a swarm of unprofitable applicants coming in next round.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#213

Post by bfe » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 7:31 PM UTC

Given sama's enthusiasm for SpaceX, including as a "great example" in his blog post on the original new RFS, it seems unambitious for the RFS to mention space only in the context of robots and science.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#214

Post by drzaiusapelord » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 7:32 PM UTC

ealloc wrote: post #79

I'm surprised no one has commented yet on the first couple of these - Energy, AI, Biotech, and Drug design. These have traditionally been domains requiring a huge research apparatus with tremendous manpower, for only very long term gains. Not good for startups. In AI, how can a startup hope to succeed when academia has had almost no success in 50 years (and I am doubtful throwing more CPU/neuron layers will 'solve' t…

Dumb, but practical AI would be a game changer. Look, I don't need HAL. I need a simple robot with enough vision processing and brains to vacuum up my house, pick up dirty clothes, and load the dishwasher.

We can't be too far from that. Even if that thing sold at $10k it would have buyers lined up.

Agreed about y-combinator not being the appropriate format for hard nuts to crack. Mobile stuff and low hanging fruit like disqus and dropbox? Sure. Breakthroughs that define how business and society works? That's probably going to come out of larger institutions that dont consist of 20 somethings living off ramen. This format can be seen as working with breakthroughs that are out there, but haven't been applied the right way or are under-monetized. TBL didn't need to invest TCP/IP, fiber networking, server kernels, etc. He just had to write HTTP.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#215

Post by wj » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 7:34 PM UTC

If anybody is working on the financial services one I would love to talk to you about it. My day job is in that industry and I think there is a ton of room for innovation. Sometimes it is hard to convince people in the industry of that as they retain the ideas they came up with. I recall hearing somebody say in a talk (or maybe on Twitter) recently that industry disruption happens from people outside of the industry rather than people inside the industry.

Ultimately I think something that provides a whole financial picture is what is needed (I think Learnvest is trying to do that). I picture something along the lines of a combination of Credit Karma, You Need a Budget, and Vanguard as being the way to go.

My email and twitter are in my profile if you would like to talk.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#216

Post by vonklaus » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 7:35 PM UTC

mbesto wrote: post #176

> We want to fund companies that have the potential to create a million jobs. I still am curious about this one. Is there any startup that has successfully done this in recent history? Keep in mind, there is a big difference (IMO) between creating new jobs and shifting existing ones.

I think if you look at an ecosystem as a whole the. It has happened. Google is a good example. The actual enterprise has thousands of jobs but has created over a million. You have upstream hardware manufacturers and downstream developers. There is SEO, advertising, X-Prize, managed services, etc. If someone deleted google today the net loss to jobs would probably be well over 1m jobs.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#217

Post by dobbsbob » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 7:36 PM UTC

frandroid wrote: post #58

It's a fantastic list; I'd like to comment on how some of the problems are already solved (outside the U.S.) or not cast properly. > Healthcare in the United States is badly broken. We are getting close to spending 20% of our GDP on healthcare; this is unsustainable. That's mostly a policy problem, not a technology problem. Countries with single-payer healthcare spend massively less on it per % of GDP than the United…

Water will be a serious problem, if I remember correctly Jordan has to import potable water. I'm sure they would be interested in any ycombinator ideas, and the government of California.

Where I live there is an abundance of crystal clear drinking water being wasted by fracking to sell LNG at bargain basement prices.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#218

Post by superzamp » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 7:47 PM UTC

pyb wrote: post #106

Is it just me, or are these RFSes too vague to be inspiring or actionable. It looks like you perhaps had a good list of actual ideas, which you redacted to death ?

I think they're seeds for thought, nothing more.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#219

Post by dasmithii » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 7:47 PM UTC

akkartik wrote: post #32

> 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…

With any improvement in programming language technology, we narrow the disparity between human and computer representations of logic. In it's simplest form, this is the premise of language designers.

The biggest difficulty with current languages is their reliance on absolute determinacy. Programmers must express in exact form what computations ought be performs, and the languages possesses no intelligence in themselves. I think this needs to change. Inference should have applications outside type declaration, and the vast knowledge base that is the Internet should be taken into account.

At this point, there are two promising pursuits that I've seen. First is Wolfram Language, which you've all heard of. The other is Escher, which enables "programming in analogies". It's on early stages right now, but I'd encourage you to check it out at https://github.com/gocircuit/escher.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#220

Post by deet » Fri, Sep 12, 2014, 7:47 PM UTC

lnanek2 wrote: post #175

nerfhammer wrote: post #168

> It’s not a secret that saving money is hard, and that people tend to be bad at doing it. The personal savings rate has largely been falling since the early 80s. There already several startups in the "personal saving" space largely based on index funds, though some of them have large minimums. Complex schemes may not be worth the effort for those with only a few bucks to spare: https://www.wealthfront.com/ https://w…

I think you are kind of missing what the hard part is for many people, which is not choosing where to put the savings, it is choosing to save at all. Many live paycheck to paycheck, even go deep into debt on credit cards and payday loans. There's a whole broad class of apps like Mint, where it will show you all your costs and income and give you tips about how to reduce your spending, save more, refinance debt, etc..…

As nerfhammer mentions, for some reason YC focused on the "invest" side of "It’s too hard to find good ways to save and invest" in their description. It would be good if they clarified that that's really what they intended.

I find this confusing as well because while simpler investment mechanisms would help some people who already have money to invest, for the majority of people getting this initial money is the problem.

It's improvements in personal finance tools and systems to help people make better decisions that let them save (and hence invest more) that could make the most difference for the most people. It doesn't necessarily have to be games or social networks though. Even just presenting the right information at the right time could work.