Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New Requests for Startups

ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 407 posts

Re: New Requests for Startups

#381

Post by zak_mc_kracken »

theuri wrote: post #154
maxcan wrote: post #131

> We’d like to see new services that make it possible to invest in super low-cost index funds. Sorry, this is not the right problem in financial services. Companies like Vanguard are already doing a great job of this and the costs are extremely low. Its a commodity product with razor thin margins that actually serves the needs of its customers well. Maybe there's a marketing issue where they aren't educating enough p…

Hey Max - Agreed - low cost index funds are a dime a dozen. Even "hot" startups like WealthFront / Betterment are a waste of money - you can spend a minute on the site, get their recommendation, hop over to Vanguard and carry it out yourself (and save thousands). Just send yourself a reminder to rebalance once a year and you're done. The biggest driver in building wealth, from our experience and that of working at Gu…

> using behavioral finance to automatically accumulate more assets over time

Can you explain what that means?

Re: New Requests for Startups

#382

Post by randall »

radicalbyte wrote: post #211
randall wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then you haven't done a good enough job communicating why it's important. :) My wife was really supportive because she knew it'd be worth it.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#383

Post by walshemj »

maxcan wrote: post #131

> We’d like to see new services that make it possible to invest in super low-cost index funds. Sorry, this is not the right problem in financial services. Companies like Vanguard are already doing a great job of this and the costs are extremely low. Its a commodity product with razor thin margins that actually serves the needs of its customers well. Maybe there's a marketing issue where they aren't educating enough p…

That is a solved problem and has been for well over a hundred years the F&C investment trust started in 1868!

And there are plenty of very low cost index trackers.

For a VC to make this sort of request is troubling as it indicates that they have very little knowledge on how investing works.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#384

Post by calgaryeng »

xur17 wrote: post #241
danielweber wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too much choice So we are going to make another choice? What if I only have $1000 to invest? Put it into your savings account because you need a rainy day fund. When you have $3000 to invest, put it into Vanguard's S&P 500, and call it a day. You are already beating more than half the managed funds out there. You spend time with your kids. This is slightly more complicated than YO , but only slightly.

Not another choice, just a simpler way to choose funds, with recommendations, etc. Wealthfront and a few others have offerings that do a pretty decent job at this, but they don't cover 401k plans, and their fees are high for something that should be set and forget. Target date funds are actually pretty good at doing this, and some have relatively low fees. A lot of the 401k providers just dump a list of 40 funds on y…

I think the app I'm working on (https://www.RetirementPlan.io) is in the right ballpark for what you are asking for. Can you try it out and provide feedback? It's free while in beta.

It's missing the Mint-style auto-connect, but it largely does the rest of it (the actual hard math).

Re: New Requests for Startups

#385

Post by orky56 »

bravura wrote: post #139

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'd like to invite people to try the early release of Empire API, which is one API for every enterprise SaaS: http://empiredata.co Empire is an API for accessing enterprise SaaS services such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Google Apps, etc. It provides a uniform, data…

Very interested in your product. With Catalist[1], we are approaching each of these SaaS functions from the ground up. Integrating your product would be huge for onboarding and creating a seamless transition. Let's definitely chat[2].

[1][www.catalist.me] [2][sumedh at above]

Re: New Requests for Startups

#386

Post by orky56 »

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.

This is a tough one to understand since traditional technology solutions reduce the need for many jobs with a net effect of eliminating many jobs since those workers no longer have the skill set. If you look at this differently, it's a case for new ways of thinking about worker education (Codacademy/One Month/etc.) but in a way more focused on employment (General Assembly/Hack Reactor/etc.) The former group of companies is built to scale whereas the latter is a high touch, franchise model.

Another case where jobs are being created is in the direct service marketplace with the shared economy (Uber/Airbnb/etc.) as well as the general assistance (TaskRabbit/VA positions/etc.).

With the rise of mobile, I think we'll see more situations where knowledge workers can provide quick and dirty value to lower tech industries in ways that are highly targeted and very efficient. Making money on the side should be higher value than answering surveys but easier and with less commitment that ramping up a full consulting business or getting a part-time job at a b&m store. /rant

Re: New Requests for Startups

#387

Post by orky56 »

Regarding enterprise, our approach with Catalist is a combination of 1. (Making the Expensive Cheap) & 3. (Digitizing Every Industry). We are providing companies with easy-to-use solutions based on the basic systems they understand. Half our companies come from competitor's tools while the other half are just getting started with a tech solution for their general workflow. Our hypothesis is that majority of workers wear multiple hats and spend more time figuring out what to do by assessing their responsibilities across multiple tools. We give these workers and their teams one place to address their system. This gives everyone on the team a clear idea of what actually needs to be done with full context.

Our favorite use case is a medical office that has made the jump to EMR. Much of their data is digitized but there is little benefit directly to them. However, once that digital data becomes a part of their workflow they actually see the benefit in it.

We are trying to think more generally about each of these problems and providing guidance to our individual customers specific to their vertical. Although it may seem we are still finding product-market fit, the small business market is always fragmented and diverse so this is just the reality of the situation.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#388

Post by radicalbyte »

eropple wrote: post #342
sqs wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes times 1,000! This is what we're trying to address at Sourcegraph ( https://sourcegraph.com/ ). 80% of programming is about reading and understanding code, not writing code. Why don't existing tools focus more on helping people read and understand code--and, more broadly, collaborate on a development team? Things like: * seeing everywhere a function or class is used, in context (like https://sourcegraph.com/github…

FWIW, I think this is absolutely fucking genius and everyone should check it out... ...but I can't give you money without Java/Scala support. Roadmap? Pleeeeease? =)

Do the JetBrains IDEs support this?

Find All Usages and Jump To Definitions are the reason I spend 400 EUR on Resharper licenses, it makes reading code so much easier..

Re: New Requests for Startups

#389

Post by johnobrien1010 »

wj wrote: post #215

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…

Reading the new list of Y-Combinator “Requests for Startups”, the Financial Services request really resonated with me.

Probably the best investing advice for people is really straightforward; you need to start saving now in order to reap the benefits when you retire.

A set of simple questions, such as your age, whether or not you are contributing to a 401k, and your net worth would probably get you 90% of the way there; from that information alone, most investing advice would follow based of basic mortality statistics, historical stock market performance, and the average retirement age.

The hard part is to start putting money away; that is, to start saving a significant portion of your savings and investing them in the market.

One way to do that might be to make it a one-time decision. What if there was a site where in order to sign-up you were required to setup direct deposit to special investing account? The investing account would, in turn, take a percentage of your salary, and invest it in age-appropriate index funds. The remainder would be re-deposited into a person’s local checking account. That way, it would feel like you only had the net amount that ends up in your checking account, and the invested amount would be removed before you had a chance to contemplate spending it.

A setup like this is something that someone could easily do for themselves using a discount broker, but a site that would more or less make it a one-time decision could be really helpful, because it would remove much of anxiety and education that a person typically has to go through to get this right.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#390

Post by bravura »

ig1 wrote: post #364
bravura wrote: post #139

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'd like to invite people to try the early release of Empire API, which is one API for every enterprise SaaS: http://empiredata.co Empire is an API for accessing enterprise SaaS services such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Google Apps, etc. It provides a uniform, data…

I looked at a few companies in this space when I was at a VC, and the fundamental problem was that they didn't provide enough value to the end developer. Aggregator APIs tend to provide extremely reduced functionality compared to the source API, and the ease-of-use doesn't compensate for this. In most cases it just makes more sense for the developer to spend a day building a custom adaptor for the API. That said I th…

Thank you. The pure SQL is a cool twist, because you can instantly start getting fancy, e.g. doing JOINs between different services.

In terms of value to the end-developer, there are a handful of value-add services we'll be rolling out that are a pain for people to implement:

- Authentication

- Federated search

- ETL / caching

- Record matching / fuzzy inference of foreign-key relationships

- Entity de-duplication

We also feel that Empire API will be exciting for pure client-side apps and apps that don't want to run a backend, e.g. the sort of apps that would build on Parse or Firebase.

Post reply on HN