HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

Detached from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9785941, per "please don't comment otherwise on this thread until we're done at 1 pm PDT". You're welcome to have this discussion after that, of course.

When I think about marketplace problems, I ideally want to solve one side of the equation at a time. That means understanding whether this is supply constrained or demand constrained. Looks like you have an abundance of demand (people who want rides) and not enough supply (drivers). So all your efforts should be focused on how to get people to offer rides.

Usually the incentive for drivers when I've seen other companies work on this problem is they get to drive in the carpool lane. Does that not work in your instance?

Why couldn't you have drivers be paid by passengers and you take a cut of that process?

I think a lot of people are selfish about their cars because they're valuing efficiency and control of their commute over everything else. Adding a passenger reduces those primary values. Can you think of other values that might overcome those? Money is one, but considering the lack of interest to meet that demand, it might not be enough.

If I were creating a ridesharing program that I wanted people to talk about organically, I'd want to design it in a way that commuting via my program was FAR better than commuting by myself. Off the top of my head, the best part of my commute is listening to a great podcast. If you could get exclusive content that only ridesharers can get access to if they ride together...that could be interesting.

Doesn't need to be entertainment. Could be learning a language together or business skills, etc.

Why did you think you had a negative growth week?

Could you say more about how making the product open-source will give you a monopoly? Will the data be open-source too?

If the product is open-source, how will monetization work?

If you can get 30 houses in your neighborhood as happy customers, that would be a great start. You should give them super customer service--ie, go around to their units and make sure everything is working perfectly. The word-of-mouth recommendations from your first customers is so important.

What do the unit economics look like? How much are you charging for the current units, how much do people need to spend a year to operate them, and how much do they save on groceries?

I think one of the challenges is that there is usually extra capacity to the ISS, and so you at least initially you need to compete on convenience not money (by the way, I should note that we funded Bagaveev in the last YC batch).

The most convincing thing to investors will be an order book--ie, go convince people in that backlog to say they will pay you a certain amount for future launches if you can build a reliable rocket. If you have that plus credible initial technical development you can probably raise some money.

That's pretty awesome that you guys backed a semiconductor company. I didn't apply as I was skeptical you would invest in one... great to see YC expanding so far and fast though.

We're looking at having full simulation capabilities (with physical verification in progress) come the end of this year, with a shuttle run (prototype) tape out in Q1 next year. It's about a 3 month turn around, so we are expecting to have our first 100 prototype chips in the ~May-June timeframe next year. From there, we'll be putting together 20-25 evaluation units (consisting of 4 of our chips put together), and selling those... we have 4 order commitments already, which almost cover the cost of getting the prototypes made (though we are not reliant on that, as we now have outside funding). We'll be using TSMC (the largest pure-play semi foundry) and their 28nm process (with the very slim possibility of going down to 16/20nm if the price is right at that point).

Right now, our connections are primarily in academia and government, so they are the people we have talked to the most and have said they will put money up, and we do have some government grant funding. I do not want government and academia to be our primary focus though (Any thoughts on that?), although early non dilutive funding is nice. For the applications we have specced out that they care about, we are showing around a 10x efficiency increase for dense matrix applications (over top of the line CPUs and GPUs currently used), and even enabling some applications that were not really practical on existing systems. I can't go into too much detail on those publicly, but can talk about them offline.

When it comes to our best application space, and what I would like to target, is the signal processing and mobile basestation space. Our best performance and efficiency (25x the best CPUs, GPUs, and DSPs at the moment) comes with FFTs, and we're capable of doing next generation large FFTs better than the best DSPs are at doing the current generation types. The few people (mostly academics in the field) I have talked to in this think this is a big game changer for that industry, and the problem we have is that we don't really have any connections in the industry itself. My idea has been we should try to build up as much evidence before talking to more people in it.

While I have talked about two areas, our architecture isn't really limited to any one, it just performs exceptionally well for those... but planning for wider market adoption is I think too far ahead of us at this point.

With our current funding, we'll be able to get through making 100 (16 core) prototype chips, build those into evaluation units, and test them with customers... from there, doing a full tape out and getting the full 256 core chip to market will be another $10 to $15 million, and we expect to be able to tape out and go into mass production in the first half of 2017.

Question: Do you think the Thiel-style monopoly approach would work in our case? I initially imagined we would be able to enter and do very well in the High Performance/Supercomputing area, eat up market share from the big guys (Intel, NVIDIA, etc) who don't care about the "small" HPC market. From there, expand to large business data centers (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc) and mobile basestation systems, and so on until we hit mass market devices. Do you think this is a decent (although very simply described for brevity) plan for the 3 to 5 year timeframe?