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HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

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Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#71

Post by ph0rque »

sama wrote: post #65
ph0rque wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the reply, Sam. To build a monopoly, the plan is to make the product open-source. On the data side, having data about all the different environmental conditions and how they affect plants and fish will also help build a monopoly. The first unit will go in a customer's back yard in a few months. In my new-construction neighborhood of ~400 houses, I plan to find 10-30 customers; I've started talking and have…

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 recomme…

My thinking is that the hardware and software will be open source, but not the data. Also, the OS license would allow modifications for the customer, but not for resale. Since the biggest part of the cost will be the "dumb" hardware (the containers and structure make up ~70% of the cost), it should be straightforward to sell the product at a profit.

Another point of monopoly would be to keep up a pace of innovation that is faster than the competitors.

I am offering the first customers a sale price of just the material costs. Also, they would get 24/7 support, and the CEO's (i.e. my) cell phone number.

Currently, similar products cost $1500+. My costs are $1000 (in quantities of one), and that price will come down 10-fold once I can manufacture 10k units per year.

At the current costs ($1500), the payback time is 1-2 years. Once purchased, the cost to operate is negligible (tens of dollars yearly). So they save $1-2k in groceries annually, depending on the length of the growing season.

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#72

Post by kevin »

mwilkison wrote: post #31

http://www.zerodb.io/ ZeroDB is an end-to-end encrypted database that lets you operate on data while it's encrypted. Demo video: https://vimeo.com/128047786 Question: We want to sell to large enterprises (financial services, healthcare, saas providers, etc.). The common advice is to start with SMBs/startups and get traction that way before going upmarket to enterprises. How can we balance that with the fact that what…

Curious. What are the differences in features being asked?

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#73

Post by ljd »

kevin wrote: post #68
ljd wrote: post #2

Company: http://PlaceAVote.com Pitch: We're replacing congress with voting software. We are running 70 candidates in the 2016 Congressional elections on our platform, if any of them get voted into office we'll take all bills before congress and put them on our site where each voter in that district gets one authenticated vote. Question: In your experience, what's the most effective way for B2C company to educate user…

Hey guys, good to hear from you again! Why do think your company is a B2C company? You're selling the software to politicians / political organizations. The consumer awareness part of this will be handled by your customers if this is part of a greater trend of voters wanting more transparency and accountability of their representatives. Of course, candidates will adopt this only if they find out they can win election…

Great talking again, Kevin!

Good question! We're not selling to politicians or political organizations. Our PAC is running candidates that are part of our community. People like you and I; professionals in tech that wouldn't mind making $170k to do literally nothing but proxy votes for their district.

Regarding what candidates need to tell voters, we're really looking to run a very centralized campaign, where people can come to our site to find out which name to vote for. We've found ways of legally hacking the election system so that we get ballot access, and differentiate our candidates in a uniform way. So we still see ourselves as a consumer product.

Is it wrong that we are adamant about remaining B2C? I want to find the best possible path, but I don't see how turning politicians that are so used to political donations for favorable voting will decide to shun their financiers to listen to the people they were voted to represent. It feels like that is a practice in futility.

We both agree on the last point, since we've spoken, we've picked up 11 new candidates in California and 9 abroad. We are trying to saturate the 2016 ballot with candidates.

Half our team are data people (I'm an algo dev myself) so finding the best conditions is something we are sorting out with data right now.

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#74

Post by sama »

trsohmers wrote: post #69
sama wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We funded a semiconductor company in the current YC batch (I believe for the first time). I think extreme energy efficiency is a great thing to go after for a new semiconductor company. It fits the "surf someone else's wave" principle well. Big companies are of course trying to do this to, but focused startups beat big companies all the time. Don't worry about being a low-level hardware company. It's a feature for yo…

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 o…

This sounds really good. If mobile base stations are the right first customers, go try to get some of them to agree to buy your chip (if you deliver it as planned), and then go try to raise a seed round. After you deliver the evaluation units, try to raise a $10-15MM seed round.

I'd focus less on academia and government. They are usually difficult investors and difficult first customers. Non-dilutive funding is nice, but dilution is not so bad in a binary-outcome situation, and venture investors are usually far faster and more helpful.

I think taking over the "small" HPC market first is a very good plan.

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#75

Post by dzine »

sama wrote: post #64
dzine wrote: post #4

Sam, Kevin, We are building a platform that allows anyone with a mobile phone to earn a living by performing discrete tasks. Our platform aims to break down complex jobs into easily actionable items, that can be performed easily by anyone, anywhere. The first vertical we are applying this to is reservations. The Loft Club ( https://useloft.com ) is a service that makes reservations for you at amazing restaurants ever…

Hi Zhuang and Derrick-- I think that 98% of the time, the right answer is to start out and remain focused on one vertical until you take it over. Most startups expand far too early and then fade out everywhere (this is often the fault of bad advice from investors). Facebook started in an extremely small vertical (Harvard undergrads), then expanded to a still-small vertical (US colleges), and then at some point took o…

We picked a reservation concierge service first, as it is a vertical that is immediately testable in SF with easy to understand mechanics for consumers. With the increasing mass-media fueled foodie culture, our hypothesis being that people don’t want the trouble of deciding where to eat and making the reservation - they just wanted a curated experience. And that made it a good candidate for our platform.

The other 2 verticals we considered were 1) a marketplace for on-the-ground, region specific collection of data and 2) travel planning in countries with low internet penetration, namely bookings and suggestions by locals.

With Loft, we have 20 customers paying us $10 ~ $20 a month, but we haven’t grown beyond that due to limited marketing, as we focus on nailing the operations side of platform. The agents are currently just the both of us, and we can afford $10 - $15 an hour per agent if our economics hold.

All in all, we have our vision of what the future of jobs can be. Loft is an experiment towards that which has seen mild traction, and that’s why we really want your advice!

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#76

Post by sama »

ph0rque wrote: post #71
sama wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 recomme…

My thinking is that the hardware and software will be open source, but not the data. Also, the OS license would allow modifications for the customer, but not for resale. Since the biggest part of the cost will be the "dumb" hardware (the containers and structure make up ~70% of the cost), it should be straightforward to sell the product at a profit. Another point of monopoly would be to keep up a pace of innovation t…

I think you will have a hard time claiming that the project is open source except the data which you keep and monetize.

I strongly suggest considering other models. Why do you want to "open-source" this at all? Why not just make it hardware and software you sell, and recommendations about how to grow based off of your large data set, but very hackable?

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#77

Post by ferpro »

yaraher wrote: post #34

Hey guys, We are CodePicnic (codepicnic.com), a platform for sharing, running and showcasing code through a browser. We help people and business improve their demos, APIs documentation, or anything that needs for their users to run and try some code online. We'd love to improve our "getting there" process. We've been interacting with users here in Hacker News, Reddit, Product Hunt and other sites, and getting better…

Go codepicnic

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#78

Post by ph0rque »

sama wrote: post #76
ph0rque wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thinking is that the hardware and software will be open source, but not the data. Also, the OS license would allow modifications for the customer, but not for resale. Since the biggest part of the cost will be the "dumb" hardware (the containers and structure make up ~70% of the cost), it should be straightforward to sell the product at a profit. Another point of monopoly would be to keep up a pace of innovation t…

I think you will have a hard time claiming that the project is open source except the data which you keep and monetize. I strongly suggest considering other models. Why do you want to "open-source" this at all? Why not just make it hardware and software you sell, and recommendations about how to grow based off of your large data set, but very hackable?

Sure, I have no qualms with dropping the open-source label, and opening up the data set. (However, trying to patent the hardware/software might be hard to do, given how much prior art is out there).

Do you have any other suggestions on how to build a moat/monopoly?

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#79

Post by trsohmers »

kevin wrote: post #70
trsohmers wrote: post #13

Hi Kevin and Sam, May be a bit out of your area, but I'm curious about your thoughts. Even though we are in "Silicon" Valley, there has been very little when it comes to new semiconductors investments. I'm the co founder and CEO of REX Computing ( http://rexcomputing.com ), a new semiconductor startup working on a super energy efficient processor architecture. We've actually raised seed funding, and I'm interested in…

What practical application is your chip best for? What can we do with your chip that we won't be able to do with the current line of chips coming in the next few years if they stay on the current path? The biggest problem for hard technical problems is the storytelling. I went through your site and I couldn't find the sentences I would need to make someone else excited about what you're making in a conversational way…

Hi Kevin,

Thanks! I really need to update the website as it is based on our (unsuccessful) fundraising pitch... thankfully, we had some great feedback a couple of months ago on storytelling, and it really improved our pitch and we were able to close a round. I'll make updating our website a priority this weekend.

Right now, it is best for signal processing applications and dense matrix (although it is not limited to that). To give you some actual applications, think mobile base station processing (Everything from your wifi router to big cell antennas, small cells, etc), computer vision/image processing, video rendering, machine learning (both convolutional neural networks and recurrent NNs), plus a bunch more to long to list. The new abilities that we are providing is that we can fit the performance of a high end system with ~300 watt GPU (which also needs a ~100 watt CPU attached to it), for say machine learning, in a 4 watt power budget.

The simple story that we've come up with is this:

30 years ago when existing computer architectures were designed, the power cost of moving data and processing it were roughly equal, but things have changed. Today, it takes 100 picojoules to do a double precision floating point operation, but 4200 picojoules (42 times!) more energy to move that data from RAM to your registers. We're solving that (among many other problems overlooked by the rest of the industry)problem through a new design rather than a radical new technology in order to achieve over a 10x energy efficiency increase over existing systems.

I typically have a more succinct oral pitch with accompanying presentation... hopefully this came through clearly. Any feedback would be apppreciated!

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#80

Post by sama »

dzine wrote: post #75
sama wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Zhuang and Derrick-- I think that 98% of the time, the right answer is to start out and remain focused on one vertical until you take it over. Most startups expand far too early and then fade out everywhere (this is often the fault of bad advice from investors). Facebook started in an extremely small vertical (Harvard undergrads), then expanded to a still-small vertical (US colleges), and then at some point took o…

We picked a reservation concierge service first, as it is a vertical that is immediately testable in SF with easy to understand mechanics for consumers. With the increasing mass-media fueled foodie culture, our hypothesis being that people don’t want the trouble of deciding where to eat and making the reservation - they just wanted a curated experience. And that made it a good candidate for our platform. The other 2…

If the main thing you want to prove out is that you can build a platform where small tasks can be easily farmed out (which again, sounds like a really good idea), I'm very unsure this is the right way to start. It's well established that you can get people to make restaurant reservations for you.

The best companies do something either fundamentally new or 10x better than existing solutions.

As you think about the future of the world, what can't people do today that they should be able to and that your platform could allow?

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