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Startups that debuted at Y Combinator W17 Demo Day 2

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Re: Startups that debuted at Y Combinator W17 Demo Day 2

#121

Post by sah2ed »

nostrademons wrote: post #103
sah2ed wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are some interesting cultural questions about how in North American society, natural black hair is deemed unacceptable, and this has generally been internalized by black women. If you choose to just be natural (as my friend did) you get a lot of flak from other black women. You've basically identified the source of a "problem" that shouldn't even exist to begin with: an inferiority complex.

Isn't this basically the driving force behind every consumer product made since food & shelter became abundant?

I agree that mimetic pressures drive consumption but I was trying to dwell on the bit about black women becoming less proud of natural hairdo to make the market for hair attachments massive like it is today. I don't think Michelle Obama ever donned natural in her 8 years as FLOTUS.

It used to be that women of African descent would sport plaits, Jheri curls (80s), Afro (70s) etc. These were styles that rarely required the use of hair attachments or wigs. Wigs used to be for masking hair loss ...

Re: Startups that debuted at Y Combinator W17 Demo Day 2

#122

Post by sushid »

adamnemecek wrote: post #46

> with the worldwide black hair care market estimated at $500 billion a year Did they mean million? No way it's billion?

This is a projection they took from a weakly sourced article. A Huffington Post blog "article" states that the market is around $684M (as of 2014) and "a potentially $500B industry." [0]

But the real source that it cites can't be found on Mintel's website (maybe it's a paid publication?).

[0] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/antonia-opiah/the-changing-bus...

Re: Startups that debuted at Y Combinator W17 Demo Day 2

#123

Post by sushid »

TuringNYC wrote: post #80

>> Paragon One – Career coaching from real professionals >> Families spend a fortune on sending their kids to college......Families pay $7500 up front, and the kids get coaching over video chat. Paragon One says 100% of students who completed the program got job or internship offers. Wow, so the for-pay college application coaching is now becoming for-pay jobs&internships "coaching?" I suspect this will be limited co…

Also, the 100% received an internship offer seems like a disingenuous statistic at best. It's trivial to receive "an internship" if you count scammy, unpaid ones.

Re: Startups that debuted at Y Combinator W17 Demo Day 2

#124

Post by nandemo »

reckoner2 wrote: post #106
nandemo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to this [0] the sum of black population, plus australoid (for the sake of the argument, let's say they will be part of the target audience regardless of how they self-identify ethnically) and mixed caucasian+black, caucasian+australoid etc is about 27% of world population. Let's round that up to 30%. Also, let's round up the world population estimate to 7 billion, and assume men are part of the target audie…

Some anecdotal data that might surprise you then: A good friend of mine gets her hair cut once a month and says with tip it's about $100. Then coloring a few times a year at $200 a pop, then lots on shampoo, conditioner, hair products, new hairdryer and brushes every few years. She's spent over $1000 for a weave multiple times in her life. She's of course at one end of the spectrum, but $240 on average a year doesn't…

That doesn't surprise me at all. You've cherry-picked someone who's far richer (in absolute terms) than the average person within those 2 billion.

You're probably talking about an American (or a Brit or a French person? Someone in the developed world) who's at least lower-middle-class. Consider someone in an emerging country. For the average Brazilian or Colombian, a U$1000 weave would be far too expensive. And the vast majority of the target population is living in Africa and is much poorer than the average Brazilian.

FWIW, I don't see anything wrong with the startup. I just making a back of envelope calculation that shows the market estimate is BS.

Re: Startups that debuted at Y Combinator W17 Demo Day 2

#125

Post by randusr »

pavlov wrote: post #88

How is Vize different from Tableau?

Co-founder here. Vize caters to use cases beyond the sales/marketing/BI ones where Tableau is used. If you have millisecond time-series data, want to run simulations, or need more performance, Vize would be great tool :)

Re: Startups that debuted at Y Combinator W17 Demo Day 2

#126

Post by megablast »

_m8fo wrote: post #20

I wish you could bet on the odds of some of these succeeding in 3 years or so. Someone should start a startup that does this and get into Y Combinator to be super meta. random commentary below: * FloydHub – Heroku for deep learning * It's unlikely in my eyes that a company with enough data worth doing deep learning for is going to outsource the actual model building. I'd be interested to hear counter examples. * Tetr…

* Uber *

This is stupid, everybody just has there own car and drivers where they need to be.

* Airbnb *

This is stupid, who wants to rent out part of their home to strangers, who knows what they will do. And have you ever heard of hotels? Sheesh.

Re: Startups that debuted at Y Combinator W17 Demo Day 2

#127

Post by _m8fo »

megablast wrote: post #126
_m8fo wrote: post #20

I wish you could bet on the odds of some of these succeeding in 3 years or so. Someone should start a startup that does this and get into Y Combinator to be super meta. random commentary below: * FloydHub – Heroku for deep learning * It's unlikely in my eyes that a company with enough data worth doing deep learning for is going to outsource the actual model building. I'd be interested to hear counter examples. * Tetr…

* Uber * This is stupid, everybody just has there own car and drivers where they need to be. * Airbnb * This is stupid, who wants to rent out part of their home to strangers, who knows what they will do. And have you ever heard of hotels? Sheesh.

I'm not sure what you're getting at. If you have something substantial to say... why not say it?

Re: Startups that debuted at Y Combinator W17 Demo Day 2

#128

Post by pavlov »

randusr wrote: post #125
pavlov wrote: post #88

How is Vize different from Tableau?

Co-founder here. Vize caters to use cases beyond the sales/marketing/BI ones where Tableau is used. If you have millisecond time-series data, want to run simulations, or need more performance, Vize would be great tool :)

Thanks for the info!

Re: Startups that debuted at Y Combinator W17 Demo Day 2

#130

Post by katm »

aestetix wrote: post #84

Did they actually do anything besides donate money to the ACLU? I didn't see anything on the ACLU's website about it, which is strange given the arrangement YC usually has with companies they "fund." Did anyone from the ACLU go to YC and participate? Is there a "demo day" presenation from the ACLU? I'm very confused.

We donated money, are advising on technical projects and are connecting with them technical volunteers on a number of projects they're working on. When we announced we were working with the ACLU, over 1,500 people in our community volunteered to help. We sent one of our software engineers, Cadran Cowansage, to work with them full time this batch. She has been plugging in volunteers as needed. Anthony Romero, the Executive Director of the ACLU, presented at Demo Day. You can read a bit more about it here: https://www.axios.com/how-yc-is-helping-the-aclu-get-more-te...

And we don't have an arrangement with companies we fund. Founders decide if they want to put our logo on their site.

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