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YC: Requests for Startups

ycombinator.com

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Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#151

Post by SteveNuts »

brettv2 wrote: post #51

> NEW ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING SOFTWARE Very curious if anyone knows how to pull this off. There's so much value to be unlocked but it's just impossible to break through. I've personally met three very talented founders that tried and failed (one was accepted to YC as a mid-market ERP and successfully pivoted into an application tracking system) and failed very quickly. I'm guessing an important feature would be…

Step one is to make sure it's auditable.

Every auditor on the planet is intimately familiar with how Oracle EBS and SAP do certain things.

If you don't have that trust built up, a customer simply won't want to take the risk and additional headache and overhead passing an audit will take.

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#152

Post by advael »

It's bizarre to me that Tesla gets cited as an exemplar for operating as an American manufacturer for physical goods, given that it's been the subject of numerous scandals regarding quality control of the physical components manufactured there, many of which I've found out about through this very site. If manufacturing comes back to the US in the form of more companies that operate like Tesla, I would guess that American-manufactured goods would come to be distrusted more

Of course, to put this solely on Tesla isn't completely fair. A lot of the problems with how Tesla does business are symptoms of the larger crisis in how businesses are run here, but I think that trying to bring manufacturing back without solving the corporate governance problems that make doing it well infeasible (and indeed caused a lot of the offshoring in the first place) is likely a fool's errand. Most businesses face little discipline on quality in the form of either regulation or competition (which tends to be eaten by mergers even when it arises), and intense pressure from investors to cut corners at every turn

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#153

Post by snapcaster »

bradgessler wrote: post #120
emseetech wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two factors to consider though. On the one hand, you're correct that it does nothing for the American worker to bring manufacturing back if it means huge buildings with skeleton crews and machines that effectively run themselves. I don't particularly have a solution for this. Americans have gotten used to the price of goods being artificially low because of inexpensive labor in impoverished countries. Unles…

> On the one hand, you're correct that it does nothing for the American worker to bring manufacturing back if it means huge buildings with skeleton crews and machines that effectively run themselves. This seems analogous to the transition from bespoke manufacturing of goods to mass production. I think what we need is leadership that can get people excited, in good faith, about a future where small groups of people ca…

Is the narrative incorrect though? I feel like the underlying situation is described pretty well by that narrative in most cases. Inequality has increased pretty massively since tech has taken over the economy

Maybe take a crack at it, what is incorrect with the "feudalism" narrative? what is the better way of framing it that you're implying exists?

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#155

Post by ushakov »

gavinhoward wrote: post #133
Bagged2347 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll bite, I'm interested in the OSS dev tools field and I agree with your stance on investment money tending to corrupt good products. It's a big trade off. What are you working on? Do you have a website to share? Is it just you right now or do you have partners or employees?

I am surprised at the interest, thank you! One note: technically my software isn't quite Open Source; it's source available. [0] I will have my first release in less than two months, hopefully. It will include a scripting language and a build system. If the language gets interest, I'll expand it and build the standard library. If the build system gets interest, I will expand it. The end goal is Nix for mere mortals.…

Why would anyone pay for what you’re building? SQLite is not a business model anyone in the world could meaningfully replicate, don’t hope for it.

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#156

Post by sam0x17 »

brettv2 wrote: post #51

> NEW ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING SOFTWARE Very curious if anyone knows how to pull this off. There's so much value to be unlocked but it's just impossible to break through. I've personally met three very talented founders that tried and failed (one was accepted to YC as a mid-market ERP and successfully pivoted into an application tracking system) and failed very quickly. I'm guessing an important feature would be…

another key thing is you need SOC 2 or ISO right out of the gate. We actually had to do that at Arist when they were seed stage because all the customers are literally FANG and fortune 500s which require such certifications to even do business with a vendor

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#157

Post by bradgessler »

KittenInABox wrote: post #135
bradgessler wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the one hand, you're correct that it does nothing for the American worker to bring manufacturing back if it means huge buildings with skeleton crews and machines that effectively run themselves. This seems analogous to the transition from bespoke manufacturing of goods to mass production. I think what we need is leadership that can get people excited, in good faith, about a future where small groups of people ca…

> Feudalism doesn’t get pluralities excited, so how does that mainstream narrative change in a manner that feels like everybody is part of the journey instead of an exploit? The problem is not the need for a narrative change. The need is actual change .

"Actual change" implies that all tech is complicit in feudalism, which isn't categorically true. That doesn't matter though because enough tech companies have engaged in activities that lead to the narratives we regularly see today.

Yes, there is "actual change" that's needed by a lot of actors in tech, but that alone won't be enough. Ideally we see both "actual change" and "narrative change" happen in tandem that get people excited about the future.

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#158

Post by nonethewiser »

mandmandam wrote: post #146
nonethewiser wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your opinion, should we not have any defense technology?

There's probably some middle ground between no defense tech whatsoever , and trillion dollar illegal wars and genocides . Every American - and the rest of the world too - is paying that very real debt. We're all paying the opportunity cost too, and the societal cost. It will be paid for generations, and many of the true costs are incalculable. Some very few people are making a tonne of money, and here, YC is saying t…

> There's probably some middle ground between no defense tech whatsoever, and trillion dollar illegal wars and genocides.

There is obviously middle ground. Which is why categorically condemning defense spending is indefensible.

What are you referring to as genocide?

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#159

Post by networked »

I would still like to see RFS 5 "Development on Handhelds" (https://web.archive.org/web/20140428231118/http://ycombinato...) fulfilled. I asked sama about it in 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10361215. The state of the art has advanced since. Termux (https://termux.dev/en/) on Android is a viable development environment. With a Debian PRoot (https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/PRoot), it feels a lot like "normal Linux". What I want to see, though, is something that takes advantage of graphics and touch input. Structural touch-based editing of s-expressions in particular seems like it could be practical and fun. Think Snap! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap!_(programming_language)) but built for multitouch devices.

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#160

Post by hef19898 »

mjhay wrote: post #150
hef19898 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They really talked about ML-automated robotics in that blog... I swear, I dodn't read it before commenting. This line >> Companies like SpaceX and Tesla have trained an entire generation of engineers in how to build an American company that makes physical products but operates like a startup. is sending chills down my back so. After all, Tesla was almost bankcrupted by their drive to automate everything. And Tesla's…

Whatever you say about the rest of that, dethroning SAP would be a noble goal.

I know that sentiment. Usually comes from people who either never worlkd with something else or only know SAP as some kind of hour booking and expense tool.

If that is what you know about SAP and ERP systems, sure, you can come up with something like YC Call for Start-Up section on ERP systems.

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