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HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

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Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#151

Post by r0naa »

goldMIT wrote: post #45

Golden Speak ( http://www.goldenspeak.com ) helps you speak better by analyzing your voice for pitch, rhythm, vocab, fillers, and clarity. We'd like to talk about launching minimum features quickly vs. high user expectations that people have from apps like facebook, etc. Does it make sense to focus more on polish instead of launching within an almost embarrassing feature set?

I believe to be one of your target demographics (international students, thick accent) and I would definitely pay for a service like yours.

Focus on delivering a polished products that can deliver, I will try your product only once and if your product's quality convince me that there is an opportuntity to improve my speaking skills I will literally throw money at you.

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#152

Post by highCs »

kevin wrote: post #118
highCs wrote: post #23

I'm making a competitive real-time strategy game like starcraft (which is declining) but without the punitive aspect of the game which is why a massive number of players stop playing it I think. Starcraft is also the only decent competitive RTS on the market right now, a successor can grow at startup-level in the long term I beleive. I have a solid engine, nothing launched yet. My question is: why would you not fund…

Are you working on this by yourself?

Cracking attempt 3

I've proved in the past (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQLiANnRPBU) I can get plenty of traction with a minimal game done by a couple of guys. Moreover, since the RTS is competitive, I can get a feedback and growth loop by organizing tournament with prizes. If the core gameplay works and the updates are substancial, players will come more and more numerous each time.

Here is a video of the RTS (January): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNIFd6jxQbY

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#153

Post by lacker »

graceofs wrote: post #21

Hi Sam and Kevin, We built ObjectiveFS, it's like Dropbox, but for servers. We have users running our shared file system in production, and are getting great feedback. Our current challenges are user growth and upcoming competition from Amazon EFS. We would like your feedback on what we can do on our website ( http://objectivefs.com ) or additional things we can do to get more people to start our free trial and to ad…

Isn't NFS more of your competition? It looks like Amazon EFS is designed as a NFS competitor itself. Is your software better than NFS? As far as I can tell, everyone who uses NFS thinks it sucks. You will have a much easier time convincing people to switch from NFS to your stuff than from a not-yet-existing product to your stuff.

"Like Dropbox but for servers" doesn't seem like it's quite the right pitch. Because you also say, use this on your laptop. Maybe you want something more like, "Dropbox for teams of software engineers". Or just, "NFS that doesn't suck".

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#154

Post by akhilcacharya »

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…

Thomas, I've read about REX before and I've been intrigued. How did you learn enough to be able to innovate in the HPC space before you went to school for EE?

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#155

Post by walterbell »

ph0rque wrote: post #150
veb wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder... you could advertise something like this as a health product. Let's say you have Celiac and you need to eat gluten free. Using this AutoMicroFarm, you can grow exactly what your customer needs (some lettuce strains may be hard on the stomach, some much better etc), so using your combined data from all units, customers, you can make sure that a certain AutoMicroFarm unit is completely fine tuned to that cus…

Thanks, I'll definitely keep that in mind! I have a friend who eats only organic for health reasons and to avoid ingesting the odd chemicals you mention, and he's definitely interested in an AutoMicroFarm.

There may be overlap with the market for food spectrometers, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/903107259/scio-your-six... . You are providing food supply chain transparency at the point of production rather than consumption. This is related to software security efforts to build reproducible binaries from open source, to guarantee production integrity.

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#156

Post by nostrademons »

tlb wrote: post #129
trsohmers wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you sure the power savings for mobile base stations are worth building chips for? I don't know the numbers, but suppose for example that there are 100,000 base stations that currently use 100 watts each doing the DSP. That's 10,000,000 watts total, costing about $10M/yr at $0.12 / kWh utility rates. If you can save 80% and capture 1/3 of the savings for the first 2 years (typical of efficiency improvement sales),…

I'm curious if there might be a premium brand strategy with this. If you work out the economics, a Prius almost never saves you enough in gas mileage to be worth the extra cost of the car. People still buy them anyway, because they want to advertise to everyone that they are environmentally conscious and care about the planet, and in this era of global warming, pollution, and institutionalized selfishness, that's worth something. It's conspicuous economy.

This would require a radically different marketing strategy, but what if they partnered with artists and sculptors and the advertising departments of the companies whose property the base stations would be located on? A mobile base station is usually designed to be as inconspicuous as possible; what if they flipped that around and turned a bunch of them into public art installations? The sales pitch to companies would be "Show your customers that you care about the planet, and get them talking about your brand." That's an advertising business, where they could charge way more than the power savings business.

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#157

Post by graceofs »

lacker wrote: post #153
graceofs wrote: post #21

Hi Sam and Kevin, We built ObjectiveFS, it's like Dropbox, but for servers. We have users running our shared file system in production, and are getting great feedback. Our current challenges are user growth and upcoming competition from Amazon EFS. We would like your feedback on what we can do on our website ( http://objectivefs.com ) or additional things we can do to get more people to start our free trial and to ad…

Isn't NFS more of your competition? It looks like Amazon EFS is designed as a NFS competitor itself. Is your software better than NFS? As far as I can tell, everyone who uses NFS thinks it sucks. You will have a much easier time convincing people to switch from NFS to your stuff than from a not-yet-existing product to your stuff. "Like Dropbox but for servers" doesn't seem like it's quite the right pitch. Because you…

Thanks for your insightful comment. We are currently competing with NFS, GlusterFS & other distributed file systems. Our software is much easier to use, requires no storage cluster maintenance and has no single point of failure.

I like your suggestion on the pitch, especially the "NFS that doesn't suck". :-) We will work on improving our pitch. Thanks again!

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#158

Post by jongraehl »

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…

1. what kind of binding promise can someone make to vote?

2. presumably only those who registered an intent to vote (in the election) for your proxy candidate will be able to direct (with website-votes) that proxy. have you thought about what legal measures can be taken to ensure that someone voted (probably it's not legal to determine who they voted for)?

Re: HN Office Hours with Kevin and Sam

#159

Post by declan »

kevin wrote: post #135
declan wrote: post #9

I'm a co-founder of Recent ( https://recent.io ), and we've created an iOS/Android app and recommendation engine that we describe as news powered by artificial intelligence. We have technical backgrounds; one of us also worked as a journalist for Wired, Time, and CNET. We're seed-funded, on the SF peninsula, and incorporated in Delaware. You were kind enough to invite us to attend YC's Startup School last October. Co…

Get out of beta. You're artificially constraining growth. For example, I wanted to try it out. Couldn't. 1 user lost. You will struggle your entire startup's life trying to get as many people to use you as possible. It's not like you don't have bugs after you launch. If you're a decent startup, you will be agile and you will change and fix things as they come in. Since this is a news recommendation engine, no one is…

Kevin: Thanks much for the excellent advice! My fears were finding serious bugs in the app or problems with the recommendation engine that would come to light with more users. But in retrospect my fears seem to have been launch anxiety: The response so far has primarily been folks saying: It's good, it's fast, and please can I have these additional features too!

Again, thanks for the advice, and I plan to follow it as quickly as possible.

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