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New Requests for Startups

ycombinator.com

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Re: New Requests for Startups

#171

Post by sama »

ealloc wrote: post #79

I'm surprised no one has commented yet on the first couple of these - Energy, AI, Biotech, and Drug design. These have traditionally been domains requiring a huge research apparatus with tremendous manpower, for only very long term gains. Not good for startups. In AI, how can a startup hope to succeed when academia has had almost no success in 50 years (and I am doubtful throwing more CPU/neuron layers will 'solve' t…

the energy and biotech companies that went through YC this summer seemed to have a good experience. we can often help companies raise very large amounts of capital after YC.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#172

Post by akkartik »

joshpadnick wrote: post #166
akkartik wrote: post #32

> What comes after programming languages? I've been working on this for several years, though a startup seems the wrong vehicle for it. I think the description in the RFS is misguided: "We’re interested in helping developers create better software, faster. This includes new ways to write, understand, and collaborate on code, and the next generation of tools and infrastructure for delivering software continuously and…

This is a great point. I am always struck by how there are so many times where, if I could sit down with the original program author for 5 - 10 minutes, I could understand more from that interactive back-and-forth than several hours of reading code in solitude. This tells me it's not that understanding how that code works is intellectually difficult; rather it's discovering how it works is time-consuming. It would be…

As it happens, I've been working on something like that. Still pretty half-baked, but send me an email and I'll show you what I have. Email in profile.

"There are so many times where, if I could sit down with the original program author for 5 - 10 minutes, I could understand more from that interactive back-and-forth than several hours of reading code in solitude."

Peter Naur wrote a paper in 1985 where he conjectured that this seemed to be a universal law. No matter how much documentation authors provided, new programmers still needed to talk to them. http://alistair.cockburn.us/ASD+book+extract%3A+%22Naur,+Ehn...

Re: New Requests for Startups

#173

Post by tdaltonc »

akkartik wrote: post #32

> What comes after programming languages? I've been working on this for several years, though a startup seems the wrong vehicle for it. I think the description in the RFS is misguided: "We’re interested in helping developers create better software, faster. This includes new ways to write, understand, and collaborate on code, and the next generation of tools and infrastructure for delivering software continuously and…

I’ve seen a good example of this recently. Nipype [1] produces network visualization of neuroimaging processing code[2]. They still look like a gnarled nest, but, for other neuroimaging people, they’re a lot easier to read then the actual code.

1 http://nipy.sourceforge.net/nipype/ 2 http://nipy.org/nipype/0.4.1/_images/graphviz-01bb1b88b33f7c...

Re: New Requests for Startups

#174

Post by marcelsalathe »

atonse wrote: post #68

While I've always felt a strong attraction to YCombinator (especially the cameraderie that comes from being a part of it) and been very inspired to apply, I can't help but feel that I am in a phase of life that's simply not a good fit for YC, or at least the narrative that's pushed. I'm no longer a mid 20-something that can live on Ramen and 16 hour days. I'm married and have a young child. Are there YC founders in t…

There was a priceonomics piece recently about Founders with kids: http://priceonomics.com/founders-with-kids/

It's more a question of whether your life fits to everything that comes with being a startup founder, rather than YC itself.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#175

Post by lnanek2 »

nerfhammer wrote: post #168

> It’s not a secret that saving money is hard, and that people tend to be bad at doing it. The personal savings rate has largely been falling since the early 80s. There already several startups in the "personal saving" space largely based on index funds, though some of them have large minimums. Complex schemes may not be worth the effort for those with only a few bucks to spare: https://www.wealthfront.com/ https://w…

I think you are kind of missing what the hard part is for many people, which is not choosing where to put the savings, it is choosing to save at all. Many live paycheck to paycheck, even go deep into debt on credit cards and payday loans. There's a whole broad class of apps like Mint, where it will show you all your costs and income and give you tips about how to reduce your spending, save more, refinance debt, etc..

Then there's a whole broad class of lifestyle apps that could be written, like a saving social network where you are socially rewarded for not spending a lot, win status in a game, etc.. E.g. maybe an app where you make a bet with a friend, if you spend under $100 on food this week, they owe you $100, and vice-a-versa. That would keep you both watching your spending and actually having something to save.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#176

Post by mbesto »

> We want to fund companies that have the potential to create a million jobs.

I still am curious about this one. Is there any startup that has successfully done this in recent history?

Keep in mind, there is a big difference (IMO) between creating new jobs and shifting existing ones.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#177

Post by saosebastiao »

ealloc wrote: post #158
saosebastiao wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These have traditionally been domains requiring a huge research apparatus with tremendous manpower, for only very long term gains. Not good for startups. In AI, how can a startup hope to succeed when academia has had almost no success in 50 years (and I am doubtful throwing more CPU/neuron layers will 'solve' the problem). This is a pure example of the AI Effect[1]. Academia has been extremely successful with AI Rese…

Interesting link, but I still feel AI hasn't had much success: Do we really have much more today that A* search, neural nets with backpropagation, and HMMs/SVM/etc, which were all developed in the 1960s? The successes of AI that I see (eg OCR/speech recognition and Chess/Jeopardy) use these same old algorithms with only marginal improvements and more CPU. There have been no new major techniques or insights. I'm not a…

The very incomplete high level overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applications_of_artificial_inte...

Re: New Requests for Startups

#178

Post by u124556 »

ccozan wrote: post #19
chrisacky wrote: post #6

- INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE "An important trend is the API-ification of everything. As more and more businesses are accessible with a web API, the Internet becomes more and more powerful." I think a POSTman style Zapier, love-child would go down very well. Also products like Mashery where you provide APIs as a service and charge. Notably missing from the list... - Anything related to travel. - Anything related to stora…

Let me reply regarding travel: - is full 99% of so established players, with lots of money. To enter this marked requires either equally amount of money or something truly truly innovative...which brings to point 2: - what is left to invent in this area to be so disruptive so that a start-up in this area makes sense? I'd love to be contradicted, but I think all important things in travel have been invented.

I can think of two very easily: Sub-Orbital travel and medical tourism.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#179

Post by yaur »

bradleyjg wrote: post #38
wmeredith wrote: post #18

I liked this line: "the government is a very large customer with very bad software." It could also be written like this: the government is a very bad customer with very large software.

Selling to governments is very difficult and time consuming. The company I work for has spent over a year now trying to get approved to sell our software to the NYC schools (not land a sale, just get approved to try to land sales), and it looks like we may have hit a dead end.

One of the previous places I did some freelance stuff for solved this by partnering with a vendor that was already on the approved list.

Re: New Requests for Startups

#180

Post by joshpadnick »

akkartik wrote: post #172
joshpadnick wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great point. I am always struck by how there are so many times where, if I could sit down with the original program author for 5 - 10 minutes, I could understand more from that interactive back-and-forth than several hours of reading code in solitude. This tells me it's not that understanding how that code works is intellectually difficult; rather it's discovering how it works is time-consuming. It would be…

As it happens, I've been working on something like that. Still pretty half-baked, but send me an email and I'll show you what I have. Email in profile. "There are so many times where, if I could sit down with the original program author for 5 - 10 minutes, I could understand more from that interactive back-and-forth than several hours of reading code in solitude." Peter Naur wrote a paper in 1985 where he conjectured…

Would love to. Email sent.
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