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YC: Requests for Startups

ycombinator.com

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Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#211

Post by jagged-chisel »

networked wrote: post #159

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…

> RFS 5 "Development on Handhelds"

I have ideas that I would love to explore given funding.

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#212

Post by hef19898 »

animal_spirits wrote: post #172
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…

I think this is an interesting take and something I've been relatively close to personally. I have a family member who owns one of those 100k Brother CNC machines, a robotic arm and some vice clamps and is starting a small manufacturing business with it out of his garage. While this isn't something that an average American can do, it can allow distribution of manufacturing to places that don't need a 500 acre lot, an…

Mass manufacturing is cheap because of economiea of scale, that means large volumes. The best a small shop can achieve, and that can be highly profitable if done right, is small batches, prototyping or serving as a sub-contractor for the big ones.

None of which actually drives final product prices dibe, and is already done extensively.

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#213

Post by brandensilva »

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #74

For the AR/VR space, I'm curious about YCs thinking about the addressable market and the possibility to have a unicorn-scale company developing solely for VR/AR in the foreseeable future (that isn't a device manufacturer). The devices seem to be getting better and better, but the software seems rather lacking (currently typing this from a gorgeous giant display on my Vision Pro, which I use mostly exactly like how I…

I think the larger dev ecosystem has created a bit of backlash against the big players for some time and aren't quick to adopt the new tech they are dishing out. I would guess taking a 30% cut, lawsuits, and unfair terms has left a sour taste in everyone's mouth.

And it wasn't until competition stepped up with an indie dev, aka a YouTube VR app called Juno made for the Vision Pro, that even Google decided to jump into developing YouTube for the Vision Pro.

So now we are back at the chicken and the egg problem and few big devs want to support the giants. It'll happen probably eventually when monetization becomes a reality for devs embracing the tech but I don't see it happening any time soon.

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#214

Post by deoxykev »

riemannzeta wrote: post #62

Anybody interested in talking to a potential customer for: * Developer tools inspired by existing internal tools * LLMs for manual back office processes in legacy enterprises Feel free to message me. Having worked in-house for the last 15 years, I've seen a variety of these, have built more than a few of them myself, and am in the middle of building some new ones using LLMs right now — all within large enterprise leg…

Hi there, I would be interested in a chat about those back-office patterns and use cases. Could you send an email to a2V2aW4gQCBkZW94eSAuIG5ldA==

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#215

Post by hef19898 »

monero-xmr wrote: post #35
dpflan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have some ideas for this request? What’s a stablecoin development that’s needed?

With USDC and local fiat-crypto exchanges available in nearly every country, it is now possible to hire a truly global workforce and pay them with a crypto-payment vendor. If some company systematically went country by country, learned the local HR laws, partnered with the most trusted exchange, and then handled all accounting and taxes, a truly global HR and payment system could be built to make onboarding and payin…

Crypto exchanges are not work around for lical tax laws and visa requirements. It is true so, crypto solves that problem, the same way it solves embargoes and money laundering problems.

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#216

Post by eitally »

SteveNuts wrote: post #148
samsolomon wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or 3. Target a small slice of ERP/CRM tooling and gradually evolve into something more fully-featured.

The problem is ERP needs to be incredibly tightly integrated into the whole business from end-to-end. You can't only offer raw materials tracking, but not accounting and shipping. There's just not a lot of value to the business unless you have everything coupled. The MVP for an ERP is essentially, a fully featured and battle-tested system which is very expensive and time consuming to build before it's profitable.

That's strictly true for standard definitions of ERP, but it's a rare enterprise that doesn't already have adjacent software they've licensed to specifically support parts of their business. This could be freight & logistics, or warehouse management/inventory, or QA/Test, or RMA, or whatever. Convincing someone to move away from Oracle or SAP is a nonstarter for a startup. It worked several years ago for Netsuite, which advertised itself as the first "cloud native ERP" and was widely lauded for being so much more easily customizable than Oracle (so Oracle bought them in 2016).

I don't think starting a new ERP company from scratch makes sense for anyone. The best you would likely do is to become either a minor player (just look at the array of CRMs that aren't Salesforce), tailored to a very specific market niche, or an "ERP adjacent" platform of some kind. That last bit is the obvious play. The bread & butter of Enterprise Applications IT departments around the world is to build custom stuff that inherits data from ERPs or feeds data into ERPs and similar mission critical business platforms. Speaking as a guy who ran one of these departments in an F250 for about ten years, most of what they build is pretty crappy.

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#217

Post by mannyv »

eltondegeneres wrote: post #122

Jared Friedman and Gustaf Alströmer want to make it easier to kill other human beings, and turn a profit while doing it. Shame on them and anyone else who works on "defense technology." > I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which…

You can believe in a world without conflict if you want. It'll serve you well right up until the time you get put up against the wall and killed by someone who doesn't share your beliefs.

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#218

Post by ianbutler »

arjunaanand wrote: post #186

Just plain marketing. In reality they will invest in incremental startups of serial entrepreneurs or well known people in silicon valley. They became traditional corporate long ago. Shows in their recent portfolio.

Seeing as I just recently talked to two young students who got in and also know someone from my college days who was accepted for the W24 batch this doesn't seem very correct to me.

Notably neither of those two groups of people are SV based, both NYC affiliated.

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#219

Post by SirLJ »

arjunaanand wrote: post #186

Just plain marketing. In reality they will invest in incremental startups of serial entrepreneurs or well known people in silicon valley. They became traditional corporate long ago. Shows in their recent portfolio.

Yep, already got rejected couple of times, even before the AI boom, with my company which clearly falls under "Using Machine Learning to simulate the physical world" and "Explainable A.I." and have the potential to fall under most of the rest...

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#220

Post by advael »

bko wrote: post #196
advael wrote: post #152

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 Amer…

What scandals (honest question)? Is it more than comparable companies? I think a big problem is that modern American firms outsource practically all required expertise to suppliers so they are left with no core competency apart from marketing, lobbying and financial engineering. Its my impression that Tesla does more stuff themselves so they were quicker to innovate and experiment. But not sure if that's just their m…

Off the top of my head, there was a story on here about cars crashing due to axles failing months after they rolled off the lot, and a more recent story about the bodies of cybertrucks rusting from small amounts of rain exposure

This is just on the physical components side. Tesla is also continuously dealing with scandals about data provenance, transparency, the false promises and dangerous consequences of its pushes toward autonomous driving, and of course the same nickel-and-dime nonsense other tech companies do like trying to charge subscriptions for every little feature, gradually rolling out user-hostile behavior in a proprietary software ecosystem, litigation threats toward victims of accidents who seek any remedy or even accountability for harms caused by many of these issues, etc.

It serves as a better exemplar of how much hype and marketing to attract investment drive the success of an American company in the current environment than of how onshore manufacturing could work

EDIT: Also, comparable in what sense?

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