YC: Requests for Startups

Some of these are not like the others.

Also some are way more achievable by software-type engineer-types and the financial associates in their ecosystem, due to extreme familiarity with that particular landscape. Some also require a little more commitment than starting a small software company.

If I was going to split the combined vision into only two categories it would be like this:

  -  Applying machine learning to robotics
    
  -  New defense technology
    
  -  Bring manufacturing back to America
    
  -  New space companies
    
  -  Climate tech
    
  -  A way to end cancer
    
  -  Foundation models for biological systems
    

and then the less moonshotty efforts:

  -  Using machine learning to simulate the physical world
    
  -  Commercial open source companies

  -  Spatial computing

  -  New enterprise resource planning software (ERPs)
    
  -  Developer tools inspired by existing internal tools
    
  -  Explainable AI
    
  -  LLMs for manual back office processes in legacy enterprises
    
  -  AI to build enterprise software
    
  -  Stablecoin finance

  -  The managed service organization model for healthcare
    
  -  Eliminating middlemen in healthcare
    
  -  Better enterprise glue
    
  -  Small fine-tuned models as an alternative to giant generic ones

Interestingly, #1 rose to the top of my list well over 40 years ago when I had a chance to do a little machine learning to guide automated systems. Was very lucky to have such powerful advanced equipment under my complete control in the laboratory at such an early time. Needed custom gear to bump it to the next level though. Figured all kinds of people would be doing things like that once "personal" computers were no longer a rare curiosity.

The remaining things in the first group are some other things I (and I'm sure many others) have had in mind since before personal computers became accessible.

"Too bad" my ambition has grown with age and it would take about a $10 million company to build my prototype hardware, and that's before any deployable machine learning can commence.

So it's been an interesting 43 years keeping in mind how I would apply automation and machine learning to almost everything all the time, and refining my intended approach for a greater number of decades the earlier I had the idea.

I submitted an application for w24 that fits in the "Developer tools inspired by existing internal tools" category but wasn't accepted. I suspect my pitch probably needed work, and I also haven't started building at all yet and submitted as a solo-founder which it seems has less chance of being accepted.

Here's the pitch and some details, in case anyone else is interested in the idea:

> Supportal uses AI to generate internal tooling for startups that enables founders to scale customer-support without having to rely on engineering resources.

> Given some simple input context like tech-stack and a database schema, Supportal uses AI to auto-generate internal tools which allow customer-support to easily answer questions about and take action on customer-data without needing help from an engineer.

> Supportal offers founders a fully-featured self or cloud-hosted web UI.

Retool (https://retool.com), Zapier (https://zapier.com), Airtable (https://www.airtable.com), Superblocks (https://www.superblocks.com), and Google AppSheet (https://about.appsheet.com) would likely be primary competitors, although their products require heavy user interaction to build internal tools either through composition in a WYSIWYG editor, low/no-code solutions, or integrations expertise using a full programming language.

Although I'm no longer there, we actually evaluated and/or used all of these tools at Pulley, so I've had first-hand experience with their friction and where the gaps exist that Supportal would fill.

These tools are also all targeted at integrations-experts who have the technical knowledge to write code and spend time building the tool they want.

Supportal aims to generate the tooling you need intelligently via AI introspection and get you up and running with useful command and query tools to help your customer-support team take action and gain insights without help from engineering right out of the box.

My most recent experience comes building internal tools for Pulley; I built the initial version of the internal tools in ~3 weeks and added features to it within Pulley over ~2 years. Roughly ~2-3 months of full-time work spread over that time period.

Features were added as we identified gaps in our support agents ability to answer questions and take action, which often required dedicated engineering resources to help with, leading to a productivity loss for both groups.

That said, I haven't actually built out anything that would _generate_ tools like this yet, but I've done enough adjacent work in the codegen/AI space in the last couple years that I feel confident I could put the pieces together.

Technical founder in the VR/AR space here. Not in a rush so have discounted YC in the past, still may be worth a short chat. Use the "Apply" link on the RFS page?

Ironically, people like Garry have actually fueled said epidemic, by contributing to ever-rising inequality, driving people to the streets, where they turn to crime and drugs.

> 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 think that right. It still means goods are being produced in America, which means:

1. Greater security of production against geopolitical threats, and

2. More goods being produced overall, meaning cheaper goods.

Even without significant employment, those are good things!