Maybe they are investing more in the founders than the product?
Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
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Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
#32“No more looking for the Google calendar tab in Chrome.” Gustaf Alströmer Said nobody ever! It is literally three clicks away... 1. New Tab 2. Click dotted square 3. Click cal button
Or CTRL/CMD + T and type cal...autocomplete will do the rest
Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
#33The product itself might not be a huge thing, right.
However, it might be just a little tiny thing that they want to do. They launched ASAP. They've got some feedback. Etc.
Next thing might be that they will reinvent the way we use calendars. Who knows? Not YC. But they will give it a shot.
You start small (even if you have a trillion dollar ambitions), you grow.
Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
When they started YC they were "a video lecture platform for professors"
They pivoted. It happens. That doesn't tell you anything about what their plans are now.
Just ask AstroPad and f.lux who both have been targets of being 'sherlocked'.
I can only see that these guys are at risk of being sherlocked by Calendar.app, Google Calendar and Calendar.exe.
Wonder what their answer to YC was when they were asked about that risk.
Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
#35“Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a backup app you can already build such yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem”
I don't think it's fair to compare a way to seamlessly move data around with "We’re building a calendar app for the Mac menu bar."
I think the point was that Dropbox was not at the time viewed as "seamlessly moving data around". We see it in retrospect as revolutionary, but that was certainly not the view at the time since many of us had already seen online storage platforms come and go (xdrive, anyone?).
I will not comment on whether this calendar app is revolutionary, it might not be, but it's also possible it is something that will make an impact. There's lots of untapped potential in the calendar and event space, in my opinion.
Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
#36“No more looking for the Google calendar tab in Chrome.” Gustaf Alströmer Said nobody ever! It is literally three clicks away... 1. New Tab 2. Click dotted square 3. Click cal button
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Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
#37Literally every time you see a startup release a product that seems trivial it's because that's not the full story. You're judging without complete information. For example, the public face might be a simple Mac calendar widget, but that could be the gateway to calendar sharing, native office apps, meeting booking, event management, ticket sales, corporate flight sales etc. Building an audience with a cheap tool that…
Exactly.
Also, if you want to make money selling software to consumers, Apple's platform is the one to target. Mac and iOS users are the most likely by far to actually pay for software. It's far more difficult to sell an app for actual money to Android or Windows users.
Again talking specifically about the consumer market here, not enterprise.
Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
#38did y combinator ever find its way to begin with? besides making money, have any really useful things been funded by them? airbnb is the only one i can think of that is something im actually glad exists
> airbnb is the only one i can think of that is something im actually glad exists
If you leave aside the fact that it destroyed housing in many cities, like the one I live in. A handful of landlords got richer, turists could travel cheaper (not necessarily a good thing overall), but an entire class of citizens got kicked out of the city as now no landlord wants to regularly rent their flat.
If you ask for disruption, that's what you get. When you disrupt a market, you also disrupt many lives, even indirectly.
Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
#39Literally every time you see a startup release a product that seems trivial it's because that's not the full story. You're judging without complete information. For example, the public face might be a simple Mac calendar widget, but that could be the gateway to calendar sharing, native office apps, meeting booking, event management, ticket sales, corporate flight sales etc. Building an audience with a cheap tool that…
Indeed the founder says: >We’ve only solved a small part of a bigger problem. The SaaS platforms we use for work don't work well together. It shouldn’t take cycling through ten different apps and Chrome tabs to stay on top of everything. >We’re now looking to bring Slack and GitHub into a unified notification inbox in the menu bar. We want to better organize everything you use as we’ve done with Google Calendar.
If they build a unified notification inbox, I will pay for that. I had one of those when I used a Blackberry and I miss it as I now have to check 10 sites periodically to stay on top of things.
Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
#40I'm more interested in their privacy policy: "SHARING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION: We share your Personal Information with third parties (analytics tools) to help us use your Personal Information, as described above. We use analytics tools to track our users to improve our product and provide a better experience." Calendars, like contact lists, like emails, like all of the other personal content people produce everyday…
And this is for a paid product as well. Bit of a pisstake when they charge you for the product and spy on you through it. It's like when you pay for a streaming service and it still shows you ads (looking at you, Amazon).