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YC: Requests for Startups

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Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#321

Post by freedomben »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #39
rgrieselhuber wrote: post #21

I’ve mentioned this one before but I would really like to see a startup make an attempt at prison reform. It’s not completely a technology problem but I do think there are ways in which a combination of technology and smarter segmentation of types of prisoners can work more toward rehabilitation and careers post-incarceration, while also supporting families and relationships.

https://www.ameelio.org/ sort of followed this route with prison communications. Non profit startup, but needed policy as rocket fuel to nuke entrenched for profit incumbents. Prison reform feels much more weighted towards policy work, but perhaps I'm missing a path. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ameelio https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/hy70st/i_am_zo_orchin... https://www.npr.org/2023/01/01/1146370950/prison-phone…

CTO of Ameelio here. Yes we are still working on it! You are right that policy is highly important. One of the biggest challenges we have faced with getting our video call system adopted, is the kickback system. Basically, for-profit incumbents charge outrageous rates to incarcerated people and/or their family members, and then "kick back" some amount to the DoJ. In some cases, this is an important part of their budget, so even if they want to switch to a non-profit provider like us (who doesn't charge families or incarcerated people at all), they can't without inducing a budget crisis. That's a pretty tought sell, and the only way to fix that is with policy, which fortunately some states are doing.

That said, there's still plenty that can be done without policy work, but it's a hard slog and requires a lot of legal work. Reviewing RFPs, submitting RFPs, integrating with the existing systems, implementing regulatory requirements, all while trying to keep the codebase and tech stack manageable with a small team and when contract periods can be multiple years long.

It's going to take some time, but we're still going and still growing.

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#322

Post by hef19898 »

arach wrote: post #316
hef19898 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, from my experience it wouldn't be fair to say that. There is a reason why migration projects are yearlong, multi million projects. Go through one, ideally multiple, of those first before looking at automating any of that. Added benefit, jobs at those projects pay incredibly well for the functional consultants involved. And when, when not if, automation doesn't work out, you still don't have to worry about a job e…

it's complicated because it's complicated and the pay is good sounds like good white collar jobs about to get automated away

Serious question, what is your experience with ERP systems so far?

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#323

Post by CalChris »

ELIMINATING MIDDLEMEN IN HEALTHCARE

by creating another middleman in healthcare. This was first proposed by Jim Clark's Healtheon. "We want to empower the doctors and the patients and get all the other assholes out of the way." … "Except for us. One asshole in the middle." — The New New Thing, Michael Lewis.

The reason we spend so much is that public healthcare is a public good and private companies aren't good at managing public goods. They're good at making money which is a different purpose (which has probably served most people reading this very well). We need Single Payer. Indeed we have Single Payer in Medicare and TriCare and other areas. It works pretty well. We need to eliminate middlemen in healthcare by actually eliminating rent seeking middlemen in healthcare.

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#324

Post by shmageggy »

> We have a fair chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change if startups offer commercial solutions to decarbonize society or remove carbon from the atmosphere.

Either this is sloppily phrased, or the SV techno-optimist kool-aid is way stronger than I would have thought plausible. Does anyone seriously believe that a reasonable solution to climate change has exactly one thing on the list and it's "more climate tech start-ups"? Of course climate tech has to play a role (we need everything we can throw at the problem), and start-ups will certainly provide a subset of that tech, but claiming that this alone provides "a fair chance" is extremely revealing of certain bias (and ignorance)

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#325

Post by hibikir »

happytiger wrote: post #312

I spent a great while inside of medical during the pandemic and it was… interesting. There are some incredibly large interests in the space that wield intense power and control over various markets. There is also a profound degree of inefficiency in a lot of what’s happening. The question is whether many of those inefficiencies are technology problems or if they are intentionally constructed for the many reasons thes…

In many parts of the US, you can only construct a hospital if the other hospitals in the area agree that yes, the area could use another hospital. Imagine how easy it would be to get them to agree to let you open your hospital if they know you are a huge company trying to undercut them in price, through any technological or organizational edge.

Basically every healthcare reform would be positive, either towards single payer or towards markets, as the current equilibrium is just optimizing extraction. See how the ACA, which was attempting to let insurers force prices of medical services down, led to hospitals buying out massive amounts of private practices, as it's easy to bully 5 doctors, but not a hospital system that is at the same time negotiating for a lot of primary care, specialists, and ar least a third of hospital capacity in the city.

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#326

Post by quartesixte »

groby_b wrote: post #275
jaredmclaughlin wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What part of a cell phone do you think we can't make?

Do we have the aluminum milling capacity at scale? Can we manufacture touch screens at scale? Can we manufacture Li-ion batteries at scale? (Tesla and Panasonic might be able to, with large new investments, but I don't think there's anybody ready to go) Do we have 3nm fab capacity? (TSMC is planning to build one, but AFAIK not yet) Do we have the ability to manufacture various sensors at scale? (Some likely yes - amb…

That aluminum milling scaling problem itself is like, an entire category of hard.

CNC machines are hard to scale anything more than linearly. We need to train up hundreds of thousands to become CNC machinists. An entire support industry for machine maintenance, tooling manufacturing (an even harder problem), consumable commodities needs to be similarly scaled in parallel.

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#327

Post by tomashertus »

marcosdumay wrote: post #320
tomashertus wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I apologize, but I don't understand your point. Could you please explain to me what you mean by that or how the fact that you "can't buy cybersecurity" contradicts what I wrote? The cyber security market was valued at USD 153.65 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow from USD 172.32 billion in 2023 to USD 424.97 billion in 2030, so apparently people are buying cybersecurity solutions.

Almost the entirety of that market does not actually improve the security of anything. The rest looks much more like services than products.

I understand and agree with your point that you can't just "buy" cybersecurity by throwing money at the problem. It's more like building a well-defended castle, where multiple elements work together to create true security. Cybersecurity is a company-wide process that needs to be powered by specialized tools.

The fact that one of the fastest-growing markets is omitted by YC is shocking to me. The opportunity to build $1B companies, which seems to be one of YC's acceptance criteria, is enormous.

I don't know how far or close you are to the security field, but I do share your sentiment that many tools and so-called security solutions are useless and don't solve the problem. So it's now even more necessary to go and build new solutions. The problem persists and grows.

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#328

Post by lkbm »

bozhark wrote: post #315
Animats wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US currently imports only 17% of its steel, mostly from Canada and Mexico. The US also exports steel, but imports are about 4x exports. So the US steel industry is doing OK. 60% of US steel consumption is now from recycled steel. Nucor became the largest US steel manufacturer by making that work.

US Steel is now Japanese, btw

Depending on the specific concern, I assume what mostly matters is where the facilities are, not who owns the company. (At least so long as it's an ally.)

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#329

Post by happytiger »

hibikir wrote: post #325
happytiger wrote: post #312

I spent a great while inside of medical during the pandemic and it was… interesting. There are some incredibly large interests in the space that wield intense power and control over various markets. There is also a profound degree of inefficiency in a lot of what’s happening. The question is whether many of those inefficiencies are technology problems or if they are intentionally constructed for the many reasons thes…

In many parts of the US, you can only construct a hospital if the other hospitals in the area agree that yes, the area could use another hospital. Imagine how easy it would be to get them to agree to let you open your hospital if they know you are a huge company trying to undercut them in price, through any technological or organizational edge. Basically every healthcare reform would be positive, either towards singl…

This is precisely it. This is how you end up with this colossally large ecosystem where things like surgery centers proliferate — with every specialist operating as an outside extension or even an inside extension and costs skyrocket for customers because you just have some many people involved in the chain of care. To boot, a lot of these networks operate their partner organizations through backend ownership groups.

Obamacare tried to fix this by making the entire chain of care responsible for patient satisfaction and outcome and making rate payment contingent, but it really ended up consolidating so much of the industry into integrated and profit maximized network-of-relationships so that the downside can be managed (and the backend financing consolidated similarly, though in many different ways). All of them, to your point, really optimized for extraction.

I spent some time looking into generic drugs and compounding operations as well and we really don’t have many left in the West. It’s concerning. No money left for the basics and the system isn’t very robustly built for basic operations (read the boring, lower paying part of medicine that keeps us all alive every day).

Re: YC: Requests for Startups

#330

Post by kirse »

Developer tools inspired by existing internal tools... they often don’t realize that the internal tools they had at prior jobs are a great place to get inspiration from.

Interesting that YC is willing to toe the IP theft line on this one. I think plenty of us do in fact realize that homegrown corporate ideas / apps could likely be turned into external new businesses, but then the blurred ethics and legality of doing so occurs a few thoughts later.

An F100 I worked for had an entire corporate group for the purposes of spinning off their IP so that it could be done ethically/legally and give the employees' new startup the boost it needed. Several of these startups have gone on to $MMM/$B valuations. If you're at Boring BigCo and thinking of ripping one of their developed ideas for a small YC check, I'd advise against it.

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