41–50 of 101 posts
Is it just me or does anyone else think that many of the startups from Day 1 and Day 2 are well beyond the "seed" stage that YC claims to target? I get that YC is a perfect program to prepare a company for raising significant investment, so it makes perfect sense for the startups to join even at a later stage. Also derisks YCs investment on the standard terms (i.e. 7% of a later-stage company for 120k$ is a better de…
Obviously the 'Try it Free' should have a way to email your wife, right? Or are men not supposed to recommend feminine hygiene products to their wives? One for $3.95 (shipping cost) per address is a great marketing tactic.
Anyway, I get a kick out the fact this is a YC funded startup.
Simple Pickup is in Y Combinator. Nice!
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You get the YC stamp of approval, which makes selling, recruiting, fundraising (everything, really) much easier. It's like asking why a genius would go to Harvard, when he can just teach himself everything.
exactly. a real genius wouldn't go to harvard. real geniuses don't need "stamps" of approval. fake geniuses do, and not to shit on Y Combinator startups, but these days they aren't that ground breaking. Though now there are more hardware startups, in terms of "app startups," every batch looks the same. The tech isn't that different from what was being done 3-4 years ago. Web app with a panel for a given industry, per…
Y Combinator has always been about business. That's the point of a startup: to build a successful business, not to build useless technology that no one wants.
As a nomad, airfordable is the best of the bunch to me. It almost balances out the karma of Legalist.
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Surely you're exaggerating. You can create a toy program or even a very basic (most likely web-based application) that solves some problem in a weekend, but there really are very few lucrative companies or ideas that can be accurately "tried out" in a single weekend. If these companies are "seed" stage companies, then I'd argue it isn't that any bar has been raised, but that "seed" has come to mean something entirely…
Yes I have the same question too. The $120k for 7% is meant for seed stage startups where $120k is a Big Deal. If you already have $800k revenue each month, what is the math behind giving up 7% of your company, permanently, for $120k?
pg wrote about it a few years ago: http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
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Surely you're exaggerating. You can create a toy program or even a very basic (most likely web-based application) that solves some problem in a weekend, but there really are very few lucrative companies or ideas that can be accurately "tried out" in a single weekend. If these companies are "seed" stage companies, then I'd argue it isn't that any bar has been raised, but that "seed" has come to mean something entirely…
Yes I have the same question too. The $120k for 7% is meant for seed stage startups where $120k is a Big Deal. If you already have $800k revenue each month, what is the math behind giving up 7% of your company, permanently, for $120k?
This is an awesome list, I find the drone defense an interesting one too. There have been reports of drones near Moffet being commandeered and then sent into the Bay. Seemed like it would invoke a lawsuit, but if law enforcement was doing that, I could see it working out.
This is a physical threat (in the terrorist scenario) that needs to be dealt with kinetically.
RF spoofing doesn't work for planed flights, GPS spoofing can work but reply attacks are wonky at best and most just will trigger a "go home" which is easily overridden to be the target.
Skywall (http://openworksengineering.com/skywall) type stuff is interesting, but very hard to get right...know a few folks in the field working on some cool stuff.
The passive whoops I'm a terrible drone pilot and flew my drone over moffet is fairly easy to deal with (betting we'll see some sort of drone tagging (RF)/mgmt system tied to the in-place registration very soon)...but not nearly as lucrative as true airspace security
/2cents from someone not in the field but interested in it
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At the very same time it is trivial to update the drones of today to use a secure mutual authentication mechanism which the "drone defender" cannot break into. So, even if there is a spectrum DoS (which might be illegal to do for anyone apart from law enforcement) its not that the defender will take over the drone. This is a cat n mouse game where the drone creator always has an advantage.
Yeah, but GPS isn't a handshake, and most commodity drones rely on it. You can't take it over, but you can probably blind it.
http://news.utexas.edu/2013/07/29/ut-austin-researchers-succ...