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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?

#81

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

westmeal wrote: post #75
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still have a special Z10 that I was allowed to keep after working there. It's a red Z10 running an unlocked bootloader which allows you to hold down volume up-volume down and boot into Android 5.0 environment. Sadly "Project Exodus" was considered inappropriate at the time just like the original Android Player on BB10 since it was considered inappropriate to think anything other than BB10 was the greatest thing sin…

Can you ask your friends how to unlock the bootloader on my key2? Pretty please?

It is probably not possible, you have to unlock on premises using a signed version of the tooling on a beta version of the OS on the device.

Your key2 probably has a customer version of the OS running it, so it would never be able to be unlocked :(

I argued about this but eventually the security of the "ecosystem" takes over the usability of unlocking older devices so they can be used for something else.

Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?

#82

Post by mattnewton »

onion2k wrote: post #56
rvz wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wonder what their answer to YC was when they were asked about that risk. "Apple buy hundreds of companies every year. Being bought by Apple is a potentially a valid exit strategy."

Maybe, but Apple did not buy Sherlock.

Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?

#83

Post by blackrock »

gtCameron wrote: post #2

“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”

Is there an opportunity to make a cheaper Dropbox? Their paid service is very expensive.

Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?

#84

Post by colinplamondon »

I couldn't disagree more. I absolutely LOVE VimCal, and one of the reasons for that is the menubar functionality.

Showing a countdown to my next meeting in my menubar, with one click video join, is super useful. The app itself shows how much room for improvement in calendar apps there is - their availability sharing and time travel features are consistently deeply helpful

This is all to say, I think this product approach has a lot of merit. I primarily use Vimcal in its "App Mode", not its "Menubar Mode", but its menubar mode is super valuable.

I happily pay Vimcal $15/mo, and love seeing in the space. Google Calendar and iCal are fucking terrible. I hope the SuperPowered guys crush it.

Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?

#85

Post by choxi »

exabrial wrote: post #21

I haven't seen a lot of "hard" startups, more like "lets chuck money at this and see if people buy it and then get out after 3 years" companies of late.

YC seems pretty committed to hard tech startups, there's a big list here: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/4r-yc-and-hard-tech-star...

It'd be interesting to see their % of investments in hard tech startups versus the entire VC industry. Ten years ago the entire VC industry was almost exclusively investing in software startups where many of them were sort of gimmicky social media apps or just taking a traditionally offline business and putting it on the cloud, I'd argue that YC was one of the first ones to buck that trend, Sam has a handful of posts just on hard startups.

YC made 398 investments in 2020 and I estimated that at least 33 of them could be considered "hard tech" [1]. It's hard to judge what startups are "trivial software" versus "hard tech" without looking through each one, so I tried to just filter out anything software-related, even though many of those (maybe even most) are probably as non-trivial as a hard tech startup.

1. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?batch=S20&batch=W20&i...

Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?

#86

Post by harperlee »

the-dude wrote: post #44
rvz wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For the curious : https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sherlocked

Thanks a lot! Could you paste it here? Work firewall blocks that site.

Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?

#87

Post by mattnewton »

jack_riminton wrote: post #46
s_dev wrote: post #9

Paul Graham: Startups at the begginning are alot more fragile than people think. It may be the case they've very little to show. I'm not seeing some tipping point here. YC has always had startups that were a bit funny or outright weak sounding -- their investment strategy pretty much means the idea must initially sound bad in the pitch. They're aiming for things that are counter intutitive to give them an advantage.

Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin.tv which became Twitch And has some pretty successful alumni!

I’m not sure I would use this as the example, Justin.tv was doing something a bit weird and different. Even if it didn’t pan out (which it didn’t before their pivot), it wasn’t clear at the time why it would work or not work.

This product has many competitors in a crowded space, and the risk of being sherlock-ed.

Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?

#88

Post by sofixa »

emdowling wrote: post #49
MattGaiser wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wasn't a unified place for communications, with connections and feeds from all the services you and your company used, the original goal of Slack?

Yep, and IMHo it does a pretty good job at it with some integrations.

Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?

#89

Post by okprod »

onion2k wrote: post #13

Literally 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…

> Literally every time you see a startup release a product that seems trivial it's because that's not the full story.

Sometimes it's also just a startup pivoting due to a misfire or system, e.g, regulatory, problems

Re: Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?

#90

Post by aetherson »

adenozine wrote: post #68

Was there ever a time where YC only boosted deeply meaningful companies that were focused on uplifting humanity? I mean, no disrespect on yc, but it performs what it says on the tin. It's a business for businesses. Idk. I have tempered expectations moreso than some I guess. You've got a point, I just wonder how egregious is TOO much.

I didn't read the objection as being that this company doesn't do enough for the common good of humanity, I read it as, this company doesn't have a large potential market.
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