Trella is going to get sued by Trello.
Startups from Y Combinator’s S19 Demo Day 2
91–100 of 161 posts
Re: Startups from Y Combinator’s S19 Demo Day 2
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of businesses look similar when comparing the basic idea. When you compare on execution things can get dramatically different.
As a tech founder in B2B I would go even further and say the idea nor technical implementation matters much, what's important is how well you can build relationships with your prospects, how you can sell it, and hire people to help you scale it up
I think the most important thing is managing to convince dozens of sweat-shop, conveyor belt startups per year to give you equity for almost nothing, thereby guaranteeing at least some equity will eventually be worth billions merely by chance. Good job, YC.
Re: Startups from Y Combinator’s S19 Demo Day 2
#93MyPetrolPump is genius. It's last-mile delivery for gas (or Uber for gas), but solving a security and logistics problem for a high-value market. Only qualified truck drivers can move trucks, and you pay them per hour. So now you refuel the trucks behind closed doors while the truck is parked overnight and you only have to secure access for the petrol driver.
not for American market. average car tanks takes 30-50 dollars of gas. markup on gas prices is really small around 15%. if sold at market prices profit from each delivery will be 4-6 dollars. cost of delivery will be around $20-30 dollars when you count driver salary, truck lease, fuel, etc. Fuel delivery has been done in US profitably for very long time. its delivery of heating oil to houses but during every deliver…
Agreed. A lot of construction workers even have trucks with a the toolbox style gas tank in the bed. They have handles that look just like gas pumps.
Re: Startups from Y Combinator’s S19 Demo Day 2
#94The Custom Movement sounded really interesting for a moment. I was already having fantasies about getting a pair of sneakers with thin soles, wide toe boxes, plenty of air holes and one the left shoe one size larger than the right.
Alas. It's just about printing designs on sneakers.
Re: Startups from Y Combinator’s S19 Demo Day 2
#95I'm quite confused my Tensil, is the training of the model moved to their chips, or the final model? If the former, then are the chips locked in to whatever model they were built for, e.g. this chip only trains a multi-layer perceptron with n layers? Or are the chips re-programmable or FPGAs? If the latter, don't most models run quite quickly on CPU after training anyways?
It seems like they're selling ASICs. It would be useful in something like an embedded system where you train a model beforehand, deploy it, and then let it go. On top of speed improvements, they're generally more efficient, so something running on battery power could last longer.
Re: Startups from Y Combinator’s S19 Demo Day 2
#96Working in the area makes this text on Tensil’s page me extremely curious: “This gives you the performance of custom silicon at the cost of commodity hardware. With Tensil, you can roll out your dream chip in weeks instead of years, at prices measured in thousands instead of millions.” So they designed some fuse programmable ASIC for machine learning? Setting the fuses makes this ASIC “custom silicon”? ASIC for thous…
Tensil founder here. We're a little different from the other ASIC companies because we specialize our chips to individual model architectures on demand. Our value prop is that our chips are smaller and cheaper than high end GPUs while offering the same or better performance on the model you care about.
This is compelling to a lot of hardware companies, where they often have 1 model that represents >50% of their compute workload. Making a Tensil ASIC for that model becomes much cheaper than GPUs at scales of 1000 chips or more.
I'm happy to talk in more detail if this interests you! tom@tensil.ai
Re: Startups from Y Combinator’s S19 Demo Day 2
#97Vendr.com: A SaaS to keep track of your SaaS subscriptions. and a 6.5k or 10k PER MONTH for someone to buy your SaaS subscriptions seems super expensive. I'm not too versed in the SaaS market but is this really something that you need a dedicated "SaaS expert" to manage for you?
Yes! This is a great idea!
Signing up with a typical SaaS service these days typically involves 1) a qualification call with an SDR (wastes 30ish minutes), 2) a redundant qualification call with an AE (roughly 30 minutes where they probe you for price sensitivity), 3) a 2-3 day delay while they draw up a really high anchor for your price, 4) two or three iterations of you fighting the price (wastes an hour each time), 5) you sign a contract with a lingering uncertainty you got ripped off.
Repeat for the 20-30 SaaS providers you end up using. It's a huge time suck for a dubious benefit. I would love to pay to make that go away in the future.
Re: Startups from Y Combinator’s S19 Demo Day 2
#98Trella is going to get sued by Trello.
A middle east-focused shipping marketplace is potentially infringing on the not-the-same-word trademark of a list/board web application?
Re: Startups from Y Combinator’s S19 Demo Day 2
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
:) well I posted on a FYI - For Your Information only angle. My thoughts: seed valuations for YC Demo Day are probably on a all time high, VC's giving gifts to be able to get in rounds looks like something out of Silicon Valley HBO, ok I remembered everything on SV HBO is based on real life events.
I think the most ridiculous thing is not even the gift, but the fact that it is a Tandem bike (just because of the name). What's the rationale there? "Ohh their name is Tandem. Let's buy them a Tandem bike to convince them to accept our term sheet. It's our fiduciary responsibility to do this stupid thing". For me, that's just a red flag. How little can you add to a company besides money, that you have to resort to t…
It’s basically a joke. Jokes attract attention of other people. Investors need to set up a relationship with the founders.
Re: Startups from Y Combinator’s S19 Demo Day 2
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly what's happening. More meetings + synchronous chat/calling apps won't solve this either.
yeah, there needs to be something more radical. I think at the moment fully remote teams work better than semi-remote because fully remote teams most communication happens through slack and emails so there is almost always a paper trail.
My experience reflects yours.
Once you have a SINGLE full-time remote employee your team should operate as a fully-remote team. That means online meetings, online communications, documentation, etc.