Companies from the YC Summer 2018 Batch
blog.ycombinator.com
Companies from the YC Summer 2018 Batch
1–10 of 99 posts
Re: Companies from the YC Summer 2018 Batch
#2Congrats! These all look really great ;)
Biocontainment solutions (Synvivia) that prevent environmental contamination of genetically modified organisms looks to be a very high demand market.
Re: Companies from the YC Summer 2018 Batch
#3Nice batch. I think the concept federacy is tackling has huge potential. We lose a lot of sleep thinking about security and I like the idea of being able to tap a hive mind to help us plug security gaps our team is unaware of (and we would pay a lot for it).
Re: Companies from the YC Summer 2018 Batch
#4Personalize testimonials to the person reading them? Did I read that correctly? Fake reviews taylored to the reader?
Re: Companies from the YC Summer 2018 Batch
#5Personalize testimonials to the person reading them? Did I read that correctly? Fake reviews taylored to the reader?
They're not doing fake reviews. They're choosing which user reviews to show depending on the audience (e.g if the person visiting the website is from a company in the hotel industry, the website might show testimonials from other hotel companies like Hilton as opposed to software startups)
Re: Companies from the YC Summer 2018 Batch
#6Cool batch, particularly LemonBox which provides personalized vitamin packs to buyers in China. There's a huge user base right there, and I imagine the U.S. market is largely saturated / competitive already.
I must respectfully express my concern over: "Grabb-it Inc. turns rideshare cars into digital billboards." There's probably a market for it as online advertisers face an uncertain future with possible regulation, and at least scrutiny, of social media companies, but is this really the future we want to build? Where the only goal of some of these companies is to unrelentingly cover every square inch of the world with ads? Surely there are lawsuits waiting to happen when drivers, distracted from these eye-catching ads on all the cars around them, kill people.
I am worried that our public spaces are turning increasingly hostile to our citizens. Won't this trend continue to make the public space more unpalatable?
Re: Companies from the YC Summer 2018 Batch
#7Personalize testimonials to the person reading them? Did I read that correctly? Fake reviews taylored to the reader?
They're not doing fake reviews. They're choosing which user reviews to show depending on the audience (e.g if the person visiting the website is from a company in the hotel industry, the website might show testimonials from other hotel companies like Hilton as opposed to software startups)
It’s going to be a bit more difficult to pull it off with the recent crack down on privacy and 3rd party cookies.
I wonder if they’ll be using data brokers or focusing only one first party data.
Re: Companies from the YC Summer 2018 Batch
#8Cool batch, particularly LemonBox which provides personalized vitamin packs to buyers in China. There's a huge user base right there, and I imagine the U.S. market is largely saturated / competitive already. I must respectfully express my concern over: "Grabb-it Inc. turns rideshare cars into digital billboards." There's probably a market for it as online advertisers face an uncertain future with possible regulation,…
Totally agree. Coming up with an idea to serve even more ads is not something to be proud of. Take your money and develop some new technology instead.
Re: Companies from the YC Summer 2018 Batch
#9Cool batch, particularly LemonBox which provides personalized vitamin packs to buyers in China. There's a huge user base right there, and I imagine the U.S. market is largely saturated / competitive already. I must respectfully express my concern over: "Grabb-it Inc. turns rideshare cars into digital billboards." There's probably a market for it as online advertisers face an uncertain future with possible regulation,…
All we need is a YC-backed AR startup that removes ads from your personal visual space. Although it might be difficult to get that tech safe enough to be used while driving.
Re: Companies from the YC Summer 2018 Batch
#10CSPA [1] sounded interesting, and is something similar to what I’ve been wanting to do, but after looking at the sample exam, I was pretty disappointed.
I thought it would be about computer science and engineering fundamentals. It has some of that (e.g., representation of integers, memory access speeds, etc.) but I also noticed it’s full of completely inessential things, like escaping XHTML, identifying valid JSON payloads in HTTP, and alignment rules in CSS. There was heaps of JavaScript, HTML, CSS, SQL, and drawn out shell exercises.
To be clear, I’m not claiming that’s all useless knowledge. It’s not! But, as a hiring manager, I’d rather look for strong critical thinking skills and strong foundational knowledge. Remembering that keys in JSON must be quoted strings is not at all a demonstration of that.
The exam seems to be more of a “well rounded full-stack engineer” rather than what they suggest.
[1] https://cspa.io/