Really impressed with this batch! These companies seem to be targeting a lot of really cool hard tech problems which is great to see.
In particular, a lot of super cool next-gen transportation: electric planes (Heart Aerospace), jetpacks/bikes (Jetpack Aviation), hydrofoil cargo ships (Boundary Layer Technologies).
Also seems to be a big focus on India, China and Africa, and a big increase in the proportion of bio/med-tech companies. There are even two (2) companies turning CO2 into cool stuff (Prometheus turning it into gasoline and Saratoga Energy converting it into nanotubes).
Feeling very optimistic about the future and looking forward to reading what Day 2 has in store.
Bonus: seems to be a handful of Harry Potter themed company names (not counting Centaur of course).
I'm intrigued by the CO2 transformation companies. Would love to know more about the byproducts and energy efficiency of the processes, but I can't find much info about them. I guess we'll find out as they progress
I clicked the link and saw "Here are the 85+ startups that launched at YC’s W19 Demo Day 1" and closed the tab.
These used to be some of my favorite articles every six months, kind of a view into what's coming next. But they felt digestible, with a few dozen startups featured each time.
Now it feels like a fire hose.
I'm not convinced there's going to be a YC circa 2007-2012 ever again, but I miss that. Probably not how the ecosystem works anymore.
As a disclaimer, I do take full responsibility for my turning 30 a few years ago and going through a darker, cynical period of burnout that has likely permanently affected my outlook on startups.
I haven't gone through anything that has resembled dark burnout, but I also share a similar sentiment.
Years ago, I would be amazed at all the cool startups and tools people were building. Now, my reaction is more.. "OK, so what? You build AirBnb for X... so what?"
Off the record, your comment reminded me of this Douglas Adams quote:
1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
I can't stand this template anymore. There's probably a natural cycle/rise-and-fall for these things.
1) Problem identified, "how do i quickly and efficiently describe the purpose of what we're doing"
2) "[existing popular company everyone knows] for [different market that it can be applied to]" is passed on to others to solve that problem. Phrase becomes popular, more people start using it.
3) Everyone starts using it, phrase becomes overused.
4) People begin questioning whether it still has the same meaning or if it's changed contexts since it was originally suggested.
5) People despise hearing it.
I'm right around step 4 there at the moment, heading towards 5. All I keep thinking is "so you're using the same phrase everyone uses, yet you're telling me you're revolutionary, and groundbreaking."
I get that it's just one phrase, and I'm starting to make assumptions here, but I think at some point it becomes more formulaic. And it's hard for me to believe you're hacking, innovating, and revolutionizing when you're following a formula. It's just more "I'm in-the-club" language now.
For what it's worth, there shouldn't be any less signal in these batches than earlier ones. The acceptance rate this batch was the lowest ever. It's just that startups are now global and in every industry.
This is more like your favorite author writing books on a lot more subjects, than just putting out a longer more rambling book.
I don’t think the issue here is “signal”, so much as it is that the arbitrage is gone.
For a brief, golden period, startups were new and innovative. You could stand out from the crowd by taking some risk and working hard. Early YC reflected this ethos.
Now, “startups” are so common as to trigger cynicism, and merely starting a company no longer offers differentiation. Every angle that can be explored is being explored, usually by multiple scrappy, identically hustling teams of millenials, and to differentiate, you need to take risks that feel increasingly long-shot to stand out (e.g. nuclear fusion! electric planes! revolutionizing drug discovery!) Even the seed-stage “accelerators” are systematized, large-scale success-mining machines for fairly well-developed companies.
Which is not to say that there won’t be successes; there will almost certainly be “unicorns” from 2019, as there have been in just about every year. But the frontier is closed, the game is clear, and it’s the same as it ever was.
The only reason they had 12k applications this time was because they incentivized every Startup School company to apply in order to potentially get $10k. I would be pretty shocked if there won't be significantly less applications for S19.
Not sure why they did that to be honest, giving someone $10k to apply is probably the best way to decrease application quality and have more work to sort through. Maybe for more data?
I think this is more of a failure of the initial reporting than an existential crisis for YC.
Imagine if the article broke things down by industry and/or tech category and you could expend just the ones you're most interested in and see 3-5 companies in each group.
I think parent is commenting at the fact that everybody is just doing a startup just because they can. I somewhat agree, because I don’t see as many startups launching that provide a societal and economical utility like those in 2007-2012.
Like the u/giarc commented. What makes bento so different than all the food delivery services that came before it? There’s nothing unique about it.
Nope, not in the least! YC should do whatever is best for them.
I'm saying (poorly) that I miss getting excited about new startups launching. This is probably more of a reflection of my own shift in perception than it is a statement on YC or incubators as a whole.
"VanGo: An on-demand ride service for getting your kids and teens around. The founders say that, because “moms trust other moms,” 85 percent of drivers on their service are moms and all of them are women."
It appears so, because I remember thinking the same thing when https://www.gosafr.com/ launched (uber for women).
I recognize there are different safety concerns for men and women, but I do have a problem with companies like these. At least with safr, their advertised safety benefits for women come down to:
1) App/Tech features that would be beneficial for either gender (like extra monitoring by safr through the phone app, and "thorough" vetting/background checks of drivers).
2) Marketing relies heavily on "It's safer because your driver is a woman." which seems to be part of van go's pitch as well, and as a man i find particularly offensive that i'm being deemed unsafe around children/women simply because i'm a man.
That being said, I'm obviously not the target audience. And I believe it's legal because they don't discriminate against men who apply to be drivers/riders, they simply only target women in their marketing, so the people end up being almost entirely women. I would guess this is what vango will end up doing/saying about the gender split as well.
In some circumstances it is legal to hire based on sex/gender. Say changing room assistant. Proving a job can only realistically be done by 1 gender is a high bar though.
I doubt VanGo can do that. But they are not big enough to get sued yet. Also as another poster pointed out they cater to women but don't specifically screen out male drivers?
It's probably not legal for them to use sex as a hiring criteria, but it's legal for “all women” to be the outcome if the actual criteria are both facially neutral and sufficiently narrowly linked to job functions. Judging from VanGo’s website, they require 3+ years of childcare experience, with references and clean background check; the childcare experience filter alone, given how female-dominated that field is, is likely to result in an overwhelmingly female potential employer pool, a d their may be further bias in who chooses to apply to VanGo.
Pushing the 85% moms thing (which VanGo does, unlike the all women thing, on their webpage) is potentially problematic ; if they are advertising it, they are likely inclined to favor it, which is illegal (even if it was parents, not “moms").
This seemed like the most interesting startup in the batch to me. For those who didn't want to comb through 85 startup descriptions, Prometheus claims that they can "remove CO2 from the air and turn it into gasoline" for about $3.00/gallon. If that's a number they can eventually get closer to the current cost of manufacturing gasoline, well then this is gonna be a $500 billion company.
"If that's a number they can eventually get closer to the current cost of manufacturing gasoline, well then this is gonna be a $500 billion company."
It's a $5 Trillion dollar company.
This, and the 'male contraceptive with no side-effects' are 'magic claims' style companies, where if their claims are true, they immediately massive companies.
Usually, the devil is in the details. A few little things here and there contextualize the claims.
Think of how many smart people we have working on big problems and how few real breakthroughs we have.
These things will mostly be evolutionary. Like 'male contraceptive' but it actually does have the side effect of long-term problems. Or takes a year to wear off. Or is $20 a pop and last for 1 hour. Or is only 95% effective. Etc. etc..
Prometheus definitely stood out.
If they can do what they advertise, states could start implementing carbon taxes per gallon on the current gasoline to make the 'CO2 neutral' gas the same price or less.
Had a look through the patents. Their IP seems to be around a forward-osmosis separation process. They use CO2 in ammonia on the dilute side of the osmosis process.
So my complete seat-of-the-pants, duffer-on-the-bench guess is that they have a CO2 capture process (or use CO2 from a nearby industrial combustion process), use the CO2 in their process to separate gasoline in place of a traditional distillation process, then remove the CO2 from the gasoline by precipitating it as ammonium carbonate, which can be sequestered somehow.
>Basement: A social network for your close friends
Seems like this would impose some serious limits on ad revenue generation (assuming that's how they plan to monetize). With only close friends the volume of friend-generated content would presumably be much lower than that of Facebook or Instagram (even if those individuals are generating more content), meaning you have a much lower threshold beyond which you start pissing off users with ads due to relative volume.
But also, possibly, you'd have a lot more and a lot deeper interaction. This could be the kind of app Facebook was originally, where you added your friend and shared basically anything random without a focus on getting likes. Dumb inside jokes, unfiltered photos, etc.
Kinda like the texting groups friends often have these days. That's market that could potentially use some optimizaiton as texting isn't a great format to communicate with ~5-10 people.
Fernando here from Basement. This is pretty spot on. The greater level of intimacy leads to far more interaction since you're pretty free to be yourself and post content that is meant for your actual friends to see instead of random people viewing your perfect life. The intuition is naturally that fewer friends would limit usage, but in fact, it's responsible for the high levels of interaction.
As for the revenue – there are certainly cool opportunities to run relevant ads when you have high levels of attention from someone and their close friends (think group experiences, people buying things at the same time that their friends, etc). That said, we don't like what ads have done to current social platforms. They misalign incentives where the more money the product makes, the worse the product tends to get for users. Snapchat was pretty fun until it went from only seeing friends to seeing celebrity gossip and repetitive ads. Because of that, we're planning on doing a subscription model down the road, similar to what WhatsApp tried out before it got acquired (first year free, then a small fee.) Certainly a new model for a social app, but we think it's the best direction for us long-term.
I completely get the appeal from a user perspective. From a revenue perspective, are you saying deeper interactions could be used to justify more expensive ad buys to counter lower volume?
Google tried exactly this with Google+, and it failed. Facebook is optimized for network effects, and every feature / acquisition is decided upon that 1 criteria whether it increases network effects or not.
> > VanGo: ... “moms trust other moms,” ... all of them are women.
> Straight sexism.
Oddly, while the TC page has the “85% are moms” and the “all of them are women”, VanGo itself has the same “85% are moms” but “all of them are...prescreened with 3+ years childcare experience, reference checked, fingerprinted & clean background check”.
With these already being available options, I don't understand why anyone would be trying to solve what appears to me to be a solved problem, getting kids to school.
The most exciting company here to me is Prometheus, who is mentioned in several threads here.
It bugs me though, that the TC blurb, and the comments here, and the Prometheus website, all say the company is turning CO2 into gasoline. That strikes me as alchemy. I think the company is more likely using CO2 in a separation process that is an alternative to the traditional distillation tower used in oil refineries.
There's a difference between "turning CO2 into gasoline" and "using CO2 to refine gasoline from crude oil".
Readit News
In particular, a lot of super cool next-gen transportation: electric planes (Heart Aerospace), jetpacks/bikes (Jetpack Aviation), hydrofoil cargo ships (Boundary Layer Technologies). Also seems to be a big focus on India, China and Africa, and a big increase in the proportion of bio/med-tech companies. There are even two (2) companies turning CO2 into cool stuff (Prometheus turning it into gasoline and Saratoga Energy converting it into nanotubes).
Feeling very optimistic about the future and looking forward to reading what Day 2 has in store.
Bonus: seems to be a handful of Harry Potter themed company names (not counting Centaur of course).
The founders I know who worked with them before said "They may actually be able to pull this off."
And there it was, right out front on Demo Day.
Wishing them and everyone else the best of luck over the coming months, rounds, and decades
Second, existential crisis time.
I clicked the link and saw "Here are the 85+ startups that launched at YC’s W19 Demo Day 1" and closed the tab.
These used to be some of my favorite articles every six months, kind of a view into what's coming next. But they felt digestible, with a few dozen startups featured each time.
Now it feels like a fire hose.
I'm not convinced there's going to be a YC circa 2007-2012 ever again, but I miss that. Probably not how the ecosystem works anymore.
As a disclaimer, I do take full responsibility for my turning 30 a few years ago and going through a darker, cynical period of burnout that has likely permanently affected my outlook on startups.
Years ago, I would be amazed at all the cool startups and tools people were building. Now, my reaction is more.. "OK, so what? You build AirBnb for X... so what?"
1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
I can't stand this template anymore. There's probably a natural cycle/rise-and-fall for these things.
1) Problem identified, "how do i quickly and efficiently describe the purpose of what we're doing"
2) "[existing popular company everyone knows] for [different market that it can be applied to]" is passed on to others to solve that problem. Phrase becomes popular, more people start using it.
3) Everyone starts using it, phrase becomes overused.
4) People begin questioning whether it still has the same meaning or if it's changed contexts since it was originally suggested.
5) People despise hearing it.
I'm right around step 4 there at the moment, heading towards 5. All I keep thinking is "so you're using the same phrase everyone uses, yet you're telling me you're revolutionary, and groundbreaking."
I get that it's just one phrase, and I'm starting to make assumptions here, but I think at some point it becomes more formulaic. And it's hard for me to believe you're hacking, innovating, and revolutionizing when you're following a formula. It's just more "I'm in-the-club" language now.
This is more like your favorite author writing books on a lot more subjects, than just putting out a longer more rambling book.
For a brief, golden period, startups were new and innovative. You could stand out from the crowd by taking some risk and working hard. Early YC reflected this ethos.
Now, “startups” are so common as to trigger cynicism, and merely starting a company no longer offers differentiation. Every angle that can be explored is being explored, usually by multiple scrappy, identically hustling teams of millenials, and to differentiate, you need to take risks that feel increasingly long-shot to stand out (e.g. nuclear fusion! electric planes! revolutionizing drug discovery!) Even the seed-stage “accelerators” are systematized, large-scale success-mining machines for fairly well-developed companies.
Which is not to say that there won’t be successes; there will almost certainly be “unicorns” from 2019, as there have been in just about every year. But the frontier is closed, the game is clear, and it’s the same as it ever was.
Not sure why they did that to be honest, giving someone $10k to apply is probably the best way to decrease application quality and have more work to sort through. Maybe for more data?
Imagine if the article broke things down by industry and/or tech category and you could expend just the ones you're most interested in and see 3-5 companies in each group.
I worded my original comment poorly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Like the u/giarc commented. What makes bento so different than all the food delivery services that came before it? There’s nothing unique about it.
I'm saying (poorly) that I miss getting excited about new startups launching. This is probably more of a reflection of my own shift in perception than it is a statement on YC or incubators as a whole.
Is that legal?
I recognize there are different safety concerns for men and women, but I do have a problem with companies like these. At least with safr, their advertised safety benefits for women come down to:
1) App/Tech features that would be beneficial for either gender (like extra monitoring by safr through the phone app, and "thorough" vetting/background checks of drivers).
2) Marketing relies heavily on "It's safer because your driver is a woman." which seems to be part of van go's pitch as well, and as a man i find particularly offensive that i'm being deemed unsafe around children/women simply because i'm a man.
That being said, I'm obviously not the target audience. And I believe it's legal because they don't discriminate against men who apply to be drivers/riders, they simply only target women in their marketing, so the people end up being almost entirely women. I would guess this is what vango will end up doing/saying about the gender split as well.
I doubt VanGo can do that. But they are not big enough to get sued yet. Also as another poster pointed out they cater to women but don't specifically screen out male drivers?
It's probably not legal for them to use sex as a hiring criteria, but it's legal for “all women” to be the outcome if the actual criteria are both facially neutral and sufficiently narrowly linked to job functions. Judging from VanGo’s website, they require 3+ years of childcare experience, with references and clean background check; the childcare experience filter alone, given how female-dominated that field is, is likely to result in an overwhelmingly female potential employer pool, a d their may be further bias in who chooses to apply to VanGo.
Pushing the 85% moms thing (which VanGo does, unlike the all women thing, on their webpage) is potentially problematic ; if they are advertising it, they are likely inclined to favor it, which is illegal (even if it was parents, not “moms").
It's a $5 Trillion dollar company.
This, and the 'male contraceptive with no side-effects' are 'magic claims' style companies, where if their claims are true, they immediately massive companies.
Usually, the devil is in the details. A few little things here and there contextualize the claims.
Think of how many smart people we have working on big problems and how few real breakthroughs we have.
These things will mostly be evolutionary. Like 'male contraceptive' but it actually does have the side effect of long-term problems. Or takes a year to wear off. Or is $20 a pop and last for 1 hour. Or is only 95% effective. Etc. etc..
So my complete seat-of-the-pants, duffer-on-the-bench guess is that they have a CO2 capture process (or use CO2 from a nearby industrial combustion process), use the CO2 in their process to separate gasoline in place of a traditional distillation process, then remove the CO2 from the gasoline by precipitating it as ammonium carbonate, which can be sequestered somehow.
Does the $3/gallon include both?
Seems like this would impose some serious limits on ad revenue generation (assuming that's how they plan to monetize). With only close friends the volume of friend-generated content would presumably be much lower than that of Facebook or Instagram (even if those individuals are generating more content), meaning you have a much lower threshold beyond which you start pissing off users with ads due to relative volume.
Kinda like the texting groups friends often have these days. That's market that could potentially use some optimizaiton as texting isn't a great format to communicate with ~5-10 people.
As for the revenue – there are certainly cool opportunities to run relevant ads when you have high levels of attention from someone and their close friends (think group experiences, people buying things at the same time that their friends, etc). That said, we don't like what ads have done to current social platforms. They misalign incentives where the more money the product makes, the worse the product tends to get for users. Snapchat was pretty fun until it went from only seeing friends to seeing celebrity gossip and repetitive ads. Because of that, we're planning on doing a subscription model down the road, similar to what WhatsApp tried out before it got acquired (first year free, then a small fee.) Certainly a new model for a social app, but we think it's the best direction for us long-term.
Straight sexism. Cause a Dad driving his kids to school has gotta be a creep or terrible driver or something?
>Bento Club:
Cheaper than what is already there? Food is a losing business and these guys are going to race harder to the bottom.
> Slapdash:
Is just https://www.appdirect.com/products/appwise/features
> Straight sexism.
Oddly, while the TC page has the “85% are moms” and the “all of them are women”, VanGo itself has the same “85% are moms” but “all of them are...prescreened with 3+ years childcare experience, reference checked, fingerprinted & clean background check”.
1) Uber - random dude (most likely)
2) Another mom or at least a pre-screened woman
Not many moms will choose the uber for fear of appearing sexist.
3) Bus
4) Kid Walks/cycles themself
5) Mom drives them herself
With these already being available options, I don't understand why anyone would be trying to solve what appears to me to be a solved problem, getting kids to school.
It bugs me though, that the TC blurb, and the comments here, and the Prometheus website, all say the company is turning CO2 into gasoline. That strikes me as alchemy. I think the company is more likely using CO2 in a separation process that is an alternative to the traditional distillation tower used in oil refineries.
There's a difference between "turning CO2 into gasoline" and "using CO2 to refine gasoline from crude oil".