To those who think this list will help them get into YC, or lament "why didn't I get into YC when my idea was squarely on this list":
The YC application is a sales pitch, and you're not selling your idea, you're primarily selling your charisma and capacity to spin vision and sell. Second, you're selling your chemistry with your cofounders and stability of your relationship. Third, you're selling your capacity to build, at least some usable prototype, but this a low bar.
At no point are you actually selling the concrete idea, unless you're doing something extremely specific that seems valuable and you're one of the few who can build it. For the rest, the idea is a rhetorical vehicle to sell the other things.
Yes, and quite often you are selling your company. Investors will try to push you out of the game if they see potential in your products. If you don't have a time-to-market-sensitive product you are usually better off grinding in the basement for a longer time than people wants you to believe.
If however, you have a very narrow window to be able to launch properly, or if your product is mostly visionary you need investors asap. Just don't expect to come out with a Zuckerberg deal, expect 1-2% of the company in the end and make sure you cash out during the entire road.
Having met a bunch of YC companies now, I wouldn't say the Ivies are exactly under-represented but it always seems like there's more Stanford than UPenn and more UWaterloo than Cornell. If school means anything it's the quality of their CS programs.
Don't let your school hold you back from applying :)
I think this is an excellent point. That being said, there are some warm fuzzies that come by seeing my grad school research topic listed here as well (the ML for physics simulations topic). Just some validation that the area I'm spending time in could not only help my specific niche, but be broadly attractive to VC funding to help grow it. Not that I'm anywhere near being ready to build anything (or near graduation, for that matter) but the conversation about it being a possibility came up recently and maybe sometime in the far future it could be a reality.
We've never been accepted, but my experience with application process indicates this isn't strictly true. We're not getting any more charismatic, but they have continued to show interest in us applying. Not sure if that's what everyone gets or not.
> The YC application is a sales pitch, and you're not selling your idea, you're primarily selling your charisma and capacity to spin vision and sell. Second, you're selling your chemistry with your cofounders and stability of your relationship. Third, you're selling your capacity to build, at least some usable prototype, but this a low bar.
YC is late to the early alpha and is betting on talent/leadership to soak up.
> We've never been accepted, [...] they have continued to show interest in us applying
You're getting recurring meetings with them (which have significant opportunity cost for them), so it's not just the usual startup investor unwillingness to say "no" with finality?
I don’t think this is true at all. I did YC and neither I nor my cofounders had any hype surrounding us or our idea. Unless if by hype you mean a handful of paying users then sure, that won’t hurt :)
I spent a great while inside of medical during the pandemic and it was… interesting.
There are some incredibly large interests in the space that wield intense power and control over various markets. There is also a profound degree of inefficiency in a lot of what’s happening.
The question is whether many of those inefficiencies are technology problems or if they are intentionally constructed for the many reasons these things are created.
I feel like there needs to be almost a Walmart size company pushing down on prices with that kind of scale before many of these structures will be broken, and unfortunately that doesn’t appear to be the direction most things are going (oh they exist in scale, just not direction). I was hoping Amazon’s entry into the market would do it. It didn’t.
Might be time for a different direction in health care entirely. Kaiser had it right, but I don’t think they executed well and they are largely a company rooted in past thinking in how they are structured.
Combining health care and subscription with ongoing medical care is definitely the direction of things to come. The fundamental shift needs to be moving the system from fixing problems to keeping people actually healthy, and that means that healthy people need to pay for the system or the entire thing gets it’s incentives inverted (as it is now). This is a fundamental shift, but if it were done right it would be a massive company and really change the world. I’ve been looking in to how to build this over the last year and know I want to go in this direction.
And there is also a ton of interesting businesses in generics.
Just some thoughts from someone who has been in many aspects of the medical industry over my career. Hope it inspires some good discussion with my favorite community.
In many parts of the US, you can only construct a hospital if the other hospitals in the area agree that yes, the area could use another hospital. Imagine how easy it would be to get them to agree to let you open your hospital if they know you are a huge company trying to undercut them in price, through any technological or organizational edge.
Basically every healthcare reform would be positive, either towards single payer or towards markets, as the current equilibrium is just optimizing extraction. See how the ACA, which was attempting to let insurers force prices of medical services down, led to hospitals buying out massive amounts of private practices, as it's easy to bully 5 doctors, but not a hospital system that is at the same time negotiating for a lot of primary care, specialists, and ar least a third of hospital capacity in the city.
This is precisely it. This is how you end up with this colossally large ecosystem where things like surgery centers proliferate — with every specialist operating as an outside extension or even an inside extension and costs skyrocket for customers because you just have some many people involved in the chain of care. To boot, a lot of these networks operate their partner organizations through backend ownership groups.
Obamacare tried to fix this by making the entire chain of care responsible for patient satisfaction and outcome and making rate payment contingent, but it really ended up consolidating so much of the industry into integrated and profit maximized network-of-relationships so that the downside can be managed (and the backend financing consolidated similarly, though in many different ways). All of them, to your point, really optimized for extraction.
I spent some time looking into generic drugs and compounding operations as well and we really don’t have many left in the West. It’s concerning. No money left for the basics and the system isn’t very robustly built for basic operations (read the boring, lower paying part of medicine that keeps us all alive every day).
Well I met with a company doing surgical supply and viewed their facility, and at the time (2021) they were one of only a few vial generic manufacturers based in the United States. They were mostly supplying GPOs, but there is precious little manufacturing capacity in North America for the stuff.
That’s just one example.
The market for surgical supply is wildly inefficient but there aren’t that many people operating manufacturing domestically right now. I think it’s a r potential opportunity.
Cuban’s Cost Plus drug play really showed another weak spot in generics: the entire business he’s in is simply shortening the inefficient supply chain. That can be done in a lot of ways, and can be bundled with financing in many other ways and that can be a big deal (b2b) in this space. That’s what I’ve consulted on in the past.
Last time I checked this page was several years ago, given that, my main takes on this list are:
* Crypto currencies are clearly on a decline given their location and volume in the list. It seems that the hype is mostly gone.
* Naturally, AI dominates the list, but the focus is on various applications such as healthcare, robotics, enterprise, and the always-a-hit: traditional industries.
* YC lists three and a half requests with a strong geo-political aspects: army technologies (justified by current global wars), startups manufacturing in the US (the role of the US in the 21st century), space and climatech. Our zeitgeist (and as such YC’s justification) is that large changes occurring in the world and they aims to take part in it. This is both bold and on-point.
* Companies relying on open source as part of their core business. YC identifies such companies as having multiple advantages and would like to see more such companies in their portfolio. This is a valid statement that I truly believe in, but I also think that this is only a part of the criteria and not something that solely holds an investment thesis.
Very curious if anyone knows how to pull this off. There's so much value to be unlocked but it's just impossible to break through.
I've personally met three very talented founders that tried and failed (one was accepted to YC as a mid-market ERP and successfully pivoted into an application tracking system) and failed very quickly.
I'm guessing an important feature would be an integration system that maps data from the current ERP seamlessly into the new ERP. And that assumes you can even get through the enterprise sales process to even get the company to migrate.
> Very curious if anyone knows how to pull this off.
I work in this space (small/mid-size).
The good news is that there are several "obvious" ways to pull this off because an ERP is the culmination of everything a company needs and does. So almost anything you can imagine on the software is part of it.
The bad news, and the reason everyone wants a solution, is that is truly a big space, and then you need E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G.
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My take is to start from the bottom, and build a much better version of Access/FoxPro (https://tablam.org).
Any medium/big ERP end being a specialized computing platform that needs:
- A programming language
- A database engine
- An orchestration engine
- ELT engine
- Auth
- UI/Report builders
And to be clear: NONE of the "programming language", "database engine", etc are a good fit today.
NONE.
This is the big thing, This is the reason (from a tech POW only) that most attempts fail.
This is the secret of why Cobol rule(d): Is all of this! but is too old! (also, this is why SQL still is best: Is almost this).
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So, to pull this off, you need a team that knows what is "missing" from our current tools, makes a well-integrated package, and adds a "user-friendly" interface in a way that is palatable for the kind of user that uses excel (powerfully).
Is not that impossible. FoxPro was the best example of this kind of integrated solution.
I spent 8 years buidling and running a crm system as a solo project. (https://web.archive.org/web/20080706045541/http://officezill...). I agree without a programming language and database for users to build their own stuff in like Salesforce does any groupware/crm is doomed.
But I think of the YC requirement more like build a Zapier and make your crm all an API. Use some sort of AI or business logic for users to glue it together.
But at the end of the day you still would need to build out an internal programming language as well because it still would not be enough without it.
The problems with ERP is (1) in order to be a big player you have to cater for so many use cases it starts becoming a glorified development tool without any room for providing actual ROI to the vertical that wants to buy it. (2) it's very, very easy to fall into the trap of saying "well, process x is really no different in industry y, we can adapt the ERP system". In reality there's so many nuances that the platform becomes compromise.
Vertical specific software provides so much more value as you can build things unencumbered by the engine/data structures/way things work.
I've found our niche - ERP's would be hopelessly expensive so save for top tier OE companies no one uses it. In weeks we can develop and roll out features & functionality that our clients just lap up that you would never in a million years build into an ERP platform, but is intrinsic to the delivery of our clients products.
It was inconceivable to me 2 years ago, but now I've had very real discussions with some companies where they're looking at our software going "wow... you're going to give mid tier players better functionality that we could only dream of from our ERP systems.."
Basically ERP platforms are "jack of all trades, master of none".
In my former life we did vertical specific software for the window and door industry. Every time we heard from a prospect "oh we're looking at __some ERP platform__ to do configuration of W&D", we'd immediately list dozens of reasons why they would fail, and fail hard.. countless untold money to consulting teams has been burned learning those lessons.
What make this complicated is that each company turns into a different project. So is like have several branches:
ERP
/CompanyA
/CompanyB
This is high maintenance the more successful you are (and puts a serious barrier to adapting to certain customers).
It gets to a point where after a certain # of customers you can't grow, and now is where you think about making your own DB, programming language, ... :)
> In weeks we can develop and roll out features & functionality that our clients just lap up that you would never in a million years build into an ERP platform
Interesting. Just to make sure I understood this correctly, are you taking of a purpose built app/software for each such 'request' as opposed to this being some 'module'/'add-on' in an ERP suite?
You already cannot map data automatically from one SAP instance to another, so forget auto migration. What usually happebs is, to keep the legacy system around for auditing purposes, and the live business happens in the new one. With cut-off dates per function and or department. With manually developed interfaces, and all the crap that comes with those, during the migartion period.
An nothing of this has anything to do with SAP, and everything with ERPs and the messy reality of businesses.
Why is it not entering the realm of possibility for the migration system to function not at an API layer but at the levels of pixels and OCR and RPA to click through every possible interface within the ERP to export and structure the legacy data to complete a total migration? Like humans copying over the data manually?
This makes me wonder. I wonder if the real opportunity is in solutions that help auditors in one way or the other.
If the auditors are sensitive to which systems they are familiar with, it would perhaps be beneficial to the auditors to be able to understand other systems.
I'm sure there are companies that are servicing auditors, creating UiPath flows or whatever for a bunch of auditors. So there's probably already a ton of very specific solutions out there, for auditing various systems.
At least it sounds like a more solvable problem than yet another ERP
Sounds like there is the opportunity. An ERP that can eliminate the need for auditors. Then it won’t matter what the auditors think. Auditing isn’t some black magic. It’s a set of rules. Rules a machine can follow.
Hi. I'm working on Logkeeper which is an all in one business management platform.
I don't think it will be possible to compete directly with the big players. However, having spoken to a few potential customers, it seems my software can help businesses that are small today but will scale up tomorrow. If I can prove that my software can indeed scale up with them, I will have a good opportunity to tackle the enterprise side eventually. Right now though, I'm just focused on getting the product to a level that helps these smaller folks out. I have been working on it during evenings, and this is my first week moving forward focusing on it full time. Let's see where it goes. I'm really early stage, super fresh to business, but I'm experienced as a swe and consider myself a closer. Cheers!
If you want to know a little about my background, I've worked on massive (many, many millions of dollars) ERP projects from the business side. I've also been a platform engineer/lead on a saas that IPO'd a few years ago. I've seen it from both sides, and I believe that I have an idea of what is missing when it comes to business software in general.
I have allways wondered why there isn't a "headless" erp-system.
I have worked with cms-systems. And in this world it is accepted, you need different frontends for different tasks. Therefore a world of systems - calling themselve headless - support only the backend part of cms management. Worked with Strapi that support this kind of thinking.
How come something similar doesn't exist in the ERP world ?
One major reason is that both developers/customers who ask for it think in UI first, all the time.
Most developers I know are at the far-end of development practices (one of the ERPs I integrate has tables like `F0001, F0002, ...` and fields `F00001, F00002`), and this ERPs then uses old tools like Cobol, Fox, (Old) Delphi, (OLD) VB where it has a better UI history.
And it causes to be very hard to build an API (you can't image how much torture is when an ERP vendor says "we have an API!" instead of using plain text or direct SQL)
For this, you need people that know how to do good APIs. And the good API for an ERP is NOT Rest, GraphQL, JSON, ... (ideally, you need a DB!)
another key thing is you need SOC 2 or ISO right out of the gate. We actually had to do that at Arist when they were seed stage because all the customers are literally FANG and fortune 500s which require such certifications to even do business with a vendor
It's the kind of software where early venture capital funding can be poisonous rather than helpful. Choosing the right abstractions to build a solid, flexible platform requires a lot of user feedback. You don't get the latter unless you have *paying* customers who have switched their critical processes to your product for a while. You need to build, sell, implement, and provide several upgrades. We bootstrapped a low-code BPM platform (pyrus.com) and were lucky to break even in several years. VCs push you to grow, while premature scaling could be harmful in the long term. It takes time before your platform is mature enough to serve inherently different use cases.
ERP is a tough space to compete in, as you're fighting against SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, etc. I would say that ERP, CRM and Enterprise payments solutions are the few spaces that firms should not compete in - in a few years, these companies will be akin to COBOL for airlines.
Not a direct answer, but I am targeting data marts from ERPs and other Enterprise applications like CRMs. I think data marts (data warehouses) are very valuable but they are too expensive and hard to build, so an AI that could generate the sql for the marts directly from the apps could be very valuable. What do you think?
Most of those take a lot more time and money than YC usually offers.
There are some opportunities in "New Defense Technology". Something like a low-cost replacement for the Javelin anti-tank missile based on off the shelf phone camera parts ought to be possible. Of course, once that's out there, every insurgent group will have some.
"Explainable AI" is really important.
"Stablecoin finance" is mostly how to make sure the issuers don't steal the collateral.
Maybe the people behind the stablecoin have an explosive collar welded around their neck. If the price drops, it detonates. That might work.
"Applying machine learning to robotics" has potential. Get bin-picking nailed and get acquired by Amazon. Many people have failed at this, but it might be possible now.
"Bring manufacturing back to America". Is it possible to build a cell phone in the US?
"Climate tech" - think automating HVAC and insulation selection, installation, and analysis.
Installers suck at this. See previous HVAC article on HN.
A phone app where you walk around and through the building with an IR camera is one place to start.
Map the duct system. Take manometer readings. Crunch. That's do-able on YC-sized money.
Fun fact about the Javelin bit. I know it was just a throwaway example but something to tickle your brain about it:
Phone camera parts would be overkill. The Javelin sensor isn't nearly that high-resolution, we're talking low triple digits in "pixels". It does however refresh its readings very fast, a necessity given its speed. The old Javelin used active cryo and a filtered IR imager, the new one is passive like the IR camera in some phone attachments. It is stupidly simple in operation: CLU provides the target "signature" and the imager seeks it. After the initial ascent in top-down mode, a stronger signal on one edge of the sensor pushes the control surfaces in the opposite direction until it strikes its target. I'd give the Wikipedia page a read. It contains a surprising amount of information that informs the design and thought behind the missile. Military systems are cool for how robust yet simple they are.
One thing I’ve been thinking about re: Javelin (and MANPADS)—would it be better to be able to fire them remotely? ie let soldiers put a set of launch tubes in a bush or behind a rock, then use the targeting system from a separate location. That way, the solders’ location isn’t revealed by firing the missile. Better yet if you can strap the tubes to a robot dog.
Another idea: drone AWACS. I mean, a drone with radar to detect other drones (and other aircraft).
"Bring manufacturing back to America". Is it possible to build a cell phone in the US?
I think we should start more basic and work our way up. For example, there isn't a real reason we can't produce all of our domestic iron and steel needs in the USA, but we end up importing a lot right now. Same with aluminum, etc. But this isn't something YC is really going to help with unless they are funding manufacturing and industrial tech that makes it easier/cheaper to set-up and run these types of facilities.
The US currently imports only 17% of its steel, mostly from Canada and Mexico. The US also exports steel, but imports are about 4x exports. So the US steel industry is doing OK.
60% of US steel consumption is now from recycled steel. Nucor became the largest US steel manufacturer by making that work.
You can do advanced electronics manufacturing in North America, it just has tradeoffs - primarily cost and process availability. I work for a company that builds high-end electronics over in Canada; Opinions are my own.
We import a lot but we make a lot. I made a living supervising the manufacturing of the rolls used to roll steel in mill. We weren't exporting even the majority of the product.
Cost. I don't think America should focus on mining raw materials that can be sent elsewhere so cellphones can be made which America will import back at high costs.
It's a good sign that Purism can do this at all, even though it's a boutique/fringe product right now.
Note that it's $1,999+ for mostly made/assembled in USA version, vs. $999 for Purism's made in China version.
And China is more capable at scaling, if the product were ever competing on price rather than principle. So still a ways to go to be competitive at manufacturing.
The is no practical reason why javelin costs the $$$ it costs post r&d which was completed in the early 1990s. The matrix and most other electronics in it are extremely basic and could be obtained off the shelve already like 20 years ago. The concept is already outdated anyway - just use a cheap drone
I think this is why we're seeing that the type of founders YC usually funds in these industries aren't going through YC and choosing alternative methods of getting started.
Is this a serious suggestion, or a warning for why there's no place for move-fast-and-kill-things startups in the defense space? No one should be working on this, especially not involving AI in any way.
> I think they are looking for a "decentralized" solution where the collateral is held by a smart contract.
Problem is that unless the asset is virtual, it's going to actually be held by a legal person in the real world, not the smart contract, and it's not ideal to have a stable coin collateralised only by another virtual asset (although makerdao seems to make it work so far).
I think the main innovations here wouldn't be technical but legal, since good solutions to this problem involve the interface between the real world and the blockchain. I remember reading about a legal structure where real assets were held by a trust for the benefit of the owner of an NFT or something, but I'm sure there are other things you could do with the right legal structure, or possibly a central bank or a jurisdiction like Estonia could come up with something that would engender a lot of confidence.
This is a Chesterton's fence situation - we already know the problems of HEAVY, punitive liability and accountability for everything.
But I do think we're leaning way too far towards the no-accountability side currently, and need to shift a bit further the other way.
(But I don't expect THAT to come out of a VC industry where so many prominent people and parters have track records that generally include a lot of "founded unprofitable company but kept it alive long enough to have a good exit" stories... This world lives on the perception of success, not on long-term responsibility.)
China sometimes does that. Zheng_Xiaoyu, the head of China's equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration, was caught taking bribes to allow tainted drugs to be sold. He was executed in 2007. [1]
Strongly deregulate nuclear power - on condition that CEO of company operating, designer, manufacturer CEO live with families within 15km of power plant.
(unlikely to work for several reasons, may be stupid idea but looks like something that could work in not-so-different world)
Do we have the aluminum milling capacity at scale?
Can we manufacture touch screens at scale?
Can we manufacture Li-ion batteries at scale? (Tesla and Panasonic might be able to, with large new investments, but I don't think there's anybody ready to go)
Do we have 3nm fab capacity? (TSMC is planning to build one, but AFAIK not yet)
Do we have the ability to manufacture various sensors at scale? (Some likely yes - ambient light, inertial - some no)
What about image sensors? (Maybe, Omnivision is probably the best candidate, but I don't think they can currently do 48MP. ON Semiconductor is also a good chunk away from that, AFAIK)
I think that's a sufficient number of parts to claim we currently can't make cell phones, as long as you define cell phone as "current gen cell phone". We could probably retool relatively quickly back to at least cell phones, but even that is AFAIK not a current capacity.
Can we _theoretically_ do all that? Sure. But we can't right now, or within short time frames, and we can't without significant investment.
These are all so CapEx intensive it is totally disconnected from YC reality. Which implies if this is really what YC thinks is the direction we are headed, then the approach will essentially be much fewer bets at larger check sizes, for a very small subset. Also the business model for some of these is not exactly obvious. It’s either that or, public equity and/or massive debt heavy capex financing becomes more prevalent earlier on, so some type of high risk debt instrument. Alternatively this is partly a content marketing play to show how forward thinking and visionary they are.
Today I learned that YC not only funds military companies, but encourages new startups to focus on killing machines and spying. And to point to the spy firm Palantir as an example of a model company shows how morally bankrupt YC truly is. Anything for a buck, right? All this while those same defense firms are currently making tens of billions of dollars supplying hardware to kill hundreds of civilians a day right this very instant.
The founders that work in defense are mission driven. they see nation-state preservation as a moral issue.
They would fail to “make a buck” if that was their only goal, as is the case in most industries/sectors
Respectfully, I’d encourage you to review the HN guidelines. Skepticism is welcome here, but even cursory research will show that the founders in defense have deeply personal reasons for building what they do.
> The founders that work in defense are mission driven
That's not really saying anything, since it doesn't say anything about what their mission is. Sure, you have to be mission driven to get things done and lots of good and necessary things have been accomplished by people who were mission driven, but every villain in history was mission driven too. To point at someone and say "they are mission driven" as if being mission driven is on its own evidence that someone is good is at best naive.
> they see nation-state preservation as a moral issue.
hmm, surely at no time in history was a bad thing done by a leader who believed that nation-state preservation was a moral issue.
> They would fail to “make a buck” if that was their only goal
A somewhat peculiar and unsubstantiated claim about an industry that famously makes enormous amounts of money.
> See “American Dynamism”
I'm not really sure what sort of point you're trying to make here other than "VCs like defense companies".
Respectfully, I'm aware of all of the fancy words investment firms hide behind to make themselves sleep at night when they're really building killing machines. I'm sure plenty of them have patriotic stories they tell about protecting the nation they live in. That doesn't mean I need to buy into their narrative.
These war firms will appear whether or not YC funds them. YC chosing to explicitly call for more war firms shows they put the acquisition of even more extravagant wealth over human lives.
Ukraine suffer from daily Russia's drone attack. How about a low cost network that detects, disables or shots down those drones before they can get to their targets? That also, and truly is, a defense system.
I don't see anything in YC's call saying they would only fund defensive capabilities (which is itself somewhat of a misnomer since it doesn't take much engineering to turn "defensive" tech into offensive weapons of war). YC looks like it is open to funding all forms of warfare.
So, how would the US defend itself against countries like China and Russia if no one built weapons? Everyone agrees weapons can be used in ethically horrendous ways. It doesn't follow from that, that the US doesn't need a weapons industry.
YC doesn't need to be funding the weapons industry; they're already filthy rich. This shows their greed outweighs any moral quandries around building machines of death.
I'm loving my rechargeable bluetooth keyboard & mouse which are really made to compensate for limitations of touchscreens.
The keyboard I have is about the size of an ipad itself so there is no numeric keypad, and it's about as heavy as a tablet too since this one has a slanted slot in the back to slip the tablet or phone into, portrait or landscape, at a good angle for use so the combination acts not much differently than a laptop.
If it wasn't so heavily weighted it would topple over backward when you left the tablet in the slot. There are other bluetooth ones that are lightweight which should be just as useful if you have a different way to support the device.
Sometimes a hardware solution is ideal, other times software, most of the time with digital devices it's good to consider both and have lots of options which parts of the heavy lifting are where.
Readit News
The YC application is a sales pitch, and you're not selling your idea, you're primarily selling your charisma and capacity to spin vision and sell. Second, you're selling your chemistry with your cofounders and stability of your relationship. Third, you're selling your capacity to build, at least some usable prototype, but this a low bar.
At no point are you actually selling the concrete idea, unless you're doing something extremely specific that seems valuable and you're one of the few who can build it. For the rest, the idea is a rhetorical vehicle to sell the other things.
If however, you have a very narrow window to be able to launch properly, or if your product is mostly visionary you need investors asap. Just don't expect to come out with a Zuckerberg deal, expect 1-2% of the company in the end and make sure you cash out during the entire road.
Don't let your school hold you back from applying :)
There is no, no. They tell everyone "maybe next time."
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38677251
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YC is late to the early alpha and is betting on talent/leadership to soak up.
Then again, first movers don't always win.
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You're getting recurring meetings with them (which have significant opportunity cost for them), so it's not just the usual startup investor unwillingness to say "no" with finality?
Gen AI two years ago was a toy that fit "somewhere" into the "creator economy", which seemed dead.
Now try and you'll get a completely different reception.
There are some incredibly large interests in the space that wield intense power and control over various markets. There is also a profound degree of inefficiency in a lot of what’s happening.
The question is whether many of those inefficiencies are technology problems or if they are intentionally constructed for the many reasons these things are created.
I feel like there needs to be almost a Walmart size company pushing down on prices with that kind of scale before many of these structures will be broken, and unfortunately that doesn’t appear to be the direction most things are going (oh they exist in scale, just not direction). I was hoping Amazon’s entry into the market would do it. It didn’t.
Might be time for a different direction in health care entirely. Kaiser had it right, but I don’t think they executed well and they are largely a company rooted in past thinking in how they are structured.
Combining health care and subscription with ongoing medical care is definitely the direction of things to come. The fundamental shift needs to be moving the system from fixing problems to keeping people actually healthy, and that means that healthy people need to pay for the system or the entire thing gets it’s incentives inverted (as it is now). This is a fundamental shift, but if it were done right it would be a massive company and really change the world. I’ve been looking in to how to build this over the last year and know I want to go in this direction.
And there is also a ton of interesting businesses in generics.
Just some thoughts from someone who has been in many aspects of the medical industry over my career. Hope it inspires some good discussion with my favorite community.
Basically every healthcare reform would be positive, either towards single payer or towards markets, as the current equilibrium is just optimizing extraction. See how the ACA, which was attempting to let insurers force prices of medical services down, led to hospitals buying out massive amounts of private practices, as it's easy to bully 5 doctors, but not a hospital system that is at the same time negotiating for a lot of primary care, specialists, and ar least a third of hospital capacity in the city.
Obamacare tried to fix this by making the entire chain of care responsible for patient satisfaction and outcome and making rate payment contingent, but it really ended up consolidating so much of the industry into integrated and profit maximized network-of-relationships so that the downside can be managed (and the backend financing consolidated similarly, though in many different ways). All of them, to your point, really optimized for extraction.
I spent some time looking into generic drugs and compounding operations as well and we really don’t have many left in the West. It’s concerning. No money left for the basics and the system isn’t very robustly built for basic operations (read the boring, lower paying part of medicine that keeps us all alive every day).
Can you please elaborate on this? We are currently exploring a project in the same space, and I would love to discuss.
That’s just one example.
The market for surgical supply is wildly inefficient but there aren’t that many people operating manufacturing domestically right now. I think it’s a r potential opportunity.
Cuban’s Cost Plus drug play really showed another weak spot in generics: the entire business he’s in is simply shortening the inefficient supply chain. That can be done in a lot of ways, and can be bundled with financing in many other ways and that can be a big deal (b2b) in this space. That’s what I’ve consulted on in the past.
https://costplusdrugs.com/
* Crypto currencies are clearly on a decline given their location and volume in the list. It seems that the hype is mostly gone.
* Naturally, AI dominates the list, but the focus is on various applications such as healthcare, robotics, enterprise, and the always-a-hit: traditional industries.
* YC lists three and a half requests with a strong geo-political aspects: army technologies (justified by current global wars), startups manufacturing in the US (the role of the US in the 21st century), space and climatech. Our zeitgeist (and as such YC’s justification) is that large changes occurring in the world and they aims to take part in it. This is both bold and on-point.
* Companies relying on open source as part of their core business. YC identifies such companies as having multiple advantages and would like to see more such companies in their portfolio. This is a valid statement that I truly believe in, but I also think that this is only a part of the criteria and not something that solely holds an investment thesis.
Very curious if anyone knows how to pull this off. There's so much value to be unlocked but it's just impossible to break through.
I've personally met three very talented founders that tried and failed (one was accepted to YC as a mid-market ERP and successfully pivoted into an application tracking system) and failed very quickly.
I'm guessing an important feature would be an integration system that maps data from the current ERP seamlessly into the new ERP. And that assumes you can even get through the enterprise sales process to even get the company to migrate.
I work in this space (small/mid-size).
The good news is that there are several "obvious" ways to pull this off because an ERP is the culmination of everything a company needs and does. So almost anything you can imagine on the software is part of it.
The bad news, and the reason everyone wants a solution, is that is truly a big space, and then you need E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G.
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My take is to start from the bottom, and build a much better version of Access/FoxPro (https://tablam.org).
Any medium/big ERP end being a specialized computing platform that needs:
- A programming language
- A database engine
- An orchestration engine
- ELT engine
- Auth
- UI/Report builders
And to be clear: NONE of the "programming language", "database engine", etc are a good fit today.
NONE.
This is the big thing, This is the reason (from a tech POW only) that most attempts fail.
This is the secret of why Cobol rule(d): Is all of this! but is too old! (also, this is why SQL still is best: Is almost this).
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So, to pull this off, you need a team that knows what is "missing" from our current tools, makes a well-integrated package, and adds a "user-friendly" interface in a way that is palatable for the kind of user that uses excel (powerfully).
Is not that impossible. FoxPro was the best example of this kind of integrated solution.
P.D: This is my life's dream, to make this truth!
But I think of the YC requirement more like build a Zapier and make your crm all an API. Use some sort of AI or business logic for users to glue it together.
But at the end of the day you still would need to build out an internal programming language as well because it still would not be enough without it.
Vertical specific software provides so much more value as you can build things unencumbered by the engine/data structures/way things work.
I've found our niche - ERP's would be hopelessly expensive so save for top tier OE companies no one uses it. In weeks we can develop and roll out features & functionality that our clients just lap up that you would never in a million years build into an ERP platform, but is intrinsic to the delivery of our clients products.
It was inconceivable to me 2 years ago, but now I've had very real discussions with some companies where they're looking at our software going "wow... you're going to give mid tier players better functionality that we could only dream of from our ERP systems.."
Basically ERP platforms are "jack of all trades, master of none".
In my former life we did vertical specific software for the window and door industry. Every time we heard from a prospect "oh we're looking at __some ERP platform__ to do configuration of W&D", we'd immediately list dozens of reasons why they would fail, and fail hard.. countless untold money to consulting teams has been burned learning those lessons.
What make this complicated is that each company turns into a different project. So is like have several branches:
This is high maintenance the more successful you are (and puts a serious barrier to adapting to certain customers).It gets to a point where after a certain # of customers you can't grow, and now is where you think about making your own DB, programming language, ... :)
Interesting. Just to make sure I understood this correctly, are you taking of a purpose built app/software for each such 'request' as opposed to this being some 'module'/'add-on' in an ERP suite?
An nothing of this has anything to do with SAP, and everything with ERPs and the messy reality of businesses.
Every auditor on the planet is intimately familiar with how Oracle EBS and SAP do certain things.
If you don't have that trust built up, a customer simply won't want to take the risk and additional headache and overhead passing an audit will take.
If the auditors are sensitive to which systems they are familiar with, it would perhaps be beneficial to the auditors to be able to understand other systems.
I'm sure there are companies that are servicing auditors, creating UiPath flows or whatever for a bunch of auditors. So there's probably already a ton of very specific solutions out there, for auditing various systems.
At least it sounds like a more solvable problem than yet another ERP
I don't think it will be possible to compete directly with the big players. However, having spoken to a few potential customers, it seems my software can help businesses that are small today but will scale up tomorrow. If I can prove that my software can indeed scale up with them, I will have a good opportunity to tackle the enterprise side eventually. Right now though, I'm just focused on getting the product to a level that helps these smaller folks out. I have been working on it during evenings, and this is my first week moving forward focusing on it full time. Let's see where it goes. I'm really early stage, super fresh to business, but I'm experienced as a swe and consider myself a closer. Cheers!
If you want to know a little about my background, I've worked on massive (many, many millions of dollars) ERP projects from the business side. I've also been a platform engineer/lead on a saas that IPO'd a few years ago. I've seen it from both sides, and I believe that I have an idea of what is missing when it comes to business software in general.
I have worked with cms-systems. And in this world it is accepted, you need different frontends for different tasks. Therefore a world of systems - calling themselve headless - support only the backend part of cms management. Worked with Strapi that support this kind of thinking.
How come something similar doesn't exist in the ERP world ?
Most developers I know are at the far-end of development practices (one of the ERPs I integrate has tables like `F0001, F0002, ...` and fields `F00001, F00002`), and this ERPs then uses old tools like Cobol, Fox, (Old) Delphi, (OLD) VB where it has a better UI history.
And it causes to be very hard to build an API (you can't image how much torture is when an ERP vendor says "we have an API!" instead of using plain text or direct SQL)
For this, you need people that know how to do good APIs. And the good API for an ERP is NOT Rest, GraphQL, JSON, ... (ideally, you need a DB!)
Two approaches I can think of:
1. Target mid market or smaller and grow with customers (will be slow)
2. Take a front-door-wrapper approach
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There are some opportunities in "New Defense Technology". Something like a low-cost replacement for the Javelin anti-tank missile based on off the shelf phone camera parts ought to be possible. Of course, once that's out there, every insurgent group will have some.
"Explainable AI" is really important.
"Stablecoin finance" is mostly how to make sure the issuers don't steal the collateral. Maybe the people behind the stablecoin have an explosive collar welded around their neck. If the price drops, it detonates. That might work.
"Applying machine learning to robotics" has potential. Get bin-picking nailed and get acquired by Amazon. Many people have failed at this, but it might be possible now.
"Bring manufacturing back to America". Is it possible to build a cell phone in the US?
"Climate tech" - think automating HVAC and insulation selection, installation, and analysis. Installers suck at this. See previous HVAC article on HN. A phone app where you walk around and through the building with an IR camera is one place to start. Map the duct system. Take manometer readings. Crunch. That's do-able on YC-sized money.
Phone camera parts would be overkill. The Javelin sensor isn't nearly that high-resolution, we're talking low triple digits in "pixels". It does however refresh its readings very fast, a necessity given its speed. The old Javelin used active cryo and a filtered IR imager, the new one is passive like the IR camera in some phone attachments. It is stupidly simple in operation: CLU provides the target "signature" and the imager seeks it. After the initial ascent in top-down mode, a stronger signal on one edge of the sensor pushes the control surfaces in the opposite direction until it strikes its target. I'd give the Wikipedia page a read. It contains a surprising amount of information that informs the design and thought behind the missile. Military systems are cool for how robust yet simple they are.
Another idea: drone AWACS. I mean, a drone with radar to detect other drones (and other aircraft).
I think we should start more basic and work our way up. For example, there isn't a real reason we can't produce all of our domestic iron and steel needs in the USA, but we end up importing a lot right now. Same with aluminum, etc. But this isn't something YC is really going to help with unless they are funding manufacturing and industrial tech that makes it easier/cheaper to set-up and run these types of facilities.
60% of US steel consumption is now from recycled steel. Nucor became the largest US steel manufacturer by making that work.
Definitely possible, this one is mostly US-built: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/
Note that it's $1,999+ for mostly made/assembled in USA version, vs. $999 for Purism's made in China version.
And China is more capable at scaling, if the product were ever competing on price rather than principle. So still a ways to go to be competitive at manufacturing.
- small production runs
- obsolete components
- obsolete production technology
- certification requirements
- continued support and design changes to account for the above
- the mandatory defence surcharge
From top of my head.
We have seen consumer grade DJI drone use in Ukraine-Russia war by both sides.
AI to control a swarm of cheap drones to survey and kill?
Longer range systems cost a bit more, but not a whole lot much more.
Improvements that are desirable are generally in terms of range, endurance, sensors and resistance to electronic warfare.
Copying the silent prop design from Zipline would also be neat to reduce the sound signature and give the enemy less time to react…
I think they are looking for a "decentralized" solution where the collateral is held by a smart contract.
> "Bring manufacturing back to America". Is it possible to build a cell phone in the US?
US is offering money, so why not take it?
Problem is that unless the asset is virtual, it's going to actually be held by a legal person in the real world, not the smart contract, and it's not ideal to have a stable coin collateralised only by another virtual asset (although makerdao seems to make it work so far).
I think the main innovations here wouldn't be technical but legal, since good solutions to this problem involve the interface between the real world and the blockchain. I remember reading about a legal structure where real assets were held by a trust for the benefit of the owner of an NFT or something, but I'm sure there are other things you could do with the right legal structure, or possibly a central bank or a jurisdiction like Estonia could come up with something that would engender a lot of confidence.
I hate crypto, but I love this idea. We should apply this to a lot of systems.
Make stakeholders of anything accountable. 100% skin in the game.
But I do think we're leaning way too far towards the no-accountability side currently, and need to shift a bit further the other way.
(But I don't expect THAT to come out of a VC industry where so many prominent people and parters have track records that generally include a lot of "founded unprofitable company but kept it alive long enough to have a good exit" stories... This world lives on the perception of success, not on long-term responsibility.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_Xiaoyu
(unlikely to work for several reasons, may be stupid idea but looks like something that could work in not-so-different world)
I would hate to cross you. That is scary.
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Can we manufacture touch screens at scale?
Can we manufacture Li-ion batteries at scale? (Tesla and Panasonic might be able to, with large new investments, but I don't think there's anybody ready to go)
Do we have 3nm fab capacity? (TSMC is planning to build one, but AFAIK not yet)
Do we have the ability to manufacture various sensors at scale? (Some likely yes - ambient light, inertial - some no)
What about image sensors? (Maybe, Omnivision is probably the best candidate, but I don't think they can currently do 48MP. ON Semiconductor is also a good chunk away from that, AFAIK)
I think that's a sufficient number of parts to claim we currently can't make cell phones, as long as you define cell phone as "current gen cell phone". We could probably retool relatively quickly back to at least cell phones, but even that is AFAIK not a current capacity.
Can we _theoretically_ do all that? Sure. But we can't right now, or within short time frames, and we can't without significant investment.
Make bombs people want, I see.
https://a16z.com/american-dynamism/
It’s a moral stance, explicitly
The founders that work in defense are mission driven. they see nation-state preservation as a moral issue.
They would fail to “make a buck” if that was their only goal, as is the case in most industries/sectors
Respectfully, I’d encourage you to review the HN guidelines. Skepticism is welcome here, but even cursory research will show that the founders in defense have deeply personal reasons for building what they do.
That closing line is hilarious tho
That's not really saying anything, since it doesn't say anything about what their mission is. Sure, you have to be mission driven to get things done and lots of good and necessary things have been accomplished by people who were mission driven, but every villain in history was mission driven too. To point at someone and say "they are mission driven" as if being mission driven is on its own evidence that someone is good is at best naive.
> they see nation-state preservation as a moral issue.
hmm, surely at no time in history was a bad thing done by a leader who believed that nation-state preservation was a moral issue.
> They would fail to “make a buck” if that was their only goal
A somewhat peculiar and unsubstantiated claim about an industry that famously makes enormous amounts of money.
> See “American Dynamism”
I'm not really sure what sort of point you're trying to make here other than "VCs like defense companies".
These war firms will appear whether or not YC funds them. YC chosing to explicitly call for more war firms shows they put the acquisition of even more extravagant wealth over human lives.
Do you have any problems with that?
So, how would the US defend itself against countries like China and Russia if no one built weapons? Everyone agrees weapons can be used in ethically horrendous ways. It doesn't follow from that, that the US doesn't need a weapons industry.
*By things we mean people.
The keyboard I have is about the size of an ipad itself so there is no numeric keypad, and it's about as heavy as a tablet too since this one has a slanted slot in the back to slip the tablet or phone into, portrait or landscape, at a good angle for use so the combination acts not much differently than a laptop.
If it wasn't so heavily weighted it would topple over backward when you left the tablet in the slot. There are other bluetooth ones that are lightweight which should be just as useful if you have a different way to support the device.
Sometimes a hardware solution is ideal, other times software, most of the time with digital devices it's good to consider both and have lots of options which parts of the heavy lifting are where.
I have ideas that I would love to explore given funding.