Watching from the outside I still can't believe how you Americans just put up with things like this. Why can somebody/something overrule decisions of an actual doctor that has personally examined the patient?!
Insurance appeals is an actual problem though. Medical practices have to hire staff to argue with insurance companies and it increases healthcare costs.
They're already using AI denials, and hiring someone who's technically a doctor to click "no" on all the claims the AI wants to deny, without reading them.
What YC company would you consider innovative and groundbreaking - at the stage when they were small enough to be in YC?
Even the massive successes were still essentially novel takes on existing ideas, when they were in YC: Airbnb as Couchsurfing variant; Dropbox as file sharing service with a better UI; Stripe as PayPal but not terrible. Etc.
I wouldn’t really expect the average company at this stage to be groundbreaking.
Since when is YC about innovation? YC (and all VCs) are about maximizing returns for investors. That is NOT innovation, that is mostly rent-seeking. Hence most YC startups are boring B2B SaaS products designed to milk the oceans of freely printed money floating around the American economy.
The trickle-down wealth transfer goes like this: Federal Reserve -> Banks -> Traditional Businesses (who do the hard work of actually providing goods and services people need) -> B2B SaaS that sells them software to replace spreadsheets.
True inventors and innovators tend to be eccentric and purpose-driven rather than money-driven. That is actually a negative signal for YC. They want the slick grifters, popular kids, who can wine and dine clueless execs at "enterprises" to sell them chat apps like Slack at $100/seat. Much easier and faster way to get investor ROI than pie-in-the-sky "innovation".
To expand on this, and maybe this point is obvious, but accelerators and VCs purposefully fund a lot of companies they assume will not succeed. Something like 10% success is an acceptable target.
I wonder if all this focus on AI companies is actually denying opportunity to founders who have better ideas? Every AI agent company in YC and other accelerators is one that could have been taken by someone else.
But that’s the thing, AI is the highest risk highest reward opportunity, which fits the VC model. A boring CRUD app that solves an actual problem might be more likely to succeed but less likely to explode into a unicorn.
> For coding, this has started to happen and it's in full swing, what about other domains?
There needs to be a moat. I see all these startups with a moat that is no bigger obstacle than a puddle.
A local (geographically to myself) pre-LLM (Convolutional Neural Network) company invested in a huge moat, building a large training set of human labeled data ... I knew the moment I saw an LLM that could ingest image that their moat had evaporated in an instant. A lot of the technical staff either left or lost their jobs but the company appears to be limping on hoping for an exit.
If a startup depends on a secret prompt and a few MCP servers, they have no moat.
I think the next wave of AI-based SaaS (rather than pure AI API providers) will be companies like the Legal IDE (Tritium [1]), recently featured on the homepage. Tools that innovate and use AI, but would still be innovate even without it.
[1] I have no affiliation whatsoever. I just liked the demo and the concept.
You are being overly negative here. No one said they are doing something groundbreaking. If they were doing something groundbreaking with credibility, they wouldn't be giving away 7% to YC at $2M valuation. All the big AI folks who are "aiming" to do something groundbreaking are raising at 500 times that.
I think there are more factors than just how groundbreaking their ambitions are that justify different valuations.
Like brands, customer count, contracts, hardware access, headcount, and existing progress.
Thinking openai is worth more than a day1 startup only because they are more ambitious requires all their years of funding, progress, bd, sales, and brand have little value. In my opinion these things matter a lot more than long term ambitions (which always change in response to the market anyway).
Is anyone else sick of hearing "AI agent"? I can't fully explain the feeling, but it's nauseating. Y Combinator is probably the worst culprit in using it, especially on their YouTube channel.
Nope. It is the same as getting sick of hearing "new JS framework" before there was a real new JS framework fatigue. Or: get used, it's just the beginning.
Readit News
This is hilarious and soul killing at the same time. The AIs are going to argue with each other over whether or not a human gets health care.
No one there is interested or capable of solving actual problems. They just want to be another middleman leeching value.
AI is a force multiplier.
Forces can be applied in a negative direction too, and often are
Even the massive successes were still essentially novel takes on existing ideas, when they were in YC: Airbnb as Couchsurfing variant; Dropbox as file sharing service with a better UI; Stripe as PayPal but not terrible. Etc.
I wouldn’t really expect the average company at this stage to be groundbreaking.
The trickle-down wealth transfer goes like this: Federal Reserve -> Banks -> Traditional Businesses (who do the hard work of actually providing goods and services people need) -> B2B SaaS that sells them software to replace spreadsheets.
True inventors and innovators tend to be eccentric and purpose-driven rather than money-driven. That is actually a negative signal for YC. They want the slick grifters, popular kids, who can wine and dine clueless execs at "enterprises" to sell them chat apps like Slack at $100/seat. Much easier and faster way to get investor ROI than pie-in-the-sky "innovation".
I wonder if all this focus on AI companies is actually denying opportunity to founders who have better ideas? Every AI agent company in YC and other accelerators is one that could have been taken by someone else.
But that’s the thing, AI is the highest risk highest reward opportunity, which fits the VC model. A boring CRUD app that solves an actual problem might be more likely to succeed but less likely to explode into a unicorn.
You can even find that in PG's “essays”, although he doesn't say it that directly.
For coding, this has started to happen and it's in full swing, what about other domains?
There needs to be a moat. I see all these startups with a moat that is no bigger obstacle than a puddle.
A local (geographically to myself) pre-LLM (Convolutional Neural Network) company invested in a huge moat, building a large training set of human labeled data ... I knew the moment I saw an LLM that could ingest image that their moat had evaporated in an instant. A lot of the technical staff either left or lost their jobs but the company appears to be limping on hoping for an exit.
If a startup depends on a secret prompt and a few MCP servers, they have no moat.
I think the next wave of AI-based SaaS (rather than pure AI API providers) will be companies like the Legal IDE (Tritium [1]), recently featured on the homepage. Tools that innovate and use AI, but would still be innovate even without it.
[1] I have no affiliation whatsoever. I just liked the demo and the concept.
Dead Comment
You are being overly negative here. No one said they are doing something groundbreaking. If they were doing something groundbreaking with credibility, they wouldn't be giving away 7% to YC at $2M valuation. All the big AI folks who are "aiming" to do something groundbreaking are raising at 500 times that.
Like brands, customer count, contracts, hardware access, headcount, and existing progress.
Thinking openai is worth more than a day1 startup only because they are more ambitious requires all their years of funding, progress, bd, sales, and brand have little value. In my opinion these things matter a lot more than long term ambitions (which always change in response to the market anyway).
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
The 10 most exciting AI agent startups at Y Combinator's Demo Day for its first-ever spring cohort
https://archive.is/OgCkl