Here Are the 52 Startups That Launched at Y Combinator Summer 2015 Demo Day 2

http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/19/here-are-the-52-startups-that-launched-at-y-combinator-summer-2015-demo-day-2/

by awwstn • 11 years ago

46 62 11 years ago

mildbow5• 11 years ago

As a minority[0]: I hate the idea of Jopwell. Fewer things have, in my opinion, done more harm for the professional perception of a minority person as the affirmative action debacle[1]. Anything that says "hire more minorities, it's a good thing!!" automatically gets a black mark from me.

[0] I don't presume to speak for us all :)

[1] Edit: removed anecdote coz I don't want to spend the next hour talking about affirmative action.

gkoberger• 11 years ago

This isn't directly about hiring, however (as a white person) it shifted my perceptions significantly:

https://www.reddit.com/comments/3du1qm/

In a few years, I want Jopwell to not exist anymore. Not that I'm rooting for them to fail, but rather that I hope every job site is equally diverse. But for now, we need to be intentional about this.

Most companies hire from within their networks. So, this problem will solve itself eventually, as minorities start bringing their networks of potential hires to companies and the companies start naturally hiring from that new pool. However, it's a chicken-and-egg problem that needs a kick start.

brador• 11 years ago

I agree it's a problem, but there must be a better solution than simply excluding white males.

Better education for all has been previously mentioned as the ideal solution, and it's the one I stand behind and support.

aianus• 11 years ago

Where have you worked where it was easier to get hired as a white man? Everyone in tech is already tripping over themselves trying to hire women and minorities.

This 'company' is blatantly discriminatory and unnecessary and taints the success of their hires by making it appear they took a shortcut into their positions via their race/sex .

vfdfv2• 11 years ago

If you don't mind me asking, what minority group do you belong too?

mildbow5• 11 years ago

Hmm. One that prefers to not have to hold up a specific minority flag :)

Think for a second: why does it matter what specific minority I am? Am I black? A woman? A black woman? Or one of those that doesn't get anywhere close to the media attention these do?

Doesn't matter. Hire me for how I do the job. That's how prejudices are broken. Not by re-affirming prejudices by giving me handicap points.

unoti• 11 years ago

Hardware was the clear cut theme of Day 1...
L. Condoms — “Condoms That Women Want”...

Do the condoms count as hardware, or software? Or perhaps both, depending on how long they are worn.

allendoerfer• 11 years ago

https://youtu.be/ObpcGNCU944

TheBiv• 11 years ago

This article is a recap of the startups included in Day 2

siquick3• 11 years ago

"Their claimed profit margin is 94%"

So they're totally ripping the consumer off then...

jegutman• 11 years ago

Or they have high fixed costs.

JauntTrooper• 11 years ago

That would create a high 'contribution margin.' A profit margin usually includes fixed costs. :)

hayksaakian• 11 years ago

I argue that "ripping off" is based on the value that a consumer receives relative to the price of the product or service.

Imagine you say: "I will tell you a joke, if you laugh then you must pay me 100 dollars"

If I give you 100 dollars, and you just run off with it, I got ripped off.

If I give you 100 dollars, and you tell me a really funny joke, then I was not ripped off.

Your problem seems to be that telling jokes is virtually free, and the profit margin might be 94%.

siquick3• 11 years ago

Yep I get it but it seems like an incredibly naive and almost arrogant message to relay...

"Hey customers, buy our product for $16 even though it actually cost $1 to make"

rokhayakebe4• 11 years ago

If spoon costs $0.10 to make, and you cannot make a solid business selling it for $0.30, while at $2.00 per spoon the market is willing and you get to create jobs, what shall you do?

scottkduncan2• 11 years ago

"Vive — Classpass for hair blowouts"

I'm trying to think of a better "X for Y" startup parody, but am failing.

_pius2• 11 years ago

You may not be in their market (yet), but that company is going to make a lot of money if they execute well.

scottkduncan2• 11 years ago

I haven't considered the economics of salons, but not sure they would have the same low variable costs that allow Classpass to succeed in fitness. I certainly wish the team (and all the other YC companies) the best though considering the guts and determination it takes to give it a shot, and you are correct that I am decidedly not in their target market so I may be missing something about the idea that is gold.

curun1r2• 11 years ago

Not necessarily. The long tail of integrating with the management systems those salons use is really long and it's basically a non-starter without management system integration. Add to that that those management systems have started to wise up to the need for scheduling and it's a very difficult nut to crack.

And no, those businesses will not copy appointments back and forth themselves. Small business scheduling is hard. Very hard. This isn't speculation, I've worked on a product that has pretty good traction doing exactly what they're doing. It would surprise me greatly if they've yet discovered why this problem isn't solved yet, and it isn't for lack of trying or that previous attempts haven't been executed properly.

idlewords2• 11 years ago

I think it's an intentionally silly description, thank God

rdl2• 11 years ago

It's a bad "x for y" because I've never heard of classpass and I don't know what a hair blowout is. The "hair blowout" part might be commonly known among investors, and definitely among the target market, but I don't think classpass is a household name. ("blowout" would be bad; "hair blowout" is probably ok.)

It's not necessarily a bad startup (from a few minutes googling, it's probably a good market, and a solid team; haven't looked at the product).

Grovara123• 11 years ago

I love these companies... such a great/fun read.

JasperBall• 11 years ago

"They argue that the market for software development is $407 billion compared to $93 billion for gaming."

Seems crazy. Anything to back it up?!

sama• 11 years ago

There are a lot of things I love about HN, but seeing the hate on ambition, hard work, and potential success is always disappointing.

bliti4• 11 years ago

Serious question: How are the opinions of a couple of internet commenter an attack on ambition, hard work, and potential success? I mean, big successes are treated the same way! Trolls will he trolls. Never mind the website.

waterlesscloud• 11 years ago

I'm going to challenge you to apply the Principle Of Charity here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

Instead of "hating", what's the best possible motivation for these kinds of comments?

Alternatively, what emotions are behind them? What reaction can you have to those emotions that help the people who have them?

Disclaimer- I find middlebrow dismissal as disappointing as anyone. But I've found value in considering what underlies it.

idlewords2• 11 years ago

This is one of the most supportive forums on the internet for your projects. Take it back.

untilHellbanned• 11 years ago

Do a poll where you ask people something it seems inconceivable anyone would disagree with. "Should we teach and protect our children?". 20% will not want it. It's either internet hanging chads or trolls. Neither are worth reflecting on.

geofft2• 11 years ago

The root cause of the things you love about HN is that people are honest. Praise on HN is genuine because condemnation is genuine. If you want people to be truly passionate about changing the world, about disrupting entrenched inefficiencies that are bad for people, about seeing Silicon Valley be the best that Silicon Valley can be, they will call you out when you fall short of that.

If you don't want to be disappointed, fund better startups.

ed• 11 years ago

The root cause of the things you love about HN is that people are honest.

I've been here a while and that's never made HN great. HN is supposed a welcoming place for smart folks with an interest in the small intersection between tech and business.

It's always felt like an implicit rule, but it's pretty simple: don't be a dick, and don't discourage people from exploring ideas they think are interesting. What positive outcome could that possibly have?

bliti4• 11 years ago

When you say better startups, what do you mean?

mildbow5• 11 years ago

Hush now. Criticism isn't hate. Disappointment isn't hate either. Being a back-patting "good-job" for everything forum seems like the ultimate sad ending to HN. Maybe you like to live in the lala land of yes men, and cronyism sponsored happy endings so even mild internet posts cut? :(

Anyway, this is the internet: people will have a problem with anything you do so don't take it personally.

q2hokremeo5gth1• 11 years ago

TL;DR Can someone give me an advice on how to prevent myself from degrading my own ideas in order to create a startup?

I do not see how these startups and/or others companies created during the last years are solving real problems. People in the country where I live have a saying for the people of my city: "They are so recursive, they could sell you a hole and make you buy it". If I am literal to this statement and try to think the same way the founders of these startups think I could create a company to dig holes in the grown as a service, maybe a telecommunication company could see this useful considering that (at least in my city) they put their cables underground (mostly). But you do not see people here selling holes, that is stupid.

Now, to my question again, can anyone give me an advise of how to change my mind about these things in order to prevent myself from degrading my own ideas? Because they may be silly but may also work and produce a revenue, but I am too negative to see them flourish.

mtmail• 11 years ago

It's better to submit the question separately on the Ask HN section. It's too off-topic with this submission/article.

wj• 11 years ago

Sometimes software solves a problem you didn't know you had. Both Facebook and Twitter for example.

Also, "real problems" is pretty subjective.

bliti4• 11 years ago

Here is another side of the coin. Some ideas might seem silly. In fact, some actually are! But let's say a couple of them make it and turn a profit. Did the idea change the world? Maybe a little. If that much. Here is the kicker: The idea will probably have changed someone's world for the better. You don't need to go out and change the world itself. Sometimes its enough to improve somebody's world. Who knows? Maybe its one of those uber drivers Ive met who have fallen into hard times and are driving a car around to support their families. Not world changing, but important. And uber, when you think about it, is a simple app where you request a car to pick you up. It has not resulted in world peace. But is definitely keeping some people from going hungry.

monort• 11 years ago

If someone voluntary and without deceit pays for your service, you are solving a real problem. It may be not important, but it is real.

E.g.: Does Netflix solves important problem? No. Does it solve a real problem? Yes.

philipn• 11 years ago

Whoa, AppCanary looks really sweet now! I'm also really happy they added a lot more information about themselves to their website :) I think there's a huge market for really simple security products like this, as most people don't realize how much work keeping even an LTS Ubuntu image up to date is (hint: unattended updates aren't automatically installed, and you'll often have to restart the box to get essential kernel security fixes!)

flyinglizard• 11 years ago

You can play a fun game by looking at these lists and speculating which of these companies would still be included if YC was a $200m fund with 10-20 bets to make.

jonlucc• 11 years ago

Can someone who knows something about farms explain how Picktrace is different from FarmLogs? Are they direct competitors?

bsbechtel• 11 years ago

I think FarmLogs is more about collecting (and making useful) data at the geographic level (rainfall levels, soil types, yieldmaps, etc), and Picktrace is more about collecting data at the operational level (payroll, productivity levels for high labor farm tasks, etc). The agricultural segments they are targeting only slightly overlap as well - Picktrace seems to be built for farms that require large amounts of labor to operate, such as orchards and vegetable farms, while FarmLogs targets high yield row crops, such as corn, soybean, and wheat farms that are highly mechanized.

funkyy2• 11 years ago

There is lack of disruptive companies in my opinion in this batch.

The ones that can grow in to something huge are Vive, Paribus, Bitmovin, Scentbird and AppCanary, but still a long road ahead of them.

rokhayakebe4• 11 years ago

If you are truly disruptive, it is in your best interest as a startup to not appear as such.

funkyy2• 11 years ago

While I agree, but Ycombinator among others says they are looking for disruptive (one way or another) startups.

jakejake• 11 years ago

I'd be curious to know how Gravitational works if the founders are here? How would one take a public service and make it private?

grantlmiller• 11 years ago

I’m not sure how the gravitaional guys are doing it, but we launched a related company a few months ago. We basically leverage the portability of Docker containers so that SaaS vendors (like NPM, Code Climate, Travis CI) can use the same product in the cloud that they use to ship on-prem. You can see a quick demo on our website: www.replicated.com

kelukelugames• 11 years ago

I love it. Some of the start ups have the potential to be huge.

Her and Jopwell are really, really cool and much needed but I can't see them getting to $100 million in revenue or whatever the threshold for VC funding is. And frankly that's depressing.

On a related note how profitable is Grindr?

welder• 11 years ago

Curious about Gigster. They say they aren't a marketplace, but if they only have vetted devs and PMs how do they plan to scale up?

nstart2• 11 years ago

I'm totally excited about heroic labs. Is there any other company providing this service (that isn't part of a closed eco system that is)?

AppCanary sounds great. I've been working on a tiny prototype that makes use of a dockerfile to check on software that should be updated and sends a mail/SMS when an update is needed. Connects to various RSS feeds and vulnerability DBs to figure out when to notify the user. I guess AppCanary can be a drop in replacement for that.

On a separate note, and I hope I'm not putting negative fuel here, would anyone be interested in a quick and dirty website to place bets on whether a company will grow or fail and maybe how long it will take to go big/fail? Point here isn't to hate on any company. It would just be an experiment that would yield some interesting results in a couple of years as to how good our individual abilities are in predicting success/failure.

rokhayakebe4• 11 years ago

"Everything you can do with a frown, you can do with a smile."

I think you can give a positive spin to your site. That is people can say why they think a certain product will succeed (break market & competitors analysis/overview, team strength, product strength, etc....). They can also state what problems they may face etc.. And please delete and do not allow negative comments that add nothing to the feedback.

Cheers,

nstart2• 11 years ago

On a site like that, I don't think I'd ever want to allow comments :D . Thanks for the feedback

Edit - After reading this I just realised it could be taken as loaded with snark. Really did not want it to come across as that. Just to clarify my statement, a website which allows for people to comment on the highly polarizing issue that is "what value, if any, does this new Silicon Valley funded startup X bring to the table?" would probably be filled up with thoughtless/cruel comments right at the start. I'd never be able to control that on my own, so would just never build a site like that that allows for comments.

Again, sorry if my initial statement came off as snarky.

Here Are the 52 Startups That Launched at Y Combinator Summer 2015 Demo Day 2

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