Companies from Y Combinator’s Summer 2017 Demo Day (Day 2)

https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/22/yc-demo-day-s17-day-2/?utm_source=tcfbpage&sr_share=facebook

by stenlix • 9 years ago

141 76 9 years ago

slikq• 9 years ago

I was expecting Slik[1] to be on this list. Anyone know why it was not included? There were quite a few articles about this company since it was founded by a 15 year old and a 16 year old [2].

There was also a WSJ article[3] today though I did not read it since it's paywalled. Anyway to read the article?

[1] https://blog.ycombinator.com/get-automated-leads-from-a-data...

[2] http://betakit.com/slik-ais-founder-the-youngest-canadian-en...

[3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/teen-duo-behind-slik-to-present...

coolswan2• 9 years ago

Some companies go off the record. One reason is that they have deals or revenues they don't want to share with the public.

austenallred3• 9 years ago

They were off record. Didn't want a couple things to be public.

elmar5• 9 years ago

this company since it was founded by a 15 year old and a 16 year old

Great to see such young entrepreneurs, who is the CEO? even in Delaware I think you must be over 18.

elmar5• 9 years ago

Show HN: Slik Prospector – Find Anyone's Email (slik.ai) by wilozxc 288 days ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12899814

elmar5• 9 years ago

why create a throw away "slikq" account? any intentions of trolling?

allenleein• 9 years ago

'slikq'= Slik HQ?

purple-again• 9 years ago

I'm curious how the crowd around here feels about the ethics of this company. This is a website where we all regularly talk to each other in myname @ the google domain specifically to avoid to spammers picking up our email accounts and bothering us.

alextheparrot• 9 years ago

Great variety of companies, really looking forward to some of the biotech in particular. I am a bit worried about Vanido (The singing app), though, as for me (With no ability) a 34% improvement might leave me in the same place ;).

bruceb• 9 years ago

What's the difference between Flowspace ( AWS for warehousing) and already existing Flexe ?

ovi256• 9 years ago

Could be just YC-level focus on execution. That was enough for a lot of previous companies.

Gargoyle2• 9 years ago

Do these companies let existing sublease their own space on say a seasonal basis. Some companies need lots of space in their own buildings at certain times of the year and not others. Limited time subleasing seems like it could be a win.

40acres• 9 years ago

Are most of these companies using bootstrap as a JS template? This look feels very familiar.

bduerst• 9 years ago

The couple I looked at were on Wordpress or React.

indogooner• 9 years ago

Looks like pretty impressive monthly revenues for some of them eg. Leon & George. If YC is the first investor (which is what I expect) they have done very well being bootstrapped so far.

giarc5• 9 years ago

I don't understand Leon & George though (plant delivery). The TC bio talked about finding the right plant for your space. Seems like they just sell a few plants. I can walk into any florist, garden store or even IKEA and get the same or better selection. So the value prop is delivery I guess? But does delivery large plants across the country scale?

christudor• 9 years ago

Bloom & Wild (https://www.bloomandwild.com/) do flower delivery and they're doing very well. They're only in the UK at the moment, but I think they have plans to expand internationally.

patrickyan• 9 years ago

Seems like it's just exploiting the Instagram/"aesthetics" crowd who are too lazy/dumb/rich to go to a nursery. LA has a ton of nurseries, and fiddle leaf fig trees can be found for $60 (4 ft) and $150 (6ft). Actually the planters (pots) are actually more expensive than the plants. Real Case Study planters go for $150-300. You might as well get a fake off of Etsy for half price.

nimos• 9 years ago

The startup hopes to someday be the “Monsanto of Cannibis.”

Not sure that's a comparison I'd invite in that market.

amsilprotag• 9 years ago

The marketing choices are interesting. I don't think we'll see that line in their B2B copy. The names Covetly and PreDxion feel like a tonal mismatch for their more rulebound audiences. The cartoonish visuals of Construct Simply and CarDash also feel a bit off relative to a pick-up truck or motor oil ad. But in those cases, the clients often drag the service providers to the platform.

4010dell• 9 years ago

observation:

Good: Hardly any entry of "Uber for X". That's a relief considering most "uber for X" are not viable businesses.

Bad: we are going after "billion dollar market". How do you even estimate the market size ?? why dream of revenue in billions why not millions. A small company can be a great company. Bad: 50%-60% companies from day 1 or day 2 do not have mission critical business. Their business is finding a problem for some kind of solution that claim to have.

jaypaulynice• 9 years ago

There are quite some "Uber for x," but I'm guessing no one will mention Uber in conversations as it brings up bad memories...look closely from day 1. Marketplaces are effectively "Uber for x"

jedberg• 9 years ago

If you consider any marketplace the "Uber for X", then Uber is the eBay for seats in cars. :)

coolswan2• 9 years ago

There's nothing wrong with million dollar businesses but I think these companies are going after VC money and well, that TAM better be in billions for those VCs to give a damn.

mattmanser• 9 years ago

It's the fundamentals behind investing. Basically, you make no money gambling $10 ten times on 10% chance of success with $100 returns, but you make money if the returns are $10,000.

So, for investing in companies, there is no point funding companies aiming for millions as you can't get a good return because of the failure rates. They're basically taking up one of the slots of a potential billion $$$ company.

The point is for every 10 companies funded, have 1 become a billion $$$ company, while most of the rest will fail.

Say YC has a 6% stake, which gets diluted down to 1%(? I don't really understand this side of it) and then the company sells for $10 mill. Great for the founders, but YC only make $100,000. That doesn't cover the other 9 companies that failed (10 * $16,000 = $160,000 = $60,000 loss).

jacquesm3• 9 years ago

It is, but the corollary to that is that nobody knew ahead of time which companies where going to be the $1B and up companies and which were duds, also-rans or simply solid small to mid sized businesses.

No investor ever invested in a billion dollar start-up to be knowing that start-up was going to be a billion dollar company one day.

So those stats are based on one thing only: survivor bias and each and every investor will have to be satisfied with investing in what they believe to be solid performers with potential upside.

wastedhours• 9 years ago

As much as I appreciate that's the VC model, perhaps less would fail if VCs didn't push for billions in revenue? The failure rate might be less than 9/10 if it wasn't "all or nothing"? Guessing it still wouldn't make enough home runs as an investment vehicle though?

elmar5• 9 years ago

Strange (51) First day and (57) second day = (108) total on the record companies only a single one on CryptoCurrency/Blockchain technology.

BTW Does anyone knows how many off the record presentations, the batch official numbers are around (125).

Edit: one company dharma.io

redditmigrant• 9 years ago

there is dharma.io on second day.

elmar5• 9 years ago

ok, only one company.

shubhamjain2• 9 years ago

It surprises me how successful these companies are already. I don't think to have more than $20K MRR is any less than having a product-market fit (of a lesser scale, maybe). It's almost as if YC is not taking bets at all because the companies that are applying seem to know well what are they solving. And although it's not obvious from the article, it sounds like they scaled to that revenue pretty quick (comparatively, to say the least).

If I compare with the companies in the batch 5-6 years ago, the difference seems conspicuous. Where are the companies like Segment, AnyPerk that were struggling to find a product-market fit and presumably, were working on bad ideas? The companies who wouldn't have a good answer to what they're solving and why? There are bets, like Greo, Goosbump, which would find it hard to attain a sustainable revenue, but I think the numbers are still low.

Paul Graham used to insist that their first priority is the team, but I think they have inadvertently raised the bar. Or, it could mean that startup wisdom of building MVP, talking to users, has become mainstream to warrant the decline in the bad ideas.

WikipediasBad• 9 years ago

I always ask this myself. I think like you said, startups are so mainstream now that the traction bar is higher now. But the problem is that YC also seems to be getting less prestigious. As great as these companies are, I am sorry but I don't believe that 100+ a batch is the same YC as what started a decade ago. YC is now a factor, not a family.

Lordarminius2• 9 years ago

I don't believe that 100+ a batch is the same YC as what started a decade ago. YC is now a factor, not a family.

You are not wrong.

The batches are of noticeably lower quality. I wont name names out of respect for the founders obviously, but you certainly have to wonder if some have been chosen solely based on their touting the latest cool tech buzzword in their application. My opinion also is that YC has moved from its earlier mandate of discovering talent to funding companies that the partners consider 'promising', where 'promising' == 'safe bet'. A lot of talented founders do not have the resources to build a company that has gained traction by the time they apply; heck a lot of talented founders not even have a viable company/idea at the time of first contact.

YC now funds companies that in another era would be considered stable, non risky investments. Could AirBnB, Reddit, Segment and DropBox (companies founded by wild youngsters with only an idea,in the case of Segment and Reddit founders a bad initial idea, and no market presence) be funded by YC today ? I'd bet not. Why? Because YC now places safe bets. You know which other institution plays it safe when giving out money ? Banks. The partners were on to something when they announced YC fellowship in 2015, it would have been a way to return to their roots and explore anew the lost idea of seeking out and funding talent, but sadly they shut it down. YC has grown big and successful and perhaps is itself ripe for disruption.

jacquesm3• 9 years ago

It's actually pretty easy to explain.

YC has global reach and is now very well known. That increases the applicant pool and that in turn means there are more quality applications as well. Having a larger pool of quality applications means that it becomes easier to select companies before a batch is considered 'full', lower quality applications will therefore have a much smaller chance of getting selected in a given batch.

So even if YC's first priority hasn't changed at all there is still a very plausible explanation for the effect you are seeing.

austenallred3• 9 years ago

I'd argue it's just much easier to get to $20k MRR than it used to be. A lot of companies barely have traction before YC and get it during YC, and $20k isn't that hard to get to.

jmstout• 9 years ago

Makes me wonder how many of these companies are actually offered the "standard deal" of 120k for 7%. Would love for YC to release some stats on this.

austenallred3• 9 years ago

I'd be shocked if there are more than one or two (if any) that aren't offered the standard deal

giarc5• 9 years ago

I think you have to remember that these TechCrunch bio's are written after their YC class. So they might have come in with $1000 MRR and have scaled up in the mean time.

Dawny33• 9 years ago

Dating site for muslims? When did YC start funding for ideas like these?

Don't the normal dating sites already cater to everyone?

ndh2• 9 years ago

https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/03/yc-backed-muzmatch-definit...

stereobit3• 9 years ago

Retool sounds great. I've wasted so much of my time building internal tools that are relatively simple and are just a bunch of forms and always thought that finding an easy way to build internal tools is a massive market opportunity. But I wonder if it's even possible to create a one size fits all solution. Hope they find a way.

skummetmaelk• 9 years ago

Sounds good, but there is no information about how it actually works.

EDIT: They had a show HN post a couple of months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494

stereobit3• 9 years ago

Ah, that gives a bit background. The visual programming language sounds cool. Would love to play with it. About to set up a internal tool architecture and so far it looks like it's gonna be react toolkit + separate graphql endpoint.

lettergram2• 9 years ago

I doubt it's supposed to look like this:

http://imgur.com/QIQiy9W

Doesn't exactly give me confidence in their tooling.

dvdhsu2• 9 years ago

Sure isn’t! I just loaded it on my computer and everything is fine. Can you open up dev tools and see what’s failing? We’re on cloudflare — maybe something weird happened there?

lotteryfest• 9 years ago

My sleeper out of the bunch: Loop Support sounds like a really awesome idea.

Companies will pay tens of thousands of dollars/month to hire good support staff. If Loop can automate easy tickets away with a knowledge base (with NLP/ML + humans), the unit economics of their pricing seems really good. Any company with a large volume of non-technical support tickets could benefit from Loop. Does anyone know how competitive the space is?

Some advice to Loop founders though: please learn how to design a website - looks like a badly clobbered Bootstrap job.

0bsidian• 9 years ago

I am a bit puzzled by OneLocal.

It looks like it's a review generation / marketing automation / CRM solution for small businesses.

Just off the top of my mind, i can think of the following venture backed companies that do the same (at least on the reviews / marketing for SMB front):

- BirdEye

- Podium.com

- DemandForce

- Signpost

- Yodle

- Womply

- Broadly.com

- Yext

What am I missing?

jacquesm3• 9 years ago

And don't forget TeamLeader.

reviewmon• 9 years ago

It is a huge market, one more horse in the race.

giarc5• 9 years ago

My initial thoughts were they weren't focusing on a single aspect that local businesses need. Seems like a broad set of features. My opinion is to start small and build from one or two solid features that your customers love.

rm2904• 9 years ago

Based on my understanding, YC doesn't invest in just one company in an industry. They invest in markets and founders. Because they are investing at an early stage, they choose to invest in multiple ones. Startups are tricky and it's really difficult to pick a winner early in a company's lifecycle.

DanielShir• 9 years ago

Lots of startups are basically existing ideas, just for India. Looks like YC is doubling down on that particular economy.

anubisresources• 9 years ago

Copying an existing idea into a new market is incredibly lucrative. It's also a lot easier than coming up with something new.

plaidfuji• 9 years ago

Entocycle stood out to me as having significant long-term prospects. Bug protein is a fundamentally disruptive product at a time when demand for sustainable protein is growing all over the world.

giarc5• 9 years ago

From what I've heard, the problem isn't finding customers, the problem is breeding and raising bugs at scale. I think if you solve the scale problem, you will be successful.

indescions_2017• 9 years ago

Piggy (piggy.co.in), the "Vanguard for India"!

Just wow. Now there is a concept that sells itself. It's easy to see the Total Addressable Market potential. Savings institutions such as Vanguard and BlackRock are completely embedded in our lives. Every high school student who graduating this summer was probably given the same advice to start saving early and I'm guessing for those who did, many selected a Vanguard fund. At least those not speculating in BTC and ETH.

For Asia's emerging middle class, solving the problem of where to safely invest for generational periods of time looks daunting but enormously rewarding. Am interested in hearing about all aspects of the issues and Piggy's solution. What are the cultural roadblocks to getting young Indian professionals who just want to spend on travel, living material goods, etc. to think about investing long term? What comprises the funds holdings? How do you solve the issue of liquidity? Are you considering developing your own products such as market ETFs for direct investment?

shubhamjain2• 9 years ago

The concept isn't novel. In fact, I would argue that they're late to this game. I am using Scripbox for a while which works fine. As I see, they're not launching their own fund, they would be investing in existing ones, which kind of makes "Vangaurd for India" a misnomer.

I think the addressable market is huge, partly because the major things allowed in the tax saving section 80 (C) are life insurance premium, a government backed retirement fund (PPF), and long term mutual funds. The last one is the easiest to invest into. That means it's relatively easy to onboard working professionals if they are want to save tax in that section.

One issue is that the public isn't knowledgable enough about merits of equity markets. For some, it's a gamble and would rather go with fixed-rate funds.

dang• 9 years ago

They did a launch thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14857978 if you're interested.

giarc5• 9 years ago

I think there is definitely a market for OneLocal[0]. I've been renovating my house lately and dealing with trades is a mess. I had a few very reputable AC guys come in and quote on installing a unit. After they left there was no follow up whatsoever... no email, no text, no call, not even automated stuff. If OneLocal could solve that problem they could probably help SMBs convert more customers.

0- http://info.onelocal.com/for-business

goatherders• 9 years ago

There are dozens (hundreds?) Of companies offering marketing tools for small businesses.

Gargoyle2• 9 years ago

I did some work for a company doing this for home improvement contractors back...geez, it must have been a decade ago. The problem is they don't respond to middlemen like this any more than they do end customers. It's a lot of work to manage them, even just on the customer relationship side of their business.

davidivadavid• 9 years ago

Can't wait to see how "CocuSocial" is received in France.

Companies from Y Combinator’s Summer 2017 Demo Day (Day 2)

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