The 10 Best Startups From Y Combinator’s S12 Demo Day

http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/21/best-of-yc-demo-day/

by Mariel • 14 years ago

66 62 14 years ago

tokenadult• 14 years ago

9gag certainly illustrates how hard up the Internet is for high-quality humor. (Just now, browsing the site, I didn't find anything I would want to share with my friends.)

Fundersclub sounds quite disruptive.

Bufferbox might be useful (at the right price) once it is within walking/bicycling distance of my house, as a UPS store location already is.

polshaw2• 14 years ago

IMO 9gag shows how a reliable stream of quantity can beat out quality of content on the web. Every time you go to 9gag (AFAIK, can't say i've visited much) there is new content.

It preys on the 'seeker' human behaviour (like reddit, minecraft, even HN). Maybe next visit there will be something hilarious?

A lower volume of higher quality wouldn't invoke the same response.. visits would often have no new content, and users wouldn't regularly visit.

cookingrobot• 14 years ago

I think even more important than volume is that 9gag, reddit etc have lots of bad content, with an occasional gem. That's the most effective reward schedule for creating compulsive behavior. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Schedules_of_rein...

jcollins1991• 14 years ago

One of the biggest selling points of BufferBox originally (to me) was that it was in the main student building of uWaterloo so pickup can be any time and you don't have to miss class or go all the way to a post office. Given that they've already expanded to Union Station in Toronto, their next expansions will likely be targeting similar situations (places where people with busy lifestyles go on a daily basis). So chances are you won't be getting a BufferBox nearby for a while.

Regarding price, IIRC the prices for service (in the Beta at least) were extremely attractive, only a few bucks for the couple of credits needed for a decent sized box. For larger item's I'd probably find a cheaper way to get it shipped direct and avoid their charges, but for small items (4 or 5 books from Amazon maybe) their fee is pretty insignificant.

noelrock• 14 years ago

I find BufferBox a strange inclusion here, given similar competitors such as Ireland's parcel motel are up and running on a larger scale here already...

samstave7• 14 years ago

I just had a weird thought:

Could FunderesClub be an avenue for laundering money?

Think of it this way - an entity or a group could setup many accounts on FundersClub to invest small-ish amounts <9500 in many many avenues and be able to make interest on that money and then sell whenever they want. Because they invested smaller amounts than would be required to be reported, however you would have to pay tax on all interest/dividends received over $1500.

Although, I am sure there are some very creative financial mangers for the elite of silicon valley that do away with even these rules with a deft hand...

NeilRShah• 14 years ago

Been watching Breaking Bad? ;)

rdl3• 14 years ago

There are many many vastly easier and lower risk ways to launder money, which don't leave a well documented audit trail throughout the system.

I think your average individual or organization laundering money would want to invest in the kind of things he understood, like small businesses, in the later stages of laundering money, too.

jack-r-abbit• 14 years ago

Does the UPS store accept FedEx, USPS, and Amazon packages?

I have no use for BufferBox personally because packages get delivered to my house just fine. In the case of USPS, our neighborhood mail boxes have the old style key boxes and the postman just locks it in and puts the key in my mailbox. In some cases I've had things delivered to my office instead. I can't think of the last time I had to go retrieve a package.

Anyway, I understand that a great number of people do not have a reliable solution for getting packages when not at home... or keep hours that do not match with the non-24x7 drop points. BufferBox seems to solve that issue by making things self-serve. Sure it costs a few bucks per delivery, but that is the price you pay for convenience. And when you don't really have a better solution, you pay it. I wish them a great deal of success.

jhuckestein• 14 years ago

This is click bait. Expect to see a similar post with a different selection of startups on GigaOM, VentureBeat, TNW, Mashable, Pandodaily and every other such site.

You also have to wonder about how they select these startups (other than at random)? It's comparing apples to oranges and doesn't even seem to have a consistent metric (expected roi, innovativeness of idea, best pitch, etc).

Why is instacart not on there?

3am_hackernews2• 14 years ago

Yes, I was really curious about their metrics for ranking the startups.

As you correctly pointed out - why is instacart missing while 9gag is present? I can name so many much better alternatives to 9gag: instacart, KIPPT, Everyday.me etc.

zio993• 14 years ago

But what if there is a way to rank these startups? Similar to how there are algorithms to pick startup winners: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428427/an-algorithm-to-... and software to pick Blockbuster hits: PDF: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/papers/1329.pdf and of course, my very own academic research in this arena: http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/29634915106/what-i-l...

What if the only criteria required by this article was to list startups that sold something (rather than be a platform or <insert disruptive buzzword here> that doesn't currently monetize. E.g. Makr.io, ReelSurfer). So that would boil it down to: Double, Coco Controller and a handful others.

As investor Kevin O'Leary would say: Follow the money.

lacker• 14 years ago

9gag is a pretty obvious selection - they have tens of millions of users.

Kiro• 14 years ago

Because Instacart will fail while 9GAG already is one of the most successful YC companies ever.

benologist2• 14 years ago

Pretty sure most of their metrics boil down to previously generating pageviews on HN, with extra points for the SEO bonus when those pageviews were on TC.

waterlesscloud• 14 years ago

They give you a one line bolded "why?" for each pick. All pre-tl;dred and everything.

samstave7• 14 years ago

This article crashes safari on my ipad2 - three times in a row now...

Anyone else care to test it?

thejteam• 14 years ago

It works on mine.

snprbob86• 14 years ago

I've been noticing that if I open two or more TechCrunch articles in tabs, all of the TechCrunch tabs become unresponsive. I have no idea what they are doing to upset Chrome so badly...

benologist2• 14 years ago

They have a lot of JavaScript stuff going on, in addition to their own stuff:

http://imgur.com/vt8Qq

samstave7• 14 years ago

>I have no idea what they are doing to upset Chrome so badly...

I think it would be Chrome's grammar and spell-check function that gets overloaded....

fecklessyouth• 14 years ago

>“Forget everything you know about telepresence robots.”

Done.

twakefield• 14 years ago

I just have to say (post upvote) that this was one of the funniest comments I have read on HN. It so perfectly points out how ridiculous much of tech coverage is.

ed209• 14 years ago

Well, you might say that... but by coincidence BBC news covered a telepresence robot in hospital today: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-19341028 :)

a_bonobo3• 14 years ago

>9gag aggregates memes and jokes from around the web — much like Reddit

Evil persons would mention that much of the content on 9gag is copied from Reddit's r/funny (which is on a large scale hard to proof) - but they got funding, so why not, looks like a viable business model.

The example-pic the article uses can be found on Reddit, with the same title, over Google: http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/ykrlh/when_links_are_... Can't tell which one came first, as the article's pic doesn't have a time.

>Its founders say that in July, 9gag had more than 65 million unique visitors, compared to Reddit’s 39.7 million

According to Wolfram Alpha, Reddit has roughly double the amount of unique daily visitors when compared to 9gag: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=reddit+9gag (Keep in mind these numbers are daily, not monthly like in the article)

alanfang• 14 years ago

Wolfram Alpha also uses Alexa which is next to useless for traffic estimates.

a_bonobo3• 14 years ago

True, because it's based on their spyware-toolbar, so you only measure the people who are relatively clueless about their computer - but in absence of the 9gag-people citing their sources there's not much more to do.

I don't know how ranking.com generates the numbers, but in their ranking reddit.com is 11,763, 9gag is 11,768 and 4chan is 11,775 - all kinda identical.

s_henry_paulson• 14 years ago

Nearly all of Reddit content is not created by users and comes from other sources.

endersshadow2• 14 years ago

I think you have to qualify that. Nearly all of /r/pics and /r/funny (or any image-centric sub) is not OC. However, /r/AskReddit, /r/IAmA, etc are all entirely Redditor-generated content. Those are huge subreddits, and should not be discounted. Reddit is a gargantuan site with a metric ton of content. It's greatly expanded since its initial charge to be a news aggregator. Reddit now deals almost exclusively in communities.

Because Reddit is the amalgamation of its communities, you get this backlash against 9gag--us vs. them and all. I'm interested to see how this evolves. I think 9gag will have to be something better than "funny stuff" eventually. Internet history is littered with companies/sites that were spun up around other people's funny content, got very popular, and have since gone by the wayside.

That's why I think Reddit will continue to survive. Its communities are its lifeblood. I don't know enough about 9gag to know if it can really form this community well and keep it, or if it's another just ebaum's World.

salman89• 14 years ago

A common trend I am noticing amongst these startups are that they target a particular industry pain point, and have the ability to charge for their product. None of them seem the type that can be huge businesses, but they all seem like they can turn a profit. Call it lower risk investments if you want.

6ren• 14 years ago

A pain point is the way to start. Some, like the perfect fitting shirt or the package delivery kiosk, could give a strategic advantage to an existing industry player, and therefore provoke an acquisition bidding war. Or, they could conceivably found a new player in that industry.

chimi2• 14 years ago

This is a good crop and I can see a lot of success coming from all of these companies. There's a market out there and it's waiting to be tackled. Several of them are known solutions applied to another niche.

There is more of a real world feel to these companies. Robots, Big boxes of delivered things, instacart which isn't in this list, but is another example.

I also notice there's a lot more traction already with these companies than I remember -- it's a more mature bunch. I wish you all the best of luck. The journey hasn't even begun yet, but you've come a long way already.

samstave7• 14 years ago

>This is a good crop...

Personally, I am not to fond of that word... crop...

wheels• 14 years ago

Part of the perceived increase (though certainly not all of it) is that the batch sizes are several times larger than before. Whereas before you might have a shooting star or three in a single batch, now you might have a dozen, even if the proportions remained about the same.

chimi2• 14 years ago

INteresting when you put it that way. There are 75 in this batch and this is only 10 of them. Being in ycombinator in earlier years almost guaranteed you'd be covered in the big blogs and well... heard of. There are some of the 65 remaining startups in the bunch I'll probably never hear of.

ekianjo• 14 years ago

Where are the ''Kill Hollywood'' startups?

edwinnathaniel• 14 years ago

9gag.com, new "kind" of entertainment.

PS: I saw 9gag.com often in Facebook. OFTEN.

While I never visited the site, I noticed their presence.

thronemonkey• 14 years ago

This seems difficult because what makes Hollywood profitable is the movies they make, which cost big dollars and often license expensive IP from others (think Transfomers, superhero movies, etc.). It seems like the kind of thing that's hard to disrupt on a low budget.

volaski• 14 years ago

I wonder what happened to Diaspora. http://allthingsd.com/20120511/diaspora-says-its-back-on-tra...

I was really expecting to see what kind of product they would launch. Did they just not launch at the demo day but still working on it, or did they actually pivot into something else?

jmonegro2• 14 years ago

They launched Makr.io (https://makr.io) a few days ago here on HN.

zio993• 14 years ago

I asked this question before: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4391638 and still wondering: 1. Does Y Combinator then own a stake in Makr.io or Disapora? 2. When a company pivots, does YC own a stake in the pivot? 3. How about side projects?

dopp• 14 years ago

www.virool.com - Platform to distribute and market videos. Company makes $0.12/second.

dj2stein9• 14 years ago

Most of these seem like derivative of other successful startups, like most of YC companies. They all just seem "done" already, so what's the point? On another thread there was the release of a YC-based iPhone controller which was no better than 5 or 6 other competitors in the exact same space. So what kind of advantage do these fancy-pants YC companies really have over their competitors over the MEGA HYPE of demo day?

Probably nothing. The consumer putting up his bucks is what really matters.

dirtyaura• 14 years ago

No, these ideas are not "done". Do you have telepresence robots in your office? Or Bufferbox-like delivery boxes in your mall? I don't.

Saying these businesses are "done" is like saying mobile phones were "done" when Motorola launched their first phone. Startups are about creating businesses, not about materializing some idea the first time on the Earth.

coopdog• 14 years ago

Same idea, better execution?

For investors you also get startups that have already been vetted enough by the ycombinator team for them to invest time into, so you know that the startup already has connections in the right places

pawelwentpawel• 14 years ago

Double Robotics looks very interesting! I've seen teleconferencing "creatures" before but this one seems very appealing.

Quite surprised about 9gag though. When did they start? Their pictures were so popular for some time it gives me the feeling that they've been online for ages already.

esschul• 14 years ago

Huh, we've had something like bufferbox in Norway for years now(I think). Don't know how popular it is though.

softrhinoskin• 14 years ago

Not trolling. Genuinely curious. What exactly does TC rankings mean? It is not like they have a good track record of non-biased tech news reporting. I have avoided their websites/articles like the plague for the past 3 years so I don't know what their record has been as of late, but I doubt it has changed for the better since then. Judging by headlines I see here on HN, I am willing to bet that it has changed for the worse if that is possible.

The 10 Best Startups From Y Combinator’s S12 Demo Day

Related Stories