ritikm

YC once tried an experiment of funding seemingly good founders with no ideas. I think every company in this no-idea track failed.

We were a no-idea company in the S12 batch. We ended up starting Streem [1], which was acquired by Box in 2014 [2] and ended up integrating and becoming Box Drive [3]. While we didn't build an enduring company, I'd say it was a moderate success by some metrics.

YC had two no-ideas in S12 and another one or two in W13 before they shut the track down. Unclear if that's enough data to spot a trend, but YC is smart and likely had other data to back up the decision. Looking back, it was a painful process to go from "no idea" to what eventually became Streem. I don't think I'd ever go and decide to start another company without an idea in the future.

[1] https://lifehacker.com/streem-offers-unlimited-cloud-storage...

[2] https://venturebeat.com/2014/06/16/box-acquires-streem-so-yo...

[3] https://www.box.com/drive

[PM on Brex Cash]

Glad to hear that you’re having a good experience with the Brex card! We would love to hear your feedback on the card, and what you would like to see in Brex Cash. We are doing a limited roll-out for Brex Cash, however, as YC alumni ourselves, we are prioritizing this community and would like the opportunity to show you the product and let you see for yourself if it’s a strong fit for your business. Shoot me an email: ritik [at] brex.com

[PM on Brex Cash]

- checks are still a thing in business, what is remote deposit story?

You’re absolutely right - which is why are in the process of adding the capacity to send and receive checks. Remote deposit capture is what we're looking into for the "receive checks" piece.

- ACH fraud a big thing - do you have ACH positive pay? Ie originator ID and limit?

Yes, we are able to offer ACH positive pay. Generally, per the payment network (NACHA) guidelines, if a fraudulent transaction is identified by Brex or by a customer, we are able to return it to the originating bank. This helps to prevent customers from ACH debit fraud, and allows us to keep track of potentially malicious activity for future transactions.

[PM on Brex Cash]

This may not solve your problem, but if you have a company entity registered in the US, we can support you no matter where you live or have your headquarters domesticated!

Got it, good to know and will keep in mind for future planning. Thanks for the feedback here!

[PM on Brex Cash]

We require all users of Brex Cash to have 2FA enabled on their account. Adding 2FA checks to withdraw/send money is on our roadmap for Cash!

[PM on Brex Cash]

Great question -- not on the roadmap as we're laser focused on building a resilient and delightful Brex Cash product for our customers.

[PM on Brex Cash]

Top five things:

1) 1.6% or more yield on your cash balance. (Savings accounts in the US offer 0.06-0.16% interest on average.)

2) Zero fees on ACH and wire transfers. (Average wire fee is $23.)

3) Get Brex reward points every time you do a transaction. (Haven't seen an account give reward points for each transaction but I could be wrong.)

4) One account for all your deposits. (Typically have two accounts -- checking and savings -- with checking typically earning less yield and savings accounts having a transfer limit of 6 transactions/month).

5) Easy-to-use online interface designed to give you back time to run your business. (Of course, very easy for me to say this so I'll let the customer feedback do the talking as we roll Brex Cash out).

You can visit https://brex.com/cash for more information.

[PM on Brex Cash]

Yes, you get an account and routing number with your Brex Cash account, which you can enter into on Stripe (like you would your bank account's account/routing number) to receive your Stripe payouts.

[PM on Brex Cash]

Thanks for the feedback! Let us know if you have any questions by emailing support@brex.com or visiting https://brex.com/cash

[PM on Brex Cash]

It’s true that banks are able to offer money market fund sweeps, however, they are incentivized to hold funds as deposits (better for their bottom line), which often results in limitations on account activity, and checking account interest rates near 0%.

We built Brex Cash to give startups their time back -- so customers can spend time building their businesses, instead of optimizing deposits and spending across multiple bank accounts. Within the Brex Cash account, our goal is to provide startups with a safe and liquid place for their funds, with benefits of yield that larger companies are offered.

[PM on Brex Cash here]

Thanks for the response, all great questions. Answers below:

Can you guys elaborate on this in non-marketing/PR speak? If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck…

Brex Cash functions like a checking account, but the structure behind it is different. Traditional banks separate checking and savings accounts, which means customers earn a lower yield on their money as a whole. To be able to offer yield in all of the funds, we use a different structure: customers put their cash into Brex Treasury LLC, a registered broker-dealer affiliate of Brex Inc., that invests the cash in U.S. Treasuries through a money market fund. This means that while we don’t offer FDIC insurance, funds are held in low-risk securities backed by the U.S. government.

Do we want you to be getting around the regulations? Are those regulations in place to hurt or help us (the business owners)?

Brex Cash is regulated as a broker-dealer, by FINRA. This is a well known structure used by Fidelity and other large financial institutions to offer similar products offering higher yield cash accounts.

I’m genuinely curious here — I am seriously excited about a real, digital-first, intelligent, non-physical business bank. But I’m immediately concerned that you’re trying to “move fast and break things” and frankly I don’t really want that when it comes to my business checking account.

Totally understand the concern, and this is top of mind for us as well. We’ve spent over a year building the right technical, regulatory, and financial foundation to make sure we can scale this product. This is a product that we have built to be resilient and not to move fast and break things -- when it comes to customer’s money, we simply don’t do that. We’ve been working with customers for months to make sure the product functions well. Lastly, we’re rolling it out slowly, starting with an early access program for existing customers. Our motto internally is: “The Brex Cash rollout should be boring” :).

Hey HN, co-founder of Elph here!

Excited to share what we've been working on.

Elph is highly scalable blockchain infrastructure for Ethereum. We're capable of handling over 5,000 transactions per second (vs. Ethereum's 15) at a fraction of the cost by using a MapReduce-like technique (lots of transactions that get executed on our chain that get submitted to Ethereum as a single transaction) that retains the trustless and security properties of Ethereum today. (For those in the blockchain space, this is done using concepts from Plasma.)

Happy to answer any questions!

Garry is one of the best human beings out there.

One fond memory that resonates well with how he thinks and works with other people was in an office hour we had with him. I asked him why he does what he does and his response was simple: "I do this to help people get out of the rat race."

Thank you, Garry, for everything.

We built an on-demand adaptive bitrate video transcoder that works with HLS. So it's able to fluctuate the quality and size of the video being streamed server-side before sending it down to the client. In a low-bandwidth environment, the quality decreases automatically so that the video streams without any lag. It's similar to how Netflix does their streaming.

We really wanted to make the list :)

(Streem co-founder here) Small clerical error - we were actually YC S12, not W14 :).

It's definitely on our list of things to do before our full open launch. Sorry for not being on top of this sooner; we'll get this fixed ASAP.

Sorry, bad choice of words. It's against YouTube's TOS, and there have been quite a few YouTube-scraping sites that have been taken down by YouTube/their legal team in the past, so there's precedent for Streamnation to go under the same way.

On our roadmap! We'll make an announcement once we release it.

Definitely not our goal; happy to explain further: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7601652. Or take a look at the CEO of Reddit's post on this: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/1sndxe/weve_rewritten_...

Here's a breakdown of what each of these things mean:

royalty-free: Streem doesn't have to pay the user to display the content they upload back to them from our authorized clients (web, desktop, mobile).

perpetual: The right to display the content doesn't expire after some time, unless the account is closed and data is deleted as described in the second paragraph.

irrevocable: Once the user uploads content, they can't tell Streem that they take back the right to display the content, except by deleting the content, which is covered in the second paragraph.

non-exclusive: This is there for the user's benefit. It means that the user retains the right to the content they uploaded, and we don't take exclusive rights on displaying it back to them. So they have full rights to upload/store/do whatever with it elsewhere.

worldwide: These rights are not restricted to a specific country/zone, like the US, because our service operates and displays content around the world.

publicly perform, publicly display: Users can generate public links to their files, so we have to cover the case where they post it publicly and let their content be publicly displayed via the link they created. Publicly display covers still work like images; publicly perform covers "moving" work like music and videos.

derivative works, copies: Gives Streem access to make thumbnails/cover arts (derivative work) and copies of the data (redundant storage).

authorizing others to do so: Lets Streem pass the content through different layers and service providers during the upload, processing, and when data is requested. For example, Streem has to pass the content through a CDN when the user accesses it, which this gives us the right to do.

The main thing that prevents Streem from abusing these policies is the "for use in connection with the Service and Company’s (and its successors’ and affiliates’) business" line. This ensures that we can only operate on the data to provide our service to the user when they authorize us to do so (i.e. if they click the "Share" button, they authorize us to operate on the file to enable it for sharing), and not for something like advertising the user's content to generate money since they haven't authorized us to do that (we'd have to add an opt-in "Advertise this for me" button or add it in to the TOS and appropriately notify everyone if we wanted to be malicious like that, which would be ridiculous for us).

Other cloud storage companies also have very similar TOS's, although they're more colloquial in their wording, so they may be easier to understand, but no different in the rights they're asking for.

If you want a more credible source, take a look at Yishan Wong's (CEO of Reddit) post: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/1sndxe/weve_rewritten_...

- Unlimited space vs. 1TB

- No sync required + native integration into Finder/Explorer. With Google Drive you have to sync (i.e. store locally) to open files with your native app like VLC, or you have to view them on the web if you don't store them locally, which is a hassle for the average joe, and a deal-breaker for the media enthusiasts/XBMC/Plex-ers.

- HLS adaptive bitrate streaming. Google Drive limits the quality, whereas we'll fluctuate the quality of the video based on your bandwidth.

We follow the same DMCA policy as Dropbox, etc. [1] If we get a DMCA takedown notice, we disable public linking and sharing on the file. The original owner gets to keep the file in their own account (exactly how Dropbox works).

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/30/how-dropbox-knows-when-your...

Yes, we transcode all video files so that they're streamable on whatever platform you're on (including directly streaming from the browser). We'll be giving users access to our iOS app slowly, which will let you stream MKV (and other formats) directly. You can also use our desktop app to stream directly into your native video player.

- Native desktop filesystem integration. We don't make you go to a website to access your content; everything is accessible as a regular file in Explorer/Finder and opens/plays in your native player (i.e. VLC).

- Instant adaptive bitrate transcoding. Videos you upload to Streem play instantly on any device, regardless of bandwidth (slow connections automatically get a lower quality; if your connection gets better, we auto-upgrade to a higher quality). Streamnation has a large wait time before the video is transcoded and ready for playback.

- Streamnation has illegal features built in to their app (i.e. auto-scraping and uploading YouTube videos), which makes them much more liable for shutdown.

We have a few advanced techniques that inspect the file data and ensure that the file is valid. So even if you rename your encrypted backup to to My_Home_Video.avi, it wouldn't pass our check and would fail to upload.

Absolutely! We're also testing out our Javascript RAW image viewer so you can browse your RAW images without any special software, directly on the web, and on any computer.

We're limiting filetypes to media files (videos, photos, music, docs), so you can't pipe in petabytes of garbage dumps of random data. So in your case, we wouldn't be able to accept your database backup, but would be fine for your media files.

No max file size limit.

We have CDNs around the world to help with network speeds. Of course, that's a vague answer for now, but we're gathering more data on upload/download speeds as we let more users in and will have more information on this in the near future.

Definitely not planning on firing anyone for using too much. The only case we'd ask someone to stop using our service would be if they're abusing our policies (i.e. 100 people on one account). So far we've been fine with an "expected value" type system -- some people will store/stream a lot, and some won't, but overall it all works out so that the $20/month price point works out just fine.

Encryption is done through convergent encryption (example here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7601277).

We do offer unlimited storage for $20/month, the 200GB for $20 is what Dropbox offers -- sorry if that was unclear.