The YC application is a sales pitch, and you're not selling your idea, you're primarily selling your charisma and capacity to spin vision and sell. Second, you're selling your chemistry with your cofounders and stability of your relationship. Third, you're selling your capacity to build, at least some usable prototype, but this a low bar.
At no point are you actually selling the concrete idea, unless you're doing something extremely specific that seems valuable and you're one of the few who can build it. For the rest, the idea is a rhetorical vehicle to sell the other things.
If however, you have a very narrow window to be able to launch properly, or if your product is mostly visionary you need investors asap. Just don't expect to come out with a Zuckerberg deal, expect 1-2% of the company in the end and make sure you cash out during the entire road.
YC is late to the early alpha and is betting on talent/leadership to soak up.
Then again, first movers don't always win.
You're getting recurring meetings with them (which have significant opportunity cost for them), so it's not just the usual startup investor unwillingness to say "no" with finality?
There are some incredibly large interests in the space that wield intense power and control over various markets. There is also a profound degree of inefficiency in a lot of what’s happening.
The question is whether many of those inefficiencies are technology problems or if they are intentionally constructed for the many reasons these things are created.
I feel like there needs to be almost a Walmart size company pushing down on prices with that kind of scale before many of these structures will be broken, and unfortunately that doesn’t appear to be the direction most things are going (oh they exist in scale, just not direction). I was hoping Amazon’s entry into the market would do it. It didn’t.
Might be time for a different direction in health care entirely. Kaiser had it right, but I don’t think they executed well and they are largely a company rooted in past thinking in how they are structured.
Combining health care and subscription with ongoing medical care is definitely the direction of things to come. The fundamental shift needs to be moving the system from fixing problems to keeping people actually healthy, and that means that healthy people need to pay for the system or the entire thing gets it’s incentives inverted (as it is now). This is a fundamental shift, but if it were done right it would be a massive company and really change the world. I’ve been looking in to how to build this over the last year and know I want to go in this direction.
And there is also a ton of interesting businesses in generics.
Just some thoughts from someone who has been in many aspects of the medical industry over my career. Hope it inspires some good discussion with my favorite community.
Basically every healthcare reform would be positive, either towards single payer or towards markets, as the current equilibrium is just optimizing extraction. See how the ACA, which was attempting to let insurers force prices of medical services down, led to hospitals buying out massive amounts of private practices, as it's easy to bully 5 doctors, but not a hospital system that is at the same time negotiating for a lot of primary care, specialists, and ar least a third of hospital capacity in the city.
Can you please elaborate on this? We are currently exploring a project in the same space, and I would love to discuss.
* Crypto currencies are clearly on a decline given their location and volume in the list. It seems that the hype is mostly gone.
* Naturally, AI dominates the list, but the focus is on various applications such as healthcare, robotics, enterprise, and the always-a-hit: traditional industries.
* YC lists three and a half requests with a strong geo-political aspects: army technologies (justified by current global wars), startups manufacturing in the US (the role of the US in the 21st century), space and climatech. Our zeitgeist (and as such YC’s justification) is that large changes occurring in the world and they aims to take part in it. This is both bold and on-point.
* Companies relying on open source as part of their core business. YC identifies such companies as having multiple advantages and would like to see more such companies in their portfolio. This is a valid statement that I truly believe in, but I also think that this is only a part of the criteria and not something that solely holds an investment thesis.
Very curious if anyone knows how to pull this off. There's so much value to be unlocked but it's just impossible to break through.
I've personally met three very talented founders that tried and failed (one was accepted to YC as a mid-market ERP and successfully pivoted into an application tracking system) and failed very quickly.
I'm guessing an important feature would be an integration system that maps data from the current ERP seamlessly into the new ERP. And that assumes you can even get through the enterprise sales process to even get the company to migrate.
I work in this space (small/mid-size).
The good news is that there are several "obvious" ways to pull this off because an ERP is the culmination of everything a company needs and does. So almost anything you can imagine on the software is part of it.
The bad news, and the reason everyone wants a solution, is that is truly a big space, and then you need E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G.
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My take is to start from the bottom, and build a much better version of Access/FoxPro (https://tablam.org).
Any medium/big ERP end being a specialized computing platform that needs:
- A programming language
- A database engine
- An orchestration engine
- ELT engine
- Auth
- UI/Report builders
And to be clear: NONE of the "programming language", "database engine", etc are a good fit today.
NONE.
This is the big thing, This is the reason (from a tech POW only) that most attempts fail.
This is the secret of why Cobol rule(d): Is all of this! but is too old! (also, this is why SQL still is best: Is almost this).
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So, to pull this off, you need a team that knows what is "missing" from our current tools, makes a well-integrated package, and adds a "user-friendly" interface in a way that is palatable for the kind of user that uses excel (powerfully).
Is not that impossible. FoxPro was the best example of this kind of integrated solution.
P.D: This is my life's dream, to make this truth!
Vertical specific software provides so much more value as you can build things unencumbered by the engine/data structures/way things work.
I've found our niche - ERP's would be hopelessly expensive so save for top tier OE companies no one uses it. In weeks we can develop and roll out features & functionality that our clients just lap up that you would never in a million years build into an ERP platform, but is intrinsic to the delivery of our clients products.
It was inconceivable to me 2 years ago, but now I've had very real discussions with some companies where they're looking at our software going "wow... you're going to give mid tier players better functionality that we could only dream of from our ERP systems.."
Basically ERP platforms are "jack of all trades, master of none".
In my former life we did vertical specific software for the window and door industry. Every time we heard from a prospect "oh we're looking at __some ERP platform__ to do configuration of W&D", we'd immediately list dozens of reasons why they would fail, and fail hard.. countless untold money to consulting teams has been burned learning those lessons.
An nothing of this has anything to do with SAP, and everything with ERPs and the messy reality of businesses.
Every auditor on the planet is intimately familiar with how Oracle EBS and SAP do certain things.
If you don't have that trust built up, a customer simply won't want to take the risk and additional headache and overhead passing an audit will take.
I don't think it will be possible to compete directly with the big players. However, having spoken to a few potential customers, it seems my software can help businesses that are small today but will scale up tomorrow. If I can prove that my software can indeed scale up with them, I will have a good opportunity to tackle the enterprise side eventually. Right now though, I'm just focused on getting the product to a level that helps these smaller folks out. I have been working on it during evenings, and this is my first week moving forward focusing on it full time. Let's see where it goes. I'm really early stage, super fresh to business, but I'm experienced as a swe and consider myself a closer. Cheers!
If you want to know a little about my background, I've worked on massive (many, many millions of dollars) ERP projects from the business side. I've also been a platform engineer/lead on a saas that IPO'd a few years ago. I've seen it from both sides, and I believe that I have an idea of what is missing when it comes to business software in general.
I have worked with cms-systems. And in this world it is accepted, you need different frontends for different tasks. Therefore a world of systems - calling themselve headless - support only the backend part of cms management. Worked with Strapi that support this kind of thinking.
How come something similar doesn't exist in the ERP world ?
Two approaches I can think of:
1. Target mid market or smaller and grow with customers (will be slow)
2. Take a front-door-wrapper approach
There are some opportunities in "New Defense Technology". Something like a low-cost replacement for the Javelin anti-tank missile based on off the shelf phone camera parts ought to be possible. Of course, once that's out there, every insurgent group will have some.
"Explainable AI" is really important.
"Stablecoin finance" is mostly how to make sure the issuers don't steal the collateral. Maybe the people behind the stablecoin have an explosive collar welded around their neck. If the price drops, it detonates. That might work.
"Applying machine learning to robotics" has potential. Get bin-picking nailed and get acquired by Amazon. Many people have failed at this, but it might be possible now.
"Bring manufacturing back to America". Is it possible to build a cell phone in the US?
"Climate tech" - think automating HVAC and insulation selection, installation, and analysis. Installers suck at this. See previous HVAC article on HN. A phone app where you walk around and through the building with an IR camera is one place to start. Map the duct system. Take manometer readings. Crunch. That's do-able on YC-sized money.
Phone camera parts would be overkill. The Javelin sensor isn't nearly that high-resolution, we're talking low triple digits in "pixels". It does however refresh its readings very fast, a necessity given its speed. The old Javelin used active cryo and a filtered IR imager, the new one is passive like the IR camera in some phone attachments. It is stupidly simple in operation: CLU provides the target "signature" and the imager seeks it. After the initial ascent in top-down mode, a stronger signal on one edge of the sensor pushes the control surfaces in the opposite direction until it strikes its target. I'd give the Wikipedia page a read. It contains a surprising amount of information that informs the design and thought behind the missile. Military systems are cool for how robust yet simple they are.
I think we should start more basic and work our way up. For example, there isn't a real reason we can't produce all of our domestic iron and steel needs in the USA, but we end up importing a lot right now. Same with aluminum, etc. But this isn't something YC is really going to help with unless they are funding manufacturing and industrial tech that makes it easier/cheaper to set-up and run these types of facilities.
Definitely possible, this one is mostly US-built: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/
We have seen consumer grade DJI drone use in Ukraine-Russia war by both sides.
AI to control a swarm of cheap drones to survey and kill?
I think they are looking for a "decentralized" solution where the collateral is held by a smart contract.
> "Bring manufacturing back to America". Is it possible to build a cell phone in the US?
US is offering money, so why not take it?
I hate crypto, but I love this idea. We should apply this to a lot of systems.
Make stakeholders of anything accountable. 100% skin in the game.
I would hate to cross you. That is scary.
Make bombs people want, I see.
https://a16z.com/american-dynamism/
It’s a moral stance, explicitly
The founders that work in defense are mission driven. they see nation-state preservation as a moral issue.
They would fail to “make a buck” if that was their only goal, as is the case in most industries/sectors
Respectfully, I’d encourage you to review the HN guidelines. Skepticism is welcome here, but even cursory research will show that the founders in defense have deeply personal reasons for building what they do.
That closing line is hilarious tho
Do you have any problems with that?
So, how would the US defend itself against countries like China and Russia if no one built weapons? Everyone agrees weapons can be used in ethically horrendous ways. It doesn't follow from that, that the US doesn't need a weapons industry.
I have ideas that I would love to explore given funding.
The devices seem to be getting better and better, but the software seems rather lacking (currently typing this from a gorgeous giant display on my Vision Pro, which I use mostly exactly like how I would use my computer). Even in gaming, where the use-case is a lot more mature, we haven't seen the kinds of investment in AAA content that you'd expect, even though clearly the platforms could benefit from it.
I'm curious what YCs thinking is, and if perhaps they just feel no one has earnestly taken it on yet?
And it wasn't until competition stepped up with an indie dev, aka a YouTube VR app called Juno made for the Vision Pro, that even Google decided to jump into developing YouTube for the Vision Pro.
So now we are back at the chicken and the egg problem and few big devs want to support the giants. It'll happen probably eventually when monetization becomes a reality for devs embracing the tech but I don't see it happening any time soon.
In the spirit of Jeff Bezos’ “your margin is my opportunity”, we believe it’s possible to build a highly profitable business and make the system more efficient at the same time.
Didn't Amazon try this and is now shutting down part of its healthcare (pill selling) play?
Slightly scary to think about Amazon having a near monopoly on healthcare, but ask yourself whether our current reality is better or worse…
Especially not VC backed start-ups...
by creating another middleman in healthcare. This was first proposed by Jim Clark's Healtheon. "We want to empower the doctors and the patients and get all the other assholes out of the way." … "Except for us. One asshole in the middle." — The New New Thing, Michael Lewis.
The reason we spend so much is that public healthcare is a public good and private companies aren't good at managing public goods. They're good at making money which is a different purpose (which has probably served most people reading this very well). We need Single Payer. Indeed we have Single Payer in Medicare and TriCare and other areas. It works pretty well. We need to eliminate middlemen in healthcare by actually eliminating rent seeking middlemen in healthcare.
No country in the world can address this without a government organization. You start by telling patients where their money goes in a transparent way and which organizations benefit from it. That is it.
The problem is the trust aspect of this level of transparency. There is so much money (large insurance and healthcare groups) and chaos (biotech stocks), making it extremely difficult for businesses to be reliable to individuals as a business. To run a business, you need money, and to operate a business like this, you need an unconditional amount of money for the long term. VCs can take care of the unconditional giving of money, but they are never long-term. They will badger the investee to join the darkside of healthcare because they need an answer in 5 years of series A whether the startup is going to be a unicorn or not.
Lots of countries do not have single payer healthcare, and have an insurance system that resembles America's, yet they don't have America's ridiculous prices.
If you want to build machines that kill people, you should at least be willing to say it clearly. If it makes you uncomfortable to talk about, maybe that should tell you something. And it's not a very good excuse to argue that you didn't build a weapon, you just built something that makes it easier to use weapons.
Arms races are not the way. The biggest threat to the West isn't somebody else's weapons, it's that Indonesia's elections today went to a candidate who doesn't want to align with the West, relations with India are increasingly strained, and even Brazil and Turkey are starting to lean out. Geopolitics is politics, and politics requires appeal. Our brand image is significantly worse than two decades ago, as far as I can see.
If the West can't gain allies on friendly terms and maintains power through the development of ever-more advanced military technology, then what kind of world have we built, exactly?
It's extremely disappointing to see this.
Pretending any of these objective truths are wrong is folly and ignores a dozen millennia of human history.
There will always be individuals/organizations/countries that don't the "the West" as an ally. Some subset of that will be outwardly hostile to Western ideology, and some subset of that will be willing and able to use violence as a means to their end. The fact that some Western countries have impressive militaries doesn't somehow mean they should stop investing in that technology.
Well maybe that's not at all what they're saying.
Perhaps you could share what you consider the least extreme version of "building machines that kill people." Building missiles - OK yeah obviously. Improving satellites which are used for information gathering which could be used for missions where people are killed? Does that fall within "building machines that kill people?" What is the mildest example of something that constitutes "building machines that kill people?"
Sad day for YC.
I’m not sure the companies who actually have a shot at solving any of them can benefit from YCs approach or even network
Most of the industries are won through long standing insiders partnering with exceptional engineering talent
Not really YCs model
Some of these are "necessary but not sufficient", others just plain platitudes.
Either this is sloppily phrased, or the SV techno-optimist kool-aid is way stronger than I would have thought plausible. Does anyone seriously believe that a reasonable solution to climate change has exactly one thing on the list and it's "more climate tech start-ups"? Of course climate tech has to play a role (we need everything we can throw at the problem), and start-ups will certainly provide a subset of that tech, but claiming that this alone provides "a fair chance" is extremely revealing of certain bias (and ignorance)
YC is simply missing the boat here. Pun intended.
The sun is free 1.3kw / meter energy for ~5 hours in the sun belt states.
I have always found it interesting that JavaScript is one of the most consumed programming languages in the world and nobody can write in it, especially in the browser. When I say write in it I mean without abstraction libraries (React, Angular, jQuery, and so on) and doing something other than CRUD apps. Until last year I was writing JS full time and met only 3 or 4 other people who do this and of them had security clearances.
There is a huge opportunity there that nobody is filling. While the talent for it is completely absent the surprising thing is that it’s ridiculously easy to train for provided the candidates are smart enough to follow simple instructions and write original code.
But it doesn’t sound like bypassing the “constraints imposed for security” is the desired outcome for the bosses, so who are you selling to?
* Developer tools inspired by existing internal tools
* LLMs for manual back office processes in legacy enterprises
Feel free to message me. Having worked in-house for the last 15 years, I've seen a variety of these, have built more than a few of them myself, and am in the middle of building some new ones using LLMs right now — all within large enterprise legal departments.
I won't be able to share any confidential data, but I'm happy to answer questions about patterns I've seen across a few different organizations and where the unmet needs seem to be.
Thanks, appreciate it!
Why is that? Is conflict resolution too much of a non-tech thing and more in the realm of politics? Or is there simply no money to be made in reducing warfare and hostile nation-state competitions?
> $136b worth of stablecoins have been issued to date but the opportunity seems much more immense still. Only about seven million people have transacted with stablecoins to date, while more than half a billion live in countries with 30%+ inflation. U.S. banks hold $17b in customer deposits which are all up for grabs as well. And yet the major stablecoin issuers can be counted on one hand and the major liquidity providers with just a few fingers.
This is not entirely true. There has been a stable coin for over 50 years now, and most billionaires should be familiar with it because it's used to pay for satphone calls.
SDR (Special Drawing Rights) is IMF's stable coin. US$935.7 billion SDR are currently allocated. It has been called paper gold and an international reserve currency.
SDR is fairly well known among people who study reserve currencies. While most people take for granted the US dollar as the global reserve currency, those who study it are aware of alternatives (SDR, gold, bitcoin), even though those are too tiny (right now…) to seriously get the “reserve currency” title.
FWIW, Facebook’s stablecoin (Libra/Diem) was designed as a basket of currencies like SDR. In fact, it’s not too far off to explain Libra/Diem as SDR on blockchain, but backed by its own association instead of the IMF. If you understand the geopolitical challenges facing SDR (even with its IMF backing), you can imagine why Libra/Diem got such pushback.
I had no idea you could pay for satellite calls with SDR. (I don’t roll like that…) I’d love to learn more.
The satellite call use case is interesting though. I’ve heard rumor/speculation that Starlink may accept crypto for payment. The use case makes sense. If you’re bringing internet access to parts of the world that don’t already have it, you can’t assume those users have easy access to traditional payment rails.
And this is not a unique problem for Starlink. Many internet companies I know or have worked with have users from all over the world, but in many countries those users are stuck in the “free” tier because there are too many hurdles for them to pay (or in some cases, get paid) for online services. I know of small businesses in SE Asia that would set up a company (and bank account) in Singapore just to pay (get paid) for online services. There’s a huge gap between the inexorable rise of the internet economy and the fossilized global payment system. In fact, I’m founding a startup to use stablecoin to bridge that gap.
Not all of these are moonshots, but some of them are (e.g. securing defense contracts seems lower risk). Also I imagine getting that defense contract may be a very different value proposition depending on what connections that investor has.
pg's most frequent advice to founders about ideas is to ask themselves what they themselves wish would exist, then make that—i.e. solve a problem you yourself have. Another thing he and Jessica say a lot is that you need to be passionate about what you're working on in order to make it through the arduous haul of a startup.
That's even more true of the 'moonshot' startups, since they're harder and take longer. If you look at the hardest startups YC has invested in, you won't find many founders who aren't personally obsessed with what they're working on, and have been for many years. That's one of the things YC would be looking for before funding somebody to work on such things.
That one is interesting in that I wouldn't naturally think of manufacturing as a common start up idea.
> The MSO model enables doctors to run their own clinics by (1) providing them software that can handle back office tasks such as billing and scheduling and (2) channeling patients to them.
> These functions are largely what PE ownership provides. Doctors who are part of an MSO model can continue to run small, physician-owned practices while competing successfully with large, PE-owned conglomerates.
I feel this is building off a false hypothesis. PE isn't out-competing independents. Sure, there is a tiny bit of synergy and some bargaining power that comes with the scale of having a portfolio of clinics. But most independents concerned with that have joined one of the numerous GPO/networks that exist. What's really happening is there is a huge generation of providers reaching retirement age and PE is a well capitalized buyer for them to sale their practice. New doctors are more likely to be employees versus being entrepreneurial in the past. I think for this to work, you would want to find ways for new providers to own a practice which means taking on debt that would out bid PE. It might be that the startup that gets this right, provides said financing with the management fee income as an addition to the debt service/income for risk. This could be interesting and new doctors might see this as an attractive path towards practice ownership; but getting the financial model for all constituents to be attractive is going to be tough IMO.
MSO for back office synergies is possible, but from what I've seen it's usually more cost effective to have your under-utilized receptionist wear many of these hats and that's what independents tend to do.
I honestly am game for this even though I have zero experience in healthcare but as a consumer, where do I start how bad it is. I would do anything to change our shitty healthcare system where there are so many middlemen b/w me and my doctor.
Recent event: Went to ER because my toddler son spilled hot coffee on him (thankfully he is ok and wasn't as terrible as it could have been). There was a pediatrician on call who looked at him for like 2 mins and then left. A nurse came in and most of her questions were about "insurance details".
Then they didn't tell me what the heck was going on and after pressing, they said "we are getting stuff for him. wait". Then after almost 1.5 hours of waiting where my son is wailing, they got some bandage (I kid you not) with some Over the counter stuff (bacytracin) and applied it on the burn. Then we went home.
Bill = $2000 after Insurance coverage. Our premium for family is $1800+/month btw . Then there is the deductible. Supposedly, the insurance company only partially approved the claim. Whatever the f that means.
If you don't see a problem with this whole cycle of experience, I don't know what else to say. And no, don't tell me to get better insurance. I want to get rid of all these middlemen mafia.
The fundamental problem is that the facilitator cannot be a for-profit entity, which is why universal healthcare in other countries are run by the government.
* very fast, arbitrary disapprovals of healthcare-- requiring 6 weeks of physical therapy before ordering a test of what is almost certainly a torn ligament or other thing is stupid and directly harms patient outcomes;
* enforcement of mental healthcare equality-- hospitals should have equal beds, equal availability, equal pay for workers, and insurance companies should also be paying equally for mental and body health;
* forcing the hands of drug price fixers-- that's right, it's not just insurance, or pharmaceuticals, it's a shitty middleman between them all that rolls up and sets prices on both sides, things like e.g. medicare negotiating drug prices directly will disrupt these fuckos
* DOCTOR OWNED HOSPITALS MUST COME BACK-- no more vulture finance that literally made this illegal
* hospital geographic monopolies must be eliminated-- that's right, hospitals can ban competition! No more of this!
* SAFE STAFFING RATIOS
* releasing the budget on residency-- that's right, the government sets how much money they are willing to put towards new doctors!
* jail time for negligent insurance decisions-- we know that insurance companies will slow-walk bureaucracy lifesaving healthcare to desperately ill, disabled people in the hopes they will die before the approval goes through
Does anyone have good resources to understanding the bloat of the industry as well as the regulatory constraints? I realize that the complexity here is almost infinite, but I do think you can potentially find inroads and compete along those.
I also don't think being a more efficient "middleman" is a bad thing. There are always going to be providers of services that are incentivized by making money. The key in my mind is to keep it in a respectable/realistic place for customers, as well as eliminate toil/confusion. It feels like you could get both outcomes and also align for better patient care/experience. For example everyone loves Costco, yet they still are a "middleman" between you and the goods you want.
Interesting that YC is willing to toe the IP theft line on this one. I think plenty of us do in fact realize that homegrown corporate ideas / apps could likely be turned into external new businesses, but then the blurred ethics and legality of doing so occurs a few thoughts later.
An F100 I worked for had an entire corporate group for the purposes of spinning off their IP so that it could be done ethically/legally and give the employees' new startup the boost it needed. Several of these startups have gone on to $MMM/$B valuations. If you're at Boring BigCo and thinking of ripping one of their developed ideas for a small YC check, I'd advise against it.
Especially since the first stage of your startup is to test the waters with an MVP, which leads to a quasi-immediate pivot from the initial idea. Example:
> web application which would combine a project manager, contact manager, and to-do list
became Blogger and was sold to Google in 2003 (by Jack Dorsey).
Exactly what I thought would be absolutely terrific: a robot commanded by voice that poses floor tiles. That's v1. V2 builds a house.
I can't think of any "toy" as exciting as this atm. Plus you pose the first tile of this and you're a trillionaire.
My background's in education. I always wonder whether a solid bet would be on overhauling the system totally so the foundations of these new 'future trades' are solidly grounded from 4 years old somehow.
It seems our knowledge is an abstraction layer upon an abstraction layer upon... There's just so much shit to know, and it feels all muddied. I feel what I learnt at school hasn't equipped me for anything in the 21st century whatsoever.
After seeing how my doctor iteratively ordered up different sets of tests for me over the course of a few months, I got to thinking about improving decision trees for blood testing (and maybe others).
However, when I spoke to a (first year) med student about this he suggested that doctors actually don’t want something like this. I don't think I followed the thought process completely but it was something along the lines of, “we’ll always find something.”
Would be interested if someone could elaborate on this line of thinking.
If they get results from a test, but without the compelling observation, they're then operating outside their well established statistical framework, and they can't confidently evaluate the meaningfulness of the test results.
To me, this doesn't mean the extra information is bad, or unhelpful, it's just they are not yet properly calibrated to use it properly.
I've heard this sentiment from medical professionals before and this was my conclusion.
What they do want afaict is more fundamental, should-be-so-much-easier stuff like case management software that doesn't suck, and like, a chair to sit on while using that computer.
But don't expect a corporate VC to be as fun or cool as YC.
Also some are way more achievable by software-type engineer-types and the financial associates in their ecosystem, due to extreme familiarity with that particular landscape. Some also require a little more commitment than starting a small software company.
If I was going to split the combined vision into only two categories it would be like this:
- Applying machine learning to robotics
- New defense technology
- Bring manufacturing back to America
- New space companies
- Climate tech
- A way to end cancer
- Foundation models for biological systems
- Using machine learning to simulate the physical world
- Commercial open source companies
- Spatial computing
- New enterprise resource planning software (ERPs)
- Developer tools inspired by existing internal tools
- Explainable AI
- LLMs for manual back office processes in legacy enterprises
- AI to build enterprise software
- Stablecoin finance
- The managed service organization model for healthcare
- Eliminating middlemen in healthcare
- Better enterprise glue
- Small fine-tuned models as an alternative to giant generic ones
The remaining things in the first group are some other things I (and I'm sure many others) have had in mind since before personal computers became accessible.
"Too bad" my ambition has grown with age and it would take about a $10 million company to build my prototype hardware, and that's before any deployable machine learning can commence.
So it's been an interesting 43 years keeping in mind how I would apply automation and machine learning to almost everything all the time, and refining my intended approach for a greater number of decades the earlier I had the idea.
If you just look in terms of aggregate market cap, defense companies are some of the larger companies in the world - i.e., Lockheed Martin is valued over $100B. That's a good sign that it's possible to build a big company in the space, which is all you need.
I agree that superiority is one of the best deterrents.
I assume that's how Anduril is going to end up.
I wonder how many YC startups joined due to a past RFS and went on to be successful.
My impression is that YC emphasizes the quality of the startup founders over the quality of the startup idea, so I find it interesting that this RFS tradition persists.
AI is a marketing catch-all that encompasses technologies of a certain level of “how did they do that” automation that are generally understood to leverage machine learning models under the hood (but not always).
LLMs are one class of ML models that operate in a text-in-text-out fashion.
“Models” are more of a statistical/mathematical term that generally mean “anything that can make a prediction” - it’s broader than just ML (eg climate models that are first-principles-based, not learned from data).
From what I have been reading from those who run top-tier research labs in the field most agree that we are really far away. Why would people casually quote 30y away? https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/02/robotics-qa-with-metas-dhr...
It is because core issues remain unsolved, has nothing to do with some old engineering process that can be disrupted and more so with the fact that science isn't there yet. Most of the GPT wrappers that are used as reasoning still sit on top of classical low-level control. Personally, as someone who works in AI specifically around robotics I believe there is headway to make here.
It's kind of laughable how YC is now requesting for startups in these lines when 10 years back, they rejected us (DefTech) on exactly the above premise. While we didn't manage a multibagger exit, we did manage a non-acquihire exit, which is more than what most YC companies can manage. The right time to invest in these problems was 10 years ago, when all the low-hanging fruit still existed.
It's only "unwarranted" if you're willing to be blind to the entire history of crypto.
> The crypto economy advances year after year,
Yes, the speculation and scams in crypto grow year after year.
> but you would never know it perusing HN.
People don't only peruse HN. We've yet to see that amazing growing economy grow beyond speculative trading and scams [1]
[1] Yes, there's a small part of crypto that helps people send money to sanctioned countries
As a concrete example, if someone posts an article about Merkle tree, it would get maybe 10-50 votes and 5 comments, and probably not much hate if any. Yet (according to wikipedia, I'm not into cryptocurrencies) it's a part of the underlying technology of "the Bitcoin and Ethereum peer-to-peer networks"
On the other hand, this is listed below “cure for cancer”, so maybe it’s an ambitious one…
STABLECOIN FINANCE
- Brad Flora
Stablecoins are digital currencies that peg their value to some external reference. This is typically the U.S. dollar, but it can be other fiat currencies, assets, or even other digital currencies. Their transactions are recorded on a digital ledger, usually a blockchain. This means they can be traded at any time of day between any two wallets on the same network, transactions settle in seconds, and fees are a fraction of what you see in traditional finance.
There’s been much debate about the utility of blockchain technology, but it seems clear that stablecoins will be a big part of the future of money. We know this because YC companies have been effectively incorporating stablecoins into their operations for years now – for cross-border payments, to reduce transaction fees and fraud, to help users protect savings from hyperinflation. This utility is so straightforward it seems inevitable traditional finance will follow suit.
In fact we’re seeing signs of this. PayPal recently issued its own stablecoin. Major banks have started offering custody services and making noise about issuing their own.
It all looks a bit like digital music’s transition from the realm of outlaw file sharing in the early 2000s to becoming the norm as players like Apple entered the market. Importantly, those major players were all outmatched in the end by Spotify, a startup founded during that same transition moment.
$136b worth of stablecoins have been issued to date but the opportunity seems much more immense still. Only about seven million people have transacted with stablecoins to date, while more than half a billion live in countries with 30%+ inflation. U.S. banks hold $17T in customer deposits which are all up for grabs as well. And yet the major stablecoin issuers can be counted on one hand and the major liquidity providers with just a few fingers.
We would like to fund great teams building B2B and consumer products on top of stablecoins, tools and platforms that enable stablecoin finance and more stablecoin protocols themselves.
I mean, it's sandwiched in-between such moonshots as "A.I. TO BUILD ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE" and "A WAY TO END CANCER". YCombinator wants money, and stablecoins are a good way to make it if you're crafty and quick on the uptake.
If anything this is wholly unsurprising given YC's opportunistic attitude and fits in well alongside their other pipe-dream investments.
> I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (p. 19)
> “All of modern high tech has the US Department of Defense to thank at its core, because this is where the money came from to be able to develop a lot of what is driving the technology that we’re using today,” said Leslie Berlin, historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University. https://archive.ph/PY5sT
I do believe the majority of humans involved with massacres are not doing so by choice.
As a quick example, it seems to me that an AI may not need the concept of a universal, in the philosophical sense, because it is capable of handling a near-infinite number of particulars.
2. Applying Machine Learning To Robotics
3. Using Machine Learning To Simulate The Physical World
4. New Defense Technology
5. Bring Manufacturing Back To America
6. New Space Companies
7. Climate Tech
8. Commercial Open Source Companies
9. Spatial Computing
10. New Enterprise Resource Planning Software
11. Developer Tools Inspired By Existing Internal Tools
12. Explainable A.I.
13. L.L.Ms For Manual Back Office Processes In Legacy Enterprises
14. A.I. To Build Enterprise Software
15. Stablecoin Finance
16. A Way To End Cancer
17. Foundation Models For Biological Systems
18. The Managed Service Organization Model For Healthcare
19. Eliminating Middlemen In Healthcare
20. Better Enterprise Glue
21. Small Fine Tuned Models As An Alternative To Giant Generic Ones"
If I may suggest one:
22. Help The Growing Number Of Homeless People In Our Country
Hmmm...solving glue code, the "dark matter of [enterprise] software". Maybe I should apply? ;-)
https://blog.metaobject.com/2021/06/glue-dark-matter-of-soft...
Hmm Tesla is using end to end GPT-style model for FSD V12. It actually works surprisingly well.
For actual robotics, Electric Sheep is doing something similar for their lawnmower [1]. However, I am a lot more skeptical about that than Tesla's FSD.
I thought I was just being overly picky but this request shows that there are lots of exciting ideas out there.
Why do I see such a disconnect?
Lots of smart people are yearning for opportunities to tackle more ambitious problems, but many I speak to, mention that they don't believe capital is available for high risk companies. Contrary, like we see here, I hear investors yearn for more ambitious startups.
My take is that there's a mechanism missing somewhere between these groups. You don't just bootstrap and MVP a fusion reactor, to raise capital, you don't even go about doing meaningful due diligence beforehand, as these paradigm shifting technologies comes with a kind of event horizon, where projections become as meaningless as asking Edison for the ROI on utility electricity, prior to inventing the lightbulb.
I don't want to plug anything from our gracious host, Y-combinator, but we have started Unbelievable Labs, to make headway on exactly this Catch-22 problem.
My "RFS" includes: Electron-beam drilling, Nuclear Isomeric Energy Systems, Industrial-scale nuclear transmutation, Systems Biology for nano-scale structural assembly of macroscopic structures, Telekinetic manipulation (EEG+actuators), Electro-Hydrodynamic Air-Space Drive and similar "unbelievable" concepts.
We have concluded that funding for these concepts requires at least proof of a new technological principle, and we are scraping together a pool of capital from dreamy angels, as well as a cadre of possible scientists and entrepreneurs, and then instead of waiting for "somebody" to form a startup, and hope they will allow us to invest in them, we are funding the pre-seed, setting the team and getting them started. If we can convince larger corporations and nations to fund this as a kind of "Bell Labs" for the post-monopolistic world, we would have succeeded in our dreams. I don't think anything less can generate the kind of progress requested here.
Let's hope YC and others can accomplish this pivot from easy-apps to hard-progress soon.
What really unlocked ML was when you didn't need to have a deep academic background in ML to be able to use it. Now that the primitives exist, every software engineer can build a compelling ML app.
I'm not sure if robotics is there yet, but if not it probably will be.
- antithesis - topless computing - programmable company
I was surprised to see ERP as a real option - interesting
Is something I'm working on right now - it's all Open Source but I'm looking at what could make it Commercial Open Source or what additional offerings would make sense to businesses
Ahh.. haha. Yes it was certainly the innovation and industrialism of the UK that did it, not the inevitable result of centuries of imperialism, conquest and subjugation.
alternatively find me on the founder matching platform: https://www.startupschool.org/cofounder-matching/candidate/t...
for reference these are the ideas: 1/ New enterprise resource planning software (ERPs) 2/ AI to build enterprise software 3/ Better enterprise glue 4/ LLMs for manual back office processes in legacy enterprises
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ameelio
https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/hy70st/i_am_zo_orchin...
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/01/1146370950/prison-phone-call-...
> When the law goes into effect next month, Massachusetts will join Connecticut, California, Minnesota and Colorado in eliminating prisoner phone call fees.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38454743 (citations)
Commissary Club (formerly 70 Million Jobs) tried on the post incarceration jobs topic, but did not obtain traction (casualty of the pandemic).
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/commissary-club
(some solutions simply cannot succeed when profit is a requirement; they require systems you throw money in and outcomes come out instead of profit)
https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey/status/1530604281732116481?...
You can't make prisoner's lives better / post prison lives better IF the voters and politicians don't wish to / pay you to do so...
One idea is getting rid of backroom office workers, the other is to replace developers. Plenty of underlying sadism here.
Who will peruse Hacker News if no one is a software engineer?
What they’re proposing here seems so doable. Certainly not EASY, but POSSIBLE. Companies tackling this problem could legitimately change the world.
Announcement post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39369766
The same will certainly apply to the intra-head security you want against fake content and propaganda.
That one sounds more like a salesperson + consultant rather than a software startup.
Unless YC is looking for a startup that lobbies against for-profit health insurance this is more like "eliminating middlemen and replacing them with our own in healthcare"
"Uber for healthcare" now pivoting to "OpenAI for healthcare"
Defense startups should not be normalized. If you are going to forcibly normalize it then don't pick sides as that's not good for business.
The idea is to provide a square where users can discover ,share, collaborate discuss on various chatGPT prompts and their corresponding outputs .
Here's the pitch and some details, in case anyone else is interested in the idea:
> Supportal uses AI to generate internal tooling for startups that enables founders to scale customer-support without having to rely on engineering resources.
> Given some simple input context like tech-stack and a database schema, Supportal uses AI to auto-generate internal tools which allow customer-support to easily answer questions about and take action on customer-data without needing help from an engineer.
> Supportal offers founders a fully-featured self or cloud-hosted web UI.
Retool (https://retool.com), Zapier (https://zapier.com), Airtable (https://www.airtable.com), Superblocks (https://www.superblocks.com), and Google AppSheet (https://about.appsheet.com) would likely be primary competitors, although their products require heavy user interaction to build internal tools either through composition in a WYSIWYG editor, low/no-code solutions, or integrations expertise using a full programming language.
Although I'm no longer there, we actually evaluated and/or used all of these tools at Pulley, so I've had first-hand experience with their friction and where the gaps exist that Supportal would fill.
These tools are also all targeted at integrations-experts who have the technical knowledge to write code and spend time building the tool they want.
Supportal aims to generate the tooling you need intelligently via AI introspection and get you up and running with useful command and query tools to help your customer-support team take action and gain insights without help from engineering right out of the box.
My most recent experience comes building internal tools for Pulley; I built the initial version of the internal tools in ~3 weeks and added features to it within Pulley over ~2 years. Roughly ~2-3 months of full-time work spread over that time period.
Features were added as we identified gaps in our support agents ability to answer questions and take action, which often required dedicated engineering resources to help with, leading to a productivity loss for both groups.
That said, I haven't actually built out anything that would _generate_ tools like this yet, but I've done enough adjacent work in the codegen/AI space in the last couple years that I feel confident I could put the pieces together.
Did the YC folks have a falling out with OpenAI and disagree that AGI is here? Or maybe the opposite - they’re letting OpenAI take the industry uncontested… What’s the hacker news policy on casually floating (ill-informed) accusations of cartel activities? ;)
PS big laughs from me on seeing “cure cancer” halfway down a list of otherwise fairly capitalist short-term priorities. I’m sure they made that decision for a reason but I think the end result is a Freudian slip on behalf of our entire culture
- Assessing applications for a mortgage or a business loan
Really? Are we really giving these things as prime examples of what LLMs can automate.
I do not want my mortgage application or business loan rejected because some un-auditable, non-deterministic, inference decided so.
The tech upper classes really are sheltered from the real impact on real people that trusting IT can have.
There's countless scandals of faulty algorithms (which are tractable) causing people real pain, often with suicides resulting.
Using a black-box inference machine instead is MUCH worse.
Of course, to put this solely on Tesla isn't completely fair. A lot of the problems with how Tesla does business are symptoms of the larger crisis in how businesses are run here, but I think that trying to bring manufacturing back without solving the corporate governance problems that make doing it well infeasible (and indeed caused a lot of the offshoring in the first place) is likely a fool's errand. Most businesses face little discipline on quality in the form of either regulation or competition (which tends to be eaten by mergers even when it arises), and intense pressure from investors to cut corners at every turn
Interesting to see that overall the VC ghouls seem a bit out of ideas on how to squeeze more cents out of a dollar.
The one thing on that list that remotely makes any sense is leveraging LLM tech to automate legacy manual processes. Scalability on that though, whew.
Because of that stake, they want an "exit" in some form, and the drive to that exit will pave the road to user-hostile software and make it the path of least resistance.
They became traditional corporate long ago. Shows in their recent portfolio.
YC is seeking startups for
"NEW WAR TECHNOLOGY" Killing is our business. and business is good.
Yes, what we need are startups focused on killing people in ever more efficient ways, with the least amount of threat to our own people.
Hopefully, we can invent a even more efficient way of genocide by inventing something much stronger than a hydrogen bomb, but with less radiation. Friendly and looks good on TV.
The future so bright. I gotta wear shades.
Many years ago, when the state was more honest the US had a "Department of War".
Which it ought to have kept given that few wars ( or "military conflicts") that the US engages in is about Defense of our home country. Our patch of dirt. Easy to see since they usually take place on a different continent.
In 1984 they call it "Department of Peace".
--------------
>NEW DEFENSE TECHNOLOGY - Jared Friedman and Gustaf Alströmer
The US is now engaged in large-scale conflicts in several regions that threaten to change our world. While the US has historically led the world in defense technology, the defense contractors it depends on have grown slow and inefficient, bloated by decades of cost-plus contracts.
SpaceX showed the world that a private space company could be vastly more effective than the publicly-funded United Launch Alliance. New companies that sell to the DoD like Palantir and Anduril are showing that the same thing is true for defense tech.
Silicon Valley was born in the early 20th century as an R&D area for the US military. Early Silicon Valley companies were largely funded by the DoD and played a key role in WWII by building military radar, code-breaking equipment, and components for the atomic bomb.
This decade is the time to return Silicon Valley to these roots.
--
In this list without a single request for managing corruption in .gov, the senate, how we address world situations which difficulties are FN COMPOUNDED by the very tools youre asking for -- AND the fact that you claim Alignment is an important feature...
Palantir muc, inqtel much, every fn defense thing
Your list is literally CONfinment.
2. AI for defense == We can profit here.
5. Are you fn daft: East India Company, do you speak it? Show me how many hands you have. "The UK became the world's richest country in the 19th century by being the workshop of the world. Death, murder conquer brought this, not some hipster Build a Startup They Said.. meme claim"
10. Enterspiese resource mgmt ; so HR on AI jax? FUCK that.
15. DC much?
19. Ive built more hospitals than you can shake a stick at. This is a nuanced comment:
Eliminating the middleman in healthcare, your startup list will ONLY be medical records "disruptors" against EPIC and such and a boon to insurance - you cant kill the Pharma PornStars slinging pills. If you want to eliminate 'middlemen' - KILL PHARMA ADVERTISING AND PHARMA PILL PUSHING. (Source, I have designed built, implemented, commissioned and GO-LIVE more hospitals than you have been admitted to in your life. (this is a political issue, not a tech/pharma issue, per se -- the middlemen are the political policy makers and this is just a money hole)
Your RFS is written by grifter VCs who have no soul.
Prove me wrong.
I want technological improvement, but the nuanced self-serving focus of this RFS makes me want to puke (its not the what, its the how, and the complete abrogation of any sense of historic context on all the technological platforms that brought us here, and the lack of awareness by these requests...
These requests are NOT to inspire you - they are to feed their input....
When we heard AI was dangerous... think of a single one of the RFSs that do not include @sama.
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@Dang, and @SAMA
--
In this list without a single request for managing corruption in .gov, the senate, how we address world situations which difficulties are FN COMPOUNDED by the very tools youre asking for.
---
Where EXACTLY do YOU think we should be plannig for and that includes
SERIOUSLY
What are HN's motives.
------
Seriously
Bring manufacturing back to America
New space companies
Careful not shooting yourself in the foot there …
How about: do you have any path to profitability, or you're still on the path to lose hundreds of millions of dollars per year or get sold to the highest bidder?
That explains the admin on this forum throwing a "you're a nationalist!" at me recently, turns out I was ahead of the game on that (only that I was doing it for the wrong geo-political bloc)
> NEW DEFENSE TECHNOLOGY
Ooo, that certainly explains lots and lots of stuff, including the "warnings" whenever the comments don't support the correct geo-political bloc mentioned above.
All in all very interesting, turns out that YC and the money behind it has smelt where things are going and are following the likes of Eric Schmidt. Let's see what the time will tell.