
Companies from the YC Winter 2018 Batch - dsr12
http://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-12-companies-from-the-winter-2018-batch/
======
floatrock
YC releases a Requests for Startups list that's part VC zeitgeist, part
buzzword bingo, but mostly an interesting summary where they think interesting
things are: [https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs](https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs)

Was curious how these companies stack up against that list:

    
    
      1. *Energy: none*
      
      2. AI:
      - Cognition IP
      
      3. *Robotics: none*
      
      4. Biotech:
      - Nutrigene ? (stretch)
      
      5. Healthcare:
      - Medumo
      - Nutrigene ? ("these statements have not been approved by the fda")
      
      6. *Pharmaceuticals: none*
      
      7. Education:
      - Juni Learning
      
      8. Human Augmentation
      - Nutrigene
      
      9. *VR and AR: none*
      
      10. Transportation and Housing
      - Statecraft
      
      11. *One Million Jobs: none*
      
      12. Programming Tools:
      - Buglife
      - Storyline
      
      13. *Hollywood 2.0: none*
      
      14. Diversity:
      - tEQuitable ?
      
      15: Enterprise Software
      - Slite?
      - Storyline?
      - Substack
      - tEQuitable?
      
      16. *Financial Services: none*
      
      17. *Computer Security: none*
      
      18. *Global Health: none*
      
      19. Underserved Communities
      - Statecraft
      
      20. *Food and Farming: none*
      
      21. *Mass Media: none*
      
      22. *Improving Democracy: none*
      
      23: Future of Work
      - Slite?
      - tEQuitable?
      - The Lobby (and probably not in the good way)
      
      25: *Water: none*
      
      26: Other:
      - Sheerly Genius ?
    

I don't really know anything about these companies beyond the 1-paragraph
summaries from the article, and yes, you may arrange your Startup
Superheroes(TM) trading cards into slightly different piles, but the point of
this is that (of the announced companies), it's curious to see where the gaps
in the debutants are.

~~~
dcole2929
Wanting companies that work on these problems is great. But finding ones with
unique and interesting value propositions is probably incredibly hard. There
is a reason that the Hollywood model for instance, has managed to last 100
years. Yeah there's an absolute shit ton of protectionism going on but also no
one has come up with anything better yet, and not for lack of trying. The same
is true of a lot of these categories. The issues they have are hard, and
expensive. I'd be interested to see the list of companies YC rejects.

~~~
floatrock
> But finding ones with unique and interesting value propositions is probably
> incredibly hard.

Exactly why the gaps are interesting.

Also: they need to fit the VC timeline and specific VCs' returns model (there
are other business models outside of taking SV VC money)

------
koolba
> The Lobby lets candidates buy affordable 1-on-1 calls with company insiders
> to help them land top finance jobs without needing an inside connection.

This one made me smile. It’s only a matter of time until the _employees_ of
these companies directly monetize their connections. It happens indirectly
already through hiring bonuses and quid pro quos though the latter is on a
much longer timescale.

There’s also the possibility of only losers trying to monetize their
connections, thus watering down the overall value.

I’m not sure if the idea will generally pan out as employment agreements may
bar this type of practice but it’s either genius or terrible. Best of luck!

~~~
dchhugani
hey koolba! glad it made you smile :). Definitely issues to consider as we
scale up, right now it seems to be adding a lot of value to people who are a)
trying to figure out if this career path is for them but have no way of
understanding what life is actually like until they speak to someone or b)
getting the inside tips & tricks that can help you get hired but that you
won't access without a close friend or elite school connection.

~~~
petra
So basically people who don't know how to search or use forums?

------
Keats
> Slite is building the first notes app designed for teams.

I don't mind marketing/bragging but that sounds silly. The first, really?

~~~
dvt
I wonder how Slite is different than Quip. Hopefully it's at least cheaper.

~~~
meagher
Or Input ([https://input.com](https://input.com)) - which looks very similar

------
baron816
> Slite is building the first notes app designed for teams. It’s like Evernote
> + Slack

Actually, I believe Evernote Business deserves that title:
[https://evernote.com/business](https://evernote.com/business)

~~~
spIrr
My team uses Evernote Premium, which shares collaboration features with
Business, I believe, and it feels like any sort of collaboration is really an
afterthought, for example:

* the complete note gets locked when someone simply places a cursor anywhere in the note, just like in the days of carbon/master copies and check-in/check-outs.

* work chat is meaningless, I have hardly seen anyone use it beyond the automatically-generated messaged when you share a note

* notes shared with you are ONLY accessible from the work chat, there is no menu item to access a list of notes that have been shared with me.

------
swedish_mafia
Question for the YC folks: these companies seem reasonably far along. One of
them has 300 users already. So would a Dropbox be accepted into YC today?
(IIRC dropbox had a barely working prototype and no customers)

~~~
capocannoniere
Yes, these companies seem far along. But do keep in mind that this is somewhat
of a biased sample -- the dozen or so companies that "launch" on HN months
before demo day are likely to be the companies that are the most far along.

There are ~100 other companies in the current batch [1] that haven't launched.
I imagine many of those companies are not nearly as far along as the ones
mentioned in this article, and some are still pivoting / navigating the idea
maze.

That said, it does seem like in the most recent batches, YC companies get to
demo day with significantly more traction than the early YC companies. I
wonder to what extent that's because YC's reputation has gotten better over
time (thus self selecting for startups with traction) or because it's gotten
easier/cheaper/faster for startups to build a product and gain traction.

[1] I don't know the exact number of companies in the current batch. Last
batch had 124 companies so using that as a proxy
[http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-
summer-2017-stats/](http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-summer-2017-stats/)

------
orb_yt
I'd love to hear some discussion on the following:

I really like developer focused companies like Buglife. However, what path
could Buglife take to reach a $1B dollar company?

The post notes that they are currently in 300 apps. I'd assume the majority of
these 300 are on a free plan. Let's assume that they hit a growth spurt and
end up in 10,000 apps. Let's also assume that _every_ one of those customers
is paying for their Premium plan. That works out to a little over $2 million a
month in revenue.

Not only that, but there are already very established companies in this space
(Fabric/Crashlytics, Firebase, Sentry, etc.). It's also fairly trivial to
switch to another provider.

How do companies like this propose they hit that $1B mark?

~~~
elihu
1) Does YCombinator only invest in companies with a plan to become $1B?

2) What you're doing right now isn't necessarily the thing you end up doing in
the long term. Sometimes it makes sense to create a simple product with a
smallish market that people use now, and adapt over time to address or create
a larger market. This other discussion today is relevant:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16334035](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16334035)

~~~
orb_yt
I think it's a pretty well known fact that YC tends to invest in companies
that have the opportunity to be billion dollar ventures.

> What you're doing right now isn't necessarily the thing you end up doing in
> the long term.

What sort of opportunities do you think a company like Buglife could focus on?

~~~
elihu
> I think it's a pretty well known fact that YC tends to invest in companies
> that have the opportunity to be billion dollar ventures.

"Tends to" isn't the same as "always". I expect they'd rather invest in
unicorns, but maybe they're willing to invest in a few more modest endeavors
for various reasons.

> What sort of opportunities do you think a company like Buglife could focus
> on?

Beats me. I wouldn't have guessed that Amazon was going to become a cloud
provider back when they were just an e-commerce site. I think Paul Graham has
said that sometimes YCombinator will accept founders who have an uninteresting
idea if they seem like the sort of people who are capable of generating new
ideas and changing course as the situations demand.

------
jacquesm
Interesting to see how a new YC kind of startup is the company serving the
rest of the YC startups.

Buglife, tEQuitable, Slite and Cognition IP all fit that bill.

It takes making shovels to sell to the gold rush seekers to a whole new level.

~~~
tiffani
Not really new. I think of Stripe and Docker as examples.

~~~
Impossible
Heroku and Parse were big examples of this before they got acquired.

------
giarc
Storyline looks cool. Currently watching the tutorial.

Reminds me of the recent beta of Twilio Studio. Both should help when you want
to quickly develop some tools.

------
didgeoridoo
Cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:cJrWf1e...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:cJrWf1elWqQJ:blog.ycombinator.com/meet-12-companies-
from-the-winter-2018-batch/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

------
andrewfong
How does Cognition get investment as a law firm? My understanding was that
firms can't receive investment from or share profits with non-lawyers.

Or are they doing what Atrium is doing and really running two entities, a tech
company and a law firm?

~~~
blee37
Bryant here from Cognition. We're running two entities, a tech company and law
firm, and the tech company received investment from YC.

------
iandanforth
I want Statecraft to win. IMO theirs are the most important problems of this
list.

------
LisaDziuba
Happy to see Ukrainian companies there :)

