

Ask YC: Are there any promising non-web startups? - mikelikespie

I'm graduating soon and the job search has began.  Unfortunately, it seems like there's not a whole lot of opportunities for somebody like me in companies that aren't huge corporations.  I <i>can</i> do javascript, and web applications.  I find doing C, C++, and python much more fun, especially when dealing with concurrency, optimization, 2D/3D graphics, image manipulation, etc.<p>So I guess my question is:  Is there a place in the start-up world for programmers like myself? or should I just suck it up and sell myself to a large corporation or spend my time concentrating on becoming proficient at web stuff?
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ivankirigin
Some smart robotics startups:

MekaRobotics (by Aaron Edsinger, MIT star behind Domo) <http://mekabot.com/>
<http://people.csail.mit.edu/edsinger/domo.htm>

Willow Garage (former early Google employee founder)
<http://www.willowgarage.com/>

AnyBots (Trevor of YC's company) <http://anybots.com/>

Q Robotics (early stars from iRobot that liked startups so much, they needed
to leave and start another once iRobot went public) <http://qrobotics.com/>

You don't really need to know anything about robots to work on them. The best
groups are made up of specialists that understand a bit of everything, but are
essentially software|hardware|electrical|systems engineers at their core.

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bayareaguy
One thing you could do is follow the VC money. Do some VC research. Look for
VCs that invest in whatever non-web stuff you think makes sense (you must have
some ideas there). Then look into what startups they've funded and consider
contacting them or their recruiters.

If you're more ambitious you could research the kinds of problems you think
those startups will have and look for an application you can build that they
might need but isn't something they would want to develop themselves.

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emmett
The web is just the most convenient place to deliver software.

Justin.tv has a huge* amount of highly concurrent, high performance Python
code that delivers our video. That video is still delivered via the web,
though.

Speaking of which, we're hiring...

* It's not actually that many lines of code, but it's comparable to our web codebase.

~~~
justin
Thanks for pointing that out, Emmett, we are indeed hiring! Both our chat
server and Video cluster are written in Python's Twisted framework. We're
always looking for smart hackers who want to help us make our systems better.
Everyone at JTV is tossed in the deep end (Bill, who found us through news.yc,
learned Twisted, wrote and deployed our chat server in his first two weeks
here). Find out more here: <http://blog.justin.tv/2007/07/justintv-is-
hiring.html>

Or email justin at justin.tv

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manvsmachine
I would think that there are a decent number of non-web tech startups, but not
as many straight-up software startups. Oftentimes, small non-web software
companies will get acquired as soon as they come out with something useful,
and their ideas are integrated into the larger companies' products. My
suggestion would be to do the big company thing for a few years, and then once
you have the experience/contacts, you'll be in more of a position to find a
fledgling startup or form your own.

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cperciva
Not all _internet_ startups are _web_ startups. In my case, I'm working on
online backup, and every single line of code I've written for it has been in
C.

I'm not going to suggest that you should get into the same field and start
competing with me, but there are many options under the umbrella of
"infrastructure services" which all require highly efficient coding.

~~~
mrtron
Certainly. Although most internet startups will include a strong web presence,
that is often a small part of the equation. I got pretty heavily flamed for
suggesting to not write your own framework, but I think the whole point was
different business genres. For an internet startup, you probably don't want to
write your own framework. For a web based startup, where that is the core of
your product, you might have a huge competitive advantage writing your own.

Best of luck!

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neilc
There is _lots_ of promising non-web startups -- the fact that this question
even needs to be asked is evidence of how insular the YC news community can be
at times.

The field I know best is database systems -- there are a number of interesting
startups in this area. There's an emerging market for "complex event
processing" (essentially database systems that operate on live streams of data
as well as static historical data), which has applications to algorithmic
trading, network monitoring, real-time business intelligence, military
applications, etc. I work for one startup in this field
(<http://www.truviso.com> \-- we're hiring!), but there are several others
(Corel8, StreamBase, Aleri, etc.)

There's also data warehousing, in which there are a lot of startups
challenging the existing players: GreenPlum, ParAccel, Vertica, DATAllegro, C2
Appliance, etc.

More broadly, I think non-web startups are typically trying to solve harder
and more interesting problems than the web guys. The time-to-market is often
longer than with a typical consumer-oriented web startup, and if you're trying
to sell to enterprises, that brings a very different set of sales challenges
than selling ads on a website, for example. That often means you need a
founding team with a deep technical background, and you've often got to take
the traditional VC route (rather than bootstrapping). So I can understand why
it's not a good fit for the traditional YC model. Still, there are a ton of
startups out there, and many (most?) of them aren't developing web apps.

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igexome
I'm in the same situation - but its more of a psychological hurdle to apply to
places that want X years of experience, when all I have under my belt as a
soon-to-be new college grad is summer internship experience. Just be vigilant
on craigslist and sites like SimplyHired and Indeed. There are tons of
opportunities available and your net may simply have to be cast wider.

Oh, also - check out <http://www.ventureloop.com> for culling startups. I've
found that these small companies have a ridiculously fast callback rate.

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iamelgringo
If you're thinking about C code, you're probably looking at drivers or unix
programming. I'm sure there's database companies that are looking for decent C
or C++ programmers. You'd be programming for concurrency and optimization
there. Granted, databases aren't really a sexy field, but... where there's
muck there's brass as they say.

From what I understand, a lot of the C++ programming is windows stuff. But a
lot of the Windows programming at small companies is going over to C# stuff.
But, there are some ISV's around that are probably looking for programmers.
Joel Spolsky is always hiring. I don't know how much concurrency work you'll
be doing at an ISV, though.

As far as 2D/3D graphics are concerned, there's always work for programmers in
the special FX industry. Those tend to be smaller companies, and they tend to
do more C++, C, and python stuff working with graphics. You don't have the
upside potential that you do with startups, though. If you're interested, by a
copy of CineFX at Borders, go through an look up the company names and see if
they're hiring programmers. Or, Goiogle companies like Pixar, Dreamworks, ILM,
Tippet studios, Blue Sky and see if they're hiring programmers.

The VFX world does a lot of C++, Python and works a lot with distribued
computing, render farms, graphics, optimization, image manipulation, etc... It
might be your cup of tea.

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henning
No. The only startups that exist are JavaScript hacks that take up 90 MB of
RAM.

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hhm
Didn't you think in applying for research in places like
<http://www.merl.com/>, <http://groups.csail.mit.edu/vision/>, or in companies
such as <http://www.gesturetekhealth.com/>, <http://www.tandentvision.com/>,
etc? There is lot of interesting research in computer vision in usa, both in
large and in small companies and companies and laboratories if you are
interested in that. Maybe some of these companies are small enough to
categorize as "startups", I don't know. You could check the always growing
robotic field too.

This site could be useful for you, too:
<http://www.cs.ubc.ca/spider/lowe/vision.html>

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falsestprophet
There are a lot of cool computationally intensive problems in drug
design/discovery and trading/investing. There is also the possibility of a
substantial upside in both fields.

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DaniFong
We're starting a startup in computer vision. We're deploying across the web,
but that's just because it's the cheapest distribution mechanism.

You describe interests that might imply you'd enjoy game development. Have you
thought about giving that a go?

~~~
asmosoinio
Computer vision, neat. You guys need a good developer? If so, you can find my
email in my profile.

~~~
DaniFong
I'm sorry to say, but we're not hiring at the moment. We try to bring people
on only when they can do something that we can't.

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tx
<http://www.neuric.com>

These guys are in Austin and they're building some cool AI technology. I have
seen the demo and it was very, very impressive (their AI has emotions, so it
can be pissed at you, etc). I suppose I cannot disclose much more, even though
I do not work for them, but they do not use JavaScript for that.

BTW: There are other startup hubs, besides SV, in US. Austin is one of them,
and I would say that most companies here do not do dot-coms, often it's
hardware+software combos. Recently I bumped into another local startup that
does some cool stuff with visualization - they've been hiring some C/Linux
hackers (don't recall their name).

I suggest you burn a custom RSS feed for jobs@craigslist with certain
keywords, like "startup", "software", etc.

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jdvolz
Coming from the consulting angle, it is much easier to get work doing web
related stuff, and that work pays better I am finding. Even the desktop stuff
I am doing either has a web component, communicates with the web or a website
in some way or has a version that is a website. Learn your Javascript and have
a decent working knowledge of HTML and CSS.

I do think that you should know probably PHP (for consulting most web projects
are in this or are extensions of projects written in it) and one of either
Ruby or Python.

There are opportunities out there, just not nearly as many. Also keep in mind
as a recent graduate you are competing with all the people who never made the
web transition because they already had 3-5 years experience on the desktop
that now have 10-12 years experience there.

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thorax
You might check out cilk: <http://www.cilk.com>

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utnick
there are tons of startup video game companies that you would probably be
interested in

~~~
mikelikespie
Maybe I'm not good at finding startups.

~~~
hhm
If you are interested in game development, go to the GDC in February this
year: <http://www.gdconf.com/> There'll be job boots and all that, and also
you can get to know people who's doing game startups at the event place
itself. If you find the expo to be too expensive, you can volunteer for
helping in some simple tasks, and in such case you get a full access to all
the event (<http://www.gdconf.com/volunteers/caregistration.php>).

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menloparkbum
video games, hedge funds

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wmorein
Xobni.

