
Startups from Y Combinator’s S19 Demo Day 2 - denisvlr
https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/20/here-are-the-82-startups-that-launched-on-day-2-of-ycs-s19-demo-days/
======
m0zg
What always strikes me about these lists is that if I had these ideas (and I
often do), I'd discard them out of hand as non-viable. Yet people behind these
startups don't mind staking years of their life on what is essentially a
lottery with rather poor odds, and find passion in doing things which, at
best, would make me yawn. Maybe I'm just old, I don't know.

~~~
pier25
I kinda agree. I just don't see the value in 90% of those ideas even if they
are well executed. Maybe I'm getting old too but it seems most of these
propositions are based on the premise of making something attractive and
getting funding from VCs wanting to diversify their investments and play the
lottery.

The lowest hanging fruit in tech has already been taken years ago and the
human needs haven't changed that much. We need to communicate, we need to
listen to music, we need to move around, etc.

~~~
fra
I vehemently disagree with you. There are million dollar checks laying on the
pavement, you just have to spend a bit of time outside of software engineering
to see it. So much time is waiting executing rote processes by hand across
industries, and billions of dollars are spent with the likes of Accenture to
build custom applications.

~~~
mdorazio
That's rarely because of a lack of technology, though. Entrenched business
processes, human bias, "old boy networks", fear of losing jobs, etc. are far
bigger factors in things outside of SV often sucking. You can build the
perfect solution for a problem at an amazing price and Accenture would still
win because the people making the decisions want Accenture, not the actual
best solution.

------
postscapes1
After a quick browse through lists on both days:

\- Where have all the IoT companies gone?

\- Cool seeing machine learning being used inside applications (The audio
analyzer to separate and boost voices for conference calls comes to mind)

\- Surprised at how many "meh" reactions I had. Too many grocery/fashion and
not enough bio/energy game changers and I left feeling mostly uninspired by
overall visions.

More power to everyone hustling out there though.

~~~
Hermitian909
> \- Where have all the IoT companies gone?

Was talking to some VC folks the other day and asked this same question. The
answer I got was under performance, not enough unicorns per investment and the
number of companies even hitting profitability was much lower than other
sections of their portfolio.

------
toxicFork
I am currently participating in another accelerator in London called Antler;
and I have been exposed to ideas from 70 entrepreneurs. We are presenting to
investors this week.

Also I am in YC Startup School too, which allows you to see what's coming up
in the world, and that's awesome too.

It's amazing to see that a significant percentage (~30%) of ideas they have
come up with have been also thought of by others e.g. from the YC list
independently to an uncanny extent.

Honestly it should not have caught me by surprise but it did.

~~~
atlasunshrugged
I recently heard about Antler, how is the programme?

~~~
toxicFork
It has been very helpful for me. I am a tech guy and they have assisted in
various ways for me to find a cofounder, for example with opportunities to
work on mock business cases with the other people in the program, lots of time
to chat and allowed us to take our time when to decide to partner up, most
people teamed up after 3-4 weeks.

Speaking about other people, as I mentioned it's about 72 of us, 40% ish with
tech background, the rest with business and/or industry experience.

They provided us with advice on what to do first to validate the idea, get
traction with first customers, and many opportunities to do mock investment
pitches where we would get comments from a committee with what we need to
improve or what investors would ask.

Additionally there were some courses about different aspects of startups, from
design thinking to unit economics, sort of like a mini mba.

So far it has been very valuable for me.

However, on the criticism side, it's sort of early days for them so they could
not give too much advice for example on how to tell if a team works or not,
with my first team that I had formed we spent 5 weeks (out of 10) spinning in
circles not being able to decide on any idea. We generated around 12 but
discarded them as soon as any friction came. So we had disbanded and stressed
out, then I met another person who had a firm idea what to do and had already
validated it, just needed a tech person, and this is going much better now.

~~~
puranjay
Slightly off-topic, but as a non-tech guy (unless you count making websites
with Bootstrap as 'tech') with significant experience in the
business/marketing side of things, would attending an accelerator with the
intention of finding a tech co-founder help? I can self-fund a product for a
few years at least so I would bring that into the equation as well.

~~~
toxicFork
Yes :)

60% of the program attendees are pretty much as you described, including my co
founder. They have found the tech partners here.

------
Balgair
In looking at all the bio-based companies they all seem ... mature. Like,
going on their pages and seeing the people there, well, there are not a lot of
'fresh' faces. Most of them are MDs/PhDs or have some years on them. I think
thats a great thing!

------
elmar
Fresh out of Y Combinator, Tandem lands millions from Andreessen Horowitz

[https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/20/tandem/](https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/20/tandem/)

"is raising a $7.5 million seed financing at a valuation north of $30 million"

"We’re told several top venture capital firms were vying for a stake in
Tandem. One firm even gifted the founders a tandem bike, sources tell
TechCrunch, resorting to amusing measures to sway the Tandem team. But it was
a16z — which has an established interest in the growing future of work sector,
evidenced by its recent investment in the popular email app Superhuman — that
ultimately won the coveted lead investor spot."

~~~
whoisjuan
I hope not to sound like a jerk or get downvoted for this, but what's the
point of quoting the article without adding at least an opinion or thought?

~~~
elmar
:) well I posted on a FYI - For Your Information only angle.

My thoughts: seed valuations for YC Demo Day are probably on a all time high,
VC's giving gifts to be able to get in rounds looks like something out of
Silicon Valley HBO, ok I remembered everything on SV HBO is based on real life
events.

~~~
whoisjuan
I think the most ridiculous thing is not even the gift, but the fact that it
is a Tandem bike (just because of the name).

What's the rationale there? "Ohh their name is Tandem. Let's buy them a Tandem
bike to convince them to accept our term sheet. It's our fiduciary
responsibility to do this stupid thing".

For me, that's just a red flag. How little can you add to a company besides
money, that you have to resort to this chaplinesque strategy?

~~~
WillPostForFood
Why not? Personal relationships are a part of why deals are made. Showing some
whimsy and personal attention isn't going to hurt, and costs what? ~500?

~~~
bch
Not _really_ your point, but if somebody gifted a $500 tandem/boat anchor for
a $30MM co, that might indeed be a red flag. A $500 tandem is probably a boat
anchor no matter what the circumstances are...

~~~
mathattack
This is the norm in business. It forces reciprocity. It’s why most sales orgs
spend so much on business entertainment.

~~~
bch
I (think) I know what you’re saying, what I’m saying is that if I said I was
interested in your billion dollar automobile startup, and bought you a car as
a gesture, you might be excited, until I handed you the keys to a used 1998
Hyundai Excel.

Unless I really am missing the point, because a $500 bicycle really is a
pretty cheap machine these days, let alone a $500 tandem.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Excel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Excel)

~~~
WillPostForFood
It's the thought that counts right? Tandem is the name, they are gifted a
tandem bike, which reinforces the symbolism of doing something together. I'd
hope it would be perceived either neutrally, or generate some very small
positive feelings, but not negatively.

~~~
bch
I appreciate all the positive readings.

Maybe it’s that I’m personally more focused on downsizing than accumulating :)

------
pgt
MyPetrolPump is genius. It's last-mile delivery for gas (or Uber for gas), but
solving a security and logistics problem for a high-value market. Only
qualified truck drivers can move trucks, and you pay them per hour. So now you
refuel the trucks behind closed doors while the truck is parked overnight and
you only have to secure access for the petrol driver.

~~~
sidcool
I feel there is also a room for mobile superchargers. They can come to your
house and fully charge your car in half an hour, rather than waiting for hours
on home voltage.

~~~
pgt
I considered this, but nothing beats hydrocarbon energy density. It seems more
practical to swap out pre-charged cells like some electric scooter companies
do, which would require an interchangeable format that might be obsoleted by
newer tech every 5 years.

Once we have supercapacitors and room temperature superconductors, a lot of
these problems go away, though.

Exciting times!

~~~
sidcool
Swapping would be faster. I recollect that Tesla had such a system. Not sure
where it went

~~~
fossuser
They did a demo for the Model S and there was an Israeli EV company that had a
similar model, but died.

There are a few problems with the swapping idea:

\- People like to have ownership over their batteries (and the battery
capacity)

\- Logistics around swapping availability and costs

But the biggest one is:

\- Charging continues to get faster and capacity continues to increase.

Whatever small amount of time is currently saved by swapping will be
irrelevant by the time anyone could overcome the current obstacles to get
something off the ground - it's a bad strategic bet.

------
elkynator
I can say that Tandem is the one which strikes me the most. I had a privilege
to test the product in early beta and you can see the benefit of such
solution. Basically Discord for work which I believe will be adopted soon by
many companies.

~~~
fnord123
>Basically Discord for work

This was very confusing for me since I use Discord only for chat for various
open source projects.

Tandem is voice and video chat - the part of Discord I never use.

~~~
creativityland
Interesting discussion here
[https://mobile.twitter.com/KateClarkTweets/status/1163918806...](https://mobile.twitter.com/KateClarkTweets/status/1163918806520979456)

~~~
antupis
I have worked remote last 5 years and there is no tool that has truly solved
Information asymmetry that remote workers meet every day. How usually
organizations solve this is overcommunication and keeping memos from
everything but that is a huge time sink and there are always those bad apples
that don't keep memos.

~~~
lukethomas
This is exactly what's happening. More meetings + synchronous chat/calling
apps won't solve this either.

~~~
antupis
yeah, there needs to be something more radical. I think at the moment fully
remote teams work better than semi-remote because fully remote teams most
communication happens through slack and emails so there is almost always a
paper trail.

~~~
kjsbfkjbf
My experience reflects yours.

Once you have a SINGLE full-time remote employee your team should operate as a
fully-remote team. That means online meetings, online communications,
documentation, etc.

------
chichikid
here are all S19 companies
[http://app.crunchdex.com/s19](http://app.crunchdex.com/s19)

------
cbanek
> TrustedFor: LinkedIn is just such an awful platform that there’s space for a
> startup to disrupt it by just remaking it. TrustedFor is building “LinkedIn
> 2.0,” a platform for professional profiles that is centered around
> recommendations from people that the users have actually worked alongside.
> The startup is leveraging the YC network pretty heavily to get associated
> companies on board.

Good luck. I'm happy to see someone trying to get into LinkedIn's business.
I've used LinkedIn close to when it started, but it is really getting on my
nerves.

If they succeed, that could be really interesting on how to compete with an
established company where the network effect is their real edge.

~~~
jammygit
LinkedIn is so spammy, I hate it. The recruiters don't even read your profile,
and you feel like a jungle explorer trying to find how to turn off all the
notifications

------
Tharkun
The Custom Movement sounded really interesting for a moment. I was already
having fantasies about getting a pair of sneakers with thin soles, wide toe
boxes, plenty of air holes and one the left shoe one size larger than the
right.

Alas. It's just about printing designs on sneakers.

------
mcthrow
I'm quite curious about Waves. There have been a number of unsuccessful
attempts (that I'm aware of) to make a dating site/app with kink matching, but
it's hard to keep the emphasis on sexual compatibility from completely
overwhelming the other aspects of dating.

Looking at their site, there doesn't appear to be any obvious secret sauce
(the app is not available where I am) except perhaps that the range of 'kinks'
they're catering to is limited to the mildest and most popular, so maybe
they're targeting a slightly more mainstream userbase?

~~~
Grustaf
What if it's not about "dating", but just casual sex, like Grindr?

------
lnsru
Working in the area makes this text on Tensil’s page me extremely curious:
“This gives you the performance of custom silicon at the cost of commodity
hardware. With Tensil, you can roll out your dream chip in weeks instead of
years, at prices measured in thousands instead of millions.” So they designed
some fuse programmable ASIC for machine learning? Setting the fuses makes this
ASIC “custom silicon”? ASIC for thousands? Sounds to good to be true.

~~~
323454
Tensil founder here. We're a little different from the other ASIC companies
because we specialize our chips to individual model architectures on demand.
Our value prop is that our chips are smaller and cheaper than high end GPUs
while offering the same or better performance on the model you care about.

This is compelling to a lot of hardware companies, where they often have 1
model that represents >50% of their compute workload. Making a Tensil ASIC for
that model becomes much cheaper than GPUs at scales of 1000 chips or more.

I'm happy to talk in more detail if this interests you! tom@tensil.ai

------
ben_e
I'm quite confused my Tensil, is the training of the model moved to their
chips, or the final model? If the former, then are the chips locked in to
whatever model they were built for, e.g. this chip only trains a multi-layer
perceptron with n layers? Or are the chips re-programmable or FPGAs? If the
latter, don't most models run quite quickly on CPU after training anyways?

~~~
christophclarke
It seems like they're selling ASICs. It would be useful in something like an
embedded system where you train a model beforehand, deploy it, and then let it
go. On top of speed improvements, they're generally more efficient, so
something running on battery power could last longer.

------
fybe
Vendr.com: A SaaS to keep track of your SaaS subscriptions.

and a 6.5k or 10k PER MONTH for someone to buy your SaaS subscriptions seems
super expensive. I'm not too versed in the SaaS market but is this really
something that you need a dedicated "SaaS expert" to manage for you?

~~~
morcutt
The same idea was built in Austin and acquired. I had the same thoughts.

[http://www.siliconhillsnews.com/2018/05/02/meta-saas-
acquire...](http://www.siliconhillsnews.com/2018/05/02/meta-saas-acquired-
flexera/)

~~~
fybe
Reading that article it actually makes sense. But to potentially spend between
78,000 and 120,000 dollars a year to manage your SaaS would require a high
assessment if it's worth it. Especially when they are targeting small to
medium companies, for which that money could be spend on a few junior
developers, sales people, or on ACTUAL SaaS.

It's a tough sell but I can get the idea

------
pontifier
Here are the ideas that I think have the most potential...

talar: Huge potential here. Cars are on their way out, and scheduled grocery
delivery can replace it.

spotless materials: Coatings can make a huge difference in the way we interact
with materials... in fact, for the most part, that's all we interact with.
better coatings make things better.

encellin: I believe that interacting with our bodies on a more finely tuned
small scale is the future.

my petrol pump: I can see a lot of convinience happening here. Recurring
customers whos lives are made better.

rejuvenation technologies: I want to see life extension succeed. If they have
something that works then that's fantastic for us all.

tensil: Baking AI seems like a good compromise for a lot of reasons. known
capabilities, and known weaknesses make for predictability.

~~~
DrAwdeOccarim
Rejuvenation Technologies is based on this paper:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4415018/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4415018/)

I hope they can get this to work! The issue is their paper uses technology
covered by other players in the space who have a decade head start and
significant research budgets. Maybe they'll get bought out, but my guess is
delivery and CMC are hurdles they'll run up against and then have a hard time
getting follow-on investors. FIH for this idea is going to be really hard. If
they can get this going, I'd love to see adding in additional components of
the telomerase holoenzyme.

Edit - Their IP position is actually pretty strong and they are already
thinking about delivering the other holoenzyme components:
[https://patents.google.com/patent/US20140242155A1](https://patents.google.com/patent/US20140242155A1)

I hope they lean on the exosome delivery idea discussed within, "In highly
preferred embodiments, the delivery vehicle is an exosome". That would really
differentiate them from the competition. The real test will be biodistribution
in non-rodent models. I will be following closely!

~~~
wiggles_md
Your link is to the patent application. If you check PAIR, you’ll see that
only a small subset of the claims, amended, have received NOA. I would tend to
disagree about the strength of their IP portfolio based on a cursory glance at
the publicly available info, but I’d be curious to hear why you think
differently.

~~~
DrAwdeOccarim
Ouch, I didn't look at PAIR. They lost all their delivery claims. I was
impressed by their priority date, which pre-dates some of the competition, but
it looks like they lost most of the key claims they'll need to fight off a
lawsuit.

------
pgt
How is Globe going to prevent hourly escort rentals?

~~~
pysxul
do you need to? I see another business opportunity

------
glebedel
[https://prooftrading.com/](https://prooftrading.com/) this looks like a
resume template. The "Progress" section's content is mind boggling to see.

"hire CTO" as a goal

Team capabilities star ratings...

~~~
paulcole
The gigantic Our Story section reads like YC Mad Libs.

> ______ is a bloated industry. It is opaque and old-fashioned, and it has not
> substantially improved through the technological revolution in the way other
> industries have, in part because there are tremendous barriers to entry for
> new innovative players.

> ______ is taking a crack at changing ______ for the better by starting with
> what we know: ________________________. We are building a nimble,
> transparent, highly effective ______ platform and hope to go live in 2020.

~~~
jerrre
> hope to go live in 2020

CURRENT_YEAR + 1

~~~
woah
Not good if it takes more than a year to launch an app

------
sidcool
Is there a directory which lists how the YC starutps are doing? As in how many
from 2016 batch are still around, and how many didn't make it? I am sure there
has to be one around.

~~~
jerrre
There is this:
[https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/](https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/)
Not exactly what you asked, but gives some insight

------
vadym909
wow- I didn't even have the patience to read through all of them. How does YC
coach so many? At 15 min a startup, they can cursory mentor 32 startups/day or
160/wk if they do nothing else. That doesn't seem like coaching. More like a
certificate school.

------
adrianN
MyPetrolPump: Bold move to start a business for ICE cars today. Those things
need to be all but gone by 2040.

~~~
LeonM
Is getting fuel in India really such a hassle that people are willing to pay a
premium to get the fuel delivered to them? How big is this market?

I live in Europe, and have never been to India, so I don't know about the
situation there. But personally I can't imagine paying for a service that
would maybe save me 5 minutes per week.

~~~
type-2
I opened their website and they show refilling generators. In india
electricity is unrelieable even in the best cities(including bangalore.) So
every office and apartment has generators.

~~~
LeonM
Ah, that makes sense! Thanks for the clarification, I should have visited
their website before posting my comment.

------
bufferoverflow
Trella is going to get sued by Trello.

~~~
allworknoplay
A middle east-focused shipping marketplace is potentially infringing on the
not-the-same-word trademark of a list/board web application?

------
koolba
> GitStart allows you to send small coding tasks (from JIRA, etc.) to its
> global network of developers. They charge a fee for each task — but if the
> developer does a good enough job that you’d like to hire them more
> permanently, GitStart also makes a commission.

When was this company created? I thought the Git trademark policy disallows
anybody new from naming things “Git”-thing.

~~~
yreg
What about GitHub? Is it older than Git's trademark?

~~~
koolba
It, along with GitLab and a couple others, predate the official policy so
they’re grandfathered in.

