
The 10 Best Startups From Y Combinator’s S12 Demo Day - Mariel
http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/21/best-of-yc-demo-day/
======
a_bonobo
>9gag aggregates memes and jokes from around the web — much like Reddit

Evil persons would mention that much of the content on 9gag is copied from
Reddit's r/funny (which is on a large scale hard to proof) - but they got
funding, so why not, looks like a viable business model.

The example-pic the article uses can be found on Reddit, with the same title,
over Google:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/ykrlh/when_links_are_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/ykrlh/when_links_are_more_than_ten_words_long/)
Can't tell which one came first, as the article's pic doesn't have a time.

>Its founders say that in July, 9gag had more than 65 million unique visitors,
compared to Reddit’s 39.7 million

According to Wolfram Alpha, Reddit has roughly double the amount of unique
daily visitors when compared to 9gag:
<http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=reddit+9gag> (Keep in mind these numbers
are daily, not monthly like in the article)

~~~
alanfang
Wolfram Alpha also uses Alexa which is next to useless for traffic estimates.

~~~
a_bonobo
True, because it's based on their spyware-toolbar, so you only measure the
people who are relatively clueless about their computer - but in absence of
the 9gag-people citing their sources there's not much more to do.

I don't know how ranking.com generates the numbers, but in their ranking
reddit.com is 11,763, 9gag is 11,768 and 4chan is 11,775 - all kinda
identical.

~~~
necubi
Actually, 9gag does release their numbers, via Quantcast[0]. According to
those, they have a long ways to catch up to Reddit, which even in 2010 [1] had
more than double the visitors (3mm vs 8mm "people" monthly).

Incidentally, the 65mm visitors from that quote seems to have been actually
referring to page views, of which Reddit had 429mm monthly in 2010.

[0] <http://www.quantcast.com/9gag.com> [1]
[http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-
our-...](http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our-
traffic.html)

(disclaimer: I work for Quantcast).

~~~
a_bonobo
Cool! Thanks for the insight, so did they mix page views with unique visitors?

Also, off-topic question: How do you measure a visitor's income or education
level, do you deduce based on location?

------
fecklessyouth
>“Forget everything you know about telepresence robots.”

Done.

~~~
twakefield
I just have to say (post upvote) that this was one of the funniest comments I
have read on HN. It so perfectly points out how ridiculous much of tech
coverage is.

------
jhuckestein
This is click bait. Expect to see a similar post with a different selection of
startups on GigaOM, VentureBeat, TNW, Mashable, Pandodaily and every other
such site.

You also have to wonder about how they select these startups (other than at
random)? It's comparing apples to oranges and doesn't even seem to have a
consistent metric (expected roi, innovativeness of idea, best pitch, etc).

Why is instacart not on there?

~~~
3am_hackernews
Yes, I was really curious about their metrics for ranking the startups.

As you correctly pointed out - why is instacart missing while 9gag is present?
I can name so many much better alternatives to 9gag: instacart, KIPPT,
Everyday.me etc.

~~~
lacker
9gag is a pretty obvious selection - they have tens of millions of users.

~~~
3am_hackernews
I was under the impression that quality triumphs over quantity for these
cases.

~~~
endersshadow
Your opinion of the content/product being sold should not be mistaken for the
quality of a business model. The two are vastly different things. For example,
I don't smoke cigarettes--hate the things, but I'll be damned if tobacco
wasn't a great way to make a buck in the past century.

------
tokenadult
9gag certainly illustrates how hard up the Internet is for high-quality humor.
(Just now, browsing the site, I didn't find anything I would want to share
with my friends.)

Fundersclub sounds quite disruptive.

Bufferbox might be useful (at the right price) once it is within
walking/bicycling distance of my house, as a UPS store location already is.

~~~
samstave
I just had a weird thought:

Could FunderesClub be an avenue for laundering money?

Think of it this way - an entity or a group could setup many accounts on
FundersClub to invest small-ish amounts <9500 in many many avenues and be able
to make interest on that money and then sell whenever they want. Because they
invested smaller amounts than would be required to be reported, however you
would have to pay tax on all interest/dividends received over $1500.

Although, I am sure there are some very creative financial mangers for the
elite of silicon valley that do away with even these rules with a deft hand...

~~~
rdl
There are many many vastly easier and lower risk ways to launder money, which
don't leave a well documented audit trail throughout the system.

I think your average individual or organization laundering money would want to
invest in the kind of things he understood, like small businesses, in the
later stages of laundering money, too.

~~~
samstave
I am not a clever man, please explain the vastly easier methods.

~~~
rdl
Place into cash-based businesses with minimal consumables tracking (nail
salons, hairdressers, laundromats, service based businesses in general); layer
via vendors to those businesses (invoicing for product they don't receive, or
just marking up product they do get to premium prices), integration by
dividend/partnership payouts to individuals, or other commercial transactions
to other businesses. (Really, now that layering happens inside the USA to
avoid bulk currency smuggling detection, and happens in businesses vs.
cambios, layer/place/integrate is a much fuzzier distinction than it was in
the 1980s. It's basically "get physical cash plausibly into a till" and then
cycle it.

~~~
samstave
This might sound crazy and naive but this sounds like the most ripe area of
cyber fraud: creating an ap/series of apps (inventory, sales, POS, etc) that
supports this type of fraud...

They already exist... on the industrial scale. Which is where the rumored
Wachovia laundering of mexican drug money was really active...

~~~
rdl
Yes, selling "licenses" which can be transferred, redeemed, and re-used is
pretty plausible. However, your average Mexican cartel leader doesn't
understand software, and is going to be a lot more comfortable with a sketchy
mundane business where he can physically see it and understand it.

Cellphone stores are often used for this, I think, though.

------
chimi
This is a good crop and I can see a lot of success coming from all of these
companies. There's a market out there and it's waiting to be tackled. Several
of them are known solutions applied to another niche.

There is more of a real world feel to these companies. Robots, Big boxes of
delivered things, instacart which isn't in this list, but is another example.

I also notice there's a lot more traction already with these companies than I
remember -- it's a more mature bunch. I wish you all the best of luck. The
journey hasn't even begun yet, but you've come a long way already.

~~~
wheels
Part of the perceived increase (though certainly not all of it) is that the
batch sizes are several times larger than before. Whereas before you might
have a shooting star or three in a single batch, now you might have a dozen,
even if the proportions remained about the same.

~~~
chimi
INteresting when you put it that way. There are 75 in this batch and this is
only 10 of them. Being in ycombinator in earlier years almost guaranteed you'd
be covered in the big blogs and well... _heard_ of. There are some of the 65
remaining startups in the bunch I'll probably never hear of.

------
salman89
A common trend I am noticing amongst these startups are that they target a
particular industry pain point, and have the ability to charge for their
product. None of them seem the type that can be huge businesses, but they all
seem like they can turn a profit. Call it lower risk investments if you want.

~~~
6ren
A pain point is the way to start. Some, like the perfect fitting shirt or the
package delivery kiosk, could give a strategic advantage to an existing
industry player, and therefore provoke an acquisition bidding war. Or, they
could conceivably found a new player in that industry.

------
dj2stein9
Most of these seem like derivative of other successful startups, like most of
YC companies. They all just seem "done" already, so what's the point? On
another thread there was the release of a YC-based iPhone controller which was
no better than 5 or 6 other competitors in the exact same space. So what kind
of advantage do these fancy-pants YC companies really have over their
competitors over the MEGA HYPE of demo day?

Probably nothing. The consumer putting up his bucks is what really matters.

~~~
dirtyaura
No, these ideas are not "done". Do you have telepresence robots in your
office? Or Bufferbox-like delivery boxes in your mall? I don't.

Saying these businesses are "done" is like saying mobile phones were "done"
when Motorola launched their first phone. Startups are about creating
businesses, not about materializing some idea the first time on the Earth.

------
softrhinoskin
Not trolling. Genuinely curious. What exactly does TC rankings mean? It is not
like they have a good track record of non-biased tech news reporting. I have
avoided their websites/articles like the plague for the past 3 years so I
don't know what their record has been as of late, but I doubt it has changed
for the better since then. Judging by headlines I see here on HN, I am willing
to bet that it has changed for the worse if that is possible.

------
volaski
I wonder what happened to Diaspora. [http://allthingsd.com/20120511/diaspora-
says-its-back-on-tra...](http://allthingsd.com/20120511/diaspora-says-its-
back-on-track-joins-y-combinator-program/)

I was really expecting to see what kind of product they would launch. Did they
just not launch at the demo day but still working on it, or did they actually
pivot into something else?

~~~
jmonegro
They launched Makr.io (<https://makr.io>) a few days ago here on HN.

~~~
zio99
I asked this question before: <http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4391638> and still
wondering: 1\. Does Y Combinator then own a stake in Makr.io or Disapora? 2\.
When a company pivots, does YC own a stake in the pivot? 3\. How about side
projects?

~~~
jmonegro
YC owns a stake in Diaspora. Diaspora owns Makr.io, therefore YC owns a stake
in Makr.io, as long as the Diaspora team set it up as an entity separate from
Diaspora, not owned by Diaspora (the company, not the team).

When a company pivots, it's the same thing. It's usually the same company
legally and fiscally, in which case YC still has a stake. If the company
pivots and the founders decide to set up a new company, and the old company
does not own the new company, then YC does not have a stake in the new one
unless the founders are good sports and cut them in.

Side projects are usually built under the corporate umbrella, in which case
the profits/losses from the side project count as part of the owning
company's. In this case, YC's stake in the parent company carries over to all
side projects (unless, again, they set it up as something separate from the
company).

~~~
zio99
What's stopping someone from using the lessons learned from a failed company
over to a new entity - IP ownership? E.g. I'm pretty sure Waterloo Velocity
doesn't own a stake in Pebble (the iPhone watch) even though the project began
there as Allerta (a Blackberry watch) and was admitted into YC as inPulse.
Wondering if these are just company name changes, or product name changes, or
separate entities? As the founder would have therefore received funding for
R&D from Velocity, YC and Kickstarter without necessarily putting out a
product. (Though I'm sure there's some intellectual property claims made).
That would mean a +1 in favour of patents, to protect the interests of the
accelerator.

------
esschul
Huh, we've had something like bufferbox in Norway for years now(I think).
Don't know how popular it is though.

------
pawelwentpawel
Double Robotics looks very interesting! I've seen teleconferencing "creatures"
before but this one seems very appealing.

Quite surprised about 9gag though. When did they start? Their pictures were so
popular for some time it gives me the feeling that they've been online for
ages already.

------
ekianjo
Where are the ''Kill Hollywood'' startups?

~~~
thronemonkey
This seems difficult because what makes Hollywood profitable is the movies
they make, which cost big dollars and often license expensive IP from others
(think Transfomers, superhero movies, etc.). It seems like the kind of thing
that's hard to disrupt on a low budget.

------
samstave
This article crashes safari on my ipad2 - three times in a row now...

Anyone else care to test it?

~~~
snprbob86
I've been noticing that if I open two or more TechCrunch articles in tabs, all
of the TechCrunch tabs become unresponsive. I have no idea what they are doing
to upset Chrome so badly...

~~~
samstave
> _I have no idea what they are doing to upset Chrome so badly..._

I think it would be Chrome's grammar and spell-check function that gets
overloaded....

------
dopp
www.virool.com - Platform to distribute and market videos. Company makes
$0.12/second.

