
Startups from Y Combinator’s S19 Demo Day 1 - bruceb
https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/19/all-84-startups-from-y-combinators-s19-demo-day-1/
======
cbanek
> Epic Aerospace: Epic is manufacturing inexpensive space tugs to deliver
> satellites into geostationary orbit. The 21-year-old founder has been
> building rockets since he was 16, and is now managing a team of seven
> aerospace engineers with Epic Aerospace. The founder describes propulsion as
> one of the biggest problems for satellite companies, in that it can take up
> to two years to qualify new satellite systems and can cost up to $30
> million. The problem they’re solving is moving satellites from low Earth
> orbit directly into geostationary orbit. Epic’s tug is half the cost of the
> competition and is reusable. They’re currently working with Satellogic, and
> chasing what the founder says is a $3.1 billion geostationary insertion
> market.

So, uh... what's the big propulsion breakthrough? They have no website (well,
they have this: [http://epic-aerospace.com/](http://epic-aerospace.com/)) and
I can't find any search results. They don't list the founder's name, and the
only person I can find or other mention other than the ycombinator article is
this: [https://github.com/OmarBessa](https://github.com/OmarBessa)

I agree it's a big market, and it costs a lot more than $30 million to prove
out a new propulsion system, especially one that can repeatedly take
satellites from LEO to GEO.

If it's some reusable tug, I'm guessing it's able to be refueled in orbit?
That'd be pretty epic indeed, because I'm not sure of anyone doing that these
days. Though transferring fuel in zero g is a real interesting problem.

~~~
gibolt
Probably is no breakthrough, other than solving a common problem with a
reusable approach.

It is wasteful to have every satellite carry the weight of its own propellant
and engines.

Having a single device that can deliver quite a few satellites to their orbit
through clever planning and efficient fuel use could save significantly on
weight, design, and launch, costs and complexity.

~~~
cbanek
Well delivering multiple satellites could be a thing, it's still basically the
same cost by mass, you're just splitting the monetary cost up among different
customers. If you are delivering multiple GEO satellites, you also have to
have them be the right place in their orbit, over their target, since they are
stationary with respect to the earth (which is why you don't have to move your
satellite TV dish). This means all your satellites for that bunch have to
basically be near each other.

That also doesn't feel like it is reusable given this definition. I'd assume
reusable means you can use it now, and then use it next month on a completely
different mission. So let's explore that.

GEO satellites are also generally a lot bigger than your typical cubesat /
nanosats that are all the rage in the bulk launcher configurations, because
you need a big dish, and a lot of power to transmit and receive signals.

> It is wasteful to have every satellite carry the weight of its own
> propellant and engines.

Even if a satellite was delivered to GEO without using an engine, satellites
need engines to do stationkeeping and keep their orbit, which is the critical
factor for the operational lifetime of a satellite.

It's more wasteful to have to have your orbiting tug do an orbital rendezvous
with a satellite in LEO (takes fuel to rendezvous), go to GEO (the normal
cost, but more expensive since you have to carry the fuel for the return
trip), then come back from GEO to LEO (takes fuel).

Following this delta-v map, it looks like it takes about 4000m/s of delta-v to
go from LEO to GEO, then the same the other way back down.

[https://external-
preview.redd.it/U5iH7huE5qKth7ZFvipXt8vzaFO...](https://external-
preview.redd.it/U5iH7huE5qKth7ZFvipXt8vzaFOO99qHFh9o9_SkLLk.png?auto=webp&s=d145ac9ae496abe35fae86fc11a584d62fe42592)

I don't know of any clever planning or efficient fuel use that can get over
the raw amount of delta-v you'd need. Fuel use isn't really efficient, it's
the engine that has to efficiently use the fuel, which is why I think there
must be some breakthrough here.

Fuel also has to eventually be delivered up to the tug for refuel, so really
it seems like all the mass savings is the dry mass of the 3rd stage.

~~~
branchan
I totally agree. You still need to get the fuel to space regardless of who is
doing the propulsion work. Let's say that your tug is already on-orbit, how is
the fuel going to be brought up? Would you not need to launch another
spacecraft to bring you the fuel? How much would that spacecraft weigh?

Besides this, they would have to develop on-orbit refueling technology, as
well as force the other spacecraft to use a bus that allows for rendez-vous
and docking/proximity ops.

And also, how big is the market for satellite startups that are heading to GEO
orbit? For now, it seems like it is just Astranis and GapSat.

~~~
ibmont
We will be able to transport satellites up to 5000 lb in mass directly to GEO,
which should be most of the market.

Almost every large GEO player is developing new, smaller satellites. We will
also modify existing interfaces to allow for docking. Rendezvous and prox-ops
is all on our side.

~~~
branchan
Who is "we"? Care to identify yourself? What existing interface are you
talking about? Which GEO manufacturer is making 5000 lb spacecraft?

~~~
zarathustra10
I can take a wild guess who "we" is, since Epic's young founder is Ignacio B.
Montero and the nick is "ibmont".

~~~
ibmont
"you got me"

------
SkyMarshal
_> Juno College of Technology: JCT is creating the technical university of the
future. The startup operates a coding bootcamp, expected to do $3 million in
revenue by the end of 2019. Similar to Lamda School, they offer income-share
agreements, but “the similarities stops there,” explained the founder. Juno
says it places 87% of founders who complete their nine-week long program._

How is it different from Lambda School? It’s not apparent from their website
other than it’s based in Canada and they have a physical campus in Toronto.

[https://junocollege.com/why-juno](https://junocollege.com/why-juno)

~~~
andyjsong
Lambda School is 6 months vs. 9 weeks with Juno.

~~~
tastroder
Wait, so people actually pay 17% of their income over two years for a 9 week
course? What on earth is the upside of this over picking up a few books/online
courses and attending a couple of networking events?

~~~
vmurthy
One possible upside: Not all jobs are advertised and maybe Juno/Lambda have
worked up agreements with recruiters.

Also,think about it from a recruiter point of view: Would you as recruiter
rather pore through hundreds of resumes from people who have picked up courses
online (and risk getting beat up by interviewers when a few of these don't
perform well) or have a pre-screened/evaluated candidates? Worst case: you
pass the buck on to Juno/Lambda. There is some incentive for a recruiter to
look at Juno/Lambda candidates,no?

~~~
tastroder
I get what you're saying but from an employee and personal development point
of view, even the most intense 9 week course sounds guaranteed to lack the
necessary substance and depth I'd want for a career start / change (which is
what they're marketing this for, right?). The same argument would make me just
as wary from a hiring standpoint, don't see much of a difference of
qualification between 9 weeks of bootcamp versus a selection of relevant
online courses there tbh. Worst case in my mind would be a $startupcollege
candidate that was just trained on passing through interview processes, that's
not sustainable for recruiter/employer relationship in the long term either.

That being said, my experience with letting recruiters filter candidates
haven't been the best in the past and my exposure to bootcamp grads is limited
since that's just not much of a thing in the German market overall (I guess
because there's no real need since traditional university/apprenticeship
education paths are far more affordable around here). Is hiring these
candidates common in the US outside of the usual startup circles?

~~~
vmurthy
> Is hiring these candidates common in the US outside of the usual startup
> circles?

I’m afraid I don’t know :-). I’m from India this isn’t common here. Yet.

------
vmurthy
> The startup operates a coding bootcamp, expected to do $3 million in revenue
> by the end of 2019. Similar to Lamda School, they offer income-share
> agreements, but “the similarities stops there,

I'm interested in learning how this can be VC scale. From what I understand,
it is a very people-intensive business (look at the student:teacher ratio for
one of their courses)[1]. How is it different from,say,a consulting firm in
terms of scalability?

[1] [https://junocollege.com/course/web-
development](https://junocollege.com/course/web-development)

~~~
Dwolb
Short answer is to build a business that’s product-led and incentive-aligned.
As long as operationally they’re trying to use technology to reduce friction
at every step (student experience, instructor experience, and curriculum)
they’ll be able to scale better than an organization that bills for time (and
is incentivized to use always consume and bill for more time!)

------
pontifier
I went through the list and these are the ones that intrigued me.

lumineye: I think this sort of technology can be very useful and I'm
interested to see how it is used in the real world.

safely deposit: I like the simplicity, instant value to users, and the way it
transitions physical documents to virtual ones. I think the price is a bit
steep though.

puzzl: This seems like it erases a huge headache for its customers. I think
about this one as provisioning people like VMs to be a physical presence. Why
hire when you can rent on demand...

million marker: There are many people who are caring more and more about
toxins in their environment, and this plays directly to their growing
paranoia.

nomad: I personally don't use ride sharing, but this one seems like it could
be competitive. It doesn't seem like there's much difference between the
current options.

earth-ai: Of course! If they have a good solution then they may be able to
find a lot of resources that we haven't fully exploited yet. This is the big
one I think.

~~~
Balgair
> Nomad: In a two-month illegal trial period, the company facilitated 5,700
> rides at Indiana University before the startup had to shut down, but they
> say they’re legal now and ready to try new markets.

Yes, this is a good look for a legitimate business.

~~~
prdjr
Easier to ask for forgiveness than permission

------
tomashertus
I’ve been wondering recently - why there are almost no security startups in
the YC? Cybersecurity is one of the biggest problems in the 21st century, the
market opportunity is huge and solutions require to solve hard engineering
problems, yet there are no cybersecurity companies funded.

Does anyone have the same feeling? Why it would be this way?

~~~
alltakendamned
Most security companies seem to fall in one of two categories: \- consulting
\- appliances (aka blinky boxes)

Consulting seldom requires venture capital and cannot scale at the level VCs
expect.

Blinky boxes can, but customers are slowly catching on to the fact that adding
another blinky box to the network is really not improving their resilience all
that much.

On top of that, it's not always easy to identify the real economic buyer in an
organisation, and e.g. a CISO might not have the authority to decide on
installing new appliances but needs to collaborate with e.g. IT. It all makes
for convoluted and longer sales cycles.

~~~
djd20
While its not in YC - there are a few SAAS type security startups aimed at
SME's - such as [https://intruder.io/](https://intruder.io/) who I am a very
happy customer of. This to me looks to be high growth.

~~~
GordonS
There are _dozens_ of these SaaS vulnerability scanning companies, with very
little differentiation between them - they basically all run Nessus. It's
difficult to see how they could make serious money, certainly not enough to
interest VCs.

~~~
andy_ppp
The only way is to make them free and build a marketplace of accredited and
vetted pen testers who you charge to be on the platform. Still how the hell
you vet these people is a huge issue.

~~~
alltakendamned
I think that's what bug bounty companies are doing by changing the model from
paying for time spent to paying for (accepted) findings.

Personally I don't think any serious pentester will spend considerable time in
this model though.

That said, I also think that one of the main challenges for buyers of pentest
services these days is to evaluate the quality of a report or of the work
done. Thoughts on how to improve that are most welcome.

~~~
andy_ppp
Mostly they are cookie cutter bullshit, right.

------
gadders
Scared to comment in case I end up like the guy that slagged off DropBox.

Maybe I should do a separate comment for each startup saying "Great Idea!
Guaranteed success!" so I can refer to it in five year's time and look really
prescient.

------
amsilprotag
Only one crypto mention, and it's a company selling banks tech to detect
crypto fraud.

 _TRM Labs: Banks are required to trace the source of their customers’ money.
TRM helps banks identify and trace cryptocurrency fraud. They charge $20K per
user seat. Though they couldn’t say the name, TRM says they recently signed a
top-five global bank as a customer._

------
ec109685
Mighty is interesting, though I wonder if they do anything fancy to avoid
being a trivial MIM proxy for your traffic? E.g. do they somehow prevent
themselves from logging onto your VM / VPN?

------
bruceb
How does [http://www.nomadmoments.com/](http://www.nomadmoments.com/) survive
the massive war chest and tech advantage of Uber/lyft?

The $25 a month fee seems easy to get drivers to pay as they can pay that to
uber/lyft everyday in commissions.

I suspect the subscription will not stay at that rate for long.

~~~
kart23
Sorry, this is kind of off topic, but why the hell is such a simple website
7MB? I instinctively dont trust companies that cant even deploy a simple
website. The massive background image doesnt even look right on mobile, its
scaled to fill.

~~~
TylerE
It's way worse than that.

It's served 25.9MB to me.

They are using ginormous background images, and loading multiples.

8000x4000 jpgs. 32 fuckign megapixels. For a background image.

~~~
bschwindHN
I had it even worse:

[https://imgur.com/XctFp8c.png](https://imgur.com/XctFp8c.png)

32.6 MB

And I have to agree with the OP, simple things like this instantly drive away
my trust that they know what they're doing.

~~~
andrewstuart
>>> simple things like this instantly drive away my trust that they know what
they're doing

It inspires me with confidence that they are focused only on things that get
them launched.

~~~
TylerE
That works great until it doesn’t?

What else have they ignored that is going to bite them in the ass?

------
ArtWomb
Congrats to all the startups making it to the end! This was quite a diverse
array of verticals: from rare earth mining to mail-in sperm tests ;)

Green Tiger. The "Robinhood of India". We hear a lot about how private wealth
management is an untapped goldmine in Asia. To the tune of $100T+. And I'm
wondering if the barriers aren't more customer development oriented than a
lack of actual trustworthy services?

How Asia Can Protect It's Crazy Riches

[https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-08-17/asia-m...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-08-17/asia-
must-protect-its-wealth-to-survive-the-next-financial-crisis)

~~~
zupa-hu
$100T is an ambitious number. Whe World GDP is about $80T.

------
19ylram49
From a privacy and security standpoint, can some help make Mighty make sense?
I just don’t see it. Yes, Chrome does hog my RAM and CPU, but my browsing
experience is simply not bad enough to just throw in the towel and give in to
a MITM

~~~
carlosdp
I mean, I agree. It seems like a backwards-facing technology. Smartphones and
netbooks are getting better and better processing power, that power should be
harnessed, not just ignored.

Besides the obvious privacy and security issues, I can see how you could get
customers in the short term with savvy sales and marketing, but trends in
development and tech don't seem to support this being a sensical approach for
the future.

I mean, one of the examples given is Slack. Slack is already web-based, if you
run it as a browser tab, you don't use much extra CPU/memory. But many run it
in the Electron "desktop" app. Why? Because it's more integrated with the
operating system and more like a first-class citizen app.

That will be solved now with PWAs and the new Web APIs being worked on, it's
just a matter of time imo. When all these electron-based apps can just re-use
the already running Chrome browser's rendering engine, and still look like a
standalone app, who cares how much CPU Chrome uses?

It'll be basically the only UI app running on the whole machine.

------
rficcaglia
Nothing targeting climate change? Hopefully day 2...

Edit: mea culpa, Holy Grail is a play here of sorts.

~~~
dang
Also Wren, which did a Launch HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20461577](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20461577)

~~~
rficcaglia
From a comment there about planting trees or preventing deforestation...isn’t
the problem now that climate extremes will make it harder to expand forests
with droughts and fires? Seems like it may have worked 50 years ago but too
late now.

I think we need to start investing in ideas that remediate actively and
aggressively. Like “oh my god there’s a killer asteroid about to hit us” level
of motivation.

I mean the planet will do just fine without us, but if we want to stay the
dominant species (and not jellyfish), we had best do as inventors/investors
what politicians and governments cannot.

Like:

* Make totally off the grid solar easier and cheaper than PG&E (remarkably hard to do today)

* zero petroleum scalable ag

* zero petroleum mass consumer packaging

* recycling that actually recycles

* economically profitable global scale carbon capture that can work in deserts and fires and extreme cold

Etc

Edit: Because this:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20745486](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20745486)

------
brainless
Does anyone here feel the need for PopSQL?

I am asking this because I was building on a similar idea a couple years back
as a side project. I lost track but got curious seeing PopSQL.

~~~
mjfisher
I got quite excited by that entry. My immediate reaction was 'oh, that's
really cool'. But after thinking a little further, I can't think of an
audience that both uses SQL frequently and also couldn't use a git repo. What
kind of user demographic did you have in mind?

~~~
brainless
My target audience was basically every non-programmer in a team who wants to
see/track any kind of data for their own product.

The SQL building would be for programmers to setup say a few initial queries.
But anyone can change (there would be a changelog) and share new things to
track.

~~~
mjfisher
Thanks; I've yet to meet any sql-wielding non-programmers in the wild.

Perhaps it's worth releasing after all?

~~~
vharuck
Just an anecdote, but my dad learned SQL 10 years before retirement. It helped
him do his work, which was not software development, without burdening the
professional programmers.

Of course, there are plenty of free and slick GUIs offering the basics of Git.
I'd like to see how this is better. Maybe customer service?

------
tastroder
Could somebody explain the thinking behind startups like yummy? This seems to
be quite common in the last few years. Do these "robot barista" type
installations really take in significantly more revenue than a traditional
vending machine that justifies this level of engineering / cost?

[https://www.yummy-future.com/](https://www.yummy-future.com/)

~~~
Judgmentality
Looks like Cafe X ([https://cafexapp.com/](https://cafexapp.com/))

Seems like a gimmick to me. But who knows, maybe their sales are great? Also
the real question isn't the upfront (or potentially distributed) engineering
cost - it's real estate. Can the robot justify the larger footprint of a
typical coffee vending machine by increased sales? My guess is they're
targeting the place between vending machines and Starbucks, which seems like a
pretty big void in the coffee market. I still don't understand why a robot arm
would do anything other than add to the novelty.

------
vharuck
>Kern Systems: This startup wants to store information in DNA.

Just imagine the complicated algorithms necessary to prevent literal virus
injection attacks.

------
mdorazio
Some surprisingly interesting companies this round, including quite a few
leveraging hardware and robotics in cool ways. That being said, two stuck out
to me:

I can't see Lumineye as something other than military and police state tech
pretending it's going to help first responders more than it will help special
operations units kill people and police/FBI violate privacy even further. This
should be disturbing, not cool.

I like what Well Principled is trying to do, but having worked in the
consulting space for a long time, the disruptable segment of the management
consulting market is not that big. _A lot_ of clients don't hire McKinsey for
actual insights or results, they hire for the brand name, someone to point the
finger at when things go wrong, and as trusted outsider confirmation of what
executives wanted to do in the first place. I have a feeling this will pivot
into the financial engineering segment of the market pretty quickly or get
bought out by one of the big 4.

~~~
seren
Regarding Lumineye, there is a market for elderly people at home, which are
already monitored by bracelets or some other devices they are suppose to wear,
that they usually forget, to detect fall, or other adverse events.

No one want to have a camera installed at home to be monitored 24/24\.
However, something that could check your pulse or maybe if you have moved in
the last 30 minutes remotely would be much more acceptable.

It is probably a much bigger market than law enforcement.

In more institutional places, it could probably be used in hospital, nursing
home, psychic wards or prisons.

~~~
mdorazio
I'm not sure why you need to be able to track bodies through walls to
accomplish that. A simple ultrasonic sensor array in a room with some software
could accomplish the same thing without the dystopian potential. I just can't
see this not getting horribly abused.

------
_hardwaregeek
> Gold Fig Labs: The startup is building a tool for version control on
> settings pages. The founders come from Firebase, where they were both early
> employees. The company has signed up 60 companies in the last five weeks,
> including “multi-billion-dollar tech companies.

I've been setting up some pipelines at work. I was thinking recently, "huh,
these pipelines aren't easily version controlled at all". Unless you use
something that is completely configurable by text, which is pretty hard to
accomplish, then it's basically impossible to get a snapshot of your services.
It's even harder to roll stuff back. Or branch it off and test out a new
configuration. I'd wager that a lot of issues in production are configuration
related, simply because it's harder to introspect and code review versus code
changes. Hopefully that can be fixed.

~~~
KptMarchewa
Maybe I don't understand what you're trying to achieve, but doesn't Gitlab CI
fulfill that role? Your versioning system is essentially git. Branching is
done trivially, rolling stuff back is running deploy pipeline from older
branch or tag.

~~~
_hardwaregeek
I'm talking about versioning infrastructure. So let's say you have a setup
with a load balancer, three compute VMs and two database instances. You modify
the config to make it three compute VMs and three database instances, but
suddenly something goes wrong! Can you roll back your infrastructure easily?

~~~
lazyant
This is a standard "infrastructure as code" task for devops/SREs/whatever ,
for ex using Terraform

------
seren
Holy grail, sounds like a moon shot. It got AI, robots, if it wasn't vetted by
YC I would think it is some sort of vaporware.

On the other hand, if they can pull off automatic research and experiments at
scale, it seems to be a real game changer.

------
probably_wrong
> As privacy-conscious consumers speak up against the proliferation of facial
> recognition tech (...) Traces is building computer vision tracking tech that
> relies on cues other than facial structure

It seems that Traces has slightly misunderstood the concerns of privacy-
conscious consumers, so I would like to publicly make the following
clarifications:

1\. If your technology can track me as effectively as face recognition does,
then it is not in any way "less invasive". You are still invading my privacy.

2\. STOP. FUCKING. TRACKING. ME!

------
gadders
What I think would be cool would be a prediction market for each year's YC
startups, limited to people with HN logins. Be interested to see how the
cumulative wisdom of people here compares to reality.

------
mcthrowaway123z
Every time I read one of these my heart freezes up at the possibility someone
has beat me to market. Then I remember why I spent 3 years in R&D.

~~~
bathMarm0t
3 years in r&d is called a masters. 5 years a PhD. Not trying to be glibe but
get your business house in order.

~~~
mcthrowaway123z
I already sold 3 companies doing the agile thing, I'm quite aware of the known
problem/unknown solution approach. This time I'm more interested in the
unknown problem/unknown solution space and, for this particular project, that
meant inventing a new branch of mathematics to solve a particularly hairy
problem.

------
Oras
<Breadfast>

Interesting to see that they got 10,000 paying customers in 2 years.

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

------
19ylram49
Dashblock and Actiondesk look pretty slick!

------
panabee
if you could invest in one startup from demo day 1, which one would it be and
why?

------
riser9
Nothing to fight global heating.

~~~
titojankowski
make the heat go away!

~~~
DoingIsLearning
If you haven't read it yet please try to read the section 'In Comments' from
the 'Guidelines' at the bottom of the frontpage.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

