
Trac (YC W16) Aims to Improve on the Stopwatch - whatami
http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2016/03/22/y-combinator-startup-trac-aims-to-improve-on-the-stopwatch/
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nbschulze
Are the guys from TRAC here? It would be great to know more about it. I ran in
college, my brother ran in college, my sister hopes to as well. I have always
been frustrated that I couldn't follow along with those trackers online. We
always resorted to trying to give play-by-play over the phone which isn't the
most elegant solution. Definitely an area you could have a lot of impact on.
Especially with the rise in popularity of marathons and other races.

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griffinkelly
So the entire idea was first inspired by timing athletes at trac practices.
our coach would spend hours timing with 5+ stopwatches in hand, write
everything on a clipboard, then type it into excel. He then would print it all
out and give us a binder of numbers at the end of the year. We wanted to
design a system that would be awesome for repeats on the track/xc course, and
its slowly progressed into timing races.

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nbschulze
That's awesome. All our splits were written down with pencil in our logs so I
definitely felt that pain. I can definitely see a lot of places you could take
it. Hope it all goes well!

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griffinkelly
thanks!

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Gaussian
The key to this product, as I've always seen it, is to subvert all of the
enterprise-style incumbent timing systems with a system that costs 80% less
and is 200% easier to use. If you've seen any of the current stuff out there
that's used at races, then you know that the latter requirement is, in fact, a
low bar. TRAC looks to be satisfying both of these stipulations. I like their
prospects.

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griffinkelly
Its insane. In college, I worked with a guy who owned an enterprise system and
the software is very backwards. Everything has to be run on a windows machine,
and every time windows updated, there were compatibility issues. We've tried
to solve as much of that as possible, you can set up on browser, and then
operate all the hardware off your smartphone when the race is going.

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griffinkelly
Hey guys, Griffin from TRAC here. Happy to answer any questions I can--pretty
busy with demo day going on right now.

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koolba
In the "office" pic of you two those monitors look low relative to your
head/eyes though the posture is eerily familiar. Doesn't that hurt your back?

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timberburn
If people are looking for something similar without RFID tags, there are sites
like [http://chronograph.io](http://chronograph.io). It synchronizes
stopwatches and timers between anyone viewing the same session.

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jamestanderson
Would be great if you capitalized TRAC, as I first read this as the project
management software of the same name.

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choward
Doesn't help for googling though.

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whatnotests
Perhaps they could start by improving the name.

