Looks like a much stronger batch to me, I take back some of what I said yesterday. I would be hard pressed to choose between some of these!
I love that we are seeing less fad apps and more healthcare / farming / energy / third world tech. It's encouraging.
Personally farming tech and third world mobile payment are areas that I've been thinking about reading up on for a while. Perhaps the time is now!
As a side note it seems like there are a lot of teams right now working on chat / chat bots / chat ai in a very overlapping way. It makes me wonder what the root of this bot/ai/virtual assistant trend is and if they would be attacking the problem the same way without slack-colored glasses.
Lots of biotech/medical device companies in this class. Historically this has not been a good category to invest in (unless you like to lose money), nor one that is easy to get right. The FDA is a real pain to deal with and trying to "do things that don’t scale" has you end up like Theranos. I do give YC kudos for trying.
I find the proposition of "Spinal Singularity" strange: why would you need a connected urinary catheter??
The things on your body, being on your body, are easily accessible. If I ever need a urinary catheter I'd rather control it with a manual pump than a cell phone. Does everything need to be connected??
Does this thing require you to have your cell phone with you in order to take a piss? And can you go if your phone dies? Also, if your cell phone can control it, it's only a matter of time before it's hacked (fun in the board room!)
Having family with catheters they would have loved this / love this.
The external valves, and associated bags, are all additional causes of infection — and this would cut those out.
It's really hard to change those bags without spillage. This cuts that out.
The external pipework getting caught on things and causing pain. Solved.
You have to adjust the kind of clothing you wear so that you can have space for the catheter bag. This would cut that out.
The location of catheter bags means that people with certain kind of mobility problems can't change them themselves - this would cut that out. This one directly affects a friend of mine right now. Four times a day that have to be around somebody who is willing to change a catheter bag with them. They cannot get up at night without somebody to disconnect/reconnect the night bag.
The whole issue of not knowing how full the bladder is - this would cut that out.
Never being able to go swimming. Never being able to have a bath. Solved.
If this can be made to work well, and it's a big if I'm sure, it is a game changer and a major quality of life improver.
I agree wholeheartedly. It seems this device just creates more points of failure (e.g. lost/dead phone, urinary tract infections, interference, etc.) for a little convenience.
Self-cathing isn't that difficult once you get the hang of it.
The FDA also provides a HUGE barrier to entry. Once a company makes it through the approval processes (if they make it), they will have a monopoly on that corner of the medical market for many years. I agree its difficult, but the rewards are higher.
You can still fail at the marketing level even if you make it all the way through the approval process (Affezza comes to mind as a good example of this [1]). My background is in biotech and I feel the risk/reward ratio is too great in this area. Still a gutsy move from YC.
My very first angel investment was in a medical device company. They had FDA approval, patent protection, all the manufacturing in place, rave reviews from users, clear benefits over the competition... and they still failed because they couldn't get distribution.
Ten years later I made another medical device investment. Again, good IP protection, FDA approved, clear data showing life-saving benefits. This one failed because the technical founders decided to go off the ranch and have a turf battle with the CEO.
The Murphy factor in this sector seems pretty high to me.
Yes the bar in this area is very high as there are so many things that can go wrong.
I think the difference is with pure software you are just dealing with human created complexity - with biotech you also have nature’s complexity to deal with too. Mix the two together and spice it up with some unbelievably stringent regulations and you have a recipe for a lot of heartburn.
Perhaps it would be possible to attack this market using a different approach. The classic startup path is approximately --> geeks hammer out MVP product, get some funding and try to grow as quickly as possible, and either go big or fail.
I got this idea after watching the Vice interview with Martin Shkreli (obviously not a role model)[1]
Shkreli made the leap from hedge funds (betting against pharma companies) into becoming the CEO of a pharma company, which apparently does research in addition jacking up the prices of HIV drugs (Shkreli actually gives out chemistry lessons on youtube[2]).
So maybe some geeks could try getting funding, buy up some underappreciated, undervalued but already FDA approved drugs, and using the cashflow to do further research, or develop cool new products or services in the healthcare space instead of the traditional, risky route. (I'm not advocating jacking up the prices of critical lifesaving drugs obviously).
For low risk medical devices, startups can use a FDA 510(k) [0] to get approval if the device has a comparable (predicate) device already approved. This is how some startups get devices approved with relatively little red tape from the FDA.
This may also work for some healthcare software apps.
I wonder if this has something to do with PG stepping aside. I heard a talk from him years ago and it didn't sound like he was to interested in getting into the health care domain. I can understand his position. It is a bureaucratic nightmare.
Since number 1 is a catheter, I want to repeat a long time complaint. Why can't technology help urinals stay clean? There are puddles in literally every male bathroom. Some one please solve this.
Edit: At my age, the last sputters go in every which way. So missing is unavoidable and we need some kind of self cleaning floor.
If you did want a technology solution I would suggest electrifying a zone area around the urinal - 5000V should get even the most haphazard user on the straight and narrow.
An electric fence is much closer than the floor, the stream may not have broken yet. It does depend on the distance -- for example you could pee from a subway platform onto the third rail and live to tell the story.
There's also the possibility of someone not wanting to have an animated medical diagram of a penis on their work monitor, even if the bosses don't care, so I see no problem with the warning.
PaveIQ looks pretty interesting. There has to be a big market of customers willing to hand over money to learn how their website is performing but aren't currently investing the time to learn GA's more advanced features or to learn how to mine insights from all that clickstream data.
I'm not so sure. There's a lot you get can from simply running basic analytics and an NPS survey. You should also be constantly talking with customers. Ideally you'd already know where the site/app is failing purely based on those interactions.
If they can pull in data from various sources (Stripe, SFIQ, etc), that's where this product could be really exciting.
So what is up with all the Chatbots? Between the two days there was at least three companies that seemed to be pushing some sort of generic chatbot. Is this really lucrative? I guess it could replace call centers with online automated help.
I love that we are seeing less fad apps and more healthcare / farming / energy / third world tech. It's encouraging.
Personally farming tech and third world mobile payment are areas that I've been thinking about reading up on for a while. Perhaps the time is now!
As a side note it seems like there are a lot of teams right now working on chat / chat bots / chat ai in a very overlapping way. It makes me wonder what the root of this bot/ai/virtual assistant trend is and if they would be attacking the problem the same way without slack-colored glasses.