On: Companies from the YC Winter 2018 Batch

[floatrock]

YC releases a Requests for Startups list that's part VC zeitgeist, part buzzword bingo, but mostly an interesting summary where they think interesting things are: https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs

Was curious how these companies stack up against that list:

  1. *Energy: none*
  
  2. AI:
  - Cognition IP
  
  3. *Robotics: none*
  
  4. Biotech:
  - Nutrigene ? (stretch)
  
  5. Healthcare:
  - Medumo
  - Nutrigene ? ("these statements have not been approved by the fda")
  
  6. *Pharmaceuticals: none*
  
  7. Education:
  - Juni Learning
  
  8. Human Augmentation
  - Nutrigene
  
  9. *VR and AR: none*
  
  10. Transportation and Housing
  - Statecraft
  
  11. *One Million Jobs: none*
  
  12. Programming Tools:
  - Buglife
  - Storyline
  
  13. *Hollywood 2.0: none*
  
  14. Diversity:
  - tEQuitable ?
  
  15: Enterprise Software
  - Slite?
  - Storyline?
  - Substack
  - tEQuitable?
  
  16. *Financial Services: none*
  
  17. *Computer Security: none*
  
  18. *Global Health: none*
  
  19. Underserved Communities
  - Statecraft
  
  20. *Food and Farming: none*
  
  21. *Mass Media: none*
  
  22. *Improving Democracy: none*
  
  23: Future of Work
  - Slite?
  - tEQuitable?
  - The Lobby (and probably not in the good way)
  
  25: *Water: none*
  
  26: Other:
  - Sheerly Genius ?

I don't really know anything about these companies beyond the 1-paragraph summaries from the article, and yes, you may arrange your Startup Superheroes(TM) trading cards into slightly different piles, but the point of this is that (of the announced companies), it's curious to see where the gaps in the debutants are.

[tlb → floatrock]

Keep in mind that that this isn't a unbiased random sample. It's selected for companies that launched publicly within 6 weeks of the start of the batch, which usually means they have a working MVP. Companies with long R&D cycles (like most energy, robotics, biotech and pharma companies) are underrepresented in this sample.

[ngokevin → floatrock]

To add one, we launched on HN couple days ago (Supermedium, a full VR browser for Web-based VR content) and missed the blog post. We'd fall into VR :)

[dcole2929 → floatrock]

Wanting companies that work on these problems is great. But finding ones with unique and interesting value propositions is probably incredibly hard. There is a reason that the Hollywood model for instance, has managed to last 100 years. Yeah there's an absolute shit ton of protectionism going on but also no one has come up with anything better yet, and not for lack of trying. The same is true of a lot of these categories. The issues they have are hard, and expensive. I'd be interested to see the list of companies YC rejects.

[floatrock → dcole2929]

> But finding ones with unique and interesting value propositions is probably incredibly hard.

Exactly why the gaps are interesting.

Also: they need to fit the VC timeline and specific VCs' returns model (there are other business models outside of taking SV VC money)

[elmar → floatrock]

"Sheerly Genius" looks like a really interesting product for a trillion market, and the presentation video is really well done and funny.

[kamphey → floatrock]

That post is from Sept 2016. I would love to see an updated list of requests.

I wonder if Hollywood 2.0 would still be on there.