Startups from Y Combinator’s S19 Demo Day 2

What always strikes me about these lists is that if I had these ideas (and I often do), I'd discard them out of hand as non-viable. Yet people behind these startups don't mind staking years of their life on what is essentially a lottery with rather poor odds, and find passion in doing things which, at best, would make me yawn. Maybe I'm just old, I don't know.

After a quick browse through lists on both days:<p>- Where have all the IoT companies gone?<p>- Cool seeing machine learning being used inside applications (The audio analyzer to separate and boost voices for conference calls comes to mind)<p>- Surprised at how many &quot;meh&quot; reactions I had. Too many grocery&#x2F;fashion and not enough bio&#x2F;energy game changers and I left feeling mostly uninspired by overall visions.<p>More power to everyone hustling out there though.

I am currently participating in another accelerator in London called Antler; and I have been exposed to ideas from 70 entrepreneurs. We are presenting to investors this week.<p>Also I am in YC Startup School too, which allows you to see what&#x27;s coming up in the world, and that&#x27;s awesome too.<p>It&#x27;s amazing to see that a significant percentage (~30%) of ideas they have come up with have been also thought of by others e.g. from the YC list independently to an uncanny extent.<p>Honestly it should not have caught me by surprise but it did.

In looking at all the bio-based companies they all seem ... mature. Like, going on their pages and seeing the people there, well, there are not a lot of &#x27;fresh&#x27; faces. Most of them are MDs&#x2F;PhDs or have some years on them. I think thats a great thing!

Fresh out of Y Combinator, Tandem lands millions from Andreessen Horowitz<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;08&#x2F;20&#x2F;tandem&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;08&#x2F;20&#x2F;tandem&#x2F;</a><p>&quot;is raising a $7.5 million seed financing at a valuation north of $30 million&quot;<p>&quot;We’re told several top venture capital firms were vying for a stake in Tandem. One firm even gifted the founders a tandem bike, sources tell TechCrunch, resorting to amusing measures to sway the Tandem team. But it was a16z — which has an established interest in the growing future of work sector, evidenced by its recent investment in the popular email app Superhuman — that ultimately won the coveted lead investor spot.&quot;

MyPetrolPump is genius. It&#x27;s last-mile delivery for gas (or Uber for gas), but solving a security and logistics problem for a high-value market. Only qualified truck drivers can move trucks, and you pay them per hour. So now you refuel the trucks behind closed doors while the truck is parked overnight and you only have to secure access for the petrol driver.

I can say that Tandem is the one which strikes me the most. I had a privilege to test the product in early beta and you can see the benefit of such solution. Basically Discord for work which I believe will be adopted soon by many companies.

here are all S19 companies <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.crunchdex.com&#x2F;s19" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.crunchdex.com&#x2F;s19</a>

&gt; TrustedFor: LinkedIn is just such an awful platform that there’s space for a startup to disrupt it by just remaking it. TrustedFor is building “LinkedIn 2.0,” a platform for professional profiles that is centered around recommendations from people that the users have actually worked alongside. The startup is leveraging the YC network pretty heavily to get associated companies on board.<p>Good luck. I&#x27;m happy to see someone trying to get into LinkedIn&#x27;s business. I&#x27;ve used LinkedIn close to when it started, but it is really getting on my nerves.<p>If they succeed, that could be really interesting on how to compete with an established company where the network effect is their real edge.

The Custom Movement sounded really interesting for a moment. I was already having fantasies about getting a pair of sneakers with thin soles, wide toe boxes, plenty of air holes and one the left shoe one size larger than the right.<p>Alas. It&#x27;s just about printing designs on sneakers.

I&#x27;m quite curious about Waves. There have been a number of unsuccessful attempts (that I&#x27;m aware of) to make a dating site&#x2F;app with kink matching, but it&#x27;s hard to keep the emphasis on sexual compatibility from completely overwhelming the other aspects of dating.<p>Looking at their site, there doesn&#x27;t appear to be any obvious secret sauce (the app is not available where I am) except perhaps that the range of &#x27;kinks&#x27; they&#x27;re catering to is limited to the mildest and most popular, so maybe they&#x27;re targeting a slightly more mainstream userbase?

Working in the area makes this text on Tensil’s page me extremely curious: “This gives you the performance of custom silicon at the cost of commodity hardware. With Tensil, you can roll out your dream chip in weeks instead of years, at prices measured in thousands instead of millions.” So they designed some fuse programmable ASIC for machine learning? Setting the fuses makes this ASIC “custom silicon”? ASIC for thousands? Sounds to good to be true.

I&#x27;m quite confused my Tensil, is the training of the model moved to their chips, or the final model? If the former, then are the chips locked in to whatever model they were built for, e.g. this chip only trains a multi-layer perceptron with n layers? Or are the chips re-programmable or FPGAs? If the latter, don&#x27;t most models run quite quickly on CPU after training anyways?

Vendr.com: A SaaS to keep track of your SaaS subscriptions.<p>and a 6.5k or 10k PER MONTH for someone to buy your SaaS subscriptions seems super expensive. I&#x27;m not too versed in the SaaS market but is this really something that you need a dedicated &quot;SaaS expert&quot; to manage for you?

Here are the ideas that I think have the most potential...<p>talar: Huge potential here. Cars are on their way out, and scheduled grocery delivery can replace it.<p>spotless materials: Coatings can make a huge difference in the way we interact with materials... in fact, for the most part, that&#x27;s all we interact with. better coatings make things better.<p>encellin: I believe that interacting with our bodies on a more finely tuned small scale is the future.<p>my petrol pump: I can see a lot of convinience happening here. Recurring customers whos lives are made better.<p>rejuvenation technologies: I want to see life extension succeed. If they have something that works then that&#x27;s fantastic for us all.<p>tensil: Baking AI seems like a good compromise for a lot of reasons. known capabilities, and known weaknesses make for predictability.

How is Globe going to prevent hourly escort rentals?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;prooftrading.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;prooftrading.com&#x2F;</a> this looks like a resume template. The &quot;Progress&quot; section&#x27;s content is mind boggling to see.<p>&quot;hire CTO&quot; as a goal<p>Team capabilities star ratings...

Is there a directory which lists how the YC starutps are doing? As in how many from 2016 batch are still around, and how many didn&#x27;t make it? I am sure there has to be one around.

wow- I didn&#x27;t even have the patience to read through all of them. How does YC coach so many? At 15 min a startup, they can cursory mentor 32 startups&#x2F;day or 160&#x2F;wk if they do nothing else. That doesn&#x27;t seem like coaching. More like a certificate school.

MyPetrolPump: Bold move to start a business for ICE cars today. Those things need to be all but gone by 2040.

Trella is going to get sued by Trello.

&gt; GitStart allows you to send small coding tasks (from JIRA, etc.) to its global network of developers. They charge a fee for each task — but if the developer does a good enough job that you’d like to hire them more permanently, GitStart also makes a commission.<p>When was this company created? I thought the Git trademark policy disallows anybody new from naming things “Git”-thing.