from Hacker News

Companies from the YC Summer 2018 Batch

by Sreyanth on 8/18/18, 3:29 PM with 95 comments

by chiefofgxbxl on 8/18/18, 5:49 PM
Cool batch, particularly LemonBox which provides personalized vitamin packs to buyers in China. There's a huge user base right there, and I imagine the U.S. market is largely saturated / competitive already.
I must respectfully express my concern over: "Grabb-it Inc. turns rideshare cars into digital billboards." There's probably a market for it as online advertisers face an uncertain future with possible regulation, and at least scrutiny, of social media companies, but is this really the future we want to build? Where the only goal of some of these companies is to unrelentingly cover every square inch of the world with ads? Surely there are lawsuits waiting to happen when drivers, distracted from these eye-catching ads on all the cars around them, kill people.
I am worried that our public spaces are turning increasingly hostile to our citizens. Won't this trend continue to make the public space more unpalatable?
by AriaMinaei on 8/18/18, 9:25 PM
Optic [0] caught my eye. They seem to have made possible a new kind of abstraction in code. Something that's different from both functions and macros. It's a kind of abstraction that can be arbitrarily customized at each call site, yet retain its identity across all of them.
Example:
```
  foo = do_a()
  bar = do_b(foo)
```
Example 2:
```
  foo = do_a()
  bar = do_z(foo)
  baz = do_b(bar)
```
Example 3:
```
  foo = do_a()
  bar = foo + 10
  baz = do_b(bar)
```
The three examples have strong similarity in their first and last statements. There is a pattern there, but that pattern cannot be abstracted into a single macro or a function. So this pattern does exist, and is recognizable to the human eye, but the language does not allow one to express it.
What Optic seems to do is to recognize the pattern, create a single model out of it, and allow you to re-use that pattern elsewhere, or even transform it into new ones and re-use those new patterns elsewhere.
Again, this would be a new kind of abstraction. One whose leaks are easier to fix. You can have your cake and eat it too!
[0] https://useoptic.com
by l33tbro on 8/18/18, 10:45 PM
I think companies like Grabb-It Labs only make the world more hellish. I really don't understand why you would start a company like this. On my commute each day they've started video advertising on my local bus and also in the subway. It just really SUCKS to be bombarded with more shitty ads for banks and big box stores.
I'm not trying to scold the founders. It just confounds me that people would start companies like this when there's clearly no net value to social capital.
by Jemaclus on 8/18/18, 6:22 PM
The CSPA thing is interesting to me because the founder/CEO was formerly the head of engineering at Crunchyroll, and interviewing at Crunchyroll was one of the worst interviewing experiences I've ever had.
Let's just say I'm skeptical. I hope it works out, but...
MacD looks interesting... but I'm kinda surprised YC would invest. A Mac n Cheese company? Very strange.
I'm very excited about the biotech space, so looking forward to seeing how that shakes out.
by reikonomusha on 8/18/18, 6:06 PM
CSPA [1] sounded interesting, and is something similar to what I’ve been wanting to do, but after looking at the sample exam, I was pretty disappointed.
I thought it would be about computer science and engineering fundamentals. It has some of that (e.g., representation of integers, memory access speeds, etc.) but I also noticed it’s full of completely inessential things, like escaping XHTML, identifying valid JSON payloads in HTTP, and alignment rules in CSS. There was heaps of JavaScript, HTML, CSS, SQL, and drawn out shell exercises.
To be clear, I’m not claiming that’s all useless knowledge. It’s not! But, as a hiring manager, I’d rather look for strong critical thinking skills and strong foundational knowledge. Remembering that keys in JSON must be quoted strings is not at all a demonstration of that.
The exam seems to be more of a “well rounded full-stack engineer” rather than what they suggest.
[1] https://cspa.io/
by abhisuri97 on 8/18/18, 9:01 PM
I found CSPA to be an interesting proposal. I'm currently studying CS and Biology and found that the comparison of the exam to the "SAT" of computer science is a bit of a misnomer. The SAT requires minimal prior knowledge to take (albeit if you want to score well, you end up needing to study for it through test prep books etc). I think perhaps it may be more likened to an MCAT equivalent (or any professional school exam equivalent) because of the need to know about certain subject fields.
Someone also brought up a point regarding the validity of testing for skills in web development if test takers won't end up in those fields anyway. However, when looking at similar exams (e.g. MCAT), you can make the argument that the majority of doctors won't use Organic Chemistry or won't need to know about the minutiae of Psychology & Sociology to be successful. The MCAT becomes a successful discriminator of good vs bad test takers because of the amount of work and critical thinking skills that is needed to cover the litany of subjects tested. Similarly, the CSPA could follow a similar pattern as the MCAT by testing a range of subjects as a means of measuring one's ability to learn a large sample of topics.
The only thing I can really think of that CSPA can improve upon is providing more preparatory materials. Additionally, it'd be useful to see how people end up performing on the exam and if there is an actual "Bell Curve" like distribution of scores that results.
by wolframhempel on 8/19/18, 6:49 AM
I have to admit that I'm missing the take-over-the-world/crazy-moonshot kind of company among the entries. I appreciate that Y-Combinator is a commercial institution with commercial goals and that personalized daily vitamin packs, better SaaS conversion and AI-powered programming are all sensible iterations on existing themes - but wouldn't there have been space for at least one next-gen Googe/Space X/Hyperloop sort of venture? Surely someone applied that'd fit that bill.
by phkahler on 8/18/18, 5:25 PM
Personalize testimonials to the person reading them? Did I read that correctly? Fake reviews taylored to the reader?
by syntaxing on 8/19/18, 2:13 AM
Saddens me that there are not many mechanical hardware companies from any YC year/season and this year is no exception.
by sattoshi on 8/18/18, 8:19 PM
Cutting edge biotech and a mac n cheese company in the same list. Wow.
by lefstathiou on 8/18/18, 5:05 PM
Nice batch. I think the concept federacy is tackling has huge potential. We lose a lot of sleep thinking about security and I like the idea of being able to tap a hive mind to help us plug security gaps our team is unaware of (and we would pay a lot for it).
by JustARandomGuy on 8/18/18, 11:18 PM
MAC'D sounds like an interesting idea. If some of the options were healthy (perhaps you could pair mac'n'cheese with tomato soup) I could definitely see myself eating here.
Open up in Chicago please!
by ArtWomb on 8/18/18, 4:33 PM
Congrats! These all look really great ;)
Biocontainment solutions (Synvivia) that prevent environmental contamination of genetically modified organisms looks to be a very high demand market.
by UncleEntity on 8/18/18, 8:40 PM
> Synvivia develops biomolecular ON-OFF switches to make synthetic biology safe for use outside of the laboratory.
Yep...then the on-off switch jumps species and the only way to survive is to consume a particular (patent pending) brand of parsnip which can't be grown from seed.
Pretty much the only place I could reasonably be accused of being a luddite is in releasing GM organisms into the wild.
by vyrotek on 8/18/18, 6:10 PM
I like the idea of Grabb-It but it also does seem like it would very distracting to have those ads playing all around me on the road.
by jxub on 8/20/18, 9:09 AM
The downside to Web MD might be that any charlatan may pretend to be a doctor.
When you've got the answers for common diseases from the doctor who gets them from an app, the doctor himself is a repleacable middleman and can be anybody with enough confidence, even if faked.
by Fomite on 8/18/18, 10:22 PM
"Customers pick a cheese sauce, a pasta base, add unlimited toppings like roasted broccoli and mushrooms, and top it off with anything from truffle oil to Hot Cheetos." - So basically Noodles and Co.
by Fomite on 8/18/18, 10:36 PM
The concept of HappiLabs calls to me, and while spendy for a new lab, is definitely less than a qualified lab manager would be.
Sadly, really only useful for wet labs.
by shawn on 8/18/18, 7:01 PM
For example, Mutiny can dynamically change a website’s customer testimonials to match the visitor’s industry.
Clever idea!
by jboggan on 8/18/18, 6:36 PM
Has anyone used Optic yet? I'm not a Javascript developer but I'm interested in the concept.
by person_of_color on 8/19/18, 12:44 AM
Good luck to all. But for those who want to join Rocket Ship companies any unicorns here?