YC is One of Fast Company's 50 Most Innovative Companies

pg 14 years ago |

Congrats also to Bump, Reddit, Airbnb, Dropbox, and Disqus!

hack_edu 14 years ago | |

I'm really curious what Bump brings to the table, at all, let alone what makes them worth the same breath as the rest of these companies.

It feels more like a trivial app put together on a hack weekend or Man Month than actual innovation.

pg 14 years ago | | |

Have you used it?

daeken 14 years ago | | |

That's a pretty poor response to a valid question. While the tone of the question was harsher than I think was warranted, the question of "why is this something I should care about?" is something that should be at the forefront of every product developer and investor's mind.

pg 14 years ago | | |

Not at all. Surely the obvious first step in talking to someone about an app is to figure out how much they already know about it.

cperciva 14 years ago | | |

While you may have intended your question as a question, that's not the impression it gave. My first reading of it was as a rudely sarcastic dismissal -- "obviously you don't know what you're talking about" -- and I was about to downvote it on grounds of incivility until I noticed that you were the author and realized that was probably not how you intended it to be read.

hack_edu 14 years ago | | |

I have. Polish is polish, the utility it provides feels pretty minor.

pg 14 years ago | | |

Utility is number of users times how much it helps each one. This is the sort of app that helps a very large number of people, but only briefly each time. It's sort of like Google in that respect. I'm not sure how many users Bump has, because this is one of those companies like Dropbox that grows so fast that the last number I heard is always way off, but many millions. They may have more users than anyone else we've funded.

They're also like Google in that most of the hard work is behind the scenes, which tends to affect users' perception of how much the app is doing. To an inexperienced programmer it might seem like it wouldn't be hard to build a search engine-- and in fact it isn't hard to write a crawler and build an index. What makes it hard to build the actual Google is (a) the scale on which they operate and (b) the refinements they employ beyond merely searching an index. It's basically the same with Bump. They have to operate on a large scale, and to work reliably they have to deal with all sorts of weird edge cases.

daeken 14 years ago | | |

I don't think this really answers the question of what Bump brings to the table, though. There's no doubt in my mind that Bump is growing like crazy, or that they're doing really hard work to make that happen and provide a good product, but... none of this matters to me as a user. What I care about is what Bump gives me that other products/services don't. What is that?

bishnu 14 years ago |

The Occupy Movement is ranked #7. This article seems very linkbait-y.

gee_totes 14 years ago | |

Since when is the Occupy Movement a company?

To quote the article: Occupy’s initial public offering, if you will, puts it in very good company.

If I will? No, actually, I think I will not.

noahr 14 years ago | | |

Occupy has lots of things in common with startups, which we talk specifically about in the story. "Disruptive. Small-d democratic. Transparent. Tech savvy. Design savvy. Local and global."

The IPO part is a joke, sorry the humor was lost on you.

benologist 14 years ago |

This list seems like an odd mix of pandering, genuinely exciting companies, and companies that did something interesting years ago and rank for still existing.

noahr 14 years ago | |

Companies that have existed for years can still do innovative things. We've highlighted those new efforts in the entries. Jawbone, for example, has been around for ages but last year had a huge hit with the Jambox. In that entry Farhad Manjoo also writes about the Up, which was flying off shelves until they found a defect and pulled it.

corin_ 14 years ago | | |

Would you mind explaining Reddit's inclusion in the same way? Certainly the write-up of Reddit in this piece doesn't seem to highlight anything new or innovative (unless campaigning against SOPA counts).

Cheers

(I feel slightly bad for picking upon Reddit, they were just the first example that came to mind when glancing at the list.)

noahr 14 years ago | | |

The first thing to note is that Reddit was not on the main list of the 50 Most Innovative. It was included in list of top 10 for Media, which is where we recognize innovators in a more general way within different industries. The main focus of Reddit's entry, after explaining the site to someone who might never have heard of it before, were the "Ask Me Anything" Q&As. Those interviews were far more social and newsworthy than most Q&As that appeared in msm. Although the series didn't start last year, it began gaining traction and became more newsworthy during 2011. Many innovations are slow to mature, or even fail despite their unique approach. The Reddit entry recognized that those Q&As have come into their own.

benologist 14 years ago | | |

Here's a better example, and it does suck to single anyone out, especially one that I use and like:

Dropbox - the only thing they've done recently was take small evolutionary steps on the innovation they showed 5 years ago when they launched.

There was so little to say about what else they've done that you basically just mention they're growing and making money. Which is great, but does growth and revenue make them the 22nd most innovative company in the world?

noahr 14 years ago | | |

I see your point. My question: Who in the cloud space is doing more innovative work that is targeted to consumers?

wr1472 14 years ago |

No mention of KhanAcademy under education?

noahr 14 years ago | |

Sal Khan is #7 on our Most Creative People In Business List from June: http://www.fastcompany.com/most-creative-people/2011/sal-kha...

andrewhillman 14 years ago |

YC is pretty remarkable and it starts at the top with PG. I also feel YC wouldn't be what it is today without HN as it extends the YC community just enough to make a huge difference... setting itself apart from the other accelerators. Congrats to all involved.

digitalboss 14 years ago |

My repost from FC.

Congrats and Thank you Paul - for helping out the passionate inventors push their ideas to the next level - what Paul has done to the startup community in the Bay Area, is what Jim Harbaugh did to the bay area for football :)