YC: Requests for Startups(ycombinator.com) |
YC: Requests for Startups(ycombinator.com) |
Bring manufacturing back to America
New space companies
Careful not shooting yourself in the foot there …
How about: do you have any path to profitability, or you're still on the path to lose hundreds of millions of dollars per year or get sold to the highest bidder?
If you haven't made anything users want, then you might need to change your idea, and that's what that sentence is referring to.
Okay, let's assume that is true
> That's the trailhead for all paths to profitability.
You can open a list of YC's companies, and then find profitable ones. An eye opener.
For those who are profitable now, you can also look at how long they have existed, how long they have been profitable, and how long it will take them to break even considering those losses.
That explains the admin on this forum throwing a "you're a nationalist!" at me recently, turns out I was ahead of the game on that (only that I was doing it for the wrong geo-political bloc)
> NEW DEFENSE TECHNOLOGY
Ooo, that certainly explains lots and lots of stuff, including the "warnings" whenever the comments don't support the correct geo-political bloc mentioned above.
All in all very interesting, turns out that YC and the money behind it has smelt where things are going and are following the likes of Eric Schmidt. Let's see what the time will tell.
People often reach for an exotic explanation in their own case, but anyone who's familiar with HN's rules can see how your comments have been breaking them. It's just that simple.
We don't care about your, or any other commenter's "geopolitics". It's all endlessly more tedious and obvious than that.
Are you referring to this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39315543 If so, it seems wildly unrelated to "BRING MANUFACTURING BACK TO AMERICA".
https://news.ycombinator.com/chinamod
Are there more?
[0]https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/lists
[?]https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...
Named after somebody better known for other ideas?
That one stuck around because the perception that it corrects (of HN moderation being against $COUNTRY, where $COUNTRY = China in this case) shows up semi-regularly—as does the opposite perception, of course. These things always come in opposing pairs.
As a side note, it's interesting to see how different users react to reading such a set of comments, i.e. comments that contradict their assumptions about how HN is moderated. In some cases the reaction is something like, "Wow, I had no idea - thanks for the information" and the person presumably goes on to adjust their priors. In other cases the reaction is a complex explanation of how none of that matters and the original perception remains intact, even though it's inaccurate.
>It’s interesting to see how different users react to reading such a set of comments…
I’ve noticed this myself and I’ve always been surprised at the wide variety of users that fall into either of these buckets. You sort of expect this from new(er) accounts. But some of the arguments from created: ~2000’s, karma: 20,000+ accounts in detached threads are wild.
I suspect this comes from a lot of moderation actually being quite transparent, but not obvious. If one has any interest they can actually go learn a lot w.r.t. moderation. But zero information is forced unless one goes looking or eventually runs afoul.
In the lack of a story, it’s easy to invent a lot of assumptions about what is done and why. People inevitably see the invented assumptions of others and repeat them.
Or perhaps there are some topics where its so close to home that any slight, real or perceived, makes it impossible to be reasoned with.
I thought I was just being overly picky but this request shows that there are lots of exciting ideas out there.
Why do I see such a disconnect?
Lots of smart people are yearning for opportunities to tackle more ambitious problems, but many I speak to, mention that they don't believe capital is available for high risk companies. Contrary, like we see here, I hear investors yearn for more ambitious startups.
My take is that there's a mechanism missing somewhere between these groups. You don't just bootstrap and MVP a fusion reactor, to raise capital, you don't even go about doing meaningful due diligence beforehand, as these paradigm shifting technologies comes with a kind of event horizon, where projections become as meaningless as asking Edison for the ROI on utility electricity, prior to inventing the lightbulb.
I don't want to plug anything from our gracious host, Y-combinator, but we have started Unbelievable Labs, to make headway on exactly this Catch-22 problem.
My "RFS" includes: Electron-beam drilling, Nuclear Isomeric Energy Systems, Industrial-scale nuclear transmutation, Systems Biology for nano-scale structural assembly of macroscopic structures, Telekinetic manipulation (EEG+actuators), Electro-Hydrodynamic Air-Space Drive and similar "unbelievable" concepts.
We have concluded that funding for these concepts requires at least proof of a new technological principle, and we are scraping together a pool of capital from dreamy angels, as well as a cadre of possible scientists and entrepreneurs, and then instead of waiting for "somebody" to form a startup, and hope they will allow us to invest in them, we are funding the pre-seed, setting the team and getting them started. If we can convince larger corporations and nations to fund this as a kind of "Bell Labs" for the post-monopolistic world, we would have succeeded in our dreams. I don't think anything less can generate the kind of progress requested here.
Let's hope YC and others can accomplish this pivot from easy-apps to hard-progress soon.
What really unlocked ML was when you didn't need to have a deep academic background in ML to be able to use it. Now that the primitives exist, every software engineer can build a compelling ML app.
I'm not sure if robotics is there yet, but if not it probably will be.
- antithesis - topless computing - programmable company
I was surprised to see ERP as a real option - interesting
Is something I'm working on right now - it's all Open Source but I'm looking at what could make it Commercial Open Source or what additional offerings would make sense to businesses
Ahh.. haha. Yes it was certainly the innovation and industrialism of the UK that did it, not the inevitable result of centuries of imperialism, conquest and subjugation.
Profit!
alternatively find me on the founder matching platform: https://www.startupschool.org/cofounder-matching/candidate/t...
for reference these are the ideas: 1/ New enterprise resource planning software (ERPs) 2/ AI to build enterprise software 3/ Better enterprise glue 4/ LLMs for manual back office processes in legacy enterprises
One idea is getting rid of backroom office workers, the other is to replace developers. Plenty of underlying sadism here.
Who will peruse Hacker News if no one is a software engineer?
What they’re proposing here seems so doable. Certainly not EASY, but POSSIBLE. Companies tackling this problem could legitimately change the world.
They don’t go into specifics, but it seems to me like this means making MRIs cheap enough, with low enough false positive rates, that every day ppl can get them frequently. Probably ~twice a year, given how fast cancer spreads.
I’m aware of companies doing proactive MRIs that cost ~$2K/scan, that aren’t covered by health insurance. Great for the wealthy, but seems infeasible for every day ppl. I’m not aware of anyone legitimately trying to make this affordable/scalable enough that most people can get scanned frequently. Maybe they’re out there and I just haven’t heard of them? Or were you referring more to the ~$2K/scan companies?
Announcement post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39369766
The same will certainly apply to the intra-head security you want against fake content and propaganda.
The cyber security market was valued at USD 153.65 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow from USD 172.32 billion in 2023 to USD 424.97 billion in 2030, so apparently people are buying cybersecurity solutions.
That one sounds more like a salesperson + consultant rather than a software startup.
Unless YC is looking for a startup that lobbies against for-profit health insurance this is more like "eliminating middlemen and replacing them with our own in healthcare"
"Uber for healthcare" now pivoting to "OpenAI for healthcare"
You don't need "disruption" or a technological revolution to fix healthcare, you just need socialism. Just look at what Cuba is doing for once and learn something.
Defense startups should not be normalized. If you are going to forcibly normalize it then don't pick sides as that's not good for business.
The idea is to provide a square where users can discover ,share, collaborate discuss on various chatGPT prompts and their corresponding outputs .
Here's the pitch and some details, in case anyone else is interested in the idea:
> Supportal uses AI to generate internal tooling for startups that enables founders to scale customer-support without having to rely on engineering resources.
> Given some simple input context like tech-stack and a database schema, Supportal uses AI to auto-generate internal tools which allow customer-support to easily answer questions about and take action on customer-data without needing help from an engineer.
> Supportal offers founders a fully-featured self or cloud-hosted web UI.
Retool (https://retool.com), Zapier (https://zapier.com), Airtable (https://www.airtable.com), Superblocks (https://www.superblocks.com), and Google AppSheet (https://about.appsheet.com) would likely be primary competitors, although their products require heavy user interaction to build internal tools either through composition in a WYSIWYG editor, low/no-code solutions, or integrations expertise using a full programming language.
Although I'm no longer there, we actually evaluated and/or used all of these tools at Pulley, so I've had first-hand experience with their friction and where the gaps exist that Supportal would fill.
These tools are also all targeted at integrations-experts who have the technical knowledge to write code and spend time building the tool they want.
Supportal aims to generate the tooling you need intelligently via AI introspection and get you up and running with useful command and query tools to help your customer-support team take action and gain insights without help from engineering right out of the box.
My most recent experience comes building internal tools for Pulley; I built the initial version of the internal tools in ~3 weeks and added features to it within Pulley over ~2 years. Roughly ~2-3 months of full-time work spread over that time period.
Features were added as we identified gaps in our support agents ability to answer questions and take action, which often required dedicated engineering resources to help with, leading to a productivity loss for both groups.
That said, I haven't actually built out anything that would _generate_ tools like this yet, but I've done enough adjacent work in the codegen/AI space in the last couple years that I feel confident I could put the pieces together.
Did the YC folks have a falling out with OpenAI and disagree that AGI is here? Or maybe the opposite - they’re letting OpenAI take the industry uncontested… What’s the hacker news policy on casually floating (ill-informed) accusations of cartel activities? ;)
PS big laughs from me on seeing “cure cancer” halfway down a list of otherwise fairly capitalist short-term priorities. I’m sure they made that decision for a reason but I think the end result is a Freudian slip on behalf of our entire culture
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ameelio
https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/hy70st/i_am_zo_orchin...
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/01/1146370950/prison-phone-call-...
> When the law goes into effect next month, Massachusetts will join Connecticut, California, Minnesota and Colorado in eliminating prisoner phone call fees.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38454743 (citations)
Commissary Club (formerly 70 Million Jobs) tried on the post incarceration jobs topic, but did not obtain traction (casualty of the pandemic).
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/commissary-club
(some solutions simply cannot succeed when profit is a requirement; they require systems you throw money in and outcomes come out instead of profit)
That said, there's still plenty that can be done without policy work, but it's a hard slog and requires a lot of legal work. Reviewing RFPs, submitting RFPs, integrating with the existing systems, implementing regulatory requirements, all while trying to keep the codebase and tech stack manageable with a small team and when contract periods can be multiple years long.
It's going to take some time, but we're still going and still growing.
https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey/status/1530604281732116481?...
(Not sure how long you would need to wait before getting paid?)
You can't make prisoner's lives better / post prison lives better IF the voters and politicians don't wish to / pay you to do so...
The rest looks much more like services than products.
The fact that one of the fastest-growing markets is omitted by YC is shocking to me. The opportunity to build $1B companies, which seems to be one of YC's acceptance criteria, is enormous.
I don't know how far or close you are to the security field, but I do share your sentiment that many tools and so-called security solutions are useless and don't solve the problem. So it's now even more necessary to go and build new solutions. The problem persists and grows.
Anyway, I do agree there's plenty to work on the solutions. But those will probably come from areas like "correctness", "user empowerment", and etc. The closest I see to it is "policy enforcement".
- Assessing applications for a mortgage or a business loan
Really? Are we really giving these things as prime examples of what LLMs can automate.
I do not want my mortgage application or business loan rejected because some un-auditable, non-deterministic, inference decided so.
The tech upper classes really are sheltered from the real impact on real people that trusting IT can have.
There's countless scandals of faulty algorithms (which are tractable) causing people real pain, often with suicides resulting.
Using a black-box inference machine instead is MUCH worse.
On the one hand, you're correct that it does nothing for the American worker to bring manufacturing back if it means huge buildings with skeleton crews and machines that effectively run themselves. I don't particularly have a solution for this. Americans have gotten used to the price of goods being artificially low because of inexpensive labor in impoverished countries. Unless we want to take a manufacturing approach akin to Germany or the Nordic countries, focusing on high quality precision built or luxury items, we simply can't produce goods at commodity prices while both paying people enough to live well on and producing the kind of profit that is required by investors. So that's where YC sees machines as solving that conflict, at no benefit to working people.
That said, there is the advantage that we have seen how fragile the global JIT supply chain is to disruptions. Either political, environmental or just plain Acts of God like COVID. Having goods produced much closer to where they're consumed is something I think every country needs to invest in. Especially for goods that aren't just nice-to-haves but necessary for basic functioning of society. Things like construction and repair materials, medicines, medical devices, etc. I support building up a greater local resilience over global dependence, especially what with climate change on the horizon.
I wish we could do this in a way that meant good blue collar jobs with strong benefits and union wages. But you can't ever expect a investors YC to take that path.
This seems analogous to the transition from bespoke manufacturing of goods to mass production.
I think what we need is leadership that can get people excited, in good faith, about a future where small groups of people can produce goods for orders of magnitude less capital, effort, etc. with robotics, ML, and other tech.
Today a popular dystopian narrative of tech is that it’s being deployed by the elite to enrich themselves and build moats around their fiefdoms. Feudalism doesn’t get pluralities excited. How can that mainstream narrative be changed in a manner that makes people clearly understand how they can be a beneficiary instead of an exploit?
I don't think that right. It still means goods are being produced in America, which means:
1. Greater security of production against geopolitical threats, and
2. More goods being produced overall, meaning cheaper goods.
Even without significant employment, those are good things!
> My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.
But if the losers of globalism keep getting purposefully shortchanged I can more easily foresee them deciding to change the system by force.
I don't think that's a terribly likely outcome, but much more likely than Red Dawn.
Maybe it does those things. But clearly it doesnt do “nothing but” those things. It brings manufacturing back which is the entire point. I really think you’re ignoring the whole point to go off on a highly partisan political tangent.
If the point is to bring back manufacturing salaries in the quantity and amount previously available, it's not the entire point.
It is completely unsurprising to me that those making this nonsense claim never accept the burden of proof. If they did, it would only further reveal that they are pushing total bullshit.
Of course, to put this solely on Tesla isn't completely fair. A lot of the problems with how Tesla does business are symptoms of the larger crisis in how businesses are run here, but I think that trying to bring manufacturing back without solving the corporate governance problems that make doing it well infeasible (and indeed caused a lot of the offshoring in the first place) is likely a fool's errand. Most businesses face little discipline on quality in the form of either regulation or competition (which tends to be eaten by mergers even when it arises), and intense pressure from investors to cut corners at every turn
Interesting to see that overall the VC ghouls seem a bit out of ideas on how to squeeze more cents out of a dollar.
The one thing on that list that remotely makes any sense is leveraging LLM tech to automate legacy manual processes. Scalability on that though, whew.
Because of that stake, they want an "exit" in some form, and the drive to that exit will pave the road to user-hostile software and make it the path of least resistance.
They became traditional corporate long ago. Shows in their recent portfolio.
Notably neither of those two groups of people are SV based, both NYC affiliated.
Obviously I don't know anything about you or your ideas and I don't mean to offend but I've typically assumed that a YC rejection means they disqualified the candidate for one reason or another.
Do they give feedback in their rejection? I'm considering applying.
YC is seeking startups for
"NEW WAR TECHNOLOGY" Killing is our business. and business is good.
Yes, what we need are startups focused on killing people in ever more efficient ways, with the least amount of threat to our own people.
Hopefully, we can invent a even more efficient way of genocide by inventing something much stronger than a hydrogen bomb, but with less radiation. Friendly and looks good on TV.
The future so bright. I gotta wear shades.
Many years ago, when the state was more honest the US had a "Department of War".
Which it ought to have kept given that few wars ( or "military conflicts") that the US engages in is about Defense of our home country. Our patch of dirt. Easy to see since they usually take place on a different continent.
In 1984 they call it "Department of Peace".
--------------
>NEW DEFENSE TECHNOLOGY - Jared Friedman and Gustaf Alströmer
The US is now engaged in large-scale conflicts in several regions that threaten to change our world. While the US has historically led the world in defense technology, the defense contractors it depends on have grown slow and inefficient, bloated by decades of cost-plus contracts.
SpaceX showed the world that a private space company could be vastly more effective than the publicly-funded United Launch Alliance. New companies that sell to the DoD like Palantir and Anduril are showing that the same thing is true for defense tech.
Silicon Valley was born in the early 20th century as an R&D area for the US military. Early Silicon Valley companies were largely funded by the DoD and played a key role in WWII by building military radar, code-breaking equipment, and components for the atomic bomb.
This decade is the time to return Silicon Valley to these roots.
--
In this list without a single request for managing corruption in .gov, the senate, how we address world situations which difficulties are FN COMPOUNDED by the very tools youre asking for -- AND the fact that you claim Alignment is an important feature...
Palantir muc, inqtel much, every fn defense thing
Your list is literally CONfinment.
2. AI for defense == We can profit here.
5. Are you fn daft: East India Company, do you speak it? Show me how many hands you have. "The UK became the world's richest country in the 19th century by being the workshop of the world. Death, murder conquer brought this, not some hipster Build a Startup They Said.. meme claim"
10. Enterspiese resource mgmt ; so HR on AI jax? FUCK that.
15. DC much?
19. Ive built more hospitals than you can shake a stick at. This is a nuanced comment:
Eliminating the middleman in healthcare, your startup list will ONLY be medical records "disruptors" against EPIC and such and a boon to insurance - you cant kill the Pharma PornStars slinging pills. If you want to eliminate 'middlemen' - KILL PHARMA ADVERTISING AND PHARMA PILL PUSHING. (Source, I have designed built, implemented, commissioned and GO-LIVE more hospitals than you have been admitted to in your life. (this is a political issue, not a tech/pharma issue, per se -- the middlemen are the political policy makers and this is just a money hole)
Your RFS is written by grifter VCs who have no soul.
Prove me wrong.
I want technological improvement, but the nuanced self-serving focus of this RFS makes me want to puke (its not the what, its the how, and the complete abrogation of any sense of historic context on all the technological platforms that brought us here, and the lack of awareness by these requests...
These requests are NOT to inspire you - they are to feed their input....
When we heard AI was dangerous... think of a single one of the RFSs that do not include @sama.
-----
@Dang, and @SAMA
--
In this list without a single request for managing corruption in .gov, the senate, how we address world situations which difficulties are FN COMPOUNDED by the very tools youre asking for.
---
Where EXACTLY do YOU think we should be plannig for and that includes
SERIOUSLY
What are HN's motives.
------
Seriously
They're very young as far as automotive manufacturers go, and this is a pretty normal part of the 'figuring out how to build a car' learning cycle. South Korean car companies had dismal quality issues decades after they were founded, and now they're much better. Manufacturing complex goods at scale is just really really hard and takes a ton of process knowledge and human capital. Tesla it at a normal part of the automotive manufacturing lifecycle
I think a big problem is that modern American firms outsource practically all required expertise to suppliers so they are left with no core competency apart from marketing, lobbying and financial engineering. Its my impression that Tesla does more stuff themselves so they were quicker to innovate and experiment. But not sure if that's just their marketing and cult that leads me to believe this. But I do know that electric cars were long thought impractical and dead, and their sudden rise in popularity coincided with Tesla creating a good electric car
This is just on the physical components side. Tesla is also continuously dealing with scandals about data provenance, transparency, the false promises and dangerous consequences of its pushes toward autonomous driving, and of course the same nickel-and-dime nonsense other tech companies do like trying to charge subscriptions for every little feature, gradually rolling out user-hostile behavior in a proprietary software ecosystem, litigation threats toward victims of accidents who seek any remedy or even accountability for harms caused by many of these issues, etc.
It serves as a better exemplar of how much hype and marketing to attract investment drive the success of an American company in the current environment than of how onshore manufacturing could work
EDIT: Also, comparable in what sense?
Though, a lot of advice given to YC companies is on how to build big companies that scale (unicorn+), so if you don't plan on doing that, you may not get very much out of the program.
I do admit that I don't want a unicorn either, so YC wouldn't be a good fit.
Every single entity who invests in your company wants an exit.
I am bootstrapping. I own 100% of the company.
I have spent years building my stack. This stack gives me extreme velocity.
For example, I built my own localization. I query the OS for the locale, but beyond that, everything is mine. This allows me to make more assumptions and move faster.
In addition, this allows me to cull tech debt aggressively. [1] After years of this, when other codebases are molasses, mine is clean and easy to extend.
In other words, I did the hard work upfront, before getting clients. I hope this will give me the ability to add the "vital few" with few resources.
[1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2023/12/code-is-not-technical-debt/
This works out well because it's the global optimum. YC has much more success optimizing for helping founders than it would by trying to squeeze individual lemons.
That said, that sibling comnent suggests that YC is for potential unicorns, and I don't want that either. So YC is not for me.
Though I will say nothing wrong with unicorns per se.
One note: technically my software isn't quite Open Source; it's source available. [0]
I will have my first release in less than two months, hopefully. It will include a scripting language and a build system.
If the language gets interest, I'll expand it and build the standard library.
If the build system gets interest, I will expand it. The end goal is Nix for mere mortals.
If neither gets interest, I will have to move to my next idea: VCS with project management and that handles large, binary files.
Beyond that, we'll see.
I have a business website, but not yet for those projects. I will at release, including tutorials.
You can read an old commit of design docs at [1], [2], and [3].
It's just me; I want to run my business like Hwaci, the SQLite guys. That also reduces overhead and will let me provide excellent support [4] for paying clients.
[0]: https://gavinhoward.com/2023/12/is-source-available-really-t...
[1]: https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/src/branch/master/docs/yao
[2]: https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/src/branch/master/docs/rig
[3]: https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/src/branch/master/docs/yar
That being said, dev tools is one of the sectors they have stopped funding, seemingly.
I am just different; I don't want gold. I want:
* Sufficient money for my needs and no more.
* To change the industry towards professional standards. [1] [2]
[1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2023/11/how-to-fund-foss-save-it-fro...
[2]: https://gavinhoward.com/2022/10/we-must-professionalize-prog...
Its not that automation necessarily brings back manufacturing, its that if it does its not only going to increase social and political division.
The truth is the applicants have to have a story that resonates with whoever reviews your submission. Sometimes people jive over a shared problem space, sometimes they just like people who remind them of themselves or who come from "trust networks" they respect. The latter cases are where the bias keeps seeping in.
And just because they don't pick you for an interview doesn't mean you were disqualified forever. A lot of people reapply and have success. There are just so few slots compared to applicants that most don't hear anything.
I address this in the second paragraph.
> More goods being produced overall, meaning cheaper goods.
I'm not convinced cheaper, more abundant goods are the top problem to solve right now. Especially as wants get cheaper, needs are getting much more expensive. And low and stagnant wages at the bottom means survival becomes increasingly difficult, despite cheaper candy and toys.
Namely, it requires more of a model basis - materials and tolerances in the 3D model. That enables better design automation and things like defined mechanical interfaces in a machine readable format. Think DARPA FANG/AVM. It also includes a mathematically sound definition or approximation of GD&T.
End result is fewer firms, fewer employees, more productivity and lower lot sizes. That means more efficiency and adaptability with higher wages and more intense training.
It also means that designing, making and selling things becomes less capital intensive. In theory every mechanically inclined person can be creating solutions. Hardware gets a little closer to looking like software because open source can be a real thing. Etc.
However, there are rumblings that standards and liability will be imposed on the industry.
In that case, I would be well-positioned as someone who could accept that liability for a price. Your run-of-the-mill build system created by volunteers? Not so much.
My wallet unfortunately does not.
Bootstrapping is hard, and I know that I am lucky to be able to...thus far.
If the world would still be net better off with the VC-backed software, and it wouldn't get made any other way, I don't think it would be immoral to take it, so long as effort is made to follow the harder path.
The problem is not the need for a narrative change. The need is actual change.
Yes, there is "actual change" that's needed by a lot of actors in tech, but that alone won't be enough. Ideally we see both "actual change" and "narrative change" happen in tandem that get people excited about the future.
Maybe take a crack at it, what is incorrect with the "feudalism" narrative? what is the better way of framing it that you're implying exists?
Let's look at "Inequality has increased pretty massively". One anecdote paints a picture of billionaires getting richer and wages of the working class stagnating. Another narrative paints the opposite picture that tech has brought billions of people out of extreme poverty over the past few decades. Both are true and can be supported by data.
I haven't quite put it into words yet, but I think the key to a narrative that gets people excited about the future is one that makes it very concrete how people will benefit.
I do regularly see gaps that I find unsatisfying, which I think is a better place for me to start so I'll take a crack at that:x
Often I see tech people saying things like, "in the future we'll be doing amazing things that we can't even imagine yet". This scares the hell out of people who don't understand tech. We need more people to understand tech, but I'm not sure how. Education seems like a logical place to start, which gets into very complicated socioeconomic factors.
Another thing I've seen lately is e/acc disparaging opponents as "deccels". Regardless of that being true or not, it's not going to get people excited about the future and instead builds up a group of antagonists. That said, I'm not sure if e/acc is trying to be a diplomatic or political movement, but I think improving the messaging here would be helpful.
I think about this a lot and hope to one day put into words a more satisfying answer to this problem.
If people are more wealthy on some kind of absolute scale but they can no longer have the financial security to compete and secure a mate they're probably not going to be happy about it regardless of what underlying material net increases have been.
For example, I think if you're a white man in US (probably true for other groups just don't want to speak on things I don't have much experience with) and you aren't into education or computers you're _correct_ to be anti-tech. All it will mean is continuing degradation in your quality of life and feelings of self worth
None of which actually drives final product prices dibe, and is already done extensively.
And even then, we talk about the lot size of one production order. Economies of scale apply to the overall output of a plant, not individual production orders...
I honestly am game for this even though I have zero experience in healthcare but as a consumer, where do I start how bad it is. I would do anything to change our shitty healthcare system where there are so many middlemen b/w me and my doctor.
Recent event: Went to ER because my toddler son spilled hot coffee on him (thankfully he is ok and wasn't as terrible as it could have been). There was a pediatrician on call who looked at him for like 2 mins and then left. A nurse came in and most of her questions were about "insurance details".
Then they didn't tell me what the heck was going on and after pressing, they said "we are getting stuff for him. wait". Then after almost 1.5 hours of waiting where my son is wailing, they got some bandage (I kid you not) with some Over the counter stuff (bacytracin) and applied it on the burn. Then we went home.
Bill = $2000 after Insurance coverage. Our premium for family is $1800+/month btw . Then there is the deductible. Supposedly, the insurance company only partially approved the claim. Whatever the f that means.
If you don't see a problem with this whole cycle of experience, I don't know what else to say. And no, don't tell me to get better insurance. I want to get rid of all these middlemen mafia.
The fundamental problem is that the facilitator cannot be a for-profit entity, which is why universal healthcare in other countries are run by the government.
I personally think if you calculate the cost of healthcare paid by an individual/family to Insurance companies and take most of that way by getting rid of insurance in EVERYTHING, even paying out of pocket for most visits will be cheaper overall. Keep Insurance only for catastrophic stuff like a major illness, accident, surgery, cancer etc.
A good compromise/balance would be "get rid of insurance premiums/deductibles/copays for general stuff" and let people pay out of pocket. Govt can subsidize those who cannot afford even the lower out of pocket costs (may be baswed on income etc).
* very fast, arbitrary disapprovals of healthcare-- requiring 6 weeks of physical therapy before ordering a test of what is almost certainly a torn ligament or other thing is stupid and directly harms patient outcomes;
* enforcement of mental healthcare equality-- hospitals should have equal beds, equal availability, equal pay for workers, and insurance companies should also be paying equally for mental and body health;
* forcing the hands of drug price fixers-- that's right, it's not just insurance, or pharmaceuticals, it's a shitty middleman between them all that rolls up and sets prices on both sides, things like e.g. medicare negotiating drug prices directly will disrupt these fuckos
* DOCTOR OWNED HOSPITALS MUST COME BACK-- no more vulture finance that literally made this illegal
* hospital geographic monopolies must be eliminated-- that's right, hospitals can ban competition! No more of this!
* SAFE STAFFING RATIOS
* releasing the budget on residency-- that's right, the government sets how much money they are willing to put towards new doctors!
* jail time for negligent insurance decisions-- we know that insurance companies will slow-walk bureaucracy lifesaving healthcare to desperately ill, disabled people in the hopes they will die before the approval goes through
Does anyone have good resources to understanding the bloat of the industry as well as the regulatory constraints? I realize that the complexity here is almost infinite, but I do think you can potentially find inroads and compete along those.
I also don't think being a more efficient "middleman" is a bad thing. There are always going to be providers of services that are incentivized by making money. The key in my mind is to keep it in a respectable/realistic place for customers, as well as eliminate toil/confusion. It feels like you could get both outcomes and also align for better patient care/experience. For example everyone loves Costco, yet they still are a "middleman" between you and the goods you want.
Companies don't want poor people to have easy access to this stuff.
Interesting that YC is willing to toe the IP theft line on this one. I think plenty of us do in fact realize that homegrown corporate ideas / apps could likely be turned into external new businesses, but then the blurred ethics and legality of doing so occurs a few thoughts later.
An F100 I worked for had an entire corporate group for the purposes of spinning off their IP so that it could be done ethically/legally and give the employees' new startup the boost it needed. Several of these startups have gone on to $MMM/$B valuations. If you're at Boring BigCo and thinking of ripping one of their developed ideas for a small YC check, I'd advise against it.
Especially since the first stage of your startup is to test the waters with an MVP, which leads to a quasi-immediate pivot from the initial idea. Example:
> web application which would combine a project manager, contact manager, and to-do list
became Blogger and was sold to Google in 2003 (by Jack Dorsey).
Exactly what I thought would be absolutely terrific: a robot commanded by voice that poses floor tiles. That's v1. V2 builds a house.
I can't think of any "toy" as exciting as this atm. Plus you pose the first tile of this and you're a trillionaire.
My background's in education. I always wonder whether a solid bet would be on overhauling the system totally so the foundations of these new 'future trades' are solidly grounded from 4 years old somehow.
It seems our knowledge is an abstraction layer upon an abstraction layer upon... There's just so much shit to know, and it feels all muddied. I feel what I learnt at school hasn't equipped me for anything in the 21st century whatsoever.
After seeing how my doctor iteratively ordered up different sets of tests for me over the course of a few months, I got to thinking about improving decision trees for blood testing (and maybe others).
However, when I spoke to a (first year) med student about this he suggested that doctors actually don’t want something like this. I don't think I followed the thought process completely but it was something along the lines of, “we’ll always find something.”
Would be interested if someone could elaborate on this line of thinking.
If they get results from a test, but without the compelling observation, they're then operating outside their well established statistical framework, and they can't confidently evaluate the meaningfulness of the test results.
To me, this doesn't mean the extra information is bad, or unhelpful, it's just they are not yet properly calibrated to use it properly.
I've heard this sentiment from medical professionals before and this was my conclusion.
What they do want afaict is more fundamental, should-be-so-much-easier stuff like case management software that doesn't suck, and like, a chair to sit on while using that computer.
But don't expect a corporate VC to be as fun or cool as YC.
Also some are way more achievable by software-type engineer-types and the financial associates in their ecosystem, due to extreme familiarity with that particular landscape. Some also require a little more commitment than starting a small software company.
If I was going to split the combined vision into only two categories it would be like this:
- Applying machine learning to robotics
- New defense technology
- Bring manufacturing back to America
- New space companies
- Climate tech
- A way to end cancer
- Foundation models for biological systems
- Using machine learning to simulate the physical world
- Commercial open source companies
- Spatial computing
- New enterprise resource planning software (ERPs)
- Developer tools inspired by existing internal tools
- Explainable AI
- LLMs for manual back office processes in legacy enterprises
- AI to build enterprise software
- Stablecoin finance
- The managed service organization model for healthcare
- Eliminating middlemen in healthcare
- Better enterprise glue
- Small fine-tuned models as an alternative to giant generic ones
The remaining things in the first group are some other things I (and I'm sure many others) have had in mind since before personal computers became accessible.
"Too bad" my ambition has grown with age and it would take about a $10 million company to build my prototype hardware, and that's before any deployable machine learning can commence.
So it's been an interesting 43 years keeping in mind how I would apply automation and machine learning to almost everything all the time, and refining my intended approach for a greater number of decades the earlier I had the idea.
I wonder how many YC startups joined due to a past RFS and went on to be successful.
My impression is that YC emphasizes the quality of the startup founders over the quality of the startup idea, so I find it interesting that this RFS tradition persists.
AI is a marketing catch-all that encompasses technologies of a certain level of “how did they do that” automation that are generally understood to leverage machine learning models under the hood (but not always).
LLMs are one class of ML models that operate in a text-in-text-out fashion.
“Models” are more of a statistical/mathematical term that generally mean “anything that can make a prediction” - it’s broader than just ML (eg climate models that are first-principles-based, not learned from data).
From what I have been reading from those who run top-tier research labs in the field most agree that we are really far away. Why would people casually quote 30y away? https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/02/robotics-qa-with-metas-dhr...
It is because core issues remain unsolved, has nothing to do with some old engineering process that can be disrupted and more so with the fact that science isn't there yet. Most of the GPT wrappers that are used as reasoning still sit on top of classical low-level control. Personally, as someone who works in AI specifically around robotics I believe there is headway to make here.
It's kind of laughable how YC is now requesting for startups in these lines when 10 years back, they rejected us (DefTech) on exactly the above premise. While we didn't manage a multibagger exit, we did manage a non-acquihire exit, which is more than what most YC companies can manage. The right time to invest in these problems was 10 years ago, when all the low-hanging fruit still existed.
It's only "unwarranted" if you're willing to be blind to the entire history of crypto.
> The crypto economy advances year after year,
Yes, the speculation and scams in crypto grow year after year.
> but you would never know it perusing HN.
People don't only peruse HN. We've yet to see that amazing growing economy grow beyond speculative trading and scams [1]
[1] Yes, there's a small part of crypto that helps people send money to sanctioned countries
As a concrete example, if someone posts an article about Merkle tree, it would get maybe 10-50 votes and 5 comments, and probably not much hate if any. Yet (according to wikipedia, I'm not into cryptocurrencies) it's a part of the underlying technology of "the Bitcoin and Ethereum peer-to-peer networks"
Even better is the employees could keep most of their money in USDC and only convert to fiat when they need to pay bills. Now they have a dollar bank account and avoid local inflation.
On the other hand, this is listed below “cure for cancer”, so maybe it’s an ambitious one…
STABLECOIN FINANCE
- Brad Flora
Stablecoins are digital currencies that peg their value to some external reference. This is typically the U.S. dollar, but it can be other fiat currencies, assets, or even other digital currencies. Their transactions are recorded on a digital ledger, usually a blockchain. This means they can be traded at any time of day between any two wallets on the same network, transactions settle in seconds, and fees are a fraction of what you see in traditional finance.
There’s been much debate about the utility of blockchain technology, but it seems clear that stablecoins will be a big part of the future of money. We know this because YC companies have been effectively incorporating stablecoins into their operations for years now – for cross-border payments, to reduce transaction fees and fraud, to help users protect savings from hyperinflation. This utility is so straightforward it seems inevitable traditional finance will follow suit.
In fact we’re seeing signs of this. PayPal recently issued its own stablecoin. Major banks have started offering custody services and making noise about issuing their own.
It all looks a bit like digital music’s transition from the realm of outlaw file sharing in the early 2000s to becoming the norm as players like Apple entered the market. Importantly, those major players were all outmatched in the end by Spotify, a startup founded during that same transition moment.
$136b worth of stablecoins have been issued to date but the opportunity seems much more immense still. Only about seven million people have transacted with stablecoins to date, while more than half a billion live in countries with 30%+ inflation. U.S. banks hold $17T in customer deposits which are all up for grabs as well. And yet the major stablecoin issuers can be counted on one hand and the major liquidity providers with just a few fingers.
We would like to fund great teams building B2B and consumer products on top of stablecoins, tools and platforms that enable stablecoin finance and more stablecoin protocols themselves.
I mean, it's sandwiched in-between such moonshots as "A.I. TO BUILD ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE" and "A WAY TO END CANCER". YCombinator wants money, and stablecoins are a good way to make it if you're crafty and quick on the uptake.
If anything this is wholly unsurprising given YC's opportunistic attitude and fits in well alongside their other pipe-dream investments.
> I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (p. 19)
As a quick example, it seems to me that an AI may not need the concept of a universal, in the philosophical sense, because it is capable of handling a near-infinite number of particulars.
2. Applying Machine Learning To Robotics
3. Using Machine Learning To Simulate The Physical World
4. New Defense Technology
5. Bring Manufacturing Back To America
6. New Space Companies
7. Climate Tech
8. Commercial Open Source Companies
9. Spatial Computing
10. New Enterprise Resource Planning Software
11. Developer Tools Inspired By Existing Internal Tools
12. Explainable A.I.
13. L.L.Ms For Manual Back Office Processes In Legacy Enterprises
14. A.I. To Build Enterprise Software
15. Stablecoin Finance
16. A Way To End Cancer
17. Foundation Models For Biological Systems
18. The Managed Service Organization Model For Healthcare
19. Eliminating Middlemen In Healthcare
20. Better Enterprise Glue
21. Small Fine Tuned Models As An Alternative To Giant Generic Ones"
If I may suggest one:
22. Help The Growing Number Of Homeless People In Our Country
Hmmm...solving glue code, the "dark matter of [enterprise] software". Maybe I should apply? ;-)
https://blog.metaobject.com/2021/06/glue-dark-matter-of-soft...
Hmm Tesla is using end to end GPT-style model for FSD V12. It actually works surprisingly well.
For actual robotics, Electric Sheep is doing something similar for their lawnmower [1]. However, I am a lot more skeptical about that than Tesla's FSD.
If you just look in terms of aggregate market cap, defense companies are some of the larger companies in the world - i.e., Lockheed Martin is valued over $100B. That's a good sign that it's possible to build a big company in the space, which is all you need.
Lockheed Martin used to be Lockheed and Martin, MDD used to be McDonnel and Douglas, Northrop Gruman, well, you get it. Those companies were built, the were merged. And they are the first on the big defence budgets, and honestly also the only ones being able to deliver modern defence and weapon systems (regardless of delays and cost over runs).
I agree that superiority is one of the best deterrents.
https://twitter.com/josephpolitano/status/175797569920841756...
https://twitter.com/palmerluckey/status/1757896863884444053
https://twitter.com/uticaeric/status/1757927405124030852?s=4...
I assume that's how Anduril is going to end up.
> “All of modern high tech has the US Department of Defense to thank at its core, because this is where the money came from to be able to develop a lot of what is driving the technology that we’re using today,” said Leslie Berlin, historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University. https://archive.ph/PY5sT
But the topic here is both about private companies, not some research fund and it's explicitly about creating products (not doing research) for military use.
Things like DARPA are even more complex, because in a way, intentionally or not it is used by the US to have essentially government funded research and infrastructure development while bypassing the whole "but that's communism!" discussion and also simply not having to publicly discuss it other than "let's raise military spending!".
So in other words what you say makes sense and I agree, but it might not necessarily apply here. Like your quote states this is about money for research coming from the US DoD, not about private capital investors wanting to make money by telling you to do R&D for the military.
I do believe the majority of humans involved with massacres are not doing so by choice.
Every American - and the rest of the world too - is paying that very real debt. We're all paying the opportunity cost too, and the societal cost. It will be paid for generations, and many of the true costs are incalculable.
Some very few people are making a tonne of money, and here, YC is saying they want a piece of that. I feel like they're not getting dragged enough for it tbh.
Right this moment the US is being investigated by the world's highest court for complicity in genocide. And YC is openly asking to invest in companies that directly enable and support such action.
Better be killed by someone with your belief? Or being sent to war by someone with your belief?
Or is that the whole "defend our values" bullshit all over again? Personally I'd much prefer a whole country to surrender, than even one human being killed.
For thousands of years borders have moved, tyrants and light towers of freedoms have ruled, but what really brought misery was war, not who happens to be the country's leader in a certain point of time. Yes, there have been to occasional ethnic cleansing, but it rarely (ever?) was that another country instilled the hatred just by moving a border. Anti-semitism was widespread in Europe, if it wasn't it would have been much harder for the Nazis to have concentration camps even in Poland.
A government taking over a population needs to also take care of the population and rarely does it work out to just control by force. It didn't even work for East Germany.
And while speculation I wonder what would happen if a country like Nazi Germany was or Russia today would take over the large parts of the world without much resistance. I think the outcome would either be that the countries split up, or are reasonably independent (think special zones in China) or there would be reforms bringing values of the occupied country.
But regardless of all of that hypothetical stuff, that might as well be completely wrong, the idea that values are defended or spread by military means is ridiculous, as is the idea that any values or things like freedom depend on the existence of individual countries. The idea that it's worth to die for them is just as dumb as the idea to die for a god. It's just propaganda and romanticism. At the end of the day it always boils down to send a ton of young people to their death, and when they actually end up in a situation where they actually see eye to eye they oftentimes realize how ridiculous they is and actually for the most parts, for the part where values really matter they would be best friends in another world. That's why history is filled with lethal enemies having a good time together at the fronts until some form of governments comes along and tells people to kill each other again. Things like the Christmas truce of 1914 happen then. And while with drones, and such this becomes harder, look about how all the drone fighters get mental diseases, and all the still mentally sane veterans end up becoming anti-war.
In a non-war environment, and on surrender people rarely get put up against the wall.
Does that mean you have no right to defend yourself? No, of course not. But the reality is that the outcome of "the bad guys winning" momentarily, might be less bad than millions of dead people, an industry fueled by arms manufacturing, a situation where generations might grow up learning to hate another country, ethnicity, etc. Because even if you technically win the war, look what Iraq brought us. Racism against Arabs, White People, hate of countries, religions, curtailing of freedoms that were claimed to be defended (on both sides actually), huge amount of propaganda material on all sides, renewed hatred in the area, spread of radicalism on both sides.
And then there's people arguing that it is all okay, because it brought technological progress.
Yes, it's not a black and white thing, it depends on circumstances, etc., but the idea that somehow "beliefs", "values", etc. are being defended is just ridiculous and means you are gullible. I mean look at how much lying there is always from all sides, how the fronts always happens to be around areas where the rich and powerful want to get resources from, how people that actually live freedoms are the first criminalized. Any values that might be worth defending die with war.
And looking at the US in particular. The US has two major borders with Canada and Mexico. Also they speak the world's language, they make the world's movie. You really think that there's someone coming from outside, does something that has never been successfully done before and do a land invasion under such geographical conditions, probably doesn't even speak your language too well, but still magically take your beliefs? Yup, then you're very gullible.
It doesn't matter if you believe in a world without conflict here. The idea that your beliefs are being protected by a startup producing military products is just outrageously ridiculous, regardless how you twist and turn it.
If military was about beliefs, East Germany/fall of the Berlin wall and reunification, the current situation of Palestine, the IRA, the outcome of American Inexpedience, etc. would never happen, because of the involved strong military. And regarding "being put at the wall". That did happen in France, but while you might hold any opinion on France in WW2, I think whatever the outcome of more military defense I am pretty sure more people would have been "put at the wall". Oh and as we all know they all became Germans and only the US made them French again.
The only belief you might fight for in military conflict between two countries is that the border should be in a certain way for some amount of time. Most beliefs that people talk about you kill as soon as you kill someone, enemy or not. And what you create is hatred. So yeah, if you belief that's your goal and worth developing weapons for, go ahead and do so.
US Health care is so massively inefficient (results per dollar per capita) that this reluctance to switch to single payer like the rest of the developed world is a level of cognitive dissonance that continues to flabbergast me.
nope. it's not clear. and crypto-proponents who can't even show this beyond kindergarten-level name calling don't help
The concept of species is maybe a good example – it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, if you think about it. It's merely a linguistic placeholder to describe a step in a process, because the idea of constant evolutionary change is too difficult to encapsulate in a single concept. An AI would have no issue with this, as it is capable of taking in and holding much more data and conceptualizing the concept of a process.
Lockheed Martin was formed by the merger of Lockheed and Martin Marietta and Martin Marietta was formed by the merger of Martin and American-Marietta, and American-Marietta was formed by the merger of American Asphalt Paint Company and Marietta Paint and Color Company.
There is obviously middle ground. Which is why categorically condemning defense spending is indefensible.
What are you referring to as genocide?
That doesn't actually follow.
> What are you referring to as genocide?
Take your pick.
>That doesn't actually follow.
It does. If some defense is OK, then some defense spending is OK. In order to categorically reject defense spending as the original commenter did, then you must categorically reject defense.
> Take your pick.
Of what?
Definitely needs crypto. What a novel idea.
As soon as their next idea is described in proper terms, they immediately devolve into insults, "you know nothing" and other "oh you're just a blind hater".
> the point of my business idea above was to solve a pain point around paying a global work force considering the costs of global wire transfers
How much do you think it will cost to "systematically go country by country, learned the local HR laws, partner with the most trusted exchange, and then handle all accounting and taxes"?
The best business ideas I’ve heard for crypto inevitably don’t need crypto.
Countries sell services (tourism) and goods (products and commodities) to earn dollars. However another major source is by creating their own local currency (i.e. Brazilian Reals), inflating it (5 to 10% common in Brazil), and banning citizens from holding foreign currency (i.e. citizens cannot hold USD). So if you want to pay someone in Brazil from the US, you send them USD, which is then stolen by the government and converted into shittier local currency (Reals).
A better option, as employees I have in Brazil will attest, is you pay them in stablecoins (i.e. USDT or USDC) which they then convert at their own leisure to Reals when they need to pay bills. This allows them to earn interest on the stablecoins and protects them from the shitty local fiat currency.
This theft of wealth from citizens via the local shitty fiat currency is a global phenomena. See Argentina, Lebanon, Venezuela, Turkey, and on and on. This is a major driver of global stablecoin demand, because everyone wants USD, especially retail, but until crypto the ability to receive and store USD was very limited by governments.
In less developed countries, it's the opposite. Wise and other centralized money transmission platforms are ripe targets to apply government pressure, with capital limits, currency conversion games, freezing accounts, and so on.
Cryptocurrency inverts the whole process. Having a crypto wallet is like having an offshore bank account, or perhaps a vault in your house. You can also send money peer-to-peer over the internet very quickly. It's just like cash, except you can make purchases (even huge purchases) without needing the danger of physically holding a lot of money.
Of course there are many downsides. You can be hacked, you can forget your password / seed phrase, you can send money to the wrong place, the whole thing is cumbersome. These downsides are being worked on in various ways, but there are some permanent downsides to holding bearer instruments that fiat accounts held by regulated financial institutions don't have.
The downsides of countries like Venezuela, Lebanon, and Argentina for trying to build businesses and accumulate savings are larger than the downsides of cryptocurrency. Entrepreneurs and normal, everyday citizens are embracing crypto from the bottom-up because governments obviously hate the freedom crypto provides their citizens. It makes collecting taxes and doing the fiat-inflation theft game harder. It requires citizens to self-report rather than automatic-deduction, which reduces government revenue.
Argentina is a de facto USD-based economy. All property purchases are conducted with United States $100 bills, with entire companies whose job is to safely transport a life savings' worth of cash to the real estate closing, where the cash is then scrupulously assessed for counterfeiting. In an economy like this, you can imagine how stablecoins can be useful, despite the cumbersome and risky nature. It's still 10 to 100x safer and better than suitcases of cash.
> In Argentina, most transactions are conducted using cash, primarily in the form of $100 US bills. This may seem somewhat traditional, but it's the prevailing practice in this country.
> Particularly when purchasing property, you typically need to make your payment in US dollars because property prices are consistently quoted in this currency.
> You can opt to bring cash or utilize a financial service to obtain the required US dollars in cash, although this may involve a fee.
> So, if you're planning a purchase, be prepared to carry a substantial amount of US dollar bills into the country, possibly up to $500,000. However, keep in mind that this process isn't straightforward, and you will likely incur a commission fee.
https://thelatinvestor.com/blogs/news/buying-process-propert...
> It makes collecting taxes ... harder.
How does that mesh with "If some company systematically went country by country, learned the local HR laws, ... and then handled all accounting and taxes"?
> the point of my business idea above was to solve a pain point around paying a global work force considering the costs of global wire transfers
How much do you think it will cost to "systematically go country by country, learned the local HR laws, partner with the most trusted exchange, and then handle all accounting and taxes"?
> Having a crypto wallet is like having an offshore bank account
> It makes collecting taxes ... harder.
How does that mesh with "If some company systematically went country by country, learned the local HR laws, ... and then handled all accounting and taxes"?
The answer is government, laws, and culture. The governments of Argentina (until things got so bad they elected a self-described anarcho capitalist libertarian!), Venezuela, Cuba, Lebanon, etc. have created terrible environments for their citizens. Crypto is allowing their citizens to break laws that are hurting them. I support the citizens fighting against their socialist and communist governments that are robbing them. That's the core function of empowering citizens with decentralized money.
These are two descriptions you started with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39371127 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39371520
It literally is this:
""" If some company systematically went country by country, learned the local HR laws, partnered with the most trusted exchange, and then handled all accounting and taxes, a truly global HR and payment system could be built to make onboarding and paying everyone 10x simpler.
the point of my business idea above was to solve a pain point around paying a global work force considering the costs of global wire transfers vs. instant USDC settlement. """
So. Given all this, here are the questions:
1. Given that wire transfers cost money, and you want to make them cheap/free and instant, how much do you think it will cost to "systematically go country by country, learned the local HR laws, partner with the most trusted exchange, and then handle all accounting and taxes"?
2. Given that, by your own words, crypto is like having money in offshore accounts making tax collection more difficult, how does this mesh with your proposal of having a company do accounting and collect taxes?
----
Note: I'm not in the least surprised that you can't answer these questions even if the first one of these I asked very early in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39372364
That's the reason there's so much "unwarranted hate" on HN: because people are not stupid, and they don't fall for demagoguery and grand proclamations. 99.9999999999% of all crypto proposals fall down immediately under the lightest of scrutinies: they are inevitably self-contradictory, unworkable, costly, don't do the job advertised, better implemented other technologies, or any or even all of the above.
The reason a business will exist and have value is because they did the work of figuring out how to pay workers in each country. My company does this now for Brazil, so it is possible to do legally.
The offshore bank account comment is to envision what it is similar to. For example it’s possible for an Argentinian to fly to the US and open a bank account in Miami, it’s just cumbersome to then get USD out of it and into Argentina. With a crypto wallet it’s similar to this but much more streamlined. The proposed business will figure out the intricacies of each country.
The YC application is a sales pitch, and you're not selling your idea, you're primarily selling your charisma and capacity to spin vision and sell. Second, you're selling your chemistry with your cofounders and stability of your relationship. Third, you're selling your capacity to build, at least some usable prototype, but this a low bar.
At no point are you actually selling the concrete idea, unless you're doing something extremely specific that seems valuable and you're one of the few who can build it. For the rest, the idea is a rhetorical vehicle to sell the other things.
If however, you have a very narrow window to be able to launch properly, or if your product is mostly visionary you need investors asap. Just don't expect to come out with a Zuckerberg deal, expect 1-2% of the company in the end and make sure you cash out during the entire road.
Don't let your school hold you back from applying :)
There is no, no. They tell everyone "maybe next time."
YC is late to the early alpha and is betting on talent/leadership to soak up.
Then again, first movers don't always win.
You're getting recurring meetings with them (which have significant opportunity cost for them), so it's not just the usual startup investor unwillingness to say "no" with finality?
Gen AI two years ago was a toy that fit "somewhere" into the "creator economy", which seemed dead.
Now try and you'll get a completely different reception.
There are some incredibly large interests in the space that wield intense power and control over various markets. There is also a profound degree of inefficiency in a lot of what’s happening.
The question is whether many of those inefficiencies are technology problems or if they are intentionally constructed for the many reasons these things are created.
I feel like there needs to be almost a Walmart size company pushing down on prices with that kind of scale before many of these structures will be broken, and unfortunately that doesn’t appear to be the direction most things are going (oh they exist in scale, just not direction). I was hoping Amazon’s entry into the market would do it. It didn’t.
Might be time for a different direction in health care entirely. Kaiser had it right, but I don’t think they executed well and they are largely a company rooted in past thinking in how they are structured.
Combining health care and subscription with ongoing medical care is definitely the direction of things to come. The fundamental shift needs to be moving the system from fixing problems to keeping people actually healthy, and that means that healthy people need to pay for the system or the entire thing gets it’s incentives inverted (as it is now). This is a fundamental shift, but if it were done right it would be a massive company and really change the world. I’ve been looking in to how to build this over the last year and know I want to go in this direction.
And there is also a ton of interesting businesses in generics.
Just some thoughts from someone who has been in many aspects of the medical industry over my career. Hope it inspires some good discussion with my favorite community.
* Crypto currencies are clearly on a decline given their location and volume in the list. It seems that the hype is mostly gone.
* Naturally, AI dominates the list, but the focus is on various applications such as healthcare, robotics, enterprise, and the always-a-hit: traditional industries.
* YC lists three and a half requests with a strong geo-political aspects: army technologies (justified by current global wars), startups manufacturing in the US (the role of the US in the 21st century), space and climatech. Our zeitgeist (and as such YC’s justification) is that large changes occurring in the world and they aims to take part in it. This is both bold and on-point.
* Companies relying on open source as part of their core business. YC identifies such companies as having multiple advantages and would like to see more such companies in their portfolio. This is a valid statement that I truly believe in, but I also think that this is only a part of the criteria and not something that solely holds an investment thesis.
Very curious if anyone knows how to pull this off. There's so much value to be unlocked but it's just impossible to break through.
I've personally met three very talented founders that tried and failed (one was accepted to YC as a mid-market ERP and successfully pivoted into an application tracking system) and failed very quickly.
I'm guessing an important feature would be an integration system that maps data from the current ERP seamlessly into the new ERP. And that assumes you can even get through the enterprise sales process to even get the company to migrate.
There are some opportunities in "New Defense Technology". Something like a low-cost replacement for the Javelin anti-tank missile based on off the shelf phone camera parts ought to be possible. Of course, once that's out there, every insurgent group will have some.
"Explainable AI" is really important.
"Stablecoin finance" is mostly how to make sure the issuers don't steal the collateral. Maybe the people behind the stablecoin have an explosive collar welded around their neck. If the price drops, it detonates. That might work.
"Applying machine learning to robotics" has potential. Get bin-picking nailed and get acquired by Amazon. Many people have failed at this, but it might be possible now.
"Bring manufacturing back to America". Is it possible to build a cell phone in the US?
"Climate tech" - think automating HVAC and insulation selection, installation, and analysis. Installers suck at this. See previous HVAC article on HN. A phone app where you walk around and through the building with an IR camera is one place to start. Map the duct system. Take manometer readings. Crunch. That's do-able on YC-sized money.
Make bombs people want, I see.
The keyboard I have is about the size of an ipad itself so there is no numeric keypad, and it's about as heavy as a tablet too since this one has a slanted slot in the back to slip the tablet or phone into, portrait or landscape, at a good angle for use so the combination acts not much differently than a laptop.
If it wasn't so heavily weighted it would topple over backward when you left the tablet in the slot. There are other bluetooth ones that are lightweight which should be just as useful if you have a different way to support the device.
Sometimes a hardware solution is ideal, other times software, most of the time with digital devices it's good to consider both and have lots of options which parts of the heavy lifting are where.
I have ideas that I would love to explore given funding.
The devices seem to be getting better and better, but the software seems rather lacking (currently typing this from a gorgeous giant display on my Vision Pro, which I use mostly exactly like how I would use my computer). Even in gaming, where the use-case is a lot more mature, we haven't seen the kinds of investment in AAA content that you'd expect, even though clearly the platforms could benefit from it.
I'm curious what YCs thinking is, and if perhaps they just feel no one has earnestly taken it on yet?
And it wasn't until competition stepped up with an indie dev, aka a YouTube VR app called Juno made for the Vision Pro, that even Google decided to jump into developing YouTube for the Vision Pro.
So now we are back at the chicken and the egg problem and few big devs want to support the giants. It'll happen probably eventually when monetization becomes a reality for devs embracing the tech but I don't see it happening any time soon.
In the spirit of Jeff Bezos’ “your margin is my opportunity”, we believe it’s possible to build a highly profitable business and make the system more efficient at the same time.
Didn't Amazon try this and is now shutting down part of its healthcare (pill selling) play?
Slightly scary to think about Amazon having a near monopoly on healthcare, but ask yourself whether our current reality is better or worse…
Especially not VC backed start-ups...
by creating another middleman in healthcare. This was first proposed by Jim Clark's Healtheon. "We want to empower the doctors and the patients and get all the other assholes out of the way." … "Except for us. One asshole in the middle." — The New New Thing, Michael Lewis.
The reason we spend so much is that public healthcare is a public good and private companies aren't good at managing public goods. They're good at making money which is a different purpose (which has probably served most people reading this very well). We need Single Payer. Indeed we have Single Payer in Medicare and TriCare and other areas. It works pretty well. We need to eliminate middlemen in healthcare by actually eliminating rent seeking middlemen in healthcare.
If you want to build machines that kill people, you should at least be willing to say it clearly. If it makes you uncomfortable to talk about, maybe that should tell you something. And it's not a very good excuse to argue that you didn't build a weapon, you just built something that makes it easier to use weapons.
Arms races are not the way. The biggest threat to the West isn't somebody else's weapons, it's that Indonesia's elections today went to a candidate who doesn't want to align with the West, relations with India are increasingly strained, and even Brazil and Turkey are starting to lean out. Geopolitics is politics, and politics requires appeal. Our brand image is significantly worse than two decades ago, as far as I can see.
If the West can't gain allies on friendly terms and maintains power through the development of ever-more advanced military technology, then what kind of world have we built, exactly?
It's extremely disappointing to see this.
I’m not sure the companies who actually have a shot at solving any of them can benefit from YCs approach or even network
Most of the industries are won through long standing insiders partnering with exceptional engineering talent
Not really YCs model
Some of these are "necessary but not sufficient", others just plain platitudes.
Either this is sloppily phrased, or the SV techno-optimist kool-aid is way stronger than I would have thought plausible. Does anyone seriously believe that a reasonable solution to climate change has exactly one thing on the list and it's "more climate tech start-ups"? Of course climate tech has to play a role (we need everything we can throw at the problem), and start-ups will certainly provide a subset of that tech, but claiming that this alone provides "a fair chance" is extremely revealing of certain bias (and ignorance)
YC is simply missing the boat here. Pun intended.
The sun is free 1.3kw / meter energy for ~5 hours in the sun belt states.
I have always found it interesting that JavaScript is one of the most consumed programming languages in the world and nobody can write in it, especially in the browser. When I say write in it I mean without abstraction libraries (React, Angular, jQuery, and so on) and doing something other than CRUD apps. Until last year I was writing JS full time and met only 3 or 4 other people who do this and of them had security clearances.
There is a huge opportunity there that nobody is filling. While the talent for it is completely absent the surprising thing is that it’s ridiculously easy to train for provided the candidates are smart enough to follow simple instructions and write original code.
But it doesn’t sound like bypassing the “constraints imposed for security” is the desired outcome for the bosses, so who are you selling to?
A JavaScript application could be anything that loads in a webpage but not necessarily from a server or domain. That could mean pasted into the console as you suggested, a SharePoint utility, any web page that does not sending data to the server, as well as pages opened from the local file system.
The primary considerations for success are high portability, data saved in the browser’s localStorage, applications that execute in the browser as opposed to on a server, no dependencies, and high performance.
* Developer tools inspired by existing internal tools
* LLMs for manual back office processes in legacy enterprises
Feel free to message me. Having worked in-house for the last 15 years, I've seen a variety of these, have built more than a few of them myself, and am in the middle of building some new ones using LLMs right now — all within large enterprise legal departments.
I won't be able to share any confidential data, but I'm happy to answer questions about patterns I've seen across a few different organizations and where the unmet needs seem to be.
Thanks, appreciate it!
Why is that? Is conflict resolution too much of a non-tech thing and more in the realm of politics? Or is there simply no money to be made in reducing warfare and hostile nation-state competitions?
> $136b worth of stablecoins have been issued to date but the opportunity seems much more immense still. Only about seven million people have transacted with stablecoins to date, while more than half a billion live in countries with 30%+ inflation. U.S. banks hold $17b in customer deposits which are all up for grabs as well. And yet the major stablecoin issuers can be counted on one hand and the major liquidity providers with just a few fingers.
This is not entirely true. There has been a stable coin for over 50 years now, and most billionaires should be familiar with it because it's used to pay for satphone calls.
SDR (Special Drawing Rights) is IMF's stable coin. US$935.7 billion SDR are currently allocated. It has been called paper gold and an international reserve currency.
Not all of these are moonshots, but some of them are (e.g. securing defense contracts seems lower risk). Also I imagine getting that defense contract may be a very different value proposition depending on what connections that investor has.
pg's most frequent advice to founders about ideas is to ask themselves what they themselves wish would exist, then make that—i.e. solve a problem you yourself have. Another thing he and Jessica say a lot is that you need to be passionate about what you're working on in order to make it through the arduous haul of a startup.
That's even more true of the 'moonshot' startups, since they're harder and take longer. If you look at the hardest startups YC has invested in, you won't find many founders who aren't personally obsessed with what they're working on, and have been for many years. That's one of the things YC would be looking for before funding somebody to work on such things.
Just look at AI and the amount of useless chatbots and other half-baked "AI" solutions several startups built in a rush after the topic became the latest fad and VCs were saying it's hot.
That one is interesting in that I wouldn't naturally think of manufacturing as a common start up idea.
I can't help but imagine some startup with limited manufacturing knowledge ultimately offering what is at best some incremental improvement in some process that isn't enough to support the start up.
Or at least that's what I've seen from start ups entering areas that I've had experience in.
> The MSO model enables doctors to run their own clinics by (1) providing them software that can handle back office tasks such as billing and scheduling and (2) channeling patients to them.
> These functions are largely what PE ownership provides. Doctors who are part of an MSO model can continue to run small, physician-owned practices while competing successfully with large, PE-owned conglomerates.
I feel this is building off a false hypothesis. PE isn't out-competing independents. Sure, there is a tiny bit of synergy and some bargaining power that comes with the scale of having a portfolio of clinics. But most independents concerned with that have joined one of the numerous GPO/networks that exist. What's really happening is there is a huge generation of providers reaching retirement age and PE is a well capitalized buyer for them to sale their practice. New doctors are more likely to be employees versus being entrepreneurial in the past. I think for this to work, you would want to find ways for new providers to own a practice which means taking on debt that would out bid PE. It might be that the startup that gets this right, provides said financing with the management fee income as an addition to the debt service/income for risk. This could be interesting and new doctors might see this as an attractive path towards practice ownership; but getting the financial model for all constituents to be attractive is going to be tough IMO.
MSO for back office synergies is possible, but from what I've seen it's usually more cost effective to have your under-utilized receptionist wear many of these hats and that's what independents tend to do.
Basically every healthcare reform would be positive, either towards single payer or towards markets, as the current equilibrium is just optimizing extraction. See how the ACA, which was attempting to let insurers force prices of medical services down, led to hospitals buying out massive amounts of private practices, as it's easy to bully 5 doctors, but not a hospital system that is at the same time negotiating for a lot of primary care, specialists, and ar least a third of hospital capacity in the city.
Obamacare tried to fix this by making the entire chain of care responsible for patient satisfaction and outcome and making rate payment contingent, but it really ended up consolidating so much of the industry into integrated and profit maximized network-of-relationships so that the downside can be managed (and the backend financing consolidated similarly, though in many different ways). All of them, to your point, really optimized for extraction.
I spent some time looking into generic drugs and compounding operations as well and we really don’t have many left in the West. It’s concerning. No money left for the basics and the system isn’t very robustly built for basic operations (read the boring, lower paying part of medicine that keeps us all alive every day).
Can you please elaborate on this? We are currently exploring a project in the same space, and I would love to discuss.
That’s just one example.
The market for surgical supply is wildly inefficient but there aren’t that many people operating manufacturing domestically right now. I think it’s a r potential opportunity.
Cuban’s Cost Plus drug play really showed another weak spot in generics: the entire business he’s in is simply shortening the inefficient supply chain. That can be done in a lot of ways, and can be bundled with financing in many other ways and that can be a big deal (b2b) in this space. That’s what I’ve consulted on in the past.
I work in this space (small/mid-size).
The good news is that there are several "obvious" ways to pull this off because an ERP is the culmination of everything a company needs and does. So almost anything you can imagine on the software is part of it.
The bad news, and the reason everyone wants a solution, is that is truly a big space, and then you need E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G.
---
My take is to start from the bottom, and build a much better version of Access/FoxPro (https://tablam.org).
Any medium/big ERP end being a specialized computing platform that needs:
- A programming language
- A database engine
- An orchestration engine
- ELT engine
- Auth
- UI/Report builders
And to be clear: NONE of the "programming language", "database engine", etc are a good fit today.
NONE.
This is the big thing, This is the reason (from a tech POW only) that most attempts fail.
This is the secret of why Cobol rule(d): Is all of this! but is too old! (also, this is why SQL still is best: Is almost this).
---
So, to pull this off, you need a team that knows what is "missing" from our current tools, makes a well-integrated package, and adds a "user-friendly" interface in a way that is palatable for the kind of user that uses excel (powerfully).
Is not that impossible. FoxPro was the best example of this kind of integrated solution.
P.D: This is my life's dream, to make this truth!
But I think of the YC requirement more like build a Zapier and make your crm all an API. Use some sort of AI or business logic for users to glue it together.
But at the end of the day you still would need to build out an internal programming language as well because it still would not be enough without it.
Vertical specific software provides so much more value as you can build things unencumbered by the engine/data structures/way things work.
I've found our niche - ERP's would be hopelessly expensive so save for top tier OE companies no one uses it. In weeks we can develop and roll out features & functionality that our clients just lap up that you would never in a million years build into an ERP platform, but is intrinsic to the delivery of our clients products.
It was inconceivable to me 2 years ago, but now I've had very real discussions with some companies where they're looking at our software going "wow... you're going to give mid tier players better functionality that we could only dream of from our ERP systems.."
Basically ERP platforms are "jack of all trades, master of none".
In my former life we did vertical specific software for the window and door industry. Every time we heard from a prospect "oh we're looking at __some ERP platform__ to do configuration of W&D", we'd immediately list dozens of reasons why they would fail, and fail hard.. countless untold money to consulting teams has been burned learning those lessons.
What make this complicated is that each company turns into a different project. So is like have several branches:
ERP
/CompanyA
/CompanyB
It gets to a point where after a certain # of customers you can't grow, and now is where you think about making your own DB, programming language, ... :)
Interesting. Just to make sure I understood this correctly, are you taking of a purpose built app/software for each such 'request' as opposed to this being some 'module'/'add-on' in an ERP suite?
An nothing of this has anything to do with SAP, and everything with ERPs and the messy reality of businesses.
Every auditor on the planet is intimately familiar with how Oracle EBS and SAP do certain things.
If you don't have that trust built up, a customer simply won't want to take the risk and additional headache and overhead passing an audit will take.
If the auditors are sensitive to which systems they are familiar with, it would perhaps be beneficial to the auditors to be able to understand other systems.
I'm sure there are companies that are servicing auditors, creating UiPath flows or whatever for a bunch of auditors. So there's probably already a ton of very specific solutions out there, for auditing various systems.
At least it sounds like a more solvable problem than yet another ERP
I don't think it will be possible to compete directly with the big players. However, having spoken to a few potential customers, it seems my software can help businesses that are small today but will scale up tomorrow. If I can prove that my software can indeed scale up with them, I will have a good opportunity to tackle the enterprise side eventually. Right now though, I'm just focused on getting the product to a level that helps these smaller folks out. I have been working on it during evenings, and this is my first week moving forward focusing on it full time. Let's see where it goes. I'm really early stage, super fresh to business, but I'm experienced as a swe and consider myself a closer. Cheers!
If you want to know a little about my background, I've worked on massive (many, many millions of dollars) ERP projects from the business side. I've also been a platform engineer/lead on a saas that IPO'd a few years ago. I've seen it from both sides, and I believe that I have an idea of what is missing when it comes to business software in general.
I have worked with cms-systems. And in this world it is accepted, you need different frontends for different tasks. Therefore a world of systems - calling themselve headless - support only the backend part of cms management. Worked with Strapi that support this kind of thinking.
How come something similar doesn't exist in the ERP world ?
Most developers I know are at the far-end of development practices (one of the ERPs I integrate has tables like `F0001, F0002, ...` and fields `F00001, F00002`), and this ERPs then uses old tools like Cobol, Fox, (Old) Delphi, (OLD) VB where it has a better UI history.
And it causes to be very hard to build an API (you can't image how much torture is when an ERP vendor says "we have an API!" instead of using plain text or direct SQL)
For this, you need people that know how to do good APIs. And the good API for an ERP is NOT Rest, GraphQL, JSON, ... (ideally, you need a DB!)
Two approaches I can think of:
1. Target mid market or smaller and grow with customers (will be slow)
2. Take a front-door-wrapper approach
Phone camera parts would be overkill. The Javelin sensor isn't nearly that high-resolution, we're talking low triple digits in "pixels". It does however refresh its readings very fast, a necessity given its speed. The old Javelin used active cryo and a filtered IR imager, the new one is passive like the IR camera in some phone attachments. It is stupidly simple in operation: CLU provides the target "signature" and the imager seeks it. After the initial ascent in top-down mode, a stronger signal on one edge of the sensor pushes the control surfaces in the opposite direction until it strikes its target. I'd give the Wikipedia page a read. It contains a surprising amount of information that informs the design and thought behind the missile. Military systems are cool for how robust yet simple they are.
Another idea: drone AWACS. I mean, a drone with radar to detect other drones (and other aircraft).
I think we should start more basic and work our way up. For example, there isn't a real reason we can't produce all of our domestic iron and steel needs in the USA, but we end up importing a lot right now. Same with aluminum, etc. But this isn't something YC is really going to help with unless they are funding manufacturing and industrial tech that makes it easier/cheaper to set-up and run these types of facilities.
60% of US steel consumption is now from recycled steel. Nucor became the largest US steel manufacturer by making that work.
Definitely possible, this one is mostly US-built: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/
Note that it's $1,999+ for mostly made/assembled in USA version, vs. $999 for Purism's made in China version.
And China is more capable at scaling, if the product were ever competing on price rather than principle. So still a ways to go to be competitive at manufacturing.
- small production runs
- obsolete components
- obsolete production technology
- certification requirements
- continued support and design changes to account for the above
- the mandatory defence surcharge
From top of my head.
We have seen consumer grade DJI drone use in Ukraine-Russia war by both sides.
AI to control a swarm of cheap drones to survey and kill?
Longer range systems cost a bit more, but not a whole lot much more.
Improvements that are desirable are generally in terms of range, endurance, sensors and resistance to electronic warfare.
Copying the silent prop design from Zipline would also be neat to reduce the sound signature and give the enemy less time to react…
I think they are looking for a "decentralized" solution where the collateral is held by a smart contract.
> "Bring manufacturing back to America". Is it possible to build a cell phone in the US?
US is offering money, so why not take it?
Problem is that unless the asset is virtual, it's going to actually be held by a legal person in the real world, not the smart contract, and it's not ideal to have a stable coin collateralised only by another virtual asset (although makerdao seems to make it work so far).
I think the main innovations here wouldn't be technical but legal, since good solutions to this problem involve the interface between the real world and the blockchain. I remember reading about a legal structure where real assets were held by a trust for the benefit of the owner of an NFT or something, but I'm sure there are other things you could do with the right legal structure, or possibly a central bank or a jurisdiction like Estonia could come up with something that would engender a lot of confidence.
I hate crypto, but I love this idea. We should apply this to a lot of systems.
Make stakeholders of anything accountable. 100% skin in the game.
But I do think we're leaning way too far towards the no-accountability side currently, and need to shift a bit further the other way.
(But I don't expect THAT to come out of a VC industry where so many prominent people and parters have track records that generally include a lot of "founded unprofitable company but kept it alive long enough to have a good exit" stories... This world lives on the perception of success, not on long-term responsibility.)
(unlikely to work for several reasons, may be stupid idea but looks like something that could work in not-so-different world)
I would hate to cross you. That is scary.
Can we manufacture touch screens at scale?
Can we manufacture Li-ion batteries at scale? (Tesla and Panasonic might be able to, with large new investments, but I don't think there's anybody ready to go)
Do we have 3nm fab capacity? (TSMC is planning to build one, but AFAIK not yet)
Do we have the ability to manufacture various sensors at scale? (Some likely yes - ambient light, inertial - some no)
What about image sensors? (Maybe, Omnivision is probably the best candidate, but I don't think they can currently do 48MP. ON Semiconductor is also a good chunk away from that, AFAIK)
I think that's a sufficient number of parts to claim we currently can't make cell phones, as long as you define cell phone as "current gen cell phone". We could probably retool relatively quickly back to at least cell phones, but even that is AFAIK not a current capacity.
Can we _theoretically_ do all that? Sure. But we can't right now, or within short time frames, and we can't without significant investment.
https://a16z.com/american-dynamism/
It’s a moral stance, explicitly
The founders that work in defense are mission driven. they see nation-state preservation as a moral issue.
They would fail to “make a buck” if that was their only goal, as is the case in most industries/sectors
Respectfully, I’d encourage you to review the HN guidelines. Skepticism is welcome here, but even cursory research will show that the founders in defense have deeply personal reasons for building what they do.
That closing line is hilarious tho
That's not really saying anything, since it doesn't say anything about what their mission is. Sure, you have to be mission driven to get things done and lots of good and necessary things have been accomplished by people who were mission driven, but every villain in history was mission driven too. To point at someone and say "they are mission driven" as if being mission driven is on its own evidence that someone is good is at best naive.
> they see nation-state preservation as a moral issue.
hmm, surely at no time in history was a bad thing done by a leader who believed that nation-state preservation was a moral issue.
> They would fail to “make a buck” if that was their only goal
A somewhat peculiar and unsubstantiated claim about an industry that famously makes enormous amounts of money.
> See “American Dynamism”
I'm not really sure what sort of point you're trying to make here other than "VCs like defense companies".
These war firms will appear whether or not YC funds them. YC chosing to explicitly call for more war firms shows they put the acquisition of even more extravagant wealth over human lives.
Do you have any problems with that?
So, how would the US defend itself against countries like China and Russia if no one built weapons? Everyone agrees weapons can be used in ethically horrendous ways. It doesn't follow from that, that the US doesn't need a weapons industry.
*By things we mean people.
No country in the world can address this without a government organization. You start by telling patients where their money goes in a transparent way and which organizations benefit from it. That is it.
The problem is the trust aspect of this level of transparency. There is so much money (large insurance and healthcare groups) and chaos (biotech stocks), making it extremely difficult for businesses to be reliable to individuals as a business. To run a business, you need money, and to operate a business like this, you need an unconditional amount of money for the long term. VCs can take care of the unconditional giving of money, but they are never long-term. They will badger the investee to join the darkside of healthcare because they need an answer in 5 years of series A whether the startup is going to be a unicorn or not.
Lots of countries do not have single payer healthcare, and have an insurance system that resembles America's, yet they don't have America's ridiculous prices.
No, they don't, beyond “private insurance exists”. The US has the largest share of the population uncovered by health insurance in the OECD besides Mexico, and that's after improving considerably because of the ACA.
OTOH, US costs are higher than that would explain, much higher than most other countries on a share of GDP basis even. So, yeah, there's some low hanging fruit, much of it in public policy around healthcare financing.
Pretending any of these objective truths are wrong is folly and ignores a dozen millennia of human history.
There will always be individuals/organizations/countries that don't the "the West" as an ally. Some subset of that will be outwardly hostile to Western ideology, and some subset of that will be willing and able to use violence as a means to their end. The fact that some Western countries have impressive militaries doesn't somehow mean they should stop investing in that technology.
Well maybe that's not at all what they're saying.
Perhaps you could share what you consider the least extreme version of "building machines that kill people." Building missiles - OK yeah obviously. Improving satellites which are used for information gathering which could be used for missions where people are killed? Does that fall within "building machines that kill people?" What is the mildest example of something that constitutes "building machines that kill people?"
Sad day for YC.
SDR is fairly well known among people who study reserve currencies. While most people take for granted the US dollar as the global reserve currency, those who study it are aware of alternatives (SDR, gold, bitcoin), even though those are too tiny (right now…) to seriously get the “reserve currency” title.
FWIW, Facebook’s stablecoin (Libra/Diem) was designed as a basket of currencies like SDR. In fact, it’s not too far off to explain Libra/Diem as SDR on blockchain, but backed by its own association instead of the IMF. If you understand the geopolitical challenges facing SDR (even with its IMF backing), you can imagine why Libra/Diem got such pushback.
I had no idea you could pay for satellite calls with SDR. (I don’t roll like that…) I’d love to learn more.
The satellite call use case is interesting though. I’ve heard rumor/speculation that Starlink may accept crypto for payment. The use case makes sense. If you’re bringing internet access to parts of the world that don’t already have it, you can’t assume those users have easy access to traditional payment rails.
And this is not a unique problem for Starlink. Many internet companies I know or have worked with have users from all over the world, but in many countries those users are stuck in the “free” tier because there are too many hurdles for them to pay (or in some cases, get paid) for online services. I know of small businesses in SE Asia that would set up a company (and bank account) in Singapore just to pay (get paid) for online services. There’s a huge gap between the inexorable rise of the internet economy and the fossilized global payment system. In fact, I’m founding a startup to use stablecoin to bridge that gap.
A stablecoin (or any 'coin' for that matter) does not need a blockchain to fulfill its purpose.
The interesting parts for me are:
- It was created 2 years before the dollar officially lost the gold standard
- It's a product of the IMF
- It is seen as a reserve currency
- It's 'stable' the sense that it's a basket of currencies
- I don't think I've ever heard anybody talk about this during any blockchain / crypto / stablecoin event.
I didn't look into how "stable" the coin actually has been over time. But I think it's good to look at the policies and thoughts from IMF's point of few as well as how countries deal with it. They have smart people there, so there's probably something we can learn from them.
Solid construction and a sleek feel. Pretty small form factor. But I love the multi-device support. Simple shortcut (Fn+F1, F2, or F3) to switch between devices.
Pair to my laptop, phone, and watch and use it for all my types everywhere.
[0] https://www.logitech.com/en-us/products/keyboards/mx-keys-mi...
It's hard to communicate a process through a REST API. Sure you could document it incredibly well, maybe even have every part of your ui represented by an API endpoint, but ultimately, due to the number of customizations involved with each ERP view, you'd end up with some sort of bastard, which was never quite the same as the real deal.
The alternative is some scrappy startup does a SaaS platform for Spa Pool shops and builds the features natively. Not being hamstrung by the ERP platform, so no compromises - no UI's that look like an ugly duckling. And of course they learn every new spa pool shop that comes onboard, adapts and improves.
Eventually the SaaS software startup will become the Spa Pool system of choice, and will come up against the ERP platforms in sales pitches.
One will be ready to go for a Spa Pool shop, the other will have a team of consultants wanting to do requirements gathering....
That's the problem with ERPs, when a vertical/niche has got dedicated software, the ERPs almost always look inferior*
* Upto a certain business size/throughput/specialised requirements, then Mega Spa Pool corp is okay paying millions to have their own ERP team.
Yes, they do. Here in Japan, everyone is covered by either government insurance, or private insurance that's partially paid by their employer. Sound familiar? Germany's system is similar. These are not single-payer systems.
You can't only offer raw materials tracking, but not accounting and shipping. There's just not a lot of value to the business unless you have everything coupled.
The MVP for an ERP is essentially, a fully featured and battle-tested system which is very expensive and time consuming to build before it's profitable.
I don't think starting a new ERP company from scratch makes sense for anyone. The best you would likely do is to become either a minor player (just look at the array of CRMs that aren't Salesforce), tailored to a very specific market niche, or an "ERP adjacent" platform of some kind. That last bit is the obvious play. The bread & butter of Enterprise Applications IT departments around the world is to build custom stuff that inherits data from ERPs or feeds data into ERPs and similar mission critical business platforms. Speaking as a guy who ran one of these departments in an F250 for about ten years, most of what they build is pretty crappy.
So you target firms that are not yet at the scale where they likely have or need ERP with something that does something they do need that would be integrated into an ERP when they get to that scale and build out from there.
No one is buying an ERP from a firm that doesn't either already have a deep relationship with the buyer or a track record in the ERP space or a track record in an ERP-adjacent space, and more than one of those is desirable, so be in the position that when you start trying to sell an ERP you have at least the last plus a stable of firms for which you also have the first.
I am a CS graduate from a 'famous' UK university (UCL). I'm also a qualified CAD engineer, project manager within agile (DSDM agile etc)...ITIL qualified etc. i.e I've spent a lot of time across these kinds of many tentacled systems that really do reach across the entirety of any large business. I've worked with these systems from FTSE 50 businesses to small 50 person manufacturing startups.
I've also been involved in the migration between PLM systems (horrible from a data perspective - all those CAD files etc) and also ERP systems (horrible but largely just the mapping between two different Entity Relationship Diagrams almost incomprehensible to any living human in terms of complexity).
It would be an incredibly ambitious undertaking to compete with one of the major players in either of these spaces. It is not something you could really even do at the scale of a start-up the likes of which YC and the media understand as 'start-up'. You would need so many not just 'early stage' founders with wildly different skillsets, you would need effectively an entire large manufacturing business, from end to end, in terms of personnel because your 'domain expert' essentially includes 'every business function you can imagine'. That's before you could even begin to think about software. It's a fascinating idea but think about it - procurement/purchasing, warehousing and logistics, engineering and design, sales and marketing, finance (very important here), HR, operations, R&D, Q&A...and these are just the ones I can think of that I have come across in my dealings with these systems. They really do touch every department.
The length of time to market would also be such that this kind of project would not really be appropriate to describe as a 'start up'. You'd essentially be creating a 'Unicorn Killer' and that unicorn killer would need insane resources to even have a chance at market success. The number and requirement for specialist migration tools into your new system from existing clients would be a 'massive' undertaking also.
It's such a bold idea but I think to describe an undertaking of that size 'start-up' would be to completely stretch the meaning of the term 'start-up' so far beyond its usage that the term would lose all meaning.
Then do the same for another slice, offer it to existing customers and make the completed slices work well together. Then another slice.
And along the way there could be profit to fund the next slice, as well as existing customers you can tap into to solve their problems. It would be simpler to niche down vs. the SAP/Oracle path of ERP-fits-all.
If I were to do this as a real business I would always impose formal language training in the JavaScript language, so prior JavaScript experience is a largely irrelevant indicator of compatibility. That is because experiences writing the language professionally vary wildly in the market place and quality of code authorship is exceedingly rare. Producing high quality output is not challenging, but most people doing this for a job completely lack proper guidance or shouldn't be there in the first place.
Therefore the most ideal candidates are people who can be trained to a very high standard. I would filter for that first and then optionally filter for clearance secondly. You will be investing in these people so be choosy by potential, intelligence, writing skills, and organizational capacity.
Sooooo close to getting it.
I checked out "How does Medicare work?" [1] and, wow, that's so much more complicated than healthcare in Canada. A big part of the problem is that Medicare has to work within the current broken structure of the US health care system and pay those same middlemen.
> Single payer may just as likely future calcif[ied] the structures.
But what the US has is so much worse than the how the rest of the developed world has "calcify the structures".
[1] https://www.medicare.gov/basics/get-started-with-medicare/me...
You never went through an audit, did you?
Sounds like the pitch Fujitsu made to the Post Office for Horizon. That worked out so well!
You cannot eliminate the need for auditors - the need is for someone to go through the system and make sure that no one is cooking the books.
Hence, an independent third party does the audit.
This is not true. Auditing is half assurance and half insurance. It has nothing to do with the actual results of a bunch of rules and checks.
"...that is connected to the firing unit by a cable, allowing it be used at distances up to 50 metres (160 ft) away"
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skif_(anti-tank_guided_missile...
In fact, as far as I know, they are a one-weather system: clear.
The optimal path for someone in your position is to go to Oxford, then get a job/do a master's at Stanford.
This line
>> Companies like SpaceX and Tesla have trained an entire generation of engineers in how to build an American company that makes physical products but operates like a startup.
is sending chills down my back so. After all, Tesla was almost bankcrupted by their drive to automate everything. And Tesla's robot is a guy in a spandex costume.
After that, I refused to see what they have to say about their goal to de-thron SAP, aka their call for new ERP systems (nice touch to include the full name in the link and not kust the accronym, I am sure people able to theoretically build a new ERP from scratch appreciate the clarification...).
Edit: Ok, I did click on the ERP link. No idea how they came to that conclusion here
This type of software is so valuable and important that we can imagine that there is the opportunity for dozens of new massively successful vendors.
considering they wrote the first sentence if it... At least they don't mention AI, LLM or ML...
If that is what you know about SAP and ERP systems, sure, you can come up with something like YC Call for Start-Up section on ERP systems.
I personally have some ideas based on my own experience in war, but I cannot make them while in a trench.
Well, given the fact that people are working on it, and many of them probably don't like you so much, it's a good idea for "the people you call friendly" to work on it.
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/healthcare-it
Epic is no longer a closed system. They now support a wide range of open standard APIs.
You'd probably start with a human in the loop solution but mapping should be a solvable problem
There is a reason why migration projects are yearlong, multi million projects. Go through one, ideally multiple, of those first before looking at automating any of that. Added benefit, jobs at those projects pay incredibly well for the functional consultants involved. And when, when not if, automation doesn't work out, you still don't have to worry about a job ever again.
If they cut out the middleman, they could negotiate directly with providers and Pharma, lowering the "fully loaded" cost of their payroll. It would be a massive savings.
Once they did it for 1M people, the hard work would be over, and they could sell Amazon plans to the public.
They created a joint venture with JP Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway several years ago called Havaen to try and fix insurance; however, it was shut down. https://hbr.org/2021/01/why-haven-healthcare-failed
In order to achieve any real savings, Amazon would have to build up a captive provider organization with practitioners as direct employees. Which all of the large payers are also increasingly doing. Basically the industry is consolidating and converging on the Kaiser Permanente business model. Eventually most US residents will obtain healthcare from a handful of huge nationwide "payvider" organizations.
(If not, I’m not seeking to argue the fundamental point you appear to be making that “if you fund defense you cannot be moral.”)
In the order you present:
>mission Im taking “moral” to mean “for a purpose of doing good.” Assuming the “doing good” is a combo of opinion on what is helpful and some feeling (such as empathy or a sense of honor), my experience with founders who sell to defense that they are moral people.
It’s possible to genuinely disagree about what “doing good” is without assuming the other person is immoral.
>nation-state On this we fully agree. However, I’ve not seen any other form of group identity escape this dilemma. I would be genuinely interested to learn of it.
>making a buck I get that this seems like a strange thing to say. But go to any industry and try to sell a 7 figure deal. Very quickly you will find there are “in group” tests, the tests are significant, and there are certain “sacred cow” values you must ascribe to. “Making a buck” is the job for everyone in business so it’s a poor purity test.
Here’s another way to think of it: if you are buying from a vendor who’s only motivation is to “make a buck,” how can you trust they won’t stick you with a problematic product after they’ve gotten the money? Government purchasing is a massively complicated process precisely to address this issue, but it is still the social fabric between buyers and sellers that is determinant when selecting speculative, new vendors (aka buying from startups).
Respectfully, we are both making unsubstantiated claims here. I’m sharing my personal observations.
>American Dynamism Politics has an outsized role today in the fortunes of companies. There are actually very few VCs with a footprint in defense and many suffered significant paper losses due to public reactions to it.
SWEs have a huge influence on what gets funded. If you can’t recruit tier 1 tech talent, you can’t build great tech companies.
In this case, a VC has built a media company and is going out making the case for investing in American Defense knowing that it will cost them relationship capital with a very large amount of the tech sector.
The reason I’m engaging with you on all of this is that, on HN at least, I think it matters to “pierce the veil” on founder motivations. “Making a buck”is a simplistic, dismissive take on why people found companies and I don’t think our community should accept it as a reasonable assertion. They are far less risky ways for talented people to make money than founding a startup and very few get such a fortunate outcome.
Let me give you a real example - a founder friend of mine helps the Pentagon replace gas powered equipment with EV powered ones.
Enabling the US to have a more mobile & resilient supply chain is a benefit the founder believes in. He considers himself a patriot.
But it’s not the company’s mission. The mission is to take on climate change. The US military is one of the greatest contributors to factors driving climate change, so it’s an important customer in terms of both mission and of course revenue.
If you’ve concluded that money is the only motivation people have for being in a business you disagree with, this probably isn’t a discussion you’ll get much value out of.
My guess is, you think it is wrong that VCs are taking a moral stance that building defense capabilities is something tech companies should be doing. Leaving no room for their humanity is one way to attack that.
But I am no longer willing to accept that tactic. I think it is more dangerous than any other. If we refuse to see the humanity of the people we disagree with, we’ve already set the stage for wanton destruction after our time here on this planet. History is full of such examples.
Apologies if I’ve been ungenerous or missed your point here. I’d be grateful to learn what I’m missing.
I commend you for taking the time and effort to write this so well, despite the original comment being somewhat snarky and clearly opinionated.
I'm personally a pacifist and would like to end all wars, all weapons production, etc, but we currently do not have a way to enforce that over the whole world.
So the realistic view is that given that currently we have wars, need weapons, etc - it does make sense that YC would fund companies that develop new ones or new technologies in the space. Even if nobody really wants to hurt people.
Rivalrous = more people getting it leads to less for others. (E.g., Software is not rivalrous, but hardware is.)
CNC machines are hard to scale anything more than linearly. We need to train up hundreds of thousands to become CNC machinists. An entire support industry for machine maintenance, tooling manufacturing (an even harder problem), consumable commodities needs to be similarly scaled in parallel.
What? Are you suggesting that aluminium phone cases nowadays are created by an army of trained CNC machinists? And not programmed once by a (few) dozen engineers per model of the handful of existing phone models and then executed by highly automated factories and an army of "low-skilled" workers.
CNC programming isn’t generally performed by engineers—it is currently mostly performed by veteran machine operators.
To get enough veteran machine operators who have the skill and talent to program at the level necessary for high-precision consumer goods, you need quite the workforce pool.
And then add in all the other CNC machinists and manufacturing engineers you need for the auxiliary industries (tooling, molding, the machines themselves) and it starts to add up.
Don’t forget every other industry that is competing for this labor pool.
> caused the deaths of over 800 people in Panama from cough syrup that contained diethylene glycol in place of glycerin.
So you pay china $1 million for some amount of steel (via vietnam) and then pay the us gov $4.56 million for a total cost of $5.56 million.
It’s amazing that so many steel companies are still underperforming in the USA seemingly in spite the intense protectionism.
0: https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-us-vietnam-steel-trad....
Simple stuff like pots and pans, cutlery, potato mashers. Then industrial parts. Farm equipment. Eventually, cell phone frames and more sophisticated stuff. I think this is what the parent comment is alluding to.
They don't want memos, but solid 10-15 year contracts. And since they are not getting that, not much is happening.
There's no need to be hyperbolic.
They're certainly facing a serious situation. But by all accounts they still have some runway. And if you'll check your current news feeds very carefully: no, the front hasn't collapsed, and no, the Russians aren't on the verge of overrunning Kharkiv and Odesa.
So no, Ukraine is not "out of ammunition NOW".
So if there would be a startup saying, we can build a automated factory, spitting out cheap javelin alike warheads using off the shelf components, would surely get money, if they have some expertise.
For context btw: I oversaw the production of hundreds (if not into the thousands) of the Javelins we sent to Ukraine. Two of my coworkers were Ukrainian too. Do not mistake my brutal realism for a lack of caring about the situation.
That worked for russia but somehow doesn't work in the west?
I mostly lack experience in defense tech beyond being a user but ime it often doesn't work as well as the certificate (which probably cost a lot of effort to obtain) states it does. I'm of the opinion that we need to radically rethink our approach here if we hope to deter or withstand potential conflict with china in the next 10 years.
The Western powers are not treating the situation as if they themselves were at war, hence no drastic changes in economic output to favor war machines. We have increased production though. Can't say how much, but it would raise eyebrows. I feel we should have been far more generous with the munitions, especially the older aircraft (think F-16, F-18) early on.
The certificates are basically just a paper trail. The aluminium is aircraft grade, the optics in spec, EMI shielding is sufficient, etc. We do extensive testing, but things slip through. Some issues are storage-related, and others are issues that don't show up til years later - such as microscopic ESD damage. Much of what we've been giving Ukraine was in storage for a while.
Regarding China, I thought the same thing. Until Ukraine. Because as it turned out, that being at constant, if low intensity, war for basically all the time since Vietnam and Korea (at least since Gulf War 2 over Kuweit), really has benefits for the warfighting capability of countries. NATO, and especially the US, have that. Russia and China don't. And it shows, Russia didn't walz over Ukraine the way the West did over Iraq. And China has to deal with an amphibious invasion against a country that had decades to prepare for just that. Which leaves the question of supply lines across the pacific for a prolonged conflict. And there my money really is on western navies.
Just as a reminder, Russia is at a war economy by now, and still has to source from North Korea. All the while, NATO countries are just emptying stockpiles and slowly, maybe too slow, replenishing them. And despite that, all Russia got is a stalemate.
Not really the same thing. Iraq was very low on quality military supplies with years of sanctions before that.
And Russia did walz over Georgia in 2008 and Russia would have walzed over Ukraine in 2014 (some russian military was enough to capture lots of ground back then). But much happened between 2014 and 2022.