Yo(techcrunch.com) |
He just texted me "What's Up"
Mission accomplished I guess?
Yo, buy this! Yo, emoji pack, Yo, plus! Yo, for enterprise.
Then suddenly their the next whatsapp.
Stuff like that really gets me. I see tons of start-ups that would have a fighting chance given that sort of investment and then lame stuff like this gets funding. Of course they're entirely free to spend their money any way they want, but was there really no place to spend that better?
Congratulations to the Yo team for furthering the research to the origins of the term 'dumb money'.
I guess if you timed it right you could use Yo to communicate in Morse, but that seems to be a waste of bits considering that each packet will activate a very large number of bits being sent where one would suffice.
I will take exception though to the 'dumb money' comment. It is dumb to gamble, but even smart people do it, it is a risk/reward trade-off. Smart people can look at the fundamentals here and see there is a possible 'flip' opportunity, high risk, high reward, short time to closure. The trick will be to see in 3 years if it hasn't flipped or exited by then. But that only tells you the payoff. I bought a $66M lottery ticket the other day, 'dumb' ? Sure it was $2 put at risk. I chose not to buy a $2 soda. Probably not a smart allocation of capital, but the soda would have been turned into piss in short order, the lottery ticket has potential right up until the drawing :-).
On the other hand if they got some money, just not as much as that, then perhaps they could fluff as you suggest. Is this common in your experience? I've heard some reports of other fluffed numbers on HN, ("turned out not to have raised as much as they claimed") but no first-hand experience of anyone doing this.
What makes you think this is an either-or proposition? There's a glut of capital chasing startup opportunities today. No entrepreneur is entitled to money, but every entrepreneur can compete for it. Sure, some entrepreneurs are better connected than others, which often makes fundraising easier. But at the end of the day, why should investors be implicitly blamed for a failed startup led by an entrepreneur who was unable to convince said investors to provide his or her company with funding?
Sales is an integral part of building a successful business, and if you need capital, you had better be prepared to sell your company to the people you're asking to provide it.
> Congratulations to the Yo team for furthering the research to the origins of the term 'dumb money'.
Even if you subscribe to the notion that there really is "smart money" and "dumb money" when it comes to angels and venture firms, let's not pretend that there isn't such a thing as "dumb entrepreneurship." Entrepreneurs who start businesses without lining up the capital they need to execute are taking a risk. In many cases, especially among young entrepreneurs, that risk is not at all calculated.
On this note, it's sad that so many startup entrepreneurs bet the farm on day one by putting themselves in a position where they believe they need to sell equity to raise capital. There are a variety of ways to fund a business and early on, selling equity is often one of the least attractive despite the sex appeal that Silicon Valley has given it.
Maybe. Consider all of the competing opportunities that might be discovered in a short window, like say a week. Out of all of those options, which ones are still early stage, which ones are demonstrating any amount of traction, and which ones have fancypants metrics like "over 5,000 messages sent per day"? (I'm just making that number up. But I'm sure that sort of number was mentioned at least once. Even if they had to squint to ignore the power law distribution.)
edit: and which ones are riding on the news or rumors of a >$1 billion exit (while still demonstrating traction)? (Snapchat/Whatsapp rumors were probably floating around for a bit before they happened.)
How much is traction worth? what about fad traction?
a huge portion of the 'technology' industry is just rich/privileged people doing nonsensical things that may make them a bunch of money. whatever.
trying to find or impose some kind of rationality on it is in my opinion pointless, and holding it accountable to some kind of moral benchmark is as sure as anything i've ever seen, to disappoint.
Not sure? (don't do this) Try calling your local emergency service (911 in the US) and hanging up.
There are a lot of situations where one bit communications can make big changes. Sending a voltage down the wire to the 'launch' relay on some missile will do a lot worse. In the end, any actuator anywhere is going to respond to just a single bit changing state. So we're in violent agreement about that.
But to reduce the available bandwidth to nothing when lots is available has me puzzled. Twitter found that reducing the number of characters (by necessity, rather than by choice) launched a new medium. I can see how taking that to its logical conclusion (from 840 bits to 1 bit) may create an entirely new mode of expression.
At the same time I fear it will not leave them with a value that is is 1/840th of twitter, that '1' is perilously close to a '0'. In that sense it is like 'pair', which tries (tried?) to be a social network for 2.
Maybe someone should come up with a 0 bit medium?
It's basically begging for you to switch apps after you get the "Yo" push notification. I can't really imagine a conversation which goes like this:
Me: Yo
Them: Yo
Me: Yo
Them: Yo
...
What I can imagine is getting a Yo from someone, switching apps, and being like "what's up? [p.s. dont fucking Yo me anymore. Just message me using a real app.]".
That "wut" app is similar in that you can't have a real conversation with anyone in particular, but it can at least be used for sharing secrets or something. I guess. Yo doesn't have such a use case that I can see.
They could maybe pivot it to act like tinder where if both of the parties yo eachother then it goes to a separate section of the app where they can actually IM eachother. But...idk. That doesn't seem particularly interesting/differentiating either.
I must be naive/short sighted.
In this thread I've seen lines like: "Filling a communication niche", "It reduces that friction of opening your SMS app and typing 'Yo'"
What a surreal thread. It literally could have come straight from a script from HBO's 'Silicon Valley'.
As an app that prioritizes ease-of-use and fast communication, Yo really falls flat on it's face.
I'm not going to comment on the potential usefulness of this app, because I'm sure others will and I don't think it'll yield any particularly interesting discussion. References will be made to Snapchat and WhatsApp, the word "bubble" might come up, etc.
iOS's sandboxing mechanism doesn't expose text messages to third-party apps.
But what about TechCrunch itself? I would bet money that there's a correlation between TC readership and depression. Reading about pointless apps is a waste of anyone's time and will make you feel worse in the long run.
I'm 50/50 on this happening within a decade.
I can't wait until the hackathons where everyone makes Yo clones unironically. It's going to create an innovation black hole.
"It's like Yo, only with 'Hey' instead of 'Yo'"
“It’s really lightweight,” said Arbel. “You don’t have anything to open. The Yo is everything, it’s all there is. You don’t have a badge you need to remove or any hidden content. Just a Yo.”
Words fail me.
Apparently, the "missed call" phenomenon, where people will call someone else and hang up, is incredibly popular, especially in other countries (e.g. Bangladesh). It's a free way to communicate 1 bit of information, which in many cases is enough if the people know beforehand what they want to communicate. E.g., "come downstairs", "call me back on another line", etc.
I think one article mentioned that missed calls are 70% of the traffic of cellular operators in Bangladesh!
Yo is ridiculous and doesn't necessarily solve any problem that is not solved with existing messaging apps.
Trying the app it said to me that I could connect to Facebook through my settings. The app didn't have settings.
sad trombone
Don't snort the 1.2 million at once, yo.
Basically any time someone says "message me when..." there is no conversation when I message them. There is just a contentless phone call or text message. This is filling a communication niche that isn't well supported by the existing methods.
That said, I'm still not willing to install a new app just for that, but that doesn't mean there isn't value there.
"Prank me when you get close and I'll meet you out front."
As it stands, what this app fails to do is establish a channel of communication. If I message a friend on Skype, I know that we're most likely going to converse over Skype. Same with email, SMS, phone call, etc. With Yo, however, they have to choose some method of communication which may not be ideal for me. Furthermore, given that there is zero metadata regarding the "Yo", they have no clue how urgent it is that they get in touch over some real communication channel. The only context that one can have around a Yo would have to be established before-hand (over a medium for real communication).
In fact, since there's no metadata (besides the identity of the sender), Yo is actually less useful than a beeper.
This might be the allure. Its a message without baggage. There's no guilt for failing to say "hey, how are you man?" No shame in saying "yo" and getting on with your life. Because it lacks the ability to "establish a channel of communication," it inherently removes social pressures to extend the communication to a degree one or both parties may not want at the moment.
Well there is a seedier way think about it, and I don't like it but I recognize that it is not uncommon.
I would not be surprised if some investor gave the company a 'high' valuation (ie lead the round), invested in their preferred shares, and demanded a 2x or 3x liquidation preference. Let's say you are right and that I am right and there are 3 employees, and lets guess that they are sharing in say 80% of the "equity" but there shares are "common" not "preferred." The employees and founders feel awesome! "Look its worth $12M and we are millionaires!" and they go about their business trying to make it more awesome and cool. Except they can't make it more awesome enough and they need more money. The original investor says "Oh sure, I'm in but I don't want to lead this round." and the founders go out stumping for money, but they can't find anyone who agrees with their original valuation much less an even higher one. What to do? what to do! And the money is running out, and there are people to feed and spouses or significant others who are getting worried. And the "Blam!" the investor mentions they could use an exit to his pal a BigCorp who offers to buy them out in an acqui-hire "terms of the deal not disclosed" and the founders are hired and given 'earn out' packages that force them to work at BigCorp of 3 maybe 4 years, meanwhile our investor clears their liquidation preference, doubles (or maybe triples the cash) in their pocket and if they are participating preferred takes another bite at what ever is left over for the common stock.
Ok so all this evilness speculation speaks poorly for the folks who just invested $1.2M in Yo. Neither I nor probably anyone else really knows what they saw in the company to make them feel that they could get their money back, but it is critical to remember that investors are in it to make money, if the founders get some too that is a "nice to have" but isn't essential. This lack of alignment gets sometimes missed when people like Jacques are wondering "What the heck is going on here?" An investor doesn't care if its a 'down round' if they are getting 2x their money back in under 5 years. Using the rule of 72[1], getting double your money in 4.8 years is a 15% rate of return. A "win" in anyone's book.
[1] https://www.directinvesting.com/drip_learning_center/rule_of...
the meaning that can be given with a single word.
I could imagine yo'ing my wife to say "Thinking of you" while at work, or my brother to say "Not up to much if you want to Skype", etc.
I think they could easily start with something curious like this and then slowly extend it to something else (e.g., single word/term conversation elements where you get more choices the deeper the conversation goes).
How many naysayers were there (and still!) with something like Twitter? Yet I use Twitter many times each day.
I assume that Yo has another plan that they haven't gone public with yet, since "Company that just says Yo raises $1m" is more newsworthy than "Company to solve problem X raises $1m." They'll get people to download the app and then add the new functionality with an automatic update.
I believe there are more than 65536 code points assigned so a tweet should be able to carry over 2240 bits of information -- 2240+ Yos.
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Incidentally, in Japanese and BEV (probably adopted from jp), the word "yo" has an entirely different meaning.
[0] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
Edit: added endnote
If your language would only allow for 140 bytes you'd be really out of luck if your language routinely requires multi-byte sequences in UTF-8.
Hm. You could do a 'tweet compression' trick where you use a fixed number of bit from a subset of UTF-8 that you know is multi-byte (selected for the extra long sequences) in order to put longer messages on twitter, and then use a decompressor to turn it back into ascii.