Winter 2012 YCombinator Batch
March 27 2012Filed under: home Startups YCombinator
The first time I went through YCombinator, it was in a batch of 14 companies. The most recent batch 59 demoed (39 publicly). They've outgrown the YCombinator demo space and have moved to an auditorium in Mountain View's Computer History Museum - with a seating capacity of 380.
I was lucky enough to attend YCombinator's Alumni Demo Day last night (where the startups do a practice run-through of their pitches). Here's a quick summary of the public companies with my thoughts:
AnyPerk: Discounts as an employee benefit. Founders have all been part of previous compnaies that have been acquired or profitable. 1000 companies signed up in 4 weeks. They're basing this model on a Japanese company which has served the Japenese workforce with streamlined benefits. Launched on TechCrunch yesterday.
TiKL: Walkie-Talkie application. They have 22MM users, 100% organic growth. That number is pretty amazing, especially since they don't have a website and their Facebook Fan page has 170,000 fans.
Dealupa: Deal aggregator. I appreciate that I can filter out deals that aren't important to me (ie, Moms & Babies) and that they'll show all the aggregated deals in one place along with the establishment's Yelp reviews.
Priceonomics: Priceguides for everything. Growing 65% per month. They crawl marketplaces (such as Craigslist) indexing transactions to determine the market price for any product. 250,000 unqiue monthly visitors. They've launched on Techcrunch in december.
Kyte: Kid phone software (for Android only). They have launched recently on Hacker News and have received Techcrunch coverage.
EveryArt: Commissioned art marketplace. Launched last week and sold $25,000 worth of artwork in private beta. Users include Alexis Ohanian, Dropbox, and more.
Shoptiques: Boutique aggregator. They've already finished their round.
Pair: Messaging for couples. The product is currently live for the iPhone and an Android app is planned shortly. I've been using this a while with my significant other and find it's an effective way to stay in touch with her even though we live in the same area. I also appreciate that I needn't worry about text message charges, since before this she was my top recipient of text messages (even after iMessage).
PlanGrid: Blueprints on tablets. They've launched in early March and are avaialbe on Apple's iOS App store.
Medigram: HIPAA-compliant chat for doctors.
Zillabyte: Palantir for salespeople. Founded by several ex-googlers. Techcrunch.
HireArt: Employment agency 2.0. Techcrunched.
Flutter: Gesture control via webcams. Starting with iTunes and Spotify. They're still in Alpha but you can sign up for it here.
Givespark: Celebrity charity fundraising platform. They have not yet publicly launched.
Popset: Group photo albums. This feels like another take a Divvyshot, my prior startup. The app is available in Apple's iOS App Store.
SendHub: SMS for organizations. Sendhub will allow small businesses to connect with their customers via text (instead of email). They haven't yet launched but already have some pretty solid traction in their private beta.
Screenleap: Super simple screen sharing, without having to download anything.
Coderwall: Quantified resumes. It almost feels like LinkedIn for developers. Connect your accounts (such as Github) and Coderwall will create a better profile that highlights your skills, contributions to open source projects, network, etc.
LVL6: Social mobile games.
Midnox: video camera app + hosting
42Floors: Commerical real estate search. On Angellist & Techcrunch.
Sonalight: 100% voice based texting (on android). 50,000 messages a day.
Your Mechanic: Airbnb of car repair. They're peer-to-peer with $20k in monthly billing (haven't yet launched).
Crowdtilt: Kickstarter for groups. $410,000 spent so far, 34% repeat usage. Groups of friends have used it to fund party busses, vacation houses, tailgates, and even the construction of an urban garden.
Flypad: Turning the iPhone into a game controller, letting you play games on your TV or PC.
TheDailyMuse: Company ads (targeted to potential employees, not customers).
AnyVivo: Sell living things. The founder, Alex Andon, started by catching Jellyfish in the waters off San Francisco and selling them online with custom-built tanks. He was featured in the New York Times a couple years ago.
Carsabi: 10% week over week user growth. Passed autotrader in inventory this week. At the current growth rate they expect to pass Autotrader in usage in the "next few months." Pretty incredible assertion, but I've been impressed by their product. When viewing a car's profile they'll chart that car's price as compared to other cars with similar mileage.
Pervices: Software-defined radio PCI card. Sounds like it'd be fun to hack against the card...if I had a desktop. I'm sure they'll be coming out with a mobile version that uses the same API.
iCracked: Tablet & phone peer-to-peer repair network.
SocialCam: Video sharing. They've already launched and have received a significant amount of traction.
HackPad: Realtime wiki. These guys seem to compete pretty directly with PBWiki, though PBWiki (now PBWorks) seems to have pivoted away from the space so there may be an opportunity here.
FamilyLeaf: Facebook for families. Obligatory TechCrunch launch happened yesterday.
Ark: People search. They snagged an incredible domain name: ark.com.
Cute: Images/videos as a service for websites and iOS applications. They provide a set of APIs that make managing media easy.
Minefold: Multiplayer game hosting. Today they provide on-demand minecraft servers.
Exec: Uber for work. Founders include Justin Kan from justin.tv. Exec has received a positive reception in San Francisco among startup founders.
99Dresses: Trade your old dresses for a virtual currency which you can turn around and spend on other people's dresses.
MatterPort: 3D scanning using the XBox connect. Freshplum (my current startup) shared office space with these guys at Sunfire. When you work right next to another company you get to know their team dynamics well. These guys would put in long hours. We'd often be the only two teams in the 30-person office.
Thanks to Gabor Cselle, a Winter 2009 classmate for the photo from Alumni Demo day.
Sam Odio on the web: Crunchbase | Angellist | Linked In | Quora | Google+ | Github
About
Hi, I'm Sam Odio. I'm a snowboarder, off-roader, developer and a life-hacker.
I've worked on a bunch of different projects. My favorites have been a touch-screen controlled bus, a photo sharing site called Divvyshot, and Facebook Photos... more.
Sub-blogs
Touch-screen bus
January 08 2012
When I was 17 my brother asked me to build a touch-screen interface for a bus he had recently purchased. The screen was to serve as the dashboard, controlling the turn signals & headlights, starting the engine, opening the door, etc.
To complete this project I used a rabbit embedded microcontroller similar to the SBC BL4S200. You can get one for as little as $250 today. A budget computer connected to the touch screen via USB & VGA and communicated with the microcontroller via a serial port. I then reverse-engineered the relays on the bus to determine their function (ie, power the ... more
sam.odio.com has a new blog.
August 11 2011Filed under: home
Since moving off Blogger (here's why) and loosing all of my blog's comments my blog has fallen into a bit of disuse. Now that I'm freshly unemployed (at least, that's how my Dad calls it) I aim to change that.
Action items:
- Create an open source lightweight django blog.
- Crowd-source a blog design using crowdspring.
- Realize that crowd-sourcing is a failure, convince Michael to donate his time and patience to fix it.
- Port all old blog posts to new platform.
- Port all comments (which have recently disappeared) to new platform.
- Make myself a Margarita and relax ... more