I'll take the contrarian stance and say I'm not really impressed with the list. There are some that may be good, but there's not much new. Mostly me too products.
Hey this is Alex from LaunchHear. We just finished our presentation fifteen minutes ago and we're hanging around outside the YC building now. I just wanted to say that a lot of these startups are actually really impressive, it's probably just not obvious from the three sentence descriptions.
Also, a bunch of these startups are still under embargo so they aren't even being written about. Give it a year or so and then start complaining.
His/her comment does not read as a complain, and I believe his opinion is shared with many. The reason, as you mentioned, is the short description takes away from the service, so I am sure these companies are in fact much much more. Another problem is that all these products are version 0.1 of a much bigger version, so they need time to mature.
Edit: However Zenedy's description was very good and there seem to have a real potential.
Well whatever the reason I think I've seen it said for every bunch of startups. Its easy to criticise and I doubt there is any correlation between startups that look interesting and success.
And although I'll regret being negative myself I will just say - Zenedy, really? I think if wanted to write a startup style description of a affiliate marketing site that'd be it.
He did not criticize. He just said he was not impressed. Frankly how often are you impressed with a product other than yours? Not so many times.
As for Zenedy. I think they are following the Demand Media model, and that has proven to be a business that generates a lot of money.
Do not discount affiliate marketers. If you look at startups that operate affiliate businesses they tend to become quickly profitable (frugalmechanic, ticketstumbler etc..)
I guess, I just hear some version of the startups not being impressive, interesting or whatever else enough each time. I don't think his point was, I'm not impressed because its not mine, I think his point was he was disappointed.
There's nothing wrong with affiliate marketing, I'm just a little surprised to see the YC funding the old "pick area, get low quality freelance content, build search rank, sell affiliates" model.
You flatter yourself by saying your expectations are high. Actually you're just not a good judge of very early stage startups. If you saw Google when they were Backrub, or Microsoft when they were making Basic for the Altair, you would have said the same thing. Minor, derivative products.
Ouch. If fnid2 is mistaken isn't it more likely because he has much less information about these startups and their founders than you or the attendees of demo day?
It's certainly true that he knows nothing about most of these companies beyond a brief text description. But that is precisely the situation where someone who understood early stage startups would know to reserve judgment.
I think the "problem" is compared to some of the quality ideas in the past (dropbox, reddit etc.) a lot of this round seems a bit trivial.
I'm pretty sure a couple of them, too, will bottom out quite quickly because they either don't appear to fit their market or understand it.
fnid2 is being silly in latter posts though; interestingly he trivialized/picked holes in the ones I think might do ok and sort of passed over the ones I think have major flaws.
People forget that reddit was widely viewed as a trivial digg clone in its early days. Dropbox also seemed trivial to some early on: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
I was stating an opinion. You don't know when I came to know Google or Microsoft and you don't know what my opinion of them was. You also don't know how good a judge I am of very early stage startups, which is largely irrelevant, because hardly anyone is a good judge of startups at this stage. Almost everyone knows that. In fact, I asked how to predict startup viability right here and well, see for yourself, no one really knows: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1146337 At least I admit it.
That isn't even what I was saying, I was saying I'm not impressed with them. When I say impressed I mean in the "Do what is hard" sense. I mean in the blue ocean sense of creating markets. Building a product in an existing market and relying on a mastery of networking, pr, and marketing to make it successful simply doesn't impress me. It has nothing to do with the viability of the startup. The least impressive startups are often the most successful.
I can go into more detail for you. Granted I don't know the founders, I only have a 2/3 sentence explanation, but here goes...
LaunchHear -- This can be accomplished with a database of bloggers and the types of products they review and a list of companies that make that kind of product. When a company wants to send a product, they enter the type and get a list of addresses to send it to. It's a fairly simple app. It's not a technical problem, it's a sales and marketing problem. Plus the manpower to find the blogs and even that can be automated.
NewsLabs -- Basically a blog with some SEO and Ad tools built in. How many journalists are doing this on their own right now?
Seeing Interactive -- Plenty of startups, some of which are run by hn'ers are doing this now. I know of one out of austin, but can't remember the name. It's been done over and over -- not to say SI won't succeed -- it just isn't impressive. EDIT: You know what is hilarious? Seeing Interactive is the company I was thinking of from Austin. I was mistaken -- they're out of College Station, but I can be forgiven for that because it was many months ago when I saw them and haven't seen them sense.
Notifo -- apparently a lot of people like this one, but still, there are lots of SMS api's and text messages can be sent via email address too. I don't know exactly how notifo differentiates itself from those methods, but it's basically sending messages to people's phones and that's not impressive.
Zencoder -- This is old hat. It's an ffmpeg cluster with a queue. Put the file on your server, send the url to zencoder, it downloads the file, encodes it, then makes a callback to another url to let the requester know where to get the encoded files. I built one of these by myself 3 years ago. You could even edit the video online cropping out certain sections or adding different audio tracks.
Nowmov -- Is it difficult to search twitter for links to movies and see who has retweeted them the most? While one is playing, find another one and change the innerHTML of a div to another embed tag.
Crocodoc -- This one is actually fairly impressive. This type of marking up and editing is hard and I'd like to see what becomes of it.
Gamador -- Really? Social gaming? Is it impressive? I just don't think so. How many social gaming companies are there now? Hundreds? Thousands? Why is Gamador better? It'll be a tough pitch, but if Kevin and Dan are badasses maybe that's all you need to make a great social games company.
Cardpool -- a CRUD app like launchhear. A dating site for people with cards and people who want to buy them. This is a matter of trust mostly -- not technology, but trust has been established. It'll be hard here because how often do people get cards like this? Is it really worth it to go trade them on a website? Why not just spend it at the store? You don't like the store? Lots of gift cards can be used at multiple stores. It's a "gift" card -- get yourself a gift.
Tweetflow -- I am almost never impressed by a company that creates another company wholely dependent on the survival of another company whose survival is also in question. That said, natural language processing can be difficult, but in this case, a list of positive words and negative words and some searching is sufficient. It's neat and people will probably use it and may even pay for it.
CHROMAom, Inc. -- I love colourlovers, but it's a community about color. It's neat and it's a big community and there are lots of great color patterns there, but it's not impressive in the pg do what is hard sense.
Answerly.com -- tons of these exist already. I can't count them on two hands. People go to the internet to ask questions -- that's what they do. SEO on the question and there you go. Not impressive.
Zenedy -- just watch google trends and see where there is a dirth of content for the keywords. Finding untapped markets is a neat idea, but this is mostly a horsepower problem. If you have the money to pay for the content, you can make money. Lots of companies do this. How many domains does the guy who started MySpace have? He's been doing this for a long time. Search for hiking trails and you'll get one of his sites. I'm not sure about the revenue for the foreseeable future though, because once you've found the market people know there's little competition there. Just watch what you are doing and then copy or steal the content. It's unethical, but even Mahalo does it!
Data Marketplace -- This is a neat idea -- but not impressive. It's an online store for people with data. This model exists already -- like http://www.freebase.com/ with a pay wall.
Embedster -- Others have already commented on this one. You're adding monetization on top of embedded stuff that is often already monetized. It's kind of leechy in a way. I wonder how you're going to get past adblock plus.
Etacts -- People seem to like this one too, but it's a CRM mashup with widgets.
Embedly -- Is embeddability the goal? I got to video.bing.com and I can find all kinds of videos to embed. It's a web crawler looking for an embed tag -- it isn't special. It isn't impressive.
500Friends -- I'm not a big fan of popularity contests -- too introverted for that, so I just don't even care about this at all. I think sites like this devalue word of mouth advertising and tarnish trust relationships between people. If I tell you about a product, it's because it is a good product, not because someone paid me to tell you. Any amount of impressed I am by a few of the others here gets dinged for bing in the same list as these kinds of sites. Again, my opinion and many, I am sure, think I'm wrong. Doesn't mean it won't make a lot of money from companies who want to pay people to advertise for them.
Infoharmoni -- Already mentione twitter before, I wish bit.ly didn't exist (another ding). Never heard of gowalla or used foursquare -- perhaps I'm a square.
140Bets -- I think sports is a net negative for society. I'm opinionated. We waste so much time on and money on stadiums that are built with lies and tax dollars and promises of jobs and increased economic activity -- and they are a horrible waste of space. Have you ever walked in a stadium neighborhood when there is no game going on? It's dead. It's wasted space that could be used for a park. Take the fence down and let people use the space -- they paid for it! Instead, 99% of the time it is unused or used by a minority of people to play a game. I love George Carlin's take on it. Give all the golf courses to the homeless people. Another ding.
Greplin -- More social scraping? Really? I suppose by this point, I'm just kind of tired of reading all the references to twitter and social networks and yada yada. Where's the innovation?
It makes me wonder how many really hard problems were submitted and how many candidates are shaking their heads right now having gone through this whole list wondering why some of these are on here and they aren't. I'm not a rich man and I'm not motivated by money so I'll probably never have enough to invest $25k or whatever in hundreds of companies, so we'll never know how good I am at picking early stage startups, but if I simply said every one of them will fail, I'll be about 99% accurate.
But I never said these companies won't succeed or the teams aren't brilliant or your ability to pick early stage companies is crap. I'm simply not impressed by them -- it's nothing personal. I am not impressed by 99% of web startups.
But I wanted to be impressed with your list and I wasn't, so perhaps I was too glibly open about my opinion. I expected a -4 for the comment and was extremely shocked by the amount of agreement.
You're just digging yourself in deeper by trying to poke holes in these companies based on such incomplete information. You really would be wiser to reserve judgment on them. Startups are so volatile, and good startup ideas so often seem bad at first. You're setting yourself up to look foolish by dismissing them so quickly.
What's the rush? Why don't you learn more about these companies before deciding about them?
If I was putting my time and money into them and had the same information on them that you do and had interviewed the candidates, it very well may be that I would pick the same companies you did -- who knows. Some of them I can't imagine picking, because the market doesn't interest me.
I'm not digging myself into a hole, I'm making an assessment based on incomplete information, which is all that can be expected of me here and now.
Why don't you stop using all the logical fallacies and insults?
When you have incomplete information, there is another option besides saying things that are, as a result, probably mistaken: to wait till you know more before you express an opinion.
C'mon pg, this isn't that kind of forum. Posts are on the front page for a day at most, mostly a few hours or even minutes. You see a post, maybe read it, then write a comment. By the time I could get to know these companies, this thread will be long gone.
If you like, I'll come sit with you for the next YC evaluations and provide my honest and informed opinions of the companies.
There were only seven minutes for you to have read my long review of them and then compose your thoughts and reply. You put thoughts in my head without knowing me. You don't know what I know or what kinds of predictions I've made. You're doing the same thing to me that you are blasting me for doing to your selections.
This thread has gone way beyond where I wanted. I was just posting a quick comment, man. I didn't want it to blow up like this. It was just an opinion and I don't know how to underail it. Usually, at this point, people tell me to just shut up, so that's what I'll do.
One way to do your best to "underail" it would be to NOT post a startup by startup list of why you think they are unimpressive.
IMO, the three major problems I have with your opinion are:
1) You assume startups should be tackling new problems. I don't know if you noticed, but "me too" companies win more often than grand new ideas with deep technical problems on the web. Google, Facebook, Zynga, YouTube, Groupon and the iPod were me-too plays.
2) You assume startups should be (or look) technically impressive. There are plenty of great startups that aren't really deep technology problems (until they need to scale).
3) You're looking at 3-5 month old companies, for the most part. Craigslist at that age was a mailing list in SFO. You'd look smarter if you were talking about things like "total addressable market" and "scalability of customer acquisition" than how impressive the companies look right now. Startups of this age are still mostly just potential.
The amount of time you invested in this screams "Troll" to me. The fact that you have had this happen enough that you say, "Usually, at this point, people tell me to just shut up, so that's what I'll do" seems to support that assessment. PG shouldn't be feeding you and neither should I, I guess. I'm mostly disappointed that your initial comment (devoid of any actual content) was upvoted by as many people as it was.
I would say that what most people are doing in this thread (using all information available to them to make a best initial judgment), is exactly what you should have expected. This is basic human understanding - taking the available information and drawing a conclusion.
I think it's a bit unfair to poke fun at names and such, but the commenters in this thread are performing the exact same process of evaluation and understanding as yourself, except the only difference is their information is quite limited.
Yes, it's stupid and unwise to draw conclusions from incomplete information, but for the most part, that's what people do and (given the information), that's all they can do.
If you want to avoid this in the future, I would say better PR and more information would help people avoid making such silly initial judgments and help to properly manage their expectations.
Besides, if most people have low expectations for these startups, underpromising will only help in the future when they do deliver. And then you can deliver your I-told-ya-sos.
I know it's possible for a forum to do better than what you claim is all people can do, because HN itself used to do better.
There's a new batch of YC startups every 6 months. The startups were about the same quality a year ago. And yet after demo day a year ago the top comment on HN wasn't a content-free dismissal with 86 points. I know both HN and the startups very well, and what's changing here is HN, not the startups. The site has grown so much that the median user is significantly dumber and meaner than a year ago.
I've been thinking a lot over the last several months about how to deal with this. One of the solutions I'm considering is to get rid of points on comments, and that would have worked well here. Fnid2's comment, as he more or less admitted himself, was just a throwaway remark. But displaying points transformed it into a rallying cry leading a mob.
So no, HN did not ever do better. It only seems worse because instead of 2 complaints about company logos, HN is now 10x the size and you see 20 complaints. There's still a lot of great articles posted, HN "Ask/Tell" discussions, and it's still full of intelligent people. However, it takes wisdom to know when to shut one's mouth, and intelligence != wisdom.
I've been here about 3 years myself, and that's why I try to stay logged out and make my bookmark to HN = /best. It's just gotten far too noisy and I was wasting tons of time keeping up with the sheer volume of (both good and bad) comments.
Holy cow, you're right, the one a year ago was pretty bad.
This problem is older than I realized. The threads before a year ago were not so bad though. (The 2007 one is just one banned troll.)
It is easy to trivialize almost any company. E.g if sports is a waste to time so is facebook don't you think? So I guess facebook is a no go in your book? Apple - why even bother with apple product its just eye candy.
I could go on but I hope you get the idea. Word of advice - stop being so negative about stuff in life.
Perhaps the "really hard problems" that were submitted & accepted into YC (which PG has knowledge of and you do not) could not be fully solved in 3 months?
I'll bet when Bump came out you thought "Who needs a new way to transfer contact info?" Now they have a partnership with PayPal, and it's clear that their vision is to build the platform for information transfer.
Think bigger. You're judging these companies by their first step on a very long journey.
Seriously, you are assuming you know what is in my head and accusing me of being short-sighted -- talking without knowing what I'm talking about... I mean... You do see the absurdity of that don't you?
And for the record, I've built electronic circuits with push buttons and had to accommodate the bounce of the button on the switch, so I do know just a little bit about the difficultly. Compound that with countless phones bumping into each other, perhaps at the same time and the problem is hard.
That's why I am impressed by Bump. It has nothing to do with their potential success then or their current success now. It's an innovative and simple idea. It makes you think, "Wow, why didn't I think of that."
In 2 or three sentences about Bump, it's obvious how difficult the problem is and that someone solved it is impressive.
Hmm... I'm Seeing Interactive and not an "HN'er". Yeah, we're from the Austin area but I challenge you to find a start-up anywhere with 250 newspaper relationships.
I remember a conversation here a little while ago with someone from SI. It was many months ago and one of the gentlemen, maybe it was you, maybe your partner -- iirc, both or perhaps it was 2 out of three members of the team at that time participated in the thread, I can't remember the specifics. But you, or he, had been working really hard in the evenings, but it's hard to sell stuff to newspapers in the evenings, and was wondering if he should quit his job and focus on it or keep working on it. There were two of you really involved at that time or maybe two. It was a long time ago, it's kind of fuzzy. I think you were making a few thousand a month at that time and I thought that may be enough to take a chance, but there was a family and a mortgage and credit cards to be concerned with and political capital was running out. You were in the valley of death it seemed and I wanted to get you through it, so you'd keep going.
I remember commenting to someone and then someone else coming in and saying, "I'm the business partner." And your name, Lloyd is very familiar.
Anyway, I suggested to talk to the employer and see if you/he could take a day off a week and focus on sales during business hours and see if you could build up enough revenue.
Unfortunately, the person felt insecure about that idea because lots of concessions had been made by the employer already and it was doubtful that more were available and there was a lot of tension.
So I looked up the company and you had three or four products that you were selling to traditional news papers and you were really passionate about saving local news and I was too and I thought it was good idea and I wanted you to succeed, so congratulations! I think you are on your way! :)
Right. I guess I don't understand what part of all this makes you "not really impressed" with us?
The other companies in the list you actually gave reasons, but with us you just keep referring to this previous conversation and I do not understand your point.
I simply didn't remember your name. Months ago when I looked at your website and commented with you here, I was impressed. I was not impressed with SI when I just read the 2 or 3 sentence description, only because of multiple coincidental reasons.
First, I didn't remember that SI was your company and I was impressed with your company, so my thought was, why is this company in the list better than the company I remember chatting with a few months back that was struggling, yet passionate and interested in saving local news. I was disappointed that companies like yours weren't represented in the list. It just so happens that the company I was reading about was your company.
So you're an interesting case, because I knew about you and knowing about you was why I wasn't impressed with the SI I was reading about, simply because I knew of an impressive other company in the space. It supports what pg is saying, that with deeper investigation, some of the unimpressive companies become impressive, because I had done deeper investigation on you months before and was impressed.
Art (founder of embedly) , yea embeddability is the goal ..... We wil be much more than a "video widget", some examples where this is powerful already ..... Posterous ( a blog site based on embeddable content) , Facebook ( embeds hulu and youtube videos) - http://www.facebook.com/hulu , Reddit.com has decided to expand their links and add content to their links
It is great to see you backup the companies you have funded. Any entrepreneur would love to see their investor fight for them in public. Respect.
However going back and forth about his opinion seems unnecessary. Even if all these companies became successful it does not take away from the fact that he and some other people were not impressed with it. His opinion is just that, an opinion.
Actually I would go further and say, you guys should chat privately. I am sure you have lots of people agreeing with you, so someone saying "Nah PG" could be helpful if he cared to elaborate. "When two people always agree, one of them is not needed in the room".
Yeah, me-too products are never really interesting. I mean, does the world really need another search engine? There's already Lycos and Altavista.
Calling an internet startup's idea "me-too" is a pretty lame criticism. Most of the most successful startups had "me-too" ideas on paper. The proof is in the eating.
Ah, but he made a clone of del.icio.us from back when it was new and minimal and still really awesome. Which is much, much better than a boring old clone of modern Delicious.
The difference is, I wasn't even referring to the names, but rather the linked descriptions. For example:
"Embedly is a single source for embeddable of content on the web."
And rather than mockery it was an expression of regret, that it's 2010 and these are the best startup ideas you got.
I think the names do a good job mocking themselves without any additional help.
NewsLabs sounds cool. There may be a lot of journalists out there frustrated with the constraints of working with a big media organization and want to do their own thing. NewsLabs could create the next Arianna Huffingtons.
Data Marketplace is promising: market research firms charge ridiculous fees for their reports which are usually overkill for what you are looking for. Data Marketplace could solve this problem.
Greplin sounds cool. 500Friends sounds like it'll generate revenue straight off the bat.
That's clients, not providers. I use Gmail and have for years, but I don't have an @gmail.com address that I use or access my mail from the web interface. My mail client is typically Mail.app or the Mail iPhone app.
They are tracking these based on loaded images, which means Gmail users by default aren't counted. Some versions of Outlook (at least 2000) autoload images. Lots of mobile devices don't load images, which makes BlackBerry users undercounted.
Not to mention sample bias--I also don't sign up for email newsletters.
Outlook 2000 is 4 (maybe 5) versions old. At least 2010, 2007 and 2003 don't load images by default, I wouldn't be surprised if Outlook XP didn't either.
More to the point: no large organization is using Outlook 2000 anymore. It's unsupported and you can get 2010, 2007, 2003 or even XP on your current license agreement.
... And yet "Outlook 2000, 2003, Express" make up 32% of all email clients found in their study. My point isn't that these are in high use, but that they are vastly over counted (and even then meaningless to try and find providers as there are plenty of people using Gmail inside of Outlook).
Aye, lumping in 2003 (which is current -1, ie, still supported by MS and most corporate customers) with 2000 and Express (which aren't supported) and weirdly omitting XP is odd.
Yes, but the company is saying that GMail replaced Outlook. Clearly it has not - I'm sure most new GMail users are not ex-Outlook PIM users. This is because GMail is in a different product category
- what percentage of GMail users regularly schedule more than one event a week?
- what percentage of Gmail users use reminders?
- How much of their day is spent with GMail open?
- How often do they search Google contacts for phone numbers and other data?
There have definitely been more people who've chosen to use GMail and GCal than have chosen to use Outlook. Most Outlook users have it forced on them by their employers. (They don't necessarily object, but they weren't given a choice.)
If you include Outlook Express, then you have to consider that it had the same tying advantages that IE had over other browsers. Even so, it's been months since I ran across someone who uses Outlook or Outlook Express for personal email. Thunderbird and Apple Mail are somewhat more common among the people I deal with, but the majority of people I deal with use some kind of web mail for their personal email, with GMail completely dominating among those who are at least slightly technical and among kids.
You don't need to be downvoted, but my experience so far completely contradicts what you're saying (with around 50 active clients at the moment, including some businesses, and currently accruing one new client a week for the last 6 weeks).
Outlook is pretty much the de facto mail client amongst my clients, even those that aren't in business environments. My largest business client is email-program-agnostic, and still the vast majority of users are asking for Outlook.
Among webmail users, most usage is either Comcast's site, Yahoo's (a result of the SBC partnership), or their internet service provider's.
Actually, I think this might help put it in perspective: more of my clients have email addresses at their own domain versus having Gmail accounts.
Only commenting on the last line, that doesn't really put it in perspective at all.
A user could, if he so chose, have email addresses at their own domain, on Gmail, AND use Outlook to access it. There's a VERY blurry line between the usage patterns of the average mail user.
That said, I agree with you in thinking the parent was underestimating Outlook's prevalence.
I think they'd be about the same. But Outlook users certainly aren't rushing to replace a PIM with a badly integrated and badly UI-designed equivalent, web based or not.
Ideas matter too. If you have really smart and capable people working on a product that not many people are going to use, then they're not going to be very successful.
There's nothing contrarian about what you're saying, and your expectations aren't too high. You're just doing what most people (outside of HN at least) do: calling the game way too early and without enough information.
These companies need time to develop/morph/mature before anyone will have any real clue as to their prospects for innovation or success.
"Google.com: A search engine that looks at link popularity to find the best search results. It's going to revolutionize search."
Talk to investors from the starting days of Google, and they'll cite you a dozen examples of similar sounding pitches. It's hard to tell from few liners about the future of a company.
Just because there have been successful "me too" products, doesn't mean that they are all worthwhile pursuits. It seems that Google is too often played as a trump card to support ideas that don't stand on their own as viable businesses.
(Although, I'm not saying that's the case with this list)
doesn't mean that they are all worthwhile pursuits
Similarly, just because they are "me too" product doesn't mean they won't succeed. It seems that "me too" product is too often played as a trump card to discard new startups.
Well this post certainly needs a counterpoint. I don't think your generalization should be the dominant stamp on the latest batch. A percentage are really interesting, and unless you compare this to past groups how can you say this is a weak showing? Yes, some are twitter widgets but they're not bad for twitter apps. I can already think of a number of customers for 500 friends. Broad-brushed pessimism is the wrong frame when a number have obvious potential and we have no idea what pivots lie ahead for the others based on an elevator pitch. Let's judge Ycom by it's long-term record.
Greplin does sounds interesting. I actually applied with essentially the same idea - cloud data indexing and search. Check it out and let me know if you want a beta invite:
Yeah, I actually pitched the exact same thing to PG a year ago (in interviews) and YC thought no one needed search beyond e-mail. Then again I hear Greplin was accepted to YC with a completely different pitch :)
Frankly, it seems hard to imagine NOT needing search beyond email. I really only user a handful of web services (I'm sure that number is only increasing) and I can barely remember whether I sent something in an email, as a facebook message, saved it to delicious, etc.
I started creating Nutmeg Search just so that I could find my own stuff, but the idea seemed useful so I'm trying to make it available to the world.
I initially had a similar reaction, but now I'm not sure that's quite fair. I think the innovations aren't so much technological, they're more like business model innovations. They have the potential to generate value for customers regardless.
I'm a developer with crocodoc. Thanks, that's what we're trying to do! Would you mind sharing the details of your painpoint? Feel free to email if you would prefer not to reply publicly, my email address is in my HN profile.
It sounds derivative, but in fact crocodoc is great. While there are lots of document markup tools, I actually use and like crocodoc. Use it a few times to mark up a real document and you'll see.
I suspect that in times of crisis people tend to play it safe and start more 'simple' companies, with safer business models, instead of swinging for the fences with experimental ideas that have no clear future or business model.
Still, there are some very interesting companies in this batch that are not particularly sexy but might have great potential.
It's not so much that you're cynical as that you haven't thought about where the descriptions of these startups came from. They came from an event where startups presented to investors in SV. So of course the descriptions sound like they'd be appealing to that audience; that's what they were trying to do.
Honest question: would tech-savvy investors' opinions of a short blurb really be that different from other technical businesspeople? Or, to put it another way: would it really require two completely different statements to appear attractive to both groups?
And more critically: I realize that this is your baby, and you have had a large amount of involvement and personal investment in these projects over the last several months. However, you're coming off as both very defensive, and very dismissive of the criticism so far.
It's surprising to me that YC would unveil its next batch of startups, and get such a "meh" reaction from the audience. That indicates a problem worth investigating, either in the community here, or in the specific projects that were funded this time 'round, or in YC's goals (specifically whether those goals might be diverging from those of the HN community).
The reason I've been so contemptuous of some of the comments on this thread is that I've been seeing the identical comments on web forums for 5 years. That's how I can be sure they're not a sign of a problem. They're just the same type of people making the same type of comments that always get made about newly launched startups.
I think Card Pool could make some money, but it also got me thinking about the retailers. Don't many of them operate on thin margins? If they offered card holders 90% cash back on the card amount, they might actually make more money from partial reimbursements than they would from the merchandise sales.
if it helps, farmville was a near duplicate rip-off of farm town, and it's now one of the most successful facebook apps. you don't always need to have 100% unique ideas. zynga spent more money advertising, and is now profitable with something like 100+ million players.
If COCA is less than first months earnings you have nigh infinite cash until you run out of channel. If Google found me ten million dollars worth of ads I'd have a stressful month doing daily credit card payments and calls to bank, but it would end with fifteen million in pocket and more miles than I want to think about.
Perhaps my expectations are too high.