Comment by wg0
1 year ago
I'm wondering how and what's the investing criteria for YC.
Maybe there's a billion dollar company in that or a sustainable business model because consumer hardwar may never be able to run LLMs.
But I really don't know because otherwise I'm sure pretty stable, serious ideas with proven demand would be rejected outright.
Having advised a company who applied to YC with traction, proven MRR, and a serious team behind, I can’t say it is certainly the case. But having seen a number of companies coming out of the latest batch, it only smells like YC has been drinking from the punch bowl that is HackerNews’ front page hype train.
I doubt Sustainable business model features anywhere in the YC requirements. It’s the antithesis of the entire throw VC money at it to grow plan
I suspect the criteria is something like every engineer is going to end up w/ a subscription to some tool like this because the return on investment is so high. Saving 1 hour of work a month easily justifies spending $50. There's no clear winner yet, so let these folks -- who did work on dev tooling elsewhere -- take a stab at it.
It’s a good theory. But in practice, it’ll become ever so easy to build something similar, and there’ll be numerous free options to choose from. Good enough free options. And quite probably the bigger fish will start buying the smaller, until it naturally becomes a monoculture. All major editors already have free AI extensions, including the legacy ones like Vim. The only subscription you might need is to the LLM. A way better bet would be to make a model over a specific programming language, you’d have unfairly superior end-to-end development quality and performance, plus a niche to cultivate. My opinion is that the age of general models will not last. You will never be able to run the most capable one on current consumer hardware, yet, you will be able to run a specialized model. All in all, it seems like this generation of AI products will be cemented as progress on AI interfacing, that it, the AIs UIs.
Yeah if such a tooling is what you're building, YC is really really great for that. Some 4000 companies are your immediate clients. Well, most of them. And it is not like that another $50 a month is going to shorten the runway of any startup running it into ground.
Rather, you now have company in your portfolio with paying customers right off the bat that it would not have otherwise or would have taken longer than usual.