I've been working on this for several years, though a startup seems the wrong vehicle for it. I think the description in the RFS is misguided:
"We’re interested in helping developers create better software, faster. This includes new ways to write, understand, and collaborate on code, and the next generation of tools and infrastructure for delivering software continuously and reliably."
There's a blind spot in prose like this that gets repeated all over the place in our community: it emphasizes writing over reading. I think we have to start with reading. My hypothesis is that we need to reform the representation of programs to address this use case: I download the sources for a tool I use, wanting to make a tweak. How can I orient myself and make a quick change in just one afternoon? This is hard today; it can take weeks or months to figure out the global organization of a codebase.
You can't "deliver software continuously and reliably" until you rethink its underpinnings. Before the delivery problem there's a literacy problem: we programmers prefer to write our own, or to wrap abstraction layers over the code of others, rather than first understanding what has come before.
> We’d like to see new services that make it possible to invest in super low-cost index funds.
Sorry, this is not the right problem in financial services. Companies like Vanguard are already doing a great job of this and the costs are extremely low. Its a commodity product with razor thin margins that actually serves the needs of its customers well. Maybe there's a marketing issue where they aren't educating enough people, but that's not a technology problem.
As an alternative: Lower the Costs to IPO, disrupt Investment Banks
Sarbanes-Oxley, minimal competition between investment banks, and heightened SEC scrutiny have made the fixed costs to an IPO astronomical. These days a company, for the most part, cannot IPO for less than a $1 billion raise. This means that the broad public, including those index funds YC loves, is prevented from enjoying any returns at all for younger, high-growth companies.
There is room for startups to disrupt part or all of the process. It would be capital intensive and hard as hell. But, you're not looking for easy right?
Hey Max - Agreed - low cost index funds are a dime a dozen. Even "hot" startups like WealthFront / Betterment are a waste of money - you can spend a minute on the site, get their recommendation, hop over to Vanguard and carry it out yourself (and save thousands). Just send yourself a reminder to rebalance once a year and you're done. The biggest driver in building wealth, from our experience and that of working at Guide Financial, is using behavioral finance to automatically accumulate more assets over time - makes orders of magnitudes bigger impact than low costs/tax harvesting/etc
The index fund is the greatest investing technology ever invented. The under-adoption of this technology is a behavioral problem. The solution definitely isn't additional layers of asset allocators taking fees on top of this.
I'm kind of confused by what Sam is talking about in the RFS about enabling lower cost index fund investing. VFINX has a minimum initial investment of $3,000 and minimum additional investment of $100. At 17 bps that's literally $5/yr. on the Vanguard S&P 500 fund. You are basically talking about a nominal cost to service accounts (send statements, support, backoffice, etc). It would be interesting to think about how technology can lower these costs, but cost isn't preventing anyone from participating.
IPOs are sales problems, which require high touch interaction and networking. They are also dangerous to get wrong which is why companies pay high fees to do them.
Remember too that Google got burnt by trying to avoid the sales process entirely.
While I've always felt a strong attraction to YCombinator (especially the cameraderie that comes from being a part of it) and been very inspired to apply, I can't help but feel that I am in a phase of life that's simply not a good fit for YC, or at least the narrative that's pushed.
I'm no longer a mid 20-something that can live on Ramen and 16 hour days. I'm married and have a young child.
Are there YC founders in this phase of life that were able to make it work in YC? What did you do differently? Is YC interested in working with these kinds of founders? (it's certainly a different kind of "Diversity")
I had a pregnant wife and a kid at home when I went through YC last January. Another friend of mine had 3 kids and a wife he had to leave home.
Realistically YC doesn't care what stage of life you're in, they just want you in Mountain View for 3 months so you can significantly improve the chances of your company growing large. It's difficult to make it work, but I promise for me it was totally worth it.
We're absolutely interested in working with these kinds of founders. Shoot me an email at kat at ycombinator. Happy to talk more or introduce you to some of the founders who went through YC with families.
There were plenty of older, married founders in our batch (S14) at YC. Some with kids. Message me directly at andrew at bayesimpact.org, and I can connect you with some to speak to.
If you're willing to work hard and are talented, we'd love for you to apply. If you have those two qualities, I could care less about that number.
Only you can answer whether you're willing to do what it takes to make a startup succeed. I personally do not believe it requires sacrificing things like family and personal health. I'm not going to lie, it's easier when you have less obligations in your life (like when you're young), but not impossible.
My second child was born after submitting the application and before being accepted. The fact that I have kids was on my twitter profile and not hidden.
It's tough. But not impossible. My solution was to cut everything else out. But, I love my family, my co-founder is awesome, and building my company is what I want to do. So, "everything else" should probably have been cut out anyway.
I was in that boat, but now if I was really motivated I could leave the family home for 3 months to do YC. The problem now is that everyone I know is in that same situation, so I've got NO co-founders to bring along. PG wrote a whole essay about why middle-aged guys don't do startups, but he also wrote one about the importance of cofounders. You solve one and end up not having the other...
It doesn't matter what your situation is, it's the same with any investor. If you have strong traction or a strong track record, you will get investment, be it YC or someone else, no matter if you're a parent or not. Of course you have to have a scalable startup.
It's a fantastic list; I'd like to comment on how some of the problems are already solved (outside the U.S.) or not cast properly.
> Healthcare in the United States is badly broken. We are getting close to spending 20% of our GDP on healthcare; this is unsustainable.
That's mostly a policy problem, not a technology problem. Countries with single-payer healthcare spend massively less on it per % of GDP than the United States with its pro-profit healthcare system, and American doctors and healthcare corporations end up being fabulously more rich than in those countries. (And they still have private healthcare, like in Sweden, which competes with public healthcare organizations.) The other reason healthcare costs are getting higher is that people are getting older and thus more sick. That's a generational bump, there's very little we can do about that. Not that I'm opposing the types of ideas YC is after in this sector (preventative medicine and better sensing/monitoring), just that the premise is wrong that it's a technological problem.
> At some point, we are going to have problems with food and water availability.
That's because we dedicate most of our water and land resources to feeding cattle that we then eat. Innovations that will have the most impact in that sector will involve weaning people from animal products. Stuff like Beyond Eggs and lab-grown meat.
> It’s not a secret that saving money is hard, and that people tend to be bad at doing it. The personal savings rate has largely been falling since the early 80s.
Sure, some super-low-cost index funds would help, but the main problem here is two-fold: 1) real incomes are stagnant, due to government policies favouring corporations and 2) government/pension funds are much better at providing good ROI on investment than individuals can. Once again policy change is much more likely to have a massive impact than trying to improve the individual worker's investment returns. Collect retirement contributions at the source, and have the best investors in the country manage them. Without taking a profit for themselves. It's done elsewhere.
To quote the article: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/pf_article_109143.html
"A study done at Harvard University indicates that this is the biggest cause of bankruptcy, representing 62% of all personal bankruptcies. One of the interesting caveats of this study shows that 78% of filers had some form of health insurance, thus bucking the myth that medical bills affect only the uninsured. "
So yea, fixing healthcare will also fix a lot of America's debt problem. There are only a couple ways to do that - decrease the costs or have a single payor. We've tried the 'decrease costs' part with college funding. That didn't work, because any time we subsidize funding to colleges, they request more money. College debt is huge now. So going the medical route and just subsidizing a broken system isn't going to fix it. It will only make the problem worse. We need to have medicare for everyone, and it should start before birth. If someone wants a college education, allow them to get it, only paying to re-take classes. That would wipe out most people's debts.
> Countries with single-payer healthcare spend massively less on it per % of GDP than the United States with its pro-profit healthcare system
Countries with universal coverage through other-than-single-payer systems do this, too. (every OECD country other than Mexico and the US has universal coverage -- but not all of them through single-payer -- and every OECD country spends massively less per GDP, let alone per capita, on healthcare than the US does; to the extent that many of those that do have public single-payer universal systems pay less in GDP for that than the US does considering public costs in the US alone, without considering the slightly-higher private costs in the US.)
I also thought the Financial Services section was rather tame and un-disruptive.
The problem is not that it's hard to find good ways to save and invest, although that is a true statement. The problem, at least for most people in the US, is that besides Social Security, "personal saving and investing" is currently the only available way to secure one's future/retirement. An additional, related problem is that the only personal saving and investing option available to most people is "buy one or more Financial Services products": Savings accounts, stocks, bonds, funds, 401(k)s, Roth IRAs, even pensions which are long gone. They're pretty much all the same scam: Hand your own personal money to someone else, and in 50 years, it may end up bigger or smaller or the same, depending mostly on who you chose to give it to, and other factors totally outside of your control. If it ends up bigger, you chose wisely and/or got lucky, and deserve to retire comfortably. If it ends up a lot bigger, you chose brilliantly and/or got really lucky, and deserve to retire in luxury. If it ends up smaller, you chose stupidly and/or got unlucky and deserve to eat dog food when you're old.
Can we get away from "use your own personal money to buy a risky financial services product" being the sensible way to secure one's financial future? Now that would be a worthwhile problem to solve.
Not to mention the fact that "Saving and Investing" is only available to people who can actually afford to save and invest (which is yet another problem that desperately needs solving).
I think startups can prevail in terms of business model and not just technology.
Look at Uber, Uber has an app, but the real issue in Uber is creating a marketplace, managing a brand, managing relationships with drivers, fighting the taxi companies, etc.
Innovations in how health care is organized and delivered are very possible.
As for food and water I'll say that the case for vegetarian and veganism is often overstated. Out here in upstate New York we have plenty of water and plenty of hillsides that are good for grazing and not for tilling. In other places the situation is different, but in some places animal agriculture is part of the solution and not the problem.
I think both the single payer and pension arguments miss the fact that the US is at a hub of a system. Inflated drug prices in the US finance drug development and cheaper drug prices in the ROW. Similarly, what a government run pension fund can attain in another country is unrelated to what one can attain in the US.
I agree with the part about stagnant real incomes, which meshes with the rising cost of health insurance, housing and college, but I don't think professional pension fund managers do that much better than individuals in the long term. They may avoid stupid mistakes like selling all of your shares in the winter of 2008-2009, but the real advantage pensions have is that they can borrow from peter to pay paul, at least in the short term.
Agreed, I'm a Canadian living in the bay area, and I recently broke my collar bone in Canada. I went the the emergency room in Canada and again, when I touched down in the USA.
The room in Canada was paid out of pocket (because I'm not a resident) and cost $600 for 1 x-ray a consultation with 2 doctors and a room for the night, and another $30 for the pain meds (morphine)
The 60 minute consultation I had in the US was $150 co pay, which if I had no insurance would have been $2000 Which got me an x-ray and 15 minutes with a doctor and another $10 for "prescription" acetaminophen. (aka overpriced over the counter Tylenol)
Doctors aren't the problem, it's the insurance companies. I don't see how it's a technology problem as much as a political will (and maybe stubbornness in believing America is always the best even when it's not). The best we can hope for is technology can help by gathering political will.
Water will be a serious problem, if I remember correctly Jordan has to import potable water. I'm sure they would be interested in any ycombinator ideas, and the government of California.
Where I live there is an abundance of crystal clear drinking water being wasted by fracking to sell LNG at bargain basement prices.
> That's because we dedicate most of our water and land resources to feeding cattle that we then eat.
As a farmer, I'm struggling to picture how we could change that land utilization in a significant way without technology to enable it. It's not quite as simple as consumer desires, although you are right that changing consumer habits changes the flow of money and where it is invested which would also spur on the necessary technology, presumably.
I'm surprised no one has commented yet on the first couple of these - Energy, AI, Biotech, and Drug design.
These have traditionally been domains requiring a huge research apparatus with tremendous manpower, for only very long term gains. Not good for startups. In AI, how can a startup hope to succeed when academia has had almost no success in 50 years (and I am doubtful throwing more CPU/neuron layers will 'solve' the problem).
In addition, the people with the skills necessary to make progress are going to be advanced researchers with PhDs, who are good enough to remain in academia if they wish or who have already developed a proven-enough idea through their research career that they don't need Y-combinator-style money.
I am not trying to be a downer on the idea, contrarily I hope there can be success. Really I am fishing for anyone with a good perspective (or an answer) to these points.
An important trend is the API-ification of everything. As more and more businesses are accessible with a web API, the Internet becomes more and more powerful.
I'd like to invite people to try the early release of Empire API, which is one API for every enterprise SaaS:
Empire is an API for accessing enterprise SaaS services such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Google Apps, etc. It provides a uniform, database-like interface to every service that it supports. Empire makes it easy to integrate data from multiple enterprise services into your own enterprise app.
You can click Login to create an account, and we'll send you an API key. Or you can just sign up for the mailing list.
While interesting - the thing that surprised me the most was not seeing "security" (take that for what you will) on the list. Given the year of disclosures, the heartbleed incident, and all other sorts of things - I feel like this field is ripe for a disruption.
Between the staid companies that have been providing tools for decades that can be better, the tools that don't really exist that need to - I think we're ready. Similarly, with the security world starting to consolidate (FireEye buying Mandiant, likely goings public of companies like Rapid7 and TripWire), I'd think it's an ample rate/return option.
"the government is a very bad customer" is better statement of the problem. The real problem with government is the system of software procurement and management.
This includes decision makers who often play favorites and often have zero expertise or sound counsel to leverage in making key technology related decisions.
The healthcare exchange is not an exception to the rule. It is the status quo of most government technology related initiatives.
Selling to governments is very difficult and time consuming. The company I work for has spent over a year now trying to get approved to sell our software to the NYC schools (not land a sale, just get approved to try to land sales), and it looks like we may have hit a dead end.
I came to Demo Day in 2010 (as an investor) but left without investing in anything, because I was so demoralized by the way it seemed everyone was trying to start lame web sites doing relatively trivial things.
If Demo Day looked like the stuff on this list, I'd be banging down the door to get in again.
Energy generation, transmission, storage and consumption technologies are the opportunity of our lifetime and it is great to see Energy as #1 on this list (though there might not be a correlation between rank and YC weighted importance).
Generation - Solar & Wind
Transmission - Distributed Grid
Storage - Batteries
Consumption - Electric Vehicles
> We believe economics will dominate - new sources must be cheaper than old ones, without subsidies, and be able to scale to global demand.
The world uses a huge amount of energy and it is vital that any technology is 1.cost competitive and can 2.scale on a globally. These are no small feats, but like Airbnb the assets already exist, but our access to them does not. This is a distribution and financing problem, not a creating new technology problem.
S.A. is talking about general-purpose AI (position 2 in the RFS). This means processing natural language. There is a lot of progress but it's just slow so it's almost invisible.
Also it's a very difficult field of science. Now you need to be proficient in AI, machine learning, computational linguistics, linguistic corpora research, cognitive sciences, statistics, and sometimes physics if the text changes over time. Of course, you also need to be a good programmer. This combination of skills is very rare. Thus, very slow progress.
I suggest to start with well defined practical problems. For example, no one seems to do much with user generated reviews. There is some sentiment analysis but that is just a binary text categorization problem - not even close to general purpose AI.
It would be much more interesting to show a seller a time ordered stream of clustered reviews that depict only the most representative review for each cluster. This way a seller can see how his/her fixes/changes impact user reviews. Also it would be a great source for features and bug fixes requests. This is an ideal testing bed for clustering, novelty detection, categorization and mild inference. The inference is required because of sparseness of data.
This would create a good data set for a more general purpose AI. We would have reviews and text documenting changes and improvements of a new version of a product. Now the computer could start learning the dialog between users and product developers. Then, we are just one more step from statistical inference based question-answering system. Not a brute force system like "Watson" or a hand crafted rule base system like "Siri".
[EDIT:] I was thinking more about a decision support system that can recommend product changes. But in a way that maximizes customer satisfaction and minimizes the cost of implementation. The dialogue between past changes and customer reaction would give us the surface that needs to be optimized. This would generalize well to other domains where there is a text for request and a text for response - just to name one: clinical text in healthcare (position 5 in the RFS).
I have stated this previously to the AGI community and think that the way to go is that QA recommendation engines will be the first killer app for AGI. Not recommendation like the ones you see now with the "others who bought...", but ones that look more like "concierge" QA services.
From what I understand from speaking with Selmer Bringsjord, Bloomberg has an outstanding internal QA system, so there is progress, the trouble is that it's all behind corporate firewalls.
There was a silly little online game that came out a few years ago called Akinator [1] that would "guess" a public personality and did so by "learning" based on user inputs - very naiive implementation of CTL but gets the gist of how you can implement a mock AI to get damn good results.
If you did a little delphi to stack the initial deck of results, say for a car buying QA recommendation service, I think you could have a pretty powerful tool that could be replicated across services.
> It’s not a secret that saving money is hard, and that people tend to be bad at doing it. The personal savings rate has largely been falling since the early 80s.
There already several startups in the "personal saving" space largely based on index funds, though some of them have large minimums. Complex schemes may not be worth the effort for those with only a few bucks to spare:
It would be cool if Vanguard had an API so we could do the same thing open-source rather than incurring the extra management fees from these companies which are mostly based on Vanguard funds.
Oh yes, yes, yes. Everyone is talking about the quantified self but human augmentation would be so much cooler. I don't care if a watch can tell me my heart rate at all times (I know when my body is tired, or out of breath, because I live in it!!!)
But there are so many senses that I would like to have; for example, be able to always know where the North is relative to me. A device that would let me feel the North would be so cool and useful (I wear a Tissot T-Touch for that reason, but it's a very poor solution to this problem).
I think I heard the Apple watch will be able to do this, in some cases; but it sounds like an afterthought. I would pay serious money for a wrist bracelet or some other wearable that would do only that, but do it well.
Very cool to see this list expanded. My own personal interest lies in programmer tools and their inevitable evolution, so it's great to see them listed on there.
A few of the accelerators I'd applied to in the past don't see the business opportunity present in developer tools (Who pays for those?) so it's a relief that YC recognizes the opportunity there.
>This seems to us like something software should help solve. We’d like to see new services that make it possible to invest in super low-cost index funds (in a normal account or a retirement account), do some customization around individual stocks, and otherwise set it and forget it.
This exists already, there are a ton of discount brokers with very competitive pricing.
Awesome, ambitious and inspiring list of the challenges humans need to solve to move forward. One huge issue forgotten though: animals and wild life. They also inhibit our planet and part of our lives, but many quickly disappearing.
Well said, we share our planet. Poor animals and plants dont have their own voice, but certainly need more represntation in our daily thinking.
Would be great to hear from the leader of the startup world. Even if only to bring attention to their cause
What would be some good startup ideas here?
My only idea is a company that manages National/Regional parks and has a monetary incentive like a)Being paid by people who visit their parks. b) Being paid as a service per square foot they manage. What other incentives can we create to make sure the companies are kept honest without involving too much government oversight?
Couldn't agree more. Protecting wildlife is like protecting nature's most valuable works of art, and it's a real tragedy that they have become so marginalized in our anthropocentric system. It would be fascinating to focus on solving problems that go beyond our own species. One of the main issues is the economics of biodiversity — how do you put a price on the preservation of an ecosystem or a species? It's certainly not a straightforward answer, but it's a question that's well-worth thinking about.
[+] [-] dang|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akkartik|11 years ago|reply
I've been working on this for several years, though a startup seems the wrong vehicle for it. I think the description in the RFS is misguided:
"We’re interested in helping developers create better software, faster. This includes new ways to write, understand, and collaborate on code, and the next generation of tools and infrastructure for delivering software continuously and reliably."
There's a blind spot in prose like this that gets repeated all over the place in our community: it emphasizes writing over reading. I think we have to start with reading. My hypothesis is that we need to reform the representation of programs to address this use case: I download the sources for a tool I use, wanting to make a tweak. How can I orient myself and make a quick change in just one afternoon? This is hard today; it can take weeks or months to figure out the global organization of a codebase.
You can't "deliver software continuously and reliably" until you rethink its underpinnings. Before the delivery problem there's a literacy problem: we programmers prefer to write our own, or to wrap abstraction layers over the code of others, rather than first understanding what has come before.
More on my approach: http://akkartik.name/about
[+] [-] impendia|11 years ago|reply
http://www.amazon.com/Discrete-Mathematics-Applications-Susa...
$264.39, for students that work part time jobs at $7.00 an hour (before taxes).
Not only students are angry about this. Professors are angry, and authors are angry too. Bitter fights between professors and publishers are common.
Everybody wants to see the big players in this industry fail. Please, someone, make it happen.
[+] [-] maxcan|11 years ago|reply
Sorry, this is not the right problem in financial services. Companies like Vanguard are already doing a great job of this and the costs are extremely low. Its a commodity product with razor thin margins that actually serves the needs of its customers well. Maybe there's a marketing issue where they aren't educating enough people, but that's not a technology problem.
As an alternative: Lower the Costs to IPO, disrupt Investment Banks
Sarbanes-Oxley, minimal competition between investment banks, and heightened SEC scrutiny have made the fixed costs to an IPO astronomical. These days a company, for the most part, cannot IPO for less than a $1 billion raise. This means that the broad public, including those index funds YC loves, is prevented from enjoying any returns at all for younger, high-growth companies.
There is room for startups to disrupt part or all of the process. It would be capital intensive and hard as hell. But, you're not looking for easy right?
[+] [-] theuri|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tpeng|11 years ago|reply
I'm kind of confused by what Sam is talking about in the RFS about enabling lower cost index fund investing. VFINX has a minimum initial investment of $3,000 and minimum additional investment of $100. At 17 bps that's literally $5/yr. on the Vanguard S&P 500 fund. You are basically talking about a nominal cost to service accounts (send statements, support, backoffice, etc). It would be interesting to think about how technology can lower these costs, but cost isn't preventing anyone from participating.
[+] [-] walshemj|11 years ago|reply
And there are plenty of very low cost index trackers.
For a VC to make this sort of request is troubling as it indicates that they have very little knowledge on how investing works.
[+] [-] foobarqux|11 years ago|reply
Remember too that Google got burnt by trying to avoid the sales process entirely.
[+] [-] atonse|11 years ago|reply
I'm no longer a mid 20-something that can live on Ramen and 16 hour days. I'm married and have a young child.
Are there YC founders in this phase of life that were able to make it work in YC? What did you do differently? Is YC interested in working with these kinds of founders? (it's certainly a different kind of "Diversity")
[+] [-] randall|11 years ago|reply
Realistically YC doesn't care what stage of life you're in, they just want you in Mountain View for 3 months so you can significantly improve the chances of your company growing large. It's difficult to make it work, but I promise for me it was totally worth it.
[+] [-] sgustard|11 years ago|reply
"This is one reason I'd bet on the 25 year old over the 32 year old."
"By 38 you can't take so many risks-- especially if you have kids"
I would be wary approaching an organization that has publicly expressed such age discrimination.
[+] [-] katm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajiang|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevin|11 years ago|reply
Only you can answer whether you're willing to do what it takes to make a startup succeed. I personally do not believe it requires sacrificing things like family and personal health. I'm not going to lie, it's easier when you have less obligations in your life (like when you're young), but not impossible.
[+] [-] marcelsalathe|11 years ago|reply
It's more a question of whether your life fits to everything that comes with being a startup founder, rather than YC itself.
[+] [-] nwenzel|11 years ago|reply
It's tough. But not impossible. My solution was to cut everything else out. But, I love my family, my co-founder is awesome, and building my company is what I want to do. So, "everything else" should probably have been cut out anyway.
SimpleLegal YC S2013
[+] [-] phkahler|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wellboy|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frandroid|11 years ago|reply
> Healthcare in the United States is badly broken. We are getting close to spending 20% of our GDP on healthcare; this is unsustainable.
That's mostly a policy problem, not a technology problem. Countries with single-payer healthcare spend massively less on it per % of GDP than the United States with its pro-profit healthcare system, and American doctors and healthcare corporations end up being fabulously more rich than in those countries. (And they still have private healthcare, like in Sweden, which competes with public healthcare organizations.) The other reason healthcare costs are getting higher is that people are getting older and thus more sick. That's a generational bump, there's very little we can do about that. Not that I'm opposing the types of ideas YC is after in this sector (preventative medicine and better sensing/monitoring), just that the premise is wrong that it's a technological problem.
> At some point, we are going to have problems with food and water availability.
That's because we dedicate most of our water and land resources to feeding cattle that we then eat. Innovations that will have the most impact in that sector will involve weaning people from animal products. Stuff like Beyond Eggs and lab-grown meat.
> It’s not a secret that saving money is hard, and that people tend to be bad at doing it. The personal savings rate has largely been falling since the early 80s.
Sure, some super-low-cost index funds would help, but the main problem here is two-fold: 1) real incomes are stagnant, due to government policies favouring corporations and 2) government/pension funds are much better at providing good ROI on investment than individuals can. Once again policy change is much more likely to have a massive impact than trying to improve the individual worker's investment returns. Collect retirement contributions at the source, and have the best investors in the country manage them. Without taking a profit for themselves. It's done elsewhere.
[+] [-] nobodysfool|11 years ago|reply
#1 on that list is medical costs.
To quote the article: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/pf_article_109143.html "A study done at Harvard University indicates that this is the biggest cause of bankruptcy, representing 62% of all personal bankruptcies. One of the interesting caveats of this study shows that 78% of filers had some form of health insurance, thus bucking the myth that medical bills affect only the uninsured. "
So yea, fixing healthcare will also fix a lot of America's debt problem. There are only a couple ways to do that - decrease the costs or have a single payor. We've tried the 'decrease costs' part with college funding. That didn't work, because any time we subsidize funding to colleges, they request more money. College debt is huge now. So going the medical route and just subsidizing a broken system isn't going to fix it. It will only make the problem worse. We need to have medicare for everyone, and it should start before birth. If someone wants a college education, allow them to get it, only paying to re-take classes. That would wipe out most people's debts.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|11 years ago|reply
Countries with universal coverage through other-than-single-payer systems do this, too. (every OECD country other than Mexico and the US has universal coverage -- but not all of them through single-payer -- and every OECD country spends massively less per GDP, let alone per capita, on healthcare than the US does; to the extent that many of those that do have public single-payer universal systems pay less in GDP for that than the US does considering public costs in the US alone, without considering the slightly-higher private costs in the US.)
[+] [-] ryandrake|11 years ago|reply
The problem is not that it's hard to find good ways to save and invest, although that is a true statement. The problem, at least for most people in the US, is that besides Social Security, "personal saving and investing" is currently the only available way to secure one's future/retirement. An additional, related problem is that the only personal saving and investing option available to most people is "buy one or more Financial Services products": Savings accounts, stocks, bonds, funds, 401(k)s, Roth IRAs, even pensions which are long gone. They're pretty much all the same scam: Hand your own personal money to someone else, and in 50 years, it may end up bigger or smaller or the same, depending mostly on who you chose to give it to, and other factors totally outside of your control. If it ends up bigger, you chose wisely and/or got lucky, and deserve to retire comfortably. If it ends up a lot bigger, you chose brilliantly and/or got really lucky, and deserve to retire in luxury. If it ends up smaller, you chose stupidly and/or got unlucky and deserve to eat dog food when you're old.
Can we get away from "use your own personal money to buy a risky financial services product" being the sensible way to secure one's financial future? Now that would be a worthwhile problem to solve.
Not to mention the fact that "Saving and Investing" is only available to people who can actually afford to save and invest (which is yet another problem that desperately needs solving).
[+] [-] PaulHoule|11 years ago|reply
Look at Uber, Uber has an app, but the real issue in Uber is creating a marketplace, managing a brand, managing relationships with drivers, fighting the taxi companies, etc.
Innovations in how health care is organized and delivered are very possible.
As for food and water I'll say that the case for vegetarian and veganism is often overstated. Out here in upstate New York we have plenty of water and plenty of hillsides that are good for grazing and not for tilling. In other places the situation is different, but in some places animal agriculture is part of the solution and not the problem.
I think both the single payer and pension arguments miss the fact that the US is at a hub of a system. Inflated drug prices in the US finance drug development and cheaper drug prices in the ROW. Similarly, what a government run pension fund can attain in another country is unrelated to what one can attain in the US.
I agree with the part about stagnant real incomes, which meshes with the rising cost of health insurance, housing and college, but I don't think professional pension fund managers do that much better than individuals in the long term. They may avoid stupid mistakes like selling all of your shares in the winter of 2008-2009, but the real advantage pensions have is that they can borrow from peter to pay paul, at least in the short term.
[+] [-] afinlayson|11 years ago|reply
The room in Canada was paid out of pocket (because I'm not a resident) and cost $600 for 1 x-ray a consultation with 2 doctors and a room for the night, and another $30 for the pain meds (morphine)
The 60 minute consultation I had in the US was $150 co pay, which if I had no insurance would have been $2000 Which got me an x-ray and 15 minutes with a doctor and another $10 for "prescription" acetaminophen. (aka overpriced over the counter Tylenol)
Doctors aren't the problem, it's the insurance companies. I don't see how it's a technology problem as much as a political will (and maybe stubbornness in believing America is always the best even when it's not). The best we can hope for is technology can help by gathering political will.
I'd love to be proved wrong.
[+] [-] dobbsbob|11 years ago|reply
Where I live there is an abundance of crystal clear drinking water being wasted by fracking to sell LNG at bargain basement prices.
[+] [-] randomdata|11 years ago|reply
As a farmer, I'm struggling to picture how we could change that land utilization in a significant way without technology to enable it. It's not quite as simple as consumer desires, although you are right that changing consumer habits changes the flow of money and where it is invested which would also spur on the necessary technology, presumably.
[+] [-] bluthru|11 years ago|reply
Yep. You're not going to fix a problem caused by privatization with more privatization.
Also, a lot of this prevention can be tied back to diets, not a lack of sensors.
[+] [-] bfe|11 years ago|reply
That's the point though: the right insight might provide a technology solution to what everyone could only think of as a policy problem.
[+] [-] ealloc|11 years ago|reply
These have traditionally been domains requiring a huge research apparatus with tremendous manpower, for only very long term gains. Not good for startups. In AI, how can a startup hope to succeed when academia has had almost no success in 50 years (and I am doubtful throwing more CPU/neuron layers will 'solve' the problem).
In addition, the people with the skills necessary to make progress are going to be advanced researchers with PhDs, who are good enough to remain in academia if they wish or who have already developed a proven-enough idea through their research career that they don't need Y-combinator-style money.
I am not trying to be a downer on the idea, contrarily I hope there can be success. Really I am fishing for anyone with a good perspective (or an answer) to these points.
[+] [-] bravura|11 years ago|reply
I'd like to invite people to try the early release of Empire API, which is one API for every enterprise SaaS:
http://empiredata.co
Empire is an API for accessing enterprise SaaS services such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Google Apps, etc. It provides a uniform, database-like interface to every service that it supports. Empire makes it easy to integrate data from multiple enterprise services into your own enterprise app.
You can click Login to create an account, and we'll send you an API key. Or you can just sign up for the mailing list.
[+] [-] cik|11 years ago|reply
Between the staid companies that have been providing tools for decades that can be better, the tools that don't really exist that need to - I think we're ready. Similarly, with the security world starting to consolidate (FireEye buying Mandiant, likely goings public of companies like Rapid7 and TripWire), I'd think it's an ample rate/return option.
[+] [-] wmeredith|11 years ago|reply
It could also be written like this: the government is a very bad customer with very large software.
[+] [-] glowstickhero|11 years ago|reply
This includes decision makers who often play favorites and often have zero expertise or sound counsel to leverage in making key technology related decisions.
The healthcare exchange is not an exception to the rule. It is the status quo of most government technology related initiatives.
[+] [-] bradleyjg|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielweber|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hazz|11 years ago|reply
Doesn't this already exist, in the form of the bicycle?
[+] [-] jblow|11 years ago|reply
I came to Demo Day in 2010 (as an investor) but left without investing in anything, because I was so demoralized by the way it seemed everyone was trying to start lame web sites doing relatively trivial things.
If Demo Day looked like the stuff on this list, I'd be banging down the door to get in again.
[+] [-] startupfounder|11 years ago|reply
Generation - Solar & Wind
Transmission - Distributed Grid
Storage - Batteries
Consumption - Electric Vehicles
> We believe economics will dominate - new sources must be cheaper than old ones, without subsidies, and be able to scale to global demand.
The world uses a huge amount of energy and it is vital that any technology is 1.cost competitive and can 2.scale on a globally. These are no small feats, but like Airbnb the assets already exist, but our access to them does not. This is a distribution and financing problem, not a creating new technology problem.
[+] [-] zeratul|11 years ago|reply
Also it's a very difficult field of science. Now you need to be proficient in AI, machine learning, computational linguistics, linguistic corpora research, cognitive sciences, statistics, and sometimes physics if the text changes over time. Of course, you also need to be a good programmer. This combination of skills is very rare. Thus, very slow progress.
I suggest to start with well defined practical problems. For example, no one seems to do much with user generated reviews. There is some sentiment analysis but that is just a binary text categorization problem - not even close to general purpose AI.
It would be much more interesting to show a seller a time ordered stream of clustered reviews that depict only the most representative review for each cluster. This way a seller can see how his/her fixes/changes impact user reviews. Also it would be a great source for features and bug fixes requests. This is an ideal testing bed for clustering, novelty detection, categorization and mild inference. The inference is required because of sparseness of data.
This would create a good data set for a more general purpose AI. We would have reviews and text documenting changes and improvements of a new version of a product. Now the computer could start learning the dialog between users and product developers. Then, we are just one more step from statistical inference based question-answering system. Not a brute force system like "Watson" or a hand crafted rule base system like "Siri".
[EDIT:] I was thinking more about a decision support system that can recommend product changes. But in a way that maximizes customer satisfaction and minimizes the cost of implementation. The dialogue between past changes and customer reaction would give us the surface that needs to be optimized. This would generalize well to other domains where there is a text for request and a text for response - just to name one: clinical text in healthcare (position 5 in the RFS).
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|11 years ago|reply
From what I understand from speaking with Selmer Bringsjord, Bloomberg has an outstanding internal QA system, so there is progress, the trouble is that it's all behind corporate firewalls.
There was a silly little online game that came out a few years ago called Akinator [1] that would "guess" a public personality and did so by "learning" based on user inputs - very naiive implementation of CTL but gets the gist of how you can implement a mock AI to get damn good results.
If you did a little delphi to stack the initial deck of results, say for a car buying QA recommendation service, I think you could have a pretty powerful tool that could be replicated across services.
[1]http://en.akinator.com/
[+] [-] aresant|11 years ago|reply
The http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus, http://www.reddit.com/r/oculusdev/, and https://developer.oculusvr.com/ are jam packed with excited hackers cranking out their projects and with the Oculus Connect conference coming up I'd love to see some of this talent pointed towards Y-Combinator
[+] [-] nerfhammer|11 years ago|reply
There already several startups in the "personal saving" space largely based on index funds, though some of them have large minimums. Complex schemes may not be worth the effort for those with only a few bucks to spare:
https://www.wealthfront.com/
https://www.betterment.com/
https://www.futureadvisor.com/
It would be cool if Vanguard had an API so we could do the same thing open-source rather than incurring the extra management fees from these companies which are mostly based on Vanguard funds.
[+] [-] bambax|11 years ago|reply
Oh yes, yes, yes. Everyone is talking about the quantified self but human augmentation would be so much cooler. I don't care if a watch can tell me my heart rate at all times (I know when my body is tired, or out of breath, because I live in it!!!)
But there are so many senses that I would like to have; for example, be able to always know where the North is relative to me. A device that would let me feel the North would be so cool and useful (I wear a Tissot T-Touch for that reason, but it's a very poor solution to this problem).
I think I heard the Apple watch will be able to do this, in some cases; but it sounds like an afterthought. I would pay serious money for a wrist bracelet or some other wearable that would do only that, but do it well.
[+] [-] Permit|11 years ago|reply
A few of the accelerators I'd applied to in the past don't see the business opportunity present in developer tools (Who pays for those?) so it's a relief that YC recognizes the opportunity there.
[+] [-] garry|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foobarqux|11 years ago|reply
This exists already, there are a ton of discount brokers with very competitive pricing.
[+] [-] DodgyEggplant|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fillskills|11 years ago|reply
Would be great to hear from the leader of the startup world. Even if only to bring attention to their cause
What would be some good startup ideas here?
My only idea is a company that manages National/Regional parks and has a monetary incentive like a)Being paid by people who visit their parks. b) Being paid as a service per square foot they manage. What other incentives can we create to make sure the companies are kept honest without involving too much government oversight?
[+] [-] gaplus|11 years ago|reply