Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #5
There are 7 startups in this thread. The initial order is random:
Clarity (YC S21) - Run your distributed team with a single weekly doc - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128962
Mentorcam (YC S21) - Get advice from public figures - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128958
Sirka (YC S21) - Tackling obesity in Southeast Asia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128964
Echoes HQ (YC S21) - Measure the effectiveness of engineering organizations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128961
PayHippo (YC S21) - Loans to small businesses in Nigeria - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28130022
ContraForce (YC S21) - All-in-one cybersecurity platform - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128959
Palenca (YC S21) - Payroll API for Latin America - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128960
126 comments
[ 6.9 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadFor example, one of our mentors is Chris Yeh, a VC and the co-author of Blitzscaling. He uses Mentorcam to give fundraising advice, feedback on pitches, input on GTM strategy, etc. to people that wouldn't have access to him otherwise.
Users have told us that they’ve had the most impactful "conversation" of the their life on Mentorcam and that they’ve found the inspiration to fight through difficult phases of their life through their interaction with their mentor. Our customers have used Mentorcam to do things like get fundraising advice, decide on where to go to college, transition careers, and find a girlfriend. The latter surprised us, but demand for dating advice has turned out to be high, even though it's not the main thing we're focused on.
Happy to answer questions and read comments!
Given the example of the feedback on a pitch, would the mentor be expected to watch a 10 minute pitch in full?
If I were looking for feedback on a 10 minute pitch, I think the most valuable feedback would be in the form of a 15-30 minute discussion with the person so that you can clarify, dig, and get to the necessary depth.
What sort of reply length are you considering? For the prices I'm guessing this is closer to a 30s-5min Cameo video?
That said, connecting these sorts of mentors for longer form feedback/input, or perhaps customised talks for companies, that could be really impactful and you’ll have a good platform on which to build those.
Customized talks for cohorts os users is an excellent idea. What type of talks would you like to see, just out of curiosity? Pre-recorded, customized sessions, and live videos with groups that can send in questions have been discussed.
To my knowledge we've never paid for these sessions – they're mostly "friends of the company", investors, CEOs from other companies in our investors' portfolios, etc, but assuming the price wasn't extortionate or the topic area was an important one, I could see us paying for this sort of thing. Again, to my knowledge, the speakers haven't prepped for these explicitly in the past so the time commitment would have likely been small, apart from travel.
Good luck.
1. Isn't mentoring more of a long-term thing, where you interact regularly and the mentor is invested in some way in your success? To me it looks more like one-off advice, maybe this could be called "micro-consulting".
2. How do you ensure the quality of the replies? For example, I can imagine mentors giving canned responses without going into the specifics of your individual case.
3. Kind of in the same vein, do you provide pointers for asking a good question? Asking good questions is an art in itself, I can imagine it's difficult for a lot of people and greatly influences the quality of the reply.
1. A large portion of the purchases are repeat and some of our mentees are more than 50 questions (100+ messages) in with their mentors. It does raise the question of offering bundles vs a subscription bases model for repeat use, which is something we are experimenting with at the moment.
2. The mentees get to rate their mentors after they receive a response and we spend time with each mentor during onboarding to make sure they understand the importance of a personalized experience.
3. This is an extremely good point. We do provide question prompts and bullet point the types of questions each mentor can answer. We are still experimenting with this to find the optimal solution. We track this by looking at the conversion rates and the types of questions that result in actual transactions (users are prompted to type in or record a question in advance).
Come to think of it, this could be another source of revenue down the road: After x sessions you can request an endorsement, at the mentor's discretion, which you can then use e.g. for marketing or fundraising purposes. Just an idea, I'm sure there are plenty of opportunities once you really get the ball rolling. Good luck!
The current problem in the cybersecurity industry is that there are too many solutions that don’t work cohesively with each other to share security alert information. This causes months of implementation time, and to effectively to understand how to detect threats requires knowledge of specific query languages. It’s why the cybersecurity consulting and service market will reach over $72B globally this year. It currently takes on average 280 days for a breach to be contained and a company to be brought back to a normal healthy state. Our platform looks to reduce the need of security engineering, and other expense security experts in order to help companies reduce alert noise by 90% and reduce the time to remediate to minutes.
We have over 20 years of experience in the cybersecurity space. Working with thousands of customers, we saw they struggled with successful implementation consistently and lacked effective measures to detect most threats and to pivot to stopping the spread of an attack in their environments quickly. We are on a mission to democratize security operations for any size company, and we believe we can up-level even IT operators to become skilled security talent. We look forward to your feedback!
I would be happy to chat further. We do provide a trial and can get any small business started.
What does this mean?
Blue ocean to your red. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ocean_Strategy
We believe our solution can bring these components together into one single platform, so even a small business can utilize security operations even on a a smaller budget.
Yes, please. As someone who also operates in the democratize (consumer) security space, hope you folks achieve your goals.
How this is different from similar solutions - XSOAR from Palo Alto Networks, Securonix SOAR or Splunk Phantom?
Why should a vendor to choose you over existing and trusted security service provider?
In regards to the vendor solutions you mentioned. While those are all strong solutions as a stand alone product, they must be bought separately and integrated together to gain the maximum value out of end to end threat detection and response.
Splunk as a standalone analytics problem still requires engineering talent to increase the efficacy of detection of malicious activity, and then you have to purchase Phantom (SOAR) separately at an expensive cost to benefit from automated incident remediation workflows. This leads to lengthy implementation cycles, and post sales management that can rival the license cost itself. Also there is the component of human error when it comes to creating the detection logic and response logic necessary with consultants doing the work on the behalf of the customer.
We actually have MSPs and MSSPs leveraging our platform to deliver security services for their customers. We take the Managed Security Service component off of their plate, and they hire only security analyst to drive their monitoring and response as a service. Some customers will want a full suite of services that could be out of our scope, but if a customer is looking to gain insights and a simple to operate security operations platform then ContraForce would be a great fit! Lastly, the cost typically associated per User/month for MSSPs are quite expensive. This makes it a costly check-box for many companies and they have to hope that the MSSP has amazing engineering talent to not miss malicious activity in their environment.
In emerging markets it’s extremely hard to validate income, identity and behavior as most of the worker's data is fragmented and inaccessible. As a consequence, countries like Mexico encounter poor credit penetration (20%) and high levels of fraud (2x the global level). Moreover, 80% of the transactions in LatAm are in cash. As soon as workers are paid, they are withdrawing all the money out of the ATM to spend it in cash. This means the vast majority of financial and employee information can not be accessed through the bank accounts.
We were previously building a lending company and had a hard time validating earnings and behavior that we needed to underwrite credit. We tried to do it first with bank accounts, but the information we were getting was either incomplete or inexistent. To solve that we built integrations with other platforms. Later we realized that the infrastructure we built to get access to the data was way more valuable than the lending business we had before.
We integrate directly with payroll systems to provide access to any worker account via our API. We already cover 90% of the Gig Economy in LatAm (e.g: Uber, Rappi, Didi). We are currently expanding to other payroll systems (e.g: Starbucks, Walmart). We are providing 4 types of information: Personal Information (e.g. Full Name, Tax ID, Photo), Profile (e.g. Rating, Acceptance Rate, Lifetime Trips), Earnings and Events (e.g: Trips, Delivery)
Our product works the same way as open banking. The end-user provides his credentials and his consent. We get his data on his behalf, and we pass it on to the company that is providing the service (e.g: Lending, Insurance, Recruitment). Right now, our main use cases are lending (cars, motorcycle, unsecured loans), direct deposit switch (change the account in which the users receive their money) background checks (validating quickly the data of a Uber Driver for a new marketplace, checking that they're not fraudulent, already experienced) and insurance (pay per km, check if the driver was taking a trip when an accident occurs).
You can check out the demo here: https://www.palenca.com/demo
So with your system the driver will supply you with their Uber credentials, and you will log into Ubers system on their behalf, extract key information such as the number of rides they have done, and pass that info back to your client. Like open banking as you say.
I hope I have that right, I initially thought that an API for payroll meant that you offered a service that paid people and handled taxes in Latin America. (Just my worldview since we are in the HR business). However I now understand that you are in fact an API to extract data from any number of payroll systems.
Just thought I would share that with you as I found it initially confusing, but that's probably on me, and your messaging may well be perfectly on target.
Good luck going forward and I hope for your success.
To be honest, I'm not too much a fan of Payroll API too, but it seems it is the term that is now coined in the US for what we are doing (see that article from a16z: https://a16z.com/2020/10/20/payroll-apis/)
If you happen to have an another idea about a very quick way to describe what we are doing (less than 10 words), that would be great !
All in all I don't know that "payroll-connected API" is any better for you - quite a mouthful and sounds way more techy.
Personally I would like "Payroll verification API" but maybe that's just because we're having this discussion and that fancy will disappear like dust in the wind by the end of the day. It might also preclude you from getting into some of the juicier areas that a16z are talking about (i.e. things that are > just verifiying data), but of course you can always change your tagline :)
FYI this area is of interest as we briefly explored automating some nasty govt systems using selenium or similar (aka RPA). We would run the robot in a VM that was torn down at the end of every session for security. We presented the UI to the user via guacamole - then once they had entered their credentials, the robot took over. Interesting but not the path we took in the end.
For the automation of some govt systems, you didn't try a "proper" reverse engineering where don't use selenium, but rather uncover the private APIs of the govt ?
I’m passionate about developer empowerment and building engineering organizations. This is what got me into engineering management in the first place, and why I later joined Docker to lead the core team. Throughout my career I’ve come to realize that organizations are often held back not by a lack of developer productivity or talent, but by the lack of proper context to achieving good results (a theme commonly discussed here in comments).
To help companies solve this, we surface why engineers are doing what they do in the simplest way we could think of. You define within Echoes what you’re investing efforts into (e.g., the categories of work, ongoing initiatives, or OKRs relevant to your organization), which Echoes publishes across all of your GitHub or GitLab repositories as labels. Applying these labels on pull requests is all it takes to surface how teams are truly allocating their efforts over time. You can later connect intents to external measurements, showing you whether efforts are actually making a difference.
Engineering managers can use this data to inform decisions on priorities, confront the plans to the reality, and communicate on the activity to their CEO / bosses / business partners with the right level of detail. One of the first use case we're using to illustrate what Echoes can do is the very common challenge of balancing the amount of efforts that should go into features versus technical work (https://www.echoeshq.com/recipes/managing-technical-debt).
If you'd like to learn more: we have a two-minute demo video (https://youtu.be/3ZRGdZq7v24), or I'd be happy to discuss and run you through a live demo (https://calendly.com/arnaudp/echoes-demo). We look forward to hearing your feedback and answering your questions!
I've got one question – would it be possible in the future to generate some kind of alerts for the managers when for example the technological debt is growing above some threshold?
We haven’t started work on this but it’s very likely to happen at some point indeed.
Signed up for a demo - looking forward to it.
1. We integrate with the GitHub Checks API and surface missing labels as a failure (similar to failed tests), which acts as a reminder to add the labels. GitLab doesn't have an equivalent to our knowledge, but we have a Docker image and a snippet of yml you can include as a build stage for a similar result.
2. We had customers ask for a JIRA integration which we are about to ship that can help with that. It creates a custom field on your JIRA instance which gets populated with your configured intents, just like GitHub labels. GitHub pull requests which reference a JIRA issue will automatically inherit its labels, meaning that if the intent was expressed at planning time, then there's no additional work to do for these.
3. When discussing with organizations who request that every pull request be linked to a ticket for the sake of reporting, it's a no brainer: would you rather file a ticket for every commit or add a label?
4. Remaining untagged pull requests can be examined and labeled directly from the product itself (making it easy to erase the pesky leftovers).
Finally, the product is indeed targeted at managers at this time, but we have plans to make it more directly useful for the engineers too.
1. JIRA most often captures what we _plan_ to do rather than what we _actually_ do. You cannot build exhaustive activity reports from JIRA unless you request all contributions to be linked to issues. This is especially true for technical work which tends to not be tracked and become invisible.
2. Most sizable organizations have an inherent diversity of processes and tools across teams which makes producing consolidated dashboards extremely hard (e.g., one team using JIRA, a second using Linear, and a third using GitHub issues).
For these reasons, our approach is to capture work where it happens rather than where it is described, and to use a central definition of intents as the ontology. Finally, capturing efforts is only one part of the equation: we allow you to associate intents with metrics to evaluate impact.
By default all pull requests are considered equally weighted, but there’s a set of labels that allow you to optionally influence that weighting (using basic XS to XL t-shirt sizing), so you could already tag it XS and have it count for very little. We actually had that question from a user yesterday, and we might add a way to ignore a pull request entirely (i.e., give it a weight of 0).
Anything you can share about a grand vision here? In 5 years is Echoes a tool for product managers (OKR alignment), engineering managers (IC performance management), a replacement for one of those functions?
Our hope is to break down silos between engineering, product, and “business”, which are at the source of so many organizational inefficiencies. We need this shared context where CEO/CFO understand where we’re headed, where engineers understand how they work fit in the bigger picture, where product can focus on market research.
I’m obviously extremely biased here, but being thoughtful and deliberate about the way we allocate our efforts just sound fundamental to me, and it’s not the sole focus of any particular function.
Clarity is a SaaS product for distributed teams to track tasks, plan projects, and build long-term knowledge in one place. Instead of consulting multiple tools or maintaining a bespoke system, teams have a single weekly doc that pulls together their projects, tasks, and notes.
In order to function well, teams must maintain a shared mental model of their work. This is especially difficult for distributed teams because we don't have a physical space to reinforce context. To solve this, the Weekly is your team's front page throughout the week.
We've both been working remotely since 2014 and we met on a mutual client project in 2018. Clarity started as a side project to help us run our client work. Our clients were happy, but we were running it all manually behind the scenes. Last year we dropped everything to turn that system into a self-serve SaaS product.
What's unique about our approach is the combination of real-time collaboration, a knowledge graph, and a formal project management feature set. With a knowledge graph, teams can capture & retrieve information quickly without the friction & fragility of folder organization. Clarity's project management functionality can leverage the graph to centralize tasks and surface what's important to your work. This creates a high-context workspace without the maintenance overhead.
Distributed work is only becoming more popular. We believe the next decade of the Internet will be more collaborative than the last. As a result, we'll need tools built specifically for collaborative Internet squads to assemble around a project or a cause. We're building the spaces on the Internet where that happens.
Check out our demo video: https://youtu.be/PDKgvD5BEgE.
The issue with tools like Notion is that you need to do everything manually. The more powerful your system, the more work you have to do. This leads to what the Notion community refers to as “breakdowns”—where a workspace is overwhelming and must be redesigned & refactored to be useful again.
Second thought post sign up - this is notion :(
Have a look at our demo video, those workflows are not possible in Notion :)
Have you considered adding some operating templates for startups? I imagine your user is signing up because they need new process, and giving them some inspiration to play with may accelerate onboarding. (I signed up hoping to get that template you used in your demo video)
I'm not a fan of the superhuman interface, I've found that it create a big learning curve for what is could be a simple interface. At the same time I'm glad you guys drew inspiration from Linear, they have some great design too. I feel like they balance the hotkeys + clickable elements really well.
Slack integration is great. I think Loom would be big in my workflow too.
Happy to do a user interview etc to help out. email is in my profile.
Definitely see what you're saying about the Superhuman-like interface. We're still iterating there. We need to enable pro-level usage without hindering accessibility to casual users. We're continuing to simplify simplify simplify :)
We are currently testing an integration using the Loom SDK.
Will definitely take you up on the user interview. Thanks!
The two most obvious are: 1) declaring tasks across documents and visualizing them in a single task database to create filtered views of work 2) interconnecting docs by topics and keywords so that you can navigate your knowledge base more effectively
There's also a shared notes feed for async information sharing, nested projects, in-app notifications, and other features that fill in the whole picture. The outline block structure also makes your information queryable beyond basic string search, which enables new types of exploration through your knowledge base, notes, and conversations.
I also wouldn't underestimate the power of a default home screen. There's a lot of power in having an enforced front page vs a doc the team must remember to check.
It's a cohesive set of functionality built to support teamwork vs a generic collection of documents.
I noticed you have a search feature, and I'm guessing it's keyword based (Algolia/Elasticsearch)? If you searched for "team is overworked", could it return the retrospective that states "This lead our teammates to feel spread thin" (from the demo video)?
I'm asking because semantic search can solve this problem. I have a research background in this area, and I cofounded ZIR AI (https://zir-ai.com/) to provide an easy-to-integrate semantic search.
So, if better search is a priority, let's connect :-) I would love to collaborate.
Also curious about pricing, and if you have any ancillary business model I should know about, like selling or otherwise using data or some other derived metrics based on user's activity.
The first place I'd start is by outlining your team's week in the Weekly. I'd finish any ongoing projects in their current tools and link to those other tools from the Weekly. This way those projects aren't disrupted, but you've now gained a central hub for your team.
As you start new projects, you can create a project doc in Clarity for each of them. Eventually the existing projects will be finished, or you can migrate what's left.
Next, I would start to conduct meeting notes in Clarity because any action items that come out of those meetings can be delegated and managed alongside your projects and their tasks.
Finally, you can start posting articles, ideas, research, and customer feedback in the shared notes feed in Clarity (rather than posting them in Slack/chat). This way chat is less distracting, and you can resurface those notes later by using tags. The notes feed gives everyone a chronological feed of notes shared by the team, without the distraction of chat.
Rather than conducting a huge migration from your current tools to Clarity, I find it's less overwhelming if you bring information over as it's relevant to your work. Not only is this less up front work, it also starts your knowledge graph off with a useful foundation.
Happy to elaborate further and answer any scenario-specific questions.
As for pricing, we are rolling that out this week. All Clarity bases are free to use for an unlimited period of time and with unlimited members. Each base has 1,000 free blocks per month [1], and can have up to 100 active tasks [2].
When you exceed either of these usage limits, you'll have the option to upgrade your base to a Pro subscription that is billed per member per month.
This is our only business model. We do not sell your data or any metrics derived from user activity. Privacy is our top priority.
[1] - A block is a unit of content (e.g. a paragraph of text, an image, a video embed, a checklist item). All documents in Clarity are composed of blocks. The 1,000 block limit resets at the start of each calendar month.
[2] - Tasks created, but not marked done, are considered active.
This is easy to convert notes to tasks (helps if you have an existing systems of projects , tasks )
I know you can do this in notion by assigning tags to rows/ records and filter by tags.
Still I like how clarity does it for me instead of me doing it
I know there's a ton of potential features to develop in the pipeline, and I'm assuming you're using the this internally (e.g. dogfood development) Is there a "roadmap" that can be publicly shared as an example of a real living document?
There are more than 150M people in Southeast Asia struggling with overweight, obesity and diabetes. Sirka cuts through ‘fads’ and low accountability by creating evidence-based plans supported by daily communications with registered dietitians. Our customers love using our product to get daily advice, reminders, and encouragement through their diet journey and on average have 5% weight loss after completing our program.
I have 5+ years of experience in Product and Growth for SEA online consumer services, including Grab, and my co-founder Dito previously worked as the strategy health insurance for Grab. We'd love to speak to any of you that are curious about what we're doing or if you have any ideas/ challenges for us.
The challenge is probably in marketing. There is a positive body movement. Any body should be accepted as they are. Any body is beautiful. So when you try to market your app to obese or overweight people, things can get awkward. So good luck!
I, myself, try to gain weight. So I'm not your target. :)
Ditto and Dito, what made you want to work in this space? Any stories? (personal or from talking to users)
Also, what alternatives do people trying to lose weight in your target market usually use?
Most of these businesses are creditworthy, but traditional banks and lenders often don’t lend to them because there are no credit scores and collateral requirements are too high. That’s why we assess businesses, build their Payhippo Scores, and provide financing to them.
Speed is everything for these business owners that are buying goods and need capital. For example, a supermarket may run out of inventory and not have the cash on hand to buy new goods. With PayHippo’s instant financing, that supermarket has the liquidity to buy inventory and make sure to retain the customer in their store. We deliver loans 21x faster than the next faster competitor. We slowed down our disbursement time from 3 hours to 6-9 hours one day. Almost immediately we got emails from two separate borrowers saying that they are disappointed at how long it is taking. This was validation about how important it is for us to be able to serving working capital needs on-demand.
Through our mobile-friendly web app, businesses can apply in just a few minutes. After 10-20 minutes our system has automatically verified and underwritten the business' loan. Once a human double-checks this verification and underwriting, (1-2 hours wait time) a business receives a loan offer. Once they click accept then funds are automatically disbursed to their account.
Please ask us any questions or provide any comments!
By supporting such a model, you could enable more capital to flow to creditworthy borrowers in your market than you'd be able to aggregate as a single org.
Also curious as to how you determine sufficient collateral for borrowers and what tools you use to hedge against default: Do you focus on lending to businesses with resellable capital assets (equipment, inventory, etc), setup autopay/direct debit as condition of loan, etc?
Per collateral: Our lending is unsecured
A Show HN is free and you don’t even need to write twenty paragraphs about how you noticed an opportunity to disrupt the market after spending your career in back office sales for insurance claims for dogs.
The difference with Launch HN threads is that the latter get automatically placed on the front page, as explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27877280.
What a terrible comment. It's people like you who discourage people from sharing and undermine the confidence of non English speakers on their journey to becoming better. Also prefacing anything with "not trying to be mean" usually means that's exactly what you are trying to do. Looking at their site, clearly English speakers aren't even their target customers, so his English really isn't even an issue. I'd also like to point out your sentence has poor grammar. "dangling phrase". Look it up. Immediately turned me off.
Not trying to be mean, but I hope you stop commenting on posts.
"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you'd like to help someone with their English, that's fine, but then the burden on you is to make sure that the context is appropriate and that your "help" isn't going to come across as an insult. "Not trying to be mean" doesn't cut it, and in fact often signifies the opposite.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28128964.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html