Not founders, they are bought into the idea (if you can get into a demo day or other function as an observer, highly recommend), but perhaps employees that fuel the machine and their common shares lottery tickets.
Important to ask yourself, "Am I working for someone who will be a decent person if my time and effort ends up making them wildly wealthy?"
Wrote [YC President Garry] Tan, addressing seven San Francisco supervisors who oversee the delivery of local government services: “Fuck Chan Peskin Preston Walton Melgar Ronen Safai Chan as a label and motherfucking crew … And if you are down with Peskin Preston Walton Melgar Ronen Safai Chan as a crew fuck you too … Die slow motherfuckers.”
That explains the admin on this forum throwing a "you're a nationalist!" at me recently, turns out I was ahead of the game on that (only that I was doing it for the wrong geo-political bloc)
> NEW DEFENSE TECHNOLOGY
Ooo, that certainly explains lots and lots of stuff, including the "warnings" whenever the comments don't support the correct geo-political bloc mentioned above.
All in all very interesting, turns out that YC and the money behind it has smelt where things are going and are following the likes of Eric Schmidt. Let's see what the time will tell.
I put lists like that together sometimes to answer specific user questions—primarily when I can't use an HN Search link because there's no search query that's precise enough.
That one stuck around because the perception that it corrects (of HN moderation being against $COUNTRY, where $COUNTRY = China in this case) shows up semi-regularly—as does the opposite perception, of course. These things always come in opposing pairs.
As a side note, it's interesting to see how different users react to reading such a set of comments, i.e. comments that contradict their assumptions about how HN is moderated. In some cases the reaction is something like, "Wow, I had no idea - thanks for the information" and the person presumably goes on to adjust their priors. In other cases the reaction is a complex explanation of how none of that matters and the original perception remains intact, even though it's inaccurate.
Ah that makes sense, as “see: ‘by:dang [$topic]’” is a pretty frequent sight, thanks for the explaination.
>It’s interesting to see how different users react to reading such a set of comments…
I’ve noticed this myself and I’ve always been surprised at the wide variety of users that fall into either of these buckets. You sort of expect this from new(er) accounts. But some of the arguments from created: ~2000’s, karma: 20,000+ accounts in detached threads are wild.
I suspect this comes from a lot of moderation actually being quite transparent, but not obvious. If one has any interest they can actually go learn a lot w.r.t. moderation. But zero information is forced unless one goes looking or eventually runs afoul.
In the lack of a story, it’s easy to invent a lot of assumptions about what is done and why. People inevitably see the invented assumptions of others and repeat them.
Or perhaps there are some topics where its so close to home that any slight, real or perceived, makes it impossible to be reasoned with.
Yes, and yes, economic autarky (which is what this “let’s bring industry back to America” thing actually is) is usually associated with nationalism and other such stuff (I personally call it Mussolinian, but someone may come and mention List, who was a 19th century German, so to each his own)
I hadn't any idea that YC was going to say this when I replied to your comments the other day. Moderating HN doesn't leave any time to be plugged in on YC's internal plans.
People often reach for an exotic explanation in their own case, but anyone who's familiar with HN's rules can see how your comments have been breaking them. It's just that simple.
We don't care about your, or any other commenter's "geopolitics". It's all endlessly more tedious and obvious than that.
Manufacturing is capital intensive to begin with. An dgiven how little the average HN crowd, assuming the average HN applicant is somehwat similar, knows about manufacturing, well, the answer to that can inly be AI? Right?
Yeah the AI line in there is interesting, it feels more than a little tacked on.
I can't help but imagine some startup with limited manufacturing knowledge ultimately offering what is at best some incremental improvement in some process that isn't enough to support the start up.
Or at least that's what I've seen from start ups entering areas that I've had experience in.
They really talked about ML-automated robotics in that blog... I swear, I dodn't read it before commenting.
This line
>> Companies like SpaceX and Tesla have trained an entire generation of engineers in how to build an American company that makes physical products but operates like a startup.
is sending chills down my back so. After all, Tesla was almost bankcrupted by their drive to automate everything. And Tesla's robot is a guy in a spandex costume.
After that, I refused to see what they have to say about their goal to de-thron SAP, aka their call for new ERP systems (nice touch to include the full name in the link and not kust the accronym, I am sure people able to theoretically build a new ERP from scratch appreciate the clarification...).
Edit: Ok, I did click on the ERP link. No idea how they came to that conclusion here
This type of software is so valuable and important that we can imagine that there is the opportunity for dozens of new massively successful vendors.
considering they wrote the first sentence if it... At least they don't mention AI, LLM or ML...
I know that sentiment. Usually comes from people who either never worlkd with something else or only know SAP as some kind of hour booking and expense tool.
If that is what you know about SAP and ERP systems, sure, you can come up with something like YC Call for Start-Up section on ERP systems.
I’ve mentioned this one before but I would really like to see a startup make an attempt at prison reform. It’s not completely a technology problem but I do think there are ways in which a combination of technology and smarter segmentation of types of prisoners can work more toward rehabilitation and careers post-incarceration, while also supporting families and relationships.
I think this was actually an idea that Palmer Luckey was exploring before Anduril took off. I also agree that there should be something done in the space but have no clear idea on a venture scale biz that doesn't end up being exploitative.
https://www.ameelio.org/ sort of followed this route with prison communications. Non profit startup, but needed policy as rocket fuel to nuke entrenched for profit incumbents. Prison reform feels much more weighted towards policy work, but perhaps I'm missing a path.
> When the law goes into effect next month, Massachusetts will join Connecticut, California, Minnesota and Colorado in eliminating prisoner phone call fees.
CTO of Ameelio here. Yes we are still working on it! You are right that policy is highly important. One of the biggest challenges we have faced with getting our video call system adopted, is the kickback system. Basically, for-profit incumbents charge outrageous rates to incarcerated people and/or their family members, and then "kick back" some amount to the DoJ. In some cases, this is an important part of their budget, so even if they want to switch to a non-profit provider like us (who doesn't charge families or incarcerated people at all), they can't without inducing a budget crisis. That's a pretty tought sell, and the only way to fix that is with policy, which fortunately some states are doing.
That said, there's still plenty that can be done without policy work, but it's a hard slog and requires a lot of legal work. Reviewing RFPs, submitting RFPs, integrating with the existing systems, implementing regulatory requirements, all while trying to keep the codebase and tech stack manageable with a small team and when contract periods can be multiple years long.
It's going to take some time, but we're still going and still growing.
The idea is basically “MRIs for all, so that we can consistently catch early stage cancer before it spreads.”
They don’t go into specifics, but it seems to me like this means making MRIs cheap enough, with low enough false positive rates, that every day ppl can get them frequently. Probably ~twice a year, given how fast cancer spreads.
I’m aware of companies doing proactive MRIs that cost ~$2K/scan, that aren’t covered by health insurance. Great for the wealthy, but seems infeasible for every day ppl. I’m not aware of anyone legitimately trying to make this affordable/scalable enough that most people can get scanned frequently. Maybe they’re out there and I just haven’t heard of them? Or were you referring more to the ~$2K/scan companies?
Look up all the mRNA research going into fighting cancer for example. Or tailor made treatment. Fighting cancer is so much more than just early detection, which isbincredibly important for sure.
Great that they are looking at Stablecoins, and by extension blockchain / crypto. The unwarranted hate on HN for this tech is a very interesting mirror on perspectives of economics and finance. The crypto economy advances year after year, as does the tech, but you would never know it perusing HN.
With USDC and local fiat-crypto exchanges available in nearly every country, it is now possible to hire a truly global workforce and pay them with a crypto-payment vendor. If some company systematically went country by country, learned the local HR laws, partnered with the most trusted exchange, and then handled all accounting and taxes, a truly global HR and payment system could be built to make onboarding and paying everyone 10x simpler.
Even better is the employees could keep most of their money in USDC and only convert to fiat when they need to pay bills. Now they have a dollar bank account and avoid local inflation.
So, you want a centralised trusted (trusted by whom?) entity to go in, do all that stuff and handle it in a centralised fashion, and work with centralised trusted (by whom?) entities to provide payment to people around the world.
Your general attitude is exactly the know-nothing, anti-crypto sentiment I was advocating against. I really don’t want to get into a debate, the point of my business idea above was to solve a pain point around paying a global work force considering the costs of global wire transfers vs. instant USDC settlement.
Your response is exactly the trouble with all the crypto-proponents.
As soon as their next idea is described in proper terms, they immediately devolve into insults, "you know nothing" and other "oh you're just a blind hater".
> the point of my business idea above was to solve a pain point around paying a global work force considering the costs of global wire transfers
How much do you think it will cost to "systematically go country by country, learned the local HR laws, partner with the most trusted exchange, and then handle all accounting and taxes"?
Even more to the point: what does crypto add in this scenario? Would the company be just as effective doing all that regulatory work, then handling settlement in local currency? (Or just using USD as the “stablecoin”?)
The best business ideas I’ve heard for crypto inevitably don’t need crypto.
Countries want US dollars. They want dollars to use to buy goods, which are usually priced in USD, and for debt interest payments.
Countries sell services (tourism) and goods (products and commodities) to earn dollars. However another major source is by creating their own local currency (i.e. Brazilian Reals), inflating it (5 to 10% common in Brazil), and banning citizens from holding foreign currency (i.e. citizens cannot hold USD). So if you want to pay someone in Brazil from the US, you send them USD, which is then stolen by the government and converted into shittier local currency (Reals).
A better option, as employees I have in Brazil will attest, is you pay them in stablecoins (i.e. USDT or USDC) which they then convert at their own leisure to Reals when they need to pay bills. This allows them to earn interest on the stablecoins and protects them from the shitty local fiat currency.
This theft of wealth from citizens via the local shitty fiat currency is a global phenomena. See Argentina, Lebanon, Venezuela, Turkey, and on and on. This is a major driver of global stablecoin demand, because everyone wants USD, especially retail, but until crypto the ability to receive and store USD was very limited by governments.
Could employers just pay USD to foreign workers who have something like a Wise account (i.e. to keep it in USD and convert it to their local currency at will)?
The US is blessed with stable laws, individualism as an ethos, and a culture that asks for forgiveness over asking for permission. Corruption is less overt here.
In less developed countries, it's the opposite. Wise and other centralized money transmission platforms are ripe targets to apply government pressure, with capital limits, currency conversion games, freezing accounts, and so on.
Cryptocurrency inverts the whole process. Having a crypto wallet is like having an offshore bank account, or perhaps a vault in your house. You can also send money peer-to-peer over the internet very quickly. It's just like cash, except you can make purchases (even huge purchases) without needing the danger of physically holding a lot of money.
Of course there are many downsides. You can be hacked, you can forget your password / seed phrase, you can send money to the wrong place, the whole thing is cumbersome. These downsides are being worked on in various ways, but there are some permanent downsides to holding bearer instruments that fiat accounts held by regulated financial institutions don't have.
The downsides of countries like Venezuela, Lebanon, and Argentina for trying to build businesses and accumulate savings are larger than the downsides of cryptocurrency. Entrepreneurs and normal, everyday citizens are embracing crypto from the bottom-up because governments obviously hate the freedom crypto provides their citizens. It makes collecting taxes and doing the fiat-inflation theft game harder. It requires citizens to self-report rather than automatic-deduction, which reduces government revenue.
Argentina is a de facto USD-based economy. All property purchases are conducted with United States $100 bills, with entire companies whose job is to safely transport a life savings' worth of cash to the real estate closing, where the cash is then scrupulously assessed for counterfeiting. In an economy like this, you can imagine how stablecoins can be useful, despite the cumbersome and risky nature. It's still 10 to 100x safer and better than suitcases of cash.
> In Argentina, most transactions are conducted using cash, primarily in the form of $100 US bills. This may seem somewhat traditional, but it's the prevailing practice in this country.
> Particularly when purchasing property, you typically need to make your payment in US dollars because property prices are consistently quoted in this currency.
> You can opt to bring cash or utilize a financial service to obtain the required US dollars in cash, although this may involve a fee.
> So, if you're planning a purchase, be prepared to carry a substantial amount of US dollar bills into the country, possibly up to $500,000. However, keep in mind that this process isn't straightforward, and you will likely incur a commission fee.
> Having a crypto wallet is like having an offshore bank account
> It makes collecting taxes ... harder.
How does that mesh with "If some company systematically went country by country, learned the local HR laws, ... and then handled all accounting and taxes"?
So it' snow been over 24 hours, and we still haven't seen the answer to two questions about this business-plan. But I guess we'll hear about "unwarranted hate on HN" or some such very soon.
> the point of my business idea above was to solve a pain point around paying a global work force considering the costs of global wire transfers
How much do you think it will cost to "systematically go country by country, learned the local HR laws, partner with the most trusted exchange, and then handle all accounting and taxes"?
> Having a crypto wallet is like having an offshore bank account
> It makes collecting taxes ... harder.
How does that mesh with "If some company systematically went country by country, learned the local HR laws, ... and then handled all accounting and taxes"?
Every human is motivated by the same human desires, from thousands of years ago to now. Race is meaningless, we are all human. So why are some countries decrepit basket cases while others are successful?
The answer is government, laws, and culture. The governments of Argentina (until things got so bad they elected a self-described anarcho capitalist libertarian!), Venezuela, Cuba, Lebanon, etc. have created terrible environments for their citizens. Crypto is allowing their citizens to break laws that are hurting them. I support the citizens fighting against their socialist and communist governments that are robbing them. That's the core function of empowering citizens with decentralized money.
"""
If some company systematically went country by country, learned the local HR laws, partnered with the most trusted exchange, and then handled all accounting and taxes, a truly global HR and payment system could be built to make onboarding and paying everyone 10x simpler.
the point of my business idea above was to solve a pain point around paying a global work force considering the costs of global wire transfers vs. instant USDC settlement.
"""
So. Given all this, here are the questions:
1. Given that wire transfers cost money, and you want to make them cheap/free and instant, how much do you think it will cost to "systematically go country by country, learned the local HR laws, partner with the most trusted exchange, and then handle all accounting and taxes"?
2. Given that, by your own words, crypto is like having money in offshore accounts making tax collection more difficult, how does this mesh with your proposal of having a company do accounting and collect taxes?
----
Note: I'm not in the least surprised that you can't answer these questions even if the first one of these I asked very early in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39372364
That's the reason there's so much "unwarranted hate" on HN: because people are not stupid, and they don't fall for demagoguery and grand proclamations. 99.9999999999% of all crypto proposals fall down immediately under the lightest of scrutinies: they are inevitably self-contradictory, unworkable, costly, don't do the job advertised, better implemented other technologies, or any or even all of the above.
Sorry, I thought the answers to those questions were obvious.
The reason a business will exist and have value is because they did the work of figuring out how to pay workers in each country. My company does this now for Brazil, so it is possible to do legally.
The offshore bank account comment is to envision what it is similar to. For example it’s possible for an Argentinian to fly to the US and open a bank account in Miami, it’s just cumbersome to then get USD out of it and into Argentina. With a crypto wallet it’s similar to this but much more streamlined. The proposed business will figure out the intricacies of each country.
So you want to pay in dollars, but at the same time "figure out local laws and taxes" even though at the same time local laws and taxes don't allow payment in dollars...
Crypto exchanges are not work around for lical tax laws and visa requirements. It is true so, crypto solves that problem, the same way it solves embargoes and money laundering problems.
A lot, or at least some, of the "hate" comes from the speculative, exploitative and get-rich-quick schemes, rather than the underlying technology behind it or any advancements. If you were able to separate the two, the socioeconomic and the technological aspects, I don't think the typical HN negative attitude would be as negative.
As a concrete example, if someone posts an article about Merkle tree, it would get maybe 10-50 votes and 5 comments, and probably not much hate if any. Yet (according to wikipedia, I'm not into cryptocurrencies) it's a part of the underlying technology of "the Bitcoin and Ethereum peer-to-peer networks"
We get it, you don't like crypto. You would be better off leaving the snark and sarcasm at home if you want to get your points across without sounding bitter.
Your last line completely contradicts the previous point you were trying to make-- it's clear to anyone that's paying attention that crypto economy has objectively grown beyond speculative trading and scams.
The defense-tech one is interesting. I wholeheartedly agree that more people should be involved in the space and it is critically important -- I think the war in Ukraine clearly shows the need for the Western world to be prepared to fight for freedom and democracy -- but as far as venturebackable business models go I don't really understand how many defense tech co's will fit. Most defense firms, other than perhaps Palantir which has a unique position as a commercial provider trade at extremely low multiples to revenue on public markets, whereas tech stocks usually have a relatively large boost. Perhaps not as much concern at early stages but not sure how the financials work out long term.
If I'm not mistaken the 'monetization model' (for founders / investors) in defense related investment looks significantly different due to the blurring of the line between public and private sector funding.
Palantir started with as much "seed capital" as OpenAI did, strong founder reps in tech - the one thing National Intel lacked back then, good contacts in the intelligence community and defense sector, and a practically untamed space back then. Same for Anduril. I don't see how YC's model is applicable to any of these spaces.
That's true. But I don't think revenue multiple is the right metric to look at.
If you just look in terms of aggregate market cap, defense companies are some of the larger companies in the world - i.e., Lockheed Martin is valued over $100B. That's a good sign that it's possible to build a big company in the space, which is all you need.
Every single defence company today is the result of decades of mergers and decades of Cold War peak defence budgets. Not even SoftBanknhas that amount of dough to repeat that.
Lockheed Martin used to be Lockheed and Martin, MDD used to be McDonnel and Douglas, Northrop Gruman, well, you get it. Those companies were built, the were merged. And they are the first on the big defence budgets, and honestly also the only ones being able to deliver modern defence and weapon systems (regardless of delays and cost over runs).
Lockheed Martin was formed by the merger of Lockheed and Martin Marietta and Martin Marietta was formed by the merger of Martin and American-Marietta, and American-Marietta was formed by the merger of American Asphalt Paint Company and Marietta Paint and Color Company.
I couldn’t tell if this was because of the stable revenue stream or because they care about changing things. Not sure Palantir is the best example here as they probably need a competitor already. Palantir was also funded by the intelligence community to solve a problem for them…
It’s used mostly correctly in each case, and they have different meanings.
AI is a marketing catch-all that encompasses technologies of a certain level of “how did they do that” automation that are generally understood to leverage machine learning models under the hood (but not always).
LLMs are one class of ML models that operate in a text-in-text-out fashion.
“Models” are more of a statistical/mathematical term that generally mean “anything that can make a prediction” - it’s broader than just ML (eg climate models that are first-principles-based, not learned from data).
If picking investors is a bit like a marriage, it's a bit scary. Who'd want to commit to having Garry in their cap table for the next 10 years? I say this as a potential applicant.
I don't entirely disagree generally, but I suspect the answer is "people who want money" and that might be enough for many of them to bypass any potential concerns.
If you believe that these elected officials have facilitated the deaths of 100s of people and the suffering of many more then... (btw I think they pretty much have fueled the drug and lawlessness epidemic in SF)
Ironically, people like Garry have actually fueled said epidemic, by contributing to ever-rising inequality, driving people to the streets, where they turn to crime and drugs.
Most of the stuff on the list is either so far out of achievable reach from its current stages, or just generic America-first proselytizing. What all of them have in common is that they require massive amounts of capital, the kind that most VCs don't have/aren't ready to invest. Those who have the capabilities to start a company targeting these problems are not the YC crowd of young college students and techies under 40 looking for cred - they are either folks who have massive amounts of dry powder to deploy, or have the connections who have that kind of capital to combine with their experience. In both cases, none of those guys are stupid to give away 7% of their company (effective 15%) for $500k.
It's kind of laughable how YC is now requesting for startups in these lines when 10 years back, they rejected us (DefTech) on exactly the above premise. While we didn't manage a multibagger exit, we did manage a non-acquihire exit, which is more than what most YC companies can manage. The right time to invest in these problems was 10 years ago, when all the low-hanging fruit still existed.
> Every week the YC Group Partners meet and discuss the current batch. One common area of discussion is ideas — what kind of ideas are these founders having the best luck with? Which ones are they pivoting away from?
How about: do you have any path to profitability, or you're still on the path to lose hundreds of millions of dollars per year or get sold to the highest bidder?
> That's the trailhead for all paths to profitability.
You can open a list of YC's companies, and then find profitable ones. An eye opener.
For those who are profitable now, you can also look at how long they have existed, how long they have been profitable, and how long it will take them to break even considering those losses.
If you want to build machines that kill people, you should at least be willing to say it clearly. If it makes you uncomfortable to talk about, maybe that should tell you something. And it's not a very good excuse to argue that you didn't build a weapon, you just built something that makes it easier to use weapons.
Arms races are not the way. The biggest threat to the West isn't somebody else's weapons, it's that Indonesia's elections today went to a candidate who doesn't want to align with the West, relations with India are increasingly strained, and even Brazil and Turkey are starting to lean out. Geopolitics is politics, and politics requires appeal. Our brand image is significantly worse than two decades ago, as far as I can see.
If the West can't gain allies on friendly terms and maintains power through the development of ever-more advanced military technology, then what kind of world have we built, exactly?
Countries need to defend themselves, and sometimes defend their allies, and not having had to defend yourself in the recent past does not mean you won't need to defend yourself in the near future. Having a robust, capable network of defensive technologies requires a lot of investment and a lot of people, and decades to build. You can't spin up a national defense overnight. The difference between defensive technology and offensive technology is very, very blurry even among people extremely familiar with the topic, which 99% of us here are not.
Pretending any of these objective truths are wrong is folly and ignores a dozen millennia of human history.
There will always be individuals/organizations/countries that don't the "the West" as an ally. Some subset of that will be outwardly hostile to Western ideology, and some subset of that will be willing and able to use violence as a means to their end. The fact that some Western countries have impressive militaries doesn't somehow mean they should stop investing in that technology.
> If you want to build machines that kill people, you should at least be willing to say it clearly.
Well maybe that's not at all what they're saying.
Perhaps you could share what you consider the least extreme version of "building machines that kill people." Building missiles - OK yeah obviously. Improving satellites which are used for information gathering which could be used for missions where people are killed? Does that fall within "building machines that kill people?" What is the mildest example of something that constitutes "building machines that kill people?"
It’s funny how morally bankrupt you are. It’s wrong to spend on defense but you want us to smile and embrace autocracy? If India assassinates our citizens you want us to smile and hug them?
Very curious if anyone knows how to pull this off. There's so much value to be unlocked but it's just impossible to break through.
I've personally met three very talented founders that tried and failed (one was accepted to YC as a mid-market ERP and successfully pivoted into an application tracking system) and failed very quickly.
I'm guessing an important feature would be an integration system that maps data from the current ERP seamlessly into the new ERP. And that assumes you can even get through the enterprise sales process to even get the company to migrate.
The problem is ERP needs to be incredibly tightly integrated into the whole business from end-to-end.
You can't only offer raw materials tracking, but not accounting and shipping. There's just not a lot of value to the business unless you have everything coupled.
The MVP for an ERP is essentially, a fully featured and battle-tested system which is very expensive and time consuming to build before it's profitable.
Most companies that I know that did it right forked something that was already mostly working, built it in house for a client and then spun it off, or yeah, have billions of dollars and still make a fairly half assed solution.
That's strictly true for standard definitions of ERP, but it's a rare enterprise that doesn't already have adjacent software they've licensed to specifically support parts of their business. This could be freight & logistics, or warehouse management/inventory, or QA/Test, or RMA, or whatever. Convincing someone to move away from Oracle or SAP is a nonstarter for a startup. It worked several years ago for Netsuite, which advertised itself as the first "cloud native ERP" and was widely lauded for being so much more easily customizable than Oracle (so Oracle bought them in 2016).
I don't think starting a new ERP company from scratch makes sense for anyone. The best you would likely do is to become either a minor player (just look at the array of CRMs that aren't Salesforce), tailored to a very specific market niche, or an "ERP adjacent" platform of some kind. That last bit is the obvious play. The bread & butter of Enterprise Applications IT departments around the world is to build custom stuff that inherits data from ERPs or feeds data into ERPs and similar mission critical business platforms. Speaking as a guy who ran one of these departments in an F250 for about ten years, most of what they build is pretty crappy.
> The problem is ERP needs to be incredibly tightly integrated into the whole business from end-to-end.
So you target firms that are not yet at the scale where they likely have or need ERP with something that does something they do need that would be integrated into an ERP when they get to that scale and build out from there.
No one is buying an ERP from a firm that doesn't either already have a deep relationship with the buyer or a track record in the ERP space or a track record in an ERP-adjacent space, and more than one of those is desirable, so be in the position that when you start trying to sell an ERP you have at least the last plus a stable of firms for which you also have the first.
Ah ok. I'm an interested in this as a topic and would like to take a stab at this as I think it's an almost impossible project. I would like to caveat any opinion first by saying these: I have a great deal of experience customizing and creating little bits of bespoke functionality for various ERP systems (SAP obviously but also some of the smaller ones aimed at niche markets eg construction). I also have similar experience with similarly complicated and sprawling PLM systems. I've spent basically my entire software career around ERP and PLM systems and systems that break out pieces of ERP functionality and try to often do it elsewhere (usually badly), and then usually have to somehow bring everything back into an ERP system anyway, either manually or with at least some level of (but rarely complete) automation.
I am a CS graduate from a 'famous' UK university (UCL). I'm also a qualified CAD engineer, project manager within agile (DSDM agile etc)...ITIL qualified etc. i.e I've spent a lot of time across these kinds of many tentacled systems that really do reach across the entirety of any large business. I've worked with these systems from FTSE 50 businesses to small 50 person manufacturing startups.
I've also been involved in the migration between PLM systems (horrible from a data perspective - all those CAD files etc) and also ERP systems (horrible but largely just the mapping between two different Entity Relationship Diagrams almost incomprehensible to any living human in terms of complexity).
It would be an incredibly ambitious undertaking to compete with one of the major players in either of these spaces. It is not something you could really even do at the scale of a start-up the likes of which YC and the media understand as 'start-up'. You would need so many not just 'early stage' founders with wildly different skillsets, you would need effectively an entire large manufacturing business, from end to end, in terms of personnel because your 'domain expert' essentially includes 'every business function you can imagine'. That's before you could even begin to think about software. It's a fascinating idea but think about it - procurement/purchasing, warehousing and logistics, engineering and design, sales and marketing, finance (very important here), HR, operations, R&D, Q&A...and these are just the ones I can think of that I have come across in my dealings with these systems. They really do touch every department.
The length of time to market would also be such that this kind of project would not really be appropriate to describe as a 'start up'. You'd essentially be creating a 'Unicorn Killer' and that unicorn killer would need insane resources to even have a chance at market success. The number and requirement for specialist migration tools into your new system from existing clients would be a 'massive' undertaking also.
It's such a bold idea but I think to describe an undertaking of that size 'start-up' would be to completely stretch the meaning of the term 'start-up' so far beyond its usage that the term would lose all meaning.
The days for this to work where back when SAP was young and ERPs the latest dosruptive tech. In order to repeat that, one has to wait for a new technology to replace ERP as a whole, developing a new ERP simply doesn't cut it.
I could see where a startup can solve one of these slices in SaaS form with the intent that it could be also sold as installable via containers on premise or in a private cloud for a customer.
Then do the same for another slice, offer it to existing customers and make the completed slices work well together. Then another slice.
And along the way there could be profit to fund the next slice, as well as existing customers you can tap into to solve their problems. It would be simpler to niche down vs. the SAP/Oracle path of ERP-fits-all.
ERP is a tough space to compete in, as you're fighting against SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, etc. I would say that ERP, CRM and Enterprise payments solutions are the few spaces that firms should not compete in - in a few years, these companies will be akin to COBOL for airlines.
Sounds like there is the opportunity. An ERP that can eliminate the need for auditors. Then it won’t matter what the auditors think. Auditing isn’t some black magic. It’s a set of rules. Rules a machine can follow.
This makes me wonder. I wonder if the real opportunity is in solutions that help auditors in one way or the other.
If the auditors are sensitive to which systems they are familiar with, it would perhaps be beneficial to the auditors to be able to understand other systems.
I'm sure there are companies that are servicing auditors, creating UiPath flows or whatever for a bunch of auditors. So there's probably already a ton of very specific solutions out there, for auditing various systems.
At least it sounds like a more solvable problem than yet another ERP
another key thing is you need SOC 2 or ISO right out of the gate. We actually had to do that at Arist when they were seed stage because all the customers are literally FANG and fortune 500s which require such certifications to even do business with a vendor
Not a direct answer, but I am targeting data marts from ERPs and other Enterprise applications like CRMs. I think data marts (data warehouses) are very valuable but they are too expensive and hard to build, so an AI that could generate the sql for the marts directly from the apps could be very valuable. What do you think?
You already cannot map data automatically from one SAP instance to another, so forget auto migration. What usually happebs is, to keep the legacy system around for auditing purposes, and the live business happens in the new one. With cut-off dates per function and or department. With manually developed interfaces, and all the crap that comes with those, during the migartion period.
An nothing of this has anything to do with SAP, and everything with ERPs and the messy reality of businesses.
Why is it not entering the realm of possibility for the migration system to function not at an API layer but at the levels of pixels and OCR and RPA to click through every possible interface within the ERP to export and structure the legacy data to complete a total migration? Like humans copying over the data manually?
Because the migration has to be auditable. And the data fields between the systems / databases mapped against business processes, on both systems. If you find a solution to automate that, cudos...
No, from my experience it wouldn't be fair to say that.
There is a reason why migration projects are yearlong, multi million projects. Go through one, ideally multiple, of those first before looking at automating any of that. Added benefit, jobs at those projects pay incredibly well for the functional consultants involved. And when, when not if, automation doesn't work out, you still don't have to worry about a job ever again.
> Very curious if anyone knows how to pull this off.
I work in this space (small/mid-size).
The good news is that there are several "obvious" ways to pull this off because an ERP is the culmination of everything a company needs and does. So almost anything you can imagine on the software is part of it.
The bad news, and the reason everyone wants a solution, is that is truly a big space, and then you need E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G.
---
My take is to start from the bottom, and build a much better version of Access/FoxPro (https://tablam.org).
Any medium/big ERP end being a specialized computing platform that needs:
- A programming language
- A database engine
- An orchestration engine
- ELT engine
- Auth
- UI/Report builders
And to be clear: NONE of the "programming language", "database engine", etc are a good fit today.
NONE.
This is the big thing, This is the reason (from a tech POW only) that most attempts fail.
This is the secret of why Cobol rule(d): Is all of this! but is too old! (also, this is why SQL still is best: Is almost this).
---
So, to pull this off, you need a team that knows what is "missing" from our current tools, makes a well-integrated package, and adds a "user-friendly" interface in a way that is palatable for the kind of user that uses excel (powerfully).
Is not that impossible. FoxPro was the best example of this kind of integrated solution.
I spent 8 years buidling and running a crm system as a solo project. (https://web.archive.org/web/20080706045541/http://officezill...). I agree without a programming language and database for users to build their own stuff in like Salesforce does any groupware/crm is doomed.
But I think of the YC requirement more like build a Zapier and make your crm all an API. Use some sort of AI or business logic for users to glue it together.
But at the end of the day you still would need to build out an internal programming language as well because it still would not be enough without it.
The problems with ERP is (1) in order to be a big player you have to cater for so many use cases it starts becoming a glorified development tool without any room for providing actual ROI to the vertical that wants to buy it. (2) it's very, very easy to fall into the trap of saying "well, process x is really no different in industry y, we can adapt the ERP system". In reality there's so many nuances that the platform becomes compromise.
Vertical specific software provides so much more value as you can build things unencumbered by the engine/data structures/way things work.
I've found our niche - ERP's would be hopelessly expensive so save for top tier OE companies no one uses it. In weeks we can develop and roll out features & functionality that our clients just lap up that you would never in a million years build into an ERP platform, but is intrinsic to the delivery of our clients products.
It was inconceivable to me 2 years ago, but now I've had very real discussions with some companies where they're looking at our software going "wow... you're going to give mid tier players better functionality that we could only dream of from our ERP systems.."
Basically ERP platforms are "jack of all trades, master of none".
In my former life we did vertical specific software for the window and door industry. Every time we heard from a prospect "oh we're looking at __some ERP platform__ to do configuration of W&D", we'd immediately list dozens of reasons why they would fail, and fail hard.. countless untold money to consulting teams has been burned learning those lessons.
> In weeks we can develop and roll out features & functionality that our clients just lap up that you would never in a million years build into an ERP platform
Interesting. Just to make sure I understood this correctly, are you taking of a purpose built app/software for each such 'request' as opposed to this being some 'module'/'add-on' in an ERP suite?
Yeah so in an ERP platform, you (well the client) needs to pay for a feature they want to be built ontop of the platform. It may have additional tables/data structures added into the ERP system or outside of it. Sure an ERP might have say an "Field Service Module" add-on you can get. But if you're a Spa Pool shop, there might be a whole bunch of things you do spa pool specific, eg taking water chemistry measurements. With an ERP system to add say a 'chemistry tracker add-on', you're very unlikely to find one off the shelf, so you need to customise the ERP system to do it. By the end of having an ERP system that works for your Spa Pool Empire you've blown $100'000's to $millions.
The alternative is some scrappy startup does a SaaS platform for Spa Pool shops and builds the features natively. Not being hamstrung by the ERP platform, so no compromises - no UI's that look like an ugly duckling. And of course they learn every new spa pool shop that comes onboard, adapts and improves.
Eventually the SaaS software startup will become the Spa Pool system of choice, and will come up against the ERP platforms in sales pitches.
One will be ready to go for a Spa Pool shop, the other will have a team of consultants wanting to do requirements gathering....
That's the problem with ERPs, when a vertical/niche has got dedicated software, the ERPs almost always look inferior*
* Upto a certain business size/throughput/specialised requirements, then Mega Spa Pool corp is okay paying millions to have their own ERP team.
What make this complicated is that each company turns into a different project. So is like have several branches:
ERP
/CompanyA
/CompanyB
This is high maintenance the more successful you are (and puts a serious barrier to adapting to certain customers).
It gets to a point where after a certain # of customers you can't grow, and now is where you think about making your own DB, programming language, ... :)
Hi. I'm working on Logkeeper which is an all in one business management platform.
I don't think it will be possible to compete directly with the big players. However, having spoken to a few potential customers, it seems my software can help businesses that are small today but will scale up tomorrow. If I can prove that my software can indeed scale up with them, I will have a good opportunity to tackle the enterprise side eventually. Right now though, I'm just focused on getting the product to a level that helps these smaller folks out. I have been working on it during evenings, and this is my first week moving forward focusing on it full time. Let's see where it goes. I'm really early stage, super fresh to business, but I'm experienced as a swe and consider myself a closer. Cheers!
If you want to know a little about my background, I've worked on massive (many, many millions of dollars) ERP projects from the business side. I've also been a platform engineer/lead on a saas that IPO'd a few years ago. I've seen it from both sides, and I believe that I have an idea of what is missing when it comes to business software in general.
I have allways wondered why there isn't a "headless" erp-system.
I have worked with cms-systems. And in this world it is accepted, you need different frontends for different tasks. Therefore a world of systems - calling themselve headless - support only the backend part of cms management. Worked with Strapi that support this kind of thinking.
How come something similar doesn't exist in the ERP world ?
One major reason is that both developers/customers who ask for it think in UI first, all the time.
Most developers I know are at the far-end of development practices (one of the ERPs I integrate has tables like `F0001, F0002, ...` and fields `F00001, F00002`), and this ERPs then uses old tools like Cobol, Fox, (Old) Delphi, (OLD) VB where it has a better UI history.
And it causes to be very hard to build an API (you can't image how much torture is when an ERP vendor says "we have an API!" instead of using plain text or direct SQL)
For this, you need people that know how to do good APIs. And the good API for an ERP is NOT Rest, GraphQL, JSON, ... (ideally, you need a DB!)
Well the UI-first thinking makes more sense, since in most cases you are solving process-problems, which involves "what does who do when?"
It's hard to communicate a process through a REST API. Sure you could document it incredibly well, maybe even have every part of your ui represented by an API endpoint, but ultimately, due to the number of customizations involved with each ERP view, you'd end up with some sort of bastard, which was never quite the same as the real deal.
It's the kind of software where early venture capital funding can be poisonous rather than helpful. Choosing the right abstractions to build a solid, flexible platform requires a lot of user feedback. You don't get the latter unless you have *paying* customers who have switched their critical processes to your product for a while. You need to build, sell, implement, and provide several upgrades. We bootstrapped a low-code BPM platform (pyrus.com) and were lucky to break even in several years. VCs push you to grow, while premature scaling could be harmful in the long term. It takes time before your platform is mature enough to serve inherently different use cases.
Anybody interested in talking to a potential customer for:
* Developer tools inspired by existing internal tools
* LLMs for manual back office processes in legacy enterprises
Feel free to message me. Having worked in-house for the last 15 years, I've seen a variety of these, have built more than a few of them myself, and am in the middle of building some new ones using LLMs right now — all within large enterprise legal departments.
I won't be able to share any confidential data, but I'm happy to answer questions about patterns I've seen across a few different organizations and where the unmet needs seem to be.
> $136b worth of stablecoins have been issued to date but the opportunity seems much more immense still. Only about seven million people have transacted with stablecoins to date, while more than half a billion live in countries with 30%+ inflation. U.S. banks hold $17b in customer deposits which are all up for grabs as well. And yet the major stablecoin issuers can be counted on one hand and the major liquidity providers with just a few fingers.
This is not entirely true. There has been a stable coin for over 50 years now, and most billionaires should be familiar with it because it's used to pay for satphone calls.
SDR (Special Drawing Rights) is IMF's stable coin. US$935.7 billion SDR are currently allocated. It has been called paper gold and an international reserve currency.
Can SDR really be traded on demand by civilians with a smartphone or computer at any time of day anywhere in the world with internet? It doesn't seem so from a quick Google search, but I don't know. If not, it seems pretty clearly quite different from stablecoins operating on blockchains.
One sure can cash in on crypto, even today! Or so I am told in various YouTube get rich quick adds. And since YC is following the strategy of selling shovels during a gold rush, them promoting stablecoims makes perfect sense!
You can't buy them as a normal person afaik. I learned about them during some boating / radio exams. They're (also) used to pay for satellite calls at sea, which I thought was interesting.
A stablecoin (or any 'coin' for that matter) does not need a blockchain to fulfill its purpose.
The interesting parts for me are:
- It was created 2 years before the dollar officially lost the gold standard
- It's a product of the IMF
- It is seen as a reserve currency
- It's 'stable' the sense that it's a basket of currencies
- I don't think I've ever heard anybody talk about this during any blockchain / crypto / stablecoin event.
I didn't look into how "stable" the coin actually has been over time. But I think it's good to look at the policies and thoughts from IMF's point of few as well as how countries deal with it. They have smart people there, so there's probably something we can learn from them.
I can’t help wonder what advantage a blockchain brings to this. At the end of the day if you’re takings deposits and issuing claims on those deposits you’re a bank. You can wave your hands all you want, regulators are going to catch up with you
SDR is fairly well known among people who study reserve currencies. While most people take for granted the US dollar as the global reserve currency, those who study it are aware of alternatives (SDR, gold, bitcoin), even though those are too tiny (right now…) to seriously get the “reserve currency” title.
FWIW, Facebook’s stablecoin (Libra/Diem) was designed as a basket of currencies like SDR. In fact, it’s not too far off to explain Libra/Diem as SDR on blockchain, but backed by its own association instead of the IMF. If you understand the geopolitical challenges facing SDR (even with its IMF backing), you can imagine why Libra/Diem got such pushback.
I had no idea you could pay for satellite calls with SDR. (I don’t roll like that…) I’d love to learn more.
The satellite call use case is interesting though. I’ve heard rumor/speculation that Starlink may accept crypto for payment. The use case makes sense. If you’re bringing internet access to parts of the world that don’t already have it, you can’t assume those users have easy access to traditional payment rails.
And this is not a unique problem for Starlink. Many internet companies I know or have worked with have users from all over the world, but in many countries those users are stuck in the “free” tier because there are too many hurdles for them to pay (or in some cases, get paid) for online services. I know of small businesses in SE Asia that would set up a company (and bank account) in Singapore just to pay (get paid) for online services. There’s a huge gap between the inexorable rise of the internet economy and the fossilized global payment system. In fact, I’m founding a startup to use stablecoin to bridge that gap.
For the AR/VR space, I'm curious about YCs thinking about the addressable market and the possibility to have a unicorn-scale company developing solely for VR/AR in the foreseeable future (that isn't a device manufacturer).
The devices seem to be getting better and better, but the software seems rather lacking (currently typing this from a gorgeous giant display on my Vision Pro, which I use mostly exactly like how I would use my computer). Even in gaming, where the use-case is a lot more mature, we haven't seen the kinds of investment in AAA content that you'd expect, even though clearly the platforms could benefit from it.
I'm curious what YCs thinking is, and if perhaps they just feel no one has earnestly taken it on yet?
Hi there, I wrote this RFP. We like to back strong technical founders, and some may be interested in working in AR/VR like I did years ago. You are right that the software is lacking which is more of an opportunity. Wrt with the market, yes, it is still very nascent, so founders working on this space have to be be very excited and inherently believe in it in the long run.
Technical founder in the VR/AR space here. Not in a rush so have discounted YC in the past, still may be worth a short chat. Use the "Apply" link on the RFS page?
I think the larger dev ecosystem has created a bit of backlash against the big players for some time and aren't quick to adopt the new tech they are dishing out. I would guess taking a 30% cut, lawsuits, and unfair terms has left a sour taste in everyone's mouth.
And it wasn't until competition stepped up with an indie dev, aka a YouTube VR app called Juno made for the Vision Pro, that even Google decided to jump into developing YouTube for the Vision Pro.
So now we are back at the chicken and the egg problem and few big devs want to support the giants. It'll happen probably eventually when monetization becomes a reality for devs embracing the tech but I don't see it happening any time soon.
> Occasionally we gather up all of these ideas and share them in what we call a Request for Startups, or RFS — a Y Combinator tradition that goes back over a decade.
I wonder how many YC startups joined due to a past RFS and went on to be successful.
My impression is that YC emphasizes the quality of the startup founders over the quality of the startup idea, so I find it interesting that this RFS tradition persists.
Seems perfectly fitting. These ideas give a good team "permission" to believe in themselves. People who think they need "the right idea" might be stuck in the Alignment Trap, from which any execution engine is the exit.
Lookong at some of the stuff on the YC list, well, ignorance is bliss I guess. But whatever helps you to get running and successfully pivot to something actually realistic.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 364 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1751264791719719371
Important to ask yourself, "Am I working for someone who will be a decent person if my time and effort ends up making them wildly wealthy?"
It's not like these deals are a mystery to the folks who sign them are they?
Wrote [YC President Garry] Tan, addressing seven San Francisco supervisors who oversee the delivery of local government services: “Fuck Chan Peskin Preston Walton Melgar Ronen Safai Chan as a label and motherfucking crew … And if you are down with Peskin Preston Walton Melgar Ronen Safai Chan as a crew fuck you too … Die slow motherfuckers.”
That explains the admin on this forum throwing a "you're a nationalist!" at me recently, turns out I was ahead of the game on that (only that I was doing it for the wrong geo-political bloc)
> NEW DEFENSE TECHNOLOGY
Ooo, that certainly explains lots and lots of stuff, including the "warnings" whenever the comments don't support the correct geo-political bloc mentioned above.
All in all very interesting, turns out that YC and the money behind it has smelt where things are going and are following the likes of Eric Schmidt. Let's see what the time will tell.
Are you referring to this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39315543 If so, it seems wildly unrelated to "BRING MANUFACTURING BACK TO AMERICA".
https://news.ycombinator.com/chinamod
Are there more?
[0]https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/lists
[?]https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...
That one stuck around because the perception that it corrects (of HN moderation being against $COUNTRY, where $COUNTRY = China in this case) shows up semi-regularly—as does the opposite perception, of course. These things always come in opposing pairs.
As a side note, it's interesting to see how different users react to reading such a set of comments, i.e. comments that contradict their assumptions about how HN is moderated. In some cases the reaction is something like, "Wow, I had no idea - thanks for the information" and the person presumably goes on to adjust their priors. In other cases the reaction is a complex explanation of how none of that matters and the original perception remains intact, even though it's inaccurate.
>It’s interesting to see how different users react to reading such a set of comments…
I’ve noticed this myself and I’ve always been surprised at the wide variety of users that fall into either of these buckets. You sort of expect this from new(er) accounts. But some of the arguments from created: ~2000’s, karma: 20,000+ accounts in detached threads are wild.
I suspect this comes from a lot of moderation actually being quite transparent, but not obvious. If one has any interest they can actually go learn a lot w.r.t. moderation. But zero information is forced unless one goes looking or eventually runs afoul.
In the lack of a story, it’s easy to invent a lot of assumptions about what is done and why. People inevitably see the invented assumptions of others and repeat them.
Or perhaps there are some topics where its so close to home that any slight, real or perceived, makes it impossible to be reasoned with.
Named after somebody better known for other ideas?
People often reach for an exotic explanation in their own case, but anyone who's familiar with HN's rules can see how your comments have been breaking them. It's just that simple.
We don't care about your, or any other commenter's "geopolitics". It's all endlessly more tedious and obvious than that.
That one is interesting in that I wouldn't naturally think of manufacturing as a common start up idea.
I can't help but imagine some startup with limited manufacturing knowledge ultimately offering what is at best some incremental improvement in some process that isn't enough to support the start up.
Or at least that's what I've seen from start ups entering areas that I've had experience in.
This line
>> Companies like SpaceX and Tesla have trained an entire generation of engineers in how to build an American company that makes physical products but operates like a startup.
is sending chills down my back so. After all, Tesla was almost bankcrupted by their drive to automate everything. And Tesla's robot is a guy in a spandex costume.
After that, I refused to see what they have to say about their goal to de-thron SAP, aka their call for new ERP systems (nice touch to include the full name in the link and not kust the accronym, I am sure people able to theoretically build a new ERP from scratch appreciate the clarification...).
Edit: Ok, I did click on the ERP link. No idea how they came to that conclusion here
This type of software is so valuable and important that we can imagine that there is the opportunity for dozens of new massively successful vendors.
considering they wrote the first sentence if it... At least they don't mention AI, LLM or ML...
If that is what you know about SAP and ERP systems, sure, you can come up with something like YC Call for Start-Up section on ERP systems.
https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey/status/1530604281732116481?...
(Not sure how long you would need to wait before getting paid?)
You can't make prisoner's lives better / post prison lives better IF the voters and politicians don't wish to / pay you to do so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ameelio
https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/hy70st/i_am_zo_orchin...
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/01/1146370950/prison-phone-call-...
> When the law goes into effect next month, Massachusetts will join Connecticut, California, Minnesota and Colorado in eliminating prisoner phone call fees.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38454743 (citations)
Commissary Club (formerly 70 Million Jobs) tried on the post incarceration jobs topic, but did not obtain traction (casualty of the pandemic).
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/commissary-club
(some solutions simply cannot succeed when profit is a requirement; they require systems you throw money in and outcomes come out instead of profit)
That said, there's still plenty that can be done without policy work, but it's a hard slog and requires a lot of legal work. Reviewing RFPs, submitting RFPs, integrating with the existing systems, implementing regulatory requirements, all while trying to keep the codebase and tech stack manageable with a small team and when contract periods can be multiple years long.
It's going to take some time, but we're still going and still growing.
What they’re proposing here seems so doable. Certainly not EASY, but POSSIBLE. Companies tackling this problem could legitimately change the world.
They don’t go into specifics, but it seems to me like this means making MRIs cheap enough, with low enough false positive rates, that every day ppl can get them frequently. Probably ~twice a year, given how fast cancer spreads.
I’m aware of companies doing proactive MRIs that cost ~$2K/scan, that aren’t covered by health insurance. Great for the wealthy, but seems infeasible for every day ppl. I’m not aware of anyone legitimately trying to make this affordable/scalable enough that most people can get scanned frequently. Maybe they’re out there and I just haven’t heard of them? Or were you referring more to the ~$2K/scan companies?
Even better is the employees could keep most of their money in USDC and only convert to fiat when they need to pay bills. Now they have a dollar bank account and avoid local inflation.
Definitely needs crypto. What a novel idea.
As soon as their next idea is described in proper terms, they immediately devolve into insults, "you know nothing" and other "oh you're just a blind hater".
> the point of my business idea above was to solve a pain point around paying a global work force considering the costs of global wire transfers
How much do you think it will cost to "systematically go country by country, learned the local HR laws, partner with the most trusted exchange, and then handle all accounting and taxes"?
The best business ideas I’ve heard for crypto inevitably don’t need crypto.
Countries sell services (tourism) and goods (products and commodities) to earn dollars. However another major source is by creating their own local currency (i.e. Brazilian Reals), inflating it (5 to 10% common in Brazil), and banning citizens from holding foreign currency (i.e. citizens cannot hold USD). So if you want to pay someone in Brazil from the US, you send them USD, which is then stolen by the government and converted into shittier local currency (Reals).
A better option, as employees I have in Brazil will attest, is you pay them in stablecoins (i.e. USDT or USDC) which they then convert at their own leisure to Reals when they need to pay bills. This allows them to earn interest on the stablecoins and protects them from the shitty local fiat currency.
This theft of wealth from citizens via the local shitty fiat currency is a global phenomena. See Argentina, Lebanon, Venezuela, Turkey, and on and on. This is a major driver of global stablecoin demand, because everyone wants USD, especially retail, but until crypto the ability to receive and store USD was very limited by governments.
In less developed countries, it's the opposite. Wise and other centralized money transmission platforms are ripe targets to apply government pressure, with capital limits, currency conversion games, freezing accounts, and so on.
Cryptocurrency inverts the whole process. Having a crypto wallet is like having an offshore bank account, or perhaps a vault in your house. You can also send money peer-to-peer over the internet very quickly. It's just like cash, except you can make purchases (even huge purchases) without needing the danger of physically holding a lot of money.
Of course there are many downsides. You can be hacked, you can forget your password / seed phrase, you can send money to the wrong place, the whole thing is cumbersome. These downsides are being worked on in various ways, but there are some permanent downsides to holding bearer instruments that fiat accounts held by regulated financial institutions don't have.
The downsides of countries like Venezuela, Lebanon, and Argentina for trying to build businesses and accumulate savings are larger than the downsides of cryptocurrency. Entrepreneurs and normal, everyday citizens are embracing crypto from the bottom-up because governments obviously hate the freedom crypto provides their citizens. It makes collecting taxes and doing the fiat-inflation theft game harder. It requires citizens to self-report rather than automatic-deduction, which reduces government revenue.
Argentina is a de facto USD-based economy. All property purchases are conducted with United States $100 bills, with entire companies whose job is to safely transport a life savings' worth of cash to the real estate closing, where the cash is then scrupulously assessed for counterfeiting. In an economy like this, you can imagine how stablecoins can be useful, despite the cumbersome and risky nature. It's still 10 to 100x safer and better than suitcases of cash.
> In Argentina, most transactions are conducted using cash, primarily in the form of $100 US bills. This may seem somewhat traditional, but it's the prevailing practice in this country.
> Particularly when purchasing property, you typically need to make your payment in US dollars because property prices are consistently quoted in this currency.
> You can opt to bring cash or utilize a financial service to obtain the required US dollars in cash, although this may involve a fee.
> So, if you're planning a purchase, be prepared to carry a substantial amount of US dollar bills into the country, possibly up to $500,000. However, keep in mind that this process isn't straightforward, and you will likely incur a commission fee.
https://thelatinvestor.com/blogs/news/buying-process-propert...
> It makes collecting taxes ... harder.
How does that mesh with "If some company systematically went country by country, learned the local HR laws, ... and then handled all accounting and taxes"?
> the point of my business idea above was to solve a pain point around paying a global work force considering the costs of global wire transfers
How much do you think it will cost to "systematically go country by country, learned the local HR laws, partner with the most trusted exchange, and then handle all accounting and taxes"?
> Having a crypto wallet is like having an offshore bank account
> It makes collecting taxes ... harder.
How does that mesh with "If some company systematically went country by country, learned the local HR laws, ... and then handled all accounting and taxes"?
The answer is government, laws, and culture. The governments of Argentina (until things got so bad they elected a self-described anarcho capitalist libertarian!), Venezuela, Cuba, Lebanon, etc. have created terrible environments for their citizens. Crypto is allowing their citizens to break laws that are hurting them. I support the citizens fighting against their socialist and communist governments that are robbing them. That's the core function of empowering citizens with decentralized money.
These are two descriptions you started with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39371127 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39371520
It literally is this:
""" If some company systematically went country by country, learned the local HR laws, partnered with the most trusted exchange, and then handled all accounting and taxes, a truly global HR and payment system could be built to make onboarding and paying everyone 10x simpler.
the point of my business idea above was to solve a pain point around paying a global work force considering the costs of global wire transfers vs. instant USDC settlement. """
So. Given all this, here are the questions:
1. Given that wire transfers cost money, and you want to make them cheap/free and instant, how much do you think it will cost to "systematically go country by country, learned the local HR laws, partner with the most trusted exchange, and then handle all accounting and taxes"?
2. Given that, by your own words, crypto is like having money in offshore accounts making tax collection more difficult, how does this mesh with your proposal of having a company do accounting and collect taxes?
----
Note: I'm not in the least surprised that you can't answer these questions even if the first one of these I asked very early in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39372364
That's the reason there's so much "unwarranted hate" on HN: because people are not stupid, and they don't fall for demagoguery and grand proclamations. 99.9999999999% of all crypto proposals fall down immediately under the lightest of scrutinies: they are inevitably self-contradictory, unworkable, costly, don't do the job advertised, better implemented other technologies, or any or even all of the above.
The reason a business will exist and have value is because they did the work of figuring out how to pay workers in each country. My company does this now for Brazil, so it is possible to do legally.
The offshore bank account comment is to envision what it is similar to. For example it’s possible for an Argentinian to fly to the US and open a bank account in Miami, it’s just cumbersome to then get USD out of it and into Argentina. With a crypto wallet it’s similar to this but much more streamlined. The proposed business will figure out the intricacies of each country.
As a concrete example, if someone posts an article about Merkle tree, it would get maybe 10-50 votes and 5 comments, and probably not much hate if any. Yet (according to wikipedia, I'm not into cryptocurrencies) it's a part of the underlying technology of "the Bitcoin and Ethereum peer-to-peer networks"
It's only "unwarranted" if you're willing to be blind to the entire history of crypto.
> The crypto economy advances year after year,
Yes, the speculation and scams in crypto grow year after year.
> but you would never know it perusing HN.
People don't only peruse HN. We've yet to see that amazing growing economy grow beyond speculative trading and scams [1]
[1] Yes, there's a small part of crypto that helps people send money to sanctioned countries
nope. it's not clear. and crypto-proponents who can't even show this beyond kindergarten-level name calling don't help
I assume that's how Anduril is going to end up.
I agree that superiority is one of the best deterrents.
https://twitter.com/josephpolitano/status/175797569920841756...
https://twitter.com/palmerluckey/status/1757896863884444053
https://twitter.com/uticaeric/status/1757927405124030852?s=4...
If you just look in terms of aggregate market cap, defense companies are some of the larger companies in the world - i.e., Lockheed Martin is valued over $100B. That's a good sign that it's possible to build a big company in the space, which is all you need.
Lockheed Martin used to be Lockheed and Martin, MDD used to be McDonnel and Douglas, Northrop Gruman, well, you get it. Those companies were built, the were merged. And they are the first on the big defence budgets, and honestly also the only ones being able to deliver modern defence and weapon systems (regardless of delays and cost over runs).
Lockheed Martin was formed by the merger of Lockheed and Martin Marietta and Martin Marietta was formed by the merger of Martin and American-Marietta, and American-Marietta was formed by the merger of American Asphalt Paint Company and Marietta Paint and Color Company.
AI is a marketing catch-all that encompasses technologies of a certain level of “how did they do that” automation that are generally understood to leverage machine learning models under the hood (but not always).
LLMs are one class of ML models that operate in a text-in-text-out fashion.
“Models” are more of a statistical/mathematical term that generally mean “anything that can make a prediction” - it’s broader than just ML (eg climate models that are first-principles-based, not learned from data).
It's kind of laughable how YC is now requesting for startups in these lines when 10 years back, they rejected us (DefTech) on exactly the above premise. While we didn't manage a multibagger exit, we did manage a non-acquihire exit, which is more than what most YC companies can manage. The right time to invest in these problems was 10 years ago, when all the low-hanging fruit still existed.
How about: do you have any path to profitability, or you're still on the path to lose hundreds of millions of dollars per year or get sold to the highest bidder?
If you haven't made anything users want, then you might need to change your idea, and that's what that sentence is referring to.
Okay, let's assume that is true
> That's the trailhead for all paths to profitability.
You can open a list of YC's companies, and then find profitable ones. An eye opener.
For those who are profitable now, you can also look at how long they have existed, how long they have been profitable, and how long it will take them to break even considering those losses.
If you want to build machines that kill people, you should at least be willing to say it clearly. If it makes you uncomfortable to talk about, maybe that should tell you something. And it's not a very good excuse to argue that you didn't build a weapon, you just built something that makes it easier to use weapons.
Arms races are not the way. The biggest threat to the West isn't somebody else's weapons, it's that Indonesia's elections today went to a candidate who doesn't want to align with the West, relations with India are increasingly strained, and even Brazil and Turkey are starting to lean out. Geopolitics is politics, and politics requires appeal. Our brand image is significantly worse than two decades ago, as far as I can see.
If the West can't gain allies on friendly terms and maintains power through the development of ever-more advanced military technology, then what kind of world have we built, exactly?
It's extremely disappointing to see this.
Pretending any of these objective truths are wrong is folly and ignores a dozen millennia of human history.
There will always be individuals/organizations/countries that don't the "the West" as an ally. Some subset of that will be outwardly hostile to Western ideology, and some subset of that will be willing and able to use violence as a means to their end. The fact that some Western countries have impressive militaries doesn't somehow mean they should stop investing in that technology.
Well maybe that's not at all what they're saying.
Perhaps you could share what you consider the least extreme version of "building machines that kill people." Building missiles - OK yeah obviously. Improving satellites which are used for information gathering which could be used for missions where people are killed? Does that fall within "building machines that kill people?" What is the mildest example of something that constitutes "building machines that kill people?"
Sad day for YC.
Very curious if anyone knows how to pull this off. There's so much value to be unlocked but it's just impossible to break through.
I've personally met three very talented founders that tried and failed (one was accepted to YC as a mid-market ERP and successfully pivoted into an application tracking system) and failed very quickly.
I'm guessing an important feature would be an integration system that maps data from the current ERP seamlessly into the new ERP. And that assumes you can even get through the enterprise sales process to even get the company to migrate.
Two approaches I can think of:
1. Target mid market or smaller and grow with customers (will be slow)
2. Take a front-door-wrapper approach
You can't only offer raw materials tracking, but not accounting and shipping. There's just not a lot of value to the business unless you have everything coupled.
The MVP for an ERP is essentially, a fully featured and battle-tested system which is very expensive and time consuming to build before it's profitable.
I don't think starting a new ERP company from scratch makes sense for anyone. The best you would likely do is to become either a minor player (just look at the array of CRMs that aren't Salesforce), tailored to a very specific market niche, or an "ERP adjacent" platform of some kind. That last bit is the obvious play. The bread & butter of Enterprise Applications IT departments around the world is to build custom stuff that inherits data from ERPs or feeds data into ERPs and similar mission critical business platforms. Speaking as a guy who ran one of these departments in an F250 for about ten years, most of what they build is pretty crappy.
So you target firms that are not yet at the scale where they likely have or need ERP with something that does something they do need that would be integrated into an ERP when they get to that scale and build out from there.
No one is buying an ERP from a firm that doesn't either already have a deep relationship with the buyer or a track record in the ERP space or a track record in an ERP-adjacent space, and more than one of those is desirable, so be in the position that when you start trying to sell an ERP you have at least the last plus a stable of firms for which you also have the first.
I am a CS graduate from a 'famous' UK university (UCL). I'm also a qualified CAD engineer, project manager within agile (DSDM agile etc)...ITIL qualified etc. i.e I've spent a lot of time across these kinds of many tentacled systems that really do reach across the entirety of any large business. I've worked with these systems from FTSE 50 businesses to small 50 person manufacturing startups.
I've also been involved in the migration between PLM systems (horrible from a data perspective - all those CAD files etc) and also ERP systems (horrible but largely just the mapping between two different Entity Relationship Diagrams almost incomprehensible to any living human in terms of complexity).
It would be an incredibly ambitious undertaking to compete with one of the major players in either of these spaces. It is not something you could really even do at the scale of a start-up the likes of which YC and the media understand as 'start-up'. You would need so many not just 'early stage' founders with wildly different skillsets, you would need effectively an entire large manufacturing business, from end to end, in terms of personnel because your 'domain expert' essentially includes 'every business function you can imagine'. That's before you could even begin to think about software. It's a fascinating idea but think about it - procurement/purchasing, warehousing and logistics, engineering and design, sales and marketing, finance (very important here), HR, operations, R&D, Q&A...and these are just the ones I can think of that I have come across in my dealings with these systems. They really do touch every department.
The length of time to market would also be such that this kind of project would not really be appropriate to describe as a 'start up'. You'd essentially be creating a 'Unicorn Killer' and that unicorn killer would need insane resources to even have a chance at market success. The number and requirement for specialist migration tools into your new system from existing clients would be a 'massive' undertaking also.
It's such a bold idea but I think to describe an undertaking of that size 'start-up' would be to completely stretch the meaning of the term 'start-up' so far beyond its usage that the term would lose all meaning.
Then do the same for another slice, offer it to existing customers and make the completed slices work well together. Then another slice.
And along the way there could be profit to fund the next slice, as well as existing customers you can tap into to solve their problems. It would be simpler to niche down vs. the SAP/Oracle path of ERP-fits-all.
Every auditor on the planet is intimately familiar with how Oracle EBS and SAP do certain things.
If you don't have that trust built up, a customer simply won't want to take the risk and additional headache and overhead passing an audit will take.
You never went through an audit, did you?
Sounds like the pitch Fujitsu made to the Post Office for Horizon. That worked out so well!
This is not true. Auditing is half assurance and half insurance. It has nothing to do with the actual results of a bunch of rules and checks.
You cannot eliminate the need for auditors - the need is for someone to go through the system and make sure that no one is cooking the books.
Hence, an independent third party does the audit.
If the auditors are sensitive to which systems they are familiar with, it would perhaps be beneficial to the auditors to be able to understand other systems.
I'm sure there are companies that are servicing auditors, creating UiPath flows or whatever for a bunch of auditors. So there's probably already a ton of very specific solutions out there, for auditing various systems.
At least it sounds like a more solvable problem than yet another ERP
An nothing of this has anything to do with SAP, and everything with ERPs and the messy reality of businesses.
You'd probably start with a human in the loop solution but mapping should be a solvable problem
There is a reason why migration projects are yearlong, multi million projects. Go through one, ideally multiple, of those first before looking at automating any of that. Added benefit, jobs at those projects pay incredibly well for the functional consultants involved. And when, when not if, automation doesn't work out, you still don't have to worry about a job ever again.
I work in this space (small/mid-size).
The good news is that there are several "obvious" ways to pull this off because an ERP is the culmination of everything a company needs and does. So almost anything you can imagine on the software is part of it.
The bad news, and the reason everyone wants a solution, is that is truly a big space, and then you need E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G.
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My take is to start from the bottom, and build a much better version of Access/FoxPro (https://tablam.org).
Any medium/big ERP end being a specialized computing platform that needs:
- A programming language
- A database engine
- An orchestration engine
- ELT engine
- Auth
- UI/Report builders
And to be clear: NONE of the "programming language", "database engine", etc are a good fit today.
NONE.
This is the big thing, This is the reason (from a tech POW only) that most attempts fail.
This is the secret of why Cobol rule(d): Is all of this! but is too old! (also, this is why SQL still is best: Is almost this).
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So, to pull this off, you need a team that knows what is "missing" from our current tools, makes a well-integrated package, and adds a "user-friendly" interface in a way that is palatable for the kind of user that uses excel (powerfully).
Is not that impossible. FoxPro was the best example of this kind of integrated solution.
P.D: This is my life's dream, to make this truth!
But I think of the YC requirement more like build a Zapier and make your crm all an API. Use some sort of AI or business logic for users to glue it together.
But at the end of the day you still would need to build out an internal programming language as well because it still would not be enough without it.
Vertical specific software provides so much more value as you can build things unencumbered by the engine/data structures/way things work.
I've found our niche - ERP's would be hopelessly expensive so save for top tier OE companies no one uses it. In weeks we can develop and roll out features & functionality that our clients just lap up that you would never in a million years build into an ERP platform, but is intrinsic to the delivery of our clients products.
It was inconceivable to me 2 years ago, but now I've had very real discussions with some companies where they're looking at our software going "wow... you're going to give mid tier players better functionality that we could only dream of from our ERP systems.."
Basically ERP platforms are "jack of all trades, master of none".
In my former life we did vertical specific software for the window and door industry. Every time we heard from a prospect "oh we're looking at __some ERP platform__ to do configuration of W&D", we'd immediately list dozens of reasons why they would fail, and fail hard.. countless untold money to consulting teams has been burned learning those lessons.
Interesting. Just to make sure I understood this correctly, are you taking of a purpose built app/software for each such 'request' as opposed to this being some 'module'/'add-on' in an ERP suite?
The alternative is some scrappy startup does a SaaS platform for Spa Pool shops and builds the features natively. Not being hamstrung by the ERP platform, so no compromises - no UI's that look like an ugly duckling. And of course they learn every new spa pool shop that comes onboard, adapts and improves.
Eventually the SaaS software startup will become the Spa Pool system of choice, and will come up against the ERP platforms in sales pitches.
One will be ready to go for a Spa Pool shop, the other will have a team of consultants wanting to do requirements gathering....
That's the problem with ERPs, when a vertical/niche has got dedicated software, the ERPs almost always look inferior*
* Upto a certain business size/throughput/specialised requirements, then Mega Spa Pool corp is okay paying millions to have their own ERP team.
What make this complicated is that each company turns into a different project. So is like have several branches:
This is high maintenance the more successful you are (and puts a serious barrier to adapting to certain customers).It gets to a point where after a certain # of customers you can't grow, and now is where you think about making your own DB, programming language, ... :)
I don't think it will be possible to compete directly with the big players. However, having spoken to a few potential customers, it seems my software can help businesses that are small today but will scale up tomorrow. If I can prove that my software can indeed scale up with them, I will have a good opportunity to tackle the enterprise side eventually. Right now though, I'm just focused on getting the product to a level that helps these smaller folks out. I have been working on it during evenings, and this is my first week moving forward focusing on it full time. Let's see where it goes. I'm really early stage, super fresh to business, but I'm experienced as a swe and consider myself a closer. Cheers!
If you want to know a little about my background, I've worked on massive (many, many millions of dollars) ERP projects from the business side. I've also been a platform engineer/lead on a saas that IPO'd a few years ago. I've seen it from both sides, and I believe that I have an idea of what is missing when it comes to business software in general.
I have worked with cms-systems. And in this world it is accepted, you need different frontends for different tasks. Therefore a world of systems - calling themselve headless - support only the backend part of cms management. Worked with Strapi that support this kind of thinking.
How come something similar doesn't exist in the ERP world ?
Most developers I know are at the far-end of development practices (one of the ERPs I integrate has tables like `F0001, F0002, ...` and fields `F00001, F00002`), and this ERPs then uses old tools like Cobol, Fox, (Old) Delphi, (OLD) VB where it has a better UI history.
And it causes to be very hard to build an API (you can't image how much torture is when an ERP vendor says "we have an API!" instead of using plain text or direct SQL)
For this, you need people that know how to do good APIs. And the good API for an ERP is NOT Rest, GraphQL, JSON, ... (ideally, you need a DB!)
It's hard to communicate a process through a REST API. Sure you could document it incredibly well, maybe even have every part of your ui represented by an API endpoint, but ultimately, due to the number of customizations involved with each ERP view, you'd end up with some sort of bastard, which was never quite the same as the real deal.
* Developer tools inspired by existing internal tools
* LLMs for manual back office processes in legacy enterprises
Feel free to message me. Having worked in-house for the last 15 years, I've seen a variety of these, have built more than a few of them myself, and am in the middle of building some new ones using LLMs right now — all within large enterprise legal departments.
I won't be able to share any confidential data, but I'm happy to answer questions about patterns I've seen across a few different organizations and where the unmet needs seem to be.
Thanks, appreciate it!
> $136b worth of stablecoins have been issued to date but the opportunity seems much more immense still. Only about seven million people have transacted with stablecoins to date, while more than half a billion live in countries with 30%+ inflation. U.S. banks hold $17b in customer deposits which are all up for grabs as well. And yet the major stablecoin issuers can be counted on one hand and the major liquidity providers with just a few fingers.
This is not entirely true. There has been a stable coin for over 50 years now, and most billionaires should be familiar with it because it's used to pay for satphone calls.
SDR (Special Drawing Rights) is IMF's stable coin. US$935.7 billion SDR are currently allocated. It has been called paper gold and an international reserve currency.
A stablecoin (or any 'coin' for that matter) does not need a blockchain to fulfill its purpose.
The interesting parts for me are:
- It was created 2 years before the dollar officially lost the gold standard
- It's a product of the IMF
- It is seen as a reserve currency
- It's 'stable' the sense that it's a basket of currencies
- I don't think I've ever heard anybody talk about this during any blockchain / crypto / stablecoin event.
I didn't look into how "stable" the coin actually has been over time. But I think it's good to look at the policies and thoughts from IMF's point of few as well as how countries deal with it. They have smart people there, so there's probably something we can learn from them.
SDR is fairly well known among people who study reserve currencies. While most people take for granted the US dollar as the global reserve currency, those who study it are aware of alternatives (SDR, gold, bitcoin), even though those are too tiny (right now…) to seriously get the “reserve currency” title.
FWIW, Facebook’s stablecoin (Libra/Diem) was designed as a basket of currencies like SDR. In fact, it’s not too far off to explain Libra/Diem as SDR on blockchain, but backed by its own association instead of the IMF. If you understand the geopolitical challenges facing SDR (even with its IMF backing), you can imagine why Libra/Diem got such pushback.
I had no idea you could pay for satellite calls with SDR. (I don’t roll like that…) I’d love to learn more.
The satellite call use case is interesting though. I’ve heard rumor/speculation that Starlink may accept crypto for payment. The use case makes sense. If you’re bringing internet access to parts of the world that don’t already have it, you can’t assume those users have easy access to traditional payment rails.
And this is not a unique problem for Starlink. Many internet companies I know or have worked with have users from all over the world, but in many countries those users are stuck in the “free” tier because there are too many hurdles for them to pay (or in some cases, get paid) for online services. I know of small businesses in SE Asia that would set up a company (and bank account) in Singapore just to pay (get paid) for online services. There’s a huge gap between the inexorable rise of the internet economy and the fossilized global payment system. In fact, I’m founding a startup to use stablecoin to bridge that gap.
The devices seem to be getting better and better, but the software seems rather lacking (currently typing this from a gorgeous giant display on my Vision Pro, which I use mostly exactly like how I would use my computer). Even in gaming, where the use-case is a lot more mature, we haven't seen the kinds of investment in AAA content that you'd expect, even though clearly the platforms could benefit from it.
I'm curious what YCs thinking is, and if perhaps they just feel no one has earnestly taken it on yet?
And it wasn't until competition stepped up with an indie dev, aka a YouTube VR app called Juno made for the Vision Pro, that even Google decided to jump into developing YouTube for the Vision Pro.
So now we are back at the chicken and the egg problem and few big devs want to support the giants. It'll happen probably eventually when monetization becomes a reality for devs embracing the tech but I don't see it happening any time soon.
I wonder how many YC startups joined due to a past RFS and went on to be successful.
My impression is that YC emphasizes the quality of the startup founders over the quality of the startup idea, so I find it interesting that this RFS tradition persists.