Summaries Entrepreneurship and Startups Startup Expo 2018: Discovering the Gateway to Success

This is a summary of a YouTube video "Work at a Startup Expo 2018" by Y Combinator!

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Joining a startup can provide valuable learning opportunities and serve as a gateway to starting your own startup, and to evaluate a startup's potential for success, focus on finding a small number of users who really love the product, trust in exponential growth and momentum, and consider the quality of the founders and early employees.

• 💼
  00:00

  Joining a startup can maximize learning opportunities and serve as a gateway to starting your own startup.
• 🚀
  14:48

  To evaluate a startup's potential for success, focus on finding a small number of users who really love the product, trust in exponential growth and momentum, and consider the quality of the founders and early employees.
• 🚀
  36:44

  Atrium uses AI to revolutionize the legal industry, Carat Fertility offers customized fertility benefits for companies, visual SQL simplifies data exploration, Checker provides accurate background checks, and Coin Tracker manages cryptocurrency portfolios.
• 🚀
  47:09

  CrowdAI builds API for change detection in aerial satellite and SAR data, serving customers from ride-sharing to US government.
• 🚁
  1:00:36

  Iris Automation builds collision avoidance systems for industrial drones using computer vision and AI software, 🚗 Level 5 creates HD maps for autonomous cars, 🎓 new college model trains students for high-growth tech companies, 🌿 Meadow processes $10M of weed per month, 🧒 Mystery org creates video explanations for kids, and 🏠 Neighborly provides free credit reports and background checks for landlords and tenants.
• 🔍
  1:12:53

  Notable Labs is doing personalized drug discovery for blood cancer, Innova Credit is creating a standardized format for credit history data, and various companies like PlanGrid and Poppy are hiring across different positions.
• 💰
  1:26:44

  75% of people in jail can't afford bail, Quartz II provides free software for scientific labs, Quartz offers molecular biology tools, Reach Labs uses high dimensional adaptive antenna arrays, Repl.it is an online IDE, and Retool provides building blocks for custom internal tools.
• 🚀
  1:36:36

  Scale, Science Exchange, Scope AI, Shone, Starsky Robotics, Universe, Bland C, Volley, and Instacart are all hiring for various positions in their respective industries.

Detailed summary

• 💼
  00:00

  Joining a startup can maximize learning opportunities and serve as a gateway to starting your own startup.

  • Justin Kahn, founder of three YC companies, discusses the reasons why you should and shouldn't join a startup, including bad management and the statistical improbability of getting rich.
  • Joining a startup can provide access to job opportunities that you may be unqualified for in a traditional career path.
  • Joining a startup can provide access to job opportunities, serve as a gateway to starting your own startup, and maximize your speed of learning.
  • Joining a startup can maximize learning opportunities, as seen in the example of Kyle, who became a co-founder and VP Engineering at Cruz despite lacking knowledge in scaling systems.
  • The co-founders of Twitch, Kyle and Daniel, had a crash course in startups and learned valuable lessons through their experiences, including Kyle's development of a live video system that became the fourth largest bandwidth consumer in North America.
  • The speaker's co-founder learned valuable negotiating skills from a small and difficult deal that helped him succeed in his next company, which was eventually sold for over a billion dollars.
• 🚀
  14:48

  To evaluate a startup's potential for success, focus on finding a small number of users who really love the product, trust in exponential growth and momentum, and consider the quality of the founders and early employees.

  • To maximize personal growth and learning, it's important to take on roles that may seem unqualified for, and when choosing a startup to work for, think of it as making an investment and consider factors such as risk and return.
  • When evaluating a startup, focus on finding a small number of users who really love the product, trust in exponential growth and momentum, consider the growth rate and potential size of the market, and identify platform shifts and real trends based on the amount of time people spend using a new platform.
  • The quality of the founders and early employees, having an exciting mission, and identifying ideas that sound bad but are good are important considerations when evaluating a startup's potential for success.
  • YC has found that recent college graduates are consistently 3-4 years ahead of investors in identifying real trends, and it's important to carefully choose peers for career advice and demand fair equity at startups.
  • Astronomy is building small low-cost telecommunication satellites to provide internet access to the four billion people in the world who are not online, and they have already put their first test satellite in space.
  • Estrada's has a blameless culture, values work-life balance, and offers fun team-building activities like visiting farms with baby goats.
• 🚀
  36:44

  Atrium uses AI to revolutionize the legal industry, Carat Fertility offers customized fertility benefits for companies, visual SQL simplifies data exploration, Checker provides accurate background checks, and Coin Tracker manages cryptocurrency portfolios.

  • Atrium is a tech-enabled law firm for startups that uses AI technology to digitize legal services and transform an outdated industry, with a massive market of over $400 billion per year and currently the only law firm startup tackling this market.
  • Carat Fertility provides customized fertility benefits for modern companies to make fertility care more accessible and affordable for employees, with the goal of making it as standard in the workplace as medical, dental, and vision coverage.
  • Join us for product development opportunities, market growth potential, and a meaningful mission with Carrot, promising a 50x opportunity for personal growth.
  • The speaker's company has created visual SQL, a drag-and-drop language that works with all databases and makes exploring data easier, allowing for the creation of charts and dashboards to be shared with teams.
  • The company consistently receives high ratings in four main categories, is number one in three of them and number two in the fourth, has 800 sub customers and uses Cheerios as the main data tool, is profitable with 10 or less engineers due to strong coding practices and is looking for more engineers to join their team.
  • Checker does background checks with a focus on accuracy, reliability, and transparency, while Coin Tracker is a portfolio and tax manager for cryptocurrency that integrates top crypto exchanges and wallets into one dashboard.
• 🚀
  47:09

  CrowdAI builds API for change detection in aerial satellite and SAR data, serving customers from ride-sharing to US government.

  • CrowdAI is building an API for change detection in aerial satellite and SAR data, solving a two-prong technical problem with the lack of training data for segmentation and building their own convolutional neural net architecture for segmentation of geospatial data, with customers including ride-sharing companies, mapping companies, insurance and utilities companies, and the US government.
  • DoorDash is a technology company that specializes in food delivery and last-mile logistics, expanding into other verticals like groceries, and has raised $535 million from top investors, delivering food from over 100,000 merchants across the nation every day and expanding into new cities every week.
  • Amber's issues corporate cards that enforce expense policies and is looking for an engineer to augment their fraud detection algorithms or design new bot interactions for their slack integration.
  • Life science tech companies face delays and arbitrary decision making due to terrible information systems, but Vocal Systems offers a solution by automating the FDA approval process with a rails web app and NLP ML back-end, resulting in products reaching the market one to three years faster.
  • Focal Systems deploys hardware and software inside retail environments to provide solutions like out-of-stock detection, automated checkout, and indoor location to solve the inefficiencies of brick-and-mortar retail and is currently working with six of the world's biggest retailers.
  • Honey Love is a direct-to-consumer fashion brand seeking a founding CTO to create amazing ecommerce experiences and build out the team.
• 🚁
  1:00:36

  Iris Automation builds collision avoidance systems for industrial drones using computer vision and AI software, 🚗 Level 5 creates HD maps for autonomous cars, 🎓 new college model trains students for high-growth tech companies, 🌿 Meadow processes $10M of weed per month, 🧒 Mystery org creates video explanations for kids, and 🏠 Neighborly provides free credit reports and background checks for landlords and tenants.

  • Iris Automation builds collision avoidance systems for industrial drones using computer vision and AI software to allow drones to see the world like a pilot, collecting data and continuously improving the product.
  • Level 5 is creating HD maps for autonomous cars using computer vision and a program called Paver, which allows users to make money by driving and optimizing the program is crucial for the company.
  • New model of college focused on training students for high-growth tech companies, with a two-year bachelor's program, diverse student body, and tuition paid as a percentage of earnings, seeking passionate educators to mentor and coach junior developers.
  • Meadow is a cannabis SAS company that processes over $10 million of weed per month and aims to build the best software in the growing $47 billion cannabis industry.
  • Mystery org is a visual Wikipedia for kids that creates video explanations for every question and is looking for passionate engineers to help scale their platform.
  • Neighborly is an AI-based credit bureau that provides free credit reports and criminal background checks to help landlords know who they're renting to while helping tenants access fair credit and build their credit by just paying their rent.
• 🔍
  1:12:53

  Notable Labs is doing personalized drug discovery for blood cancer, Innova Credit is creating a standardized format for credit history data, and various companies like PlanGrid and Poppy are hiring across different positions.

  • Notable Labs is doing personalized drug discovery for blood cancer by testing different combinations of approved drugs on a patient's actual cells to identify personalized combinations of approved drugs that a patient can use, and is actively hiring software engineers, data scientists, and cancer scientists.
  • Innova Credit is solving the problem of immigrants not being able to get credit in foreign markets by creating one standardized format across the world for credit history data through their global data API.
  • This company helps and mentors students and young professionals in their job search and early career development, with no upfront cost and an income share model, and is looking for individuals who want to make a meaningful impact.
  • PlanGrid and Poppy are hiring across various positions and offer great benefits, with PlanGrid building software for the construction industry and Poppy connecting parents with vetted caregivers.
  • Precious uses AI to organize photos of kids, while a Seattle-based team is creating a marketplace to connect parents with trusted caregivers.
  • Precious is an early stage company that uses AI to organize photos of people's kids, has revenue and profit with a small team, and values work/life balance.
• 💰
  1:26:44

  75% of people in jail can't afford bail, Quartz II provides free software for scientific labs, Quartz offers molecular biology tools, Reach Labs uses high dimensional adaptive antenna arrays, Repl.it is an online IDE, and Retool provides building blocks for custom internal tools.

  • 75% of people in jail are there because they cannot afford bail, and software can help reduce the number of nonviolent offenders stuck in jail.
  • Quartz II is an operating system for scientific labs that provides free software and makes money by selling supplies to labs all over the world.
  • Quartz is a platform that provides molecular biology tools to over 4,000 customers, including startups, publicly traded pharma and biotech companies, and offers remote positions to join a team of genuine, ambitious, and driven people.
  • Reach Labs uses high dimensional adaptive antenna arrays and nonlinear optimization algorithmic control to send energy through the air, enabling applications that couldn't exist without this technology, with initial applications focused on industrial sectors.
  • The company just closed their Series A funding with Data Collective VC and is now looking to hire talented engineers to help with scaling up and integrating with their pipeline of clients.
  • Repl.it is an online IDE with zero setup, full-featured code intelligence, live deployment, and supports 40 programming languages, while Retool is a faster way of building custom internal tools by providing building blocks for tables, buttons, and more.
• 🚀
  1:36:36

  Scale, Science Exchange, Scope AI, Shone, Starsky Robotics, Universe, Bland C, Volley, and Instacart are all hiring for various positions in their respective industries.

  • Scale is an end-to-end API driven platform for getting ground truth data, which is the biggest bottleneck for building incredible applications, and has become the standard for ground truth data in the self-driving car and computer vision industries.
  • Science Exchange is a mission-driven company with a collaborative engineering culture, diverse team, and a lot of growth potential, while Scope AI is an NLP-powered analytics platform for customer conversations that automates the entire process of extracting valuable data from text and building one of the world's only text-based analytics suites to explore that data.
  • Shone is retrofitting existing cargo ships with autonomous technology to reduce the crew from 25 to 15, while Starsky Robotics is making trucks autonomous on the highway and teleoperated for the first and last mile.
  • Starsky Robotics is looking for machine learning and controls experts, while Universe is seeking an iOS engineer and Bland C is hiring for their production and D teams.
  • Volley makes voice-controlled games for Alexa and Google Home with over half a million monthly active players, while Instacart aims to be the world leader in online groceries and is hiring about 200 engineers over the next 12 to 15 months.
  • The company has doubled its growth rate in the last year and invites individuals to join and make a huge impact on the company's trajectory, growth, learning, and success.