Favorite YC Summer '20 Startups
Now that the second fully-remote YCombinator Demo Day has come and gone, I wanted to highlight some of my favorites and offer a few thoughts on trends in this new world. For some investors, this batch was challenging, especially for ownership-threshold-focused investors. In many cases, syndicating rounds across multiple funds was out of the question and most of the action was gobbled up by super-angels. This was probably good for founders in the long run and actually forced entrepreneurs to be more disciplined about the investors they decided to work with. The net effect was that entrepreneurs raised less money and put together more valuable syndicates—in essence, I’m glad Aaron wrote his post and pushed the batch in this direction. I expect we’ll see more capital efficient companies and less founder dilution as a result of YC’s new fundraising advice.
A few considerations in this batch:
COVID-19 has made the world smaller — global teams didn’t seem so far away
Every market worldwide now requires and demands remote replacement solutions for formerly in-person processes
Desktop apps became cool again because we’re all stuck at home and YC clearly picked teams who realized this early
Now, on to the companies. Here are my top 5 favorite companies in this batch:
Tella — A collaborative video editor with features to build interactive decks with video narration. It’s a lot like Loom but in the browser, fast, and with more creative capabilities. I met this team before YC and originally liked the idea, but found Grant and Michiel’s focus on different use-cases across sales, marketing, and fundraising to be compelling. In fact, some of the companies in the batch used Tella to pitch investors. It’s quite useful and well-done. I expect the team to add more features to compete with traditional presentation software in the future.
Index — I’m not a fan of Tableau. It’s slow and clunky and doesn’t integrate well with data warehousing solutions. Chart.io requires reading tutorials and learning how to connect your data sets to their graphing library. We’ve seen major improvements with HTML5-rendered animated graphs in the last few years with libraries like D3.js or Apache Superset. The team at Index, formerly at Facebook, is building a solution for business users to quickly hook up a data warehouse and generate beautiful embeddable graphs on demand.
Hellosaurus — While I don’t have kids yet, I found Hellosaurus to be awesome. The founder ran product for the once-famous HQ Trivia app that took the world by storm a few years ago. His own idea is to create a tool for teachers to build interactive episodes of content and monetize their own curriculum in the context of a set of clear rules and characters that Hellosaurus has created. Reminds me a lot of Udemy in the early days but with quality content specifically for toddlers.
Cohere — Screen-sharing is something we all do everyday now. It has become an essential part of how we interact in the remote-only world. Cohere has developed a way for users to grant full control of a web-app running on someone else’s machine. The novelty is that they aren’t showing an image of the host’s screen, they’re transmitting the current DOM to the viewer’s screen. This allows screen sharing control to be smooth and it uses significantly less bandwidth. I’m quite impressed with the elegance of the solution and seeing it live made me think “multiplayer” for any webapp is finally possible.
Gitduck — Pair programming can be highly productive for developers working on complex projects. In the remote world, pair programming is cumbersome. Some of my friends have kept Zoom running all day to emulate this behavior, but it isn’t great and not designed for developers. Gitduck has built an experience specifically for remote engineers to pair program wherever they are.
Looking forward to the next batch!