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This is good! (full disclosure, I know the founder), I've just put Amy's blog post around founder anxiety and covid-19 reality https://www.foundercoach.io/blog/founder-fear-covid-19 and while it doesn't pass the Turing test, it's pretty damn good!

Given the digital nature of crypto, do we need a crypto exchange in every country? Does it just make it easier to transfer to/from different payment providers?

As a UK company founder, that spent a year in SF I wholeheartedly agree. London is getting a little better though but it's more of a cultural shift and will take time.

Oh this is good, this does room level localisation by the looks of it. From what I can see, with Anyplace you have give it a building plan and then walk along the and sample the APs RSSI for each position, more data points give a better approximation of where you are

That's what they claim on their website, but you are right, I think Indoor Positioning System would be a better description of what Anyplace offers. <2m accuracy is good enough for me though, just wondering if there are any alternatives. And thanks for the Decawave suggestion, good to be aware of it but it is waaay too pricey as you mentioned

Any other open Indoor Navigation Services I should be looking at for inventory tracking?

I'm in the VR/AR space and literally, I only came across Blippar once in 2011, what have they been doing for the last 7 years?

Nice one @newy, congratulations!

Yeah there are applications where I can see this being useful and a smart-home controller is there at the top for sure. There are also applications like co-working space meeting room management, store shopping terminals etc.

As for consumers, I think it may be popular with those who like the minimalist approach, although you there are still cables, you are right. I think I'll get one though.

A few years back there was a start-up doing something similar called StartupStay a.k.a BiZpora ( https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bizpora). I hosted some founders in London, it was a great experience and I made some friends. I am glad this is being looked into in SF! All the best with it!

Plexus, high-performance haptic gloves for AR and VR

My company was in the Startup School also. We were accepted into YC when we applied after finishing the Startup School (applied twice before, no interview). Interestingly I know other founders from Startup School that were at the demo day as investors!

The key factor here is the time it takes for a startup to be "successful", it took 9-11 years for Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe to get to where they are today after they went through YC. It will take a similar amount of time to see how successful the larger batches are. I'm guessing your concern is whether they manage to give the same attention to each of the startups as the intake size increases. PG talks about doing things that don't scale (http://paulgraham.com/ds.html), so I'm guessing YC is trying to experiment with scaling, and it will be at least a few years to see definitive results.

I literally spent the last 2 weeks looking into this. Used Confluence and a few wiki solutions before. Both in context of a tech team in a large investment banking institution, startups and community organizations. In the end it was a close call between Confluence and a new product called Slab, for my small startup but we decided to go with Slab (http://slab.com).

What I liked about Slab is the way better performance over the Confluence, quick integrations from their team (took them about 2 days to add draw.io integration on request). I liked how clean it was and easy for non-devs in my team to understand the structure.

I'm surprised no-one had mentioned YC's Startup School! We did the Founder's Track last year and it's by far the most useful MOOC for my startup and I. We had an awesome YC alum as an advisor and a weekly group office hours chair.

Yes, not just because of brexit, but it was what tipped it over the edge for us. Have a few friends in tech who have left UK over the last year, more are planning to leave. We are not moving to Europe though, but to the SF area. We'll keep the R&D here for now (we are a deep tech company), and see how things with the negotiations pan out.

Have been considering Tide, as we are applying for an HSBC Business bank account currently gulp. As Prepay Technologies Ltd is used to store the deposits I believe small companies ARE eligible for compensation under FSCS should Tide/PrePay run into problems.

Anyone know what's the regulation around laser devices that are not laser pointers is like? (for laser pointers to be allowed to be sold it's: US < 5mW, UK <1mW)

Interesting that you are going for a limited direct to consumer model for your orders. Is this something YC is recommending as means of showing traction? I remember Thalmic (W13) going for a similar approach, though in their case it was a pre order campaign.

Well said.

But lets break down what value YC offers:

Education: The Startup School videos are available publicly here: http://bit.ly/YCVideos. You can schedule office hours with YC even if you are not part of YC on https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-open-office-hours/

Investment: A YC allum last week told me that YC's investment is really not a good deal financially, and I think he's right given where we are (we've been through 2 accelerators)

Network: This is one of the aspects that's hard to replace, but reach out to your network (get https://www.conspire.com/ ). I managed to get a lot of advice from the above YC allum who I happened to work with in banking a few years back. And also help people out! You never know how it can come back, e.g. a guy at our co-working space I helped out with some electronics last year was the designer for the original Oculus Rift and put as in touch with one of the co-founders!

A YC badge for your startup: Again, hard to replace but it just means you have to be that much better at pitching and looking for angels/advisors who are in your space. Also read Venture Deals

YC makes a lot of mistakes and most of their startups fail, they have however got some big successes and that's what makes them attractive.

Hope this helps those that didn't get in

Sign me up :) Will see if I can get BillForward (YC S14)guys to contribute!

I personally feel this has thick coat of sugar around it, the investment figures are from Pitchbook and... themselves

This isn't getting as much interest as I expected. I thought it would be popular with hackers, we pledged for one to replace our scrum board. I'm not-so-secretly hoping that they productionize their large frame design (http://madebythose.com/woodpecker/), they only lease those units currently Full disclosure: we work in the same co-working space as "Those"

Have been using KiCad for PCB development for my hardware startup and overall happy with the choice.

Yes, they have made questionable UX decisions in development but then I've not tried an EDA tool that got the UX right. For those considering KiCad, but struggling to do it by themselves, I suggest you either take a Udemy course to show you the user flow. Or better yet, buy some tuition (with beer or whatnot) from someone at the local hackspace or similar.

Great to see this meetup is back again, would be great if someone from YC (and/or YC alum) can do a talk about the emergence of hardware startups, maybe Luke Iseman ?

Hi, I know you started accepting hardware startups recently, I also realize you value teams that can iterate quickly. Having spent 18 months working to show that what the complex hardware product is feasible, my worry is that we would be seen as "slow" because in the software world , where I came from, 18 months is a lifetime. So my question is, do you treat hardware and software startups the same in terms of iteration speed? Cheers!

Yeah, the resiliency of the organic body is impressive. I would hazard a guess that similar therapy for stroke rehabilitation could be even more effective if one were able to actuate the hand like researchers in the OP have done with the legs. So far I've only seen therapy that is essentially VR equivalent of mirror box therapy https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278157406_Reinforce... I think I'm going to put an OpenEEG setup together...

Ah, sorry for the double post, didn't see it originally!