jayjay71

If you're starting a company, be prepared to lose a lot of sleep moving forward :]

Shoot me an email [redacted] and I'll help you with your application if you want.

The mentors provide excellent feedback on what you should focus on at any given time, and are great at troubleshooting problems. In addition to that, they have a great network (the YC alumni which includes some self-driving car companies as well as investors) who may be able to connect you directly to the companies you want to work with.

One of the hardest things for people that have never started a company before is to understand just how hard it will be. Having people on your side can make all the difference, if only to improve morale and help you maintain you sanity.

DARPA does a great job when they design competitions especially. Look at what they did for self-driving cars (they held all their competitions before Google or any company was putting any effort into it). A couple years later and suddenly it's a burgeoning field and now companies are being acquired. Their competition for humanoid robots likewise resulted in teams building real hardware on a deadline with impressive results.

This is a misunderstanding of fundraising. If you give up 50% of your company, no investor will touch you unless you're already profitable or growing like Uber. So unless you believe you can go from zero to unicorn with $500k, giving up such enormous equity is doom for the company.

That $120k is intended to last 3 months, not 1 year. And afterwards most companies go on to raise 7 digits for much less than 50% of their companies.

He also was the main technical guy at Google for self-driving cars, and in fact his company 510 Systems was bought by Google because he was the one who actually built the hardware that went on the cars.

Uber has, by a huge margin, the best talent working on self-driving cars.

Why do you assume most self-driving cars use Canny edge detection? And even if they did, you can simply have the algorithm choose the higher threshold (with some other sanity checks, suck as are the lines the expected distance apart) and ignore the lower threshold.

The algorithms for lane following are quite a bit more sophisticated than that though. Here's a paper from 2008, and there are other approaches as well.

http://www.vision.caltech.edu/malaa/publications/aly08realti...

AirBnB

"fare share"

I assume this was an accident, but it's actually better.

That sounds neat. Can you link me to a paper?

Otto was designed to be sold to Uber before it was created, there's a reason it was self-funded despite having nearly 100 employees by the time it was acquired. Anthony Levandowski met Travis Kalanick years ago and had been planning something like this for a while. It's basically an open secret.

That isn't sound logic. GM has a track record of making terrible managerial decisions, so assuming they know best is ignoring history. The people making the decisions haven't worked on self-driving cars and are not the best people to judge the technology, in fact these are the very people who twice (technically thrice, but that's another story) abandoned their own self-driving R&D which ultimately went to Google and Delphi (and another which was just completely thrown away).

You're also assuming that all of the other companies wanted to sell, which isn't true.

This is a little simplistic. Computers can do things they aren't heuristically programmed to do - that's the basic idea behind machine learning. I've seen some incredibly impressive robots that ran entirely on neural nets and never failed, but because it was impossible to understand how they worked they could only be used for demonstration purposes as guaranteeing safety was impossible.

What you seem to be referring to is true AI. I agree we are nowhere close to anything resembling true AI, but I do believe something representative of a computer that can "think" will appear in the coming decades.

That said, you can program a car heuristically. Statistically speaking, the unknown unknowns are so rare that assuming it doesn't fail under expected conditions you can guarantee it to be safer than humans. The unknown unknowns are not the problem right now, it's just dealing with limited sensor input (cars have a hard time "seeing" what's around them) and making sense of the world around it.

This is false, and one of the reasons Tesla got a lot of deserved criticism over the death that occurred from using their autopilot system. So far, all of the data (which is limited, so it's far from conclusive) points towards self-driving technology being deadlier than manual driving.

This is not a condemnation of technology augmenting driving. ABS is clearly a win, airbags were once controversial, and even seat belts were once considered questionable. The technology will likely improve, but it isn't there yet and believing that it is can quite literally kill you.

GM had the Cadillac/CMU technology, but due to...I'll call it managerial oversight, they lost their initial IP to Google in 2009 (basically everybody had left and took their knowledge with them) and then again to Delphi in 2015 with the Ottomatika acquisition.

GM knew it needed self-driving technology, and Cruise was in the right place at the right time. Kudos to Cruise for pulling it off. Hopefully GM doesn't repeat themselves and effectively kill the technology for a 3rd time.

Automating food is harder than you think. I agree though - that would be amazing.

I wish more people built stuff as well, but I think you're confusing passion and profit. There are fewer people with those skills because the markets are changing - there's just less demand than there used to be.

Why do you say the space was dead in 2006? That was just before the Urban Challenge in 2007. 2008 was the dead year before Google started working on it.

Care to share some of the offers you got?

This is a particularly interesting anecdote about someone faking his way into Google, and then later starting a company almost as famous.

https://www.wired.com/2013/04/fakeit/

Just curious as the name is familiar - do you go to Georgia Tech?

As much as I love writing clever software to work around hardware limitations (I believe it's what makes videogame programming of the 80's and 90's fascinating and led to better creativity and better games), I once had the job of writing software for "broken" hardware. By this I mean I was in charge of a computer vision algorithm, and the camera was physically incapable of taking the images necessary for the algorithm to function. It's worth mentioning this was for a self-driving car.

Tesla will never come close to a stage 4 autonomous vehicle with the hardware rigs they're currently selling. That said, it'll be interesting to see what improvements they can make with software. Given their over-promise and under-deliver history though (which arguably killed someone), I'll take their marketing with a grain of salt.

I never did, but I don't know too much about what they did after I left. We did most of our testing on a construction site near a defunct steel mill. Otherwise we sometimes drove around the city, usually Southside as it was nearby and great for testing. There was a media release about driving the car to the Pittsburgh Internatioal Airport.

http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2013/september/sept...

I can't tell from the picture, but their test track looks like where we used to test self-driving cars when I was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon. Except when I was doing it, it was basically dirt (most of it not even roads) in a super-sketchy part of the city. The Roundhouse, where we kept the cars, looked like an abandoned building - in fact, and I am not exaggerating, 1/3 of the roof had collapsed in on the building.

It'll be interesting to see what impact this has on the city of Pittsburgh. Mayor Peduto is definitely a progressive guy who is very gung-ho about reinventing the city.

Here's another interesting fact - almost none of the initial 40 engineers that Uber poached from NREC had any previous experience with self-driving cars. Those guys mostly went to Google, and a handful created a startup called Ottomatika which was acquired by Delphi.

They hired some faculty as well, although the vast majority were senior personnel at NREC.

The L in HSL stands for lightness, and is similar to the L in Lab which also stands for lightness. Lab is meant to better represent how humans perceive color, but it's not inherently better for removing ambient lighting compared to HSL. The main difference between HSL and Lab is how good they are at distinguishing specific colors, and Lab tends to work better for things regarding human perception. I've always had better luck with HSL than Lab, but I tend to just try every color space when approaching a new problem.

Also, removing glare and other lighting abnormalities is one of the banes of computer vision. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has figured out a good way to do it yet (although I've seen some promising work on dealing with occlusion, which you could use to overcome moderate glare with proper segmentation).

No raindrop believes it is responsible for the flood.

I think The Stanley Parable is a much better example of an artistic experience. The creator made another game called The Beginner's Guide which I thought was just as good.

Limbo, Papers Please, I Am Bread, Please Don't Touch Anything, are all good examples of games I would also consider art. These games are genuinely different and many of them are considered incredibly enjoyable by most people.

If you want something which really is just art and not much of a game, The Cat And The Coup is free on Steam. Frog Fractions 2 is also free and you can find it using Google (you have to play the whole game to understand).

For the most part I think gamers and developers are a bit sensitive about their medium, trying to argue it's "art" because it has a positive connotation. I think they should just enjoy it for what it is, as most games are designed to be fun instead of something else. That said, I think VR might try to change this. A friend of mine at Oculus mentioned how it's the very early stages, comparing VR to movies from ~100 years ago. Back then they just filmed plays, as they didn't realize what they could do with the medium. I'm sure VR will have lots of typical blockbusters following generic formulas, but I think indie developers (of which there are more every day) will build some pretty incredibly stuff in the coming years.

Companies that shut down aren't included in this list.

There have been YC companies in the past that spent most of their time away from San Francisco, including some companies that actually spent most of their time in Europe. AirBnB famously flew to and from New York every week. You don't have to be there for the entire 3 months, although I think all that travel will likely exhaust you if you aren't absolutely committed to your company (and it sounds like it could be difficult with the baby).

Also, $80k for 3% is a far better equity proposal than YC. $80k for 5% would be equivalent. That said, I can't imagine they'd splinter themselves any further. I think the way they've set themselves up works great for them, obviously they can't please everyone.

If you really have that much interest for your idea, get several LOI (letter of intent) notices from your potential customers and take it to investors. That should get you a lot more than $80k.

This is fascinating. I can't believe I never knew this.