<story><title>Product Hunt Is in Current Y Combinator Batch</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/17/product-hunt-the-popular-tech-product-discovery-site-is-in-current-y-combinator-batch/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>untog</author><text>How is Product Hunt even a business? It&amp;#x27;s a fine site, but this feels like a development similar to VC firms investing in PandoDaily - control the overall message, ensure Silicon Valley becomes more and more of an insider&amp;#x27;s club.&lt;p&gt;Another disappointing move - I want the YCombinator that requested startups working in energy, robotics, healthcare and internet infrastructure back:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;rfs&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mbesto</author><text>Having been a fairly active member of HN, I&amp;#x27;ve noticed the following trends about companies they choose to invest. Companies generally get bucketed into the following:&lt;p&gt;1. Company did something relatively novel with regards to growth hacking and&amp;#x2F;or digital hustling (&amp;quot;these guys got 10,000 users in a day&amp;quot;)&lt;p&gt;2. Company&amp;#x2F;founder built an MVP with little technology experience, but got massive demand by using something off the shelf and wants to scale it with technology (&amp;quot;this girl sold these items using wufoo as an e-commerce and wants to scale now&amp;quot;)&lt;p&gt;3. Company&amp;#x2F;founder did something important in tech before (sold a company) or had a role in a company people from YC alumni generally have an affinity for  (&amp;quot;this guy was the head of marketing for X company, it grew to 100 million users and  sold to Google for X million&amp;quot;)&lt;p&gt;4. Founders are from MIT&amp;#x2F;Stanford&amp;#x2F;etc and did something cool while they were there (&amp;quot;AngelList says &amp;#x27;TEAM = STANFORD&amp;#x27; and one of the founders built a robot&amp;quot;)&lt;p&gt;5. Founders have some sort of extensive domain knowledge in a market that can be a billion dollar business (platform&amp;#x2F;data play) (&amp;quot;No one is building farm tech ($XXbil industry), but these 6 guys from Iowa are&amp;quot;)&lt;p&gt;6. Company&amp;#x2F;founders don&amp;#x27;t fully meet 1-5, but have inklings of one or more and have the potential for a billion dollar business (&amp;quot;Smart scrappy guys who are building the next big messaging app&amp;quot;)&lt;p&gt;There are of course exceptions to all of this, but the general theme is that (1) the business model doesn&amp;#x27;t necessarily matter (they&amp;#x27;ll figure it out, all 6 situations make these individuals smart) and (2) the makeup of the team matters more than anything else.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d put PH in bucket number 1.</text></comment>
<story><title>Product Hunt Is in Current Y Combinator Batch</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/17/product-hunt-the-popular-tech-product-discovery-site-is-in-current-y-combinator-batch/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>untog</author><text>How is Product Hunt even a business? It&amp;#x27;s a fine site, but this feels like a development similar to VC firms investing in PandoDaily - control the overall message, ensure Silicon Valley becomes more and more of an insider&amp;#x27;s club.&lt;p&gt;Another disappointing move - I want the YCombinator that requested startups working in energy, robotics, healthcare and internet infrastructure back:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;rfs&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>suhail</author><text>Companies evolve with time. Not every business has to look like a traditional revenue-generating machine out the gate. Great products and ideas can take time to be big.</text></comment>