What startups do you properly love and are rooting for?
I haven’t felt a strong connection to a particular startup since 2012, at least one that I was excited about and anticipating their releases.
What startups do y’all love (can’t be your own)?
Rooting for Manara(YC W21)[0] to the point people I talk with ask me if I'm a founder or have a stake, and talk I do.
https://manara.tech
Unless you live in North-Africa or the Middle East or places like that, you can't do justice to what Iliana and Laila are doing. Many of these countries are prisons with flags. Isolated from the world with pretty much useless passports. Isolated from monetary flows. Isolated from the global job market. Scrutinized at every airport. These people's only sin was to be born there, and they're paying a dear price, especially with the cultural values of sticking by parents/grand parents. Some of these countries actually forbid their citizens to build an estate or own something in another country, many have non-convertible currencies that make it hard to do business and black markets, even black markets for visas.
In other words, if you were born there, you're screwed unless you muster a disproportionate amount of grit to get to a baseline.
Go Iliana, go Laila!
If you know people in North Africa or the Middle East, that's a great way to improve the situation.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25849054
Does Vercel still count? It's been a few years, but next to Cloudflare, they are one of the few tech companies really pushing the Web forward, and I'm deeply appreciative of their magic.
I'm really hoping they take over as the premier web host and normalize the use of these services vs raw AWS or GCP. It makes devops soooo much lighter and stabler. It's a night and day difference between this and the in house pipelines I've used.
As a dev, I love that I can just deploy UI and business logic and know that it will work, instead of fighting some esoteric build pipeline every step of the way.
I really love LaunchDarkly as a company. The feature set is solid and has served us really well, and from the outside, the culture seems fantastic. Their sales and partner success teams were much more responsive than competitors. We're very happy with them, and I continue to root for them as much as I can.
Framework laptops! For reasons that are hopefully obvious to this crowd.
Supabase. It’s an incredible product (greases so many friction points in pg) and the team is awesome. They do such a good job with communicating.
Textio, an augmented writing platform that de-biases language in text, especially for recruitment listings and emails to attract diverse candidates.
OpenAI - It is doing wonders, especially with Github Copilot.
Netlify - It has improved my productivity.
Reddit - It is the face of the internet and I want it to continuously improve.
Nvim - It's a technology and community upstart.
Repl.it- they've been moving at a breakneck speed recently and have grown a ton from what used to be only useful as a REPL.
I’m rooting for Oxide - big fan of the past work of the headline crew involved, and their interesting and approach to on prem hardware.
Scientists have a big problem. Abstract search can take up a big piece of any researcher's time. They often farm it out.
The quality of results can vary depending on who does it. Researchers in sibling specialties often use different phrases for the same concepts.
Rogobi manages cross-disciplinary search by collecting terms across disciplines and guiding your search as you go.
Like other abstract search engines it also manages PRISMA details, collects and generates result reports for your clients, and coordinates multiple researchers sifting the same results.
The startup's difficulty is finding the sweet spot of a customer with money that also recognizes the pain point (shallow/silo'd searches due to search term fracturing across disciplines).
I am giving serious consideration to starting a free mini goat petting zoo for local families and ours just to chill and hang out at. more of a clubhouse I guess but oce to focus on non-tech stuff that I feel can have a positive impact on a childs life, my own included. I still have a 7 yr old inside as well
OpenAI. I love how fast the world has gone from "lol AI could never do that" to "AI has unfair advantages!" Much of it is based around OpenAI demos like GPT-3 and DALL-E 2.
They've set the benchmark and expectations, and put it ethically high, even if it means ironically not being as open as their competitors. Just like Google set advertising and free software as the norm of the Internet, OpenAI set safety as the norm for AI. If many other companies held the lead by now, the internet would be full of sex chatbots, fake reviews, deepfakes.
Descript for podcast editing. I used it for an internal podcast last year and got to experience childlike glee once more.
It was extra special because I work in nlp but so many nlp applications just don't excite me
Purism. You can debate all you want about some of their more than questionable business decisions.
That being said: they’re making phones that run an unmodified mainline Linux kernel.
Aether. They make electric 2 wheelers for the Indian market.
Fly.io, I really respect them and their awesome "light vms". Their blogs are fantastic and one of these days I'll have a reason to try them.
supabase, typesense, zerotier, tailscale
Tenstorrent - Jim Keller.
comma.ai. full manual driving is barbaric and unsafe.