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Early YC - Reddit, Dropbox, Twitch - products and services tackling massive meaningful technology things.

YC now - Here's some expensive detergent for a niche audience.

I feel like YC is losing its mojo.



These companies are massive and meaningful because they've had time on their side...who's to say that Frey isn't the next Tide? Is that a small market? Not a user of Frey, but your examples are really poor:

--Twitch started with Justin Kan strapping a video camera onto his head and live streaming it. He did this for over a year iirc. They've spent the last 11 years going from that livestream to what Twitch is today.

--Reddit was such an early flop it was comical. Alexis and Steve talk about sitting around and making fake comments for the first year of the site because no one was using it.

--Um...do you remember Dropbox's launch on HN? Not so great.

--Airbnb had to re-launch something like five times because literally no one gave a shit about "another couchsurfing.com"


Haha this is amazing! All extremely great points.

At the end of the day, we're just out here trying to do a little bit of good.

You're a rockstar, thank you for the support =)


Put your investment hat on. Frey has comps with dollar shave club ($1bn exit) Clorox ($CLX) and are focused on one of the fastest growing consumer segments - men’s home and body care. If YC was just a tech accelerator, sure this would be odd. However they’re expanding their focus, and if Frey lads get it right, they have a captive customer base where they can produce a whole army of new products as first movers in an “emerging” market. Just looks at spend in Asian men’s body care markets/consumer spending.


Most new and better things start out expensive. Medicine, rockets, electric cars, cars, etc.

If a new expensive detergent that's very ecological gains traction, it will either drop in price or another company will mass-market it.

Compared to the usefulness of Twitch? I'll take an eco product that can be used by everyone any day.


That usually applies to things that are totally new or a complete reinvention. They start out expensive and incremental progress or application of knowledge/progress from other fields makes them cheap and common. This detergent does not represent a fundamental shift from other detergents.


Thank you so much! And I actually laughed at the Twitch comment, fantastic =)

But genuinely, really appreciate the support =)


Those all probably seemed like smaller things when they first launched




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