[13ren]

Most YC companies seem not to be technically revolutionary, but applying existing technology to solve real problems (not a criticism, an observation - after all, there is great opportunity there for making money).

- Are there any technology-based startups funded by YC?

- A proxy could be patent applications: how many YC startups have filed for patents?

[emmett]

YC startups are often technology companies; I'd argue Justin.tv, where we wrote our own video server software from scratch, would count. The ones who file patents tend to be slow burn, and are still under the radar.

[13ren]

Thanks for explaining the slow-burn/patent correlation.

I'm looking at Justin.tv, and I've never seen smooth live video online before. It's consistently smooth (though minor freeze-frames every so often). Your implementation is a better method for live video.

Is this because your implementation is coded better - tighter, more efficient, cleverer - or is there a fundamental new insight behind it, that makes it faster?

[emmett]

It's just better coded, for the most part. It was actually better before we started growing a lot; now we have scaling problems. We're working on smoothing everything out now.

Of course, there have also been insights that I think may be fundamental, but they aren't patentable as far as we know.

[13ren]

Whenever clever people work on new problem-spaces (ie. not yet mined-out), they have good chances of being the ones to have the fundamentally new insights; so your odds are good.

But the two kinds of technology-based businesses make me think of Google's technology: server implementation (fast results) and pagerank (relevant results).