YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide
I always wonder how people can say things like this: &quot;They&#x27;ve created a wifi-enabled immersion circulator called the Nomiku so every home chef can prepare simple, Michelin-starred meals.&quot;<p>I mean, I bet that literally zero Michelin-starred meals have been prepared with this device. And the phrase &quot;Michelin&quot; or &quot;Michelin-starred&quot; is trademarked and has a clear meaning. If I was a marketer for this company I would feel uncomfortable using a phrase like that.<p>With that aside, it&#x27;s odd to see so many YC companies on this list with the same faddish business models of &quot;send some stuff to you every month you don&#x27;t get to pick the stuff but trust us&quot; and &quot;do something that&#x27;s already pretty simple in your kitchen or home but now using an overcomplicated device with machine learning and wifi&quot;<p>The former model isn&#x27;t really a technology empowered business model at all, it&#x27;s really a buying or deals club driven by marketing. And the latter is ostensibly technology but it doesn&#x27;t seem to have really any of the accelerative effect on efficiency that real genuine networked software based businesses have.<p>Seeing all of them in one place like this, backed by YC, is pretty disheartening.