# Y Combinator ## Founder Profile ### FOUNDER #### Name Shun Kakinoki #### Email Address #### Age 21 #### Gender Male #### City where you currently live Tokyo #### State / Province Tokyo #### Country Japan ### BACKGROUND #### Schools, Degrees (including field of study), and Years of Graduation Keio University (Political Science), 2021 Keio Shonan Fujisawa High School, 2017 Keio Shonan Fujisawa Middle School, 2014 Tsuchihashi Elementary School, 2011 Eaton Elementary School, 2009 #### Employers, Position / Titles and Dates No full-time work experience. Nikkei, Full Stack Software Engineer Intern, Apr, 2019 - Mar, 2020 ### PRESENCE #### Personal website https://www.shunkakinoki.com #### Github URL https://github.com/shunkakinoki #### Linkedin URL https://www.linkedin.com/in/shunkakinoki/ #### Facebook URL #### Twitter URL https://twitter.com/shunkakinoki ### SKILLS #### Please tell us about the time you, shunkakinoki, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage. It was after practice of the summer camp of the high-school swimming team, we had to dry up a few dozen kickboards within a relatively small area. Lacking the usual shelves to put them up, we devised of a way to put together the boards triangularly so they would all fit while having enough distance between each other for them to dry out. #### Please tell us in one or two sentences about the most impressive thing other than this startup that you have built or achieved. Contributions & projects & repositories listed in my Github profile (https://github.com/shunkakinoki) #### Are you a technical founder? Yes ### COMMITMENT #### Do you have at least 10% equity in the company you're applying with? Yes #### If we fund you, will you move and live in the Bay Area during the duration of the batch? Yes #### Will you commit to working exclusively on this project for the next year? Yes #### Do you have any other commitments between January through March 2021 inclusive? No #### Do you have any commitments in the future and if so what? My life mission is to Obliterate the Galaxy 🚀 Steve Jobs once said that he wanted to "put a dent in the galaxy". I want to create great products that are galaxy shattering, and wake up everyday in the morning striving to do so. ### CURIOUS #### Have you been to any YC events? If so, which ones? Startup School (Online) ## Startup Application Form ### COMPANY #### Company name: Sentrei, Inc. #### Company url, if any: https://sentrei.com #### If you have a demo, what's the url? Demo can be anything that shows us how the product works. Usually that's a video or screen recording. https://sentrei.com/demo #### Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less. Open source, enhanced virtual workspace. #### What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do. Sentrei is a dedicated virtual workspace for remote teams. We help people do great work through providing the best user experience for remote teams. Fully open-source, see us on https://github.com/sentrei/sentrei Key Features 1. Enhanced Video UI/UX. The video chat UI will be optimized depending on the use-case. No same blatant set of controls each time. We aim to deliver the best possible user experience through providing dedicated features depending on the purpose of each room. 2. Fun. Compete with your teammates through a dedicated leaderboard, and occasionally poke at others if you are feeling like taking a break. Hop into "bonding" rooms to recreate the feeling of spontaneous conversations online. 3. Seamless. Enter the same virtual room when you want to get to work (same static link always!!!), and never worry about time-limits, invitations, or passcodes. Everything is minimalistic and kept simple as possible for your team. #### Where do you live now, and where would the company be based after YC? Tokyo, Japan / Cupertino, U.S.A. ### CONTACT #### Personal email address of the founder who is filling out this application: #### Phone number(s): ### FOUNDERS #### Please enter the url of a 1 minute unlisted (not private) YouTube or Youku video introducing the founder(s). This video is an important part of the application. (Follow the Video Guidelines.) https://youtu.be/hvVKiPQKEt0 #### How many founders are on the team? 1 ### CATEGORY #### Which category best applies to your company? Other ### PROGRESS #### How far along are you? Beta Launch. I am in the process of refining the product. I will keep on making improvements until I've reached a point where I will want to buy my own product. #### How long have each of you been working on this? How much of that has been full-time? Please explain. From April 2021, full time since then. Thankfully, I'm lucky enough to have the blessing to be with my family for now, but mom has warned me that I will get kicked out next April. #### Are people using your product? Yes #### How many active users or customers do you have? If you have some particularly valuable customers, who are they? If you're building hardware, how many units have you shipped? About ~10 users during the beta launch. Frankly speaking, most of the beta testers are my friends. It's hard for me to say we have particularly valuable customers at this point in time. #### Do you have revenue? No #### Anything else you would like us to know regarding your revenue or growth rate? https://sentrei.com/analytics #### If you are applying with the same idea, did anything change? If you applied with a different idea, why did you pivot and what did you learn from the last idea? This is my first application. #### If you have already participated or committed to participate in an incubator, "accelerator" or "pre-accelerator" program, please tell us about it. https://pioneer.app (fully remote accelerator) from August, 2020. ### IDEA #### Why did you pick this idea to work on? Do you have domain expertise in this area? How do you know people need what you're making? I was occasionally doing a study session through Zoom with my friends back in March, and it was far from a great experience. 1. Too many steps to get a session going even for the same consistent group of people (links, passcodes, etc...) 2. You get distracted by keyboard sounds if un-muted, video chat seems unnecessary otherwise. 3. UI is always the same even for very different purposes. I believe that the end user experience could be much better if the video chat UI was more optimized for each specific use-case like I encountered. I have basically no domain expertise in the field of video communications though Twilio would take it care for us. I know that people need what I'm making through feedback at https://pioneer.app, stories of my friends and their parents complaining in which particular areas current video communication tools lack in, and Jason Calacanis mentioning on his podcast that he had a secondary display that was always on to recreate the office experience remotely. #### What's new about what you're making? What substitutes do people resort to because it doesn't exist yet (or they don't know about it)? The new thing about Sentrei is that the UI will drastically change depending on the use-case. We believe that we could deliver a much better user experience if each video session is optimized for a particular purpose. We plan to provide three options each with distinctive video UIs. 1. Bond. - Short conversations & spontaneous chats through a colorful and joyful UI. 2. Focus. - Always-connected sessions for tele-presence to help you get things done through a zen-like interface. 3. Work. - Seamless meetings between members for doing synchronous work (basically like Zoom). I tend to resort to Zoom/Meets/Tandem, and most people do so. However, we believe that other unique products will emerge in the long run in this space. Just as Snapchat emerged over Instagram, maybe there's a product waiting in the virtual workspace field. #### Who are your competitors, and who might become competitors? Who do you fear most? Current competitors - Sidekick (https://sidekick.video/) - Tandem (https://tandem.chat/) - Whereby (https://whereby.com/) I fear most that Zoom comes out with a Slack-like alternative, equipped with features that make it tailored for teams. We do not want to compete with the above, but rather act as a supplement piece for Slack and Zoom. Thus, Zoom coming out with a Slack-like alternative video chat tool could be devastating for us. #### What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don't get? - Every video chat tool is designed for synchronous & productive communication, yet many people use it for other purposes as well. - The UI of a video chat screen should completely be optimized depending on the use-case. - A virtual workspace should be a lot more comfortable and fun, not clumsy and stressful. #### How do or will you make money? How much could you make? We charge \$15/month per user for the pro plan, custom pricing for enterprise plan. The cost would mostly consist of Twilio video server cost(avg. \$0.003 per participant/min). On the assumption that each user spends 3hr per weekday on the platform, that would lead to a cost of \$10 per month. That would probably lead to at least 30~40% gross margin. If we could create a great product to reach PMF, i.e. 100,000 paying customers, that would be about ~\$3 mil MRR, ~\$30 mil ARR. Under the current circumstances of the world, we have a puncher's chance to grow beyond exponentially. We could be the best decision your organization has ever made. #### How will you get users? If your idea is the type that faces a chicken-and-egg problem in the sense that it won't be attractive to users till it has a lot of users (e.g. a marketplace, a dating site, an ad network), how will you overcome that? Planning to launch on PH, HN, Reddit initially. It's a team-based tool like Notion/Slack, so if the product is great, it likely will grow virally over time. If not, it will die. ### EQUITY #### Have you incorporated, or formed any legal entity (like an LLC) yet? Yes #### What kind of entity and in what state or country was the entity formed? Delaware C Corp #### Please describe the breakdown of the equity ownership in percentages among the founders, employees and any other stockholders. If there are multiple founders, be sure to give the equity ownership of each founder. 100% Shun Kakinoki #### Have you taken any investment yet? Yes #### List any investments your company has received. Include the name of the investor, the amount invested, the premoney valuation / valuation cap, and the type of security sold (convertible notes, safes or stock). 1% from https://pioneer.app (SAFE) #### How much money do you spend per month? 40 #### How much money does your company have in the bank now? 120 #### How long is your runway? 3 months #### Please provide any other relevant information about the structure or formation of the company. Stripe Atlas Incorporated. ### LEGAL #### Are any of the founders covered by noncompetes or intellectual property agreements that overlap with your project? If so, please explain. No. #### Who writes code, or does other technical work on your product? Was any of it done by a non-founder? Please explain. I basically have written all of the code. The entirety of the work can be seen at https://github.com/sentrei/sentrei I've gotten some piece of UI advice from my friends, but basically I've worked all alone from the start to now. #### Is there anything else we should know about your company? Nothing in particular. ### OTHERS #### If you had any other ideas you considered applying with, please list them. One may be something we've been waiting for. Often when we fund people it's to do something they list here and not in the main application. https://pitch.shunkakinoki.com https://pitch.shunkakinoki.com/ideas https://shunkakinoki.com/ideas #### Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered. In the last 20 years, there are 0 startups born from Japan with a current market cap of over \$10 billion. This is crazy! I want to prove that even Japanese founders can create great software products beloved by people all around the world. ### CURIOUS #### What convinced you to apply to Y Combinator? Did someone encourage you to apply? The moment I started a startup, I knew at least I had to try to get in. In a sense, it's like a dream for aspiring founders all around the world. No. #### How did you hear about Y Combinator? I don't remember.