## References [Apply to Y Combinator](https://apply.ycombinator.com/) [About Y Combinator | Y Combinator](https://www.ycombinator.com/about/) [How to Apply to Y Combinator | Y Combinator](https://www.ycombinator.com/howtoapply/) [Frequently Asked Questions | Y Combinator](https://www.ycombinator.com/faq) ## **COMPANY** ### Company name: dip ### Company url, if any: [](https://dip.tools/)[https://dip.tools](https://dip.tools) ### 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. ### Please provide a link to the product, if relevant. [https://github.com/diptools/dip](https://github.com/diptools/dip) ### Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less. Provide the best developer experience for web3 app ### What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do. We work on dip:: which is the open source cross-platform application framework in Rust. Desktop plugin is already 3x faster than React, 20x lighter than Electron and it provides all the benefits Rust provides. If you're ReactJS developer, you don't need to know Rust to get it started. It's based on ECS architecture makes it highly scalable in terms of both performance and maintainability. It's based on a game engine called Bevy which allows plugins to share between not only desktop, mobile, cli, backend servers but also games. In fact, dip is already utilizing Bevy's bigger ecosystem such as logging plugin or keyboard/mouse inputs plugin. The main philosophy of dip is composability over inheritance. Imagine building application with your own sets of core plugins then combine it with"DesktopPlugin" to build a desktop application. At some point in the future, if you wish to release metaverse version with fancy 3D graphics, it's as simple as swapping "DesktopPlugin" with Bevy's 3D rendering plugin while core plugins stay mostly the same. Road to series A funding is to develop web3 related plugins to consume APIs hosted by us such as blockchain explorer and price information from any platform. You can compare our business to Vercel in terms of providing developer friendly framework for free while charging their cloud offerings. ### Where do you live now, and where would the company be based after YC? (List as City A, Country A / City B, Country B.) Paris, France / New York, US ## **CONTACT** ### Personal email address of the founder who is filling out this application: [jun.sugiura.jp@gmail.com](mailto:jun.sugiura.jp@gmail.com) ## **FOUNDERS** ### Please provide the personal email addresses of the other cofounders in the startup. No need to add yours again. [Founders must have at least 10% equity in the company.](http://www.ycombinator.com/apply/#minimumEquity) We will send an email to each founder to fill out additional information about themselves. ### Please enter the url of a 1 minute unlisted (not private) YouTube video introducing the founder(s). This video is an important part of the application. ([Follow the Video Guidelines](https://www.ycombinator.com/video/) .) ### Who writes code, or does other technical work on your product? Was any of it done by a non-founder? Please explain. Currently myself writing code but I often ask for feedbacks from my colleagues about architectural decisions. ### How many founders are on the team? ### Are you looking for a cofounder? ## **PROGRESS** ### How far along are you? I launched dip v0.1 few months ago as MVP to showcase desktop plugin. It was ranked in GitHub daily Rust trending and got 230 stars so far. I've only tweeted in Japanese so far so I think it's a good start. Now I'm working on v0.2 which is to cover best practices with documentations and full of examples. This version includes Redux like state management plugin, Tailwind CSS support, cli plugin, dip command to serve/build apps, configuration support and finally network support like fetching. I'm planning to release as soon as I polished those APIs. Then I'm going to announce in English community forum like Reddit, HN and YouTube. I'm planning a web support as well as server side plugin in v0.3. After all, it's time to build web3 plugins together with paid APIs. ### How long have each of you been working on this? How much of that has been full-time? Please explain. I started building PoCs in September 2021. I'm all in besides working for Ledger full time during the day. ### Are people using your product? No ### When will you have a version people can use? When v0.2 in few months. Becoming full-time to accelerate would be ideal. ### Do you have revenue? No ### If you are applying with the same idea as a previous batch, did anything change? If you applied with a different idea, why did you pivot and what did you learn from the last idea? I applied as DAPPFACE a few years ago which is to develop web3 mobile browser. I end up joining Ledger Live where I currently work, and basically doing the same thing. During 3 years at Ledger, I've experienced some technical pains offering cross-platform application for Web3 wallet. It depends on lots of mainly JS dependencies and it's getting big and fragile. Often times, documentation are missing and hard to follow up with historical context. When I worked on FTX swap integration on React Native mobile app, it took more months than expected to finish because there's always something failing or missing context. The other point is that I'm always a full-stack developer. Wether building a server application or desktop/mobile apps or games, it's the same thing in terms of building interface. It should not be divided so that logic can be shared between as much as possible. I learned those lessons and started building a new framework as my side project. - It should be flexible and extensible (easy to plug third-party libs) - It should be light and performant. - It should run natively everywhere even outside browser. - It should be documented and tested well but without much maintenance cost. - It should be easy to adopt for JS or React developers. Which lead me to start developing dip. I'm here to improve developer experience in Web3 industry by providing tools we'll all love. ### If you have already participated or committed to participate in an incubator, "accelerator" or "pre-accelerator" program, please tell us about it. No ## **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? dip came out of pains I faced working at Ledger Live shipping cross-platform Web3 application for 5 target (Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, iOS). I worked on FTX integration as a swap partner to Ledger Live mobile. It was the hardest project since it sits on top of almost all technical components. They are vary from hardware device integration module, to swap backend, to blockchain integrations, to UI component library. There're always some unpredicted bugs in one of the dependencies and often needs to be inspected before preceding my main task. I've been leveraging my career by investing time on learning tech that will be the next standard in coming years. (Rails, React, Web3, Go, GraphQL, gRPC etc.) Now I'm betting on Rust. I've spent a year making PoC in Rust to see if it fills my needs to make the best developer experience company for web3 industry. And I think the answer is yes. All developers deserve better tools so that they don't have to go through all the hustle I encountered building Ledger Live. It also should be future proof to any upcoming tech stack. ### Who are your competitors? What do you understand about your business that they don't? [](https://www.alchemy.com/)[https://www.alchemy.com/](https://www.alchemy.com/) The language of choice for web3 development now may be JavaScript but I believe in few years, it will be Rust. Unlike JavaScript, it runs natively on any platform. Also highly compatible with web because WebAssembly is well supported in Rust. No more developer sandbox. It is fast, light and robust. Toolings are modern and easy to use. Ecosystem is glowing fast. It is designed to stand for the next few decades. Combining Rust with ECS design pattern is even more powerful. ECS is develop mainly for gaming. Defining gaming object with OOP pattern could be pretty tricky. Sounds familiar with super class which does everything? With ECS, there is no class or inheritance, just composition of very small components much like playing with Lego blocks. This will make it much easier to model something like crypto account abstraction in Ledger Live. At Ledger, we support multiple chains. Each chain has similarity and differences. ECS helps easily sharing similar logic while not preventing you from implement differences. Great video explains ECS in 7 mins. [](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rW7ALyHaas)[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rW7ALyHaas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rW7ALyHaas) One hurdle is its famous steep learning curb and relatively small ecosystem (e.g. npm vs [crates.io](http://crates.io/)). dip is solving the problem by providing easy to use and flexible plugin ecosystem. Those contribute to increase developer experience in web3. I know what tools I need for developing web3 applications based on my experience building the best wallet app at Ledger. ### How do or will you make money? How much could you make? We'll provide plugins to connect to our hosted blockchain nodes or price aggregator. Those plugins can be consumed from desktop, web and games like metaverse. There will be three plan. One is totally free for personal use. Then Pro plan for more request volumes and eventually the enterprise plan which comes with our technical support. Market volume would be equivalent to alchemy's. So far, there's one web3 company called Gaudiy from Japan are offering us for consultant at $5k a month. Which can be a starting point for the enterprise plan. Ledger would be the next target. ### Where will most of your initial users be located? United States ### Which category best applies to your company? Developer Tools ## **EQUITY** ### Have you formed ANY legal entity yet? No ### Have you taken any investment yet? No ### Are you currently fundraising? No ### If you have not formed the company yet, describe the planned equity ownership breakdown among the founders, employees and any other proposed stockholders. If there are multiple founders, be sure to give the proposed equity ownership of each founder and founder title (e.g. CEO). Right now, I'm solo so it'll be 100% once I incorporate. Meanwhile I'm going to continue searching for one co-founder among colleagues. Planning to ask for 30-40% stake based on how much commitment the person willing to make in long term. ## **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. ## **CURIOUS** ### What convinced you to apply to Y Combinator? Did someone encourage you to apply? Have you been to any YC events? I read a book about YC. I watched YouTube channel. I attended an event held in Tokyo few years back. ### How did you hear about Y Combinator? A book and open source projects I use daily which went through YC.