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Tell HN: Winners of Apply HN for YC Fellowship 3

196 points kevin | 15 comments | 05 May 16 01:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.409s | source | bottom

Last month, we decided to reserve a few spots in the next Fellowship batch (F3) for the Hacker News community to decide who they’d like to fund. Startups applied publicly via HN and the community “interviewed” and voted for their favorites.

Context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11440627

We ran a poll for the top applications and the voting was so close that we decided to fund one extra startup. Here are the winners:

AutoMicroFarm (264 points): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11454342

Feynman Nano (208 points): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11443122

Casepad (200 points): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11452884

I’ve talked to the founders of these three startups on the phone already and I’m really excited about working with all of them. We’ve disclosed all the vote totals in the original poll thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11615639). Of course, the application that got the most votes isn’t on the final list and we’ll discuss that in the thread below.

We received 343 applications via Apply HN and over 1700 comments were generated across those posts. I was quite impressed by the quality and depth of the discussions on these applications and really loved the moments when HNers would take the time to provide quality feedback to the founders on their applications.

Thank you to everyone for participating in our little experiment. It takes a lot of bravery put your passion out there to be judged publicly and it takes a remarkable community to treat that courage with kindness and respect. It makes me very proud to be part of HN.

While we haven’t definitively decided whether we’ll do this again at this point (we’ll want to see how the companies do in the batch), I’m delighted and optimistic about what the community accomplished here.

We’ve already received a lot of great feedback from many of you on how to do this better, but please feel free to share more below.

1. phantom_oracle ◴[05 May 16 01:40 UTC] No.11633365[source]▶
You know, it is ironic that the 1 industry funding innovation (venture capital) is the 1 sorely lacking any innovation at all. It's always just the case of former-founders pooling their cash into a fund, then asking for more money from pension-funds, etc. and they then become "X fund" or "Y Capital" or "Z Ventures", etc. The game always follows this type of rotational pattern but...

Based on that, I'd like to tell you guys at Y Combinator that even though you are very entrenched in the happenings of the Valley, you are also probably the only VC-like company doing innovative and risky things like this.

I don't think I've ever heard of a VC or other-type organization funding companies based purely on a pseudonymous-community of "up" votes.

With that being said, at least we will see someone attempt to commercialize small-scale aquaponics, so something good/interesting did come out of this experiment. And not to be biased, I hope the other 2 do just as well.

replies(1): >>11633776 #
2. rev_bird ◴[05 May 16 03:10 UTC] No.11633776[source]▶
I can't tell if this is too harsh, but it seems like you're praising the contest that was advertised, not the one we got. They didn't fund companies "based purely on a pseudonymous-community of 'up' votes." When they realized the community wanted something too risky for them, they bailed, and picked the "winners" themselves.
replies(2): >>11634074 #>>11634348 #
3. cperciva ◴[05 May 16 04:55 UTC] No.11634074[source]▶
Except that's not what was advertised. In fact, the announcement said explicitly that they weren't going to fund companies purely based on voting.
replies(1): >>11634114 #
4. idlewords ◴[05 May 16 05:07 UTC] No.11634114{3}[source]▶
You're being kind of disingenuous. The announcement said that all evaluation would take place in open HN threads, but it didn't.
replies(1): >>11634132 #
5. cperciva ◴[05 May 16 05:14 UTC] No.11634132{4}[source]▶
You're right, they were more generous than the original announcement suggested. If I had been in Kevin's shoes I would have rejected pinboard based on the content of the thread rather than holding an ad-hoc phone interview to give you a chance to redeem yourself.
6. tlrobinson ◴[05 May 16 06:28 UTC] No.11634348[source]▶
It turns out when you let people pseudonymously vote for things you get research vessels named Boaty McBoatface and similar (which I think would be awesome BTW http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/world/europe/boaty-mcbo... )
replies(3): >>11634522 #>>11639504 #>>11651598 #
7. dang ◴[05 May 16 07:28 UTC] No.11634522{3}[source]▶
FWIW, that wasn't the issue in this case. We knew about that possibility and planned for it and even called it by that name. But Kevin and I decided not to treat Maciej's application as a troll. The earnest comments he posted were what convinced us of that, and I don't think we were wrong there.

I admit to being flummoxed by the combination of trollish and serious elements--it basically does a denial of service on my brain; if it were stage hypnosis I'd be squawking like a chicken. But I'm starting to think one could have taken all the jokes out of this and much the same thing would still have happened. If that's so, then the troll aspect is a red herring.

replies(1): >>11634535 #
8. cperciva ◴[05 May 16 07:39 UTC] No.11634535{4}[source]▶
I admit to being flummoxed by the combination of trollish and serious elements--it basically does a denial of service on my brain

For very good reason: Trolls often pretend to be serious, but serious people pretending to be trolls is incredibly rare.

replies(2): >>11635132 #>>11635337 #
9. thaumaturgy ◴[05 May 16 11:17 UTC] No.11635132{5}[source]▶
You seem to be implying that you think Maciej is a troll. Have you read much of his writing? He is a jester: he tends to couch the things he's serious about in a lot of humor.
10. tptacek ◴[05 May 16 12:06 UTC] No.11635337{5}[source]▶
This sounds like something Paul Graham would say. It's only missing the words "it turns out that".
replies(2): >>11635618 #>>11636912 #
11. skermes ◴[05 May 16 12:55 UTC] No.11635618{6}[source]▶
I don't know if it's really that rare, though. From where I sit Maciej is playing the fox/anansi/trickster character to a tee, with a healthy dose of ha ha only serious (http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.ht...). Whether it's a character he's pretending to be or just his natural communication style is for him to say, but dude-who-wanders-in-to-fuck-up-your-ego-with-practical-jokes is a pretty well-established archetype that predates "troll".
12. cperciva ◴[05 May 16 15:26 UTC] No.11636912{6}[source]▶
Now I'm blushing.
replies(1): >>11645559 #
13. rev_bird ◴[05 May 16 20:39 UTC] No.11639504{3}[source]▶
I think we agree? When you let "the crowd" make decisions for you, sometimes they make weird, possibly dumb decisions -- that's why "the crowd" doesn't get to do that very often. It's also why I was so impressed by the idea that we'd get to pick these companies to get funded -- if not by literal vote, at least by discussion. THAT was the innovative bit.
14. idlewords ◴[06 May 16 17:58 UTC] No.11645559{7}[source]▶
I think you're just drunk.
15. robla ◴[07 May 16 22:18 UTC] No.11651598{3}[source]▶
You also get Republican nominees named "Donald Trump". https://medium.com/@ginsudo/president-trump-is-your-fault-e5...