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Tell HN: Winners of Apply HN for YC Fellowship 3

196 points kevin | 1 comments | 05 May 16 01:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.252s | source

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.

Show context
dang ◴[05 May 16 01:18 UTC] No.11633278[source]▶
A word about why Pinboard is not included. We spent a long time thinking about this, since the original application did sound trollish, but comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11442027, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11590386, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11590315 made us think it was also serious. Had we thought it was merely a joke, of course we'd have disqualified it. We'd referred to that as the Boaty McBoatface scenario when planning the experiment and deliberately included a measure of moderator review as a way of filtering such applications out. But we wanted to give the benefit of the doubt. We like Maciej's writing as much as the rest of HN does, think Pinboard is a fine company, and Kevin was excited by the prospect of working with it. So we decided to include it in the runoff, knowing that its pre-existing popularity would probably make it a winner. That last part isn't necessarily a bad thing; popularity is a good property for a founder and company to have.

But then two things happened. First, Kevin and Maciej had the good-faith conversation described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441978, and Kevin reluctantly concluded that Maciej doesn’t want to participate in the program as intended. I don't know the details and can't speak for Kevin, but that's his call to make as the partner who runs YCF, and I know he hoped and expected it to go the other way. Getting into a YC batch isn't a cash prize—it's a close working relationship, and that's something that has to be right on both sides or it won't work. Both Kevin and I wanted it to work (if we hadn't, we'd simply have dropped Pinboard from the runoff and said why), and I felt sure that a good-faith conversation would be enough to bridge any remaining gap. It turned not to be, which is disappointing.

Second, we found evidence of vote brigading, something we'd disqualify others for. I don't believe that Maciej organized a voting ring (actually I don't believe he'd give it a second's thought), but when we dug into the data we found that the votes for Pinboard look dramatically different from the votes for the other startups. I presume this is the effect of Pinboard's (deservedly) large audience being asked to promote the post, e.g. at https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/727255170594131968 and https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/719599297604390912. We didn't know about those links earlier; we only found out about them from user complaints after the runoff was posted. But we would and did disqualify people for soliciting votes on a small scale, so it wouldn't be right to allow soliciting them on a large one.

We're sad about this. As I said, Kevin and I both really wanted it to work--I thought it would be good for HN and Kevin admires Pinboard. We also appreciate that humor and irony and "a variety of publicity stunts" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11443463) are Maciej's style, and he was simply practicing it. That part is not a problem--as readers, we enjoy it too, and creative cleverness has always been prized on HN. I both take Maciej at his word that he wasn't trolling and Kevin at his word that he tried to find a way to accept Pinboard into YCF and in the end just couldn't.

We're going to have a community discussion about things that didn't go so well with this first Apply HN experiment, but I'm not sure I'd put this in that category. I'm glad that we chose to believe the serious parts of what Maciej posted. I think it was the right call, I still believe them, and under similar circumstances would do the same again. It's not always easy to tell the joking bits apart from the serious bits, but that goes with the territory.

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idlewords ◴[05 May 16 01:43 UTC] No.11633379[source]▶
I call shenanigans.

The way this experiment was presented, the Hacker News community would be allowed to select two YC Fellowship recipients. According to the announcement, "all the interviewing and evaluating will be done in regular HN threads."

But that's not what happened here. I won the voting by a yuuuge margin, and then the vote was nullified in a vape-filled room after it became clear that Hacker News might have its own agenda, separate from YC.

Accusations of soliciting votes by tweeting the HN threads would carry weight with me if there had been any published guidelines about what kind of publicity was allowed. But rules about "vote brigading" on HN are intentionally kept secret.

People have repeatedly accused me of trolling, but I don't think it's me who just trolled you all.

I want my twenty grand.

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1. borski ◴[05 May 16 02:10 UTC] No.11633488[source]▶
I have no bone in this fight, since I did not apply nor would we apply for YCF (I think it's a great idea, but my company doesn't fit the criteria). And, if it matters, I do not use Pinboard and have never spoken a word to 'idlewords.

I respect 'dang and 'kevin both, a ton. Have always had nothing but pleasant interactions with them, and the amount of care they put towards managing this community is seemingly boundless.

With all of that said, 'idlewords is absolutely right here. The HN mods and/or YCF made a choice here not to fund Pinboard, regardless of whether HN wanted to or not. It's not really OK to say that it's an experiment where HN gets to make choices and then not support them, unless there were explicitly some bad blood or trolling occurring. Based on everything 'idlewords has posted, it would appear that he is not trolling. Sure, perhaps he has a bit of a 'let's watch the world burn' attitude, but it's not entirely clear to the rest of us that that isn't just a persona.

If I had applied for the "Apply HN" experiment, there is no way in hell I wouldn't have tweeted or asked customers to upvote - of course you would! Sure, perhaps this doesn't reflect the true nature of HN's vote, since these may or may not be regular HN users, but unless you only count users that have some age or karma, you can't prevent that. Alternatively, you can make it a stated rule that this isn't a popularity contest and thus you should not ask for votes elsewhere. That was not made clear at all - it was implied, or at least I perceived, that this was intended to be 'an experiment in democracy,' for better or worse.

I do think, if 'idlewords is truly interested in the fellowship and all of the requirements therein (Skype meetings or whatever else), that it would be good to stand by the original rules. With that said, these are investment decisions and aren't intended to be taken lightly, and obviously you guys have the final decision anyway (this was always true, no matter what HN said - you're the ones putting up the money and time).

I just think it's more 'right' if you follow along with the original plan of the experiment. Hell, maybe 'idlewords ends up getting so much value out of YCF that he becomes even more serious about Pinboard and it's the next Pinterest (no pun intended). If nothing else, YC/HN may learn something from it.