I'm afraid the whole process lost all credibility. Please, do not repeat it. It's just disenfranchising for the community as a whole: it doesn't matter what we vote for, if YC will decide on their own as they would normally do.
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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.