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Tell HN: Winners of Apply HN for YC Fellowship 3

196 points kevin | 4 comments | 05 May 16 01:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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.

1. theuttick ◴[05 May 16 02:38 UTC] No.11633624[source]▶
I would like to thank everyone for the feedback and the discussion.

I've been plugging away at CADWOLF for a while now to get an MVP going and I am really just a few weeks from a solid code base. The feedback I got let me know that I was headed in a valid direction. This whole experience was great.

On a side note, I'll be referring to the company as "the one that came in fourth" for a while. I also may be setting a record for YC rejections. Is there a solid number on that somewhere?

replies(1): >>11633774 #
2. sandGorgon ◴[05 May 16 03:09 UTC] No.11633774[source]▶
Can't wait to see what you come up with. I encourage you to apply to YC ... But make sure you are able to communicate what you are doing ;)
replies(1): >>11633850 #
3. theuttick ◴[05 May 16 03:29 UTC] No.11633850[source]▶
Thanks, I've got 3 or 4 YC rejections and now 2 fellowship rejections (single founder). Finding a co-founder in Houston is not easy.

I believe that my YC applications were better written than the very limited writeup we got here, but I should revisit that before I release the robot army to avenge me.

replies(1): >>11634087 #
4. sandGorgon ◴[05 May 16 05:00 UTC] No.11634087{3}[source]▶
I slightly disagree with how you think you have written. The problem is that HN and YC are highly technical. Most of us already know that web based CAD/numerical analysis is invaluable... What everyone is trying to figure out is YOUR approach. And there was not enough detail in it. You are constantly focusing on the bigger picture - which everybody has already granted.

You're in what I like to call "the nuclear fusion problem" - how the hell do you think you can pull it off ?

If I were you, I would talk about the innovation in the JS based symbolic solver (and that's pretty much what I would focus on from an implementation POV) and how you will use THAT to disrupt several industries.