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Tell HN: Winners of Apply HN for YC Fellowship 3

196 points kevin | 2 comments | 05 May 16 01:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.433s | 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
argonaut ◴[05 May 16 03:05 UTC] No.11633755[source]▶
What I find disappointing about the conversation here is that, in typical HN fashion, many people just assumed that this experiment was like one of those contests where you sign the legal "terms and conditions." As if the process was simply mechanistic.

As I understand, this could not be further from how this works. It was always obvious to me that votes would only be one objective factor among many subjective factors.

The discussion around Pinboard was somewhat polarized and tended to focus on the wrong aspects. I was partly guilty in that, but it's not great when the question mark is over whether or not you're serious, rather than over your business (having a question mark over your business is totally fine! that's the right kind of risk). And it was always obvious to me that the YC partners would do a final pass on selection.

replies(1): >>11633826 #
tptacek ◴[05 May 16 03:24 UTC] No.11633826[source]▶
It's comments like this that are the reason YC's communications here are so upsetting. Pinboard isn't a joke. It's how the guy pays his rent. Not only that, but it's a valuable and important service. I use it every day. Less than I use Google, but more than I use Wikipedia.
replies(2): >>11633924 #>>11633931 #
1. kevin ◴[05 May 16 03:59 UTC] No.11633931[source]▶
No one communicated that Pinboard, the company, was a joke. I feel quite the opposite.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441978

replies(1): >>11635582 #
2. tptacek ◴[05 May 16 12:49 UTC] No.11635582[source]▶
I think you mean to say, "no one intended to communicate that Pinboard, the company, was a joke."