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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: 0.225s | 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. josh_carterPDX ◴[05 May 16 04:13 UTC] No.11633976[source]▶
I've been sitting here trying to digest everything that has happened since we applied for this endeavor. And while we're disappointed we didn't get many votes, it was a proud moment for us to be among the top 20 companies out of so many that applied. I really mean that. We never thought our platform, that hasn't even launched yet, would get this much attention and we thank EVERYONE who voted for us.

The feedback we got from this process was very valuable and we even got some great beta users signed up. However, we likely wouldn't go through something like this again.

This was a bit of a distraction for us to be quite honest. We spent a lot of time working to craft a great pitch and responding to the feedback we got (despite some obvious trolling) in the best way we could.

I get why some people are/were upset though. Anytime you include such a robust community into a decision making process, you're just asking for trouble. You're not going to please everyone and even if everything goes the way you thought, you'll still be met with skepticism. This is especially true for a site like HN in which there are clear "regulars" who understand the nuances within this community.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing. I've been an outside observer for a long time and get tremendous value from the posts here. It's a site I check regularly many times a day.

All-in-all, it's an indictment of the community when you witness how the process plays out. This is not dissimilar to our own US presidential race happening today. You get people that say dumb shit, people who make outlandish claims, and people end up feeling disenfranchised. Long live democracy! :)