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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: 0.431s | 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
phantom_oracle ◴[05 May 16 01:40 UTC] No.11633365[source]▶
You know, it is ironic that the 1 industry funding innovation (venture capital) is the 1 sorely lacking any innovation at all. It's always just the case of former-founders pooling their cash into a fund, then asking for more money from pension-funds, etc. and they then become "X fund" or "Y Capital" or "Z Ventures", etc. The game always follows this type of rotational pattern but...

Based on that, I'd like to tell you guys at Y Combinator that even though you are very entrenched in the happenings of the Valley, you are also probably the only VC-like company doing innovative and risky things like this.

I don't think I've ever heard of a VC or other-type organization funding companies based purely on a pseudonymous-community of "up" votes.

With that being said, at least we will see someone attempt to commercialize small-scale aquaponics, so something good/interesting did come out of this experiment. And not to be biased, I hope the other 2 do just as well.

replies(1): >>11633776 #
rev_bird ◴[05 May 16 03:10 UTC] No.11633776[source]▶
I can't tell if this is too harsh, but it seems like you're praising the contest that was advertised, not the one we got. They didn't fund companies "based purely on a pseudonymous-community of 'up' votes." When they realized the community wanted something too risky for them, they bailed, and picked the "winners" themselves.
replies(2): >>11634074 #>>11634348 #
cperciva ◴[05 May 16 04:55 UTC] No.11634074[source]▶
Except that's not what was advertised. In fact, the announcement said explicitly that they weren't going to fund companies purely based on voting.
replies(1): >>11634114 #
1. idlewords ◴[05 May 16 05:07 UTC] No.11634114[source]▶
You're being kind of disingenuous. The announcement said that all evaluation would take place in open HN threads, but it didn't.
replies(1): >>11634132 #
2. cperciva ◴[05 May 16 05:14 UTC] No.11634132[source]▶
You're right, they were more generous than the original announcement suggested. If I had been in Kevin's shoes I would have rejected pinboard based on the content of the thread rather than holding an ad-hoc phone interview to give you a chance to redeem yourself.