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Tell HN: Winners of Apply HN for YC Fellowship 3

196 points kevin | 10 comments | 05 May 16 01:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom

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
idlewords ◴[05 May 16 01:58 UTC] No.11633432[source]▶
How many points did Pinboard get?
replies(2): >>11633438 #>>11633550 #
aaronbrethorst ◴[05 May 16 02:23 UTC] No.11633550[source]▶
More than all three companies that were funded, combined. Ahem.
replies(1): >>11634572 #
1. Kiro ◴[05 May 16 07:54 UTC] No.11634572[source]▶
So what happened?
replies(2): >>11634645 #>>11634946 #
2. cperciva ◴[05 May 16 08:24 UTC] No.11634645[source]▶
He tried to stack the deck by asking his 30,000 twitter followers to vote for him. He got caught. YC decided to be generous and interview him rather than disqualifying him completely. After the interview, YC decided not to invest in his company.
replies(1): >>11634957 #
3. toyg ◴[05 May 16 10:17 UTC] No.11634946[source]▶
He had already got 300+ up-votes the first time around and was the clear runoff "winner", so they added a low-key second poll hoping that some of the later entrants could cut it down to size. People got wind of this blatant rule-bending and gave Pinboard twice the votes he got the first time. So Kevin reluctantly called Maciej, didn't like the sound of his voice, and decided to cut him out regardless, vaguely implying that the voting process had been somehow compromised by a tweet.
4. lemming ◴[05 May 16 10:22 UTC] No.11634957[source]▶
Just to be clear, your opinion is that Maciej deliberately and knowingly cheated?
replies(1): >>11636910 #
5. cperciva ◴[05 May 16 15:26 UTC] No.11636910{3}[source]▶
My opinion is that if you use performance-enhancing drugs, you lose Olympic medals, even if it only happened because you accidentally took the wrong cold medicine while in a foreign country (see Silken Laumann). Maciej should have known that soliciting votes via twitter was against the rules; whether he did know is irrelevant to whether he should be excluded.
replies(2): >>11640239 #>>11641423 #
6. lemming ◴[05 May 16 22:42 UTC] No.11640239{4}[source]▶
You didn't actually answer my question.

When you use a lot of phrases like: "Maciej cheated", "Maciej tried to game the system", "He tried to stack the deck", you don't make it sound like you think he accidentally took cold medicine - you're directly attributing malice to him.

replies(1): >>11641224 #
7. cperciva ◴[06 May 16 02:12 UTC] No.11641224{5}[source]▶
He deliberately took a drug which he knew would improve his athletic performance. He may or may not have known that it was on the banned drugs list.
replies(1): >>11641445 #
8. tanderson92 ◴[06 May 16 03:10 UTC] No.11641423{4}[source]▶
Nitpicking here: I don't think Silken Laumann lost any Olympic medals, only Pan Am medals if I remember correctly. Not that it makes any difference whatsoever to your point.
replies(1): >>11646365 #
9. lemming ◴[06 May 16 03:17 UTC] No.11641445{6}[source]▶
In that case, I'd recommend switching to phrases like: "Maciej may or may not have cheated", "Maciej may or may not have tried to game the system", "He may or may not have tried to stack the deck" and modifying the rest of the tone of your comments appropriately. tptacek, who knows Maciej personally, seems confident that he did not.

In the comments on the new guideline about gratuitous negativity, the intent seems to be "use the most charitable interpretation". Accusing someone of being dishonest falls outside that.

10. cperciva ◴[06 May 16 20:00 UTC] No.11646365{5}[source]▶
Huh, you're quite right. I guess I mentally conflated "Olympic athlete" and "lost medals" into "lost Olympic medals".