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Tell HN: Winners of Apply HN for YC Fellowship 3

196 points kevin | 5 comments | 05 May 16 01:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.893s | 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
OoTheNigerian ◴[05 May 16 08:22 UTC] No.11634640[source]▶
I've thought about this a bit and see where both parties are coming from.

For Kevin, due to the "trollish" behavior of Maciej during this competition, Kevin was (validly) very suspicious of Maciej's intention for participating in the program. Of course previous history of Maciej rallying against all YC stands for did not help assuage the fears :)

For Maciej, the rules are the rules. he (fairly) believes you do not have to like someone to keep your end of an agreement.

Here's my position. As this is an EXPERIMENT, YC should have taken the risk. Worst case, they would have had to kick him out of the program. But everyone will see they have been fair. Seen to be fair is a quite important.

I have "clashed" with Maciej before [1] however, i see him as some one who only has a hard bark and will be quite cook in person or once you know him. Dont't be too worried Kevin.

Of course, your house your rules. But still..

I hope YC can rescind and take Pinboard in (I know... I know..:).

[1] http://oonwoye.com/2011/03/09/maciej-of-pinboard-in-nigerian...

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cperciva ◴[05 May 16 08:28 UTC] No.11634652[source]▶
For Maciej, the rules are the rules. he (fairly) believes you do not have to like someone to keep your end of an agreement.

Except that he's inventing rules ("whoever gets the most votes wins $20,000!") which were explicitly not there, while ignoring other rules ("Can I ask people to upvote my submission? No.").

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borski ◴[05 May 16 09:14 UTC] No.11634766[source]▶
Apologies - as stated elsewhere, "Can I ask people to upvote my submission? No." was never a written rule. Perhaps it was intended to be implied by virtue of this being HN and voting rings being frowned upon, but this is decidedly not the same situation as any other HN submission.

The /specific/ rule here should have been made clearer.

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1. cperciva ◴[05 May 16 09:24 UTC] No.11634786[source]▶
It's an explicit rule of HN, and from the start this was explained as "let's see which startups HN would pick". Things can always be clearer, but I really don't think there was much ambiguity here.
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2. borski ◴[05 May 16 09:45 UTC] No.11634843[source]▶
Respectfully, I still have to disagree here. Of course it's an explicit rule of HN - that has always been clear. However, the reasoning for that is that we want the HN community to decide on what's interesting and gets on the front page. Yes, that's simplified, but true at a high level.

But this was not just another HN submission. This had nothing to do with 'keeping the front page interesting'. This had to do with allowing HN to "democratically" elect companies they thought were best to fund. A candidate company asking its supporters to...support them does not only seem obvious, but very different from HN trying to keep the front page clean.

If you disagree that they are different forms of using HN and not the same spirit of submission, I'm not sure we'll be able to agree here, which is also totally fine, of course. :)

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3. dang ◴[05 May 16 14:44 UTC] No.11636507[source]▶
> However, the reasoning for that is that we want the HN community to decide on what's interesting and gets on the front page.

Exactly the same reasoning applied to deciding what's interesting and gets funded. I'm surprised this is even a question. If we had changed that rule, HN users would have skinned us alive.

Saying that "interviewing and evaluating will be done in regular HN threads" meant that the regular HN thread rules applied. We did change one of those—from "be civil" to "be nice", which by the way people did a pretty good job of—and I explained that change at length in the original post.

If you read through the comments in that original thread you'll see that a lot of them had to do with people's concerns about gaming of the voting system, which is one of the most common things that comes up here, and my answers were all about reassuring them that we'd watch for it and disqualify applications if we found it.

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4. OoTheNigerian ◴[05 May 16 15:41 UTC] No.11637061{3}[source]▶
Yo Dang,

I don't think this brouhaha is worth it. Let the community send one of theirs in there. If he takes the money and bails (I doubt) the community takes the blame and deals with it.

If he takes the money and does a gimmick (I suspect) the community will also deal with it.

Remember, this is an EXPERIMENT. It is theoretically not to work. It is similar to the "come with no idea" thig YC did years back

I didn't vote for Pinboard [1] however, truing to justify the silencing of 700+ votes will be hard.

You and Kelvin, take a deep breath and let the EXPERIMENT run its course.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11618930

5. webbore ◴[05 May 16 15:51 UTC] No.11637147[source]▶
don't forget - a true "growth hacker" only needs the thinnest veneer of ambiguity to really go to town.

I think the biggest shame is that under the guise of an experiment they had the opportunity to "really disrupt" themselves and "change the face of" ...money.. giving...

What hashtag should I use to support the twitter campaign to get Maciej into a program that he probably shouldn't be under which we're discussing on a message board... UGH! crashing under the meta-overload...