from Hacker News

Tell HN: Winners of Apply HN for YC Fellowship 3

by kevin on 5/5/16, 1:16 AM with 302 comments

• by gilrain on 5/5/16, 1:36 AM

  I voted for Pinboard as a member of this community, even when I likely would not have voted normally, because Maciej is a smart, charismatic founder who I knew would do something brilliant with the opportunity. I'm sure there are many HN members who voted similarly, which very well might look like a comparatively odd pattern.

  I'm sad that the community choice was not allowed to be made by the community, and doubly sad that the majority of us who voted for Pinboard, in good faith and within the spirit of the event, will not be able to enjoy what Maciej would have done.

  Congratulations to the winners, nonetheless; this wasn't their fault.

• by cperciva on 5/5/16, 2:26 AM

  I've had a bit longer to think about this than the rest of you -- I discovered that the vote totals were being inadvertently leaked earlier today -- and I have to say that I'm impressed with the quality of the results. Leaving pinboard out of the picture[1][2], I think the voting selected a group of companies with tremendous potential: AutoMicroFarm has the potential to develop scalable technology which completely changes how food is produced, Feynman Nano has the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives, and Casepad has the potential to make a huge industry dramatically more efficient[3].

  I hope YC does something like this again in the future, but I'd suggest a different approach: Rather than asking HN to help select startups to fund, I'd suggest asking HN to help select startups to interview. This would solve the problem of needing an out-of-band mechanism to determine if an application is "real" or not; worst case, YC would end up paying travel expenses for some companies they decide not to fund. I suspect that the advantage of having extra eyeballs ensure that they don't overlook promising startups[4] would easily justify this -- not to mention the possibility of saving YC lots of time on in-house reviewing.

  The one biggest danger I see with this is the potential for vote brigading; I suspect that we would have had more of that if it was announced at the start that votes would be a significant deciding factor. One possible way of solving this would be to limit voting choices, e.g., ask each person to pick one out of a small subset, so who only turn up because they want to support a particular candidate would usually end up filtering themselves out. I suggested this to Dan, but he thought that there wouldn't be enough voters to make this feasible; I'm not sure I agree with him.

  Obviously I have no idea how this experiment is being viewed from YC's perspective -- and it sounds like YC won't know how they view it for a while yet either -- but as an external observer I'd say that this was a very interesting and very successful experiment.

  [1] I'm sure that most people who voted for pinboard did not do so because they thought it would be a good investment. This gets back to the "it's not really clear what YC is trying to accomplish with YC Fellowships" problem which I've mentioned in earlier threads, but the original call was to "fund startups", not "fund your friends".

  [2] I think that YC could gain a lot by creating some other mechanism to bring people like Maciej into the system -- something like an "honorary YC founder" status. But I don't think funding is the answer here.

  [3] I'm a Canadian and not particularly familiar with the US legal system; but I've seen enough of it to know that (a) there's a huge amount of money there, and (b) they desperately need an infusion of technological competence.

  [4] I'd be interested to know if any of the three had applied to YC via the normal route: Did HN identify good startups which YC missed, or would YC have funded these three anyway?

• by colinbartlett on 5/5/16, 2:34 AM

  The original hypothesis was:

  > If Hacker News could fund startups, what startups would it fund?

  The answer was clear and overwehlming: The people chose an understated business model helmed by a charismatic leader who they passionately believe in. We choose an antiestablishment founder over the status quo.

  You asked the question and you didn't like the answer. It's your house so you're within your rights but I can't say I'm pleased with the way this was decided.

• by phantom_oracle on 5/5/16, 1:40 AM

  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.

• by toyg on 5/5/16, 2:30 AM

  I'm afraid the whole process lost all credibility. Please, do not repeat it. It's just disenfranchising for the community as a whole: it doesn't matter what we vote for, if YC will decide on their own as they would normally do.

• by OoTheNigerian on 5/5/16, 8:22 AM

  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...

• by theuttick on 5/5/16, 2:38 AM

  I would like to thank everyone for the feedback and the discussion.

  I've been plugging away at CADWOLF for a while now to get an MVP going and I am really just a few weeks from a solid code base. The feedback I got let me know that I was headed in a valid direction. This whole experience was great.

  On a side note, I'll be referring to the company as "the one that came in fourth" for a while. I also may be setting a record for YC rejections. Is there a solid number on that somewhere?

• by josh_carterPDX on 5/5/16, 4:13 AM

  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! :)

• by baron816 on 5/5/16, 2:07 AM

  Even though Krewe wasn't chosen, I'm grateful for the opportunity to participate in this.

  I really wish I had the opportunity to "re-pitch" Krewe. I was one of the first to apply, and I don't think I did it in the right way. It was clear from the comments that people had a really poor idea of what it is. So my suggestion for next time: have founders fill out a form so everything gets formatted correctly.

• by argonaut on 5/5/16, 3:05 AM

  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.

• by tomplace on 5/5/16, 2:37 AM

  Tom from Utiliz here. While dissapointed to miss out we were pumped to get into the final 20. The Q&A was enlightening and enjoyable. Good luck to the winners and thanks to Kevin and Dan.

• by david927 on 5/5/16, 2:25 AM

  Brodlist would like to deeply thank Kevin and Dan for doing this. It not only gave us great feedback but we found it a lot of fun as well. The winners deserve their spot and I'm looking forward to seeing great things come from all three.

  Thanks again, guys.

• by dang on 5/5/16, 1:18 AM

  A word about why Pinboard is not included. We spent a long time thinking about this, since the original application did sound trollish, but comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11442027, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11590386, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11590315 made us think it was also serious. Had we thought it was merely a joke, of course we'd have disqualified it. We'd referred to that as the Boaty McBoatface scenario when planning the experiment and deliberately included a measure of moderator review as a way of filtering such applications out. But we wanted to give the benefit of the doubt. We like Maciej's writing as much as the rest of HN does, think Pinboard is a fine company, and Kevin was excited by the prospect of working with it. So we decided to include it in the runoff, knowing that its pre-existing popularity would probably make it a winner. That last part isn't necessarily a bad thing; popularity is a good property for a founder and company to have.

  But then two things happened. First, Kevin and Maciej had the good-faith conversation described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441978, and Kevin reluctantly concluded that Maciej doesn’t want to participate in the program as intended. I don't know the details and can't speak for Kevin, but that's his call to make as the partner who runs YCF, and I know he hoped and expected it to go the other way. Getting into a YC batch isn't a cash prize—it's a close working relationship, and that's something that has to be right on both sides or it won't work. Both Kevin and I wanted it to work (if we hadn't, we'd simply have dropped Pinboard from the runoff and said why), and I felt sure that a good-faith conversation would be enough to bridge any remaining gap. It turned not to be, which is disappointing.

  Second, we found evidence of vote brigading, something we'd disqualify others for. I don't believe that Maciej organized a voting ring (actually I don't believe he'd give it a second's thought), but when we dug into the data we found that the votes for Pinboard look dramatically different from the votes for the other startups. I presume this is the effect of Pinboard's (deservedly) large audience being asked to promote the post, e.g. at https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/727255170594131968 and https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/719599297604390912. We didn't know about those links earlier; we only found out about them from user complaints after the runoff was posted. But we would and did disqualify people for soliciting votes on a small scale, so it wouldn't be right to allow soliciting them on a large one.

  We're sad about this. As I said, Kevin and I both really wanted it to work--I thought it would be good for HN and Kevin admires Pinboard. We also appreciate that humor and irony and "a variety of publicity stunts" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11443463) are Maciej's style, and he was simply practicing it. That part is not a problem--as readers, we enjoy it too, and creative cleverness has always been prized on HN. I both take Maciej at his word that he wasn't trolling and Kevin at his word that he tried to find a way to accept Pinboard into YCF and in the end just couldn't.

  We're going to have a community discussion about things that didn't go so well with this first Apply HN experiment, but I'm not sure I'd put this in that category. I'm glad that we chose to believe the serious parts of what Maciej posted. I think it was the right call, I still believe them, and under similar circumstances would do the same again. It's not always easy to tell the joking bits apart from the serious bits, but that goes with the territory.

• by Suncho on 5/5/16, 4:31 AM

  Hi guys. Alex from Gresham Dollar (now Greshm Dollar) here. It was a pleasure to share my project with all of you. Great questions and lively discussion from the HN community. Thanks to all of you who participated.

  Thanks to HN and YC for putting this together. I doubt I would have been noticed if I'd applied in the conventional way.

  Congratulations and good luck to the three startups who are getting funded!

  Back to work.

• by wcchandler on 5/5/16, 2:33 AM

  I'm really rooting for AutoMicroFarm. I'm in the process of moving from the Triangle area, with a large interest in aquaponics. It's very surreal how similar our paths could have been...

• by pdeuchler on 5/5/16, 4:38 AM

  How did YC not see this Pinboard thing coming?

  Obviously when you put something valuable up to an internet vote someone, somewhere is going to manipulate the results in some sort of fashion. Did anyone honestly think the opposite was going to happen? Did people honestly think the internet was going to play fair for the first time in history? That an online vote was going to be taken seriously?

  And how do you respond like this after Maciej explicitly said it was a protest vote? How could you not see this turning Maciej/Pinboard into a martyr? You're only adding fuel to the fire and proving everything he says about Silicon Valley right.

  This whole thing was played so obviously wrong from the beginning it feels like a publicity stunt. How can people who practically control this industry understand the internet so poorly? I'm honestly at a loss for words.

• by danieltillett on 5/5/16, 4:50 AM

  Congratulations to everyone who made the final 20 and especially to the three winners. It was a really interesting, if some what flawed, experiment. Being able to get access to the raw pitch data is really invaluable.

• by rdl on 5/5/16, 7:05 AM

  Offering Pinboard $20k but NOT a YCF slot seems like the most unambiguously correct thing to do. Sadly, I do not have $20k to give.

  (and then the correct thing for him to do is either politely turn it down, or donate it to a charity or something of mutual agreeableness)

• by idlewords on 5/5/16, 1:58 AM

  How many points did Pinboard get?

• by algirau on 5/5/16, 3:22 AM

  Feyman Nano is not doing anything new or innovative. In the materials world this is old technology with a very old spin.

• by synaesthesisx on 5/5/16, 12:35 PM

  Feynman Nano sounds awesome - anything with the potential to save lives is fantastic. Good for them!

• by nickpsecurity on 5/5/16, 3:23 AM

  I didn't see this set coming outside Casepad. Interesting. Will be more interesting to see how they do from here on out. One little benefit was that I had never heard of aquaponics until now. That's really neat stuff.

• by vishalkgupta on 5/5/16, 3:47 PM

  Vishal from WedWell here. Really appreciated the input from everyone who commented, and the votes. We're charging forward. Hopefully you'll see us in the next YC round ;)

  Overall liked having an open forum for people to give feedback on our idea. We used some of that feedback to evolve the product, we even got some new clients from HN.

  Changes for next year? I'd love the final run off to be a bit more like the final four, where you pit one start-up against another until there are only a few standing. Then YC can pick from the cream of the crop.

  Thanks again

• by namenotrequired on 5/5/16, 2:14 AM

  Congratulations to the winners!

• by xigency on 5/5/16, 5:44 PM

  Disappointed not to see Pikii!

• by thisisgarbage on 5/5/16, 1:58 AM

  Here's some great feedback: how about we let the winners win and the losers lose?