Comment by phantom_oracle

10 years ago

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.

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phantom_oracle

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rev_bird  10 years ago

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.

  • tlrobinson  10 years ago

    It turns out when you let people pseudonymously vote for things you get research vessels named Boaty McBoatface and similar (which I think would be awesome BTW http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/world/europe/boaty-mcbo... )

    • dang  10 years ago

      FWIW, that wasn't the issue in this case. We knew about that possibility and planned for it and even called it by that name. But Kevin and I decided not to treat Maciej's application as a troll. The earnest comments he posted were what convinced us of that, and I don't think we were wrong there.

      I admit to being flummoxed by the combination of trollish and serious elements--it basically does a denial of service on my brain; if it were stage hypnosis I'd be squawking like a chicken. But I'm starting to think one could have taken all the jokes out of this and much the same thing would still have happened. If that's so, then the troll aspect is a red herring.

      6 replies →

    • rev_bird  10 years ago

      I think we agree? When you let "the crowd" make decisions for you, sometimes they make weird, possibly dumb decisions -- that's why "the crowd" doesn't get to do that very often. It's also why I was so impressed by the idea that we'd get to pick these companies to get funded -- if not by literal vote, at least by discussion. THAT was the innovative bit.

  • cperciva  10 years ago

    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.