Comment by tptacek
10 years ago
Both Dan and Maciej are personal friends of mine, and it's uncomfortable to see them at odds.
But Maciej is right.
10 years ago
Both Dan and Maciej are personal friends of mine, and it's uncomfortable to see them at odds.
But Maciej is right.
I think, in the spirit of the community, you should provide some argument for why you think that, rather than just state your judgement.
From a fairly outsider perspective, Maciej/idlewords seems to dislike SV & VC culture (for lots of reasonable reasons) and YC by extension, and is trying to joke/troll here as a form of protest or publicity; OK.
On the other side, the YC/HN guys are actually trying to do something innovative, with YC fellows which is more accessible than vanilla YC (can do remotely), and now with a community choice, which is a step in a more innovative/accessible direction again.
Surely this is a step in the right direction? If not, could someone explain why? If they are trying to make good faith steps in the right direction, and someone is trolling them (by which I mean for humor/protest, not bad intentions), isn't it fair enough to exclude that application?
Did Kevin Hale have special phone conversations with the other three founders to ensure that they would be able to work together with YC?
Meanwhile, look at the the post Kevin Hale just wrote. It says, "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." But that's not true at all. The fact that Pinboard took more than 3x the number of votes as the 2nd place vote-getter is mentioned nowhere in Hale's message.
Yes, I called all the other winners too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11633517
It was pretty clearly an experiment, and it looked pretty obvious to me that they were reserving the rights to tweak and nudge and basically run it as they saw fit. It's not like it was a cereal box competition or the lottery or something where you just win some money and that's that.
4 replies →
Right about what exactly? The deal was not "we'll give $20k to whoever gets the most upvotes." It was about participating in a YC program, which this person doesn't seem to have any interest in, or at least wants to feign complete disinterest. I'm glad a spot was not wasted on him based on his attitude alone.
Could you be a little bit more careful in minting new truths about people's psychology, especially if you don't know those people, to score points in Internet arguments? The Maciej I know was definitely not disinterested in winning that YCF spot.
The Maciej I know was definitely not disinterested in winning that YCF spot.
Did he want the YCF spot, or the $20k? I don't know him, but the fact that his immediate response was "I want my twenty grand" reinforces my belief that Kevin made the right decision here.
4 replies →
There are probably ways he could have conveyed that better. Judging by the outcome, smarter people than me came to that same conclusion.
4 replies →
Of course he was interested, trolls are always interested in getting a response.