Comment by tptacek
10 years ago
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.
It wasn't a tweak or a nudge, it entirely invalidated the stated intention of the experiment, and completely disenfranchised the HN community.
But that's not the worst, dumbest thing about this. The dumbest thing is that YC would have gotten the most benefit out of giving Maciej the money, and they let their fear and discomfort keep them from doing that.
> completely disenfranchised the HN community
Their money on the line, their call. I have never felt "out of the loop" because I didn't influence their investment decisions. The value I get from HN is the conversations and things I read about and learn.
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don't call it a tweak or nudge when the experiment's parameters were deliberately altered to avoid the outcome the data was indicating.
"We had an idea for figuring out where we'd spend our money. We didn't like what happened so we spent it based on other criteria."
So the experiment was maybe the voting / HN selection, but they don't get to paint it as the experiment was "let's see who HN selects, then compare their outcome with traditional participants" like we were led to believe...