Comment by cperciva
10 years ago
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?
> I'm sure that most people who voted for pinboard did not do so because they thought it would be a good investment.
I voted for Maciej fully believing that he had no intention of building a billion dollar startup and just wanted the 20k. That said part of the reason I voted for him is that I thought it could could be a good opportunity for YC anyway, albeit risky, in addition to just being entertaining.
I also think they made the right call not to fund him, given Kevin's explanation.
If this had been "YC is giving away money! Pick someone you think YC should give $20k to!" then I would absolutely have voted for Pinboard. And I would have submitted Tarsnap, too.
But they were looking for more than that, so I voted based on the question they asked -- who should they fund, not simply who should they give money to.
And yet I bet you voted with the expectation that winners would be chosen based on the criteria laid out in the original ApplyHN post.
3 replies →
Kevin's explanation was the one that was basically "I didn't like the cut of his jib", right? That Maciej is Not Our Sort, Dear?
> [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?
During my phone call with Kevin this was one of the questions that came up, and the answer is yes, Feynman Nano applied to F3 through the traditional route. But we got buried under a lot of other applications.
As appreciative as I am to Kevin for selecting us, I'm even more appreciative of the HN community for giving us an opportunity.
We (Casepad) also applied via the traditional path to YC Core and YCF. We put in a weak application the first time around, unfortunately offering a less helpful signal as to whether or not HN identified something that was missed, so we took Apply HN very seriously as a second chance.
I'd like to echo /u/jonwachob91's post above in saying that we can't thank the community enough for the votes, feedback, and support. Also, many thanks to Kevin and his team for giving us a wildcard slot.
During my phone call with Kevin this was one of the questions that came up, and the answer is yes, Feynman Nano applied to F3 through the traditional route. But we got buried under a lot of other applications.
Based on this alone I'd say that Apply HN should count as a success: It allowed YC to catch a startup which fell through the cracks of their existing system.
That surely depends on whether the startups that fall through the cracks of the existing system caught by ApplyHN prove to be, on average, [close to] as successful as the ones picked up by the existing system and thus deserving of being caught. The cracks could be a feature rather than a bug.
Obviously you need more than two startups to make this sort of deduction, and I'm perfectly willing to believe that these and other startups missed by the traditional application process genuinely are more promising than some of those selected by it, but I'm not sure that what we have at the moment is really evidence either way.
1 reply →
This might be the case, but I think we should wait to make a final decision if it is a good way to catch startups that fall through the cracks. We really need a random selection to know if HN (and YC) are adding alpha.
> 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.
Yes. Were this the case this time, I suspect there would have been zero complaints.
> I discovered that the vote totals were being inadvertently leaked earlier today
How were the totals being leaked?
I'll let Dan answer that if he wishes to do so.
Oh that's no problem: they were still being published by the API. Perils of having two systems where there should be just one. We plan to fix that (hopefully this year) by making a new API that will also be much more usable.
1 reply →
> I'm sure that most people who voted for pinboard did not do so because they thought it would be a good investment.
No, of course not: after all, it's only been a profitable business for years which just needs a bit of cash to fund expansion plans with a lot of potential (aka acquiring delicious.com).
Why would anyone invest in that, when they can fund a backyard-sized aquaponics systems for the residential market which will mostly be applied to recreational crops deemed illegal all over the world?