He had already got 300+ up-votes the first time around and was the clear runoff "winner", so they added a low-key second poll hoping that some of the later entrants could cut it down to size. People got wind of this blatant rule-bending and gave Pinboard twice the votes he got the first time. So Kevin reluctantly called Maciej, didn't like the sound of his voice, and decided to cut him out regardless, vaguely implying that the voting process had been somehow compromised by a tweet.
He tried to stack the deck by asking his 30,000 twitter followers to vote for him. He got caught. YC decided to be generous and interview him rather than disqualifying him completely. After the interview, YC decided not to invest in his company.
My opinion is that if you use performance-enhancing drugs, you lose Olympic medals, even if it only happened because you accidentally took the wrong cold medicine while in a foreign country (see Silken Laumann). Maciej should have known that soliciting votes via twitter was against the rules; whether he did know is irrelevant to whether he should be excluded.
He had already got 300+ up-votes the first time around and was the clear runoff "winner", so they added a low-key second poll hoping that some of the later entrants could cut it down to size. People got wind of this blatant rule-bending and gave Pinboard twice the votes he got the first time. So Kevin reluctantly called Maciej, didn't like the sound of his voice, and decided to cut him out regardless, vaguely implying that the voting process had been somehow compromised by a tweet.
He tried to stack the deck by asking his 30,000 twitter followers to vote for him. He got caught. YC decided to be generous and interview him rather than disqualifying him completely. After the interview, YC decided not to invest in his company.
Just to be clear, your opinion is that Maciej deliberately and knowingly cheated?
My opinion is that if you use performance-enhancing drugs, you lose Olympic medals, even if it only happened because you accidentally took the wrong cold medicine while in a foreign country (see Silken Laumann). Maciej should have known that soliciting votes via twitter was against the rules; whether he did know is irrelevant to whether he should be excluded.
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