Context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11440627
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:
AutoMicroFarm (264 points): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11454342
Feynman Nano (208 points): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11443122
Casepad (200 points): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11452884
I’ve talked to the founders of these three startups on the phone already and I’m really excited about working with all of them. We’ve disclosed all the vote totals in the original poll thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11615639). Of course, the application that got the most votes isn’t on the final list and we’ll discuss that in the thread below.
We received 343 applications via Apply HN and over 1700 comments were generated across those posts. I was quite impressed by the quality and depth of the discussions on these applications and really loved the moments when HNers would take the time to provide quality feedback to the founders on their applications.
Thank you to everyone for participating in our little experiment. It takes a lot of bravery put your passion out there to be judged publicly and it takes a remarkable community to treat that courage with kindness and respect. It makes me very proud to be part of HN.
While we haven’t definitively decided whether we’ll do this again at this point (we’ll want to see how the companies do in the batch), I’m delighted and optimistic about what the community accomplished here.
We’ve already received a lot of great feedback from many of you on how to do this better, but please feel free to share more below.
But then two things happened. First, Kevin and Maciej had the good-faith conversation described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441978, and Kevin reluctantly concluded that Maciej doesn’t want to participate in the program as intended. I don't know the details and can't speak for Kevin, but that's his call to make as the partner who runs YCF, and I know he hoped and expected it to go the other way. Getting into a YC batch isn't a cash prize—it's a close working relationship, and that's something that has to be right on both sides or it won't work. Both Kevin and I wanted it to work (if we hadn't, we'd simply have dropped Pinboard from the runoff and said why), and I felt sure that a good-faith conversation would be enough to bridge any remaining gap. It turned not to be, which is disappointing.
Second, we found evidence of vote brigading, something we'd disqualify others for. I don't believe that Maciej organized a voting ring (actually I don't believe he'd give it a second's thought), but when we dug into the data we found that the votes for Pinboard look dramatically different from the votes for the other startups. I presume this is the effect of Pinboard's (deservedly) large audience being asked to promote the post, e.g. at https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/727255170594131968 and https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/719599297604390912. We didn't know about those links earlier; we only found out about them from user complaints after the runoff was posted. But we would and did disqualify people for soliciting votes on a small scale, so it wouldn't be right to allow soliciting them on a large one.
We're sad about this. As I said, Kevin and I both really wanted it to work--I thought it would be good for HN and Kevin admires Pinboard. We also appreciate that humor and irony and "a variety of publicity stunts" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11443463) are Maciej's style, and he was simply practicing it. That part is not a problem--as readers, we enjoy it too, and creative cleverness has always been prized on HN. I both take Maciej at his word that he wasn't trolling and Kevin at his word that he tried to find a way to accept Pinboard into YCF and in the end just couldn't.
We're going to have a community discussion about things that didn't go so well with this first Apply HN experiment, but I'm not sure I'd put this in that category. I'm glad that we chose to believe the serious parts of what Maciej posted. I think it was the right call, I still believe them, and under similar circumstances would do the same again. It's not always easy to tell the joking bits apart from the serious bits, but that goes with the territory.
The way this experiment was presented, the Hacker News community would be allowed to select two YC Fellowship recipients. According to the announcement, "all the interviewing and evaluating will be done in regular HN threads."
But that's not what happened here. I won the voting by a yuuuge margin, and then the vote was nullified in a vape-filled room after it became clear that Hacker News might have its own agenda, separate from YC.
Accusations of soliciting votes by tweeting the HN threads would carry weight with me if there had been any published guidelines about what kind of publicity was allowed. But rules about "vote brigading" on HN are intentionally kept secret.
People have repeatedly accused me of trolling, but I don't think it's me who just trolled you all.
I want my twenty grand.
I didn't think of this experiment as having fixed rules, but rather as something we'd figure out as we went along. I tried to make that clear up front: "Note that word experiment! We'll start small and figure it out as we go. But here are the initial conditions." I can see why that wasn't enough.
It occurs to me only now that "figure it out as we go" and "changing the rules" are the same thing. So yes. We changed the rules, and I'm sorry.
"We'll change things next time based on the results of this experiment" and "We'll change things this time as we see fit and appropriate" are very different, though your initial statement can be read as implying either.
I don't even think one is better than the other - I would just be more careful about communicating which it really is, next time. You guys are free to do what you want, heh. This entire "debacle," if you can even call it that, is actually a great case study in how and why clear communication is so important. The problem wasn't the decision that was made, but rather how it was communicated.
no rule of law -> automatic bullshit.
According to the same announcement, "We can talk about this in the comments, but to answer one question I know will come up: Upvotes are an important factor but they're too brittle to rely on exclusively; doing so would encourage the wrong kind of trying to game the system."
They said from the start that votes alone would not decide the results.
But Maciej is right.
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?
Sure: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11442647
P.S. I voted for Pinboard.
I understand completely why the complete rulebook on how you can't and can't promote your posts isn't posted clearly on the site. Voting ring suppression is an arms race, and posting the current rules helps the vote-ringers.
But a general statement about not soliciting support for applications could have been made clearer. And, more importantly, the vote ring really had nothing to do with this. Kevin Hale didn't want Maciej in the program. That's all there was to it.
I voted for pinboard... and I'm curious why Kevin decided that it wasn't in the spirit of the program.
I respect 'dang and 'kevin both, a ton. Have always had nothing but pleasant interactions with them, and the amount of care they put towards managing this community is seemingly boundless.
With all of that said, 'idlewords is absolutely right here. The HN mods and/or YCF made a choice here not to fund Pinboard, regardless of whether HN wanted to or not. It's not really OK to say that it's an experiment where HN gets to make choices and then not support them, unless there were explicitly some bad blood or trolling occurring. Based on everything 'idlewords has posted, it would appear that he is not trolling. Sure, perhaps he has a bit of a 'let's watch the world burn' attitude, but it's not entirely clear to the rest of us that that isn't just a persona.
If I had applied for the "Apply HN" experiment, there is no way in hell I wouldn't have tweeted or asked customers to upvote - of course you would! Sure, perhaps this doesn't reflect the true nature of HN's vote, since these may or may not be regular HN users, but unless you only count users that have some age or karma, you can't prevent that. Alternatively, you can make it a stated rule that this isn't a popularity contest and thus you should not ask for votes elsewhere. That was not made clear at all - it was implied, or at least I perceived, that this was intended to be 'an experiment in democracy,' for better or worse.
I do think, if 'idlewords is truly interested in the fellowship and all of the requirements therein (Skype meetings or whatever else), that it would be good to stand by the original rules. With that said, these are investment decisions and aren't intended to be taken lightly, and obviously you guys have the final decision anyway (this was always true, no matter what HN said - you're the ones putting up the money and time).
I just think it's more 'right' if you follow along with the original plan of the experiment. Hell, maybe 'idlewords ends up getting so much value out of YCF that he becomes even more serious about Pinboard and it's the next Pinterest (no pun intended). If nothing else, YC/HN may learn something from it.
The thing with YC is startups can’t do the program in a vacuum. Even with the remote nature of the Fellowship, the founders affect the partners they work with and the other founders they work alongside, both in their batch and among the alumni community. We made the decision to call all the startups we’d consider taking on through Apply HN and make a decision on fit. I know that’s changing the rules at the last second, but we didn’t realize this until Pinboard entered the fray. I'm actually grateful for the head's up. Like all our experiments at YC, we design them to adapt as things happen, and they certainly did here.
I made the same phone calls with the other founders and they felt completely different. I wasn’t looking for gratitude or devotion or deference. My minimum was connection, my ideal was simpatico—evidence that I could spend a lot of time with the founder, which is what’s needed to make this relationship work well. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a good rapport with Maciej. Regardless of the vote situation, I’d make the same decision.
Maciej is clearly brilliant and quite witty and knows how to build and direct a passionate following. Pinboard is unique and I’m glad it exists. More opinionated software should exist in the world. Even though we couldn’t find rapport together, I sincerely wish him and his startup the very best.
We're grown-ups and don't have to like each other to work together effectively.
However, I appreciate your being honest about arbitrarily changing the rules on me.
This times 1000. A working relationship is not a friendship nor does it require any particularly strong "rapport". Though the idea that there's no difference between a working relationship and being best buds is, I guess, not uncommon in SV---something to protest against the next time an experiment like this is run, I guess.
I realize it's inadvisable to wade into this discussion, but this just leaves me indignant and disappointed on behalf of my whole industry and profession.
The reason this experiment was so interesting was that it would bypass their biased human filtering and let in people based purely on their merit.
Not accepting Pinboard undermines the entire experiment. Pinboard could likely be a huge company with YC's help, and it would be fucking hilarious to watch.
Let Pinboard in and do the experiment again. He's smart and he's not crazy. Any founder able to win the votes is someone you can work with. Consider it a diversity program, which it would be.
This kind of statement is broad, and covers anything from "he said he'd use the money to breed a race of robotic nazi grizzly bears" to "his voice reminded me of my ex-spouse's".
YC is y'all's thing, you run it however you want, but the lack of details here does make it seem like it really is about the fact that Maciej routinely criticizes the whole VC/startup fairy tale that YC peddles, and that changing the rules at the last minute is the only way you came up with to dodge having to work with him.
I generally agree with what Maciej has to say, and have a fairly negative opinion of YC (despite enjoying the HN community, and respecting some of the people involved with YC) - I thought I'd be pleasantly surprised by YC here and see what happens when they're willing to work with one of their smarter critics.
But in the end, there's just disappointment, and no reason to reconsider my perception of YC.
"We changed the rules at the last minute. We're sorry, but that's the way it goes."
I can live with that. What you did instead, first by pretending Maciej didn't win in your post, and then by blaming him for not being selected in Dan's follow-up, was a mistake, and not a great way to treat him. I don't know you at all, but Dan likes you so you can't be a bad person, and I can't believe Dan is happy with this.
Were the real reason, as stated here, published the first time, I wouldn't even have bothered to comment.
1. As other posters have said, "we couldn't find rapport" is a warning sign of unconscious bias. And, as you said, the rules were constructed "on purpose: we don't want to bias it along the lines of how YC already operates."
2. It's pretty clear that "we decided to privately call all the startups rather than do everything in public" only happened because of Pinboard's success.
3. You guys dropped the ball on this one, big time. DQ-ing Pinboard isn't the real problem. If you think the Pinboard business is no good, or the founder would squander the money, whatever, that's your call. But it should have happened far earlier in the process. Waiting to drop Pinboard until after after two rounds of votes were tabulated is ridiculous.
>Maciej is clearly brilliant and quite witty and knows how to build and direct a passionate following. Pinboard is unique and I’m glad it exists. More opinionated software should exist in the world. Even though we couldn’t find rapport together, I sincerely wish him and his startup the very best.
I find this a little confusing in that it seems to conflict with what I had taken as the entire purpose of the experiment. If not trying out people who have positive attributes who others seem to like that you don't connect with then honestly, what's the point of this?
Everything HN readers know about choosing successful founders comes from reading material written by you guys and seeing your results in action. The facts were never going to be radically different in that our primary criteria would be things like "company name has lots of strong letters" or "that guy has a power beard", no the things discussed in the comments were stuff we've read from VCs and are effectively regurgitating. Nothing revolutionary there.
The true value I thought you were going for was to take the bias of "do I connect with this guy" out of it. But instead you say you think he's great, companies great, but just don't connect with him. You don't need us to be able to find great people with great ideas that you do connect with.
You've taken a system that would remove your own intuition bias, and then created a step at the last minute where the only apparent intent appears to be to introduce that bias. :/
I sort of hope this is just a polite "this isn't a business decision. It would just suck to work with this guy and I'm successful enough to not have to do things that suck for money", in which case fair enough.
Disclaimer: I didn't vote for Pinboard and hadn't even heard of them before this voting.
Gut feels are often valuable signals, but without further examination and specificity they are a gigantic bias bomb waiting to explode.
An organization that widely permits this type of vague assertion to pass unchallenged is institutionally incapable of improving inclusivity or diversity, and one has to wonder if it's institutionally interested in the same at all.
Some concrete questions: what is YC's policy on ensuring employees/partners have received training re: bias? Have YC decision makers all participated in de-biasing education? If not, how does this reflect on YC's apparent dedication to improving diversity in our field?
If the point was to experiment I think YC missed out on a big opportunity.
Pinboard is in a relatively unique situation amongst all the other companies in that it is beyond finding product-market fit -- it's got an established userbase and a founder with proven chops and a large following. It seems like he is in the exact position where something like YCF can help pour gasoline on the things that he's doing that are already working.
I understand YC's tremendous focus on finding a right fit with founders when they join the regular batches. But, at least at first, it's not entirely clear that this criterion should hold as much weight with YCF. They'll talk less frequently, invest less money, etc. -- maybe the optimal strategy for YCF is in fact focusing much more on the present stage of the company and whether or not the little bit of cash/partner influence can cause an inflection??? Who knows, really... but it sure sounded like accepting Pinboard -- not in spite but because there were these issues with Maciej -- would make it an especially interesting case to try out.
Retroactively doing so, sure, is your right but it's fairly underhanded.
Is what I would say.
"...but we aren't going to be the ones to help that happen."
Hi Kevin... :-)
Understand your feelings and agree with the choice in the context of YC/YCF - but to me this is a massive opportunity to grow YC beyond what it is now; to me, it feels that instead of looking for a way make it work, YC bailed out.
To that end, on a trial basis, I'm offering to start YCX, which would allow YC and the community to work together to make this possible.
While I wouldn't pretend to know the all the answers now (or in the future) - I deeply believe in bridging the gaps between communities to form new communities that in the end will be in sum stronger, more diverse, create opportunities, etc.
Very possible that I've misunderstood, but the main issues I'm seeing are: (1) how YCX relationships would work with YC/YCF and (2) insuring that the way capital is provided works for YC, the startups, and community.
To that end, to me, some solutions might be to have the funds provided by the community via non-equity crowdfunding, have YCX only mentors, allow YC/YCF to opt-in to relationships with YCX fellows, etc.
Happy to talk more offline if you're open to trying to make this work; also, completely understand if it's not a path YC wants to consider too.
If that's what you mean when you say 'the votes for Pinboard look dramatically different from the votes for the other startups', then I think you've unfairly confused my deliberate intentions with 'vote brigading'.
Things turned out exactly how I expected they would here, but it's still disappointing.
I hope single-votes are not being called out as part of some 'vote brigading' conspiracy :\
But I made a single vote, explicitly for Pinboard, and had not seen his tweets. I probably look like a voting scheme. But it was a legitimate and intentional vote because I believe in Maciej and what he could do to grow his business and improve YC through the fellowship.
Yeah, this is disappointing, but also completely predictable.
Is the true YC? For all the talk about funding radical new ideas in their normal batches, they fund a lot of companies that look and act alike. So, when YC backs out of its own experiment because it turns out unexpected, it's not really disappointing; it's just a reminder of how seemingly conformist its attitudes are.
[1] http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm
If your aim with this contest was to pilot something new and unique that might further distinguish YC, I suppose you've done just that, even if in the opposite direction. Sometimes karma is more than just a column in your database.
(Disclaimer: I did not vote.)
Rather than presuming, you could check your logs and subtract the votes from users who arrived at the thread via one of these referring URLs. What do the vote totals look like if you do that?
I exchanged a few emails with Dan, and based on those I can say that this is definitely not what happened. Rather to the contrary, he was concerned that having a poll among "leading candidates" would make it too easy to game.
How in the world do you come to that conclusion from THIS:
> Kevin: If you were seriously interested, I'd be delighted to work with you.
> Maciej: I feel like after seven years, I have a pretty good sense of what bookmarking/archiving needs people have, but am at the limits of what I can personally build. If the votes swing my way, I'd be happy to have a good-faith conversation with you.
And then how do you reconcile this statement from above:
> Kevin was excited by the prospect of working with [pinboard].
with this from below?
> tptacek: You weren't turning the knobs to see what would change. The outcome was clear, you didn't like it, and so you prevented it from happening.
> Kevin: Yes. I wasn't arguing against that.
if you wanted to work with Maceij, and he said he'd be happy to have a good faith conversation with you if he won, then why would you a) not like the outcome or b) prevent it from happening?
I don't really care who won, but these claims have no internal consistency and literally don't make any sense.
Is it possible to address the points raised by `beeboop' and `killwhitey' above with the data available -- would long-term HN members have been enough to put Pinboard over the top ? (i.e. the vote brigading had no substantive effect and it was just the phone conversation that prompted the decision)
Surely this is not hard to check? I think many people are justifiably curious, given that "vote brigading" is in my mind an accusation. (I understand that the decision has already been made and that it will not be changed.)
What do the totals look like if you filter out new accounts, or accounts with little karma?
Examining the data, we found that there were oddly more votes cast for Pinboard than the other contestants, which smelled fishy so they were disqualified. Seriously, don't ask for people to vote for things and then ignore the results. Just don't ask them to vote in the first place.
I hope this is sarcasm.
Where, exactly? His Twitter feed contains a single link to each of his original Apply HN and the later poll (plus one link-less joke about the poll). I mean, yes, he has a big following, and yes, he promoted his application (which everyone involved admits he would not have done if he had thought it was against the rules). But "explicit and repeated" makes it sound like a lot more than one (humorous) tweet per poll.
And it's not like he used a personal account, either. That one doesn't mention it at all. It's just @Pinboard - and frankly, it would be weird if you didn't think current customers would want to support you in growing your business.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes. Were this the case this time, I suspect there would have been zero complaints.
How were the totals being leaked?
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?
For Kevin, due to the "trollish" behavior of Maciej during this competition, Kevin was (validly) very suspicious of Maciej's intention for participating in the program. Of course previous history of Maciej rallying against all YC stands for did not help assuage the fears :)
For Maciej, the rules are the rules. he (fairly) believes you do not have to like someone to keep your end of an agreement.
Here's my position. As this is an EXPERIMENT, YC should have taken the risk. Worst case, they would have had to kick him out of the program. But everyone will see they have been fair. Seen to be fair is a quite important.
I have "clashed" with Maciej before [1] however, i see him as some one who only has a hard bark and will be quite cook in person or once you know him. Dont't be too worried Kevin.
Of course, your house your rules. But still..
I hope YC can rescind and take Pinboard in (I know... I know..:).
[1] http://oonwoye.com/2011/03/09/maciej-of-pinboard-in-nigerian...
Except that he's inventing rules ("whoever gets the most votes wins $20,000!") which were explicitly not there, while ignoring other rules ("Can I ask people to upvote my submission? No.").
But like someone said re: raising money from VC (was it PG?) don't listen to the reason, listen to the answer.
Kevin is uncomfortable with Maciej and took his decision based on that. As it would not seem politically connect to give that as his reason, he began looking for "good reasons" to justify it.
Is this conflict that can keep dividing us worth the 20k to YC? I would guess no.
They could and should sort this out. Kevin should understand that these HN YCF coys "belong to the community". If Maciej goes in and try to mess it up the community will (as my people say) "treat his fuck up".
My interpretation of events is rather different: Maciej cheated and got caught, but Dan and/or Kevin were concerned about the reaction if the submission which received the most votes was excluded based on the vote-rigging alone; so they went out of their way to try to find a way to include him anyway.
The /specific/ rule here should have been made clearer.
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.
As I understand, this could not be further from how this works. It was always obvious to me that votes would only be one objective factor among many subjective factors.
The discussion around Pinboard was somewhat polarized and tended to focus on the wrong aspects. I was partly guilty in that, but it's not great when the question mark is over whether or not you're serious, rather than over your business (having a question mark over your business is totally fine! that's the right kind of risk). And it was always obvious to me that the YC partners would do a final pass on selection.
YC has no responsibility for that at all.
Obviously when you put something valuable up to an internet vote someone, somewhere is going to manipulate the results in some sort of fashion. Did anyone honestly think the opposite was going to happen? Did people honestly think the internet was going to play fair for the first time in history? That an online vote was going to be taken seriously?
And how do you respond like this after Maciej explicitly said it was a protest vote? How could you not see this turning Maciej/Pinboard into a martyr? You're only adding fuel to the fire and proving everything he says about Silicon Valley right.
This whole thing was played so obviously wrong from the beginning it feels like a publicity stunt. How can people who practically control this industry understand the internet so poorly? I'm honestly at a loss for words.
Of course not. And if you read the original announcement, it was very clear: "to answer one question I know will come up: Upvotes are an important factor but they're too brittle to rely on exclusively; doing so would encourage the wrong kind of trying to game the system."
Maciej tried to game the system, and got the answer he deserved: "Nice try, but we told you that we weren't going to let you do that". Actually, I think he got more than he deserved: If I had been in Kevin's place I wouldn't have bothered with the ad-hoc phone interview.
So we're going to gauge community interest both by upvotes and comments, and in case of doubt I'll make the final call—or better, figure out a way to put the final call to the community.
Pinboard was the most discussed entrant as well as the highest voted. I also don't think it's foolish of me to think that a ranking based on "discussion" or "comments" is just a glorified poll with more subjectivity, and just as vulnerable to manipulation (if not more).
It was also implied a value judgement would only be made in case of doubt, seems like Pinboard was doubtless the front runner. Very unfortunate they didn't manage to put the final call to the community though.
As an aside, i'd just like to echo how odd it is to see people on Hacker News advocate against people gaming the system
They've consistently failed to understand even the basics of community moderation here, permitting a cesspool of racism, bigotry, and "meritocracy" (a word which originated as a dystopic warning) to grow to the point that it's beyond parody in most other corners of the internet. The idea that they know anything about human interaction on the internet is a sad joke at best.
I'm sad that the community choice was not allowed to be made by the community, and doubly sad that the majority of us who voted for Pinboard, in good faith and within the spirit of the event, will not be able to enjoy what Maciej would have done.
Congratulations to the winners, nonetheless; this wasn't their fault.
> I am hoping to attract a certain protest vote of the silent majority who enjoy this community, but are uneasy about the values of its founders and more broadly, Silicon Valley.
accurately reflects my feelings towards HN/SV, and I think having a dose of skepticism in the fold would be good for YC.
I've been plugging away at CADWOLF for a while now to get an MVP going and I am really just a few weeks from a solid code base. The feedback I got let me know that I was headed in a valid direction. This whole experience was great.
On a side note, I'll be referring to the company as "the one that came in fourth" for a while. I also may be setting a record for YC rejections. Is there a solid number on that somewhere?
I believe that my YC applications were better written than the very limited writeup we got here, but I should revisit that before I release the robot army to avenge me.
You're in what I like to call "the nuclear fusion problem" - how the hell do you think you can pull it off ?
If I were you, I would talk about the innovation in the JS based symbolic solver (and that's pretty much what I would focus on from an implementation POV) and how you will use THAT to disrupt several industries.
(and then the correct thing for him to do is either politely turn it down, or donate it to a charity or something of mutual agreeableness)
> rewarding him for being obnoxious.
What about rewarding honest HN community members who voted for him in good faith? Ignoring their wishes is a big slap in the face; we've been reminded that we're all just plebes and real power will always lie with Big (White) Men and their gut feelings.
Of course not. But I haven't seen any evidence that anyone was doing that.
honest HN community members who voted for him in good faith?
How many such people exist? I don't think anyone knows. Unfortunately the vote spam which he solicited via twitter overwhelmed any other signal.
Even if this was supposed to be entirely decided on the basis of votes -- which is explicitly not what was planned from the start -- when people cheat they normally get disqualified. You don't say "this Olympic athlete took steroids, but maybe he should keep his medal... after all, he might have won even without the drugs".
> If Hacker News could fund startups, what startups would it fund?
The answer was clear and overwehlming: The people chose an understated business model helmed by a charismatic leader who they passionately believe in. We choose an antiestablishment founder over the status quo.
You asked the question and you didn't like the answer. It's your house so you're within your rights but I can't say I'm pleased with the way this was decided.
This was never about pleasing the HN community.
I'm also thankful to YC for doing this and to the people who took the time to read and comment on my business. That extra runway and the YC advice would have been a nice bonus though.
Thanks to HN and YC for putting this together. I doubt I would have been noticed if I'd applied in the conventional way.
Congratulations and good luck to the three startups who are getting funded!
Back to work.
The feedback we got from this process was very valuable and we even got some great beta users signed up. However, we likely wouldn't go through something like this again.
This was a bit of a distraction for us to be quite honest. We spent a lot of time working to craft a great pitch and responding to the feedback we got (despite some obvious trolling) in the best way we could.
I get why some people are/were upset though. Anytime you include such a robust community into a decision making process, you're just asking for trouble. You're not going to please everyone and even if everything goes the way you thought, you'll still be met with skepticism. This is especially true for a site like HN in which there are clear "regulars" who understand the nuances within this community.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing. I've been an outside observer for a long time and get tremendous value from the posts here. It's a site I check regularly many times a day.
All-in-all, it's an indictment of the community when you witness how the process plays out. This is not dissimilar to our own US presidential race happening today. You get people that say dumb shit, people who make outlandish claims, and people end up feeling disenfranchised. Long live democracy! :)
I really wish I had the opportunity to "re-pitch" Krewe. I was one of the first to apply, and I don't think I did it in the right way. It was clear from the comments that people had a really poor idea of what it is. So my suggestion for next time: have founders fill out a form so everything gets formatted correctly.
Thanks again, guys.
Overall liked having an open forum for people to give feedback on our idea. We used some of that feedback to evolve the product, we even got some new clients from HN.
Changes for next year? I'd love the final run off to be a bit more like the final four, where you pit one start-up against another until there are only a few standing. Then YC can pick from the cream of the crop.
Thanks again
