Poll: Apply HN Runoff – Which two startups should YCF fund?
Below are the top 20 Apply HN submissions after they've been ranked using three criteria: upvotes received, number of comments posted, and quality of comments posted as assessed by multiple-moderator review. The top two choices will be the ones HN asks YCF to fund.
We've modified HN's poll software in two ways for this thread. First, the choices are randomized on each view (for logged-in users) to reduce bias. Second, we modified the voting mechanism to introduce some entropy and extra review as anti-gaming measures. You may not see your vote show up in the score right away. (Edit: koolba had a better idea—we'll just hide the point totals for now.)
The discussion below is for debating the merits of the different applications. Please don't post about the Apply HN process itself; we'll have a big post-mortem discussion later this week to talk about what worked well and what didn't. And if you're an applicant or a friend of one, please don't post in the thread below, except to answer questions about your startup.
A small number of applications (two or three) were disqualified due to abuse. If you don't see your application here and think it should be, you're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com to find out why.
Edit: voting is now closed. We'll unveil the scores and rankings shortly.
Edit 2: Hmm. We need some time to look more deeply into the voting patterns here. Please stand by.
Edit 3: Several users have complained about the voting being closed too soon. They have a point, so we've reopened voting and will let it run until some time tomorrow. Sorry about that!
Edit 4: Ok, we've closed the voting now, and HN has sent the ranked list to YCF. We'll try to announce sometime tomorrow (if so, it will be later in the day because I'm travelling tomorrow), but it depends on Kevin being able to talk to the startups first to make sure things are ok on the YC side. If there's an update about timing, I'll add it here.
Edit 5 (6:25 pm Pacific, 2016-05-04): Kevin has now talked to all the winning startups and I have now stopped travelling, so the announcement post is up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11633270. And so (in the thread) is an explanation of the thing you're probably all wondering about.
287 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] threadThe other "I'd use this" for me, is probably Eat My Dust. After some of the recent debacles like Flint, MI, I've been really interested in "at home" testing for various contaminants in water, air, soil, etc. This is something that I think a lot of people care about and might use.
EDIT: I just noticed the randomization of the entries. That's a plus!
EDIT #2: Point displays are now gone. Nice turnaround!
Edit: coerced.
As noted in the previous thread, Pinboard is indeed eligible for YCF by the letter of the law, but including a 7-year old startup with a popular founder doesn't seem to fit the spirit of Apply HN.
If anything, this second vote against 19 other startups is unfair to Pinboard, who I believed pulled far and away the most votes during the first phase.
I thought creative compliance with the letter of the rules would be welcome on a hacker website.
In fact, if part of the point of this exercise is legitimizing the use of HN as a sort of decorrelated "wisdom of the crowd" hedge for YC's ordinary selection, then including someone with great odds of doing something impactful with the YCF money is a good thing. YC will profit from it, and HN will have allowed that to happen.
Since none of the other startup ideas posted to Apply HN have especially credible founding teams (not a ding!), there's also something to be said for an Apply HN that tries it both ways, both by surfacing an unknown and also by admitting to YCF a company with an established track record. We can then see what YCF does for both kinds of companies.
And, finally: YC's got more than enough money to casually try this out, and one thing I am certain of is that YCF funding Pinboard via an application Maciej Ceglowski posts for Pinboard on Hacker News is going to bring a little bit of joy to my life. It will be fun to watch, for a lot of us, and that's worth something.
This somewhat implies that the ApplyHN experiment is at least as much about performance art and entertainment as it is doing any sort of real entrepreneurship.
That's fine and all, but let's be honest with ourselves about why we're here.
Do I love his writing, sense of humor, and most importantly his sarcastic Twitter? Yes I do. But I voted for him because I do honestly believe that he would leverage this opportunity better than any of the other candidates in order to positively grow his site into something that could see significant growth.
I undoubtably expect that Maciej will not compromise on his values and vision for the site, even if that's a bit more difficult with investment money. But most importantly, I do think that there are many ways that Pinboard could grow without the need to compromise. That's why he got my vote.
My issue instead is with the reasoning GP gave--that it'll be fun to watch.
Many of the biggest companies founded in the last 3-4 decades have been because somebody thought "Wouldn't it be interesting if...?" In Apple's case, they explicitly thought of themselves as artists, and I doubt they're unique in that.
How credible does the founding team have to be Thomas? While I might not be as well known here on HN as Maciej or yourself, I think I have more than enough of a track record to be credible.
However, I think Pinboard would be a better fit for the normal YC program. Maybe in the future there should be two tracks for Apply HN (established and idea stage).
However, I'd like to see more information like a whitepaper, or even a design.
I do have a rough whitepaper written up (I've since renamed it Greshm Dollar).
Here you go:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2jhCMrrxoeONVNQTVd6NG5pNz...
I like the idea as well, but in the description it said that vendors would be onboarded with a promise to allow g-bucks to be converted back to dollars at par. The obvious outcome is that issuing a g-buck is going to immediately result in depleting USD reserves by a dollar as soon as the g-buck is spent. Anything that inhibits immediate redemption for USD is going to inhibit adoption.
You need a real-world use-case that USD is less than ideal for, like being able to buy illegal drugs or pay cyber-ransoms or avoid currency controls for a cybercurrency to get real traction as a store of value.
It's kind of the opposite of that. Every time a GD is spent, it protects our USD reserves by resetting the expiration time on the GD.
Anything that inhibits immediate redemption for USD is going to inhibit adoption.
I don't think adoption is a huge obstacle. The plan is to hand it out as free money to low income people. If someone comes up and offers you free money, are you going to say no?
We go around to merchants (e.g. convenience stores) asking them if they want business from any of the people we're handing free money to. Some of them will undoubtedly say yes.
If we fail, we'll have done the equivalent of taken a bunch of money and handed it out to poor people for a period of time. If we succeed, that money will be circulating on its own, and hence not converting back to USD very fast. We will have established a new currency.
As the currency circulates, we can lower our reserve ratio. In much the same way that banks don't retain enough cash to cover all their deposits, our total USD reserves can fall below the total amount of GD in circulation without breaking the peg.
We're immune to a currency run, because if people panic, they want to get rid of their GD. The only way to do so is to spend it, and spending it protects our USD reserves.
You need a real-world use-case that USD is less than ideal for
People who don't have USD, but still want to buy things.
get real traction as a store of value
We get traction as a store of value by pegging it to USD and backing it up with USD reserves using the resetting timer mechanism that I've previously described.
I'll copy a comment from other user:
> What happens if there's a "bank run" where everyone waits for their GD to mature rather than spending it?
In a normal "bank run", the people are afraid that if they don't exchange the bad currency now at a discount, they will get a worse exchange later. But in this case there is a guaranty that waiting only 30 days they will be converted to dollars.
Hmm. Not exactly. Initially, this is true, but that's just an early part of the bootstrapping process. Further down the road, the total amount of GD will be greater than the amount of USD in our reserves. At that point, if everyone decides to sit on their GD at once, not all of it will convert because we would run out of USD reserves.
But this is what makes Greshm Dollar shine. If people don't trust their GD to convert to USD in 30 days, the only way for them to get rid of it is to spend it. By spending GD , they cause the GD's expiration to reset thereby protecting our USD reserves.
Who would accept it (at par value) under such circumstances?
Right. So, during the initial phase, all GD will be guaranteed to convert to USD when it expires because we'll literally have enough USD in our reserves. During this first phase, we will sign merchants to contracts that require them to accept GD at par with USD (i.e. one price) so a dollar is a dollar.
If there are people who happen to be paranoid about Greshm Dollar during that time, they will be able to spend their money to get rid of it. If they're not paranoid about it, they'll still probably spend it before they spend their USD because a dollar is worth more to them than something that will become a dollar in x number of days.
Then, later on, once we've established that GD is continually circulating and that our USD reserves are stable, we start increasing the supply of GD to be greater than our USD reserves. This process will be very transparent. Nobody will get screwed over. We won't make any promises to pay and then go back on them. For example, if we decide to only back GD at 90%, merchants can decline to renew their contracts.
It's all outlined in my white paper:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2jhCMrrxoeONVNQTVd6NG5pNz...
[0] https://upverter.com/press/ [1] http://circuitlab.com/
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11615847 and marked it off-topic.
I saw the statement I had quoted as an appeal to emotion so didn't feel bad posting my gut reaction to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_and_spirit_of_the_law
Making it into one of the two slots available for YCF could be a really big deal for someone. The founder of Pinboard is already very successful by any standards, and the product itself probably isn't going change drastically. Can't we let someone else catch a break?
Are you still not able to vote?
They were told it was not a unicorn in the making. Don't be dismissive until you can see the future.
Still, Pinboard is pretty much the only one of them that could significantly improve my life in 2016, hence it gets my pedestrian vote.
This probably again leads back to a strong team picking a good market (or having a better/unique view on how 'their' market will grow/progress).
So, using our imagination, what would happen if someone had the Tesla for databases? Something so much better that it would do for databases what Page Rank did to all those search engines in the 1990's -- obviate them. Could you imagine that taking off and eating a large portion of the market?
OK, now let's take a random situation: You have a business that makes widgets. You have customers, suppliers, parts, etc. Do you store all that information in a Word document as text? Of course not. You either have a spreadsheet or database, right? Text is great for a novel or a poem... but not for data. That would be crazy. But imagine trying to use search in Word to find the right part. It wouldn't be fun.
Currently, the web is still a big collection of text documents. What is not clear to us right now because we're knee-deep in it is is how deeply sub-optimal that is. The number of people going to the Google homepage is declining because people are now just going directly to the database that represents what they're looking for. Looking to buy a home? You go to Zillow or Trulia and query their database. People want data, not text. 95%, almost all, of the web wants to be data. It's instant, discrete, and truly searchable.
Now imagine if that company mentioned before gains that significant market share. It's all RESTful. The authentication/API(language) is common across all of these databases, so that they can actually appear as one giant database to each user. Do you see? You can look at individual databases or have it appear as one large database of everything. That's the fate of the next web. The next Google won't be better text search but instead something completely different: it will be data search: instant, discrete, and truly searchable. And the web will become essentially a massive database.
Google knows this and has been working hard to get there, but they're missing the technology to do it. It's my honest opinion that Brodlist has the technology they're missing. Does it have the team? I don't know. Every single big hit was made by a college student/dropout without experience: Experience reassures, it doesn't predict. We entered this contest for fun, not because we thought we had investor-appropriate answers for every question -- and certainly not to get grandiose on "what could be". My point isn't that we can do this, but that its absence in the application is not indicative that it's absent in general.
I wasn't responding to your application in either of the previous points. Now that I hear what you're doing I hope you never to offense to my previous comments.
Now, my 2cents about your database.
In some ways, Google IS the database you are referring to, just that it is a secondary repository of that information (don't ignore Google's Cached results, etc).
Google can do an amazing amount of slicing and dicing on metadata too.
I STILL think you have something. It doesn't have to be The Database for all the Internet, but it may be.
You sound like a very smart guy, so I'm assuming you've done the homework and know what niche you can serve first which can help you grow.
On that note :) I too didn't get too deep in the larger opportunity for my product, but in the next few weeks (probably early next month) I'll start taking data from a group of open data sensors. Would that be a good fit for broadlist? I'll drop you an email in a couple of weeks and see where you're at.
... But I'm biased...
From a business standpoint: they don't own the product supply chain, they simply provide one component to existing chains. Nice for getting to revenue but not for big growth. We make (or intend too) the entire product, an application that is anti-microbial and can be placed on any existing surface, and for polymer based products we'll nanotexture those ourselves.
India already has multiple billion dollar unicorns in this space. OyoRooms (Lightspeed, Sequoia, Softbank) is the biggest example.
I would personally invest in Siris if I could.
I think the corporate-BS-avoiding, efficient and useful product built, not on design, but on a valuable service which successfully competed against mega-corp offerings is the core of what YC has been about since the start. It's not about rapidly increasing headcount. It's about _delivery_. And I think it's clear who leads the pack in that regard.
It's necessary to have been around for a decade to understand what the protest vote is, exactly. PG's advice circa 2009 was "get to ramen profitability", which is what idlewords did. AFAIK, PG has never reversed himself on that stance.
The protest vote might be something along the lines of "YC now encourages startups to chase valuations rather than get to ramen profitability". It's unclear to me that the latter is true, but that's certainly the perception.
Good luck to everyone!
Why not give it a temp name for now? Seems strange to leave it unnamed
CADWOLF will link all of these things. This will change the amount of time it takes to design/redesign large systems from months for several engineers to seconds on a computer. It will let managers pull down and see real time information on weight/status/cost, and a number of other parameters.
Onshape can be used as one facet of engineering. CADWOLF will redefine the engineering workflow.
Also it might be worth letting the two applications that don’t have a name choose a name.
And of course, the venerable Pinboard deserves a vote as well, simply so that the owner can write about how he "scaled Pinboard after a major pivot":
;)Specifically, here are the stages we have in mind:
Stage One: Dumb hardware, such as the mushroom media mentioned in the Apply HN
Stage Two: Smart hardware (sensors)
Stage Three: Software (control and communication)
Stage Four: Services and Marketplaces
Everyone on earth needs food to eat.
And it costs money.
If you can make a good product that improves how people eat, or make food cheaper, or better, I'd say that's a big accomplishment.
Remember that it will be manual process so if everyone and their dog send a rectification, it will be too much work and he will hate me. Try this only if you extremely dislike the application that you upvoted by mistake.
- can you automatically collect payment like Square or Shopify?
- have you considered a fund that buys future royalties directly (as opposed to a marketplace)? only need 1 side of the market and reduces competitive insight into business