Tell HN: Winners of Apply HN for YC Fellowship 3
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.
311 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 253 ms ] threadBut 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...
I hope this is sarcasm.
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.
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.
While the upvotes are an indication of support for your position, it wouldn't have accurately captured the number of people who disagreed with you (and thus supported Pinboard), since disagreement is not grounds for downvoting.
I'm sure there's others given I know specific people's position on comments I made that they could've downvoted. So, parent's claim stands but we can't know how much. Maybe worth considering modifying downvote concept to deal with this somehow in another forum as an experiment.
I certainly didn't think that saying "Please don't give money to Pinboard, I don't think Maciej will act appropriately and it will spoil any chances of following this process again" fitted into "nice". Now some people did post (generally more constructive) versions of that comment, but I refrained base on the stated policy.
There was no way to vote Pinboard down other than to just vote for the other options.
The process did not actually offer any way to determine the HN community's overall view, only that were was a large subset that wanted to fund Pinboard. That subset might be greater that the subset that specifically didn't want to fund Pinboard, but there's no evidence available to determine that.
This might be worth dang and others factoring into the next iteration of this stuff. Some way for people to express agreement without being mean. Might be one post saying "Disagree or voting against" that they can upvote if they want opposition to be tallied. Maybe even make it stay in one spot on page so it doesn't get in way of rest of discussion.
What yall think?
The original announcement said:
At the end of the month, we'll rank the startups and YC will fund two. The ranking will depend both on upvotes and on the quality of discussion, similar to how the ranking of stories works. 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. 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.
All this says is that (a) upvotes and comments will be used to rank the startups, and that (b) YC will then fund two. It doesn't say they'll use the ranking as the sole criteria. It seems obvious that an organization giving away bags of $20k will exercise some kind of discretion beforehand.
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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...
> Did he want the YCF spot, or the $20k? I don't know him, but the fact that his immediate response was "I want my twenty grand" reinforces my belief that Kevin made the right decision here.
I agree, Kevin made the right decision as well.
Did he want the YCF spot, or the $20k? I don't know him, but the fact that his immediate response was "I want my twenty grand" reinforces my belief that Kevin made the right decision here.
(That being said, for someone not familiar with Maciej's approach to things, I can perhaps understand why you'd think that way.)
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.
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.
Getting into YCF even with 100 more votes than the next 3 combined is not a right. If YC doesn't feel comfortable working with him and think that he'll negatively affect the batch and the alumni network, that's their call. (Just take this thread for example, what was supposed to be a post mortem of the contest and a place to give suggestions and feedback has turned into a complaint fest).
I did somethings which the mods didn't approve of in their judgement and my application itself was disqualified (it was ranked at 5 by upvotes) but I don't feel entitled so I'm not complaining.
Is it because you don't feel entitled? Or because there's a vast chasm of difference between "5th place" and "1st place by several miles in each of two separate races"?
Questions:
1. where are these rules published?
2. why would someone (except in this one case involving money for votes) solicit upvotes for a post?
I voted for pinboard... and I'm curious why Kevin decided that it wasn't in the spirit of the program.
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.
no rule of law -> automatic bullshit.
HN has never been a rule-driven, legalistic kind of place, and isn't going to get that way. But I've had to learn a lot about people who do feel this way and obviously have a lot to learn yet. My own temperament is very far from this; it's almost impossible for me not to read "we'll figure it out as we go" as a good, fine thing.
About that, I like the point zellyn makes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11633818
The issue was that it wasn't clear there would be rule-changing or experimentation /during/ the experiment, rather than after the experiment.
From my point of view that sentence about making it up as we go was the most important thing in the original post. It meant that we didn't have to plan a fixed set of rules: if and when something unforeseen came up, we'd adapt to it then. That's why I said "initial conditions". I'd never have proposed anything that took away our ability to adapt in the middle of this, and especially not about something so untried.
I think, at this point, the issue is that it's clear to most of us what happened, but YC is still trying to put a gloss on it.
The more you and Kevin Hale try to mitigate this, the more polarized it gets, and the meaner some commenters get about Maciej, who didn't do anything wrong. You don't have to accept Pinboard into YCF, but you have a responsibility not to let him take any of the blame for this.
Yes. I wasn't arguing against that.
Or maybe, now that you've figured out what this experiment is supposed to be, you should actually run this experiment, i.e., start it over, with a clear understanding of what's going on and what the parameters are. It's unsurprising that people were confused about the parameters since you yourselves were confused about them. Their confusion is on you.
"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.
That's not what I meant at all. This is the first time this interpretation ever occurred to me.
If that's what people thought I meant, I can certainly understand some of this thread better. But it floors me that my intent would have failed so completely to come across.
It gets a little more muddled with social experiments, where it's often hard to delineate an "ending point" of the experiment, and there's often real collateral damage in the process. Even with social experiments, though, you get a more accurate signal if you let them run past the point where your gut tells you it's a bad idea.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
I think it is dodgy to have an online election, and then disqualify participants for mentioning it to people who might want to vote for them.
Certainly it never crossed my mind that the rules about voting rings would be any different than with regular posts. HN users are passionately opposed to the voting system getting gamed; we'd have been skinned alive if we allowed it. But tptacek makes a good point about that not being obvious to everybody.
I told him when I noticed the same Twitter post that it was going to cause problems (too late!), and he was genuinely surprised.
Your rules about voting rings are not public. I think that you're so used to modding the site that you forget this, but take a look at the letter of what it actually says in the FAQ.
I'm confused by your second paragraph—I just don't get it—but if there's a way to make the FAQ clearer I'd like to. There's no question that I have trouble seeing this stuff from an outside viewpoint. I'm too immersed in it.
By the way, I didn't reply to the bit about the voting rules because I think it's the only important point in your post; it isn't. It's just something that I knew how to respond to. I'm trying to write something in response to the larger substance, but am having trouble because my feelings (bad, and sad) have the better of me right now. I'll get there.
Regardless, the tweets in question were around a long time before Pinboard was disqualified without expectation. The first one certainly predates kevin's phone call, for instance.
(And of course one of the tweets in question was contained a link to the general poll, which was not a submission of Maciej's, and the other, technically, was a link to all the Apply HN posts, not to his.)
But that says nothing about the Apply HN situation. That's new, had a different set of rules (hell, you wrote a polling solution), and the regular guidelines didn't necessarily apply. That they did should have been made clear.
Again, nothing against it this time, since it's all up to you guys - just feedback for the next time.
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.
https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/727255170594131968 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/720802750317993984 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/719599297604390912
And sorry, claiming they were just jokes can't be a free pass. Everything about that application was framed as a joke from start to finish.
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.)
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.
Yeah, this is disappointing, but also completely predictable.
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.
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 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.
If Pinboard had no votes, we wouldn't be having this conversation. It was specifically because it had the most votes that there was any expectation that it might be chosen. But it was always Kevin's prerogative to say no, and he did. They were clear that it is an experiment, and that we would figure things out as we go. I don't see how you can accuse "changing the rules". There were no set rules.
You would be dishonest if you tried to say that Pinboard didn't initially approach this as a funny/protest entry ("Let's make YC great again"). Whether he changed later is irrelevant. Whether some voted for Pinboard because they liked it is irrelevant. Others voted for it for it in the same spirit as he entered it, and suddenly (whether he intended it or not) you have the Wonka Factory's doors open and a bunch of people finding it fun (and maybe cathartic) to act like Veruca Salt. Don't blame Kevin or Dan, blame Maciej.
I was about to even agree with one saying the evidence looked fishy given spotting or countering subversive behavior is kind of my thing. Then, kevin's comment appeared just as I was about to write mine to confirm opposition angle a lot.
Full disclosure: First time I've ever found out who idlewords is, I don't use that product, probably didn't give it a vote, I give mixed reviews of Silicon Valley politics/VC's, and say whatever I think facts lead to regardless of blowback. As in, near zero bias in this and people's concerns are still obvious to me.
Now, if this is your whole argument, then I don't disagree with it. Yet, tptacek's reply to you is still true based on what's in the comment you replied to and the others. Your counter doesn't apply to what he wrote.
Were the real reason, as stated here, published the first time, I wouldn't even have bothered to comment.
But when you're inconsistent, you should bear a special obligation to be generous and charitable to the people you're disadvantaging. YC didn't live up to that obligation here.
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.
YC is much more of a "mentor+mentee" relationship than a regular "coworkers on a team" relationship. A mentor relationship is much less effective if there's no personal rapport between participants.
To put it another way, suppose the best advice YC can give is to focus on something other than pinboard (or something like that), would idlewords listen? Because if not, what's the point?
I can see this is disappointing for idlewords, but overall, this seemed fair and reasonably transparent to me.
I'm worried the overall outcome is that instead of being a fun and interesting experiment, it's going to be a 'bad and sad' in YC's minds, and any future contest is going to have a lawyer writing the rules.
So, here's to a clearer 'judge's decision is final' next time and that the three accepted applicants turn out successful.
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.
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?
Retroactively doing so, sure, is your right but it's fairly underhanded.
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.
Is what I would say.
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.
"...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.
>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.
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.
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)
If it's more than what one of the "winners" got in the second poll, then the whole argument is over.
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.)
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.
What do the totals look like if you filter out new accounts, or accounts with little karma?
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.
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
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.
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.
But I still want my $20K.
If the primary criteria is "quality of founder(s)" I have no idea why they passed. Except maybe seeing someone everyday who's been successful with antithetical values might have been too much to bear.
The way this whole thing was handled stinks, and I'm sorry you got screwed by a poorly thought-out "contest." But it seems like the YCF deal isn't solely about the money -- they're trying to find companies to work with. Honestly, did you... want that? Or just the $20,000 that keeps getting mentioned?
As for my demands to get paid, I had a clever idea about how to use the money, and I'm miffed that I won't get a chance to do it.
If you don't mind me asking, how would you have used the money, if you were accepted into the program?
Basically you tried gaming the system, with your fanbase who voted for you despite your comments like "I will go through YC like a bowling ball," and now you're protesting that YC won't let you. You don't even like YC. May I ask, out of curiosity, why you're doing this?
I genuinely wanted to see what would happen with a YC/Maciej arrangement, and not just for entertainment purposes. I think they might have been good for eachother.
If you're interested, let me know.
They're all presumably adults, I'm sure they could get through some differing opinions, no?
I'm guessing you aren't from here/haven't been in Silicon Valley that long.
If anything I'd expect that he (and a lot of other people) are disappointed with not seeing what he was going to do with the cash, not the loss of the money itself.
If funding is rocket fuel, I was excited to see what could be done with it in the hands of a proven SV-venture arsonist.
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.
I admit to being flummoxed by the combination of trollish and serious elements--it basically does a denial of service on my brain; if it were stage hypnosis I'd be squawking like a chicken. But I'm starting to think one could have taken all the jokes out of this and much the same thing would still have happened. If that's so, then the troll aspect is a red herring.
For very good reason: Trolls often pretend to be serious, but serious people pretending to be trolls is incredibly rare.
When you use a lot of phrases like: "Maciej cheated", "Maciej tried to game the system", "He tried to stack the deck", you don't make it sound like you think he accidentally took cold medicine - you're directly attributing malice to him.
In the comments on the new guideline about gratuitous negativity, the intent seems to be "use the most charitable interpretation". Accusing someone of being dishonest falls outside that.
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.
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?
Yes. Were this the case this time, I suspect there would have been zero complaints.
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.
But I never thought that votes alone would decide anything; the original post explicitly ruled out that possibility.
If HN/YC wanted to do the right thing, they should have taken some time to assess removing Pinboard BEFORE voting ended. Instead, what they did was game their own system: They likely sensed Pinboard could be trouble from the beginning, but hoped they would not win. They attempted to achieve that result by letting the voting play out, and THEN disqualified Pinboard when the voting results were not in their favor.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441978
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! :)
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.
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
I'll concede that it could be misunderstood, but I'm sure that by "comments" they meant the content of the discussion, not just the number of comments.
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.
(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".
> How many such people exist?
raises hand
Hi, my account is 3000 days old today, only a little less old than your own. I went back and checked and it turns out that I didn't vote for Pinboard, but that's largely because I hadn't been active on HN in quite a while and I didn't think it was necessary. I did voice support for Maciej in the comments there.
I genuinely wanted to see him go through the program ("like a bowling ball through a python"), and not just for entertainment purposes. I think it would have been a valuable cross-pollination for everyone involved.
I've generally felt that HN -- and to a greater degree, YC -- aren't particularly welcoming towards people like me. I got fed up enough that I wrote a news reader to mine HN for articles just so that I wouldn't be tempted to visit HN as often, and when that broke a while back, I never bothered to fix it. Literally the only reason I'm here now is because Maciej mentioned it on his Twitter account. I've always been an outsider here. Seeing YC accept another, more successful outsider would have been nice.
This fiasco has all the scent of cliqueish hostility towards Maciej, you have been non-stop and relentlessly accusing him of being a troll (and you're smart enough to know better than to claim to know someone's psychology better than they do over the internet), and the results stink like a US election.
To be clear, I'm not saying that such people do not exist. I'm saying that there's no effective way to estimate their number.
If the outcome is the same then the twitter-promoting explanation is simply a smokescreen.
I would not have cared at all about some contest on HN for a YC acceptance if it weren't for him mentioning it on Twitter. In fact, I would not have even known it was happening.
And now that I've seen the way both HN and YC has handled this throughout, including the attitude you've had towards his application since the beginning, I wish that he hadn't mentioned it on Twitter at all and my nearly 6-month-long streak of forgetting that HN exists had continued unbroken.
We could probably keep sparring over this, but the results are clearly not going to change and HN does not look any more like a community I want to be a part of than it did so many months ago.
Pinboard's application had the best discussion.
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.
It has more to do with the fact that he called pg a "weenis" years ago, and openly criticizes YC and SV culture in general.
The rejection was basically "sry, but you aren't quite the culture fit we're looking for". Which is fine, YCF can fund whomever they want, it's their money and their prerogative.
But here's the rub.
The way I see it, the biggest irony of the whole experiment is that it was probably meant to draw non-traditional founders, because of the pseudonymous nature of HN. But in the end, biases still prevailed. Which is why hiring/funding in SV is beyond broken, as this experiment has proven empirically.
This thread is the embodiment of all the diversity problems that tech has, the root node if you will. When the decision comes down to arbitrary "gut feeling" vs. the best (candidate|founder), then you know there's a problem.
If you can't see that, then...I'm not exactly sure what to tell you. Spend more time in the Valley?
I got increasingly irritated with his faux innocence as the evening progressed. I should probably have stopped around midnight.
you know this isn't true
My turn to be surprised. Which part isn't true? It seemed true to me when I wrote it at 2 AM, and it seems true to me when I'm reading it again now at 8 AM (curse these early morning meetings!).
Please look up confirmation bias. And (please) do not lecture me about my lack of awareness of the situation due to my newbie status.
The /specific/ rule here should have been made clearer.
But this was not just another HN submission. This had nothing to do with 'keeping the front page interesting'. This had to do with allowing HN to "democratically" elect companies they thought were best to fund. A candidate company asking its supporters to...support them does not only seem obvious, but very different from HN trying to keep the front page clean.
If you disagree that they are different forms of using HN and not the same spirit of submission, I'm not sure we'll be able to agree here, which is also totally fine, of course. :)
Exactly the same reasoning applied to deciding what's interesting and gets funded. I'm surprised this is even a question. If we had changed that rule, HN users would have skinned us alive.
Saying that "interviewing and evaluating will be done in regular HN threads" meant that the regular HN thread rules applied. We did change one of those—from "be civil" to "be nice", which by the way people did a pretty good job of—and I explained that change at length in the original post.
If you read through the comments in that original thread you'll see that a lot of them had to do with people's concerns about gaming of the voting system, which is one of the most common things that comes up here, and my answers were all about reassuring them that we'd watch for it and disqualify applications if we found it.
I don't think this brouhaha is worth it. Let the community send one of theirs in there. If he takes the money and bails (I doubt) the community takes the blame and deals with it.
If he takes the money and does a gimmick (I suspect) the community will also deal with it.
Remember, this is an EXPERIMENT. It is theoretically not to work. It is similar to the "come with no idea" thig YC did years back
I didn't vote for Pinboard [1] however, truing to justify the silencing of 700+ votes will be hard.
You and Kelvin, take a deep breath and let the EXPERIMENT run its course.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11618930
I think the biggest shame is that under the guise of an experiment they had the opportunity to "really disrupt" themselves and "change the face of" ...money.. giving...
What hashtag should I use to support the twitter campaign to get Maciej into a program that he probably shouldn't be under which we're discussing on a message board... UGH! crashing under the meta-overload...