Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund

Hey everyone! I manage and run the Fellowship program at YC. I just want to build on top of what Dan wrote about being nice. We’re not asking you to do this because we think it’s good manners. We actually believe it’s the right way to think and act like the best investors.

It’s easy to form some really bad habits when you sit in a position of power to judge the potential of a person, a team, an idea and their execution—believing that you know better and focusing your time on finding weakness.

The best investors don’t spend a lot of time on what can go wrong. They already know the odds are against every startup that ever comes into existence. They already know every startup is a shit show. Those will be the reasons why all the other investors will miss out on an unpredictable opportunity. The best investors try to figure out what can go right. They dream a little with the startup and they then sell that vision back to the founders.

Remember that the big wins in startups come from the margins. For you to find what no one else could have predicted, know that it will take the shape of something that isn’t obvious.

Being nice gives you a good foundation for being open and optimistic, which is what we strive for when we read applications here at YC.

Thanks again for trying this out with us. I'm really excited about what we discover together.

Thought: in the original Wisdom of Crowds book, an important point was that people's selections need to be independent of one another, otherwise you get bandwagon/cascade effects. I don't know how that could be made to factor in to things.

That seems way more like a curse (re: taxes) than a reward.

Personally I'm seeing this as an excellent test of precisely what sort of community HN really is. I'm sure this will be fascinating.

For the sake of discussion, I'll offer a counterargument.

Be Nice is a good goal for Apply HN since it promotes civil discussion and stops the threads from devolving into semantic "lol no https u suck" that some Show HN threads tend to devolve into.

Users are not nice. They don't comment on HN or Twitter, they just stop using it without fanfare. And what determine a startup's success in the real world is if people want to use it.

Hindsight is 20/20, yes. But I do have concerns that "Be Nice" may dissuade commenters/potential customers from pointing out legitimate, immediate flaws.