Some sort of support for people working on building "lifestyle businesses" as side projects would be fantastic. Not all of us have megalomaniac dreams of running the next AirBnb. Question: would YC Fellowship be a good fit for that?
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Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund
71–80 of 300 posts
Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund
#72If I was to guess I'd say HN readers would be more impressed with innovative technology than how the company actually would make money. I would be wary however of learning very much with a one time experiment with only two funded companies. That would be similar to giving a prospective angel investor the advice to invest in two companies in the next thirty days and then no more.
The post said a minimum of two. In other words, in a worst case scenario they are committing to two ideas. For all we know, they might decide to fund 20 in this first experiment.
Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Be Nice" may dissuade commenters/potential customers from pointing out legitimate, immediate flaws. I don't think HN users are going to have trouble doing that, but there are different ways to do it, and the nicer ways have the critical property of opening the discussion further instead of shutting it down. We HN users are used to thinking of ourselves as the scrappy underdog, calling out incorrectness and badness…
"Hey, this looks really cool, but I notice you guys don't support TLS (i.e., if I change the 'http' to 'https', I can't connect). I know you have a million things on your todo list, but this one is extraordinarily important; your target users will simply close their browser windows once they see 'http'. Also, fixing this is easy! Just check out this tutorial [link] .. or let me know if you have any questions and I'll…
That's fine, and for those who don't feel so gushy, there's a different thing you can do: simply re-read your comments and edit out anything that isn't nice. You can always set 'delay' in your profile to between 1 and 10 minutes to give yourself some editing time. Mine is 3.
Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund
#74This is an excellent idea. Do you need a prototype and a team in place before participating?
Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund
#75Interesting idea, and kudos to you for kicking off the discussions to refine the approach - and for the "be nice" rule, which I think is very important here. A question: What are the situations where you think it will benefit people more to go the open route than applying directly? One way of thinking about it is advantages of "Apply HN": getting significant calibration and feedback on an idea that improves it whethe…
> What are the situations where you think it will benefit people more to go the open route than applying directly?
No idea! But you can always do both. It would be interesting if HN picked fundamentally different startups than YC does. That's really the genesis of the idea, as I mentioned above.
It's not out of the question that getting picked by HN could actually help a startup succeed, since the community might naturally root for it in the market. For some startups, that might affect the outcome. But I'm just speculating.
Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund
#76Also, while I don't loce what I'm about to suggest it makes sense:
1 upvote = 1 + (Account Age In Years / 2)
Or some metric discounting (but not eliminating) new accounts while proportionately weighing soneones contribution/participation in the community.
while to some extent everyone should be represented, but some members of the community have been here much longer, are much more knowledgeable, and participate a lot more. they helped shape the community, etc and may have gone to YC in early days.
ive been here for ~2 years, i know a little bit about tech and startups, however(and this doesnt map 1:1) some people helped build this community and are core contributors, there votes (as their advice) is worth some percentage more.
Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund
#77> Questions or suggestions? Let's discuss and refine this together. The upvote/commentary is likely going to be highly problematic: A) I'm pretty sure Dang can't list all 9 accounts I've used on HN over the past few years. I'm also pretty sure 9 accounts in good standing [1500+ karma] would be enough to seed an initial vote if handled carefully. The ones he'd be able to name are the 3 most recent. This being the case…
brb submitting a startup that specializes in handling your sockpuppets properly for situations like this
I don't use them for sockpuppetry. I just like changing accounts every so often.
I was just pointing out a direction someone could go.
Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund
#78This is an excellent idea. Do you need a prototype and a team in place before participating?
The only thing you need is willingness to try convincing the community to fund you.
Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund
#79I am not very sure about this for a few reasons:
1. There is possibly several ways to game the upvote system. HN community is not anonymous, and there are people who have more friends here than others. A lot of very good founders would probably not have enough friends here. That might create bias once an Apply HN post reaches first page vs. another.
2. Participating startups risk facing public bashing while hoping to get priceless feedback. This happens often here, even unintentionally sometimes. This also poses a risk that a lot of startups would not be 100% honest in one way or another to minimize bashing. This is commonplace on Reddit. But this is not Reddit and any founder cannot forever escape people here. This is an ecosystem forum which is extremely civil in Show HN (with a few exceptions) but might not be so when competing for a resource -- the 2 YCF spots. Maybe Reddit is the way it is because everyone is competing for points.
3. Publicly applying for funding might step on private financing laws of several states and nations? It might also be against some by-laws. Would this constitute a public offer?
Maybe this could be helped better by doing one or more of these:
1. Apply HN posts should not make it to homepage and should be a separate section.
2. The heuristic should not be known publicly of what YC partners are looking for.
3. Companies should still be required to fill a YC app before posting. Then it's a public contest rather than a public offer to sell shares.
This would be interesting for sure!
Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund
#80Interesting idea, and kudos to you for kicking off the discussions to refine the approach - and for the "be nice" rule, which I think is very important here. A question: What are the situations where you think it will benefit people more to go the open route than applying directly? One way of thinking about it is advantages of "Apply HN": getting significant calibration and feedback on an idea that improves it whethe…
Honestly, we don't really know. We have very few hypotheses around this idea. We're just insanely curious to see what will happen.
As far as the disadvantage you mention, that happens when you launch. That happens when you start getting press. That happens when you announce a large funding round. That happens when you're doing well.
In our experience, startups are far more likely to die by suicide than by homicide. Iteration is the only practice to greatness that we've ever seen and you can't do that well without talking about your idea to others. In a vacuum, you can only go so far.
My advice is similar to how we're approaching this experiment: don't over think it.