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Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund

#141

Post by lettergram »

danieltillett wrote: post #139
lettergram wrote: post #136

About a year ago I ran a series of tests where I continuously posted the same 15-20 articles tracking the number of up votes within the first 10-15 minutes. It turns out it was essentially random, and although every one of the posts were decent enough to make it to the front page 2 or 3 times sometimes it received zero votes, sometimes 10. It seems somewhat unfair to use the standard ranking system with this being th…

Did you write up this testing? I would love to see some hard number on this effect?

I have all the data, never published it because I didn't have time... I'll get around to it soon though

The data isn't super solid because I was stopped before I got to 50 (which was my goal).

Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund

#142

Post by raldi »

JonFish85 wrote: post #135
raldi wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I'd be curious how you'd approach it with something far more accusatory? Take Airbnb for example: I am very bothered by airbnb's approach to laws. I think they deliberately ignore laws in the name of making a profit. It's probably not "nice" to question why they look the other way in major markets where they know their listings are breaking the law, but it certainly isn't nice that they choose what laws apply to them…

"This sounds like a gigantic untapped opportunity -- it's such a waste that so many beds and couches lie unused for large chunks of the year, and there are lots of travelers that couldn't care less about concierge desks and bellhops, and would much prefer to save money or stay in more interesting lodging, but hotels don't seem interested in serving that market. However, I'm not sure I can upvote this proposal in good conscience; it sounds like you're planning to deliberately ignore laws, grow big, and then seek to have those laws overturned. Am I misunderstanding something, or is that really the plan?"

Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund

#143

Post by biot »

davidw wrote: post #92
dang wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mentioned this from the early days of HN, and it's in the guidelines: "don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation." is a great rule for most people. Imagine yourself saying your comment to someone you don't know. Does it sound ok?

I assume most times people submit a "Show HN" (or now "Apply HN") that, if not explicitly stated, there's an implicit "and please give me feedback" tacked on to the end. Sometimes feedback can be blunt and, to someone emotionally invested in the site / product, it may appear brutal. While feedback on someone's work should certainly not be mean-spirited, I don't think one should need to go out of their way to dress up their comment in order to emotionally shelter the reader.

A favorite expression of mine: "Sufficiently advanced political correctness is indistinguishable from sarcasm."

Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund

#144

Post by George_MacApp »

We are two childhood friends who started company with focus and we built it without any fancy and bootstrapped it from zero to a million dollar company.

We never had time to even spend with family we just slept four to six hours and focused on what we wanted to built.

We never had any social accounts and never socialised in Internet not went to do networking.

We thought let's built a great product and enjoy doing it.

A Story of How Two Childhood Friends from Village has built their startup up from Zero to a million dollars

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11442047

Only time we spent time is registering and applying for YC.

Coming from a small town with no business background, learning all things ourselves and with self motivation and dream if we were able to do this much.

Joining hands with YC we can do a lot more faster and quicker to change the world.

This is the reason we applied for YC. Even our employees are from rural they can't even communicate good in English but they code like hell.

If you ask a guy how to built an ap. A may tell a good story but not actually do it. B may do an excellent app but not tell it in an effective way. A May have more friends but B may not.

So founders we play as a team. George does the coding and he has no social accounts. I do the design idea and also communicate and be active to know what's happening in the world.

This is a good initiative let's see how it goes.

Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund

#145

Post by GFischer »

kevin wrote: post #48
GFischer wrote: post #31

I think that for this experiment to be valid, only accounts created before today should be allowed to vote (or make a karma threshold for new accounts).

Nah. A lot of teams don't know about HN before they apply to YC. Many make it into the batch and are good.

Sorry, maybe I didn't explain myself well. What I wanted to say is that for the end-of-month ranking ("we'll rank the startups and YC will fund two. The ranking will depend both on upvotes and on the quality of discussion"), I think upvotes and discussion by current YC members should hold more weight (maybe the algorithms already take that into account :) ).

I agree that people that didn't have HN accounts previously should definitely be allowed to participate both as submissions and in the comments :) , only that the upvotes part could be gamed.

Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund

#146

Post by danieltillett »

lettergram wrote: post #141
danieltillett wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you write up this testing? I would love to see some hard number on this effect?

I have all the data, never published it because I didn't have time... I'll get around to it soon though The data isn't super solid because I was stopped before I got to 50 (which was my goal).

You should ask Dan to let you continue :)

Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund

#148

Post by grossvogel »

JonFish85 wrote: post #135
raldi wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I'd be curious how you'd approach it with something far more accusatory? Take Airbnb for example: I am very bothered by airbnb's approach to laws. I think they deliberately ignore laws in the name of making a profit. It's probably not "nice" to question why they look the other way in major markets where they know their listings are breaking the law, but it certainly isn't nice that they choose what laws apply to them…

"I'm concerned that your business model relies on regulatory arbitrage and/or your hosts' willingness to violate local ordinances.

Not only would that make you vulnerable to changes in the legal / enforcement landscape, but there's also a growing backlash in some quarters (including on HN) against this type of business.

Can you provide any assurances that this business would be sustainable if you were forced to rely on 100% legal and taxed host properties?"

Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund

#149

Post by GFischer »

zaguios wrote: post #121

I actually already wrote this as a reply to another comment, but I think it merits a comment of its own. The best way to do the scoring for the applications is to actually make it into somewhat of a game. Each application should be given a starting elo of 1200. Every time a user wants to go and review applications they will be presented with two separate applications with a similar elo and then will be asked to vote…

Interesting, I was also going to suggest some kind of alternative review system.

I was invited to review applications to CORFO (the government program behind Startup Chile), and since they crowdsource reviews between unrelated startup founders, they have a "points" system to determine whether submissions were reasonably graded (they look for big differences between graders).

Your system sounds better :) , but I think they want to promote individual discussion of submissions too.

Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund

#150

Post by dzink »

If we read the answers to this thread as a meta lesson of what a founder would expect, I think the answers would benefit from a scorecard. A poll at the top could summarise scores. Here is my iteration for the idea of "Apply YC":

1. Would I use this product? - Only for projects I have a lot of traction with and wouldn't mind competition for, or a project I am not sure/serious about (toss and see if it sticks). Anything in between would be risky if we're serious about the "What do you know that competition doesn't" question.

2. Would I join this team? - hard to learn about team without much research on HN

3. Would I fund/work on this problem? - Yes - a low friction way to vet and support startups is needed. I've worked on other iterations to find a way. I've thought about it a lot, reply/ping me if you want to discuss.

4. What would I improve: For start, add a scorecard, so the founders can use brainpower to iterate instead of trying to interpret why they were not up-voted by strangers with different motives.

5. Any concerns: A ton can go wrong here, but what matters is what can go right - what parts of the HN experience are conducive to solving this problem, and what tweaks will finish the job of solving it. If this works, you will see a rich data set of problems that people are attempting to solve, votes that show the demand for each problem, solutions who get to see traction by potential users, and VC analysts who are trying to crunch the data to direct their own funding/sourcing, competitors taking notes, etc.

Then there are also the projects that are just poor fit with the HN subset, would you reject those in YC if you see them down-voted here?

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