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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

#181

Post by ksou32 »

dang wrote: post #176
ksou32 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not talking about someone automating voting, rather imagine if founder A is a very popular guy in Twitter and YouTube. He makes a post saying 'Hey support my awesome startup '. Founder B might have a better idea, but not the followers. However, Founders A existing popularity may provide a nice userbase for startup, which would be a key element of success. Theirs no real way to make this 'fair'

Ah, perhaps I misread the GP. But I agree that there's no way to control for all these factors. It would drive one mad to try and probably make consensus harder to arrive at.

And even outside of just automation and authentic followers you have Amazon mechanical truk which would allow you to pay real people a quarter or whatever to vote for you.

Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund

#182

Post by dang »

tclmeelmo wrote: post #126

To be frank, my first reaction on reading this idea was negative. I think part of my reaction is because I'm not seeing a useful goal: "interesting things" is certainly a goal, but strikes me as being too vague from which to extract useful information. What are interesting things? If you don't know what they are, how will you know if they happened? Are you set up to measure interesting things? If so, can you quantify…

Oh agreed, it's definitely not an experiment by any research standard. In that sense we're using the word metaphorically. But there's a place for ad hoc trial-and-error, and it's common to call that 'experimental' in colloquial English. YC has done such things in the past, e.g. for a batch or two it was possible to apply with just an idea. Nothing interesting came of that—other than that nothing interesting came of it—so it got phased out. This is an 'experiment' in the way that was.

It's popular on HN to suggest making YC (or startup investment generally) more science-like via controlled experiments, but that's hard to do at all and extremely hard to do well, and we're not set up for it. Maybe one day. But this is not that—it's just trying something new to see what happens.

As for whether interestingness is a goal in itself, on HN it is for sure. That value is hard-coded in the DNA of this place. And there's a well-established if not easily reproducible path from "huh, interesting" to "undeniably useful". That's the nature of the creative process and it's a space HN (and YC, in a different way) particularly like to inhabit.

Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund

#183

Post by skoocda »

I think there's a definite disparity between the key formative aspects of a soon-to-be successful startup, and the popular image that people will vote for. Nobody on HN as enough time or motivation to perform the gritty research on the market or the founders, which means the votes will tend towards flashy sounding concepts. As long as you guys only take this as a cheap and plentiful way of judging the 'wow' factor of these ideas, I think the Apply HN idea is great.

Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund

#184

Post by Joof »

raldi wrote: post #64
dang wrote: post #35

Earlier 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…

We aren't necessarily giving advice, just choosing who to fund. It's hard to ask a group of developers for general feedback because it will be "here's how I would do your thing". Asking very specific questions might work though "our users are doing x and we want them to understand y, how do we make y intuitive".

Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund

#185

Post by jay_kyburz »

6thSigma wrote: post #3

I think a mini application with a few questions from the normal YC app as a comment would be helpful. I see a ton of Show HNs in which I have no idea what the product does (either because the website copy is vague/confusing or because I don't know the market). Having a comment template or something reviewers can look at without have to ask the same questions in every thread would be great.

Yes, I came back to this thread to say I'm surprised how difficult it is to understand what it is they want to make. Also, I have read at least half a dozen and not a single one has mentioned how it's a business and how they will make money.

Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund

#186

Post by dang »

adrusi wrote: post #159

I'm a little concerned that this experiment could attract the wrong kind of behavior on HN, and bring in new users for the wrong reasons. I'm excited to see how this goes, but it will be quite a shame if the quality of regular content on HN suffers as a result.

If that happens we'll take corrective action. Quality of regular content is the most important thing here.

The problem of course is that there's broad disagreement about what counts as quality, but we have that problem no matter what.

Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund

#187

Post by biot »

scott_s wrote: post #154
biot wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your post does not disagree with the person you're replying to. You don't need to "dress up" your comments. If you just don't say anything you wouldn't say in person, to a person you've just met, you're probably okay.

For some reason, it seemed to make sense as a reply when I posted it. In hindsight, I should have just not replied at all.

Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund

#188

Post by lowglow »

kevin wrote: post #34
rabidonrails wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kevin, I really liked this comment because my inherent assumption would be that YC - or VC's in general - would stay away from "shit shows." Is there a method or a signal that YC looks for within a "shit show" that tells you it can be fixed?

You look for grit. What evidence can you find that shows they don't just give up when things get hard? Thing is we don't find out usually until after we invest what the real problems are...so we optimize for people we want to spend a lot of time with and work on these problems/issues whatever they may be. Most founders feel imposter syndrome after they're accepted. The great thing about being part of a batch is you r…

I'm living out of a van right now in Palo Alto, after having sold everything I own to build projects that work. My worldly possessions can fit inside a single backpack. My co-founder and I are generating revenue and grinding on making sure the community loves what we're building.

My burn rate is close to 300-400/mo, less if I eat less per day. #grit

Beyond that what else is there?

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