How much will the YC fund be normally? Will someone be concerned to disclose the product he/she is building here when stealth mode is preferred?
Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund
231–240 of 300 posts
Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund
#232One concern I could see is around disclosing the idea. I know, I know, idea.pre_exectution_worth = 0, idea.post_execution_worth = $, but I have to think that some of the most interesting applications to YC or any other accelerator are at least partially executed hence giving out their intent, or some of the sexy secret sauce which might help them gain a favorable ranking is pitted against a desire to remain secretive…
With the caveat that there are exceptions to any rule (and that this is also just my opinion), when it comes to a startup:
Team > execution >> idea
I'd also expect that the applications through hn that do well will have some sort of prototype or proof of concept. I guess we'll see!
Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund
#233Forgive me if this comment doesn't belong here: I wanted to say that I enjoy reading YC. While I'm not exactly sure what all HN or YC are about, and some of the topics are over my, I have learned some interesting things. It's awesome intelectual the exchanges can be. And at this moment I find the concept of being nice refreshing in an online forum. Anyhow good look with this startup idea. I'm sure some good stuff will surface and everyone will benefit.
Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund
#234I 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…
That's pretty interesting. Is this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system ?
Yep, implementation is fairly simple. I find the wikipedia article to be hard to follow so I'll give an example here to simplify it. Let's say the applications you want to compare have an elo of 1200 and 1600 respectively. Let's also use a kFactor of 20 (This determines how fast the elos will change based on a single comparison and can be modified to your liking).
This example is for two applications fairly far apart in elo, if each application had an elo of 1200 then one would increase by 10 and the other would decrease by 10.
Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund
#235Ranking by upvotes/comments seems highly problematic, even with HN's antibrigade features. A) There are many external factors that can implicitly cap the number of upvotes/comments. (time submitted, amount of competition, etc.) HN has repost rules to alleviate this problem: would Apply HN posts be able to repost too? B) Not to mention that it encourages sockpuppet voting/commenting, especially since there is a high r…
Everyone seems very worried about entrepreneurs ‘gaming’ the system and it somehow not being fair. Ability to game the system might however be correlated with success at building a company. I don’t know if this is true or not but top quality investors are probably open to the possibility: I know all other things being equal I’d rather invest in someone able to mobilize upvotes/their community than someone who can’t do that as that's correlated with ability to generate inbound traffic/attention.
More interesting to me though with all this is what it say’s about the future of scaling YC. YC’s mission is to enable innovation, and funding more startups hopefully leads to more innovation. The full YC program, already spread across two demo days, is probably close to the limits of how many startups can be funded in one go. The Fellowship, by being virtual, is much more scalable but one of the key bottlenecks is always going to be reviewing applications – this experiment could help remove that bottleneck. (another bottleneck I see is office hours, but getting sci-fi for a moment maybe YC research can develop a chatbot for that one day!).
Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund
#236OK, I'll be the one asking this question:
Are you planning on compensating the people who participate in this experiment in any way.
Here's the point: YC will be receiving a massive amount of help in filtering and vetting dozens or hundreds of potential companies to fund. Once funded, they might fail but they can also be huge successes. YC stands to make millions, tens or hundreds of millions (or better if the starts align).
So, you got a bunch of smart people to use their time and intellect to act as filters for your investment. What do they get in return?
The fair approach would be to give them some ownership. Even a single share would have meaning.
Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund
#237Zippy self driving meal delivery robots, in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11444797
Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You can always set 'delay' in your profile to between 1 and 10 minutes to give yourself some editing time. I had always seen this, but never actually looked into what it did. For someone like me who typically makes a litany of edits immediately after posting, this is revelatory. Thanks! For whatever reason, the textbox just isn't as good of a preview when compared to viewing the actual post.
> For whatever reason, the textbox just isn't as good of a preview when compared to viewing the actual post. I know. Good lord do I know.
Not to get in the weeds too far, but I obsessively do this too. Have you tried CSS to make the input box look more like the final comment? I'd always assumed the current style was intentional and it's hard to say if it'd be a good idea, but just throwing it out there to see if it sticks. I know HN values its scrappy design.
I would be supremely interested (as a victim of this really aggravating compulsion myself) in an A/B on your end, to see whether people do this less if the box is visually very close to the final product. My gut says yes, and it'd be useful data for lots of designers. (Anybody reading that's tried it?)
Something unconscious about the flow of paragraphs, color, length of my lines, something drives me back to editing religiously until the software no longer lets me, on any site. It actually bothers me and I've already done it twice on this comment. (Make that five times.)
Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund
#239I 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…
> Apply HN posts should not make it to homepage and should be a separate section
IHMO, Keeping it in a separate section, looks definitely the right approach.
Re: Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund
#240This is retarded