Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 332 posts

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#61

Post by dang »

parhamn wrote: post #41
tptacek wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're entirely forthcoming about this: except for job and launch posts, YC posts aren't ranked differently, and YC company upvotes are treated no differently than anyone else's. I think it'd be hard to count how often Dan has said this. You can choose, of course, not to believe him about this (I have a hard time thinking of a person in this industry I trust more than Dan), but you can't ask him to be more forthcomi…

Sure, I also, still, feel some of the kinetics need to be explained to avoid confusion. Like the homepage doesnt make much sense to me after all these years of reading HN. As I write this there are 160 upvotes in one hour on this post and it is still #9, with many weaker posts ahead of it.

The general answer to this is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

The specific answer (about this post) is that moderators haven't touched it in any way. Twitter.com links have a mild downweight, along with many other domains that produce a lot of sensational/offtopic content (relative to HN). That includes nearly all major media, forums like reddit, etc. Other than that, all you're seeing is the regular HN algorithm at work. It's more complex than just points + time—we've tweaked it over the years to (try to) do a better job of selecting for intellectual curiosity, dampening flamewars, and so on.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#62

Post by shishy »

thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #25

Fwiw I think HN should be more forthcoming on how the ranking of yc co’s posts are ranked vs other posts. Are the ranked differently? Do the upvotes of yc members affect ranking more than other user’s upvotes?

pc is probably one of the most recognizable and respected folks in tech, the vast majority of people view him in a positive light and generally like the tone in which he comments on HN (forthcoming and open), so it's entirely possible he just gets upvoted up by a lot of readers for any of those reasons (i.e. there's a simpler explanation besides a a full-blown HN / YC conspiracy on his post rankings...)

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#63

Post by AYBABTME »

parhamn wrote: post #10

I think if you get over the drama here and implied "dirtiness", the main result is still a bit interesting. Even if you exclude the implied carteling and take everything he said with a grain of salt, the outcomes of this incentive structure are clear: once SV (i.e. the YC centered VC machine) gets into a space and has a main horse, SV can no longer incubate new innovation/competition in the space. It can also very li…

Then why did Lyft and Uber, Dropbox and Box, come from SV, from the same time period? I just pulled these from my brain with little recall, which tells me your argument probably has a lot of contradictory examples.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#64

Post by parhamn »

dang wrote: post #56
parhamn wrote: post #10

I think if you get over the drama here and implied "dirtiness", the main result is still a bit interesting. Even if you exclude the implied carteling and take everything he said with a grain of salt, the outcomes of this incentive structure are clear: once SV (i.e. the YC centered VC machine) gets into a space and has a main horse, SV can no longer incubate new innovation/competition in the space. It can also very li…

If that's the main result of the post, then it's a reductio, because YC funds competitors all the time and would never turn down an innovator for anti-competitive reasons—only because they thought it wouldn't be a good investment at that moment. Anything else would both be bad for YC's business and against its principles ( https://www.ycombinator.com/principles/ ). Of course it still happens that YC turns down good c…

I find this comment surprising. I didn't say anything too controversial. Investors regularly refuse (and it's often the morally correct thing to do) investments in competitors. It's also often in their financial incentive too. To assume any investment organization in broad does differently because of their stated principles is absurd. Most investors would comfortably say this.

> YC funds competitors all the time and would never turn down an innovator for anti-competitive reasons

While I know your intentions weren't bad, it feels disingenuous to speak so confidently about the behavior of hundreds(?) of investors/employees, regardless of the take. Also getting a seed check from YC doesn't really disprove any of this. The forces of the business immune system he's describing probably wouldn't kick in until later anyway.

To be clear I don't think any of this is abnormal behavior (or reprehensible). Regardless I stand by my bet: the successor to Airbnb & Stripe probably wont be YC backed.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#66

Post by toast0 »

parhamn wrote: post #10

I think if you get over the drama here and implied "dirtiness", the main result is still a bit interesting. Even if you exclude the implied carteling and take everything he said with a grain of salt, the outcomes of this incentive structure are clear: once SV (i.e. the YC centered VC machine) gets into a space and has a main horse, SV can no longer incubate new innovation/competition in the space. It can also very li…

Wait, I forgot which payment processor silicon valley liked? CyberCash, PayPal, Venmo (whoops), BrainTree or something, does Toast (but they're east coast, maybe not SV darlings) count? I like the name, clearly and they do process payments... Etc.

There's a ton of companies in this space, and a lot of them got funding from somewhere.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#67

Post by collectedparts »

jhchen wrote: post #54

At first https://twitter.com/theryanking/status/1485784882173255680 seemed pretty damning but if you hover over the dates of the HN posts, the title attribute shows the timestamp, and it would appear Stripe's came in a couple hours before Bolt's. Add in Lyft and the "facts" around this story really seem to fall apart.

By add in Lyft, I assume you mean the fact that Lyft is not actually a YC company? (vs, the tweets refer to Lyft as Stripe's batchmate)

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#68

Post by collectedparts »

tempsy wrote: post #34
tptacek wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a list of the Summer 2021 batch companies. You can just cmd-f "pay". https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/31/here-are-all-the-companies...

just because a startup is doing something payment related does not mean “direct competitor to Stripe” and one of the two I saw hooks into Stripe as part of the service. the other was doing something internationally and also was not directly competitive.

FWIW Bolt (at least their official corporate LinkedIn, not sure about their founder) refers to Stripe as a "partner": https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bolt-com_the-fintech-50-2021-...

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#69

Post by kaycebasques »

> Stripe and YC effectively co-run the most important media asset in Silicon Valley: Hacker News.

A few of my articles [1] have made the front page so I can weigh in on this a (tiny) bit.

> The readers know: any time Stripe comes out with a new product, it’s #1 on the site

I do believe that "the mods" have the ability to boost articles at their discretion so I would not be surprised if YC companies frequently get a boost. This is a separate admin feature from the open role posts that YC companies post (which cannot be commented on and which drop from page #1 over a fixed timeframe I think). I will have to dig for the source on that but I believe dang has publicly commented on it here. That does indeed feel somewhat shady IMO if correct (and let me be very clear that I could be incorrect here).

Edit: let me elaborate on this because I'm sure dang will see it and possibly take it the wrong way. dang, isn't there a feature where you can boost "interesting" articles? I believe it was described as "articles that are probably interesting to the HN community but have not gotten enough attention" (bad timing, etc.) Are you the only one with the permissions to do that? That feature is never used to boost YC company posts? I.e. it's only used for intellectually stimulating content where no YC-related conflict of interests is possible?

But on the other hand, if you have a huge name like Stripe (or Chrome DevTools) it really isn't as hard to make it to page #1 as the Bolt person is making it out to be. The hardest part IMO is crafting a title that succinctly summarizes how new feature X is a big deal.

> Getting a #1 ranking is INCREDIBLY difficult and generates millions of views.

Millions of views sounds like a stretch. 250K to 1M sounds more accurate to me.

[1] I wrote the Chrome DevTools docs for 3 years. DevTools docs made the front page probably 10-15 times. I also was content lead for https://web.dev for a couple years. Those docs made the front page another 10-15 times. I've also had 2 or 3 personal articles make page #1.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#70

Post by rattray »

parhamn wrote: post #64
dang wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's the main result of the post, then it's a reductio, because YC funds competitors all the time and would never turn down an innovator for anti-competitive reasons—only because they thought it wouldn't be a good investment at that moment. Anything else would both be bad for YC's business and against its principles ( https://www.ycombinator.com/principles/ ). Of course it still happens that YC turns down good c…

I find this comment surprising. I didn't say anything too controversial. Investors regularly refuse (and it's often the morally correct thing to do) investments in competitors. It's also often in their financial incentive too. To assume any investment organization in broad does differently because of their stated principles is absurd. Most investors would comfortably say this. > YC funds competitors all the time and…

YC is indeed different from VCs in this regard.

VCs generally don't fund direct competitors to those in their portfolio, which I agree with you is a good thing -- conditional on there being a lot of VCs out there (which there are).

(Btw, in case any reader is not aware, dang is employed by YC to manage HN - and YC acts differently from VCs in many respects).

Post reply on HN