181–190 of 332 posts
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Actually you should use this https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=bolt.com Not much difference, I think 1 more and many dead/flagged
Why so many [dead]?
The others were job ads, and job ads aren't allowed to be regular submissions. (This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.)
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The Twitter thread and OP didn't say anything about YC investing in companies who do similar things. The "accusation" is that YC discourages other VCs from investing into competitors that YC isn't part of (for whatever reason).
I was responding to the claim in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30067382 that YC "won't be able to entertain a wave of innovators".
Not agreeing or disagreeing with this, just trying to point out this argument :-)
I was at Stripe a few years back and I don't remember Bolt coming up as a competitor, ever. Stripe was more worried about Paypal and Adyen. One thing to keep in mind - all companies at this size have a corp dev function. Over the past decade, they've likely spoken to several hundred companies and patrick has probably personally spoken to over 100 about an acquisition and looked at some of their data. Anyone who looks…
The longer version is going to involve a tedious barrage of links, but I want this to be something that people can check for themselves if they care to.
Quoting from https://twitter.com/theryanking/status/1485784877060349953 and https://twitter.com/theryanking/status/1485784882173255680:
> Both had organically made it up to #1 on Hacker News with 100s of upvotes
Their first post, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16215092, made it to #2 (http://hnrankings.info/16215092/) and got 171 upvotes. The second, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16870692, made it to #4 (http://hnrankings.info/16870692/) and got 70 upvotes.
> On April 18, 2018, we posted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16870692 [...] An ~hour later, this showed up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869290. Ours disappeared.
Stripe's post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869290) was submitted at 17:41 UTC, and Bolt's post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16870692) was submitted over 2 hours later, at 20:08 UTC. If you want external evidence for that, look at the hnrankings.info pages for the two posts (Stripe: http://hnrankings.info/16869290/, Bolt: http://hnrankings.info/16870692/). You'll see that they first pick up Stripe's post on the front page at 17:45 and Bolt's at 20:30. You'll also see that Stripe's post made it to #2, not #1 as he claims.
Here's the HN front page at 19:09 that day: https://web.archive.org/web/20180418190904/https://news.ycom.... Stripe's post is already at #2. Bolt's hasn't been submitted yet. The first snapshot with Bolt on the front page is at 20:35: https://web.archive.org/web/20180418203508/https://news.ycom.... By 21:21, Bolt's briefly makes it higher than Stripe's: https://web.archive.org/web/20180418212112/https://news.ycom....
> Ours disappeared
Bolt's post fell in rank because it was flagged by users—that is the drop you can see in http://hnrankings.info/16870692/ and in this snapshot by 21:21: https://web.archive.org/web/20180418222105/https://news.ycom....
I don't know why users flagged it. (Edit: generally, though, if you want to figure this out, the best place to look is in the comments. The top comment in the Bolt thread is complaining about non-transparent, enterprise-style pricing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16871886, which is a classic HN complaint. The same complaints had appeared in their earlier thread, for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16215604 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16215578. We actually downweighted both of those complaints. That's standard HN moderation when indignant comments are stuck at the top of a thread.)
None of the flags came from YC founders or staff. (Edit: I looked into whether it might have been Stripe people doing the flagging here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070445.) HN moderators did not make the post fall in rank, or moderate the post at all. I don't think I'd ever heard of Bolt before today.
The article no longer exists on bolt.com, but if you want to compare it to the stripe.com article, the articles are here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180418201841/https://blog.bolt...
https://web.archive.org/web/20180418171628/https://stripe.co...
His insinuations about HN are false too. He's clearly insinuating that we use insider powers to favor stripe.com submissions with special treatment on HN. That's precisely what we don't do.
Stripe succeeded on HN because they were favored by the community for many years. They are one of a small number of startups who have reached what you could call 'community darling' status on HN. It's true that this is incredibly hard to do. Another startup that managed it, around the same time, was Cloudflare (not a YC startup). Startups achieve this by doing three things: producing products that the community considers good, producing articles that the community finds interesting, and mastering the art of interacting with the community. You need all three.
I wish more startups would achieve this, YC or not. Whenever I run across one that's trying to succeed on HN, I try to help them do so (YC or not)—why? because it makes HN better if the community finds things it loves here. Among the startups of today, I can think of only two offhand who are showing signs of maybe reaching darling status—fly.io (YC), and Tailscale (not YC).
All 4 of the startups I've mentioned have the advantage that they were|are targeting programmers, which gives them a fast track to rapport with this community—sort of a ladder in the snakes-and-ladders game. However, that's not a sufficient condition for getting a satisfying click with the community, and it isn't required either. The real problem is that so much of the content that startups produce to try to interest this community just isn't interesting enough (to this community), and often gives off inadvertent signals of being uninteresting—things like seeming too enterprisey, or too slick in the marketing department.
If the bolt.com people had asked us for help, I would have been just as happy to help them as anybody else. I would have told them that the opening of their article (https://web.archive.org/web/20180418201841/https://blog.bolt...) was too enterprisey to appeal to HN. The language is drawn from ecommerce retailing, which makes sense given the little bit we've all learned about Bolt today, but is the kind of thing that comes across as boring on HN. The references to Gartner and Experian feel like reading an enterprise whitepaper, which detracts from credibility with the HN audience.
This is the sort of thing I've told countless startups over the years. It's dismayingly difficult to express this information in a way that people can actually absorb, but I have a set of notes that I've sent to many startups in this position, which I plan to turn into an essay about how to write for HN. if anyone wants a copy, email hn@ycombinator.com and I'll be happy to send it to you.
I had a bunch of other things I wanted to say here, but mercifully, I've forgotten them.
Possible this is just a marketing piece to generate discussion? Bolt the david vs Stripe/YC the goliath of SV, reconciling traditional startup pains to a monopoly but they made it anyway... Some interesting points though, particularly the one where stripe took investment from many vcs in order to block other companies... that could've been to get access to existing networks and sell to those companies too. But I coul…
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>Anything else would both be bad for YC's business and against its principles Come on. It's like saying crime won't happen because it's illegal.
I think the word 'principles' is leading to a bit of confusion here. I used that word because I was referencing https://www.ycombinator.com/principles , but I don't mean moral precepts, I mean YC's investment theses. These, for example: " Y Combinator’s goal is to cause there to be more startups, by helping founders to start them. " " YC’s value is the number of startups we help times how much we help them. " The poi…
I'm having a hard time parsing why he would post this. Did he think he'd get customers? I doubt it. Investors? They already raised hundreds of millions. To me it seems like the only thing he's going to get out of this is twitter followers. But at what cost? Are twitter followers that valuable? Why do some CEOs spend so much time growing their twitter audiences? Do they do it for recruiting? Is this really the best wa…
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Creating a cartel is "bad for business"? Are you sure about that?
Turning down good deals is bad for a startup investment business, yes. In fact it's the worst mistake such a business can make. This observation is so commonplace that it's long been a cliché.
This might not add much to this discussion in particular, but I find it interesting how much I want the big billion dollar company to be evil. This guys post and the other Stripe hate really draw me in and then of course lots of the arguments fall apart on further inspection. Is that a natural thing? Maybe a sort of robin hood feeling, like we're sticking it to the big bad rich guys? I do still have some negative fee…