Cindy Wu and Experiment.com (YC W13) • Hacker News Board

Re: Cindy Wu and Experiment.com (YC W13)

#21

Post by dluan » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 2:54 AM UTC

reasonattlm wrote: post #18

Experiment.com falls into an awkward area for my fundraising efforts for longevity science projects. The community I raise from has been funding a few n*$10k scientific projects every year or so for a decade now, and the yearly fundraiser I cheerlead brought in $150k last year, and will hopefully do as well this year (halfway there). We're growing slowly in reach, but would greatly benefit from a Kickstarter-like thi…

Eh, I guess I don't mind. Our lever on the chicken-egg problem is that we'll always go out to find the best and most impactful science, and this type of science will always be funded because this type of science is always growing. We'd rather have 1000 $1k projects than 1 $1M project. The halo of small groups is what will bring meaningful scientific results. Caveat to all of this is that there is one project right now that's so far raised $1.55M (http://experiment.com/curebatten) for orphan disease research.

Researchers who use Indiegogo are only using it because 1) they are locked-in by their institutions (a small number of universities coerce their faculty like this) or 2) they can't yet use Experiment because they are outside of the US.

Re: Cindy Wu and Experiment.com (YC W13)

#22

Post by joshu » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 3:09 AM UTC

Silly summary; the talk isn't the thing that raised the money.

(I am an investor in Experiment.com)

Re: Cindy Wu and Experiment.com (YC W13)

#23

Post by oldmanjay » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 3:45 AM UTC

tonydiv wrote: post #5

To tie a funding round to nothing more than a "spirited 3-minute speech" is silly. If I had to guess, Cindy is a fearless founder who has been working hard for a long time to achieve her vision. This article's title makes it sound like it's as easy as skipping your Starbucks run to found a company and raise $1M+.

In the quest to inspire, one may find that fudging details makes for a more compelling narrative.

Re: Cindy Wu and Experiment.com (YC W13)

#24

Post by ambicapter » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 3:58 AM UTC

reasonattlm wrote: post #18

Experiment.com falls into an awkward area for my fundraising efforts for longevity science projects. The community I raise from has been funding a few n*$10k scientific projects every year or so for a decade now, and the yearly fundraiser I cheerlead brought in $150k last year, and will hopefully do as well this year (halfway there). We're growing slowly in reach, but would greatly benefit from a Kickstarter-like thi…

Come to think of it, I don't really think kickstarter or indiegogo provide any sort of broadening of possible audience, as you put it. I mean, I don't think people scan kickstarter's front page looking for things to throw their money at, its generally up to the project managers to publicize, and then kickstarter provides the communication infrastructure once you have that audience pulled in.

Re: Cindy Wu and Experiment.com (YC W13)

#25

Post by devanti » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 4:32 AM UTC

It seems they used to have more employees and 2 other co-founders. Wonder what happened

Re: Cindy Wu and Experiment.com (YC W13)

#26

Post by teej » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 4:42 AM UTC

joshu wrote: post #22

Silly summary; the talk isn't the thing that raised the money. (I am an investor in Experiment.com)

The world wants to belive that YC works like Shark Tank.

Re: Cindy Wu and Experiment.com (YC W13)

#27

Post by bloaf » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 4:50 AM UTC

trevyn wrote: post #14

desdiv wrote: post #10

I shudder to imagine how much the experiment.com domain must have cost.

$54k :) http://priceonomics.com/how-microryza-acquired-the-domain-ex...

Meanwhile, GivingTo.Science is sitting at $75

Is there a reason people would want to avoid newer domains like .science?

Re: Cindy Wu and Experiment.com (YC W13)

#28

Post by jonathankoren » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 6:44 AM UTC

bloaf wrote: post #27

trevyn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$54k :) http://priceonomics.com/how-microryza-acquired-the-domain-ex...

Meanwhile, GivingTo.Science is sitting at $75 Is there a reason people would want to avoid newer domains like .science?

Branding. .com is the top-domain. It's synonymous with Internet companies. Without a traditional TLD, your domain doesn't even look like a domain. Instead it look s like a bunch of random.words.smashed.into.one. (Which coincidentally, is a valid domain.)

Re: Cindy Wu and Experiment.com (YC W13)

#29

Post by jacques_chester » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 7:21 AM UTC

danieltillett wrote: post #19

What we really need to find a way to support long-term, high risk projects driven by young scientists with breakthrough ideas. At the moment all scientists have to live from grant to grant which makes it near impossible to go after the really risky projects. If you try a difficult project and fail then you are out of a job. We also, because of the wonderful system of peer review, pretty much only give grants to old e…

> What we really need to find a way to support long-term, high risk projects driven by young scientists with breakthrough ideas.

Fellowships typically fill the roll of paying for long-term, high risk research.

If it needs to be weighted away from established researchers, make it a lottery.

Current funding models are optimised for convergence on leading hypotheses. A lottery would increase coverage.

Re: Cindy Wu and Experiment.com (YC W13)

#30

Post by danieltillett » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 7:35 AM UTC

jacques_chester wrote: post #29

danieltillett wrote: post #19

What we really need to find a way to support long-term, high risk projects driven by young scientists with breakthrough ideas. At the moment all scientists have to live from grant to grant which makes it near impossible to go after the really risky projects. If you try a difficult project and fail then you are out of a job. We also, because of the wonderful system of peer review, pretty much only give grants to old e…

> What we really need to find a way to support long-term, high risk projects driven by young scientists with breakthrough ideas. Fellowships typically fill the roll of paying for long-term, high risk research. If it needs to be weighted away from established researchers, make it a lottery. Current funding models are optimised for convergence on leading hypotheses. A lottery would increase coverage.

Having a lottery is a good idea and one I support for grants in general. The grant review process should be simply "is this idea viable and worthy of funding - yes or no”. If yes put it into the lottery and fund as many good grants as you have resources. Peer review works well for this type of sorting, but it is terrible for trying to pick a top 10% idea from a top 15% idea. It just isn’t possible for even the best scientists to be able to do this consistently.

The problem with fellowships is that the longest I know of only go for 5 years and most of the junior ones are only for 3 years. This is just not long enough to take the chance on failure.

If you want to encourage young talented people to tackle really hard and high risk problems you need to provide funding for at least 10 years.

I would go as far as adding a restriction that recipients of these high risk fellowships can’t publish in anything but the absolutely top tier journals (Nature, Science, Cell, etc) for the first 7 years so they don’t get distracted from the high risk work that other scientists can’t afford to do.