Hacker News users have many diverse perspectives on technology and business. Perhaps if HN picked startups, it would pick differently than YC. Maybe different startups would be motivated to apply, if they knew that the interviewing and deciding would be done by the HN community. Interesting things might happen, or they might not. We'd have to try it and see.
I ran this by Sam and he ran it by Kevin and we all got excited, so we're going to try this as an experiment. Starting today, there's a new track for YC applications: applying directly to the Hacker News community. We'll call it "Apply HN". Note that word experiment! We'll start small and figure it out as we go. But here are the initial conditions.
YC’s Fellowship program will fund a minimum of 2 startups selected by the HN community for this summer's F3 batch. (They name their batches sequentially.) The Fellowship is the YC program that fits best here since it’s designed to be experimental and inclusive and doesn’t require people to move to the Bay Area.
All the interviewing and evaluating will be done in regular HN threads, and everyone is welcome to participate. For this summer's batch, Apply HN will accept applications starting now and ending April 27.
If you'd like to apply to the HN community for YCF funding, simply post a submission whose title begins with "Apply HN" and explain what your startup does. Hopefully community members will ask you questions and good discussion will ensue.
If you'd like to help pick which startups to fund, simply jump into any Apply HN thread that interests you. Ask questions and post comments that you think will help the community make the best decisions. These will be regular threads, with all the same voting and so on, but with one additional rule: Be Nice.
Be Nice is a stronger version of our usual rule, Be Civil. Anybody who applies to HN in public this way is putting both themselves and their baby in a super vulnerable position. We're going to rise to the occasion by being not only civil, but nice. When interviewing startups, by all means be curious and probing—but only if you can also be nice. The word "nice" originally meant "not knowing". Then later it meant "precise and careful". And now it means "kind and thoughtful". Let's put all those qualities together.
At the end of the month, we'll rank the startups and YC will fund two. The ranking will depend both on upvotes and on the quality of discussion, similar to how the ranking of stories works. We can talk about this in the comments, but to answer one question I know will come up: Upvotes are an important factor but they're too brittle to rely on exclusively; doing so would encourage the wrong kind of trying to game the system. So we're going to gauge community interest both by upvotes and comments, and in case of doubt I'll make the final call—or better, figure out a way to put the final call to the community.
That's what we're thinking so far. If it seems unstructured, that's on purpose: we don't want to bias it along the lines of how YC already operates. We want to see what the community comes up with.
Questions or suggestions? Let's discuss and refine this together.
Edit: As discussed below, we'll add a top link for these a la /ask and /show. I won't get to that till later, though, so in the meantime, use the following link to find Apply HN discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22apply%20hn%22&sort=byDate&d...
Edit 2: Here's the link describing how YCF works: https://fellowship.ycombinator.com/faq/. Read it to make sure you're eligible. It's a lot more flexible than YC Core, but there are still some restrictions.
Edit 3: There's now a ranked page of applications at https://news.ycombinator.com/applyhn, a complete list at https://news.ycombinator.com/applynew, and a random sample at https://news.ycombinator.com/applyrand.
It’s easy to form some really bad habits when you sit in a position of power to judge the potential of a person, a team, an idea and their execution—believing that you know better and focusing your time on finding weakness.
The best investors don’t spend a lot of time on what can go wrong. They already know the odds are against every startup that ever comes into existence. They already know every startup is a shit show. Those will be the reasons why all the other investors will miss out on an unpredictable opportunity. The best investors try to figure out what can go right. They dream a little with the startup and they then sell that vision back to the founders.
Remember that the big wins in startups come from the margins. For you to find what no one else could have predicted, know that it will take the shape of something that isn’t obvious.
Being nice gives you a good foundation for being open and optimistic, which is what we strive for when we read applications here at YC.
Thanks again for trying this out with us. I'm really excited about what we discover together.
Are we betting on the viability of a product or idea? Are we betting on the founders? Are we betting on the team's ability to deliver? So many questions... I can't answer any of them but I'd welcome people thinking bout loud and look forward to reading these ideas. (:
Edit: recuse not revise
What gets people tripped up is that you sometimes judge a founder indirectly by seeing how they communicate an idea, looking at their ability to deliver, and hearing about how they think about the market.
The answers to those questions are important, but we put it in the context of what does it say about the founder.
One advantage HN has is more time to think. HNers will look at a much smaller stack of applications, and won't be restricted by the brief interview format YC has.
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This should be carved in stone :)
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 realize you're not alone and then learn that shit show is actually a default state. When you learn that, you relax and focus on the resourcefulness you need to solve your problems systematically.
Be Nice is a good goal for Apply HN since it promotes civil discussion and stops the threads from devolving into semantic "lol no https u suck" that some Show HN threads tend to devolve into.
Users are not nice. They don't comment on HN or Twitter, they just stop using it without fanfare. And what determine a startup's success in the real world is if people want to use it.
Hindsight is 20/20, yes. But I do have concerns that "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 with pristine honesty and with no particular effect on the situation, except occasionally a righteous one like forcing Google to do customer service. We don't think of ourselves as being in a position of power, but that's actually an illusion, as many who've walked into a wasps' nest of critical comments and come out stung can attest.
To me one interesting social aspect of this experiment, quite separate from who gets funded, is that it unambiguously puts the HN community in a position of power—a perspective that we're not accustomed to, and which requires developing different habits (edit: I mean a higher standard of conduct). Maybe those habits will end up translating to the community as a whole (yay!) Or maybe they won't show up at all (boo!)—but at least we can all keep reminding each other to be nicer in these threads.
The former puts the applicant on the defensive whereas the latter encourages discussion.
And, unfortunately, I have work to do and a headache, so I am not likely to be able to improve on either of their explanations. But you simply can't get there from here in terms of building something if all people do is tear it down.
But I welcome this experiment if only in hopes that it sets a social precedent and teaches more people here how to communicate better. Because if you think being nice involves not pointing out legitimate flaws, you really have a lot to learn. It actually isn't nice at all to let people keep shooting themselves in the foot, but it is possible to point out the connection between aiming the gun down while cleaning it while loaded and the holes that keep showing up in their feet without saying "God, what a fucking idiot! Do I even need to TELL you how stupid that is???" Yeah, when it comes to ideas, you often do need to tell people that because metaphorically shooting yourself in the foot isn't anywhere near as obvious to most people as literally shooting yourself in the foot.
1. stick to "just the facts", eg, "lack of https support will expose your users to security vulnerabilities"
2. list potential solutions if possible
Could someone from YC please explain what's going on here?
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Quick poll for the community here: I run Hacker News Daily (http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/) which many people know about; but also Ask HN Weekly (http://www.daemonology.net/hn-weekly-ask/) and Show HN Weekly (http://www.daemonology.net/hn-weekly-show/). In each case the methodology is the same: The 10 highest-scoring items which (a) appeared on relevant "front page" in the day/week in question, (b) and haven't appeared on a previous Daily/Weekly.
Would people be interested in having an "Apply HN Weekly" set up along similar lines? It's straightforward for me to copy the scripts and edit a few paths (once the HN link appears) but there's no point if nobody would want to read it.
EDIT: I'm seeing lots of upvotes to this comment, which I'm going to assume is an indication that people would like to see me implement this. If you were upvoting simply because you wanted to make more people aware that I had a really lousy idea, please add a comment to disambiguate.
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 get priceless feedback. This happens often here, even unintentionally sometimes. This also poses a risk that a lot of startups would not be 100% honest in one way or another to minimize bashing. This is commonplace on Reddit. But this is not Reddit and any founder cannot forever escape people here. This is an ecosystem forum which is extremely civil in Show HN (with a few exceptions) but might not be so when competing for a resource -- the 2 YCF spots. Maybe Reddit is the way it is because everyone is competing for points.
3. Publicly applying for funding might step on private financing laws of several states and nations? It might also be against some by-laws. Would this constitute a public offer?
Maybe this could be helped better by doing one or more of these:
1. Apply HN posts should not make it to homepage and should be a separate section.
2. The heuristic should not be known publicly of what YC partners are looking for.
3. Companies should still be required to fill a YC app before posting. Then it's a public contest rather than a public offer to sell shares.
This would be interesting for sure!
That's definitely not to say that there won't be new forms of gaming that we haven't seen before and don't know how to combat. It's a risk. We can mitigate that risk by emphasizing the quality of discussion in the threads. Experience has taught that genuine community interest is pretty recognizable. If a post gets lots of upvotes, but little community interest, or the interest doesn't seem genuine, HN users will notice, as will we. That should provide a measure of self-correction, and beyond that, we'll see what happens. If you think you notice fakery, hn@ycombinator.com is the place to let us know.
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'
IHMO, Keeping it in a separate section, looks definitely the right approach.
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 reward for doing so.
Product Hunt, for example, thrives on "how can I get exposure for my startup submission outside of the intrinsic quality of the startup itself?" and it would be an improper fit for HN.
That's how the ranking of HN stories works now. It's a combination of upvotes and human curation by users (e.g. flagging) and moderators.
So there's going to be some combination of technical and non-technical factors. How exactly will that work? We don't know yet. Let's see what happens and figure it out together. That's part of the experiment: we'll figure it out in the open and adapt to feedback. But let's wait until we have some data to look at.
FWIW, my experience with HN is that genuine community interest is relatively easy to recognize.
Another thing to watch would be the mean user karma of all votes. A bunch of low-karma vote stuffing would actually bring a post down.
If you can get a ton of massive karma users to upvote and game this, maybe you should just get in by default?
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!).
High uncertainty is actually good. That's what makes experiments valuable - they reduce the uncertainty and thereby help us better understand something. In this case that "something" is the HN application process.
So even if this process has potential problems, the experiment is still worth it.
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 on which one they think is better. Elo will then be added/subtracted with normal conditions based on the vote. This system would very quickly and accurately identify the best applications. I've seen this done before for other things and it's been proven to be very effective and prevent almost any sort of bias.
Is there a name for this kind of voting process?
Each potential implementation has slightly better/worse corner cases, but the general quality of the ranking should still be extremely accurate regardless of the particular implementation. It takes surprisingly few comparisons for items to find their appropriate ranks.
I was invited to review applications to CORFO (the government program behind Startup Chile), and since they crowdsource reviews between unrelated startup founders, they have a "points" system to determine whether submissions were reasonably graded (they look for big differences between graders).
Your system sounds better :) , but I think they want to promote individual discussion of submissions too.
The system doesn't need to stop individual discussion, you should be allowed to post responses to the applications as your are reviewing them to vote on. You should also be allowed to directly view and comment on an application by going to it directly as long as you aren't allowed to do anything that affects its rating.
http://pastebin.com/65WGmuyN
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.
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 them, and what sort of sensitivity/specificity, dynamic range, etc. do you expect your instrumentation to provide? What is the duration/endpoints of the experiment? Does the experimental design support the objective, and with what power does the experiment have to inform?
I think that the other part of my reaction is that, as an experimental scientist, I am specifically trained against doing something so unstructured. Practical considerations like safety and budgetary waste aside, I am the person I trust least: it's very easy to fool oneself about the significance of a result with an ongoing experiment that one is conducting. Experimental discipline, like planning ahead (and preregistration) and blinding and good controls, serve to promote objectivity and help reduce bias.
I have no doubt that this experiment would produce "interesting things". I am very skeptical that, as presented, you would know why it produced interesting things.
Of course, I'm just a dog on the internet. Best of luck!
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.
Random sorting is a good idea. We'll think about that.
I think we'll actually learn more during this experiment with less rules on format up front.
This problem happens to me so much I just ignore most Show HN's. I open a mainstream website to find who they are, what problems they solve, their solutions in a high-level way, and datasheets or whatever giving technical specifics. Many Show HN's here are one page of stuff that I read and read all the way to the bottom before I even begin to grasp what the hell they're doing.
That could just be due to them working in a specialized niche with its jargon. Yet, I have an intuitive feeling that it's often a problem with the presentation because they're usually intending to reach (a) current, jaron-knowing users of specific tech and (b) future users who know the concepts or needs but not that specific tech & jargon yet. So, at least a few sentences or a paragraph for people in (b) might be helpful. And at the top to save time.
YC partners complain about this all the time too.
> not a single one has mentioned how it's a business and how they will make money
I hope you asked them!
I think the equalitarian thing to do would be to encourage apply hn's to be as self contained as possible to avoid biasing on the quality of the landing page or video or whatever else would profit from the exposure