Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund

[dang]

Here at HN HQ we've been wondering: if Hacker News could fund startups, what startups would it fund?

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.

[kevin]

Hey everyone! I manage and run the Fellowship program at YC. I just want to build on top of what Dan wrote about being nice. We’re not asking you to do this because we think it’s good manners. We actually believe it’s the right way to think and act like the best investors.

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.

[newjersey]

As much as I'd love to hold power over other mortals, I'll have to recuse myself here. I publicly made fun of Drew Houston and gang when they started and again when they reportedly rejected Apple's advances. Without a crystal ball, it just feels like we're just betting here.

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

[petrbela]

> 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.

This should be carved in stone :)

[rabidonrails]

Kevin, I really liked this comment because my inherent assumption would be that YC - or VC's in general - would stay away from "shit shows." Is there a method or a signal that YC looks for within a "shit show" that tells you it can be fixed?

[minimaxir]

For the sake of discussion, I'll offer a counterargument.

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.

[pkfrank]

Hi Kevin, we applied through the conventional application process for S2016 - would there be any merit to starting an "Apply HN" thread as a supplement and opportunity for public discussion?

[bmenzalji]

Thanks for the kind words Kevin - looking forward to hearing back from YC regarding our application! I'm a believer in revolutionizing live events!

[chroem-]

I'm somewhat concerned that, as far as I can tell, my application (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11442038) seems to be unlisted on the main index.

Could someone from YC please explain what's going on here?

[cperciva]

we're already seeing quite a few Apply HNs, so we'll add a link for those a la /ask and /show

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.

[elliotec]

Speaking for myself, I would never ever look at that. I did upvote you though.

[Mz]

I upvoted to bookmark the comment. I was not aware of these services and might want to come back to them at some point. Though, you know, maybe upvoting won't actually help me find it. But I seem to lose lots of things online, no matter how I try to mark it. Que sera sera.

[arihant]

I 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 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!

[dang]

We've put a ton of work into HN's anti-gaming software. There's no piece of code we've worked harder on. We also have a ton of experience looking at voting data. That's one advantage of keeping this process close to how HN normally works: that software and experience will apply here.

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, [email protected] is the place to let us know.

[giis]

> 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.

[minimaxir]

Ranking 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 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.

[dang]

I think we're on the same page to some extent. What I meant by 'ranking by comments' is that we want the ranking to depend on the quality of the discussion. That's the one thing that can't be faked.

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.

[millisecond]

B is tough. Would be interesting to see the sum of the karma of all users who upvote a single one.

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?

[technotony]

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!).

[tryitnow]

There's a lot of uncertainty here. Maybe upvote/comments ranking will be a good thing, maybe it will be a bad ting.

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.

[schwarrrtz]

Maybe using upvotes divided by age as a metric would help with the first problem... although I suspect the distribution of upvotes over time is some kind of exponential decay... hrm.

[zaguios]

I 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 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.

[Kapow]

Would this be implemented as only showing pairs within a certain threshold of difference, or would it choose an application purely at random and then the application with the closest score (or even 50/50 the next highest or next lowest)? The former seems like it could lead to cases where applications end up in a void between clusters and stop appearing in votes, preventing late voters from giving an opinion on them.

Is there a name for this kind of voting process?

[GFischer]

Interesting, I was also going to suggest some kind of alternative review system.

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.

[dang]

That's pretty interesting. Is this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system?

[pbnjay]

I think in addition to a win/loss/draw judgement, it would be good to require a comment (and hence username) for each application. That would at the least give a way to trace if the Elo ratings are being gamed or users are biased.

[tclmeelmo]

To be frank, my first reaction on reading this idea was negative.

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!

[dang]

Oh agreed, it's definitely not an experiment by any research standard. In that sense we're using the word metaphorically. But there's a place for ad hoc trial-and-error, and it's common to call that 'experimental' in colloquial English. YC has done such things in the past, e.g. for a batch or two it was possible to apply with just an idea. Nothing interesting came of that—other than that nothing interesting came of it—so it got phased out. This is an 'experiment' in the way that was.

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.

[pbnjay]

Will there be a new toplink for "Apply HN" submissions? I think random sorting on that page would be a good idea to encourage all submissions get an opportunity for discussion.

[6thSigma]

I think a mini application with a few questions from the normal YC app as a comment would be helpful. I see a ton of Show HNs in which I have no idea what the product does (either because the website copy is vague/confusing or because I don't know the market). Having a comment template or something reviewers can look at without have to ask the same questions in every thread would be great.

[kevin]

One of the reasons we're trying this is to question a lot of our own assumptions about the best way to find a great startup. Best practices will probably arise over time on how to best apply through HN, but I'd rather we let ourselves be open to surprising ways to present a startup.

I think we'll actually learn more during this experiment with less rules on format up front.

[robinwarren]

I suppose you could look at the quality of the application (without any guidelines being set) as part of how you'd like to select companies/founders? So those who are capable communicators and can clearly explain what their business does (or will do) stand out vs those who can't.

[nickpsecurity]

"I see a ton of Show HNs in which I have no idea what the product does (either because the website copy is vague/confusing or because I don't know the market). "

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.

[jay_kyburz]

Yes, I came back to this thread to say I'm surprised how difficult it is to understand what it is they want to make. Also, I have read at least half a dozen and not a single one has mentioned how it's a business and how they will make money.

[euroclydon]

Yes, and a word count limitation for the original post!

[lettergram]

About a year ago I ran a series of tests where I continuously posted the same 15-20 articles tracking the number of up votes within the first 10-15 minutes.

It turns out it was essentially random, and although every one of the posts were decent enough to make it to the front page 2 or 3 times sometimes it received zero votes, sometimes 10.

It seems somewhat unfair to use the standard ranking system with this being the case, since it's essentially random. I think there would need to be a way to randomly show them to users and have users vote. Similar to /r/starups[1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/

BTW I eventually received an email from the YC staff, thank you for not banning me :) No one should do this.

[hoodoof]

Truth is, I'd start writing code to copy any idea that I was totally blown away by, and I don't need any funding to start doing that.

Putting your idea right there in front of some pretty fast moving programmers has to be something people would think twice about.

Having said that, it's hard to imagine an idea being sufficiently compelling to start writing code to implement it immediately. The only ideas that really blow me away are my own and they usually turn out to be silly anyway, after I've spent six months building them to crickets.

I don't think ideas are worth nothing by the way. Just ask the Facebook twins.

[gizmo]

There just aren't that many people out there who are willing and capable of doing the hard work it takes to bring something --anything-- to the point where it usable. Those who are have their own projects already, which they won't abandon based on a forum post. And if they do, they're going to abandon this new project the moment they read about an even cooler idea.

Besides, ideas grow and take on a life of their own as you work on them. By the time your interpretation of the idea takes shape it's going to be distinctly different from the original idea that inspired you.

The only way to keep people from stealing your ideas is by never talking to anybody about them. That's surely the worst of all options.

You can literally try to clone any YC company after demo day. All the startups get covered on techcrunch making their ideas public. Just pick the one you like best and open your favorite editor. They only got a 6 months head start, so what's stopping you?

[grey-area]

Truth is, I'd start writing code to copy any idea that I was totally blown away by, and I don't need any funding to start doing that.

Have you ever actually done this? If so what was the result? Did you then spend the several years of hard work it typically takes to make a great idea into a successful idea?

What people mean when they say ideas are worth nothing is that a good idea is worth nothing without execution, and the effort required to execute and develop it is usually 1000x that to have the initial idea.

[dsugarman]

I see a lot of 'entrepreneurs' who spend their time getting their fb friends to vote for them in local startup pitch competitions, they don't actually spend any time making a company, but are very effective at getting votes.

The HN community might just be a better barometer, hope to see this experiment work out and bring attention to worthy and unnoticed startups.

[davidw]

Thought: in the original Wisdom of Crowds book, an important point was that people's selections need to be independent of one another, otherwise you get bandwagon/cascade effects. I don't know how that could be made to factor in to things.

[dmritard96]

One 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. Obviously you have other submission processes but seems like perhaps something to consider, my 2 cents.

[jdp23]

Interesting idea, and kudos to you for kicking off the discussions to refine the approach - and for the "be nice" rule, which I think is very important here.

A question: What are the situations where you think it will benefit people more to go the open route than applying directly?

One way of thinking about it is

advantages of "Apply HN": getting significant calibration and feedback on an idea that improves it whether or not it is selected, a chance for a partial team to begin discussions with other potential co-founders, and the (small) chance of having an idea selected because of overwhelming support when it wouldn't have been chosen through the normal process

disadvantage: exposing the idea in a very early state to thousands of smart motivated people who are then have the time to come up with better variations on it

Obviously the tradeoffs are different for different teams and ideas ... and there certainly might be some advantages and disadvantages I missed. In any case, I'm curious about who you think might benefit most from this.

[aarkay]

Just read through a bunch of Apply HN's (~90) and realized how important it is for startups to clearly tell what their company does in the first sentence.

Even though many of the YC partners have mentioned the importance of this, I could feel the pain of reading through the first paragraph and not being able to picture anything about the company in my head. Might be a good strategy to stick in a summary of your startup in the apply hn corpus and ask close friends to see if they understand and get excited by the idea before applying to YC.

Another thing I noticed was how biased I was towards ideas which addressed problems I have had. So hopefully Apply HN will help YC look into companies which are catering to completely different industries and sets of problems which they haven't experienced.

This is a great experiment !

[pcmaffey]

The best part of this is YC's commitment to subverting their bias.

Whether successful or not, you guys (and your machines?) will learn something valuable about your process vs. the wisdom of crowds. Really commend your approach to experimentation.

[benjamincburns]

@dang: Apologies if this has been said elsewhere, and hopefully it doesn't get lost in the noise.

If upvotes are the most important metric, then vote counts should be hidden to viewers at least prior to their voting. This prevents the situation we have here with news articles where an initial small/fast scurry of upvotes is the only way to capture the attention of the larger audience. In this situation the first few votes likely have far more influence than they should.

[rmason]

If I was to guess I'd say HN readers would be more impressed with innovative technology than how the company actually would make money.

I would be wary however of learning very much with a one time experiment with only two funded companies. That would be similar to giving a prospective angel investor the advice to invest in two companies in the next thirty days and then no more.

[vonklaus]

Dang, this is awesome!

I think it would be really cool if you did the experiment blind. E.g the startup applys to YC, if they want to participate they also do HN. you have your interview make what would be your decision, then do the HN piece. that way you can gauge the delta between how the community thinks & how you would've decided without our input.

Either way, this is pretty great idea. As you flesh it out a more, an in depth write up would be great!

[nlh]

Well I for one think this is also a super cool idea. Agree with what many have said re: gaming -- just be particularly aware that people will try to figure out how to game this.

But I'd emphasize the qualitative side of the evaluation process -- it should be based on a somewhat opaque mix of upvotes, thoroughness of discussion, and thoughtfulness of answers.

I'd almost treat the various 'Apply HN' threads as open source interviews. Upvoted and the like should be a ROUGH filter, but I'd hope that the YC partners will look at the answers in the threads as a crowdsourced interview and select on the merits more than anything else.

Anyway, excited to see how this experiment plays out.

[dang]

> mix of upvotes, thoroughness of discussion, and thoughtfulness of answers

Yes! I'm glad to see someone arriving at the same basic vector that we did.