Comment by jdp23 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdp23 | Hacker News Reader

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.

Honestly, we don't really know. We have very few hypotheses around this idea. We're just insanely curious to see what will happen. As far as the disadvantage you mention, that happens when you launch. That happens when you start getting press. That happens when you announce a large funding round. That happens when you're doing well.

In our experience, startups are far more likely to die by suicide than by homicide. Iteration is the only practice to greatness that we've ever seen and you can't do that well without talking about your idea to others. In a vacuum, you can only go so far.

My advice is similar to how we're approaching this experiment: don't over think it.

Thanks for the responses. True, that's what happens in all of those situations, but in the YC Fellowship you call out that they're for people "very early in the process". So the tradeoffs may be different.

I agree. Even if someone was to take my idea and start working on it concurrently, I as the originator of the idea have an inherent advantage.

If the founders are resilient and resourceful, then the strength of their idea is more decisive than competition in determining success.

"startups are far more likely to die by suicide than by homicide"

This is a very interesting quote.

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

No idea! But you can always do both. It would be interesting if HN picked fundamentally different startups than YC does. That's really the genesis of the idea, as I mentioned above.

It's not out of the question that getting picked by HN could actually help a startup succeed, since the community might naturally root for it in the market. For some startups, that might affect the outcome. But I'm just speculating.

Another interesting thing to datamine might be number of comments positive/negative about certain companies followed by the results. Certain people will be accurate more often than not, maybe in general or certain niches. Then, new ideas receiving comments can be scanned to see if any of those people are making similar points. Might become one factor among others in the VC scoring process for what gets funded.

One useful outcome is to vastly boost your chances of finding similar/identical startup/product/company/service/OS project already in existence.

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