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You know, it is ironic that the 1 industry funding innovation (venture capital) is the 1 sorely lacking any innovation at all. It's always just the case of form
by phantom_oracle 10y ago
You know, it is ironic that the 1 industry funding innovation (venture capital) is the 1 sorely lacking any innovation at all. It's always just the case of former-founders pooling their cash into a fund, then asking for more money from pension-funds, etc. and they then become "X fund" or "Y Capital" or "Z Ventures", etc. The game always follows this type of rotational pattern but...
Based on that, I'd like to tell you guys at Y Combinator that even though you are very entrenched in the happenings of the Valley, you are also probably the only VC-like company doing innovative and risky things like this.
I don't think I've ever heard of a VC or other-type organization funding companies based purely on a pseudonymous-community of "up" votes.
With that being said, at least we will see someone attempt to commercialize small-scale aquaponics, so something good/interesting did come out of this experiment. And not to be biased, I hope the other 2 do just as well.
- rev_bird 10y agoI can't tell if this is too harsh, but it seems like you're praising the contest that was advertised, not the one we got. They didn't fund companies "based purely on a pseudonymous-community of 'up' votes." When they realized the community wanted something too risky for them, they bailed, and picked the "winners" themselves.
- cperciva 10y agoExcept that's not what was advertised. In fact, the announcement said explicitly that they weren't going to fund companies purely based on voting.
- idlewords 10y agoYou're being kind of disingenuous. The announcement said that all evaluation would take place in open HN threads, but it didn't.
- cperciva 10y agoYou're right, they were more generous than the original announcement suggested. If I had been in Kevin's shoes I would have rejected pinboard based on the content of the thread rather than holding an ad-hoc phone interview to give you a chance to redeem yourself.
- tlrobinson 10y agoIt turns out when you let people pseudonymously vote for things you get research vessels named Boaty McBoatface and similar (which I think would be awesome BTW http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/world/europe/boaty-mcboatface-what-you-get-when-you-let-the-internet-decide.html http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/world/europe/boaty-mcbo... )
- dang 10y agoFWIW, that wasn't the issue in this case. We knew about that possibility and planned for it and even called it by that name. But Kevin and I decided not to treat Maciej's application as a troll. The earnest comments he posted were what convinced us of that, and I don't think we were wrong there. I admit to being flummoxed by the combination of trollish and serious elements--it basically does a denial of service on my brain; if it were stage hypnosis I'd be squawking like a chicken. But I'm starting to think one could have taken all the jokes out of this and much the same thing would still have happened. If that's so, then the troll aspect is a red herring.
- cperciva 10y agoI admit to being flummoxed by the combination of trollish and serious elements--it basically does a denial of service on my brain For very good reason: Trolls often pretend to be serious, but serious people pretending to be trolls is incredibly rare.
- thaumaturgy 10y agoYou seem to be implying that you think Maciej is a troll. Have you read much of his writing? He is a jester: he tends to couch the things he's serious about in a lot of humor.
- tptacek 10y agoThis sounds like something Paul Graham would say. It's only missing the words "it turns out that".