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HN is mostly written by me and Rtm, but Garry and Aaron have already started building new things. Garry made a sort of private Facebook for founders in the cur

by pg 15y ago

HN is mostly written by me and Rtm, but Garry and Aaron have already started building new things. Garry made a sort of private Facebook for founders in the current batch, and Aaron has started in on the problem of doing statistical analysis of YC applications and has already made some interesting discoveries.

portman 15y ago
>> doing statistical analysis of YC applications What an awesome idea. You must have over 25,000 applications to-date, correct? That's enough to tease out some interesting, statistically significant correlations. Looking forward to hearing more about those results.
markerdmann 15y ago
It would be awesome if you could share some of those discoveries.
- jacques_chester 15y ago
  In their position I wouldn't: it'd lead to indicators being gamed and losing their usefulness.
  - postnihilism 15y ago
    As an investment fund, your trading algorithms are essential IP. I realize YC does a lot more than simply put money in companies but the statistical analysis used to determine what early stage startups to bet on is probably something they'll keep close to their chest.
zeratul 15y ago
PG or Aaron: Could you de-identify YC applications data and make it publicly available for others to analyze? [EDIT:] Or maybe you could make a prediction challenge using the YC application data? You could host the challenge on http://www.kaggle.com/ http://www.kaggle.com/ or http://tunedit.org http://tunedit.org Note to self: There is actually a very sparse body of literature that talks about data driven approach to VC, e.g., http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4621115 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4621..., this one seems interesting (predicting exits): http://www.springerlink.com/content/w024ku34221u3258/ http://www.springerlink.com/content/w024ku34221u3258/
- benatkin 15y ago
  It would probably take them a lot of thought to fully de-identify the data and once they did it might be disappointing. A lot of so-called "de-identified" data out there actually contains things that could be used to identify people.
- robryan 15y ago
  I would assume that it would be just about impossible to de-identify YC applications, as they are all fairly unique and there is generally a lot of information online about each startup. So if an app had a story about a previous product and then that story shows up again in their blog or when they are doing publicity it makes it pretty easy.
  - benatkin 15y ago
    They could release it like this: pick a small number of fields like number of founders and age, and release each of them as separate arrays. Ex: {"founders": [3, 2, 2, ...], "ages": [31, 22, 27, ...]} (the size of the founders array and the ages array would be different because the first is per-startup and the second is per-founder) Just to get an idea of how vague de-identified data might be. And I'm not even sure that would be de-identified enough.

by pg 15y ago

portman 15y ago

>> doing statistical analysis of YC applications What an awesome idea. You must have over 25,000 applications to-date, correct? That's enough to tease out some interesting, statistically significant correlations. Looking forward to hearing more about those results.

markerdmann 15y ago

It would be awesome if you could share some of those discoveries.

jacques_chester 15y ago
In their position I wouldn't: it'd lead to indicators being gamed and losing their usefulness.
- postnihilism 15y ago
  As an investment fund, your trading algorithms are essential IP. I realize YC does a lot more than simply put money in companies but the statistical analysis used to determine what early stage startups to bet on is probably something they'll keep close to their chest.

zeratul 15y ago

PG or Aaron: Could you de-identify YC applications data and make it publicly available for others to analyze? [EDIT:] Or maybe you could make a prediction challenge using the YC application data? You could host the challenge on http://www.kaggle.com/ http://www.kaggle.com/ or http://tunedit.org http://tunedit.org Note to self: There is actually a very sparse body of literature that talks about data driven approach to VC, e.g., http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4621115 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4621..., this one seems interesting (predicting exits): http://www.springerlink.com/content/w024ku34221u3258/ http://www.springerlink.com/content/w024ku34221u3258/

benatkin 15y ago
It would probably take them a lot of thought to fully de-identify the data and once they did it might be disappointing. A lot of so-called "de-identified" data out there actually contains things that could be used to identify people.
robryan 15y ago
I would assume that it would be just about impossible to de-identify YC applications, as they are all fairly unique and there is generally a lot of information online about each startup. So if an app had a story about a previous product and then that story shows up again in their blog or when they are doing publicity it makes it pretty easy.
- benatkin 15y ago
  They could release it like this: pick a small number of fields like number of founders and age, and release each of them as separate arrays. Ex: {"founders": [3, 2, 2, ...], "ages": [31, 22, 27, ...]} (the size of the founders array and the ages array would be different because the first is per-startup and the second is per-founder) Just to get an idea of how vague de-identified data might be. And I'm not even sure that would be de-identified enough.