Thank you for applying to Y Combinator; however, your startup was not selected to interview for the upcoming Y Combinator batch. We carefully reviewed thousands of applications and since there's a limit on the number of startups we can interview in person, we had to turn away a lot of promising groups. It's alarming how often the last group to make it over the interview threshold ends up getting accepted to YC. That means there are surely other good groups that fall just below the threshold.
Unfortunately we can't give you individual feedback about your application. This page explains why: http://ycombinator.com/whynot/
We sincerely hope and encourage you to reapply for the next batch. Applying multiple times in no way counts against you and a surprisingly large number of companies are funded after applying more than once.
We're trying to get better at this, but it's practically certain that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups. If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email telling us about it; we want to learn from our mistakes.
Any website where ideas and voting on ideas are the key focus of the platform, and don't go one step further of finding the underlying problems that these ideas trying to solve.
Almost all innovation management and feature-request platforms are like this.
> Actually solving problems requires a different skillset that can't be accomplished with the "magic" of crowdsourcing.
Maybe so, but the first step of problem solving is identifying the problem. And problems come from people.
(from that comment you referenced)
> So maybe if this were to be adjusted so that it was more of a place to talk about problems you wish people would solve.
> Why not structure it as a place for people to complain about inefficiencies.
This is what "Issues" on Thinkerous are. We'll make it more clear. Thanks!
Sorry, that is a bit unclear. Essentially, we want to make it easier for people to find issues that many people can identify with, and in the process, show people what some potential solutions are.
By filtering out some of the noise, the ideas that could solve widespread issues can get more resources put behind them and hopefully a greater chance of succeeding.
This might make more sense in the enterprise software realm, but we saw some interest in the startup community as well so we wanted to test it out.
Thanks! We'll definitely look into 1-click feedback and flagging.
Regarding Pull Requests - we're in the process of adding a "team" functionality, but maybe an intermediate level of involvement (between joining the team and just commenting) would be useful. Thanks again!
Nice! It's part of the Kindle library, so I'm able to borrow it for free via Kindle unlimited. Will definitely buy a hard copy if it's as good as it seems to be.
> Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.
Wow! I remember doing this to my and my friends' 4-function calculators in 5th grade! This was actually how I learned how LCDs worked.
You can also remove the reflective sticker on the back of the black and white LCD, to make it transparent where it was previously reflective. That's how I made my calculator work with our classroom's overhead projector. (and some really interesting pranks)
I was going to say, I learned about this in class! Then I read the article and the link to "CMU’s study."
...
My professor was one of the authors. Go Garth Gibson!
Hey thanks! Those are some really great tips. Currently we are trying to utilize this equilibrium of
{ share more: get more feedback and possibly great allies }
vs.
{ share less: no feedback, no exposure, it doesn't even appear on the homepage }
but as this is untested, we'll see how it goes. I definitely agree with you though, the IP issue is huge and is/will be one of the biggest things we'll have to deal with.
Regarding the upvote/downvotes, I agree also! I just pushed it up on my task list. :)
Totally agreed! That's the mindset we had when we added the "Issues" section on the site. One of the features we have planned is the capability to link Ideas/Projects with Issues, so that it encourages people to consciously consider the problem they are solving.
A side effect of this is that they will also get to see how relevant this issue is, and how many people are affected by it.
I just started using this, so I can't say how effective it is yet. But it captures notes in NValt and syncs via Dropbox.