Who is giving the money?
Why are they sponsoring people?
Only a handful of questions to preapply? Why? There used to be pages like this only to get people's emails in a target audience for spam purposes, is this is?
I can apply, I have an amazing idea to pitch, but it looks more shady than legitimate, sadly.
It does feel like there are more questions than answers here. What are the differences between full "members" and "affiliates"? Why aren't there more recognizable names behind this? I don't see a celebrity research behind this, so to speak, and that is precisely the kind of person I think you should get to start this kind of organization.
I also don't understand what "decentralized Bell Labs" is supposed to mean. The monetary funding is clearly centralized under one organization, so do they just mean the researchers won't literally be physically colocated? Is that meaningful enough a differentiater to highlight it? I can't think of a single industrial lab that has researchers who work in isolation with mentorship here and there. Didn't we try this with the Thiel Fellowship already?
However I don't think this is shady, and I think that's an uncharitable way to interpret it. It looks like the members' credentials are legitimate. The problem I have is that there doesn't seem to be a top researcher with tour de force accomplishments backing it. That probably sounds prejudiced, but I consider it a negative signal that there are no such researchers who were even willing to affiliate their names, let alone their guidance to the project.
We're focused on creating a world-class mentorship community before increasing our Fellow outreach efforts.
But I'm a little confused why you made this comment on an earlier HN post about Shannon Labs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17675617
(disclosure, I'm a mentor and the post was sent to a few mentors, which likely tripped some bot checker)
It looks like the founder was just trying to kick off discussion without being explicit about her involvement. The submitter (Aaron Lin) is also part of the organization.
In the scheme of things, I give them a pass. Raising attention for an initiative like this can be challenging. It's not actually dishonest.
dishonest - Intended to mislead or cheat.
Raising any initiative with multiples of free 100k carrots is super easy. Why do they have to resort to all other tactics?
> We have secured partial funding but not all that we intend to raise. This is just a pre-application - an impr