Hacker News Reader

Comment by seiji | Hacker News Reader

"Do any founders have other commitments between June and August 2008 inclusive?" -- probably not relevant to the January to March 2009 cycle.

Also, it's nice to see the weed-out question added: "Are any of the following true?"

View on HN

Thanks, fixed.

(We added that question last cycle. There are no changes to the questions this time.)

One or more founders will keep their current jobs during the summer.

Shouldn't that be winter?

Argh, fixed, thanks.

The Apply button on the footer still goes to S2008 too :)

Repl that.

Could be a little more sneaky though, i.e. give a little box in the end to "explain" answering yes or instead of 1 yes/no drop down, make 1 drop down for each choice. Also couldn't hurt to throw some irrelevant yes/no questions to hide the questions that matter, something like "Do you own pets?" or "Do you use dialup?"

As it is now, if you have a clue you can probably figure out that answering yes is pretty much an instant disqualification, since the system will never know if you are answering yes to only 1 founder(probably seems like no big deal to most people) or yes to none of the founders are programmers.

Answering yes doesn't mean instant disqualification. We've funded startups despite all of those. A yes just reminds us to take a second look to see if there are problems.

so how do you know if the person picked yes because its a single founder or if he picked yes because none of the founders are programmers?

I would at least add a text box for them to tell you, what it is they are answering yes to. Would save you that one phone call/email to ask that question.

Unless they've omitted something or lied it should be clear from the rest of the app why they're picking yes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com