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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

We've found that someone talking live is a much higher bandwidth form of communication than words typed into a form. As well as words you get gestures, intonation, the vibe between a group of cofounders, etc.

But people shouldn't worry that they "video badly." We're not (I hope) so dumb that we'd be taken in by people who are merely smooth presenters. We come from the world of people who video badly ourselves. If we'd been applying for Viaweb, I'd have had to negotiate with Rtm how many words he'd say, and I'd be lucky if I got it as high as 10.

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I absolutely agree that a video of someone talking is a much higher bandwidth form of communication. Similarly, usenet was higher bandwidth in 1995 than it was in 1985 -- but that doesn't mean that it was more useful, only that there was far more noise.

Maybe this will work out fine, but I worry that with a video you'll pick up things like "this guy seems uncomfortable" but not be able to identify the reasons why (is he uncomfortable with the rest of his group? Or just uncomfortable being in front of a camera?) -- or worse, get a subjective sense that a video isn't very inspiring without even identifying what you're noticing, never mind figuring out whether what you're noticing is signal or noise.

There's a reason why most professional symphony orchestras use blind auditions: While nobody disputes the fact that being able to see a musician play is valuable, experience has shown that the noise it introduces is more significant than the signal. Simply put, eliminating the high bandwidth distraction of being able to see someone allows orchestras to pick better people.

We could do blind auditions if a startup had already launched, in the sense that we could just look at stats like their traffic growth. But at the stage we're trying to pick startups, we almost never have such data. So our situation is more analogous to trying to pick people who could become good musicians, before they'd taken any lessons. At our stage, you're judging the people-- so it's useful to see the people.

Nonsense.

I am not sure if we humans can really help being impressed by looks, no matter how smart we are.

Please keep and release a tally of "creative" videos and how they were "creative": time lapse, blue screen, animated overlays...

Higher bandwidth indeed, but you're giving out an open canvas. Could be good, could be extreme. The restrictions of "traditional" submission mechanisms are like the "traditional" formats for resumes, preventing every resume from becoming a tabloid magazine.

We explicitly ask people not to do that:

http://ycombinator.com/video.html

If they ignore us and put in a bunch of fancy stuff anyway, we'll just click on "next." We have a lot of applications to read.

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