Last Saturday, I finished judging Hashed Vibe Labs: Seoul. After that, I sent every applicant an email with the results. There were far more people we could not move forward with than those who were accepted. That number was not easy to shake.
It was much harder to write emails to the people we could not move forward with than to write acceptance emails. I have applied to several competitions myself, so I know what it means to submit an application. I can imagine the kinds of nights you may have spent before the deadline. So I tried to be honest about the possibility that we could be wrong. It was also heavy to carry the discomfort of knowing we may have passed over a good team.
Once again, thank you to everyone who took an interest and applied. I also look forward to connecting through various meetups in the future.
Below is the full email.
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Hello.
Thank you sincerely for applying to Hashed Vibe Labs: Seoul.
Writing an application is not easy. We know how many nights you may have spent in the process of bringing an idea out into the open and putting it into words, persuading your team, meeting the deadline, and finally pressing the submit button. Before the result, we want to thank you deeply for that time and courage.
Around 300 teams applied to this cohort, with more than 180 teams applying on the final day alone. This number is not simply a statistic to us. The fact that this many people are seriously building something right now is what keeps us doing this work.
Unfortunately, we will not be moving forward together this time.
We conducted the review based on product quality, actual traction, the team’s ability to execute, and how deeply AI was implemented as the core value of the product. We tried to review each application sincerely, using the same criteria as much as possible. Even so, it is difficult to say with certainty that this decision was right.
We want to be honest with you. Investors repeat certain mistakes, and we are no exception. One of the most common traps is pattern matching. The more a team resembles a team that succeeded in the past—in its appearance, pitching style, or market size—the more unconsciously drawn to it we become. The more a team approaches a problem in a completely new way, the more likely it is that the reviewer will fail to recognize its potential. The second is domain ignorance. When a team works in an industry or with a group of users we are unfamiliar with, it is difficult to properly grasp the depth of what they are doing during a short review process. We tend to underestimate what is unfamiliar. The third is confusing presentation with execution. Even though we know that a well-organized presentation and a clear storyline are different from the ability to actually build well, the two are easily mixed together when time is limited. We are fully aware that we may have made these mistakes this time. We may have passed over a truly great team, and that possibility remains uncomfortable for us.
So we hope this email does not shake your confidence. Our judgment is not equal to the value of what you are building. The fact that we were unable to choose you does not define your team’s potential.
Please keep building. The common trait of the strongest teams, in the end, has been that they do not stop doing what they are doing now. No review and no result is more important than that energy.
There is one promise I would like to make. We do not want to keep only to ourselves what we learned through this review process, what we discovered while reading 300 applications, and the parts where we believe we were wrong. We plan to regularly hold public events with the community. We will create spaces where we can share honestly what investors look for, which applications stayed with us, and what mistakes we made. Regardless of this result, we sincerely hope you can join us there.
I hope this connection does not end here. We will also do our best to make sure it does not.
Thank you.
From Hashed Vibe Labs
