I can't imagine how utterly disheartened I'd be as an entrepreneur if I went to an investor's home and had an experience like that when starting out raising money.
Discouraging. Folks like "Masseuse" that most need to shape up are probably least likely to have the capacity to listen. Maybe it's because having wealth melts ones brain, or maybe a certain level of sociopathy is advantageous in accumulating wealth. However the cause-and-effect works out, I struggle to imagine a person who exhibits such behaviors being fixable through sound reasoning.
The battle to get scummy dudes to behave appropriately feels in some ways like the battle to get thieves not to steal. You can tell a thief not to steal, you can describe to them how a victim feels when their house is broken into, but it just doesn't register. A certain subset of the population lacks the empathy to respond to such appeals.
If the thieving analogy holds, the only way to fix someone like the masseuse would be to threaten punishment, but good luck creating/enforcing that.
IMO the biggest challenge would be making a system that will punish according to actual transgression, not according to perceived status. In reality, the slick investor type will get off the hook, but the virgin neckbeard programmer will get slammed for harassment and also for being a virgin neckbeard. Any ideas for fixing that?
I think you have to hit people in their image or their wallet. Slick investor types will have to publicly call out their peers' bad behavior. Slick investor types will have to lose out on a huge investments because they treated a pitch meeting like speed dating.
What can we do? We'll have to raise our children to be respectful of everyone, so hopefully, they become successful and they won't stand for this type of injustice.
I don't think there's a silver bullet. It's going to take time and work.
The power dynamic of sex influences men's inappropriate behavior. The investor no doubt had a sexual fantasy when he invited the female CEO over to his house and began drinking wine and massaging her. He wanted his investment to be symbolic, to reduce her to a whore. This is misogyny.
The anonymity in that article doesn't help. It doesn't matter how much money you have the kind of behavior described in that article is unacceptable. I like to think that the majority of technologists and entrepreneurs are humanists and they are in it to make the world a better place. I also like to think that if the article wasn't anonymous there would be non-violent collective action to make it known in no uncertain terms that kind of behavior is unacceptable from anyone.
No, saying that you want to make the world a better place, and saying that whatever you are working on makes the world a better place, is entirely (100%) different from actually taking the necessary actions to solving known and common world problems and actually making the world a better place. The level of hypocrisy in tech is beyond ridiculous.
Sure but you're not going to solve the immediate problem of the various imbalances in the tech world in terms of gender equality and general power imbalances if stuff like this continues to remain anonymous. It might not seem like it but by choosing where, how, and who I work for I'm making a deliberate choice. I know that this is a luxury and that not many people have it but I like to put that luxury to good use and not work for anyone or provide my expertise to anyone that is even peripherally related to whoever is in that article.
Well, if you go purely anonymous in all aspects, you prevent a lot of these things from even being an issue and rely only on the merit of the idea, quality of MVP, and thoroughness of the business plan - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8169051
I don't use Uber. I use Lyft. Why? Because Lyft is better people. Given the choice I'd rather support the better people. SF is full of startups that are indistinguishable in terms of technical merit, idea, business plan, etc. They are different though when it comes to the people.
Please fully describe how the age, race, gender, height, orientation, and religious aspects of employees for both Lyft and Uber are relevant and intertwined with the actions of the company. You say "better people" but I think you mean "acting ethically" and I see no relation to how that has anything to do with the above 6 descriptors I listed.
In short, that's easy for you to say. You aren't the one risking anything.
I'd also like to think that if the article wasn't anonymous there would be action. I've personally seen enough instances where nothing is done and in fact the abusers are covered for to think that expecting action is borderline naive.
So here's what I think it comes down to: You're an investor. You're at demo day. There's this female founder, and you think she's hot. You interact with her purely professionally, but you still feel the chemistry, and you think she does, too. You want to ask her out, because you think there might be something there. So what do you do?
You resign from your role as a VC/investor. That's what it's going to cost. Then you can ask her out if you want (still respectfully, and giving her the complete freedom to say no if she wants).
But if asking her out isn't worth more to you than your job is, then leave things professional.
>But if asking her out isn't worth more to you than your job is, then leave things professional.
Quit your job just to ask a woman out?
Asking a woman out you recently met isn't sexual harassment.
Some advice to your specific example:
1. Don't do it during demo day. She's a founder, and that's her time to meet with investors.
2. If you are planning on investing in her company- potential conflict of interest. Don't get involved personally.
3. If you don't have any desire to invest in her company-don't mislead your intentions. If you follow up and ask her out, don't be ambiguous with a coffee/lunch meeting that could be construed as business related. Do something that is clearly a date-like activity.
4. Don't use your influence/position for personal advantage.
Yes I'm going to generalize here, but no woman, even if she isn't interested, is going to be upset if you asked her out, if you do so at the appropriate time, appropriate place, and in a respectful way.
Yes. You are generalizing. Massively. There is no possible situation in which a VC I had met could ask me out without making me feel extremely uncomfortable, to put it lightly.
There are lots of logical reasons for this reaction, and I will list some of them briefly. 1) Power of VC network is implicit threat to 'play nice' and go along with it, even if VC in question has no intention of being nasty in any way. 2) The power imbalance already implicit in VC/founder relations makes 'asking me out' incredibly tense. 3) It would make me doubt myself- "Is every other VC I am talking to (since they are 90% men) just interested in me for that reason?".
The reasons you list are often cited reasons why managers or people in authority should not "fraternize" with subordinates. You're right, very logical reasons, and why most companies frown on that behavior.
I understand that founders want to be taken seriously, and and investor blurring the lines between professional and personal relationships can jeopardize that, but not all relationships with investors are like that, and I'd imagine not all founders would doubt themselves if approached after the fact.
I am biased, because in Seattle, the VC community isn't as threatening from a "play nice or else" perspective.
Also, I'm a sucker for romance and the boy meets girl, and live happily ever after story.
I think balls187 left off one important point as a VC: make it clear that you aren't interested in investing in their company, but want to go for coffee/lunch/whatever on a purely personal basis.
As a founder, the discomfort comes from not knowing the VC's intentions and how you are supposed to act with regards to your company. The VC needs to draw a clear line (ruling out investment and all other professional involvement) that takes a lot of that discomfort out of the situation, and removes the mixing of business and pleasure.
> make it clear that you aren't interested in investing in their company, but want to go for coffee/lunch/whatever on a purely personal basis.
You're 100% right (which is why I said don't mislead).
However, this is far more nuanced, than I first imagined. From purely a dating perspective, I'm not sure how a guy could recover from rejecting a women professionally, to getting her to accepting a date.
I guess the circumstances would have to be something like investment thesis don't align "we do biotech, your company is education."
In startups, I'd argue that founders personal lives and their businesses are inextricably linked, and rejecting one, is tantamount to rejecting the other.
Which makes for an inbalanced dynamic as acabrahams mentioned, which could be troublesome.
That was in response to the original comment suggesting an Investor should at least consider quitting their job before asking out a founder they met at a demo-day event.
Which is very much cutting off your nose to spite your face.
The cluelessness that... balls187... is exhibiting is the reason why so many men do unprofessional, uncomfortable, and offensive things and then say, "What? That's not offensive. That wasn't sexual harassment."
It seems no matter how loud the chorus of women who complain about this behavior is, some men still feel like they are the ones who get to define what sexual harassment is.
So setting aside your ad hominem attack, do you have an actual counter argument?
> It seems no matter how loud the chorus of women who complain about this behavior is, some men still feel like they are the ones who get to define what sexual harassment is.
Women don't get to define what sexual harassment is either.
You see, sexual harassment (in the US) is a LEGAL issue with LEGAL consequences. It's defined as "...unlawful to harass a person (an applicant or employee) because of that person’s sex. Harassment can include “sexual harassment” or unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature.
Harassment does not have to be of a sexual nature, however, and can include offensive remarks about a person’s sex. For example, it is illegal to harass a woman by making offensive comments about women in general." [1]
Granted that while the EEOC definition really only pertains to the work, it's not hard to extend that definition to scenarios outside employment (such as any professional setting).
Any unwanted behavior is not okay. However, I believe that politely asking a woman for a date (given the right circumstances [see my list prior]), is not sexual harassment, even if a woman is not interested.
My response in my earlier comment was very specific to the OP's contrived scenario: an investor meets a female founder, he likes her, he feels that she likes him back (this was the key) so he should quit his job before making a move.
Quitting his job has no bearing on whether the women would find his "asking her out for a date" welcome or not, because there wouldn't be any way for her to know he quit, unless he told her, and in that case she'd probably think he's crazy (rightly so).
That of course presupposes the investor did not misread the situation, given he is a potential investor, and she is a female founder.
There are always 'circles' where this is considered appropriate behaviour.
In the fashion world there are a few photographers which almost openly do this, known to us mostly because they got so used to it they put their dick in a girls mouth unannounced and rather than suck it she talked to the press about it. [1]
An old colleague worked at an IT company thirty years or so ago and on the upper management floor, as he described it, the secretaries were all paid $200k/yr and up to be, essentially, professional hookers.
It is almost certainly a problem in some circles in the tech investors industry as well.
This is just a, very welcome, statement to tell investors that if they want to be such an investor they'll be locked out of YC forever and to tell founders that they can expect to be backed up when they report this.
I meant considered appropriate within their moral framework.
I wrote it to stress that it's often group behavior, with the enablers and supporters that go along with it, and that you shouldn't think about it in terms of the 'lone distraught person.'
Just to be clear: I would never, ever, wish to be associated in any manner with a person or organization that operates on such a moral framework.
I'm baffled that this was downvoted. Does someone really not think that such groups of people exist? You must never have heard of college fraternities.
That's a pretty meaningless distinction if it has no other consequences – it's essentially demoting this to the level of seriousness of wearing non-matching socks and the only people who benefit from this are the abusers.
We know it does happen. Then: the optics that result from however many incidents happen have an outsized impact on all women (and, for that matter, similarly vulnerable men) considering venturing into VC-funded tech.
YC is one of a small number of organizations who can write something as simple as this and have this impact, because VCs compete for their dealflow. It's not the writing itself, so much as the realization that they could have this impact by writing it.
People modify their behaviour depending on the consequences they reasonably expect. For all that some harassers say that their behaviour is normal or unintentional, they don't really harass up the power hierarchy. That's actually quite a good litmus test.
Sam Altman recently wrote[1], "Yes, it’s awful to hear the horror stories of wildly inappropriate behavior from investors to the entrepreneurs pitching them. (Unfortunately, stories like these are not super rare, but because there’s a big cost to going public with them, most never get told. My hope is that YC has enough leverage at this point to make it clear that this is unacceptable and we will not continue to work with investors who do it.)"
Today, Jessica Livingston writes, "Nearly all the investors we know are completely upstanding and professional, but even one inappropriate incident is too many."
Sam's statement implies that this behavior is more common than most folks would like to believe, and that Y Combinator is prepared to punish investors who engage in it. Jessica's statement subtly suggests that this behavior is less common, and that the vast majority of the investors Y Combinator works with are above engaging in it.
I don't know, but it could be both? On one hand, most cases of harassment/ whatever never get exposed. On the other, YC thinks they have a good handle on the VCs they are working with, and believe that they are all (or mostly) above this behaviour.
The truth is probably somewhere in between, and it doesn't really matter. Both are explicitly stating that this behaviour is not tolerated and bears consequences.
Sam Altman acknowledges that stories of this behavior are not "super rare", but that "most" stories don't get told for obvious reasons. Y Combinator states that Demo Day is attended by "most of the world’s top startup investors." This is a large group of people.
Given the size of the investor pool and apparent prevalence of this behavior, the "nearly all the investors we know are completely upstanding and professional" statement is preposterous. There is simply no way for anybody to know all of the investors who are behaving badly, and the "even one inappropriate incident is too many" statement minimizes the regularity with which it is clear this behavior is occurring by subtly suggesting that these are isolated incidents.
You have provided neither the evidence nor the logic that could guide us towards your extraordinary claim that it is "preposterous" that most of the investors YC works with aren't harassing women.
I didn't claim that most investors Y Combinator works with are harassing women. I stated that it is preposterous for Y Combinator to suggest that it knows that "nearly all" investors it's dealing with are "completely upstanding and professional." As I wrote, "There is simply no way for anybody to know all of the investors who are behaving badly." As Sam Altman has acknowledged, most instances of this behavior go unreported, so most of the folks engaged in it are not known to be engaged in it. If you can't follow that logic...
Your suggestion that I somehow claimed most investors working with YC are harassing women is so absurd as to be comical. I don't know what your agenda is, and frankly don't care, but if you're going to try to distort what I wrote, I'm confident you can do a better job.
I don't think he was trying to put words in your mouth like that, but either way...
There is some logic, yes.
Is it possible that YC affiliates with higher-caliber VCs that are less prone to this behaviour?
Is it possible that "super rare" occurrences and "mostly unreported" occurrences are both very low numbers, to the point that YC can expect not to have any incidents?
I think the answers to both could be yes, but I don't know if anyone has numbers to support anything. Anecdotal evidence from often anonymous founders indicates that there is a problem, but I honestly don't know how out-of-control it is.
Either way, good on Sam and Jessica for addressing the issue.
> Jessica's statement subtly suggests that this behavior is less common, and that the vast majority of the investors Y Combinator works with are above engaging in it.
My reading of Jessica's statement was that she was trying to make it clear that ycombinator wasn't accusing their customers without evidence.
Investors, in a real way, are Ycombinator's customers. Yes, sometimes your customers do bad things and you have to deal with it, sometimes dealing with it means making them no longer your customers. As much as possible, you want to set expectations about those sorts of situations ahead of time. But, you want to set those expectations in a way that don't make your innocent customers feel like they are being accused of anything.
When you are setting these sorts of expectations, it is easy to make it feel, to your customers, like you are assuming they are guilty without evidence, and that's not something you want your customers to feel. It is a mistake I've made myself. At one point, in response to one of my poorly-considered spammer-discouragement policies, a potential customer told me "we don't assume you are stupid; but we do assume you are a spammer." - you don't want to make your potential customers feel that way.
First, there is too much capital chasing too few opportunities today. Y Combinator is widely seen by many investors as being the highest-quality accelerator so if it had merely stated "Y Combinator will not tolerate inappropriate sexual or romantic behavior from investors toward founders. Period." I guarantee you it's not going to suffer any negative consequences. I'm sure there are more investors wanting to attend Demo Day than there are Demo Day invitations.
Second, Y Combinator could have prepared a code of conduct and sent it directly to the investors invited to participate in Demo Day. Demo Day is an invitation-only event and sending a code of conduct to invitees via email would have been a more effective way to reach the target audience than publishing a "Reminder to Investors" blog post which was clearly intended to be read by a broader audience.
I don't doubt that Y Combinator sincerely wants to quell this behavior, which is a good thing. But maximizing the good you do isn't always aligned with maximizing the PR you do.
Here is a translation of Altman's message from powertalk into english:
"Dear feminists and rabble rousers, we recognize your power. We are on your team. We will genuflect in the direction of those things you consider holy. Please don't target us."
(For those unfamiliar with the term, "powertalk" is the in-group language of powerful people.)
This is a really unfortunate comment. The actual points it makes are superficial and, unusually for you, not backed by anything other than anecdote. It's mean-spirited. And most importantly, it's written in a way that can't possibly persuade anyone who isn't already on your side. You're too smart to believe you're trying to communicate here, so I'm left believing you're writing this comment just to stick a fork in people's eyes.
I know this doesn't mean anything because I'm just some random Internet stranger you don't actually know, but as someone who has stuck up for your comments in the past, I've been made to feel embarrassed by this one.
I will, of course, get over both it and, later, myself.
Lately I stick to purely factual arguments, and as a result ignore most of HN. For some reason I felt like actually having a conversation on HN today.
I don't expect this comment to persuade most people. However, I do believe the argument I'm making here, and I believe it can persuade some people. HN is a pretty good crowd. For example, over a few years, I've observed the conversation about HFT on here has shifted wildly - people occasionally cite my articles, so I think I've contributed.
I've been convinced by Robin Hanson and others that many of the public arguments made (particularly by powerful figures) are signalling of the form I describe in this post. I believe it's a good explanation of why such things are posted.
The fact of the matter is that on merit, Sam Altman's post on this topic is nonsense. It attacks a straw man and draws inference by juxtuposition. See my post criticizing it (which mostly takes the perspective that it's an honest argument):
Sam Altman is a smart guy. I seriously doubt that he wrote something so nonsensical as a real argument. The best explanation I can come up with for why so many smart people are posting silly things is like this is signalling.
I'm sorry you dislike my comment, but it is an attempt to explain my views rather than simply an attempt to "stick a fork in people's eyes".
My opinion: the comment was a little on the weak side, but the analysis on your blog is sound. In other words, I agree that this blog post is likely to be signalling. Not that I disagree with the signal being sent. It's a sensible signal to want to send!
You can criticize the format and language of the comment all you want but implying things like "I think you're too smart to believe in BS like this" is condescending.
Judging from its (current) grayness this seems to be a much derided point of view on HN. Why? In a previous comment Livingstone was quoted as saying this is a rare problem in (I assume) YC investor circles. Why put out a direct message like this then?
Some here have argued that it is useful because it makes things unambiguous and simple. I think the people who condone and/or engage this behavior (e.g. the kinds that are exemplified in the Forbes article) don't do so because they don't know any better or because "the rules of engagement" were not clearly stated in this regard.
So I think at least part of the motivation behind putting out a message like this explicitly, rather than including in, say, an investor legal agreement, has to be the desire to preempt allegations based on this point.
And it's exactly because the people engaging in this behavior know and disregard the "rules of engagement" that it's important to let them know that they will have more to lose.
And the way you do that is by stating it publicly, making YC itself accountable to the public and forcing them to actually act. That way, it's harder for such investors to convince themselves that when push comes to shove, YC wouldn't actually do anything.
They clearly have the power to cause trouble for tech companies. Witness Pax Dickinson, Julie Horvath, and various other incidents.
It just makes (selfish) sense for Altman to try to appease them. It's bad for the industry - showing weakness will encourage more behavior of this type. (Think about why they are targeting a bunch of unlikeable low status geeks.) But it's good for YC to encourage them to target others
It's really not. Feminist ideology has permeated many levels of public institutions today -- not all, of course, but quite a few. There's a reason it's seen as the 'correct'/default viewpoint to take today; if that weren't the case, then it'd be less surprising when someone declares themselves not a feminist. There might be a long road yet ahead for feminists, but I don't think it's fair to diminish their vast and obvious accomplishments thus far; doing that just feeds into the victimization cycle that's endemic in the radical subsets of it.
It's something that everyone knows to pay lip service to, in the same way that everyone pays lip service to being "green." But are you going to say with a straight face that environmentalists are in a position of power?
We (as a country) are trying to do something about global warming are we not? Sure we have nut-job deniers and all that, but compared to many countries that legitimately do not care about "being green", the US is doing rather decently (although arguably still not good enough, but it all has to start somewhere). Holding "power" is not a zero-sum game -- having slightly less power than another slightly more predominant ideology != 'not' having power. Just because we have a democratic president does not mean republicans have no power.
Similarly feminist ideology has made itself into the american public's view of the 'ideal', and anything that opposes it as unquestionably 'bad' -- to say there's no power in that sort of collective consciousness about any issue is ignorant. Just because it's not ideal yet absolutely does not mean it's not in power -- even powerful things take time to reach their full potential. When behaviors like this YC post talks about hadn't had any negative ramifications before, but now do, that's power.
> We (as a country) are trying to do something about global warming are we not?
Only to the extent that it doesn't get in the way of the hundred priorities ahead of global warming on the list. And all the pollution that isn't associated with a hot-button issue like global warming isn't even on the radar. Coal, for example, is something that's so damaging that there aren't even nut-job deniers arguing otherwise. Yet, during one of the debates of the 2012 election, Obama was arguing with Romney about which of them was more pro-coal.
> Similarly feminist ideology has made itself into the american public's view of the 'ideal', and anything that opposes it as unquestionably 'bad'
People are quite willing to embrace ideals but take little to no inconvenient action to work towards those ideals. Feminists have "power" in the same way environmentalists do. They can win a tiny victory here and there by making particularly egregious acts public,[1] but that's the extent of it.
[1] In 2012, environmentalists in Chicago were successful in shutting down Fisk and Crawford, two coal plants in Chicago that a study showed were costing the public $127 million per year in health costs: http://elpc.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/MidwestGeneration.... Only 598 more to go!
Yes, but lets not go around bashing something that is clearly better than nothing, and needlessly belittling the accomplishments of clearly influential movements. Things will always be open to improvement, and we should focus on that, not on how little power we have (oh no!); that's exactly the type of needless victimization that gives feminism a bad name (if you're not familiar with what I'm talking about, google around for 'Suey Park').
In any case, it is still an idealistic ideology, because then at what point does it declare/define 'victory'? That's never been made very clear, and despite the massive strides it has made in the past several decades, we're still talking about it like it's some totally unknown, underdog minority issue -- where are the goal posts? That's a rhetorical question because it's not supposed to have goal posts, just like how environmentalism doesn't -- it's an ideal, one of female rights that people should definitely strive for, but let's not make it out to be some sort of clear-cut political policy that has failed to be implemented, that just does the whole movement a disservice.
> We (as a country) are trying to do something about global warming are we not?
Not really. The federal executive branch is sort of unilaterally trying to do a bit using a legal framework not specifically designed for it, Congress has no clear commitment either way (the Republican Party holding a majority in the House and mostly opposing concrete action -- some members denying GW is real, some members opposing federal government action on environmental issues that might limit immediate business opportunity generally, and others just opposing any specific proposal related to global warming without necessarily having a clear ideological framework for general opposition), and some states are trying to do some things (and some states are trying to promote things directly opposed).
As a country, there's really nothing coherent going on.
Then the fact that we have powerful regulatory bodies like the EPA, and are much better off environmentally than countries like India and China is somehow just a fluke? Global warming is an environmentalist issue, but environmentalism != coherent global warming prevention -- that's really not a small problem, and would be a tall order for any nation to fill.
> Then the fact that we have powerful regulatory bodies like the EPA, and are much better off environmentally than countries like India and China is somehow just a fluke?
The EPA does not exist to address global warming specifically. The claim I addressed was that "we as a country are trying to do something about global warming", not "we as a country are trying to do something about environmental issues more generally". Those are very different claims.
You are correct. Apologies if it appeared I was talking specifically about global warming, but the context was with regards to what the parent was addressing with "being green" and the environmentalist movement as a whole, so that was the main point I was trying to convey.
But in any case, global warming is an environmentalist issue, and the environmentalist ideology does have power -- whether or not the government has managed to take coherent action about it yet is not indicative of the significance of the issue within the nation, because like I said, it is not a simple issue to solve, and we are still doing more[0] than India and China to help it anyway. And like I said in my original comment, while there is obviously still much room for improvement, there's no need to undermine what we have done to fight it... we'd all be worse of if environmental progress completely stopped in the 60's. Still a shame that we haven't done more of course.
[0] actively regulating pollution is a form of action...
The premise of this question is that execs have been fired for being "insufficiently diverse" or "insufficiently feminist". But there's a difference between not believing that anthropogenic global warming is a problem that demands changes to the way industry is run, and doing things that have the overt effect of creating barriers for women in the industry.
Leaving that aside, I think you'll find that a more careful look at the Pax Dickinson drama will reveal that it's not a particularly helpful example for this thread. There was a lot of stuff happening there.
I don't see why you think Dickinson is an unrelated example. He was never accused of any misconduct beyond wearing sunglasses while disagreeing with feminists.
The fact is that feminists have power in our society and the tech industry is relatively weak. We provide a great source of symbolic victories for them.
Just a bunch of tweets mocking feminists, liberals and Mel Gibson.
[edit: Tom I really don't understand how you think this disagrees with what I said above. How do these links imply any misconduct, or anything other than disagreeing with feminists? Are you asserting that opposing the welfare state or mocking Mel Gibson is what got him fired?]
As for the rest of it, if you want to argue that libertarianism rather than anti-feminism got him fired, square that viewpoint with Business Insider's statement about firing him. They didn't say he was too conservative, they said he disagreed with them on diversity.
Disagreeing with feminists and liberals is not misconduct. Neither is making fun of drunk celebrities.
You apply for a job or you build a startup and you want to be a professional. You want to do awesome things. Then someone else comes around, whether from a position of power or not and displays romantic or sexual interest towards you. No matter how polite it is, it irreversibly changes the previously professional relationship in a very discomforting way.
It's a dick move and it's shit like this why many women shy away from participating in technology.
Do you believe that this "dick move" is absent in other fields with lots of women? Specifically, do you believe doctors and lawyers ask each other out less than techies?
If "shit like this" is present in every field, it's a poor explanation of why women avoid technology but no those other fields.
Now if you want to rescue this hypothesis, you could point out that doctors aren't a bunch of low status nerds. But that's a naughty hypothesis, so I'm sure you won't go there.
No, you haven't shown the explanation to be poor. You've implicitly invoked one possible reason why unprofessional behavior among men might create obstacles for women, rebutted it, and declared the debate over. If this was an argument over the right way to interpret statistics over a website optimization scheme, you'd laugh at you.
Considering only gender policy, what is the most significant difference between doctors and engineers? Obviously: distribution among genders in medicine is much more balanced than in technology.
Stipulate that romantic overtures are as common in medicine as in technology. What basis do you have for your implied claim that the impact of such an overture is the same in medicine as it is in technology? It seems straightforward and reasonable to presume that the impact of an unwanted overture is much more powerful for someone who is part of a small minority, for whom the overture comes from a member of the overwhelming majority.
Michael O. Church has conjured an entire ethos in which he's been oppressed not just by venture capitalists but the entire industry they fund. He believes it so strongly that he has advocated violence to address the problem. And he's a guy, who feels locked out of the industry not because of a gender bias that has persisted overtly through pretty much all of human history, but instead due to unfair performance reviews.
From your comment history, you strike me as someone who has in his life actually talked to a woman. But comments like this force me to remind myself of that. Have you not talked to one who was shaken by being hit on by a guy in a work setting? I am not the suave, athletic bachelor you obviously are, and I've managed to hear this story from actual women repeatedly. If you have heard this story before, how are you managing to handwave it away so easily?
The OP's explanation is indeed poor. You can possibly add additional hypothesis which rescue it (I suggested one in the post you just responded to), but that doesn't mean the original hypothesis by itself isn't poor.
what is the most significant difference between doctors and engineers? Obviously: distribution among genders in medicine is much more balanced than in technology.
The key word here is "is". This was not true in the past. Yet somehow, medicine attracted women but tech didn't. At this historical point, did boy doctors not ask out girl doctors, but boy programmers did ask out girl programmers? Same for law, etc? Your "minority + asked out" theory predicts women can never escape minority status, which is evidently false.
If you want an explanation it needs to be specific to computing.
Have you not talked to one who was shaken by being hit on by a guy in a work setting? I am not the suave, athletic bachelor you obviously are...
I've heard this story before. I've heard of women being hit on in church gatherings also, yet church is full of women. Thus it fails as an explanation of why women are underrepresented in technology but not other fields.
Also, can I suggest leaving Michael O. Church alone? It's not necessary to drag him into a random conversation on topic completely unrelated to VC-istan.
I'm confused. The M.O.C. point was very simple. As it turns out from this comment, you empathize with the struggles of a white male with an established career history getting a fair shake in VC-funded technology. But for reasons I have not yet managed to unearth, you do not empathize with women whose careers are impeded by gender bias --- or, in a distinction that makes no difference, you're unable to acknowledge that gender bias exists.
You seem like the kind of person who would be irritated by the knowledge that he's missing something. You don't have a gnawing feeling that maybe you're missing something in this conversation?
I said "don't pick on Michael O. Church" (something I've observed you do repeatedly). I didn't say "Michael O. Church's factual claims are correct." I get the impression that I'm discussing testable hypothesis about the world, whereas you are attempting to signal empathy and kindness.
My very specific claim: if you postulate a theory why tech lacks women, your theory must distinguish between technology and medicine/law/catholicism (catholicism has lots of gender bias and lots of women). "People ask other people out" does not make this distinction.
Incidentally, there is a third possibility which you seem to be glossing over. I believe gender bias exists but is not the cause of women being underrepresented in tech.
I just made the distinction. Being asked out when you're the one woman among ten men is a different and more alienating experience than being asked out when you're one of four women along with six men.
Let me repeat: women were a minority in medicine and law at one point. Why did getting asked out not prevent them from achieving parity in those fields?
Because entry into medicine is neither entrepreneurial nor social. You apply and you get in.
The medical professions evaluate gender trends by the number of women who go to medical school. Once you graduate medical school, you're on a track that leads straightforwardly to gainful employment. That allowed schools to be a focal point for policy changes to improve representation of women in the field. The same thing goes for law. My sister graduated UChicago law and got a lucrative, high-status biglaw job immediately based, as I understand it, pretty much on her track record in school.
No similar track exists for software, and, obviously, even less of a path exists in entrepreneurial technology, which is largely controlled by wealthy male gatekeepers.
Tangentially: a law or medical professor could be fired for aggressively propositioning a student. A successful investor can't be "fired".
But also: you dodged my question instead of addressing it. Do you actually believe that the experience of being targeted by sexual advances is the same if you're one women surrounded by men as it is if you're one of many women surrounded by an almost equal number of men?
Neither is entry into tech. Only entry into the extremely narrow "Sand Hill Road" style VC funded tech is entrepreneurial and social. There is a rigid heirarchical track for software much like law: stanford -> google, or MIT -> apple, or rutgers -> morgan stanley. Most of technology fits a track like this, in fact.
I didn't dodge your question, I pointed out why the answer was irrelevant. There are two ways to debunk a theory: directly (by showing a premise is false) and by contradiction (showing it implies a false conclusion). I'm doing the latter.
As for how women feel about being asked out, in my experience the primary determinant is how attractive she finds the asker. To relate a real life experience, if a woman is surrounded by firefighters and one of them asks her out, she probably won't mind. Not that the anecdotes really matter (see the point above about argument by contradiction).
This is demonstrably incorrect. All you have to do is read a few years of Patrick McKenzie's advice to underemployed tech workers to see how different the character of tech jobs is from medical jobs. Scoring by "status" or by compensation, the variance among tech jobs in the first 5 years of a tech career dwarfs those of a medical doctor. Some people with CS degrees end up working helpdesk or patch management. Some of them wind up writing J2EE LOB applications wiring up form fields to SQL columns over and over again. And some of them work in challenging roles that offer opportunities to build a career.
The difference between the high-status roles and the low-status ones isn't school, excepting possibly that an absurdly small subset of the industry (Stanford and MIT grads) have easier time avoiding helpdesk jobs.
The "rigid hierarchical track" you suggest exists for tech also doesn't exist. I have a single semester of university. If you want to make the pot rich enough, we can bet on whether I can get a full time job at Google or Apple. I'd warn you that I've got an information advantage on this bet.
Hiring in technology is warped and driven by bogus apocrypha. A tiny component of the overall demand is fed by truly credentialing universities. But the majority of the demand is fed by a pool of candidates not distinguished by the particulars of their degree. Instead, they're distinguished by ability to navigate hazing rituals.
Your last paragraph isn't an argument. It's what you'd like to believe is true. It doesn't even fit the anecdotal evidence we have here. Have you met a lot of VCs? I have. As a group, they tend to be attractive: fit, the product of school, career, and social tracks that build social (and athletic) skills. They're well dressed, which comes of having large amounts of disposable income. And yet, strangely: women founders appear not to be comfortable being propositioned by them. The only way your last graf works is if we assume that those women are simply lying.
Scoring by "status" or by compensation, the variance among tech jobs in the first 5 years of a tech career dwarfs those of a medical doctor.
The variance among law jobs in the first 5 years dwarfs those of a medical doctor. You cite your sister who got a biglaw job, which is more or less the legal equivalent of stanford -> google. Most lawyers don't get to biglaw just as most engineers don't work at google.
You've done a great job explaining why medicine has women, while law and computing don't.
But the majority of the demand is fed by a pool of candidates not distinguished by the particulars of their degree. Instead, they're distinguished by ability to navigate hazing rituals.
How does this differ from most other fields? Do you think HR, lawyers, accountants or management consultants don't have hazing rituals?
As for my last paragraph, it's simply an anecdotal observation. I'm not pushing it . I'm not accusing anyone of lying or disagreeing with their experience. I'm just pointing out that your theory predicts incorrect facts.
No: the overwhelming majority of law school graduates end up in established legal practices that employ many attorneys. It's possible that not even a plurality of CS graduates end up as software developers at software firms; a huge number of CS graduates end up writing line of business software for insurance companies, or on their QA teams.
Law schools can exert pressure on law firms in ways that CS programs can't exert pressure on technology firms.
Do law firm hires endure hazing rituals like those in technology? I don't know. I doubt it. First-year associate hires aren't high-stakes the way tech hires are; the legal profession is structured around an "up or out" process that admits entrants to the profession mechanically. The technology profession as a rule does not, and relies intensely on status indicators.
You've agreed with me on that last point in the past, so I'd be surprised to hear you contest it now.
Here it's worth noting: the law profession does have gender equality issues; they just take place at a tier of the profession higher than where they happen in technology. But consider the implication of law forestalling the gender reckoning and tech front-loading it: entrants to the law field start amongst a relatively balanced cohort of coworkers. They get a foothold. They get experience working on real projects for partners. They get a track record. They have a different experience than minority entrants to technology.
Once again: the feeling of being singled out by your gender when you represent a tiny minority is different than being approached when you have a solid peer group of the same gender.
Hey: while I'm at it: I consult for F500 companies that build LOB apps. You can imagine that banks and hedge funds are more concerned about security than cat-sharing startups. Women are in my experience over the last ~9 years better represented in software jobs at non-software companies than they are in startups. Tech employees at banks and insurance companies are hired more mechanically and with less rubber-chicken voodoo than they are at startups. I don't think this is a coincidence.
No: the overwhelming majority of law school graduates end up in established legal practices that employ many attorneys. It's possible that not even a plurality of CS graduates end up as software developers at software firms; a huge number of CS graduates end up writing line of business software for insurance companies, or on their QA teams.
I don't think I fully understand the preconditions for your theory, so let me try to carefully state it. Being asked out + diversity of work situations + mostly internal department rather than external firm + non-rigorous interview process => women won't go from 0 to 50%.
Did I miss any preconditions? If I did, could you carefully list them?
Fun fact: HR (lots of women) satisfies these properties, near as I can tell. HR drones certainly ask me stupid non-rigorous interview questions, I'm sure they ask the same of each other. So there should be a dearth of women in HR?
Incidentally, the process I'm doing here was described by Scott Alexander yesterday. Basically I'm "feynmaning" you - finding examples which satisfy your preconditions but not your conclusion. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/12/does-race-exist-does-cu...
You've agreed with me on that last point in the past, so I'd be surprised to hear you contest it now.
Let me repeat myself one more time. I don't disagree with you on this. I also don't disagree with your claims about people's subjective feelings. I don't think it's unique to tech, which makes it a poor explanation of a tech-specific phenomenon. Finance certainly uses similar interview techniques, and mid-office finance (besides IT) has no shortage of women.
Incidentally, if your observations about banks/f500 vs startups are correct and generalizeable, then your theory explains part of the discrepancy. Specifically, it explains the delta between startups and f500, but not the delta between f500 tech and f500 HR. It's not the only explanation that part of the discrepancy - risk aversion also works, and to me seems simpler. But I can't immediately reject your theory for that portion of the discrepancy.
I was not making an hypothesis, I was describing how situations like this make people feel and then I described how that makes me feel.
The irony is that even though you believed that you made a rational counter-argument what you really did is describing your very own feelings with a comment that is betraying your insecurities.
...it's shit like this why many women shy away from participating in technology.
That's a hypothesis, a claim about how the world works. That's the point I'm questioning.
I don't much care about your feelings, nor was I commenting on them. You can feel whatever you like. If you want to make status lowering comments ("betraying your insecurities"), have at it. I'm well aware that personal attacks and the like are one of the results of questioning the orthodoxy.
If you don't understand why this needs to be done, you're part of the problem. If you think romantic overtures as an investor to a founder is 'ok', or should be ok, you're part of the problem.
EDIT: For those of you who think this is too harsh, you're proving my point. Sexism in tech will start to become less of a problem once people recognize that it's an issue. If you don't think it's an issue -- you're part of the problem.
> Sexism in tech will start to become less of a problem once people recognize that it's an issue.
I completely, totally, 100% agree. And not only in tech, and the same with racism, homophobia, and other related issues.
But I don't agree that simple ignorance makes you part of the problem -- although I do agree that ignorance makes it more likely that you will perpetrate these kinds of problems accidentally.
As a white, heterosexual, privileged man I don't have a very good instinctive sense for the problems that those less privileged than me face. Gradually, but mostly four or so years ago, I decided I should learn some more, and started asking people and searching the net.
When I did this, I found learning about this to be a much more grueling process than it seems it should have been. In particular, I found some people (not all) who were more eager to belittle me for my ignorance than to simply to explain the problems that they have faced, or refer to me to some resource that would.
At the core I think that both of us agree: that it would be a very good thing if more people learned about racism, sexism, and related issues. I believe that your comment detracts from, rather than supports, this goal.
Your first sentence is a bit off. I for one didn't know this needed to be done. I was under the general impression that investors that work with YC were high caliber and professional. It never crossed my mind that anyone associated with YC would be anything but that. Sad that my high level of expectations are so obviously wrong.
The only way to stop bullying is to stand up to bullies. I know it's difficult and there may be consequences, but I really believe the right way to handle this is to gather up a bunch of these stories and publish them with full disclosure of the names of people involved.
You don't change a culture of harassment by quietly warning people about who is a harasser. You change the culture by ostracizing people who behave that badly.
Devil's advocate: We should be careful about doing this as we could end up harassing someone over a false claim or overreaction. In this case, maybe some discretion is necessary. I do support public humiliation in cases that are well documented and blatant.
Look at what the investor has to lose, in most cases: very little, historically. Bad behaviour has historically been excused for the investor class.
Look at what the founder has to lose in a false accusation: not only will their startup likely not be funded, they may have trouble getting work in any capacity. (Historically, women who have made sexual harassment charges have had trouble getting future jobs.)
She has more incentive to cover it up than to expose the harassment.
I perfectly understand intolerance towards sexual harassment but I wonder what qualifies as "inappropriate romantic behavior" in this context. You can not ask a founder "on a date"? What's if is the other way around?
EDIT: of course this is coming from a nobody. I'm just curious.
Correct: if your interactions with a founder are cabined by professional settings --- demo days, funding pitches, going for coffee to talk about their company --- romantic overtures are inappropriate. Similarly: if you're in process, at any stage, with a company, overtures to their founders are inappropriate.
It's important to understand WHY this is so: if you're an investor you are in a position of power over a founder. It is not possible in such a situation to make a romantic overture that is not tainted by the possibility that you are looking for a quid-pro-quo even if in fact you are not.
In addition to quid pro quo, making romantic overtures in professional settings sets up a barrier for women that doesn't exist for men. Men can go to coffee with a potential investor and know walking in the door that they're there to get a hearing about their business. But every woman that walks through that door has to fight off the concern that the meeting isn't about their company, but instead about their own personal availability.
Even if 90% of the time that concern is unfounded, the mental effort you spend dealing with that exerts drag and hurts your performance. One of the things investors are grading you on is confidence!
It sounds like your saying, "Why isn't there a VC firm that states outright you might be sexually harassed to receive funding"
How are you possibly surprised that isn't a thing...? Of course it's not and never could or should be. You're comment is being down-voted because it's pretty ridiculous; the extremely low possibility(non-existant) coupled with the offensive nature of the concept as a whole makes it mind-boggling that someone would even consider it worth pondering in the first place.
I speak I think for many people on HN when I say that at least on this thread, in this context, in this discussion, in these circumstances, this idea should be dismissed out of hand.
Let's stipulate you just want to have an interesting intellectual conversation. Can we have it some other time?
I understand where you're coming from, and that's fine.
As for context, I disagree--I think this is a perfectly fine time for it--OP was saying, in effect, "Folks, we're about to do Demo Day, don't be scumbags and/or harass our founders; there's a price to that."
My comment was in response to a (completely valid and correct!) complaint about the tainting of business relationships for investing with romantic/sexual nonsense. I asked a question that several people interpreted as crass, which is unfortunate. I later refined and elaborated on the topic, showing it could be taken quite seriously and evaluated beyond just being thought of as some lowbrow joke.
The troubling thing to me about this all is the out-of-hand rejection of the idea without further argument than "This idea makes us really uncomfortable, and we summarily refuse to evaluate it".
It's a sign of intellectual laziness, of prejudice, and perhaps most unfortunately, mob mentality on a forum I generally respect.
If we want to fix a lot of these issues we have as an industry, we can't shy away from ideas we find odious or comfortable: we must engage them on their own ground and show them to be folly.
"I imagine such a thing would be amazingly toxic and hopefully collapse into a vortex of bad."
That's exactly right. Your idea is nothing more than a thin veneer over a brothel. And that's exactly the reason it merits no further discussion. (Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with brothels, but that's not what HN is about.)
No, this 'intellectual conversation' should never happen. The people involved in any sort of conversation of this type(as I am sure many have happened in the past) will only dull their sympathy for people who do have to struggle/contend with this happening to them. It's morally disgusting and I could care less about your definition of 'morality'.
The idea that scholarly discussions should ever be disregarded as insensitive is, in my opinion, pure absurdity.
I don't disagree that this isn't the right time for it (though I don't fault angersock for that), nor do I disagree that it might dull the sympathies of some - regardless, I completely reject that as a valid reason for avoiding an exchange of ideas driven by intellect.
The exchanging of ideas is the definition of conversation itself, it is not particular to 'scholarly discussions'. That alone completely negates your point.
However, I understand what you are trying to say. You are worried that the dismissal of conversation is a bad attitude towards progress. That is true. BUT that is not what is happening here. The premise was already set for what this conversation would be about. You should think of my rhetoric as a part of the conversation itself. Just because I weighed in as "going further accomplishes nothing", does not make that a a wrong conclusion. You could try to prove why THAT conclusion is wrong (but only in relationship to the conversation itself) instead of generalizing what I am doing as somehow "stopping all scholarly discussions".
>Stopping any scholarly discussion is, in my opinion, pure absurdity.
And yet you hypocritically just put an end to a conversation that would be about: "Whether or not stopping points for scholarly discussions can be useful".
How can you not even see how unfruitful your conclusions are?
Because I don't have any desire to prolong a conversation with someone who feels like a possibly poor choice of words on my part renders my entire argument useless.
Choosing to opt out of a discussion is not the same as attempting to prevent others from having one.
Having a discussion with someone whose principle argument is that the discussion shouldn't be had seems like folly to me. Call it unfruitful if you like, but I wasn't attempting to start an argument as much as do my duty and explain the downvote.
We could go on and talk about the hypocrisy of how your attempts to extend the conversation are being made in order to bolster your argument against having one in the first place, but truly, I was not, nor am not trying to be condescending, as much as expressing my outright rejection for the idea that there is ever grounds for preventing an intellectual discussion on the grounds that someone might not like it.
The original conversation is not the one being extended. And who chose to take a leap away from the original conversation? You did. Your entire comment: invalid.
Disagreed. Any form of discrimination or ignorance should be challenged with more dialogue instead of less. Take whatever abhorrent ideological position you can think of and I will tell you that we should discuss it publicly, challenge it publicly, and destroy it intellectually in a public forum.
This has the advantages of:
* the person who held these thoughts outs themselves as a bigot as opposed to being a toxic agent
* a corpus of knowledge how to dispel/combat such positions is formed
* people who may be in the beginning stages of harboring such ideas are either discouraged due to strong public pushback or are helped to realize how wrong that position is
steveklabnik posted a good link for PG's take on downvotes--do we have a similar reference for flagging? I recall a couple of polls on it, but beyond that, nothing comes to mind.
Maybe it was hard to see with all the grey text, but I couldn't find a specific line where you supported the idea, but rather, you just wanted to discuss and dissect the merits of such an idea through breaking it down to promote discussion and to specifically call out pitfalls in taking things to an absurd degree. Shame people here have problems separating discussion and refutation of toxic ideas from the active support for toxic ideas.
Downvotes because you're wondering why there isn't a VC fund/group "explicitly" set up to invest money in companies/individuals in exchange for some sort of sexual favors or for tolerating whatever behaviour you would throw at them.
It may just be an idea that you're not explicitly advocating, but it's an idea that's too close to what professionals here and the industry as a whole are trying to distance themselves from.
I think the downvotes are not born of disagreement (you're not really taking much of a stance here to agree or disagree with) so much as because this comment seems needlessly lowbrow and serves no clear purpose but to fantasize about a world in which even more ugly things exist.
Phone number for a business conversation? Of course.
This isn't difficult. I know techies have a reputation for being socially awkward but if you're suggesting that asking for someone's phone number in a business context could be mistaken for asking in a romantic context then you're wrong. It's very, very easy to define intention.
Any kind of romantic behavior is probably inappropriate, due to the power/incentive imbalance. A founder is trying to get money, an investor has money, and romantic overtures are really difficult to separate from the "getting money" problem.
I sort-of agree with you and sort-of don't. I think there are situations where there isn't a power imbalance.
For example a lot of VC firms won't invest in two companies in the same space. This ensures that they themselves don't have to pick which of their two portfolio companies is a winner in terms of advice, contacts, hiring help, etc. This is "baked in" to VC in a very, very obvious, no-exceptions kind of way.
So let's suppose that Anna is a founder at BoxFlix. And let's suppose that Gary is a VC with ABCD Partners. ABCD led Netflix's series A round (and since it's fictional, Netflix hasn't gone public yet). Gary is at demo day and couldn't possibly ever even HOPE to invest in BoxFlix no matter how compelling Anna and her team and company are; he's already in the Netflix deal. Further let's suppose that Gary primarily deals on the clean energy side of things, meaning that most of his personal/professional (they're often intermixed) contacts won't do Anna any good.
So could Gary ask Anna out on a date without it being inappropriate?
Let's suppose for the sake of argument that he tells Anna all this prior to his asking her out on a date such that she knows Gary and ABCD Partners will never invest in her company. In this case I think it's at the very least in a grey area and quite possibly not inappropriate at all.
Now if Gary conveniently doesn't mention that he or his company could never invest with BoxFlix, it could be argued that he's trying to bait & switch on Anna and that's a real problem.
Or if Gary led the investment in Netflix and sits on the board and remains highly involved in the company that could be inappropriate too, at least for Gary. Anna might not mind, but ABCD Partners surely would.
Disclaimer: I made all this stuff up. I live in Houston, not California and I don't really know anyone out there. If this seems too much like anything that's happened in real life I apologize and I'm happy to change the made-up names of Anna, Gary or ABCD Partners. It's all just to illustrate a point, not to make anyone feel bad.
EDIT: I wrote all this out because the original line is "Y Combinator has a zero tolerance policy for inappropriate sexual or romantic behavior from investors toward founders."
In that I read the word "inappropriate". If it was a strictly zero-tolerance policy (like schools have for guns, fake or real or toy or hand-formed-into-a-gun) then the word "inappropriate" wouldn't need to be there. By definition ALL romantic/sexual advances would be inappropriate.
So that leads me to believe that the folks at YC think it is possible for a VC and a founder to interact in a way that might end up romantic and that it's OK.
The other possibility is that they mean "no VC we invite can ever ask a founder out" but worded it poorly. I'd like to think that the folks at YC are smarter than that so I discount it as a possibility but there's still some chance that's what happened.
In either case, it's inappropriate. Professionally, it creates a major conflict of interest. Personally, it create a power dynamic where the founder may be indebted to the founder and facilitate unethical interaction.
The other responses are excellent, but I'll add my two cents. There is good reason to interpret this language broadly. Its really shitty when someone you assumed was interested in you as a potential investment (or as a coworker or mentor or contact or just an ally in office politics), turns out to just be interested in getting into your pants. Hitting on someone at demo day is just the tip of the iceberg. This goes all the way down to asking out someone on your team. This shit is just toxic up and down.
I think in this context, investor <--> founder is analagous to boss <--> employee, so I guess you'd have to take similar steps to manage it i.e. recuse yourself from investment decisions regarding that company.
I guess it would be equally awkward. In such a case, the people involved should at least wait until there is no more professional connection between them.
Furthermore, from a business standpoint, it's understandable that YCombinator doesn't want this kind of thing. It seems very dangerous for the company, without any advantage.
Still inappropriate after demo day. Investors are a tight knit group and retaliatory action is always a concern. The recent two exposes from two female founders both pointed to investors' power/influence as coercive factors, even if no specific deal is on the table.
It's maybe unfortunate it has to be this way, but investors should not hit on founders, full stop.
For those who didn't see this when it was making its way around, these are the two articles that have come up recently:
> When she asked why, he told her. “I don’t like the way women think,” he said. “They haven’t mastered linear thinking.” To prove his point, he explained that his wife could never prioritize her to-do lists properly. And then, as if he was trying to compliment her, he told Tucker she was different. “You’re more male,” he said.
This sounds like something a cartoon villain would say, but there's research that shows that the way men relate to their wives colors how they view women in their workplace. If you're a woman and your boss doesn't respect his wife's intellect, then it's going to be that much harder to make him respect your's.
I dunno where I'm going with this, but, if I were a manager and wanted to date a subordinate, I imagine I could quit, get a another job, and then ask the person out.[1] Is this route not available to an investor? Are they in the position of "permanent boss" to a founder?
This is a good plug for my general advice: make sure your employees have enough time to date outside of work.
[1] I never did this or was in a position to do this. And, speaking from general life experience, I would want someone to shake my shoulders vigorously and tell me "get over it, find someone else, there are plenty of fish in the sea," but people can't always see obvious things like this if/when they fall for someone.
Yeah, this is why I described it as "maybe unfortunate". I do believe there are roles where you will end up being "permanent boss" to a group of people, and short of losing all of your money/influence there's no way out.
A burden of being incredibly wealthy and influential, I suppose.
Since there are some founders who go through YC more than once, that's not good enough.
There are 6 billion people on this planet. It's not that hard to figure out as a YC investor: if it's a YC founder, they're no longer part of that pool. Period. I'm amazed at the amount of "but what if ..." discussion here
Sadly, I sometimes worry that explicit moves like this deter investors from working with female founders. If the risk is, "I have to watch every little thing I say/joke with a female founder lest I get blacklisted", if I was a VC, I might choose to avoid female founders altogether. Wonder if the better solution involves more carrot and less stick.
> If the risk is, "I have to watch every little thing I say/joke with a female founder lest I get blacklisted", if I was a VC, I might choose to avoid female founders altogether.
That's rich. People who think like that should really take some time to read a few first-person accounts on sexism and misogyny in tech industry. Once you've read about how women have to worry about their appearance and behavior on a daily basis just to be able to somewhat tone down the sexism they're exposed to, men's complaints about how they might have to start worrying a bit more become laughable.
To illustrate, here's an excerpt from the Forbes story making rounds on Twitter [1]:
Unlike my male peers, who could wear anything from jeans and a hoodie to a well-tailored suit, I had to choose my attire carefully. Feminine but not sexy, structured but not form fitting, classy but not too expensive, lest I imply that I was bad at bootstrapping and not "scrappy enough," professional but not so stuffy that people would assume our product lacked creativity. My hair was almost always worn in a bun or pulled back conservatively.
During the ten years that I worked in international development, clothing was a tool to defuse gender, a strategy for gaining access to an almost exclusively male professional environment. We referred to it as "taking on the third gender." For all its self-regard as the most forward-thinking place on earth, it seemed I would need to use the same tactics in Silicon Valley.
> if I was a VC, I might choose to avoid female founders altogether.
If you're a VC, you should be adept at assessing risk. If you think that the "risk" of working with female founders outweighs the potential upside, you're definitely not going to be touching my money and I'd rather not have any of yours.
Then they're effectively "leaving money on the table" by avoiding female founders, because they're being too risk-averse. The risk of false accusations that will blow up are too small to worry about.
If they're not outright bad investors, they are at least investing a suboptimal way.
I wonder if male investors are actually acting rationally leaving women out of their portfolios. I mean, we all know how a pretty face can scramble the thought processes of a male, and there actually are scientifically verified cognitive biases [1] that work against rational thinking in a multi-gender environment.
Not saying, of course, that this justifies any kind of harassment, just that maybe some of these investors have learned in the hard way that their judgment gets clouded when dealing with women.
But the Halo Effect page that you linked says that males were influenced by the halo effect when rating both male and female subjects so this isn't a strong argument for not hiring/investing in women.
And in a MythBusters I watched the other night, they "Busted" the myth that men get dumber around an attractive female. I'm pretty sure it was from the newest season if you wanted to look it up.
"Sadly, I sometimes worry that explicit moves like this deter investors from working with female founders."
Where did you read anything about gender in that reminder from Jessica? That was guidance on behavior. I'm sure YC has strong positions on racism, but that doesn't in any way imply that VCs should be concerned about working with founders from different races/ethnicities.
It's the same effect, I think, that has caused your comment to receive a number of upvotes but very little (i.e. zero at the time of writing) agreement in the child comments.
Personally, I see where you're coming from. I learn more about how sexism manifests itself in the tech industry every week, it seems. Even with good intentions and a lot of conscious thought about the issue, it doesn't seem extremely unlikely that some action I previously considered harmless could be taken the wrong way.
One day there may be a VC that only interacts with potential investments through the internet where no age, gender, height, orientation, religion, etc. is ever disclosed, both by the investor and investees. The only information to go off of would be the product/service, the business plan, and the integrity of the idea. Funny how this hasn't really caught on yet...
This will never happen because investors don't strictly invest in ideas. They also invest in people. Pg would fund any Zuckerberg idea, not because of the idea, but because of Zuckerberg's qualities. Or, put differently, Facebook minus Zuckerberg may have failed. Their early years were tenuous, and one wrong decision about what users would or wouldn't tolerate may have broken their momentum.
You can't assess that via the internet. You have to meet them.
What are the enumerated qualities of founders that can only be discerned live in person in relation to profitable product development in an age when you can hire out your PR to another person? Genuinely curious about this. I grew up on the internet, before people used their real names, when people were debating ideas and not entrenched with identity politics. I earned my first freelance job as an 8th grader and those people in the UK had no idea my age or gender, just that I could make something for them.
This is silly. If I, as an investor, never find any female-led startups that are worth funding in an already very small pool, then I should be punished?
I have always been pessimistic about the glorification of Silicon Valley, but this puts me over the edge to be utterly disgusted with everything that is the Tech world.
It might as well be a giant cult, where the "priests" (VCs and/or wealthy individuals in general) get to have sex with the women (people) of their choice. I am absolutely disgusted. The level of hypocrisy in this industry is horrendous. Until the Tech community can clean up its own act, it need not apply for 'cleaning up the world'.
There is a systemic attitude justifying these actions in the minds of these individuals. Just because they may be extremal outliers does not mean that their thinking was independent of their environment.
EDIT: I would like to add: And just because you write software, or helped build a company, or invested in a company that created a widely adopted piece of software, does NOT make you some sort of (semi-)savior of the world. I strongly believe that much of the chauvinism we are seeing is derived from the already large (undeserved) egotistical foundation much of S.V. sustains/feeds/nourishes itself off of.
"Venture capital is a relationship-driven business: a who-you-know world rather than a what-you-know world. First introductions and producers are found through social rather than professional circles, and a good number of those social circuits just don’t belong in this century. Even if the VCs aren’t racist, many of the the social intermediaries and clubs one must navigate in order to get to them are." [0]
Something I've been wondering since the Forbes article - is inappropriate investor behavior illegal? The things described there would unambiguously be sexual harassment if someone's manager did them; it seems unfortunate if the only tool to fight investor/founder harassment is social pressure.
Depends on what behavior we're talking about, but the simplest answer is no - lots of inappropriate behavior is not illegal.
It's not an investor-founder story, but a related and eye-opening read is the story from the co-founder of Meebo, titled "Why I Now Believe the Glass Ceiling Is Real"[0].
>Y Combinator has a zero tolerance policy for inappropriate sexual or romantic behavior from investors toward founders.
This implies that some sexual or romantic behavior from investors toward founders would be considered appropriate. If that's not the intended message, inappropriate should be replaced with something like 'any and all'.
While I'm not in any startup circles at the moment I would be curious for some clarification. Is it ever acceptable for an investor to pursue a romantic relationship with a founder? After the founder is funded (by another investor), for example. Or if the founder initiates?
EDIT: anyone want to explain the down votes? I point out what I find to be a confusing point in the message and ask for clarification. I didn't even express an opinion on the overall matter one way or the other. I simply asked for clarification and made what I thought was a useful suggestion. In what way is anything I wrote offensive or otherwise worthy of being down voted?
Is it ever acceptable for an investor to pursue a romantic relationship with a founder? After the founder is funded (by another investor), for example. Or if the founder initiates?
As a founder and MD of a company, quite simply, the answer is a bold NO.
Most of the opposite gender population is outside your company (or pool of possible investments). If you feel the urge, fish there, not in the tiny pond which you have a weird power relationship with. Getting romantically involved with people inside your company or which you're considering for investment is reprehensibly bad judgement as an owner or anyone in a position of authority and should obviously look like a Really Bad Idea (tm) to you if you are in that position of authority.
It's a bit like the old "should a teacher date a student" chestnut. Whether or not the student "initiates" is irrelevant. Just stay away from it, it's a terrible idea. If the founder/student "initiates", then they are the one acting inappropriately, and your thought should not be "hmm, maybe I should go along", it should be "oh shit, this could be a big problem, how do I get out of this tactfully?"
While most of the opposite gender population is outside your company (or pool of possible investments), most the opposite gender population that you interact with on a regular basis is likely not.
That's not to say I disagree with you on your overall point. I just found that argument to be a little too dismissive of the reason one might be dating within their company or pool of possible investments.
Irrespective of that, it's still a terrible idea to be dating in that pool. If we're talking about a 50'000 people company, than maybe it's ok so long as there's no direct business relationship, but if you're the MD of a small company you should simply not entertain dating people within that company. Just the potential for a sexual harassment lawsuit by itself should be enough to stop anything in its tracks - let alone the moral and ethical implications.
"This implies that some sexual or romantic behavior from investors toward founders would be considered appropriate."
That's a stretch. I think most reasonable individuals reading the statement would conclude that "inappropriate" is an emphatic descriptor, and not a categorical divider.
I consider myself reasonable and that's not how I read it. It wasn't until I visited the comments that I realized others were interpreting the phrasing differently. And if grammatically it can be correctly interpreted as either an emphatic descriptor or a categorical divider it seems less harmful to simply use a different phrasing entirely.
YC founders often do YC more than once. If you choose to pass on funding and date a founder, what happens when you they do their second lap?
What if you choose not to invest, date a founder, and then start to consider funding another startup that is in the same cohort and close to the founder you are dating? There could be questions about what information you have that you shouldn't.
It's a full-stop "don't do it." There's too much potential to hurt and divide the community and lots of smart, attractive people outside of YC.
No, the "inappropriate" is a qualifier...so there is an implication that certain behaviors are appropriate. There are many ways the statement could have been worded to state a zero-tolerance attitude...this was not one of them.
I think it does imply exactly that but don't really know how to argue the point. But regardless of whether it actually does or not, I doubt I'm the only one that thinks it does and thus if that wasn't their intent they should update the message to be more clear.
It may be intended that way but it's not semantically appropriate. I noted the same ambiguity as the grandparent poster immediately and found it somewhat confusing given the 'zero tolerance' clause that immediately preceded it. Every definition of the word 'inappropriate' relates to specific contexts. Using it as a universal is simply wrong, however common it might be in some circles.
Not working with them is a great step. Will you also publish names of people who act inappropriately (assuming it is safe and legally in the clear) so others can steer clear as well? Not only would that be further discouragement, it seems like an area where keeping the knowledge internal isn't a competitive advantage and would likely lead to a backchannel of gossip floating around (I hear x can't work with yc companies anymore)
This reminds me of HR departments that send out emails to the entire company telling them to watch their asses on their sick time because BY GOD some single person misused it and it will not happen again.
OK YC how about counseling the person that did it instead of treating everyone else like trash.
While everybody can understand the anger, the bad behaviors of some individuals must not be generalized to a profession, can it? Maybe "Demo Day attendees" would be more appropriate than investors.
Professional athletes and drug use. Police officers and violence. Clergy and child sexual abuse. As a percentage, those situations are extreme minorities, but it's important to aggressively address serious issues that exist in an industry, and not shy away for fear of generalizing.
If it was anything other than a blanket "don't do this," maybe. It's also like a crowd of new software engineers being told on day one, "By the way, you probably know this, but don't hack the payroll server to boost your paycheck." It's something the average person would never seriously consider, but in the event someone is boneheaded enough to actually do it, it negates the "I didn't know I couldn't" excuse. You can feel insulted if you want, but it's not a message _personally directed at you_, it's a general warning that, because of a few extreme incidents, needs to be explicitly stated out loud.
But one of the especially insidious things about sexism in tech is that it is often followed up with "it's just a joke" or "you're being overly sensitive". For a _lot_ of men in tech, it's just seen as boy's club fun and any discomfort it causes can easily be passed over.
I'd compare it to police corruption: the problem isn't so much the few corrupt cops, but the fact that the rest of the police will cover for them.
People actually do this?! (I'm sure there is precedent since JL took the time to write the post, but it's still mindboggling to me that someone would actually try it)
"all the time" in the mind of Shanley Kane, et. al. Disclaimers like these are mainly CYA statements such that the rabid hordes of social justice warriors don't throw Y Combinator under the bus on Pando because of a disgruntled founder looking to capitalize on feels where capitalizing on actual talent or acumen failed.
Oh come on, you honestly believe that someone who has sacrificed their time, friends and family to get an idea off the ground isn't vulnerable to being taking advantage of by investors?
This isn't a super out there PC statement that is being made. It's simply saying that this is a professional event and the expectation is for the relationships to be kept professional. You know, how it should always be.
That's not tumblr craziness, that is just basic respect and professionalism.
Sigh. Let me guess - you're a white dude, aren't you?
Of course you don't see this happening. Of course you don't see discrimination in the workplace. Maybe - just for once - accept that the people who actually do face this stuff are telling you that it does happen, and that we should do something about it. Maybe try listening to a perspective - any one will do, really - that is different from your own.
Don't worry, buddy. White dudes still hold all the positions of power in the industry. It's still way easier to get a job as a white dude. People will believe you if you're a white dude, about both things that happen to you and about your abilities.
If this is "racism" or "discriminatory", it's the least effective ever, and any comparison to the biases experienced by women and people of color is insulting.
Instead you claim that slagging of white people does not constitute racism as it does not compare to the "biases experienced by women and people of color". Absurd.
Upvoted you. It's unfortunate that it's so difficult to discuss this without bringing up the sex/race of the commentator, since it invariably invites a bunch of non sequiturs about reverse racism that talk right past the critical point, which is that overt sexism and racism are often invisible to parties to which they're not directed (and in the case of e.g. sexual harassment, the perpetrators exploit the cognitive biases involved to recruit people like the GP as unwitting accomplices in denying the reality of what's happening).
Firstly, discrimination in the workplace is not limited to "non-whites". Secondly, you cannot claim the supreme and unilateral right to determine what constitutes discrimination based on your race.
Simply stating "you're white and therefore you cannot see it" is both unreasonable, racist, and, if put forth as grounds for legislation, incredibly corrosive to the notion of rule of law.
The idea that only whites as a universal class are somehow unable to perceive discrimination is ridiculous and highly offensive.
This is no surprise. There's no metro area in the USA as cringe worthy as SV when it comes to relationships between men and women. Sexually frustrated neck beards and moderately attractive women do not mix. I can't even count the number of times a coworker has confessed his love to another, get rejected, then go out of his way to sabotage their career.
Does this come from the fact that most "computer nerds" spend their lives (whether by choice or 'lot in life') in pure isolation (if not physically then mentally)? In other words, does this void of 'sociality' in their life lead them to completely lack sympathy, empathy, and general kindness towards others? And does our tech environment (that encourages that lifestyle) also 'justify' that this mentality is not only okay but actually right. And by 'environment' I am not referring to the things we like to say (e.g. "Change the world", "put more diversity in the workplace(world)", etc.) but by the things we do (e.g. only hiring people that really are a lot like ourselves, if not just like ourselves).
I see no reason to believe that the tech industry is any more sexist than any other industry with an overwhelming male dominance. For example, a poll from just a couple of years ago reported that one in four women reports workplace sexual harassment[1].
It'd be much less worse if this was a tech industry problem only. The sad reality is that we're knee-deep in shitty behavior.
And I want to stress, since some seem people to take the opposite of the charitable principle when reading posts, that this does not in any way excuse the tech industry. It just implies that it's not due to lack of socialization; it's a general problem of men.
How is falling in love with somebody (or even just being infatuated) displaying a complete lack of sympathy, empathy and general kindness towards others? Maybe you should work on your empathy...
Imposing your own personal lustful attitudes on others who do not want to share in them and then feel internally justified (usually by the fact that no one you directly know is speaking critically of such types of actions) is very much so a display of a complete lack of any regard for other people's well beings (outside of you and your 'circle').
Edit: I thought about refraining from saying this but it really should be said: your comment is so beyond idiotic that it merits nothing except pure disgust and abhorrence.
YC investors are not "neckbeards". Further, this is a professional issue in every industry, in every locale.
In hospitals. On the factory floor. In the retail outlet. At the fast food joint. Put the sexes together and we're still trying to figure out how to make it work, trying to break free of the cloistered, sexist past. In New York, Boston, Toronto, and London.
And ultimately you have to blame popular media to some degree. In movies or shows where attractive people work together, the plot of the movie virtually always has them coupling up. It seems, from a media perspective, that you can't professional work with someone of the opposite sex (talking specifically about that situation) without it becoming romantic.
No one ever addresses the f__ked up lives that we (neck-beards, semi-down syndrome havers and others... normals) have. Flocked together, left alone to make the best out of the situation. Welcome to the real IT, enjoy!
Not insignificant, but major amount of relationships and subsequent marriages have sprung from flirts and advances at work, obviously frequently including power-disbalanced positions. [1]
While this particular (and pretty stringent at that) declaration of code of conduct is probably conducive to business and PR goals of YC, I'm far from convinced it will be advancing health of relationships between individuals concerned.
YC isn't about building romantic relationships, it's about building companies. Mixing business and romance is a losing proposition for women, because the latter taints absolutely everything. One of the awesome things about being a guy is that I can look around at, e.g., my classmates from grad school, and be quite sure that their "mental file" of me has a lot more about my intellect and character than about my looks. If someone has my back in an argument about what our team should do, I can comfortably assume it's because they respect my position, not because they're romantically interested in me. These are things men can take for granted that women cannot. And when you allow romantic advances in professional contexts, you make it all that much harder.
I'm actually pro this blanket cover, but I just see it as band-aid with pretty unclear non-business related consequences.
As for you argument, I'm considering looks an asset to be employed alongside intellect, presentation/communication skills. I mean, I wouldn't want to live in a business enviroment where we're assigned numbers as our names, modulate our voices to sound the same, and use same unisex avatars in a VR-powered business conference all the time. Would you? That would alleviate all possible business-related concerns of yours.
What the fuck kind of response is this? Attitudes like this are the reason harassment is a problem in the tech industry. Yes, it happens. Occasionally. But not in a situation with these kinds of power dynamics. It is never appropriate to flirt with someone who is trying to engage in a business transaction with you. No exceptions.
You're not listening. It's not happening ocassionally. It's one of the major drivers of relationship genesis. You may knee-jerk deny it and be inappropriate in your response as much as you want.
Just be a professional, come on. Engaging in any kind of romantic relationship with someone who you are giving millions of dollars is the definition of unprofessional. You shouldn't have that job, period, end of story.
I'll admit the analogy was extreme, but dsirijus was acknowledging the abusive potential of scenarios that "obviously frequently including power-disbalanced positions". More than simple "business contacts".
Rather than forced rape, you could say "consensual" relationships with 13 year olds, which was once the norm.
Or for a safer analogy, Bill Gates gives millions of dollars to solve real problems, and today is a top humanitarian if you look at what he's doing. However, he attained his wealth through aggressive, unethical business practices, and there are probably many who had their financial well-being destroyed as collateral damage.
It's not about the interests of anyone. It's about trying to fight sexism but instead of educating the people you try to create an environment where it can't exist. It's like trying to fight sea pollution by making swimming pools. You can enjoy your time in a pool but the pollution in the sea is still there.
If you've read any of the previous Y Combinator statements on sexism against founders, you'd know that position being taken here is one of removing inefficiencies in the system. All the women being literally chased out by male investors who are seriously abusing their power just to get their rocks off is considered to be a huge opportunity cost. A female founder conference is a workaround, and it makes you sound really out of touch to complain about it.
Okay, so let's be honest and direct and talk about the system and its inefficiencies. Because so far all this "no sexism" has everyone believe that it is about people, not "the system".
Which is why I am saying, if you care about the people - which we happen to describe with the term "females" in this case - you should strive to include them, not to create conferences, events and groups that "protect" them by isolating them.
If you wanted to do ballet tomorrow, would you prefer a "boys-only" class or a "regular" one?
By the way, thanks for the time and the effort you invest in actually discussing with me instead of just downvoting my comment - I appreciate it a lot as it is the only way for me to have a chance to understand where I am wrong and where I am right. :)
For the ballet analogy to fit, you'd have to imagine that men who attended coed classes were frequently subject to a lot of negative attention, ranging from "oh my god a male" all the way up to blatant sexual abuse. You would have to imagine men generally avoiding ballet because of this.
In such a situation, I think providing some path for men to participate at all, and thus gradually shift the balance to the point where it no longer is a big deal, would trump the more abstract general concern of "let's not ever make anything about sex." I understand that ideal, but we're not there yet. We're in a remedial situation, where VC (and much of society, to be honest) is as of yet too immature to allow that to work.
While I agree with you that an "All-One-Sex Conference" is still sexist, I am still downvoting you for showing a lack of sympathy for the people affected by the topic at hand. You'll get over it.
She hasn't made the point "explicit" (stated clearly and in detail, leaving no room for confusion or doubt [1]), because it isn't clear what "inappropriate" means.
edit: Using the word "inappropriate" makes the statement ambiguous because it states there is some sexual or romantic behavior that is "appropriate" (suitable or proper in the circumstances) [2].
If the intent here is to state that sexual or romantic behavior is inappropriate and there is a zero tolerance for this behavior, this statement fails to achieve that.
This kind of ambiguity is problem with corporate-speak in general.
Why would you write the following, which doesn't mean anything:
Y Combinator has a zero tolerance policy for inappropriate sexual or romantic behavior from investors toward founders.
Demo Day is a business context. If you are an investor talking to the founder of a YC startup, it's a business conversation. There shouldn't be any hint of romance, dates, flirting.
Tony and Ziva are colleagues, which makes their relationship different in power terms from a supervisor-supervised relationship.
For contrast, look at Gibbs and Abby, who do have a supervisor-supervised relationship with the same power dynamics as that between investors and entrepreneurs. In their case, the show goes out of its way to make sure everyone understands that their relationship, while affectionate, is neither romantic nor sexual.
Why? Because it would be super creepy if Gibbs, who is both Abby's boss and much older than her, suddenly made a pass at her out of nowhere.
That's your understanding of inappropriate, which is completely irrelevant to the discussion unless you are Jessica Livingston. That's exactly my point in the original post.
Let's look at the opposite of the question to see if that lends any light. What exactly is "appropriate sexual or romantic behavior from investors toward founders?" If the answer is "there is none" then falsestprophet has a valid point. The word inappropriate just leads to unnecessary interpretations and grey area that wouldn't exist if the word was just left out of that sentence.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/08/07/what-it...