Heading into YC demo day and there's an elephant in the room | Hacker News Reader

Heading into YC demo day and there's an elephant in the room

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36 pointsjkestner18 comments

I'm always wary of articles or tweet-blogs (i guess this is a thing now) where race is the primary conversation topic.

I'm Latino and also happen to be very black (or very, very black depending on how long I've been outside.) I've done AP classes in high school, spent years on the national debate circuit, went to a fairly well-known engineering school (that was mostly white/asian) and worked at some of the best tech companies in the country right now. So I'm no stranger to being the "token black guy" in a room/dept/company full of white/asian dudes (women are also a rarity in tech, though that seems to be changing, and that's great).

As for this situation: if Demo Day is anything similar to the Startup Weekend that I did recently (and the startup meetups that I participated in during that time), I'll theorize that the problem isn't so much that black founders don't get funded; it's that:

a) There aren't that many black or latino founders in tech,

b) There aren't that many minorities in tech in general (compared to our white/asian partners), and

c) White and Asian people tend to come from wealthier families than we do and, honestly, doing a startup (or getting funding for a startup) is kind-of a rich man's game (or knowing lots of wealthy people).

I also sometimes feel like the authors of these articles WANT race to be a problem, so they look for anything that might spark that fire and then promptly pour more gas into it until it turns into a trending topic on Hacker News or Reddit.

I mean, I don't doubt that there are some cliques that one can have an easier time of participating in by being white (this is actually one of my biggest fears --- that I'll actually start to feel racism if/when I actually come into wealth because wealthy people can "afford" to be dicks), and I certainly don't doubt that there are racist folks out there. I just don't think that it is as common of an occurrence as it's made out to be.

I think you are exceptionally lucky for race not to have been more of a negative factor in your experiences.

So while we can be glad that your path has been as you describe, we cannot let your anecdotal experience cause us to feel like the issue is less serious than it is.

I am not saying this as a means to endorse the linked article. I'm saying it so that we remember to never, ever let anecdotal stories that go "I'm in marginalized group X and I've never experienced significant negative consequences of discrimination in tech" affect our opinions about the issue's prevalence, severity, or significance.

When there's hard data showing improvement, then we can relax about it. Until then, hearing stories about the lucky few who weren't disadvantaged can be inspirational, but is not a valid way to form an opinion of the larger issue and larger community.

You're right. I'm not saying that the issue in serious. Minorities in tech is a HUGE issue at the moment, as it should be. The more smart and driven people that pursue this crazy field, the better.

I'm just saying that having a full understanding the context at hand helps more. The OP of these tweets didn't provide any hard evidence either, FYI.

> When there's hard data showing improvement, then we can relax about it.

What hard data are you proposing?

What do you mean? I'm not saying such hard data exists, but data showing that race/gender/orientation/etc are not related to being under-represented as founders (after accounting for base rates) or as funding winners, and that race/gender/orientation/etc are not related to being underpaid, being given less favorable funding terms, being passed over for promotions, or enduring unfair discriminative working conditions.

I'm not aware of much convincing data on this. Most of the data about it relating to start-ups fails to adequately account for base rates, which is a double problem: it sensationalizes superficial discrepancies that are symptoms of the social processes that generate tech workers and founders (which causes knee-jerk contrarian reactions from tech people who rightly feel the sensationalized issue misrepresents things), while failing to give enough attention to real issues that persist after accounting for base rates.

I don't know if I agree with his conclusion "27/ So please, don't sweep race under the rug when you meet me. Talk to me about it. It'll help you understand why I'm going to succeed."

I feel like if I'm asked to have some special set of "questions only for minority founders", I'm always going to think of minority founders as different. Overall I think this simply inspires animosity and hurts race relations. It puts a chip on the founders shoulder (did I deserve this or was it a handout) and casts doubt in the minds of white people that wouldn't otherwise be racist (did he earn that or was it affirmative action).

I don't claim to know what its like to be a minority founder. Nor do I claim to have a solution to race relations in America. I just don't see this as a better alternative to V.C's being as colorblind as can be.

Don't talk about race. Talk about race because it's an elephant. Don't talk about being a female developer. Talk about being a female developer. Don't talk about your your age. Talk about your age.

how are we supposed to act again?

There's really no way to convey my feelings about this sort of thing without coming off as overly negative, but I'll try.

It's kind of a bizarre logic, wherein the author gets to gloat about all of the street-cred of making it while still condemning efforts at trying to eliminate the attempts at color-blindness that have at least partially eased that journey. That seems like a self-defeating game, one that injures future folks while serving to give a temporary soapbox and bonus to the person making the observations.

Also, the bit about ethnic/minority founders being so much more resilient than everyone else is unnecessarily divisive. Go read about the early history of Id software, for example, and then tell me that stealing company equipment at night and fording rivers is somehow easier work than being one of a few persons of color at a YC demo day. Everybody's journey is rough in its own way.

And if you want to talk about the elephant in the room--at the end of the day, what are the numbers? How many minority-owned businesses have succeeded compared to their non-minority contemporaries? How many have gotten funded?

If we are here to do social welfare, and give everybody a shot at the prize, that's one thing. That's the good work of the civil rights movement. But today? Today, America's a business, and despite the whitewashing, what matters at the end of the day is what has the historically the best ROI. And if we want to be honest with ourselves, that paints a very different picture of what works and what should work. That picture is super ugly. It's also pretty lucrative.

And yeah, it's shitty. Then again, maybe we should save our pity and outrage for the dozens of homeless or imprisoned people of color in our cities instead of one dude complaining on Twitter.

Don't know the guy, but as someone that is a very strong supporter of the removal of bias from the world I will say that my experience is that in many cases those who are so vocal about bias are themselves bias, which to me is troubling. Case in point, in his tweets he to me very clearly equates education to experience, and in my opinion they're not equivalent.

They're not, but I can see his point. VCs often look for an educational pedigree when deciding who to fund. Here is a great example: http://recode.net/2015/12/03/venerated-vc-michael-moritz-ope...

He's talking about why he hasn't hired any female VCs, but the pattern exists with top VCs in both hiring partners and funding founders. He says: "We just hired a young woman from Stanford who’s every bit as good as her peers. And if there are more like her, we’ll hire them. What we’re not prepared to do, is to lower our standards."

Which says, to me (a state college dropout) that I'd get nowhere with this guy if I wanted to be a VC at his firm.

Now, is it fair that they do that? Is it right? I don't think so--but the pattern unfortunately exists.

Here is an interesting thread from Sam Altman's AMA about the same issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11315113

sama: "We looked at our data here last year--we fund founders from a very wide variety of schools, and no school at all, but many of our most successful founders went to 'top schools' and thus it's easy to get the mistaken impression we select for that."

At least you have a privilege to attend this "demo day". Try not being an American.

Things must be improving though - I get from the title that elephants no longer have any barriers preventing them from participating.

I can see the guys point that people pattern match for appearance. But I'd imagine the way to go against it is for him to let people know he's gone to Princeton and has an MBA from UCLA and the like rather than expecting VCs to say to him let's talk about you being black.

Also as an aside, as an investor I think I might be more worried about him seeming a non technical solo founder than the skin colour thing.

Just wait until you're 50 if you want to see elephants

Interesting strategy. What a gamble!

Is this PR genius, or self-defeating behaviour?

Strong message, but I'm confused why it's broken up into ~26 subsections. It's almost like there's some arbitrary word limit imposed on it or something.

Heh. There's arguments for him just posting a blog rather than what he did, but, majority of people are just RTing the first one, and he's probably getting so many more followers, and visibility. People love twitter rants.

I saw this as he was posting. Powerful.

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