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Comment by tlb | Hacker News Reader

Every underrepresented group represents an opportunity to start a company, hire some great people from that group, and succeed together. A single company, perhaps one you start this year, can make a huge impact.

YC funding applications are due today. https://www.ycombinator.com/apply

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That's such a big, intimidating risk. I don't mean that to be snarky; starting a business for means of primary income is prohibitively scary to me.

I have a few ideas that I could probably implement to make some passive income. It wouldn't be crazy initially, but it also wouldn't be an amount to scoff at. I think they all have the potential to grow or be bought. The thought of taking that giant risk and failing...

Aside from the ramifications of selectively hiring from my minority group, starting a business makes me shudder.

Underrepresented groups tend to have less financial security. (That's part of why they're underrepresented in the first place; the term means that there's less of them in some particular space than their fraction in society as a whole, not that they are a minority in terms of underrepresented numbers.)

Venture capital is great for taking someone who has some amount of financial security, but not quite enough to entirely bootstrap their venture, and giving them enough more. But it's not particularly effective at helping someone who really needs a low-risk (even if low-reward) option because they have no fallback if their company fails. (To be absolutely clear, this isn't the fault of any venture capitalist, nor is it a thing I think a venture capitalist can reasonably solve in the short term, so this is not a complaint about venture capitalists, just a statement about how the world is. Perhaps in the long term, YC's experiments with UBI might help, but that's an experiment and it won't become a reliable source of financial security for anyone for many many years.)

Race doesn't line up perfectly with financial security, and it certainly does not determine financial security. But in the US, today, it's pretty strongly correlated.

It's not a very plausible assumption that your competitors are racially biased but your investors and customers aren't.

Not only that, it's much more legal to be racially biased in who you choose as your customers. The laws in the US that require nondiscrimination in hiring, regardless of how effective they may or may not be, don't apply at all to choosing a NoSQL vendor or whatever.

Which part isn't plausible? There's plenty of evidence that competitors are biased in various ways. For tech startups, customers and investors are rarely aware of the racial mix of employees, unless maybe they're in the news for not being diverse enough.

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