One of the problems with racism in particular is that it has effects on people from birth. Past racism may have hurt their parents' socioeconomic prospects, forcing them to be born in an economically depressed ghetto with poor schools and gang violence. Even if there's no racism past that point, if their parents were prevented from ascending to the middle class, they won't pass on middle-class virtues emphasizing the importance of education. No matter how good the schools are, they don't really work the same without positive parental involvement.

And there's obstacles to how good the schools are, too--good teachers will be scared away by the violence and gang activity that's common in those environments, and district-based taxing, funding, and student allocation procedures mean that kids in those areas are trapped in bad schools. If the school system is racist on top of that, that's even another barrier.

If you don't fix something that's that bad when the kid is five years old, by the time they're eighteen and getting out of high school, let's suppose they go to college. Okay, the colleges do everything they can not to be racist, but it's genuinely harder to meet academic standards for admission if you went to shitty schools your whole life. And even if you get in, you have to compete with the students who went to better schools and got a better start. That's a barrier against even getting into difficult academic tracks like STEM. And if the university system is racist, that's even another barrier.

Okay, the job market for developers is pretty good right now even in startups. It probably isn't even racist. But even at this point, all the forces I've already described have thinned out the numbers to the point where a disproportionately small minority of the genuinely qualified population of entry-level developers are, well, minorities. But let's say the job market is racist, too.

Once you're ready to found a startup, it's absolutely true that the pool of candidates coming to YC and others for funding is genuinely unbalanced. Even if investors do everything they can to be perfectly non-racist, racism in any or all of the levels previous to this in the person's life is going to take them out of the population of qualified startup founders. And no matter what you do to fix investment, it's not going to restore the proportion of minority startup founders to the proportion of minorities in the population. You have to fix these problems at the root, not all the way out here when it's too late to make any difference.