anotherfounder

As a female founder (not black though), we went through a similarly congnitively dissonant process. A-List investors who would publicly talk about supporting female founders would behave the worst (esp. female investors, Hi Aileen!), investors whose entire brand was around supporting ethical startups (or insert any similar alternative movement) would be the least interested in that aspect (Hi Spero Ventures!) All of that, along with a healthy dose of rudeness.

In our experience, those at the very very top of the totem pole gave us the fairest chance, and those below them, were the very worst. In the end, it was hard no to feel that an investor's Twitter persona was a sham, in the end they would invest only in the hottest SAAS startup by an ex-Googler.

FWIW, I know my experience was not alone. There are tons of now well-funded female founders who will echo this sentiment. I just wish there was a way to have a public list of those who walk the talk and those who just tweet the walk..

EDIT: Adding something from thread below to focus more on solutions, and providing perspective on why what is happening is not enough.

>...What is frustrating about these investors (and YC) is that it all is very surface level. I'm sure they believe they are doing the right thing but all of their assumptions, ideas, pipelines, and teams, all are informed by those biases. And there isn't enough being done to deconstruct that. For example, what does it mean to say 'too early' to an under-represented founder? who is the comparison to? How many of your last X investments or team members came from Stanford or ex-FAANG?

> Let's put in place processes, time allocations, smaller programs. And let's put all of this in place first for those raising their first rounds - the angel or the mythical pre-seed.

For someone who has spent so much telling founders to cut buzzwords and speak in plain and simple English, this blog post by Justin Kan is something special. Case in point:

> Similarly, at Atrium, we’ve made the tough decision to restructure the company to accommodate growth into new business services through our existing professional services network.

Simple facts hidden in positive-sounding buzzwords, as if, they believe that the reader doesn't know better. It seems like a variation of 'Our incredible journey..' template

Honest question, why do companies do this? It seems disrespectful to everyone - employees (both fired and current), customers, and any adult for that matter.

https://twitter.com/EricaJoy/status/1136061641441681408

I'm also curious if this was Patreon + Discovery or a different direction.

Eventually, they just rejected our application and off we went to SVB. It was frustrating, especially since we really were hoping to support another startup.

One could argue that Wikipedia has a broader responsibility to the readers than to just the editors, and such a process gives the editors undue weight in the process. The vocal minority cannot always represent the needs of the silent majority and that role would lie with the product team, which in my understanding hasn't been the case at Wikipedia (I say this, and having interviewed and turned down a Wikipedia PM offer and having a few friends worked in Design at Wikipedia and leaving disillusioned).

From the post: > Our initial version wasn’t good enough. Our community asked us not to go ahead with it. We answered by listening to them and making it better.

This was 2 years ago, and read the comments on the 39 votes it took to not release Hovercards - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28prop...

This meant that the silent majority didn't get these features for 2 years because some considered it 'intrusive'. A feature that you could objectively argue as being a useful utility.

If anything, I think this is an indictment of the complaints against Wikipedia from those observing it and ex-employees. While a benevolent dictatorship might be going too far, such a community process where only the loudest voice wins (over considering what is best for MOST of the users), is surely a broken process. I am surprised that product & design people work there at all in such an environment.

If SAFE is a way to start what would be a priced round (a few months), then your numbers would tell a different story. You getting to invest $1M and $10M cap, and then the company raising at $20M valuation later, means that you got an unfairly low priced deal (assuming company's valuation wouldn't naturally double in those couple of months).

In short timeframes (SAFE -> Priced rounds), its hard to imagine something other than discounts being fairer to all parties concerned.

In longer timeframes where the next priced round is a Series A, an year later, your point stands and is well taken.

Also, if there is a liquidation event, then the SAFE should convert, right? And not sure if you act as an angel or represent a fund, would you rather use convertible notes or price?

For a lot of people, I see the difference being the start of the process, and the end of process which can be a few months - in which case, an uncapped with discount seems entirely reasonable.

It seems like you are referring to a case where a substantial time has passed to materially affect the valuation in a substantive way?

Would it be more appealing if you the round was closed in the next few months, so you investing early would be well rewarded with the discount?

I am also curious how the reactions differ from Angels to MicroVCs to Seed Funds.

Even then, it is interesting that the optics of this doesn't bother investors.

It would be useful for the founder community (especially outside YC network) to have examples of how different recent startups have done it - offered discount or cap or both, how they determined the cap, the experience at A, experience with SAFE when dealing with angels/micro VCs, etc.

Any founder willing to share that here?