taliban

I love you to death but please watch your double quote-nesting when using marketing buzzwords if you don't want me and mbellotti to deliver 40 lashings in a public square <3

Marianne just totally cockblocked me by mentioning that incident! It was a single isolated incident, mind you. Someone I've been talking to on OKCupid reads HN and found this post, which has now led to a heated argument about whether I'm a human capable of love or a Siri-like chat bot optimized for professional networking.

+1000000

Thinking Fast and Slow is one of those books that changes your life by permanently altering your worldview. On some level it makes you resent yourself as you start learning how to identify your own biases (and even worse, just how many there are! Good God!) but once the bruises on your ego start fading you'll find that you're a far better person for it.

All valid points -- especially the last one, which in all honesty does make me giggle every time. Every word I write, Anonymous NSA Guy, I write for you <333

On a sincere note, breck, I truly do appreciate the thoughtful feedback and will certainly act on it if I come to perceive that the benefit of doing so will outweigh the difficulty of parting with the conversation starter that is my Twitter handle. I'll be the first to admit that this kind of shock value appears to have a high risk of backfiring (which, mind you, wasn't a very relevant concern 5 years ago when no one but close friends knew my online persona), but somehow -- and even I don't know how, really -- it has led to overwhelmingly positive interactions over the years, especially as people become familiar with my personality and sense of humor.

My full first name is Tal. While I'm far too busy with work to engage in any meaningful fundamentalism, this doesn't stop my friends from giving me irreverent nicknames that start with the three letters of my name. As you can imagine, this particular one has by far the most sticking power, which has oddly morphed into a sort of personal brand over the years.

I'm mbellotti's cofounder at Exversion. For me, the main takeaway of her post is just how different the YC interview experience can appear even to members of the same team. As the other female on the team, I've always found my chromosomal makeup to be a huge advantage rather than a disadvantage (especially after establishing some level of technical competence). Despite my own belief in merit over affirmative action, it's one of the biggest tools in my toolkit, frankly. Where males have nepotism, we have novelty and the promise of good PR. I would even go so far as to say it may give us a net advantage over all-male teams.

I digress. My own view of the YC interview is such, taking into account the magic of hindsight: that we shouldn't have depended on PB and our interviewers to drive the conversation toward market size. We should have anticipated the concern on our own and brought it up as it's something we're already used to having to defend. Should've, could've, would've -- who knows if that would've mattered, but it's my best guess. Then again, we also spent our 10 minutes successfully selling them on our team and execution abilities, which we evidently did very well based on the feedback we got in our rejection email. In fact, I don't think our interview could have gone much better than it did and I still feel overwhelmingly positive about it. Contrary to Marianne, perhaps, I feel pretty viscerally that we sell our team better than we sell our product/market fit at the moment. And with the caliber of applications YC sees these days that include companies with crazy good traction, we can't properly apply the YC priorities of yore ("great team, not much else yet? You're in!") to our interview and extrapolate that it was our demographics that didn't get us in. As Marianne's (mbellotti's) experience shows, it is certainly something to consider, but it is just one of dozens of possibilities. It's also worth considering that demographics may have helped rather than hindered us in getting the interview in the first place.

Now to figure out how to make this work with a rotary phone...