Jessica Livingston
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
(John and I became interested in startups in large part as a result of reading Founders at Work. And then, because John and I were immigrants without credit history, our residence of the Bay Area started with Jessica helping to convince a landlord to rent a place to us. Once the company was underway, whenever John and I had a major decision to make, figuring things out generally involved biking over to Jessica's and PG's place for an invariably clarifying discussion.
I recall one particular decision that John and I had been debating for weeks. We just couldn't decide. Jessica's response, when asked, was immediate and adamant. We were surprised but trusted her. John and I often remark at how differently (and, I'm confident, worse) things would have ended up had Jessica not convinced us to make that call.)
Take note world. Really happy to see this essay published.
EDIT: of course I don't find it fair! I'm just afraid that the same misogynist reflexes, which erased her from YC's public history, would have lead to try and disparage her promotion as president.
Of course agan, that's no reason not to promote her; but it would have to be done with the appropriate PR strategy, to defuse such speculations.
The first really great company I worked at was explicit about being family-oriented; they'd bring everyone's family to the office and cook dinners, had Christmas at the founders house, that sort of thing.
I left that company and joined a different sort of family, which was more of a bar-fighting sort of family but still had that vibe.
Then I started my first company, which cratered, and which did not have that family feel at all, despite it being largely a group of people who were friends in real life.
I felt like we got part of the way there with Matasano (at least in the Chicago office, which was our largest), but not all of the way. It's tricky to pull off!
I really only want to work at companies that have that feel, for the rest of my career. It makes a huge difference. Also: if Jessica Livingston can generate that kind of culture on demand, that's definitely a reason to be impressed by her!
This is also the reason why in business (the reverse example) it's important (generally and depending on the circumstances) to keep an arms length relationship. If your brother in law is, for example, the contractor doing work and renovating your home, your hands are tied more than if it's someone that you don't have a personal connection to. Weighed against the potential upside of getting a bad job from someone who has no relationship with you at all of course. (Details and the parties involved matter as with anything).
>it would tend to make employees less likely to jump ship because of a personal connection and bond.
Employees should jump ship if the business sucks. It shouldn't matter how nice the owners are to you, if the business itself is no good, you shouldn't stay around and support it.
This sounds horrid. I don't want to spend Christmas with my boss, and I definitely don't want to have dinner in the office, ever.
"Sorry Grandma, can't make it for Christmas, have to go see my boss instead"?
That's not to say that companies shouldn't provide opportunities to bond with your coworkers, but I think I'd want to work for companies that appreciate people have lives outside the company.
However, it's not uncommon for tech companies to say that they're like a "family", but what it really means is that they want you to long hours, weekends etc, because you know, family obligations.
It might work in the beginning, with younger workers, but always seems to fail.
Whenever I hear were all one big family here, I automatically go to the Manson Clan. I just can't help it.
Maybe I've seen this family-thing used by the wrong parents--too many times? In the end, when the family finds out who's really making the big money; the family plan falls apart. Of course the parents are usually the last ones to find out they don't have a tight knit family, but a group of siblings who feel exploited. (Yes, many of the exploited employees are lucky to even have a job, but that's another story.) There are a few founders who put there money where their mouths are, but they seem rare.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but abused by too many rich guys--in order to get their company going.
I give respect, and loyality to a parent who came from nothing, and put everything on the line to get the family off the ground. Yes--that's a family. I'll buy the family thing.
The rich dudes who are backed by rich dudes don't get the same respect. See rich boys can take chances with cheap money. It's just two different worlds.
I don't want to argue with anyone. I know I don't have the greatest attitude. I've just seen too much injustice in the financial world, and when people start up with the family-thing; it just reminds me were in a bubble, with too much cheap money only certain guys have access to.
Not to mention, the few places I've worked like that were the only ones where I looked forward to going to work and gave it that extra percent of effort. Didn't even feel like work. Wonder if that's the experience for everyone else. All employers should at least to attempt to create such an environment as good things just seem to emerge from it.
And as this excellent post show, it can work wonders in startup incubators too.
It was a great company to work for. The product was really interesting. I got to learn so many random things - how tires are made, the warning signs of traumatic brain injuries, how the propellant for the Space Shuttle's SRBs was mixed, etc.
But the best part was the family atmosphere of the company. The owner was a business professor full time and this was his side project. We were always small - just a few interns, a few part-time people (mostly students) and just a couple full-time employees. Him and his wife always took an interest in everyone that worked for them. Getting a home-cooked meal and a night of poker once a week was a nice perk for a poor college student.
After my internship, I was hired on part-time, then full-time after I graduated until I left for a different opportunity. But to this day they're still one of the favorite companies I've ever worked for. It was such a positive experience for me and has caused me to continue to seek out companies with that type of atmosphere.
Probably not a surefire way to achieve this - and certainly not the only one - but I thought I'd share.
My company isn't even particularly successful, but it's incredibly difficult for us to get anyone who writes about us to mention that I'm a co-founder (not the founder, let alone the fact that the community that does most of the important work) and that there's an entire team behind what we're doing (that it's not "my" thing).
The single-man myth is just a lot sexier, even if false. There are great founders, to be sure, but every time you talk to the person who is the "single man" they talk about how the company is successful because of a fantastic team. In fact, a lot of the work of a founder is assembling a great team and making them work well together. I don't think I've ever seen an exception to that - even Jobs, Musk, etc.
In fact, the real moral of the story is that the tech press is almost entirely bullshit, and that is mostly to be avoided.
"Because I'm a writer" is a kind of highfalutin' way of saying "because I'm super noisy". :)
Basically, don't value yourself based on what the tech press writes about you. If you are the one getting the press: you actually aren't that great; if you aren't getting the press: who cares.
I understand that PG is writing this article because he feels it is unfair he gets written about too much and Jessica not enough, but the real crux of the issue is that the tech press is so stupid it doesn't matter. I mean just look at that article that was written about Jessica...
Taken to extremes, you get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory
Unless you're applying for certain types of visa. Then USCIS cares.
Most stories are pitched by PR firms (or the other side of the same coin, attempted take-downs). Either way, they're ready-fire-aim -- finding facts to fit a conclusion.
First and foremost they are stories -- written by someone attempting, under deadline, to fit messy, complicated reality into a simple, entertaining narrative to hold your eyeballs.
Think of them as professional fan (or anti-fan) fiction.
Even long-form articles and books that interview many people, while admirable efforts, present a pretty small slice of reality.
Any interaction I've had with the tech press from the "written about" side of things (or reading about close friends) has given me less and less faith in what I read about those I don't know.
Similarly for bands or movies. The lead may be male or female, but either way, nobody except the most obsessed fan or people who worked there is going to remember more than a few names. The closing credits give you a more accurate picture of how many people it takes to make a movie, but that's not the story anyone can remember.
The press knows this already. If you're going to interact with them, you need to understand their need to tell a good story, or nobody's going to read the article.
So I think we can't blame the press for this (much). They could tell slightly more complicated stories, but they're still going to be inaccurate, and you won't remember all the names anyway.
If anything, blame how human memory works, and keep in mind that no matter what stories you read, the world isn't really story-shaped.
So, it's an interesting phenomenon that even with such a preponderance of evidence, the story that gets told and re-told mostly leaves her out. Our industry has so many internalized prejudices that are invisible unless and until you're looking for them, it can seem perfectly normal for the story to be about a lone man building an empire with a few supporting characters. If the story were framed as building a "family", rather than a business empire, would Jessica's role be more prominent in the telling? I think one could tell it either way, but the tech industry doesn't have language for that, even though I think some of the best companies were as much a family as an empire (early HP, for example).
Gender roles are weird, is what I'm trying to say, and the tech industry is more rigid than many.
I don't disbelieve that is how it happens, but to me it just seems all a bit too magical. Like, founders should be betting their entire business that this person who won't talk to you can correctly divine your entire past and future trajectories just by watching you talk to her husband? Otherwise, they won't accept you into their family?
It's a bit of a turn off and vaguely cult-like.
Unfortunately, none of the descriptions demystify the magic. Maybe I am reading the descriptions incorrectly, but the actual logic behind the magic is never explained. The descriptions only contain an appeal to a magic oracle power.
>But after the interview, the three of us would turn to Jessica and ask "What does the Social Radar say?" [1]
The footnote for that quote says:
>...
>"She was always good at sniffing out any red flags about the team or their determination and disarmingly asking the right question, which usually revealed more than the founders realized."
I'd be interested in reading or knowing more about the questions which were asked, instead of a direct appeal to authority (right question), what the questions revealed, and what the founders actually realized.
As far as I can tell, these details never get discussed publicly.
Which says, to me, that pg doesn't understand it, either. He just trusts it based on historical reliability.
I'd also be curious to know what some of those magically insightful questions were, but I don't think it nullifies the point of the article to not include them.
My grandfather was a pub owner -- he could talk to anyone about anything, and was often able to de-escalate people and situations. I remember him being a fluent reader of body language... he could size somebody up and immediately & accurately tell you that the person was trouble.
Imagine if Jessica ran a VC firm with two other people like her, plus Paul, and they were trying to fund companies that required immense social skills. The founders would all be excellent conversationalists and promoters, and could probably fake the tech talk enough that Jessica couldn't tell. PG would be able to spot the buzzwords and call them on it, and it would seem magical to the rest because they don't know SQL from C++.
I try not to believe in magic as well, so I assume there are reasons why a particular founder was judged unsuitable. It's just that those reasons are not explored and all the language used to described the YC process is essentially an appeal to a magic oracle.
>Imagine if Jessica ran a VC firm with two other people like her, plus Paul, and they were trying to fund companies that required immense social skills.
I've never been inside a VC firm, so it's difficult for me to imagine precisely what that would be like. Are you saying that the scenario in this hypothetical is different from YC?
>The founders would all be excellent conversationalists and promoters, and could probably fake the tech talk enough that Jessica couldn't tell. PG would be able to spot the buzzwords and call them on it, and it would seem magical to the rest because they don't know SQL from C++.
It sounds like a decent strategy. Certainly not foolproof, but at least you can filter out the people who understand the language, but not yet the technicals...I think.
She is not a silent Oracle, she just isn't particularly outgoing when it comes to press and such, and so she is not seen when looking in from the outside. She is extremely friendly, entirely sincere, and not at all judgmental (unless, of course, there is something negative to judge...character of founders does matter, and if pg has noticed Jessica has better skills in judging character it would be silly to ignore her opinion). pg and the boys seem imminently capable of spotting technical fakery, but maybe are weaker at spotting character fakery. I dunno. They've obviously had great success with the way they operate. I would be unwilling to bet against them, and I know they do it while adhering to pretty high ethical standards.
So, call it a cult if you like, but if I had my druthers, more of the industry would imitate YC.
However, your claim nearly directly contradicts this essay:
>PG: One of the things she's best at is judging people.
>You: She is ... not at all judgmental ([exception])
So, yes, we have this exception where the key value is all in the judgement of individuals (I'll put aside the seeming contradictions in this line of thought for now), but the basis of the judgement is never given. Instead all the descriptions just refer to generic "negative character attributes" (my own paraphrasing). There is never a description of what a negative character attribute is (other than the very vague, "faker"), how it was determined that a person possesses such a character, nor how the decisions are followed up to see if the judgments were accurate.
The essays also make it sound like Jessica's feedback is never given to those who are interviewed. From the descriptions, it sounds like Jessica either gives you a thumbs up or a thumbs down. If you get a thumbs down you just get the boot, but likely no feedback on how your character was judged.
>call it a cult if you like
I didn't call YC a cult. I said that some of the descriptions given in this essay, and others, are vaguely cult-like.
Being judgmental is usually meant as someone who is quick to criticize even mundane things and who focuses on the negative. Its a filter that ignores the positive and amplifies the negative - someone who blows things out of proportion. It often is driven by a desire to feel superior to another and comes from a place of insecurity.
Being a good judge of someone is being observant and weighing the complexities of what someone presents of themselves. Think lady justice with the scales - taking a whole picture before making judgment, and avoiding bringing in one's own motivations, emotions, or concerns in the process. Lady justice's blindfold is the symbol for this objectivity.
As you can see they're totally different in how they filter data, when they make judgment, and their relationship to the other.
You're right, the criteria used doesn't seem to be visible. While feedback on particular aspects of an interview NOT related to social cues would be helpful, feedback for social cues & character is just not something anyone owes you - no matter how emotionally difficult an interaction may be to participate in.
There are likely ways you can get feedback on these kinds of things - friends or coaches - but ultimately its not the kind of thing that one studies directly for. If it were, everyone would come in an actor, rather than themselves (and lets face it, the psychopaths would be the winners). You can try all you want to study how to project the right microexpressions and whatever but that's endlessly complex and you'll lack sufficient data to optimize, not least of which is because every person and situation is unique. This may go against some notions of fairness but lack of visibility and feedback is just part of the domain of social interactions.
Fundamentally the character & social cues you give off are an output of what you do with other inputs - how you view and treat people, what you're motivated by, the time you take to strengthen your own observational skills (such as through mindfulness practice) and how well you know yourself, etc. If you're concerned about giving off good social cues, you'll get a heck of a lot farther focusing on building an awareness of whats going on in your mind, in the conversation, and with the other person that is triggering those cues. That's the best way to be genuine, and in turn the best way to come across as genuine.
Isn't this basically the feature that is being claimed here? PG relates that even when the other partners are all go, Jessica has an amplifier that finds the negatives and blows it up? The only thing left to determine would be whether the proportion was correct. Unfortunately, the aftermath of the explosions aren't really discussed in these essays, so we can only speculate.
>Think lady justice with the scales - taking a whole picture before making judgment, and avoiding bringing in one's own motivations, emotions, or concerns in the process. Lady justice's blindfold is the symbol for this objectivity.
It sounds fine in theory, but unless this lady can put down the logical argument that connects the premises to the conclusions, and which can be argued against, I wouldn't want such a lady deciding justice for anyone.
>Lady justice's blindfold is the symbol for this objectivity.
I think any time objectivity is being symbolized, you need to be very, very careful. As far as we can tell, true objectivity cannot be attained. Fetishizing is dangerous.
>There are likely ways you can get feedback on these kinds of things - friends or coaches - but ultimately its not the kind of thing that one studies directly for. If it were, everyone would come in an actor, rather than themselves (and lets face it, the psychopaths would be the winners). You can try all you want to study how to project the right microexpressions and whatever but that's endlessly complex and you'll lack sufficient data to optimize, not least of which is because every person and situation is unique. This may go against some notions of fairness but lack of visibility and feedback is just part of the domain of social interactions.
I agree. The problem is that this essay essentially describes YC's process as being exactly this situation. Jessica sits and analyzes the situation, then brings down judgement and it is decided. No details given (so, one must assume that the decision could be based on such things as microexpressions, though PG labels it character, and Social Radar).
>Fundamentally the character & social cues you give off
And here is the problem. People don't give off character and social cues, those are entirely constructs in the perceiving mind. Assuming that people are communicating some thing that they may not be is a recipe for problems. Relagating an oracle to interpret such communications (which may or may not exist) is something that is difficult to comprehend.
He also gave at least one example (Airbnb) where they didn't like the idea, but funded them because they liked the founders. Who do you think was the primary judge of "liking" the founders in that case?
> unless this lady can put down the logical argument that connects the premises to the conclusions, and which can be argued against, I wouldn't want such a lady deciding justice for anyone.
What if the logical argument doesn't exist? You seem to be ignoring that possibility completely. We have to make choices all the time with insufficient information; in fact the situations in which we actually can articulate a logical argument for doing or not doing something are rare. The fact that you appear to be very uncomfortable with this does not make it false.
> People don't give off character and social cues, those are entirely constructs in the perceiving mind.
"Character and social cues" just means "information about what the person will do in situations other than the one they're currently in." All of us do give off this information, whether we like it or not. Everything you say and do is information about the internal processes that determine what you say and do, and therefore is information about what those internal processes will output in other circumstances. It's certainly not complete information, but complete information is unattainable anyway.
> Assuming that people are communicating some thing that they may not be is a recipe for problems.
People aren't consciously communicating character and social cues; in fact they might be consciously trying to hide them. That doesn't mean they can't be valid information.
This only really shows that Jessica (assuming your implication of who the primary judge was in that instance) may also advocate for particular founders, not just veto some.
>What if the logical argument doesn't exist?
Then lady justice should not make a decision.
>"Character and social cues" just means "information about what the person will do in situations other than the one they're currently in."
The problem is that this is nearly equivalent to tea reading. What theory allows you to accurately predict what I will do, purely based on your observation of me, or even under cursory verbal examination? I don't think that there is one. That people in this thread believe that there could be one is strange.
Unless you are going to accept everybody or reject everybody, there are going to be valid reasons to advocate for some founders and advocate against others. I don't understand why you insist on focusing on the latter but ignore the former.
> Then lady justice should not make a decision.
So you only make decisions when you have a logical argument that justifies a particular choice? You must lead a very...interesting life.
Also, your use of the word "justice" is not, um, justified. Whether or not someone gets funded by YC is not a matter of justice. Nobody has a right to YC funding.
> What theory allows you to accurately predict what I will do, purely based on your observation of me, or even under cursory verbal examination? I don't think that there is one.
You're right; there isn't one. So what? Do you have a theory that allows you to accurately predict how a food you've never tasted before will taste to you? How a color or material you've never seen before will look to you? How an experience you've never had before will feel? Yet somehow you manage to taste new foods, see new colors and materials, and have new experiences.
You don't need a theory of how something works in order to do it. People accurately threw spears long, long before anyone discovered Newtonian physics. People ate nutritious food and got energy from it long, long before anyone had a theory of how metabolism works. And people make accurate judgments about other people even though nobody has any very good theories of how the human mind works.
> That people in this thread believe that there could be one is strange.
That you believe that you need logical arguments and theories in order to do anything at all is strange.
I don't think I have focused on either. I'm primarily just responding to the points others are bringing up. I made my main points in my OP's.
>So you only make decisions when you have a logical argument that justifies a particular choice? You must lead a very...interesting life. >Also, your use of the word "justice" is not, um, justified. Whether or not someone gets funded by YC is not a matter of justice. Nobody has a right to YC funding.
It's not my use of justice. It is the word the other person in this thread brought in. If you read the thread, you will see that they were making an analogy of this situation to "lady justice". I agree that it is a rather inept analogy.
>People accurately threw spears long, long before anyone discovered Newtonian physics.
And sometimes they failed. The essay treats Jessica as fail-proof.
>That you believe that you need logical arguments and theories in order to do anything at all is strange.
Complete strawman. Show me where I claimed, or even implied as such.
If you wish to convict someone a la the lady of justice, then yes, I do believe you need logical arguments and theories before you can do anything (in regards to punishment).
I don't see that at all. It says she contributed something important to the YC evaluation process that none of the other founders could. It doesn't say she never made any mistakes. Nor does it say that her input was the determining factor in every choice. I think you are reading things into the article that aren't there.
> It's not my use of justice.
You didn't use the word first, but you are treating YC's process as though the word was appropriate. See below.
> If you wish to convict someone a la the lady of justice, then yes, I do believe you need logical arguments and theories before you can do anything (in regards to punishment).
But if you believe the justice analogy is "inept" (your word), why would you buy into someone else's interpretation of YC rejecting an applicant as "punishment"? It's not. As I said before, nobody has a right to YC funding. Their money, their choice. They don't have to give a logical reason; they don't have to give a reason at all. They could choose among applicants by throwing darts, and nobody would have any right to complain.
Of course, choosing by throwing darts wouldn't work well, which is why YC doesn't do it. But what they do do, including the "Social Radar", does appear to work well, even if no one can construct a logical argument for why it does. Since it's their money, and it's working well for them, nobody else has any right to complain that they're being "punished" if YC rejects them. They certainly don't have a right to do so on the basis that there isn't a logical argument backing up YC's choices.
Who is complaining? Obviously YC can do whatever with its money. It doesn't even need to be said, let alone, twice.
>Of course, choosing by throwing darts wouldn't work well, which is why YC doesn't do it. But what they do do, including the "Social Radar", does appear to work well, even if no one can construct a logical argument for why it does.
Right, so as far as anyone on the outside can tell, YC operates on a type of magic oracle.
>You didn't use the word first, but you are treating YC's process as though the word was appropriate.
My only point here is that the essays describe YC as essentially a magic process. The person I was responding to tried to make an analogy to the "lady of justice", while simultaneously making a claim to objectivity (in addition to others). My sentences with containing or referring to "lady" (including my comment about punishment) were only in response to that person's claims. Those sentences contain no information about what I think about YC's process (or rather, it's description in this essay).
Best example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG4DvM0wxdk
So, maybe the scene above will illustrate the difference between cult-like leadership and leadership that's more like a family. If anything, the essay just describes a down-to-earth, genuine, tightly-knit approach to business and evaluating business partners. There's many companies like that albeit not as famous as YC. You don't see people suing them, writing exposes, and alleging all kinds of abuse like with the cult-like companies. Huge difference.
Of course, that's what all job interviews are like. If they get a bad vibe from you or think you're not a "culture fit", they can quickly reject you based on a short impression. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
What bothers me is the reptition of the idea that any one person can be some kind of magical oracle of character judgment, bordering on having psychic properties. Especially without strong scientific evidence. I'd rather PG use less black-and-white language.
The thing is, however, that everything you do will also have this metric applied to it, by everyone you interact with, and it is a metric that impacts success. Any sales interaction you have, any hiring process you implement, any investor meeting you have, etc. All human interactions will be judged with this metric in addition to the other metrics. Is it "fair"? I don't know. But, it is reality. Given that, having someone who is good at it, on a team that is otherwise not good at it (and having read pg on nerds and popularity, I can surmise he considers himself not terribly good at it; nerds in general are famously socially inept), is worthwhile.
Which raises the concern that the social ineptitude of a technically brilliant founder might prevent them from getting into YC (and I think that is the fear being expressed in this thread). I can say that most YC founders I know are charming people; nerdy, mostly, but still charming and socially adept, at least when interacting with similarly nerdy peers. Is this a prerequisite for startup success? And, is it actually what is being selected for when we talk about this "social radar"? I don't know. I don't think I have this particular skill strongly enough to recognize a hit and a miss on these metrics, though I can spot technical fakery a mile away (and there's a surprisingly high number of applicants who are technically incompetent trying to pass for competent; I suspect few make it past the application process).
>We nerds (and I am among this bunch) don't really like the fact that popularity, "emotional IQ", and social influence are not quantifiable, but we are judged on them, anyway.
It's not exactly that such things are not quantifiable, but that PG is unable to express what is being judged other than in the same few, undefined words, at least in this essay. An example of such judgement is never given, it is only asserted that correct judgement can be dispensed by Jessica. That is a magic oracle. No basis is provided for the judgement (other than its source), only the judgement itself.
Now, as others have pointed out, I doubt this is exactly how it happens. Most likely Jessica brings to light some contradiction, however, the essay doesn't go into what those contradictions have been, or might be. The essay really only provides the view that the contradictions are blessed and therefore automatically accepted.
The concern here is that PG is propagating concepts like "character", "Social Radar", etc., without being able to define what they are. Others may try to replicate this and start their own cargo cult, which has applied its own secret definition of those words, in order to work the magic sauce.
What is so hard about the concept/metric being applied here that it can't be put into words?
In every one of your responses, for starters. ;-)
"Others may try to replicate this and start their own cargo cult, which has applied its own secret definition of those words, in order to work the magic sauce."
As I mentioned I would like for more investors to try to behave like YC, even if they're unsuccessful in the attempt.
And, there are already many investors cargo culting the YC process. I don't think that's a bad thing; they aren't as successful (I guess TechStars is the nearest analog so far), but they're trying to replicate the winning formula. They may fail in a variety of interesting ways, because it is cargo culting in many cases, but by trying to do things more like YC they're likely making the world a little better for early stage founders.
"What is so hard about the concept/metric being applied here that it can't be put into words?"
Again, I would guess pg doesn't understand it, and so can't quantify it, but trusts that Jessica's correct more often than not. It doesn't seem like pg was even trying to show everyone how to do what Jessica does, just to clarify that she does many things within YC and that she has often been forgotten in the telling of the YC story; explaining that does not require him to explain how it works.
> Again, I would guess pg doesn't understand it, and so can't quantify it, but trusts that Jessica's correct more often than not. It doesn't seem like pg was even trying to show everyone how to do what Jessica does, just to clarify that she does many things within YC and that she has often been forgotten in the telling of the YC story; explaining that does not require him to explain how it works.
I can have a stab at an explanation here. I'm sort of straddling the border (being a "socially inept" nerd by nature, and having invested considerable amounts of time over the last 15 years in getting better at the "social stuff") and know enough people who are on the other side, and have spoken with them often enough, to have formed some ideas about this.
First, most people who are really good at this tend to be at a stage of unconscious competence. It's not really something you teach to others very frequently, so it's rare to find someone who spends the time to analyse their own analysis of others, which helps explain the "mystery factor" here. As they say, if it takes 10 years to get good at something, it takes another 10 years to get good at teaching it to other people!
In my experience people who get very good at this tend to be (like Jessica is described in this article) people who have a strong discomfort around conflict and/or other people's distress. I don't know what the chicken/egg situation is - which comes first, the sensitivity to other people's distress, or the skill in reading other people's emotional states? Either way, the two combine and lead to someone who spends a lot of time being aware of how people around them are feeling, what they're thinking about, etc, so that they can detect potential conflicts very early and head them off before they cause distress. Like anything else, you get good at what you do a lot, and someone who spends a lot of time thinking about what's going on in other people's heads is, over a few decades, going to naturally develop an incredible (from the outside, almost magical) skill at reading people from what are almost unnoticeable cues like tone of voice, body language, the content of what they say, what they don't say, etc.
Ultimately what this boils down to, imho, is building a model of the other person in your head. Think of your best friend, the one you understand most - you probably have a model of them in your head. You could have a conversation with that model and, if you have known them for a while and are not totally insensitive to people (which is possible... don't beat yourself up about it!) you can probably predict how they would react to a given situation with a fairly high degree of accuracy. Sure, you'll get it wrong from time to time, but you'll get it mostly right. People who are good at this "social stuff" just build those models much, much more rapidly, and much more accurately, than you do, through practice and habit, and they do so constantly throughout the day with everyone they bump into, so they get to practice that over and over again, and keep getting better.
Does this help a little?
This social radar is the ability to spot people that would "stab you" if needed.
To be clear, I did not say it is cult-like, only that it is unclear.
If YC does operate on a magic oracle, then I might argue that it might be a cult.
>Of course, that's what all job interviews are like. If they get a bad vibe from you or think you're not a "culture fit", they can quickly reject you based on a short impression. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I'm not sure what it means that a YC interview may be thought of as a job interview, but I share your concerns. I'm also concerned that the essays may encourage such behavior. While the teams of the sort YC are organizing may benefit from such a selection process ("culture fit"), without any logical explanation of the process, the essays essentially encourage people to go out to start their own cults.
That intuitive part of the brain represents the vast majority of what we do day to day. Our rational brains activity feeds into it, too. However, cues about people's speech, behavior, emotions... these are naturally all picked up best by the emotional brain. Jessica may have been doing what Paul describes for much of her life with that part of her brain soaking in details she can logically spot and some that are unconscious impressions/feelings. Trial, error, and external observation correct inaccuracies over time if one lets them. At some point, the models in her mind were honed so well that they can spot significant positive or negative traits very reliably.
So, there's nothing wrong with Paul's description and it's likely Jessica couldn't fully explain her mental model because she doesn't know it. She will certainly, with introspection, have elaborated out many specifics that she could explain and you could train yourself to work with. However, as I said, this is mostly a subconscious process that can at best only be partly elaborated. Like any black box, you can only assess its reliability by looking at the quality of outputs that come from inputs.
There will always be false negatives, false positives, and occasionally WTH!?'s from intuitive decisions about people. What's good in this space is quality of results whose accuracy is consistently good with relatively-low, error rate. Paul's statements indicate her emotional/intuitive brain uses very-effective models of people far as their character goes. The results speak for themselves. That's all you should need.
Note: Only way to learn such skills is experience. A job where you deal with lots of people in ways that makes their ethics show can accelerate the process. Still takes years and years, though.
I agree, so let me try to rephrase for you. For a bunch of people (YC et al) who actively promote making decisions with data, resorting to some ill-defined intangible such as "Social Radar" as being the secret sauce for success just seems noticeably contrived.
For instance, the vigorous, long-lasting and constantly denied spamming that AirBnB did off CraigsList with fake names, or some of the early Reddit fake accounts and general puffing-up (which was, to be fair, less bad.)
Maybe business tactics are explicitly not part of what PG and Jessica consider "good character"? It seems increasingly clear that they mean something different by it than I do.
1) "Good people" is relative, and even good people still sometimes do bad things.
2) No detector is perfect, and so a metric of "no YC company has done anything bad" seems strong. Something like, "YC companies are less bad on average than others".
3) Their definition of "good" is not 100% congruent with yours.
4) The high-pressure environment of startups is a double bind. If you don't do at least some bad things you fail, or at least lose out to non-good people.
There are predatory founders who are short term thinkers and there are long-term-create-value types of people. The type of people that understand and appreciate that serving your users is your most important goal and the reward comes as a result of that.
The examples you have of spamming, etc... is still in the spirit of serving their customers with a better experience and more value.
You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.
> The existence of people like Jessica is not just something the mainstream media needs to learn to acknowledge, but something feminists need to learn to acknowledge as well. There are successful women who don't like to fight. Which means if the public conversation about women consists of fighting, their voices will be silenced.
> There's a sort of Gresham's Law of conversations. If a conversation reaches a certain level of incivility, the more thoughtful people start to leave.
I imagine that this idea applies to many situations. Replace "feminists" and "[successful] women" with something else.
It would be interesting to see him elaborate on that, because he normally has a quite "hard" debating style himself. He has repeatedly spoken out for not having to limit what you say and against things like political correctness, and also approved things like hellbanning and 'downvote to disagree' on Hacker News.
If there are equations that describe the net, since the mid-1980s, this is one of them.
A lot of the commentary here is about "shyness" or "introversion," which, I don't know J.L.
But I think the point of PG's Gresham comment is it's not only personality. Analogy: What professor of physics is going to wade into the hyper-bullshit environment of a typical online physics "discussion?" As soon as they see the word "photon" or "rest mass" I'm sure they run for the hills. Introvert or extrovert, it's a waste of time. Just get out in one piece before it gets any worse.
It's a trap!
Any chance you could write up what it means to have social radar? Right now you might as well substitute the word "magic." What is it that you see that other people don't? Do you score especially highly on reading micro-expressions (http://www.paulekman.com/micro-expressions/)? Is this a familial trait? What is your subjective experience when talking to a 'faker?' Have you ever tried to track you first impressions against later behaviors?
I'm super curious about what seems to be a real life superpower!
Body-scan meditation allows for the insula in your brain to develop (more than normal). Note that the insula maps to the body in a visceral sense. In my experience, this results in that everything that you will see you will also feel. So that means when you see a facial expression, you will feel it as well in a quite intense fashion. The most interesting example was when my best friend went to the movie Oblivion the evening after a 10 day meditation retreat. He told me he felt like he was in it.
Caveat: you do need to meditate (aka 'feel your body') every day to keep up this level of 'social intelligence' (for lack of a better word).
If you'd want to know more about it, search for: Search Inside Yourself written by Chade-Meng Tan. He worked as a software engineer Google and writes from a software engineer's mind.
I do believe some people are certainly better at determining honesty and character than others. But without any sort of blind testing, or even some kind of empirical foundation or proposed specific techniques, it's very difficult to know for sure if a particular person really is better than average or not.
The short version of what I claimed is if you have good empathic skills (e.g. being better able to feel the facial expression other people are making at that moment), then you'll have part of the answer of how to detect genuine people (and I believe being not genuine and lying are two completely different things).
About meditation itself and its relationship on social intelligence, there's not much written about it, since I made the term "social intelligence" up. I'd recommend reading about meditation and emotional intelligence on Science Daily. Then practice it for 5 days in a retreat and then see for yourself how it could improve your 'social radar'. I know it's a lot of effort, but in my opinion that's the minimal amount of investigation that you'd need in order to see if it holds value. The 5 day retreat is needed to gain the tacit knowledge that cannot be explained through language (just like the feeling of playing an instrument very quickly can only be practiced).
Personally I've invested a lot more time in my computer skills than my social ones. I imagine if it was the reverse I'd have some social radar. Instead I can make pixels do my bidding while peers in my age group have trouble with email but don't freak out about networking mixers.
I think it would be pretty difficult for her to write about social radar. It probably involves a lot of intuition that has been learned and honed over years of socializing.
I might not be so quick to discredit what's required to be a great judge of character. Even many of the people who can be considered to be more socially adept, maybe business or humanities majors, are quite poor judges of character.
It might be difficult to write about, but I imagine that even trickier would be to take the written word and internalize it.
All very nebulous, I know, but part of acting is learning to listen to your intuition or impulses and not immediately discount them or ignore them (something left brained me is very prone to doing)
I could tell something was wrong with this 'founder' but I rationalized as 'anal-retentive'. Then I got sucked into my OCDness, and stopped taking acting classes while trying to get this startup running. 4 years of hell later, I finally realized I was dealing with a full blown psychopath (i.e. failed to do any background checks on the guy in my rush of enthusiasm at the start of any project). The guy who introduced me to him finally decided to tell me some stories...
Just an example of the hazards of not listening to one's gut. The books about acting tend to be "flaky", from an engineer's point of view, but once you understand the concepts they are trying to explain and the lingo, it is useful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEp9aaQuYp4&index=1&list=PLQ...
He even asks the question, "If Jessica was so important to YC, why don't more people realize it?" His answer: he's vocal and she doesn't seek attention. Those may be true, but that's not enough to answer the question. As the NYT just wrote, even famous female economists get slighted like this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/12/upshot/even-famous-female-...
So a) there is a well-known societal problem of women being underappreciated, especially leaders. And b) he added gender to his essay by talking about how they were dating and she was the mom and how her special skills were the kind of thing that get called feminine. (Note the many comments here explicitly relying on that.) He also talks explicitly about how people don't notice her contributions because they read her as a secretary, which is a very gendered phenomenon.
So whether or not gender is the formal thesis, the essay is shot through with gender-related issues.
This approach begs the question [assumes the conclusion it supposedly seeks to find]: it seems as likely that a certain type of person is underappreciated. That a lot of women are of that type may be true but that doesn't make it an issue of sex per se. Reading between the lines of the essay Mr Graham hints that he feels one reason his wife is underappreciated is because she shies away from vocal conflict. That at least leaves a hypothesis that this is not really about the sex of the person but about character traits that are more often found in one sex than the other.
You might for example say there is a societal problem of women being forced to use stepladders when in fact it is short people that use stepladders and it happens that women on average are shorter than men.
The topic has a little interest to me in understanding attitudes of those in one area of work I'm in (loosely "craft as a leisure activity"). Other workers - almost all the people in this sector are women running their own businesses - always assume that I'm just there to carry the heavy boxes [which I usually can't due to a back injury] rather than actually function as an integral part of the company. In short they read me as the minion and her, my co-worker, as the boss. Basically we're in the sex-opposite position of Mr Graham and Ms Livingston wrt our roles in the business we're in.
From the public side of things I've been asked more than once if there was a woman available to do my job instead of me. Which I find particularly hilarious if then my female co-worker has to ask me what to do.
However, we have a historical record millennia long with enormous discrimination against women. Were women not allowed the vote until a century ago because their character traits mysteriously changed enough for them to finally be responsible? Did their character traits start changing in 1970 such that they were suddenly suitable for medicine, law, and science (and, briefly, technology)? [1] Because the feminine character was certainly cited as a reason why women shouldn't vote or be allowed to pick particular professions.
Further, we receive all sorts of gender socialization, starting with color-coding infants, moving up through toys and education, and continuing through all sorts of gender expectations during youth. A lot of education is explicitly about building character. A great deal of what you call "character" is learned behavior.
I'd think that you working in an area where you are treated as an idiot because of your gender would make you aware of how arbitrary this stuff is.
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...
> Those may be true, but that's not enough to answer the question.
I think the "he's vocal and she's not" answer is a perfectly good answer to the question "why do people tend to ignore Jessica?", since it does seem to be the main reason. If the question had been "why do people tend to ignore women?" then maybe that NYT article might be relevant.
Even if PG believes that the broader societal problem is not at all relevant here, I think it would have been a stronger essay if he'd said that and said why. Since he didn't, I'm left to wonder whether he is even aware of the problem. A lot of guys aren't, so a reasonable reading of this essay is that he may have written about a tree without noticing the forest.
The grandparent to my previous comment suggested that "if [PG] focused the essay more on gender discrimination instead of just on Jessica, she would not be comfortable with or allow the essay to be published."
You said that since PG felt he could write the article without mentioning societal gender discrimination, "I'm left to wonder whether he is even aware of the problem."
I linked to a video where Jessica covers the same material that PG did. She also does not so much as hint at societal gender discrimination. This can be consider supportive evidence, along with PG's footnote about feminism, for the GP's hypothesis that Jessica would not being comfortable with societal gender discrimination being in the article.
It would follow that if you are going to respect Jessica's choice to not talk about gender discrimination in her talk, you would have to also respect the choice of PG to not have it in his essay, on the assumption that he may have withheld any such commentary in deference to Jessica's preferences.
Not really. Women may avoid talking about this stuff because it makes them targets, and they may not need more trouble. Guys can and should talk about this; it's our chance to use our gender privilege to reduce the problem.
My experience is that for any given feminist statement I get 90-100% less crap than women do. I hear some squeaks from the antifeminists, but very little from the active misogynists and other abusive shitheels. If you're right and PG is unwilling to take even mild heat when he could easily do so, I don't feel obliged to respect that. Especially after his big talk about him getting all the credit because he's more comfortable in the spotlight.
If PG really didn't want to talk about gender discrimination because Jessica, he could have just said so. Or he could have not mentioned her feelings at all and said, "gender discrimination could be a factor but I want to focus on X for now." Refusing to acknowledge it at all weakens the piece. And expecting people to pick up subtle radiations from obscure YouTube talks also doesn't strike me as a very good essay-writing strategy.
>[3] The existence of people like Jessica is not just something the mainstream media needs to learn to acknowledge, but something feminists need to learn to acknowledge as well. There are successful women who don't like to fight. Which means if the public conversation about women consists of fighting, their voices will be silenced.
It admonishes feminists for doing feminism wrong. Which I always find a little rich from people who are not themselves doing the thing. It feels to me like when non-developers tell me how to develop. My reaction is, "Oh, you know how to do this better? Why don't you show me?"
The point of this article also wasn't Jessica's involvement in YC. It was correcting the general public's lack of understanding of her involvement.
That lack of understanding fits the broad pattern of women being undervalued, and the work of women being written off as subsidiary to prominent men. It's a topic that has been much discussed, and was, as I linked, in the New York Times less than a week ago.
Given that he literally asks why more people don't recognize a woman's contributions, it seems weird to me that he lays it entirely at her character (and his), without reference to known systemic biases. That footnote only makes it weirder, in that he seems to be claiming sufficient acquaintance with the discussion of this problem that he should be aware of the biases.
And pg is actually very right - reasonable people from all sides of the issue avoid mainstream social justice discussions because they're just ridiculous and a huge waste of time. Participants of those have their stance on discussed issues tied too close to their personal identity[0].
Feminists are arguing for things not to be gender issues. People make it a gender issue when they ignore female accomplishments for which men would be honored. Paul Graham explictly made this a gender issue when he praised her for being the "mom".
If you don't think talking about these things is valuable, nobody's forcing you to talk about them. The participants, me included, don't see it as a waste of time, because society has been making steady progress on this for the last hundred years or so. Maybe in another hundred things finally won't be intrusively gendered all the time and we can all get back to what we're doing. If you'd like to help, great. If not, maybe let the people who care get on with it?
Interesting way of doing that by making everything a gender issue all the time.
> Paul Graham explictly made this a gender issue when he praised her for being the "mom".
No, he just praised Jessica for performing the role of mother in the YC family.
> If you don't think talking about these things is valuable, nobody's forcing you to talk about them. (...)
I usually don't. But someone has to speak up when there's bullying starting to happen, because if nobody does, then it will just continue. I want to live in the world where all people are respected and happy. I don't want to live in the world where everyone is afraid of saying a thing in fear of getting bullied by political-correctness defenders.
(And no, I'm not talking about 21st century first-world problems like "getting offended on Twitter" or PC-bullshit or what not... I'm talking shit that drives you literally to tears, as you see your life's chances, choices, freedoms and potential getting gradually but relentlessly taken away from you by the actions and expectations of your employer, your advisor, your peers, your own family even...)
So for you it might be "just ridiculous and a huge waste of time" --but some of us this is indeed "tied too close to our personal identity". Because we have to live with it.
And I am talking exactly about those. Because this comment against pg's essay was a typical 21st century first-world problem. And those problems are what dominates mainstream discussions. It hurts those who experience injustice more than it helps by trivializing their problems.
I see this sort of "u r doin feminsm wrong" comment a lot from people who a) are not part of the population harmed, b) never actually help themselves, and c) have very little understanding of the topic. But perhaps you're different. Could you tell us about three ways you've personally fought gender discrimination lately? Bonus points for links.
The whole idea of fighting for equal opportunity is so that everyone can be more of who they are, and not have to fight more than anyone else to be heard, because of race, gender, sexual preference, social standing or any of the myriad of things we are so great at holding against people for no good reason.
Anyway, just as with the last time few times PG found himself in a minefield of mostly misguided political correctness -- I think this simply shows his general style of pragmatically voicing his thoughts, without much concern for overall social analysis. I for one welcome that, even though if read in in a certain light, he can sound anything from quaint to prejudicial (not so much in this article).
But he's not alone in that -- any neutral voice in a in-equal society can be seen as being oppressive -- of supporting the status quo.
I also see how people can get tired of being expected to fight, when all they want is get on with their work. It's a perfectly natural reaction. It's quite horrifying to see one of the more powerful women of Silicon Valley (?) not dare to be interviewed for fear of how her message will be twisted though. If anyone needed confirmation that there's a long way to go to equal opportunity in management, that surely is it.
Perhaps because he's actually being prejudicial?
It's odd how we somehow think that someone being honest about their prejudices somehow minimises the prejudice.
"The overall atmosphere was shockingly different from a VC's office on Sand Hill Road, in a way that was entirely for the better."
The rest of the essay is filled with words like family, mom, character, culture, authenticity, good(ness), social radar etc. Words you would hardly ever associate with a successful business - let alone a big time, successful VC firm on Sand Hill Road or anywhere else. It sounds like a crazy way to run a company based on such fuzzy concepts. But remarkably, these soft, fuzzy concepts appear to be a key part of YC's huge success - and not some cold, calculated decision making. In a way this bears out one of PG's other theories - that hugely successful startups usually start out with ideas that look really bad or crazy. And in YC's case, the most successful startup to come out of YC may be regarded as YC itself!
Edit: Would like to add a key part of their approach seems to have been to throw out the old, tried and true approach, think from first principles and build the company and culture in a way that they felt comfortable with - and not how it was "supposed to be done".
It is indeed. I wish she will write more books or even essays like PG. I am excited to see if Founders at Work will one day be in an audio format.
I usually find interviews annoying as the interviewer interjects a lot, breaking the chain of thought, diverging the discussion or some times cutting them off to inject their own opinions.
This book I thought had none of that. And I learned a lot reading it.
As for PG's essay, I think I came across this exact content some place else (my memory fails me).
Edit: I just re-read it and it's still as awesome as I remember. This would actually make a great movie, much better and more exciting than the Facebook or Apple films.
> So we decided to build a moderation system. I originally had my parents moderating since they were retired, and after a few days I asked my dad how it was going. He said, “Oh, it’s really interesting. Mom saw a picture of a guy and a girl and another girl and they were doing ...” So I told Jim, “Dude, my parents can’t do this any more. They’re looking at porn all day.” We decided to open up the community of moderators to the public. You had to apply and write an essay to get in.
It's also stated that she doesn't ask many questions but prefers to observe from "afar" - presumably that's not true in this book of interviews.
Livingston seems to have been somewhat mischaracterised or my reading comprehension is super-ropey.
>"Partly because I'm a writer, and writers always get disproportionate attention." (Graham, "Jessica Livingston" an essay) //
The book isn't remarkable because of Livingston's writing, of which there is barely any, but for the scope and execution. She found dozens of great subjects, got them to tell great stories, and edited everything into a very valuable book.
I think it also shows her good judgment, her passion about startup founders, and her skill at listening. Of course it's mostly about the founders and not about her.
Graham writes tons of essays about his own opinions, which is quite different!
Generalized, this explains why a lot of the really cool, thoughtful, and kind people I know seem to fly under the radar.
And it suggests that moderating a discussion forum means constantly pushing uphill.
Those of us in YC knew she wasn't just PG's girlfriend.
It's my impression (primarily from lurking) that the more nuanced, observant conversation tends to take place in less publicized fora, which while not exactly closed are at least so little publicized that they are not "public". Sometimes this is termed a "safe space", sometimes the essential characteristics are arranged without calling it that. Anyway the conversations are very much "here's my impression; it's different than yours but we can agree on at least these things" and "I'm sorry but that is just so far out of bounds that we'll have to part ways and not try to work this out". There's a conversation, but not a debate.
Maybe some would lament the "filter bubble" aspect of such an arrangement, because after all everyone should prefer to debate each point to death, but in fact not everyone does prefer that. (Of course, I do, but I'm slowly learning not to assume everyone else is like me.) It's tempting to put this all on "the feminists", but that is selling ourselves short. We can all listen without speaking, long enough to realize that feminism is not monolithic and that many feminists are aware of women like Livingston. The ignorance of the media and the Twitterati is a property of them, not of all of feminism. (Of course much of feminism is, for want of a better word, "masculine" in the sense of wanting to dialogue each point until we have a party line for everyone to toe, but much of feminism is not that.)
You don't even have to be belligerent about it. Just say "maybe we should discuss the gender imbalance in tech and startups" in a public forum, and you're guaranteed a flamewar.
http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/the-social-radar-what-i-...
(I posted this partly due to the predictable reaction to PG's use of the word mom.)
Is it something you can learn, is it experience, x-ray vision you either have or have not? Are women better suited for this job?
What clues are you looking for while talking to founders?
Is there something like a 'perfect' character or does she make a list of positive and negative traits?
Are some traits more important than others?
You could literally ask the same questions about Mozart or Einstein. Let me try that: what's their secret? Can you learn it? Is it experience, something you either have or have not? Are men better suited for the job? What clues are you looking for while analyzing a theory? Is there something like a 'perfect' symphony, or did he make a list of positive and negative tone patterns? Are some chords more important than others?
I think her traits are what make her good at this. She doesn't like attention and is more of an introvert. These traits probably make her very good at listening and a great observer of people.
Most introverts I know are very good at judging people because they don't want the attention on themselves.
Yes, practically all of the core traits PG describes are typical feminine traits. This is a nice piece because it explains how critically important the feminine touch is, and how easy it is to ignore that because most females don't care much about their personal fame, they mostly care about helping people and being useful.
While PG has described the utility these traits have in running a "family" of founders, they're also extremely valuable in running an actual family. PG has really written an ode to womanhood in general, and whilst reading it, I think most of us will relate as we identify similar things in our wives and mothers.
This is not to detract from Jessica Livingston's specific ability to apply these to the world of VC, which undoubtedly takes a lot of skill and knowledge, but I think it's important that we recognize the value from these types of contributions is accessible and often regularly enjoyed by those of us who are lucky enough to have such stereotypically selfless women in our lives.
Guys, if you think that these traits are useful for running successful businesses, just go learn them. It is possible for men to listen just like Jessica. We can also be nurturing, supportive, sensitive, thoughtful, emotionally perceptive, and kind. These are actual skills that we can actually learn if we want. We don't have to push women to be stereotypes just to have successful businesses and families.
We need both genders -- neither can be discarded, and insisting that the two genders are so similar as to not have any unique properties or advantages is the same as discarding them.
For those interested in how much this varies across species, I heartily recommend Dr Taiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00846X144
It's a great and funny book on the biology of gender and reproduction, written as an advice column.
Growing up in the midwest, I mistook a lot of what people got up to as essential facts of human biology. But after 15 years living in San Francisco, I've come to realize how much of that is purely socially constructed.
I have a simple thought experiment for those who have a strong impulse to downvote the parent comment (and doubtless my own comment): Imagine the discussion here were, say, a study that illustrated men naturally resorted to forming factions and solving disagreements with violence, and someone commented, “No, it’s 100% society, not innate whatsoever” and then someone replied to that saying “no, while individual variation is of course very real, there is some evidence that the general trends that inform some of our stereotyped intuitions of gender are based in biological fact.” Would you be quite so quick to mash the down arrow? … Perhaps. It’s a discussion fraught with a lot of charged emotions, and we collectively are not so good at dealing with points of view contrary to whatever we want to believe.
I don't know anybody who would argue that gender has absolutely no biological implications. But to suggest they tell us something about how society should be structured is the naturalistic fallacy, confusing is with ought.
As an example, illness and death are natural. But that doesn't mean that we should just shrug and say, "Oh well, tuberculosis is natural, so we should just accept it." The natural details of death should certainly inform how we fight it. But they can never tell us we shouldn't.
> We don't have to push women to be stereotypes just to have successful businesses and families.
Totally agree with that, despite my above comment.
Everyone, including you, do get different feelings from different people. Maybe there's that uncle you're just not that comfortable with to begin with, or your neighbour who always lightens you up somehow. But the problem is that focusing on thoughts and modelling your impression by thinking masks these feelings off. Thus, most people don't realize how their feelings change when they move from place to place and from person to person. The feelings can be seen in your body language but in the worst case you're completely oblivious to them yourself. Typically you just grow a blurred sense of anxiety or ease, much like a moving average of what you've felt that day.
Now imagine you do get a slight grasp of all that, and begin to practice it. Maybe you can find a way to "feel" different people, maybe you observe how your feeling changes when stepping into an elevator with different people each time. Maybe you find some other way to sift through people and try to get a feeling from each one. There are infinite number of ways to practices and they are all equally hard.
Sensing can be really hard because, today, everyone is always going, talking, making noise, and acting busy. It's impossible to deal with a lot and try to get a feel of a person at the same time. I think something similar was described in the article: you need to be out of the focus, you have to have some space around you to make this connection with your feelings. However, for some reason, your body tends to like breathing. Focusing on breathing tends to tone down the active parts of brain and emphasize your sensibility to your feelings going through your body. Maybe that is the reason martial arts emphasize breathing a lot. So, it might be that you find yourself breathing slowly and steadily in the elevator, maybe gazing out to the wall during the ride, and just practice sensing what the feeling is each time, with different people.
The more you practice, the better you get. Usually, as with practice, there are turning points where you just suddenly "get it", or at least you will get a glimpse of it if nothing else. Maybe at some point you begin to associate these feelings with an idea, or rather, an intuition. This is where you learn to put meaning in the feelings. A lot of times these feelings tend to be unexplainable. You don't know how, but your answer is "no". Or "yes". Or whatever you were seeking to know. In fact, the surefire sign that the feeling produces a genuine intuition in you is that you can't make yourself explain it. You're still practicing but now you need to practice trust. You get readings, some of which are noise from your mind and some are signals, from your body and based on genuine feelings, and you need to learn to trust your judgement on which one you heard.
Becoming more sensible is not a game. You can't game it: what you need to do is surrender. Also note that it is absolutely not a one-way street. By changing how you perceive your surroundings and the people out there also changes you. You will not be the same person who is asking about this and who eventually gets the answer. It's also nothing mystical nor magical, it's just something humans can do but very rarely choose to do by a conscious choice.
Foot note: I've been a very sensitive person since I was kid. So has my wife. It seems all so normal here now. Many a years back, it was truly comforting to realize that there are others like me. I've chosen to increase my sensitivity during the early adulthood by relying more on it. What you use will get bigger, I guess it's like what a muscle would do. It's also not a general trait or objective capability: it's very personal. What and how I feel the world is completely different from how Jessica Livingstone feels the world. Or my wife. Or anyone else. But the truths I feel myself are only applicable in my own life, so that is fine.
The way in for me was English literature. Since the modern novel, writing in English focuses on revealing character through what someone does or says. Why do they choose this word and not another? By their actions, what can you learn about what's going on in their head?
Turns out that works pretty well in real life too.
A trivial example: I had a supervisor who I would say had problems with role-reversing. While ostensibly the boss, this person really wanted other people to notice what a difficult time they were having. Again I figured this out just through word choice. Some people, in the boss role, express their vision as "we need to do this"; with this boss it was more like "nobody is supporting me, so you all need to step up". Instead of performing confidence, they performed their personal discomfort, which is a cry for others to show that they care.
I think most people would realize that this is annoying, but look a little deeper, to see the need that's behind that. This is someone who habitually fears abandonment. (Maybe that's even why they took the boss role.)
So, all it took was a tiny comment every now and then from me, to allay their fears, and our relationship dramatically shifted for the better.
Now, this kind of personal attention can be just kindness. You can use it to give people around you the motivation they need to succeed. But in this case, the neediness was sort of a bottomless pit, so it made me seriously question ever working with this person again.
Most people are broadcasting all kinds of things about themselves, almost painfully strongly. It's just that for the most part, nobody is picking up on it. Developers in particular usually don't want to pick up on it.
So, many people that do this try to detach themselves. That Jessica further keeps the image or at least visitors' assumption that she might be just a secretary is straight brilliant: almost nobody pays attention to such people. That let's her stay either 100% or nearly so focused on her evaluation of them.
There are two modifications that have shown to be superior. One is that one or more of the interviewers have the same ability to read people. As I said, the difficulty makes these rare people. However, you do see this among talented negotiators, intelligence types, and so on.
The other one is keeping the assessor outside the room but with full visual and audio to pick up the unconscious cues plus a feedback mechanism. This might be a computer or earpiece for one or more interviewers. The reason is that the character assessment might run into situations where it's too vague to make the assessment. So, the person assessing might give a suggestion to the interviewers for how to prod the person to get a specific reaction. This might happen a little or a lot if the overall team has worked together a lot. Eventually, the interviewers get so good at spotting these situations and remembering how they were handled that they intuitively create these opportunities for the remote reviewer without being asked. The results are a more detailed and effective evaluation.
Such a setup is not for everyone. Many prefer just having one or more people talking with another doing more listening and people watching. That's Y Combinator's setup. Many high-stakes interviews or negotiations use the latter method though with lots of effectiveness. That you can read the reviewer while the reviewer can read you probably helps a lot. ;)
That essay is also comforting for me on a personal level because like Jessica, I'm uneasy with attention, public speaking, etc and that's a tough thing to struggle with when you're a startup founder, where a big part of your job is to be the affable, extroverted face of the company. The thought of doing a YC or similar interview makes me sweat, even though I know what I'm building is awesome, cool and valuable. If ever Jessica is giving lessons on how to get over that, sign me up please!
I wonder what chances these people would have if they were to apply to YC now: Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey etc.
And therein lies the problem. Professional feminists are extremely vocal radicals that do not represent the majority of women. Their statistics and talking points tend to be universally unsound and inflammatory, and they are at this point more accurately described as a racist and sexist hate group.
So the question is, why are they deemed the authority on so many issues in the mainstream media? Why does PG even acknowledge their nonsensical demands, or try to engage with them to defend Jessica?
Anyone who has lived a day on this planet understands that empirical reality is immutable, and ideologies cannot alter them. So when feminists for example, state matter-of-factly that "biology is a social construct", why are they allowed to continue speaking nonsense? Meanwhile, brilliant academics who debunk feminist propaganda like Helena Cronin [1] are nowhere to be found in the media.
Perhaps women like Jessica Livingston and Helena Cronin need to take an active stance against radical feminists, and not dignify their accusations with a response other than: "please educate yourself before attempting to open a dialogue regarding these issues."
AKA: Do not feed the trolls.
1. https://edge.org/conversation/helena_cronin-getting-human-na...
Only one typo "[pg] is better at some things (that) [sic] Jessica is"
But I do have to say, wow, there was a lot of really new information in this post, to me, and I also could feel the emotion and passion in it.
It's nice when someone gets praised in such a manner - regardless of if its from their SO, because I felt that there was a lot of objectivity in this post as well.
If your comment is because you failed to recognize Jessica's talents, you should ask yourself whether that has negatively impacted her life in any way?
I would argue that she missed out on nothing that matters.
I suspect that the recent articles playing up her role are because she & YC realized that there is something they're missing out on: millions of potential female founders are not starting companies because they don't have strong role models. This hurts YC in a financial sense, but even beyond that: if your mission is to increase the amount of startups and innovation in the world, then having half the world's population disqualify themselves because they don't have many good examples of it being done before is losing out.
The fact that "she failed to be recognized because she doesn't sell herself" does not translate into "she should sell herself", because the very act of doing so can undermine what makes her be so good at what she does.
And in fact, a lot of people don't care about selling themselves well, so why put so much effort and time into something a) they don't like b) they don't need?
My co-founder is a woman and we have a somewhat similar dynamic: she doesn't write as much, doesn't like the publicity or argument that sometimes happens with a position in business: but at the end of the day she helps create a feeling of family in our team. I don't know if it is gender-based or just her personality, but it's nice to see someone in a similar (albeit much more successful) position getting some recognition.
There is another lesson here for feminists that PG does not fully articulate. In my experience, most women are similar to Jessica in that they do not fit naturally into an alphadog founder type role. The time-honored tradition for such women to be part of accomplishing great things, is to partner with an alphadog mate. Unfortunately, modern feminism is all about turning women into men, rather than guiding women to fit in as complements and partners to a strong man.
If Jessica was so important to YC, why don't more people realize it? Partly because I'm a writer, and writers always get disproportionate attention.
And also because she was not listed as involved when YC was first founded. I assume that Jessica was "The Fourth Man wants to remain anonymous for now"? https://web.archive.org/web/20050324095016/http://ycombinato...
I was wondering if you could share any data on success/failure of startups where 2 co-founders are in a relationship, and if/how this is rated in yc applications.
For how she is so good with personality radar, IIRC recently there was a research paper that confirmed that already in the crib the girls are paying attention to people and the boys, to things. So the girls are making eye contact, understanding facial expressions, smiling, and, thus, eliciting protective emotions from adults while the boys are trying to hack the latch on the crib and install Wi-Fi and an real-time, embedded Linux in the toy fire truck on the floor!
So, with some nerd men and a really feminine woman, there's no contest -- on personality radar, no way will the men catch up with the woman!
Congrats PG, you just achieved "the greatest prize life has to offer".
see her in action: https://www.instagram.com/p/zA41aSKM9C/?taken-by=juicycanvas
The challenge is that 99% of my time is spent on so many righ-brain tasks..i practically become a 'vulcan' so when a customer email or PR challenge or new biz dev opp comes flying in.. its very easy to just mis-read it or reply in a curt almost cold way. Luckily she QA's all our communication with a filters yet undiscovered by scientists. Deb i love you darlin! Where would we be without you!
Interestingly I read the article he refers to earlier today and I was really surprised (I took it at face value, apparently I should have been wiser) to read that someone like Jessica was so "shaken" by a guy hitting on her in what sounded like not-that-aggressive a way to me. I've never met her, but I've read enough online about her to have the opinion that she probably isn't someone who gets off on playing the victim.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just still really shaken up.
That’s never happened to me before.”
Imagine you were at a bar and you saw an attractive person and started to inquire as to whether they are single, etc. You find out they are happily involved in a relationship already, but that they're a developer and they're waiting for some coworkers. If you work for a company that is hiring developers, you might ask them if they're open to exploring new opportunities. Absent any "creepy" signals, it seems unreasonable for them to conclude that you are offering an interview or a job in exchange for a date.
Without knowing more information regarding body language, tone of voice, and so on it's entirely possible that she simply misread his intentions. Especially since the article concludes with:
“What if he wasn’t hitting on me? What if I totally misunderstood?” she said.
Then again, I have noticed some of the changing narrative on the founding of YC and it's good that pieces like this are being written to prevent erasure. I've heard her speak both times at Columbia and have only heard wonderful things about her, so I'm glad this piece exists - hopefully the narrative will shift back to what I had thought it was in the future.
You are a lucky man, PG
Also, the publicity. pg was public in a bunch of ways that Jessica wasn't.
on point(b) - I do this too. I have seen that very few people pick up on this queue. I smile and hide my nervous energy.
A little Manichaen?
Successful founders are usually doers that often make bold adventures and can execute plans efficiently and ruthlessly, but they need consultant guidance from a wise person. I guess this is the YC's success formula?
I've read about qualities of good startup founders. Wondering now, what are the qualities of good people? (real question) What have you found? What should I read?
Putting these qualities onto paper would make good reading.
Yet elsewhere it's noted that one of the candidates pointed out that Livingston asked the fewest but most pointed questions. This makes me wonder if anyone ever did think that Livingston was "some kind of secretary" [and what's wrong with that] or if that assumption just plays to the conclusion that sex rather than, say, hot-headed assertiveness or attention seeking is the reason for the disparity in public perceptions of Livingstone and Graham. [I'm talking speculatively, I don't know either of these people].
Given the nature of the essay I find this, in the footnotes, quite peculiar:
>No one understands female founders better than Jessica. //
Why does she only understand female founders the best - that would presumably be because females are inherently different in some characteristics pertinent to being founders? Why is this not "No one understands founders better ..." is there someone who does understand founders better but for some reason is unable to understand female founders as well as they do male founders.
Surely this is the answer to the question posed on notability if others are better at understanding founders who are male, for some reason, then as more founders are male [it seems, I don't have stats on this, just going with my perception of the consensus] it would stand to reason that those best able to understand the largest cadre of founders are most notable - this understanding we're told is the vital element in the field after all.
The inclusion of the word "female" here is the key one way or another.
>The person who knows the most about the most important factor in the growth of mature economies—that is who Jessica Livingston is. //
It almost looks like Graham is saying, but perhaps not wanting to say, that the sex of his co-founder is the key element in reaching a broader base of founders?
I'm not at all saying Livingston isn't the best person in the World in this role, but Graham's footnote leads away from that conclusion.
On a slightly different focus:
>There are successful women who don't like to fight. //
People. There are successful _people_ who don't like to fight; unless you're saying their sex is the reason they don't like to fight or that this characteristic is peculiar to women then why do people have to force sexual bivalence all the time. The inference that follows that all [successful] men do like to fight is doubly unhelpful IMO.
Not a very interesting character portrait, and has an slightly weird sniff about it.
A big thing that changed that for me was doing in-person tech support in college. About 10% of the job was knowing facts. The rest was helping humans in very human ways. When, years later, the term "emotional labor" [1] came around, it made a lot of sense to me. I may not have been natively good at it, but you don't have to have talent to get skill. It just takes more work.
So when he talks about emotional radar and her being the mom and whatnot, it all strikes me as a false dichotomy, one I've worked hard to avoid. It's especially odd to me in a piece about society treating a woman as lesser.
[1] Lots of good stuff on the topic in this amazing Metafilter thread: http://www.metafilter.com/151267/Wheres-My-Cut-On-Unpaid-Emo...
That's so much better articulated than what I said! Exactly this.
As men, we should make tech more accommodating to women.
It is interesting that if Jessica was really a man "Jessie" how would the experiences have been. (i.e. founders ignoring "him", assuming "he" was a secretary, etc.)
Of course, I better make sure I don't fall into this trap!
Update: Interesting state of affairs. My comment is being downvoted.
Don't bias based on weight.
Don't bias on college/university.
Don't bias on motivation to change the world.
Don't bias on environmental/gender/racial activism or lack thereof.
Don't bias based on the presence of a lumbersexual-style beard.
Don't bias based on sense of humor.
Don't bias based on political opinions.
Don't bias based on social anxiety and bombing an interview because of freezing.
Don't bias based on age.
Don't bias against dressing well or wearing a suit.
This makes me think that YC Combinator should upgrade from a school of entrepreneurs to a school of entrepreneurs advisers (which will create their own school of entrepreneurs).
Something like going from a simple school to a school that trains teachers and them to a school that trains teachers how to train a new teacher of teachers.
At this point, you can achieve self-sustenability. Wouldn't be great if YC model was replicated around the world (given the basic pre-requisites)?
TL:DR It would be nice if YC Combinator tought people how do what Paul Graham does, the whole package.
Not to say that people like PG & Jessica are so rare that it couldnt happen via an institution, (i'd ague that most of the yc alumni could become founder founders), but the circumstances to become a PG & Jessica require a rare blend of both personal character development beyond just authenticity and a perfect alignment of opportunity to make for such an incubator.
As soon as the process of an art form is institutionalized, one of the first things to go tend to be authenticity to the form of process and policy. It isn't that there is anything inherently wrong with institutionalizing something, but that authenticity and relationship development inherently do not scale, and the simplest way to make it scale is to exchange relationships for process & policy.
Many day to day decisions could be made into an algorithm optimizing for the greater good, yet opportunities would be lost to scenarios akin to that of the scene in iRobot where the robot saves the adult man instead of the young girl from drowning because the robot calculated that the man had a higher chance of survival. decisions like these are where character is paramount.
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.219431....
Paul Graham is NOT the whole package when it comes to YC - as stated in the essay.
You have to have social radar to sniff out the fakes and bad founders that would be bad investments and not able to finish a project.
PR firms and news media and SJW always try to paint women as victims, but don't talk about female founders like Jessica Livingston as a success who went on to help many founders start many startups and get them successful. It is politics mostly from the left that uses victimhood to sell stories and get ratings and attention. I'd like to read stories about successful female founders and how they got success through hard work and being able to use social radar to detect fakes and bad founders and find ways to advise founders and help people out and give tips for starting up a company.
So often on HN you see a link submitted about sexism in IT or racism or some other social justice cause and it usually gets flagged because it causes a lot of trolling and voting down of comments for disagreeing with them. I'm glad to read one about a female founder that isn't political and talks about her strengths and how she worked on a team to get things done and deserves more credit. I think HN needs more of this positive news about female founders rather than articles about sexism in IT or racism or whatever.
We need real life examples to get females and minorities to study STEM and get into more startup jobs. When they are victimized, they decide not to study STEM because they think they would be discriminated against, and really that isn't the case at YC which has no discrimination and judges based on authenticity and who is a good founder.
Not everyone is given credit, for example Steve Jobs is given credit for fixing Apple but he had a team of people helping out to find out which products cost more to support than they bring in and come up with new ideas for new products to bring in more revenue. The same with Bill Gates and Microsoft he had a team of people as well.
Jessica Livingston needs more recognition, and if I was doing PR I would list her accomplishments, I would write about her social radar and spotting fakes and bad founders, I would write about how she helped startups and got them going. I would never try to make her into a victim, I would focus on her strengths and skills instead.
Oh wow I disagree with this totally. One reporter gives a bad slant to a story and that is enough to make you give up on setting up and getting other PR? What am I missing here? Anyone who has ever appeared in a story in the news (I have multiple times) knows they always get things wrong and always angle to story to what they think is something interesting that will allow them to sell advertising. That is the business they are in. With all due respect to Jessica (who I don't know) this sounds to me very thin skinned and not exactly an example of overcoming adversity in the entrepreneurship world. Of course it's her right to not do interviews if she doesn't feel like doing them but the way PG presents the story it's as if this one incident was enough to sour her taste (and there were no other factors at play).
Edit: As would be expected say something (not delicately or gently enough) about anyone closely associated with YC and get downvoted. Maybe that's just because people will pay attention to the comment more and tend to react more emotionally than rationally.
Edit#2: As far as those who say "YC is successful Jessica doesn't need to be in the limelight it's important to realize that people read these essays who are not in that position. Or even close. So perhaps PG could have pointed that out in a more direct way so that those learning from his writings could understand the nuance of the decision.
Character? It's clear from PG's essay that she hates being in the limelight. What was very likely her worst fear about doing PR happened straight away. It's completely understandable that an incident like that would have had her just back away from it all as fast as possible. Especially when it's something she doesn't have to do.
Sorry to hear that Jessica learned this the shittiest possible way. I had it easier, being simply misquoted on two occasions and seeing the pattern.
NB: Analysts are slightly better, because they take time to understand market structures, technology trends and value chains. This is because people pay them for information, rather than for column filler. It is not a coincidence that really good PR people move up to AR where they may actually see some benefit for their efforts.