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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

PG is having a semantic debate with himself about "income inequality" when the world is using this term to refer to the raging class struggle in America.

The startup world is 100% class-based, worse than anything, and yet PG actually seems to believe that it's a meritocracy. He thinks Stanford PhDs like Larry Page (whose father was a professor) had about the same chance as anyone of getting funding.

He completely ignores the fact that startup funding and elite credentials are extremely limited pies. Harvard only admits a certain number of people. YC only funds a certain number of people. Sequoia only funds as many people as they can sit on the boards of. So who do these people always choose? Other members of their class.

See: https://www.ycombinator.com/people/

He seems to have no awareness of what it's like to live outside the elite bubble he was born into. And how could he...

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Um, you do realize that PG (through YC) is trying very hard to fund people from other backgrounds?

More: You seem to think that VCs decide who to fund based on class. What VCs actually look for is companies that they think will make money.

1. YC doesn't publish numbers on economic diversity and I'm not aware of any special attempts at funding people from poor backgrounds.

2. VCs make money and raise funds by getting higher valuations. VCs in later rounds will value companies with elite founders at higher numbers, and are more likely to fund them in the first place. VCs also can't be as easily blamed when elite founders fail, so they're a safer bet, etc.

They recently started having office hours specifically for minority groups, and they seem pretty attentive to stuff like this, but I haven't really seen money-where-your-mouth-is action either.

> YC doesn't publish numbers on economic diversity and I'm not aware of any special attempts at funding people from poor backgrounds.

Well, I know they are making efforts toward female founders, but I suppose you can argue that they could be of "the right class" as well. I presume that YC looks at different socioeconomic backgrounds, not just gender, but I can't prove it at the moment.

> VCs in later rounds will value companies with elite founders at higher numbers

Citation needed.

In that article PG basically points out that income inequality has two reasons 1. wealth shifting 2. wealth creation (as in "out of thin air"). So not a semantic debate.

> He completely ignores the fact that startup funding and elite credentials are extremely limited pies.

Well these pies are private. Its up to them who do they give it to. I dont think they claim to distrubute it "fairly" unlike promises made by many democratic political parties which get naive people all hoped-up and, worse, entitled.

However, they do claim to distribute in a market perfect way most of the time. They claim to be prophets of value.

Yes. The clothes and demeanor of the bourgeois class are a prerequisite for utilizing their resources.

This ensures that power networks remain tight, and closed to the chance of social mobility most of the time.

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