Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

I was prepared to skeptical--investors of course will dislike situations which set up competitive bidding scenarios.

But the writer has some good points, including demo days favor men more than women, as well as extroverts:

For entrepreneurs who don’t pitch well — or who don’t fit investors’ mental image of a successful entrepreneur — Demo Days may hurt more than they help. The preparation teaches entrepreneurs to focus on transactions more than relationships (when, in reality, an in-depth conversation after the pitch matters a lot more than the pitch itself).

The Demo Day format is not ideal for investors, either. If you’re picking who pitches best, not who runs the best business, you’re not getting the best results.

What I have seen happening at accelerators, universities, and startup events in the Boston area is this intense focus on pitching. It's all about showing off the team, presenting a problem, sharing market or usage stats, prepping a slick video, and getting the deck just right. This approach emphasizes superficial qualities over the product or service being built. Product demos are almost an afterthought, and information about build progress or actual discussions with customers are turned into a couple of bullets on slides 4 and 5.

So yeah, by all means, ditch the demo days. But don't assume that focusing on "building relationships" will solve the problems of investors favoring certain types of people, or glossing over product and customer discussions. Extroverted founders and talented salespeople can project empathy, ask the right questions, and send other signals that are more likely to suggest a "good relationship" to investors. These qualities/skills will not determine who runs the best business.

Eerily similar to problems associated with tech interviews: favoring extroverts and smooth pitch-people over substance.

How so?

The guys/gals that can express themselves without anxiety are, more generally, going to make a better impression. Those with social anxiety or those with less social skills than those "extroverts" will, more generally, make worse impressions.

Any interview/test/discussion without overwhelming objectivity will be subjective by nature and therefore subject to emotional bias.

The parent mentioned favoring extroverts so I assume they meant hindering introverts, not people with anxiety.

I think they meant favoring extroverts, regardless of what prevents an extrovert-style presentation.

People with good social skills are more valuable to employers, other things equal.

I actually like tech interviews specifically because it's hard to BS your way through them.

I've definitely seen smooth talkers with great resumes get through any other filter, but I've never seen a false positive with the technical interview.

It's not that you can BS your way through a tech interview, but that the skillset required to do well in a tech interview is different than the one you need to be good at a developer job.

I've seen way more than a few false positives from tech interviews, along with tremendous amounts of false negatives: People with backgrounds of being transformative to teams and organizations that just couldn't look good enough while solving random algorithm problems to save their lives.

It's just hard to see the kinds of things a company misses when they keep insisting in asking people about graph algorithms and implementing red black trees, because those same companies just never get to see the kind of people that you get when you do things differently.

I currently work for a company that does relatively traditional tech interviews and does 95% of sourcing from big schools and ver well known tech companies. I fail to see a major difference between my coworkers here vs my coworkers at places where your average dev went to a midwest state school and was never asked an algorithm question during interview.

I've seen people who can whip up a nice solution to an interview problem but can't plan out a larger system. Or they have some cool way of solving the interview but then it turns out they want to write 100% of their code as monkey-patches. Or they write great code but cannot get along with anyone. Or they can solve the interview but don't actually have the deeper expertise that they said they did. I'd call all of those false positives from the technical interview.

I guess you could counter that you need to have a 10x longer technical interview that covers all these aspects, but a long interview process is going to filter out all the candidates who are good enough not to have to put up with one.

This is why I wish system design questions were more common. I couldn't care less if you can do a bunch of palindrome algorithm problems on a white board. I do care if you understand the scalability, maintainability, and implications of your code. And if you understand how different data structures work and are used. Most whiteboard problems fail spectacularly at this.

I agree that, in principle, system design interviews are great. The problem is that, in practice, I have seen them generate way too many false positives. This was at great companies and with people who had absolutely stunning resumes.

Ah, but the problem with technical interviews isn't the false positives, it's the false negatives -- introverts, people who are inexperienced with whiteboards, people who think it's silly to memorize BFS and DFS when they could look them up, women, people of color.

False positives are way more expensive than false positives. Any filter that is not heavily biased towards false negatives over false positives would likely be terrible for the business goals of interviewing. That is a baseline fact.

I am not sure why you think women and people of color are extra bad at whiteboard problems. In my experience the applicant pool for technical and engineering fields is heavily biased towards white, asian and Indian males, but that happens way before the stage of the whiteboard interview.

> For entrepreneurs who don’t pitch well — or who don’t fit investors’ mental image of a successful entrepreneur — Demo Days may hurt more than they help.

How does this prepare founders for the eventuality of needing to sell their protect in a similar way that they are pitching their demo?

It doesn't and it doesn't matter. I doubt good business will sink or swim based on "demo day" type expositions and vice versa for a bad business. Eventually the "market" will figure it out... It may take some time for that to happen however.

> the market will figure out

Unfortunately, start-ups don't function like normal businesses. If they can't get their name out there sufficiently, they'll die before the market takes its sweet time "figuring it out."

Demo-day results are suggestive, just like SAT scores. It's a measure of the founder's ability to sell (which is arguably the most important task for a CEO).

It doesn't matter if it's a great product. Amazing products have been created and destroyed when the founders couldn't market it to an audience.

Could you provide some examples of companies that died because of the CEO's inability to "sell"?

Unlikely, but that's not the point I'm arguing.

needing to sell their protect in a similar way

Much like your inclusion of this typo, maybe it's the criteria for the "eventuality" that is problematic. Does the VC industry have a means by which to take imperfect people seriously? Before they're a CEO with $10B in funding, that is.

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