YC is compiling a blacklist of venture capitalists accused of harassing women
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Notice the word is "accused" and not "guilty". Now I am not going to accuse YC of running a star chamber: I assume (without knowing) that they are fairly responsible with their blacklist. But the principle is still worrying.
Like most institutions, private companies are not able to hold trials and rigorously tell guilt from innocence, so whenever they set out to police others they must do so on some lesser evidence.
It is our right to shun others because we suspect them without proof of something bad. Perhaps it is even our right to gang together and ostracise such, but society suffers when that is the norm.
Empirically, we seem to be too far in the direction of "innocent until proven guilty." This allows people to prey on others unchecked.
It can swing back too far in the other direction, but a healthy balance is probably best.
I would hope that at least a preponderance of evidence standard is used, beyond just the leveling of an accusation. Considering the consequences for the accused, clear and convincing is probably a better standard.
You can't know this without knowing how many of the allegations are false.
I don't think we'd want a court hearing to decide if a particular grudge can be held.
"This influential Silicon Valley firm is compiling a blacklist of venture capitalists accused of harassing women"
It appears the WaPo changed the headline: "This influential Silicon Valley firm is spearheading a blacklist of venture capitalists accused of harassing women"
NewsDiff still has the original: http://newsdiffs.org/article-history/https%3A/www.washington...
It would definitely be good for the mods to change the title to reflect the new WaPo headline.
My concern with the headline is not about how they are written, it is about what real aspects of society they reflect. If those reflections are accurate, then the headlines are not a problem at all.
And if the headlines don't relfect realtiy, that's WP's problem, not yours.
It's things like this that make it hard for me to be totally down on YC, despite disquieting things about its culture. It's hard to argue that it hasn't been an unalloyed good for founders.
I can't agree with this without knowing who is on what list and why. There's way too much room for bad judgement to get in the way.
Having said that, I'm making a very minor point here, since of course you can say the same about every single business and who they will or won't work with.
I can't convince you either way. It would be pointless to debate it. Reasonable people might disagree. I'll only say that I don't know any founders, including people who have gone through YC and not felt they got much out of it, that don't agree with me that YC is far, far on the "founder" site of the "founder vs. capital" spectrum.
I have less respect for the argument that YC might be pro-founder but would prioritize some secret conspiracy to inflate harassment claims above the welfare of their portfolio companies. (I don't see you making that argument, just heading it off.)
For what it's worth: I have no connection to YC, and am openly critical of Sam Altman.
Do they give a warning to a person if they received 1 single report, and then if they receive more over the years then they get added?
Bad behaviour usually continues in part because a person believes they're getting away with it. If there's an early signal that they're in fact not getting away with it, then that would be beneficial to everyone for them to hear about it - the person harassing and the community at large.
The problem here has less to do about YC maintaining a list and more to do about the people reporting incidents to YC. Sorry, but people are ruthless, and I can see this being abused by founders who may feel vengeful they didn't get funded.
If the list was based on convicted sexual harassers, then so be it, but if it's based on feedback reviews, it'll be ripe for abuse. This is going to have tricky sociological impacts in the VC community that won't actually solve the problem.
I think that attitude is no small part of why this problem is as deeply rooted as it is.
That is: which is the greater harm? Founders getting abused by VCs without this list, or VCs getting accused by founders with it? Maybe it reflects my categories and biases more than reality, but I know which way I'm inclined to err, there.
The idea that there's something unusual about this is pretty silly. Businesses track the reputations of other businesses all the time. There's never any transparency in those lists, and people that fall on the wrong side of those lists never have any recourse.
Really, what we're arguing about here is the simple concept of "reputation". It's tough for message board nerds like us to hear this, but reputation in the real world is powerful, and it's not tracked in public Bugzillas. Ironically, the only upsetting thing that has happened here is that YC took the time to tell you about what they're doing.
Or (in the cases of sexual harassment or racial discrimination only) admit there could be behavior which may not rise to the level of criminality but still is a good reason to cause potential partners to shun you.
> admit there could be behavior which may not rise to the level of criminality
Very little bad investor rises to the level of criminality. And most bad investor behavior is still a good reason for yc to shun you.
I know of no business that regularly tracks the reputation of any _individuals_ in a database as part of it's regular business practice (the individual part is important) and that isn't part of it's model to disclose to involved parties. Uber would be a good example of someone that does this, but at least you can see a users rating at the time.
> The idea that there's something unusual about this is pretty silly.
I never said it was unusual. I think you're honing in on the wrong thing on this thread - which is the presumption that people are disgusted that these tactics happen. I more concerned that they are actively tracking it in a "review style" database and the data is only access by a select few (which is the presumption here).
I bet recruiting firms do.
The employees, apparently, don't usually get access to their U5.
What's more, there's not much you can do about it. Ultimately, they're not employers. They're investors. You can't coerce people into investing.
Exactly, informal. That's my point. The suggestion here isn't that informal lists exist, its that they are publicly announcing that it's being formalized. That's what makes this a big deal.
I still feel like you're not reading what I'm writing and keep trying to make a point responding to a wider discussion in this thread.
First thought is that if pretty experienced founders who are starting a company in a space YC isn't experienced in(e.g. biotech 5 years ago) went through it they might not get much out of it.
If you think about it, the worst case for a company that goes through yc is that it's neutral. They can't really hurt anything — when companies fail (or struggle) it's never because of yc. There are hundreds of reasons companies fail.
So the tl;dr; is that people probably won't ever say "yc was bad for us", and companies that come out doing well won't think "yc wasn't great for us".
In the UK, people can ask to see any information on them stored on a computer. Which is why blacklists are done on cardfile even today.
You're right, too, almost all the stuff that would be a black mark against an investor is an accusation.
Given that such a list can't have a high degree of transparency attached to it for a number of legal and practical reasons, it would be hard to argue anything in particular about it.
1. It's been described as a "blacklist" and people have a visceral reaction to that particular term, even though the moral equivalent of blacklists occurs in every other business situation in which reputation is tracked.
2. There's a political/ideological interest, heavily represented on Internet message boards, in trying to establish the notion that sexual harassment and gender inequality are overblown issues.
If you don't trust YC, this shouldn't be the issue that worries you about them; they've been using their influence this way for years and years, and they haven't told you a single thing about it. The only thing that's really happening here in this announcement is that YC is being open about it for this particular issue --- obviously, in order to put VC firms on notice.
There are things I don't trust YC with, but defending the interests of founders just isn't one of them.
Finally: we should all recognize that no matter how much we might want a transparent process that gives each and every one of us all the information we need to judge YC's actions, in the real business world we virtually never get anything like that, and this won't be any different.
Therein lies the big disadvantage of the politics of outrage. Any movement that can't organize itself to make the tactical climb onto the moral high ground will continue to wallow in the lowland quagmires of outrage. The most unreasonable of one side will anger the most unreasonable of the other in an unending cycle of recruitment through the viral nature of outrage on social media. The "leaderless" movements of the 21st century are just this, and are just doing this.
(Yes, I am seemingly obliged to repost this. I will repost this as many times as I can manage! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc )
There's nothing that involves subtlety and sophistication to understand which is going to benefit from "discussion" in a state of outrage. Racism and sexism in the 21st century are two topics which fit this. For example my "lived experience" tells me that racist micro-aggressions exist, they often coexist with forms of sexually charged transgressive psychological warfare. However, my lived experience also informs me that going around in a militant, accusatory state to combat such things is like emotional carpet bombing -- in that there is an almost complete certainty of hurting your own cause in the long term in several ways. (By causing collateral damage to innocents, for one.)
So is there a point to getting upset about Y Combinator's list? No. Just about anyone has bigger fish to fry. It's also a good idea to steer clear of both such controversies and the broken individuals who might seek to exploit such controversies. If someone is upset about such a thing, it probably means there's some kind of magical thinking going on and there's a need for some introspection. (Y Combinator isn't an oracle, pg and everyone involved are just ordinary human beings, and your feelings of security about the world shouldn't depend on a world view that requires woo-woo thinking.)
(tptacek -- I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I think this is the right place to say these things.)
EDIT:
Finally: we should all recognize that no matter how much we might want a transparent process that gives each and every one of us all the information we need to judge YC's actions, in the real business world we virtually never get anything like that, and this won't be any different.
tl;dr -- If one doesn't think YC has their head in the right place, one shouldn't be doing business with them.
That aside, his point stands. Personal testimony is evidence. Seriously people deciding whether to act on personal testimony have a variety of heuristics and tools for deciding to what extent they weight a particular piece of evidence.
Meanwhile, these same VCs that people on this thread are champing at the bit to defend routinely create blacklists of founders, which they'll share with competitors to fuck people over. If they don't like you, they'll take meetings with you, telling you the whole time that they can't wait to get you a term sheet, and then take your slide deck and their notes from the meeting and send them to portfolio companies and other VCs for competitive intel†.
It's a little silly to think we're going to feel sorry for these people in this situation.
Really, the distinction is that it's important to some people that we all believe a large fraction of sexual harassment complaints are bogus. It's got nothing to do with the impact of YC shunning you, and everything to do with the politics of the issue.
† Ask me how I know this. But, I mean, you already know how I know this.
"She also tweeted that Y Combinator had disinvited an investor who was trying to replace a female chief executive with a white male"
Should it be the best person for the job, male or female alike?
You can say this for just about any organization which has power. This is why transparency is often a good check for power. In cases where transparency isn't practical, then there is the larger granularity of the market. Where this breaks down is in very acute concentrations of power. The realist view acknowledges that power is contextual, and that contextual abuses will happen. Sometimes the world is imperfect and you're going to have to leave for more peaceful pastures.
Throughout all of the above, you can recognize "the good" in their magnanimity and their protection of the dignity and rights of individuals -- even extending this to the accused. I forget who said it, but the true test of character is not in how someone treats those they need, it's how they treat those they don't need.
I would just push back on the idea that it's somehow out of bounds for them to have lists of potential business partners they won't want to work with in the future. Businesses do this all the time. All YC has done here is actually told us about one of those lists.
Yeah, that's not how it works.
I dug up the original tweet:
"Last month another investor asked a female founder/CEO to search for a white male to replace her as CEO. Also uninvited."[1]
On one side, there should be a ledger of people doing shitty things, even if the behavior isn't illegal. Who wants to work with assholes? No one. If there's a record of people's bad behavior then future founders can save themselves a lot of suffering by simply knowing to avoid these people.
On the other side, what standards are used to put someone on this list in the first place? Are multiple offences required? Seems like without a process of submitting good evidence of people's poor behavior there's a lot of room for abuse. If this list actually becomes a tool that people rely on to select their investors I would start to be concerned by the potential abuse of power.
I'm curious how others feel about this idea of putting people on lists.
In practice, everything about this initiative is good.
Yes, yes they will: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2017/06/23/maaj...
I don't think Maajid Nawaz is going to win because he'll have to prove real damages from the SPLC (horribly erroneously, in my opinion) labeling him an "anti-Muslim extremist". Being put on a blacklist by YC might result in damages that are easier to prove, though.
I think this is less likely to be legally complicated than you think. Consider: YC has been doing this for years already.
EDIT: When it comes to conferences and professional organizations, I think those things are more like a bakery than like YC. A programming conference is in the business of fostering discussion of and dissemination of information about programming. A code of conduct is fine for such an organization, but a politicized code of conduct has no place in such an organization. There's something clearly wrong with politicized code of conduct in a non-political organization that makes a subset of its members uneasy. There is no place for intolerance in a liberal humanist multicultural society, and people who want to use the bureaucracy of non-political organizations to alienate their political opponents are intolerant people who have given up on convincing people. Such people want to bully people into doing what they want. What they are doing is only the softest form of intolerance.
My supposition is that sexual harassment is too grey. It's ill defined. It's hard to know how to 100% avoid it when flirting with someone. If someone can define the exact point hitting on someone goes from acceptable flirting to unacceptable harassment, then we could all rest easy. But without that, it's incredibly worrying to accidentally do something that ruins your career.
Is there a place for coworkers falling in love or making love in 2017? Maybe not. Maybe so. But I think it's sort of sad how much we are repressing human sexuality if not.
You can be against investors and bosses making passes at the people who have to make them happy without wanting to ban workplace romances entirely. Big companies have been doing this for years.
Well, there's flirting and then there's flirting.
Real-life example, which I observed from the sidelines:
.
Mr. A is a new hire.
Mrs. B is the senior non-management team member.
Someone gets flowers sent to them. Mr. C decides it would be amusing if they ended up on Mrs. B's desk, with a note saying they're from Mr. A.
An hour or two later when Mr. A realizes he's just being hazed and still has a job, he decides to take the joke and run with it. This leads to several years of the most absurd and blatant come-ons you can imagine.
Several years later, Mrs. B is the official team lead and Mr. A is reporting to her. The blatant flirting and absurd come-ons are still exactly the same as they've always been.
.
The only concern about whether this is OK, is if some outsider were to see and take it seriously enough to cause trouble with HR.
A good generalization: presumably, you like this person. Why would you want that — or you — to be a thing that is unpleasant for them? That should be the place you're operating from: what's good (or, at the very least, not bad) for them, not what you want out of the situation.
That said, here's a few tests you can use:
If you have any kind of authority over the other person (or them over you), don't even start.
If it's unwelcome, stop immediately. Apologize if it's warranted. Go out of your way not to make it worse.
If you're in any kind of doubt about whether it's appropriate or welcome, it probably isn't. Err on the side of caution.
If you still want to try, a good place to start is probably an honest, respectful, "Hey, so I think I've got some feelings here, but I don't want that to be a problem for you."
If you do that and you're told it's not OK (whether explicitly, or implicitly, thorough the lack of an enthusiastic response) DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES CONTINUE, unless that response changes.
"Unless that changes" doesn't mean polling for state changes. That's creepy.
That's all I've got, offhand. This list isn't remotely exhaustive. It's survivorship bias, but I've never been sued for harassment, nor my employers because of me. And, like I said, I'm not good at this stuff.
(This comment was edited bigly.)
My mom married her boss, my dad. So I'm not sure the authority part is cut and dry.
But the rest seems like good albeit no-full proof pointers.
If you want to flirt with a same-level employee, I don't think there is actually a guaranteed way to make a first move with zero liability. It seems we agree there is inherent risk in making any move, whether its just 1 time or not.
HN Gender skew is kind of the obvious explanation.
AMA link for those interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/6najyy/im_a_found...
If YC has their head in the right place, then such abuses will be figured out, and will effectively flag the abusers. If YC doesn't have their head in the right place, you really didn't want to do business with them in the first place.
Hell is paved with good intentions.
In some ways, the beginning of the 21st century really isn't all that different from the beginning of the 20th or the 19th!
Do they though? It seems every demo day some VC posts up a blog about how they are not fans of demo day anymore for X, Y and Z reasons and that they're no longer attending.
Don't get me wrong YC is great and all but you make it sound like most of the VCs need YC but so many companies outside of YC get funding I'm not convinced that's even close to the truth.
Dealflow is everything in the VC community, but this is pure hyperbole. Statistically speaking, there are way more companies that drive VC returns that come from outside of YC than the ones that come from it.
This seems to be the case so far (YC has kept track of "problem VCs" for a long time), but I don't see why it should be. One of the few things more powerful than "if you sexually harass a YC founder, you'll be shunned by all future YC founders" is "if you sexually harass a YC founder, you'll be shunned by everybody".
People deserve the opportunity to defend themselves.
Also, as far as I remember he only mentioned meals, not meetings in general.
When I used to be a professor I would refuse to have "closed door" meetings with any student (male or female) on my own because the risk of a false accusation was just too high - I saw too many careers ruined by crazy students [1].
If a student wanted a private meeting with me over some issue (99.9% of the time it was about their marks) I would drag in a colleague.
1. If you think I am joking I managed to avoid getting caught up into two legals cases brought by disgruntled students. In one of the cases I was the only academic staff member in the whole department that was not accused.
If I was a VC I would be very concerned about having a private meeting with any founder I didn’t know well.
My friend was arrested, and the whole campus had posters of him up. Eventually the girl said she lied and just wanted attention.
After that, she got off without anything but a warning - but my friend would go around school and people would cuss him out and vandalize his things and eventually he went from a 3rd year CS student to dropping out and now lives with his parents and has deep depression (it's been 5 years?).
No one ever did anything to help him, the girl never got any penalty and it ruined his life.
At the very least there needs to be consequence for false accusations if the punishment is so severe (destroying the reputation of a venture capitalist). The process should also be open to scrutiny once judgment is passed.
I personally don't like the way society is going. If I was a good looking woman with a warped moral compass, I would consider ganging up with several other women and blackmailing ourselves a few million dollars. As a venture capitalist with such a claim against you and no evidence to prove your innocence, you'll likely lose or be forced to pay up.
"One group of women has already founded a start-up, BetterBrave, that aims to be an online hub for female workers who felt they were sexually harassed at work. SheWorx, composed of female entrepreneurs, is planning an online database that would enable women and others to report unethical behavior by investors."
This also assumes that the accusing women are being entirely truthful, honest, and acting in good faith which unfortunately is not always the case.
Best advice for startups, deal with people on the blacklist, less competition.
This isn't unlike Uber or Yelp ratings, where someone's reputation will affect their ability to make money. It's not perfect, but it at least provides some accountability.
"More likely, since pretty much every VC in the valley needs access to the YC dealflow, becoming persona non grata with YC will force VC firms to make personnel changes."
But still, this will probably be good on balance. False accusations of this sort will certainly be something to watch out for, but now victims of real sexual harassment will have recourse.
Wouldn't a list of VC that behave professionally be better?