Good point on how the whole interview process is a crapshoot anyway. Hadn't really thought about that aspect, but obviously is a huge opportunity for subliminal bias since it is how it is.
One possible interpretation --- and there are probably equally credible others --- is that this founder found it difficult to compete in the (overheated) SFBA market for talent, irrespective of gender.
https://m.cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/5/186026-decoding-femi...
1. I went to LinkedIn
2. I searched for "Silverlabs"
3. I found the page for their company
4. I clicked on the link labeled "14 employees and former employees have LinkedIn profiles"
5. I observed that all the engineering profiles were in Hyderabad.
I'm being a little snarky but also it's good to know how superficial this "research" was so it's not at all unlikely that I'm totally wrong about this.
"But, they lacked the energy to put us into overdrive. Worse, they were starting to drain the energy from the rest of the team."
What exactly does it mean to "lack energy"? Were these women unqualified or otherwise incapable of doing the work? If so, why not say so explicitly? Because otherwise, in the context of startups I would be inclined to interpret that sentence as meaning "they weren't willing to work 80 hour weeks like the rest of our team so we fired them".