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Comment by rmena123 | Hacker News Reader

I can bet, if YC had the stats for race/ethnicity amount who applied, we would be shocked of the amount of blacks or Latinos who were never accepted. Especially from the early days.

Count me and a few other Hispanics who never have been accepted. The only time its cared about is after the fact and just for show purposes like this.

On a side Note: Yc doesn't understand people like me will never have the resume they are looking for, but have the talent and drive. I could game the application process to get accepted. Because we know what you accept and its not just a race issue.

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If you truly believe this than I am sorry. If you are interested - feel free to email me: michael@ycombinator.com

I'll email you sometime and I appreciate the response.

Just to set my example, how many staff at YC are black or Hispanic in the list below? I find it odd considering the amount of population of these groups in the USA alone. Not many startups cater to this demographic, if they aren't being accepted.

http://www.ycombinator.com/people/

You are a spot on bro, they are all talk and no action...

You may have a point. The decision of who to fund may rely in part on seeking people similar to oneself and if the demographics of the applicant pool are not reflected in the staff of YC it may skew the outcome against minorities.

Why does the concept of free association stop, and the and the chilling effect of we can't be seen together without a representatives from every phenotype begin?

When do we start to demand that Latino rap groups (eg. Cypress Hill) hire to meet diversity quotas?

It stops when you're large enough that statistically speaking you should have people of all walks of life in your portfolio. If you then don't that's proof that there is some kind of bias at work.

How do we determine whether the bias is caused by the employer or whether by the applicants?

Anyway, I'll agree that we need to have this conversation, and we need to work out some way of applying some rules that seem somewhat fair, and that the issues should be dealt with on all fronts.

We, in Australia anyway, already have varying rules / laws / regulations that apply to a workplace depending on the number of employees and / or revenue. So it would seem to make sense that diversity quotas would be applied in a similar fashion. I mean if we, as a society, believe that's necessary, which does appear to be the direction we're headed.

I guess I tend to recoil from the idea because I work in heavy steel fabrication and construction. The job roles in this industry tend to be very traditional with regard to gender. Women work the administrative side, men do all the dangerous / dirty / heavy / hot / long hours work. And as far as I can tell everyone is okay with that.

Until I see diversity quotas applied in the job roles that kill and injure men at work it's a little hard for me to take serious this ... squabbling ... in tech industry.

What might be best is, since this doesn't really involve me, as in: I don't work in the hotbed-tech-industry-in-a-large-city, I might just stay out of the conversation.

> Until I see diversity quotas applied in the job roles that kill and injure men at work it's a little hard for me to take serious this ... squabbling ... in tech industry.

That argument was beaten to death years ago. The basic outcome is this: you should allow people to work where they want to work, anything else is conscription (the Soviets tried this with predictable effects). So unless you are willing to force people to work in jobs they don't want diversity won't be 100% across all kinds of jobs simply because people self select for the kind of jobs they feel they can do and which will not lead to them getting injured or killed on the job in higher numbers than those that are physically more suited to doing that work.

So the diversity conversation will center on those professions where such innate differences won't make a difference. Even so there are women who do traditional 'mens' jobs and do them well but they are rather the exception than the rule.

And very few of those 'mens' jobs are really in that category, most of the time it is simply tradition rather than some actual basis in fact. Though I'll definitely yield to there being some of those in the steel industry, I've worked near two steel plants (IJmuiden and Sault Ste Marie) and know many steelworkers and would definitely not see them being replaced by females (or less bulky men) any time soon.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/apr/26/meet-wo...

That said I do know a female welder and there are plenty of women in construction who don't care about danger (which should be avoided anyway), dirt or heat and for 'heavy' we have cranes.

You can achieve gender quotas without conscription. For example, the state could institute a policy to favor bids from companies with no gender segregation. No one would force women to work at a construction companies, but those companies would suddenly feel a major pressure to get female employees. Similar, the government has multiple dangerous / dirty / heavy / hot / long hours work that they sub contract, and all those could get the same treatment.

You could also do the reverse and encourage men to get into more safe work, while freeing up competent women to go into typical male professions. Both psychology and veterinarian have both around 10 female applicants per male, and the median school grades needed for both is very high. 40% of those women could easy be denied a spot in those female dominated professions in favor of gender diversity, and could then go into tech. It would be very interesting if a large veterinarian company and IT company would join in a pledge to hire one minority gender employee if the other did so. A "fair trade" in the area of social activism.

Why not accept people based on their skill and merits and not the color of their skin? Why should YC choose someone simple because he is black? Only 16% of the U.S. population is black, the amount of black people YC has accepted is not completely off, plus there is no reason it should exactly match the population make up of the U.S. anyway.

Slightly related: I'm curious about educational background and the impact on admission.

The figures for Summer 2017 are 72 different universities out of 294 founders. That seems like a pretty specific group within academia. Possibly a set of highly selective universities. I'm curious if the applicant pool similarly as narrow, or if the brand of one's alma mater bears relevance to the process.

As mentioned prior, a piece of paper is a poor proxy for talent and drive.

Are you suggesting that YC rejects applicants because they are black or hispanic? Why would they do that?

You seem to also say that they want to brag about accepting these ethnicities, so why then they discriminate _against_ them?

It's not that they reject them for being black or Hispanic, but look at the numbers, not just recent classes.

It's a hot topic for companies to do the right thing now, its then they start to care.

I don't think its done on purpose or with a hatred, but its an issue, look around.

Sorry, I don't follow you. So they are not discriminating against hispanics? What exactly is the issue?

Someone wrote this above... I agree with.

The decision of who to fund may rely in part on seeking people similar to oneself and if the demographics of the applicant pool are not reflected in the staff of YC it may skew the outcome against minorities.

So then you are saying they discriminate against e.g. Hispanics, but subconsciously, while at the same time consciously they want to show off how many hispanics they acccept.

Well I suppose it's not impossible.

The numbers of accepted hispanics tells you nothing about that on it's own, you'd need to know how many hispanics apply.

For women for example you can see from the numbers that there is no bias in the acceptance rate, the thing is that very few women apply. Could be the same for hispanics. I don't know what proportion of engineering students are hispanics but it's likely that as for women the underrepresentation starts already in school.

See my comment above or I will paste again here:

What evidence is there that proves an equal percentage of every race and gender leads to a more profitable company (or has a higher chance of a successful exit)?* *Because I assume that by listing "UNDERREPRESENTED FOUNDERS" YC wishes there were 50% female founders and 50% male founders? And what about the racial makeup of founders? Is the ideal world for YC a racial make up of 20% white, 20% black, 20% asian, 20% middle eastern, and 20% other?

>On a side Note: Yc doesn't understand people like me will never have the resume they are looking for, but have the talent and drive. I could game the application process to get accepted. Because we know what you accept and its not just a race issue.

I would venture to guess that YC understands more than you think. How could you game the application process to get accepted and what purpose would it serve? Sure you could misrepresent who are the founders in the video but don't you think they would not at the interview, assuming you would be offered an interview?

Yes, you could game the application, but yes it wouldn't take you far, maybe an interview to tell them what I did. Which I wouldn't do.

I guess my question would be ....game the application to what end? While you clarified that you would not game the application I would venture to guess that it has probably happened or at least been seriously contemplated by other applicants.

It seems to me that this would certainly be a very unwise decision given that the YC community is very tight knit. I guess there are those who would hope that if just given the chance to be heard during the interview that YC would see the passion and determination but it seems like it would be a very unwise way to start what he/she hopes would be a long term relationship. As you said, the application could be gamed but I don't think it would be looked upon as a good move and given the number of applications that YC receives, such a move is a terrible waste of the YC screeners valuable time.

I always get the impression that they make a particular effort to understand groups outside their typical applicants and look for opportunities in other countries and cultures.

Surely there's every chance that your application isn't strong enough?

I think there are some implicit bias. I've noticed that most black startups in accelerators cater to other black groups or hail mostly from Africa.

If not being strong enough was a criteria then you could guarantee that every startup would succeed, but looking at a lot of accelerators, there is still a high rate of fail, so who is to say strong enough? I've also seen people you least expect to succeed often succeed and some that you would expect to succeed fail...

Your best bet as a black/latinx founder is to be that outlier or build something for your own group...

By no means am I saying I should of been accepted. I'm actually saying the opposite, I don't fit the mold and probably lack many things, but I rather look at it as a whole. The truth is the staff at YC lack blacks or Hispanics. And just recently started accepting Hispanics and black founders out of a current trend/topic for tech companies to accept diversity. If it wasn't brought up, would YC have made it a point to accept more blacks or Hispanics/woman now?

I think YC is great, but they don't get the fact that founders can have a horrible application or even look horrible on paper.

Being an entrepreneur is not a cookie cut process, nor is business or anything else.

"And just recently started accepting Hispanics and black founders out of a current trend/topic for tech companies to accept diversity."

This is either very poorly worded or unfairly incorrect. When have they not accepted black or Hispanic founders?! They might have attracted mostly white/Asian applicants, but they have never precluded any group.

"...they don't get the fact that founders can have a horrible application or even look horrible on paper."

Of course they get that fact. They often speak about how often they miss opportunities - it's not a charity and they can't pick every winner in advance. They don't just judge applicants on paper. They take a video, and they look at product traction and so on. They have people from all sorts of backgrounds showing it's not a cookie cutter process.

But if you do a bad job at presenting/explaining yourself and your idea, there's every chance you'll have similar struggles pitching to investors and customers.

Did you see any black or Hispanic founders in YC for the first years?

Not to repeat myself, but look at the YC staff today. How many? http://www.ycombinator.com/people/

There's at least one black guy in that list and he's been there for a few years. He was also involved in one of their early and well-known investments.

You've implied that they only started accepting black/Hispanic people like they've been banned or something?!

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