Hundreds of Startups Tell Investors: Diversify, or Keep Your Money
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
They are demanding investors discriminate in their employment practices based on race/color/gender, which is both unethical and explicitly illegal by US employment law - https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/race_color.cfm
Note that discrimination in employment is illegal even if you are discriminating against white people - "Title VII prohibits race/color discrimination against all persons, including Caucasians." - https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/publications/fs-race.cfm
How about they actually become outright superstars and then provide a road map for others like themselves? Get to the level of national notoriety and success before you start telling others how awesome you are in a startup that is likely to fail.
Do you think the kids in Liberty City, Chicago, NYC know what a VC, startup, or much less those people from the article are?
No they don’t know. Want to see a good spokesperson for hard working Hispanics ? Checkout A-Rod who’s always talking about his mom working hard and himself trying and failing and trying again. Kids can see him on Shark Tank tell his story and success. Not some virtue signaling nobody living in whacky world SV.
if a startup is dumb enough to pass on a round of funding because there isn't "diversity" within the investment group, they aren't worth investing in anyway.
have people forgotten that VC's are in the money making business? come on folks, get real.
Used to be, we had a work life, a private life, friends and activities that more or less never interacted. Now it seems people want all the above, all the time, every minute of every day. Google runs the workplace like they are mum and dad, and everyone wants work to solve all their life's meaning, rather than providing a living so we can find meaning elsewhere. This blending of all facets of our lives is partly why privacy is so skew-if (as we broadcast all the time), and why it is so hard for people of differing views to seemingly get along.
In my darker moments, I think a lot of the progressive stuff is a conspiracy by business to make everyone want to work 12 hour days - this idea is not helped by books like Lean In, or the way many modern workplaces invent ways to keep you at work longer and longer. In my less dark moments, I think good ideals have been co-opted or money making purposes, which is kind of how life seems to work.
All this leads to ideas like this, where people not only can't separate different elements in life from their life, but demand that all elements of their life conform to their pre-set ideals. I'm not sure who wins long-run between the VCs and the startups in a situation like this, but the long run affects of this blending of life into one thing, well I'm just not sure the animal that is a human being really benefits from it at all.
I really wish we could re-seperate out the spheres of our life, and not expect work to provide all our meaning, or provide all of the solutions. I wish instead that we could have a work life and a, for want of a better term, life-life, and (rarely?) the twain shall meet.
Is there this much money slushing around that startups are now mocking investors?
There are nearly 20,000 startups. Does that mean 19000+ startups told investors to "not diversify and give us your money"? Every day, the media disappoints me.