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Comment by mbrumlow | Hacker News Reader

And my point is they founded companies without taking money from themselves. So anybody else should be able to do the same as they did.

Further more, why is their money better for founding companies than somebody else's ?

On top of that. What is the suggestion? Sorry Uber I have already invested in my quota of companies founded by men ?

Even more being founders is not a job position nyou hire for. You have to have something to have a idea and plan. The assertion that they are telling women with amazing ideas that they won't invest them because they are woemen is silly.

Not every idea is a good one. They fund founders who they think have good ideas.

This whole article is silly and flame bait. I wish I had never replied.

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Thiel got started with just a million dollars from his family. Surely anyone can do that, right?

> The assertion that they are telling women with amazing ideas that they won't invest them because they are woemen is silly.

The judgement of "amazing" is extremely subjective and vulnerable to unconscious bias on the part of those being pitched to.

So you are telling me these were the only guys ever to have friends and family with that sort of cash to help out ?

Many millions are lost every year by friends and families helping start companies that fail.

> Many many many millions are lost every year by friends and families helping start companies that fail.

As you've seen, there is a huge amount of luck involved as well.

But unless luck favors men, it does not explain gender gap.

I think "luck" is mostly a bucket that we put all of the factors we couldn't have properly planned for into, so it seems that unconscious bias expressed by insiders in an industry/movement could easily describe a lot of what we might normally chalk up to "bad luck". My point isn't to say "that is definitely what happened", just that the notion that "luck favors men" isn't as ridiculous of a proposition as you seem to imply.

Put another way, every interaction we have with other people, no matter how brief or long lasting, contributes to that person's "luck" based on whether those interactions ended up favorable or unfavorable. If there was a present unconscious bias in a group that slanted the probability of a person's interactions with everyone else in that group (even if it just slanted it a bit) due to a personal characteristic, that would manifest itself as "bad luck" for group of people that had this characteristic who received this statistical slight.

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