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Comment by frankdenbow | Hacker News Reader

I know how you feel. I was one of 2 black students in my graduating CS class at CMU. It has never been a source of pressure/anxiety for me, but I do understand how it may affect other black students to feel like you are on your own.

As far as investors go, I doubt that they have any aversion to supporting entrepreneurs of any background. This is one industry that I would presume is more of a meritocracy than society at large. As I said on my tumblr a while back (http://bit.ly/g7jCAF) investors can see the green inside all of us :-)

There are many discussions going on about women in technology startups. The greater question is not why there aren't more founders, but why there arent more minority/female students in academia. Most of your founders are going to be a subset of those in academia anyway, so why not look at the problem closer to the source?

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I think the answer isn't just the employment and supporting of people already excelling in the system, it is in changing the distribution of opportunity prior to formal education.

We intend to do this by operating a program within our company, starting with community computer and science lab, promoting to a group work day with interactive collaboration, then eventually fitting a child's interest in a role with a second-seat internship at each employee's desk.

This is all early stage of process, but 20 years of thinking and experimentation. If I'm able to build my current venture out, my next will be promoting these early programs to help expand young people's thinking (and hopefully help them make themselves their own role model) about science and technology.

That's an interestingly familiar situation. Since my freshman year, there were more the 4 black students in my computer science classes. In fact at some point, the African Americans ende up dropping the major whereas the African students kept going. It's not like we had much of a choice really, our parents would have "killed us" for wasting their hard earned money :)

"The greater question is not why there aren't more founders, but why there arent more minority/female students in academia"

http://www.prb.org/Articles/2007/CrossoverinFemaleMaleColleg...

http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2009/section1/indicator11.as...

To wit: Females have dominated academia for a couple decades now.

Also, it should be pointed out that many founders are college dropouts or even high school dropouts, so I'd be interested in some sort of citation of evidence that one can assume most founders will be a subset of academia.

None of your data is broken out by major. That doesn't really help us, and you probably should refrain from going ad hominen immediately (troll, misinformed, are you serious etc) when your "facts" are far from conclusive.

I know in my college, in my two majors (mechanical engineer & computer science, 2007-2010) it was about 80/20 male/female in ME and 70/30 male/female in CS. The girls average was likely higher than the guys. I don't see how they are "dominating". You're numbers show there are more guys than girls in college - which was also true of my college which overall was 60/40 female/male. That doesn't mean there are more girls in majors related to startups like the ones we are talking about here (which I would highly doubt you can find numbers to say that).

There are more types of startups than just web applications.

I think he was referring to the software and electrical engineering majors which should smooth out your flabbergastation a bit.

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