Navigating Silicon Valley as a Female Founder | Hacker News Reader

Navigating Silicon Valley as a Female Founder

celinehh.com

35 pointsapsec11223 comments

This is solid advice. VCs are just as susceptible to the same biases as everyone else. Learning to navigate that minefield is unfortunately part of the massive extra effort it takes to start a SV company as a woman.

My minority wife has raised millions in the past couple of years for her company. The struggle is real. It's hard for underrepresented cohorts to trust VCs, because it can be hard to tell if their motivation is genuine. Are they just interested in you as a way to improve their diversity metrics? Do they actually believe in your company and will they be able to provide valuable guidance and feedback? The investors who are looking for diversity points have tended to be net-negative contributors to her company. The social dynamics are much more complicated for her than they are for me. She and other women and minorities who deal with SV culture are badasses for having the grit to deal with it.

I also want to say that I don't really blame SV for this culture either. This isn't unique to SV, it's just human nature. Any founders coming from socio-economic backgrounds that are different from those of their investors will face this problem. The best thing that VCs can do to combat this isn't necessarily to invest more money in women and minorities. That's easy, and without changing the dynamic it's sometimes not even helpful. IMO, you can make more of an impact by looking around--work on diversifying the socio-economic backgrounds of your GPs and LPs.

> Here are the most common traits: apathetic, very logical, quantitative and concise sentences, fast-speaking, use and identify their models in their speech, a dash of academic prose, direct eye contact, infallible confidence.

Oh man I hate this type of speech pattern. Everyone speaking a million miles per hour to try to show how quickly they think, but takes the same amount of total time to convey the same amount of information if they slowed down and used better constructed sentences.

She has another, rather dark, post where she concludes that she wouldn't have succeeded without being harassed by someone at university, and that she's on her own: https://www.celinehh.com/gifts-of-my-harasser

It's 100x worse if you are over the age of 45 regardless of gender. You can be profitable and growing and your grey hairs will turn off the majority of VC's. Agism is so accepted there's not even lip service paid to combatting it as there often is with founders of color or female founders.

If you're over 45 and really smart, you should already have great connections and/or capital built up using your personal investments. Actually what I realized when I was 30, is that at that point the only way I was able to get an interview was through my connections...through my ex collegaues I could get an interview with any company I wanted to in 1 day though (I just didn't try that first).

You’re confusing getting a job at a company with starting a company w vc funding.

Girl why waste your time on what other think while you could have told me how your would prolong a dogs life and when you think to migrate to the human market.

Well, presumably because the latter gets the author an upvote from you on HN and the former gets her funding in SV. That upvote is worth nothing and that funding is worth a lot.

In fact, considering that Loyal was posted on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26546291 and received no upvotes it looks like the choice is between 3 upvotes, 0 funding and 0 upvotes, >$0 funding and so she's made the right choice.

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