Betting My Life On Transgender Hackers | Hacker News Reader

Betting My Life On Transgender Hackers

tcombinator.blogspot.com

15 pointsalliem15 comments

Where's the substance? "I'm gonna do something" with little explanation of "something" or the motivation behind doing it. I can support living your passion, but I'm not motivated to provide much of any other kind of support without more background information.

I am moving to Mountain View to run TCombinator out if the HackerDojo.com. My apologies for not being clear.

This is great! I read some of your blog, and your story sounds like a tough one... I can only assume that it s like that for a lot of other transgender folks.

What is your general plan?

I'll be in MV at the hackerdojo in 1-2 weeks. Once I am there, the first thing I will be building will be a front end to crowdfunding platforms like kickstarter featuring free/libre projects as the alpha for the Copyleft Media Foundation, with Richard Stallman and the FSF interested in my idea. Since my first incubee is an artist, a startup to sell her paintings is next. CubicleCurator is me asking offices to hang up her art, and hoping they buy some when I threaten to take it back and put it back in rotation. Third will be the TCombinator web site. I can't say for sure what will be next after that. At some point I will walk into YC and lay out my hand. For food, I'll try to always have a date lined up for lunch/dinner. For places to stay, I'm just winging it hoping somebody comes through for me. That's the part I am trusting my charm, enthusiasm, and unbelievable luck.

Do you believe transgender hackers are specifically discriminated against or disadvantaged in the startup community? Do you think that a startup incubator built around the all the participants being transgendered and drawing attention to their gender identity will help address this?

Or is the idea just to give something back, in general? It's not clear what your purpose is, or why you decided to go about it without any resources.

I'm looking at the data. 1 in 500 people are trans. 0 in 10000 venture funded startup founders are trans. Why is there such a disparity between their proportion of the population, and their representation in the startup world? I am not going to speculate as to why that is, I am just going to hack it. I don't intend for all incubated startup to have all transgender founders. My only condition is that they have at least one. It might seem like I am doing this with no resources, but my gut tells me that I am building wealth by doing it this way, that the story it creates will catalyze events that make those resources available. All I need to do is get picked up by YC.

While I admire your intentions, I think you should first look at the actual number of transgender people starting companies before drawing a conclusion that they "don't get funded". For all I know (and I don't know the numbers, I'm speculating here) we could use the same argument about Latinos and African Americans (jeez, do I hate those stupid terms).

It'd be interesting if you could backup your intentions with some numbers. I think you'll find the startup community, specially in San Francisco and the Bay Area, is specially open to all cultures and sexual orientations.

In any case, the best of lucks! :)

Just because you could make the same argument for any group, does not invalidate the argument. It speaks to it's universality. If getting them funding were the problem, it would call for a different fix. The problem is getting them to apply, to make them aware the option even exists, and to get them to think like entrepreneurs to prepare them for the rest of a YC like process. We just come in earlier in the life cycle and are using a succesful business practice as a tool for social good. We got 5 new incubees over night, so they do exist, and we are rolling.

Lots of things in the tech field are very straight male centric. From brogrammers to the lack of women.

After all, if we have problems getting cis women to stay in technology, how do you think trans women will feel?

It looks like an interesting concept, but I feel like you're jumping the gun a little. I would expect, though I don't pretend to know, that starting an incubator would require a lot of contacts/money/etc.

Moving to where the contacts are, so I can make them, and leading a life such that my story gathers attention, in hopes of attracting funding; seems like the way to go. I want to inspire future transpeople with my story. If I can make this work, starting from nothing, then there is no excuse for a transperson that has nothing not to apply to TC

The name is a little derivative...

I thought I'd make the idea easy to convey. My first name for it was TIntegrator but the word tint throws one off.

TIncubator? I can't tell if that's better or worse.

So we either apply tint to windows or keep tin warm? Thanks for the thought though!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com