Exec Crunchie Nomination Rap and PG Making it Rain
blog.iamexec.com
blog.iamexec.com
Nah, kidding. Best part was PG, though, clearly unaware of the appropriate way to make it rain. In fact, I suggest someone make a gif of just that part and it be made the background of HN every time a YC company is acquired.
I know several gay men (and a few lesbian women or transgendered people) who work in the startup world, but even then they tend to be non-engineering positions. A former co-worker of mine and I started an NYC meetup for this exact purpose - we're actually having a game night tonight if any engineers are interested: http://www.meetup.com/Identity-Hackers/ [0]
Speaking only for myself, I've never felt any kind of discrimination, though I imagine if I were female or transgender, that experience may be different. I was also pretty lucky, though - my first experience working as a startup was at an incredibly gay-friendly dating website, so when your job is to work on posts like these[1], it's pretty easy to feel comfortable.
That doesn't really solve the problem of getting people in the door, though, and I've often wondered why more LGBT people go into engineering in the first place. I went to a very gay-friendly school, and even there the LGBT crowd seemed underrepresented in the engineering classes. I imagine this is related to the question of why we don't have more female engineers (whether straight/cis or not), but that's a much larger discussion.
[0] I hope the timeliness and relevance is enough to forgive this shameless plug! [1] http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/gay-sex-vs-straight-sex/
In my experience, that's certainly not been the case, at least in NYC (though it seems to be true about SF as well). It's even more bizarre because Silicon Alley overlaps with most of the gayborhoods in NYC. At a startup I used to work at, our local dive bar happened to be a gay bar, even though only one member of the team was openly gay[0]!
[0] Backstory: the old dive bar got bought and turned into a gay bar, so people just kept going to the same place anyway.
A surprisingly large number of transgendered people. My first contact with a transgendered person was finding out the ~40 year old female IRCop on EFnet who was married to a woman was originally a man. Really confusing for a 13yo, but it was great to first encounter someone that different from me in a safe setting where I already respected that person's technical competence and general reasonableness.
It's kind of funny that in the military, where the whole LGBT rights thing was a big issue, one of the biggest predictors of "would you be ok with LGBT openly serving" was "did you know someone who was LGBT and a good soldier otherwise" -- if the first gay person you met was some horrible example of humanity independent of being gay, it was pretty easy to assume all gay people would be like that. If the first one was a great soldier (like 1LT Dan Choi), you'd be more likely to support gay soldiers as a class.
I think part of the problem with it is that most LGBT people are basically invisible about sexuality in their work settings -- which is awesome. I don't want to know about coworkers who have weird fetishes for objects, or blondes, or whatever. If it comes up in the context of "oh, I can work late, my husband will take the kids..", that's a great way to learn a coworker is gay. It isn't something you need to hide, but in a work setting, there's no reason to flaunt any traits unrelated to work.
Awesome video overall, though!
I hate people with flags/ribbons/etc. on their cars, generally.
Having said that, congrats to exec. Definitely not our intention to take away any spotlight from them by posting that here. We just found it fitting. We'll gladly take down this link if the OP asks.
The downvotes are probably because you aren't adding anything to the discussion, just blindly pimping your site. If it comes up in a discussion, or it's relevant to the topic at hand, throw in a plug. But making an account expressly for spamming is a poor choice.
In any case, I didn't want to get into the details before but we were actually unable to post the link to HN using this account as a "new" submission so we had given up on posting to HN. Trust me, I, like you hate when people plug their service on someone else's post. Having said that, when we were reading HN today and saw this headline, we couldn't resist.
So, I guess, good luck. It seems really weird and unlikely.
Thanks for the "luck".
We have been active HN readers/contributors for over 3 years. The "richkidsoftwtr" HN handle is one we created simply for this service and not for our personal use.
Having said that, one thing this community appreciates is a good story about a hard working group of guys using innovative ways to solve not only the problems that their customers face but also their internal problems (i.e. how are we going to survive until the next payment is received, etc...).
If you were to honestly take time to read the "about" link (https://www.richkidsoftwtr.com/about) you would see that we're an honest group of guys trying to do something unique to solve our own cash shortage. We're not just being opportunistic douches but rather capitalizing on this opportunity given the Exec team referred to "Making It Rain" in their post.
After all, having been in this rat-race for a few years, we appreciate just as much as the next person the amount of daily grunt work required to make it. This is just part of our effort. Kudos to all the other rats who appreciate our effort.
Other than that I have no idea