Interview: Y Combinator Founder Jessica Livingston | Hacker News Reader

Interview: Y Combinator Founder Jessica Livingston

thenextwomen.com

78 pointsdrm23721 comments

Being a hacker and dad of girls, I have to admit I am always very excited and proud of women achievement in the tech world.

I still think there are not enough ladies hackers out there. I thank you Jessica for your work, this should inspire more girls to become hackers.

Wouldn't have pegged Jessica as a typical hacker or really an inspiration to get girls coding in that sense of the term, but any woman working in tech happy to share her story gets an automatic thumbs up regardless of terminology.

Finally the mainstream looks up to a woman in tech that actually seems to deserve it. I.e. not Carly Fiorina.

(Downvoted for the personal attack, not disagreement with the first bit)

Upvoted for the personal attack, since Fiorina deserves it

Flagged for celebrating a 'personal attack'.

JL was PG's girlfriend, which is how she got involved in this stuff. So she interviewed some founders.

Then she did organizing for start-up school and administrative duties for YC.

Not sure what you mean about "deserving". Sure, having organizational skills is useful, but not exceptional.

Not a knock at all on JL, but becoming CEO of HP was certainly a lot harder and more exceptional, even if Fiorina was exceptionally bad at actually being CEO.

Still waiting for a tech equivalent of the Go-Go's.

Have you read Founders at Work? The interviewing is exceptionally good. It feels like the founders are just telling their stories. JL's questions almost disappear, even though they're right there in the text. You don't achieve that level of invisibility as an interviewer without a deep understanding of what your interviewees are talking about.

There are probably other ways you're undercrediting her. I only mention this one because it's the one I have personal experience with.

Actually Jessica does a lot more than "administrative duties" for YC. Of the four YC partners, she is the best judge of people, and that's the main thing we're judging at this early stage. It would not be too far from the truth to say that interviews consist of me and Rtm and Trevor asking founders a lot of questions, and then as soon as they walk out, turning to Jessica and asking "ok, should we fund them?"

> Of the four YC partners, she is the best judge of people, and that's the main thing we're judging at this early stage.

"Best judge of people" is sufficiently nonspecific to not be a testable claim.

If you mean she is best at judging who would be the most successful if you fund them, you lack the evidence to make that claim, as you don't know what would have happened with all the people you didn't fund, which is almost all of them.

If you mean that the ones that she picked -- but you didn't -- performed better than the ones you picked -- but she didn't -- it's possible that she is valuable not because she is so accurate, but that you are so inaccurate.

The notion that YC is especially good at choosing successes is not borne out by your results, or you'd all be a lot richer. And as mentioned, you don't know which were the ones that "got away" -- founders that went back to school because they didn't get in, but would have been even larger successes. Reddit would have been in that group if you hadn't had a last-minute change of heart.

As for the relentless founders, was it really that difficult to recognize that Sam Altman was one of those people? For the obvious cases, it's apparent to all four of you; and for the less-obvious cases, you lack the data to know how many were false negatives. All you know is the false positives; but that's going to be the most common outcome anyway.

Being ramen profitable working on something you don't especially like is silly compared to what you COULD be making at jobs in the Bay Area. A website is not a startup, and most of them lack any major potential, barring irrational market exuberance.

Considering Yahoo! Paid 6 billion for Broadcast.com and 4 billion for Geocities shortly after paying 95 million for ViaWeb just shows the most important skill is finding someone with billions of dollars and talking them into throwing it away on your unprofitable business.

In fact, when we started YC Jessica was the only one of us with venture capital experience (having worked at a major investment bank in Boston since before she met PG.) She had a lot to do with us getting into the business, and her judgments about whom to fund have proven to be accurate.

Sorry to disappoint you by not being an all-girl seed funding firm with thigh-high pink boots.

> and her judgments about whom to fund have proven to be accurate.

As mentioned to Paul, you lack the data to establish what would have happened if you had funded other people instead.

> Sorry to disappoint you by not being an all-girl seed funding firm with thigh-high pink boots.

Start-up, not investment group. Referencing the lack of technical female founders, as mentioned in the article.

What you guys do is obviously not technical in the sense we were talking about if JL is better than the other three of you.

You have no idea what you are talking about. For one thing, from what I understand Jessica was the main force in starting up YC. No Jessica Livingston, no Y Combinator.

Tell Henry Ford and Ray Kroc that there's nothing exceptional about being the first to figure out how to organize something. And YC's impact might just end up being more than either of those.

Why is it that any article about any female in computing, regardless of who they're working for or what they're working on, will always mention at some point the high male:female ratio in most technical fields? What is it about this topic that makes people want to come back to it over and over and over, no matter how many discussions they've had on it previously? Eg., even though this article's title is completely generic, the very first thought I had upon looking at it was "this will talk at some point about the dearth of women in programming or startups or something-or-other", and lo, my prophecy was fulfilled.

The interview was conducted by The Next Women, which has a "focus on startups and growing businesses, led, founded or invested in by women."

http://thenextwomen.com/about/

I don't understand why an article wouldn't mention it. A lot of articles are written because the subject stands out in some way, and to not address that seems remiss to me.

"Comically unbusinesslike behavior struck me as actually critical to the success of a startup."

What an interesting quote. I think I know what she's talking about, but I'm not sure.

If there's a difference between commonly accepted behavior and the behavior of successful startup founders, then which is really more "businesslike"?

And which is more comical?

There's no question that plenty of very successful people have not behaved in the way that most people consider to be "professional". The problem is that people either don't realize that or have a vested interest in ignoring that fact.

I think it all comes down to people wanting to be like the "business" people they see on TV. The persona of the rigid professional suit-wearing business person is attractive to a lot of people.

Edit: The insidious part is that they scorn you if you don't play along!

"I think it all comes down to people wanting to be like the "business" people they see on TV. The persona of the rigid professional suit-wearing business person is attractive to a lot of people."

No, it comes down to protecting a brand. If you're doing a startup then it's ok to show up to meetings blazed, because your job is just to get work done and if you can still get work done while high then that's fine. But at big companies your job isn't to get work done, because the most valuable asset of a big company isn't the work that gets done but rather the brand. How does this tie into suits? Well, suits are sort of the crescent wrench of attire. If you are a startup then you only have to dress in a way that pleases the niche you're serving. But if you are a big business then by definition you are interacting with people from multiple niches all day long. Everyone is comfortable dealing with someone wearing a suit, whereas if you wear surfing clothes to work then that only works if you trying to send a message to a small niche of surfers.

The vast majority of the YC kids aren't starting out with a personal brand, so it doesn't matter what they do as long as they get work done. In fact, screwing around will help them build a brand as long as they are only dealing with people within their community, because unique culture is a purple cow that helps you stand out. Luckily most of the YC companies make products where even when they get more marketshare they won't have to act much differently because of quirks related to the high-leverage of software, but most big companies eventually do adopt a different culture as the ways they create value as businesses becomes more nuanced.

And following the link trails we find:

Paul Graham (Viaweb) On raising money: “The advice I would give is to avoid it. I would say spend as little as you can because every dollar of the investors’ money you get will be taken out of your ass…”

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/03/founders_at_wor.html#ixz...

Is that "Y"?

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