I have my doubts about how much sexism was in play, but I also accept that the writer of the article necessarily has more first hand experience of the situation than can be adequately laid out in a short column (which may in turn have been edited for length by a copy editor). Note as well that she is going out of her way to be circumspect about the identity of the person in question; I am perfectly willing to believe that there's more to the story but that she is choosing to exercise some discretion to avoid impinging on the person as an individual and also to avoid the possibility of a libel accusation. I don't think ageism is a big issue here since the star hire was apparently happy to end up reporting to the author's (then) 32 year old cofounder, and the author appears to be of a similar age.

The point I'm making above is that the grandparent poster seems to have some need to make up facts that are not present in the original story in order to justify his angry tone. In short, I think he has a giant chip on his shoulder.

What I think you and a lot of other posters are missing is the import of her paragraph about how diversity costs; when they were a freewheeling write-the-r-own-rules startup they could afford to blow off or ignore anyone who tried to leverage personal biases such as sexism, ageism, or anything really. Once they were funded and had investors whose expectations they had to satisfy, they were also obliged to deal with suppliers (of skills in this case) whose economic apparent economic benefit outweighed the ancillary costs in terms of team cohesion and founder status. She's pointing this out as an example of systematic discrimination - not in the casual but incorrect sense that most people use the term, involving some villainous type whose primary goal is to disenfranchise others, but as an unfortunate consequence of the laws of supply and demand.

If you need to hire a hotshot in some specialized field and the expected value of that person's economic contribution is greater than the cost of buying out a cofounder, then said cofounder is at the mercy of any personal biases that the hotshot might have. And being a hotshot is absolutely not correlated with any kind of superior moral development. I have met plenty of highly skilled people who were leaders in their field but who were markedly undeveloped in other respects, and indeed I could say the same of myself in some respects.