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Comment by wvenable | Hacker News Reader

I think it's silly that you think pg is claiming there is absolutely nothing he can do.

The problem is now that many many people are now reading as much as possible into everything that he saying. If he has an opinion, you don't know exactly what it is. But you'll analyze every word, every phrasing, and make up your own assumptions. That is all that is happening here.

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The full transcript is at the bottom of the submitted article's page, and from the conversation, it's pretty clear that pg thinks there isn't anything he can do. When asked what YC could do to bring more women founders in, he says they don't exist and then says we need to start looking at middle school computer science curriculums. Those are two things he flat-out said; I'm not reading anything into it.

I would say it's pretty clear that PG thinks there isn't any more he can do. Lets not assume that he's doing absolutely nothing now.

I'll ask again: isn't it possible that he's right? There seems to be general consensus that girls do not get into computing science at a young age. So it makes sense there would be shortage of women with right ability at the right time for YC. There's nothing controversial about that. And short of inventing a time machine there isn't anything PG can do about that.

I know a lot of women in computing and almost none of them started as young as my male peers. These women code and some started their own companies. But they didn't do it in their late teens or early 20's because they hadn't even discovered it then.

It's possible he's right that there's absolutely nothing more he could do. I think it's extremely unlikely, though. If women feel uncomfortable in YC-funded companies, I think that's a problem he could address. If women feel uncomfortable in the culture surrounding YC, I think that's another problem he could address. It's very un-hacker-like to, when confronted with a problem, throw your arms up in the air and proclaim there is nothing more you can do.

You're still not addressing the point. If there is a shortage of women in computing then nothing you just mentioned will fix that. Sure those might be problems that could be fixed but that's not even what we're talking about. Those things aren't going to solve the underlying shortage.

That is what we're talking about... They're problems that need to be addressed that pg has decided aren't his responsibility. That's the whole point of what we're talking about.

You don't need to mold someone from adolescence in order for them to be a founder or a hacker. It's not something you have to grow up with.

You do need to mold someone from adolescence in order for them to be a founder or a hacker in their late teens and early 20's.

PG is in the business of spending very small amounts of money on in the slim hope that a few of them will be wildly successful and return hundreds of times on that original investment in a relatively short time frame. He invests in people who move to the valley and live huddled together on peanuts and ramen. Those young people are a very small and specific subset of all people who can be founders or hackers.

But Otherwise I agree with you entirely.

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