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Comment by Consultant32452 | Hacker News Reader

Did I miss something? The only thing he states he's actually learned from female founders so far is that women and men express confidence differently. I was hoping for more substance.

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I learned several interesting things from Sam's post actually (I'm Jessica, one of the founders of Y Combinator). I hadn't known that women really want more YC women in the interviews. That would have been hard at first, when I was the only female, but now we have enough female partners to do this. I was also surprised to hear that women actually believed that we try to fund people who look like Zuckerberg. I thought that was just something that trolls liked to claim was our strategy.

Once could be ignored as sloppiness. But he wrote: "One advantage startups have over established companies is that there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. For example, I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon. But you're not allowed to ask prospective employees if they plan to have kids soon. [...] Whereas when you're starting a company, you can discriminate on any basis you want about who you start it with." (http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html)

Or he says: "I see a couple of guys walking down the street and I think, oh, they look like they'd make good founders or bad founders, right, as the case may be. [...] The right kind of nerdy. Like, these guys in this room are not suits, but they're not schlubs either. These are fierce nerds. You have to be somewhat intimidating looking, and that's what these guys are. [...] Yeah, yeah. They're like the kind of people Julius Caesar was afraid of." (http://www.wbur.org/npr/155005546/failure-the-f-word-silicon...)

Or that hilarious cherry-picked stat YC came up with: "at least one female founder." (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/03/04...)

If YC people can't see this, that doesn't bode well for their self-critical thinking skills. (But at least Paul Graham's fairly open about what he thinks, and looks good compared to HN posters.)

Exactly. Why I never bothered applying. I have been reading HN for a long long time. I have a memory.

He literately can't say anything of substance on a topic like this or else his words will show up all over the news as an attack by YC on some party or other.

He didn't even talk about how men and women express confidence differently. IMO the article was a waste.

Men tend to exaggerate their skills. Women understate theirs.

See: http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2014/03/19/women-hiring-ma...

my observation is that we also apologize more, speak up less, and negotiate less effectively (if at all).

i teach 8 year-old girls how to code in my free time and one of the biggest challenges to their success is re-wiring them to believe in themselves, in their critical-thinking skills, in their ability to solve problems. it seems they don't need a few mentor-role models: they need a chorus of people encouraging them and reminding them of their innate abilities. which leads me to believe—i can only extrapolate—that this must be what many boys (and men) experience on a quotidien basis.

i will never know, but i can help create that for myself and other women, particularly the wee ones. :>

Your comment implies this is a PR piece?

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