A Reminder To Investors
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/08/07/what-it...
No, saying that you want to make the world a better place, and saying that whatever you are working on makes the world a better place, is entirely (100%) different from actually taking the necessary actions to solving known and common world problems and actually making the world a better place. The level of hypocrisy in tech is beyond ridiculous.
I'd also like to think that if the article wasn't anonymous there would be action. I've personally seen enough instances where nothing is done and in fact the abusers are covered for to think that expecting action is borderline naive.
The investor acted misogynistic on the face of it. I don't know how playing thought police adds to this.
The battle to get scummy dudes to behave appropriately feels in some ways like the battle to get thieves not to steal. You can tell a thief not to steal, you can describe to them how a victim feels when their house is broken into, but it just doesn't register. A certain subset of the population lacks the empathy to respond to such appeals.
If the thieving analogy holds, the only way to fix someone like the masseuse would be to threaten punishment, but good luck creating/enforcing that.
What can we do? We'll have to raise our children to be respectful of everyone, so hopefully, they become successful and they won't stand for this type of injustice.
I don't think there's a silver bullet. It's going to take time and work.
You resign from your role as a VC/investor. That's what it's going to cost. Then you can ask her out if you want (still respectfully, and giving her the complete freedom to say no if she wants).
But if asking her out isn't worth more to you than your job is, then leave things professional.
Quit your job just to ask a woman out?
Asking a woman out you recently met isn't sexual harassment.
Some advice to your specific example:
1. Don't do it during demo day. She's a founder, and that's her time to meet with investors.
2. If you are planning on investing in her company- potential conflict of interest. Don't get involved personally.
3. If you don't have any desire to invest in her company-don't mislead your intentions. If you follow up and ask her out, don't be ambiguous with a coffee/lunch meeting that could be construed as business related. Do something that is clearly a date-like activity.
4. Don't use your influence/position for personal advantage.
Yes I'm going to generalize here, but no woman, even if she isn't interested, is going to be upset if you asked her out, if you do so at the appropriate time, appropriate place, and in a respectful way.
No, but you can recuse yourself from that particular deal.
Which is very much cutting off your nose to spite your face.
There are lots of logical reasons for this reaction, and I will list some of them briefly. 1) Power of VC network is implicit threat to 'play nice' and go along with it, even if VC in question has no intention of being nasty in any way. 2) The power imbalance already implicit in VC/founder relations makes 'asking me out' incredibly tense. 3) It would make me doubt myself- "Is every other VC I am talking to (since they are 90% men) just interested in me for that reason?".
So follow the OP's advice. And just don't do it.
I understand that founders want to be taken seriously, and and investor blurring the lines between professional and personal relationships can jeopardize that, but not all relationships with investors are like that, and I'd imagine not all founders would doubt themselves if approached after the fact.
I am biased, because in Seattle, the VC community isn't as threatening from a "play nice or else" perspective.
Also, I'm a sucker for romance and the boy meets girl, and live happily ever after story.
As a founder, the discomfort comes from not knowing the VC's intentions and how you are supposed to act with regards to your company. The VC needs to draw a clear line (ruling out investment and all other professional involvement) that takes a lot of that discomfort out of the situation, and removes the mixing of business and pleasure.
You're 100% right (which is why I said don't mislead).
However, this is far more nuanced, than I first imagined. From purely a dating perspective, I'm not sure how a guy could recover from rejecting a women professionally, to getting her to accepting a date.
I guess the circumstances would have to be something like investment thesis don't align "we do biotech, your company is education."
In startups, I'd argue that founders personal lives and their businesses are inextricably linked, and rejecting one, is tantamount to rejecting the other.
Which makes for an inbalanced dynamic as acabrahams mentioned, which could be troublesome.
It seems no matter how loud the chorus of women who complain about this behavior is, some men still feel like they are the ones who get to define what sexual harassment is.
> It seems no matter how loud the chorus of women who complain about this behavior is, some men still feel like they are the ones who get to define what sexual harassment is.
Women don't get to define what sexual harassment is either.
You see, sexual harassment (in the US) is a LEGAL issue with LEGAL consequences. It's defined as "...unlawful to harass a person (an applicant or employee) because of that person’s sex. Harassment can include “sexual harassment” or unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature.
Harassment does not have to be of a sexual nature, however, and can include offensive remarks about a person’s sex. For example, it is illegal to harass a woman by making offensive comments about women in general." [1]
Granted that while the EEOC definition really only pertains to the work, it's not hard to extend that definition to scenarios outside employment (such as any professional setting).
Any unwanted behavior is not okay. However, I believe that politely asking a woman for a date (given the right circumstances [see my list prior]), is not sexual harassment, even if a woman is not interested.
My response in my earlier comment was very specific to the OP's contrived scenario: an investor meets a female founder, he likes her, he feels that she likes him back (this was the key) so he should quit his job before making a move.
Quitting his job has no bearing on whether the women would find his "asking her out for a date" welcome or not, because there wouldn't be any way for her to know he quit, unless he told her, and in that case she'd probably think he's crazy (rightly so).
That of course presupposes the investor did not misread the situation, given he is a potential investor, and she is a female founder.
Good call.
And just as technically it has been unacceptable in practice that won't change anything.
In the fashion world there are a few photographers which almost openly do this, known to us mostly because they got so used to it they put their dick in a girls mouth unannounced and rather than suck it she talked to the press about it. [1]
An old colleague worked at an IT company thirty years or so ago and on the upper management floor, as he described it, the secretaries were all paid $200k/yr and up to be, essentially, professional hookers.
It is almost certainly a problem in some circles in the tech investors industry as well.
This is just a, very welcome, statement to tell investors that if they want to be such an investor they'll be locked out of YC forever and to tell founders that they can expect to be backed up when they report this.
[1] http://jezebel.com/i-felt-a-dick-pressing-into-my-face-terry...
I wrote it to stress that it's often group behavior, with the enablers and supporters that go along with it, and that you shouldn't think about it in terms of the 'lone distraught person.'
Just to be clear: I would never, ever, wish to be associated in any manner with a person or organization that operates on such a moral framework.
Sam Altman recently wrote[1], "Yes, it’s awful to hear the horror stories of wildly inappropriate behavior from investors to the entrepreneurs pitching them. (Unfortunately, stories like these are not super rare, but because there’s a big cost to going public with them, most never get told. My hope is that YC has enough leverage at this point to make it clear that this is unacceptable and we will not continue to work with investors who do it.)"
Today, Jessica Livingston writes, "Nearly all the investors we know are completely upstanding and professional, but even one inappropriate incident is too many."
Sam's statement implies that this behavior is more common than most folks would like to believe, and that Y Combinator is prepared to punish investors who engage in it. Jessica's statement subtly suggests that this behavior is less common, and that the vast majority of the investors Y Combinator works with are above engaging in it.
Which one is it?
The truth is probably somewhere in between, and it doesn't really matter. Both are explicitly stating that this behaviour is not tolerated and bears consequences.
Given the size of the investor pool and apparent prevalence of this behavior, the "nearly all the investors we know are completely upstanding and professional" statement is preposterous. There is simply no way for anybody to know all of the investors who are behaving badly, and the "even one inappropriate incident is too many" statement minimizes the regularity with which it is clear this behavior is occurring by subtly suggesting that these are isolated incidents.
Your suggestion that I somehow claimed most investors working with YC are harassing women is so absurd as to be comical. I don't know what your agenda is, and frankly don't care, but if you're going to try to distort what I wrote, I'm confident you can do a better job.
Is it possible that YC affiliates with higher-caliber VCs that are less prone to this behaviour?
Is it possible that "super rare" occurrences and "mostly unreported" occurrences are both very low numbers, to the point that YC can expect not to have any incidents?
I think the answers to both could be yes, but I don't know if anyone has numbers to support anything. Anecdotal evidence from often anonymous founders indicates that there is a problem, but I honestly don't know how out-of-control it is.
Either way, good on Sam and Jessica for addressing the issue.
"Dear feminists and rabble rousers, we recognize your power. We are on your team. We will genuflect in the direction of those things you consider holy. Please don't target us."
(For those unfamiliar with the term, "powertalk" is the in-group language of powerful people.)
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/11/the-gervais-principle-i...
YC is attempting to appease the internet bullies and avoid unwanted media attention (witness the Paul Graham sexism non-incident), not convey facts.
Similarly feminist ideology has made itself into the american public's view of the 'ideal', and anything that opposes it as unquestionably 'bad' -- to say there's no power in that sort of collective consciousness about any issue is ignorant. Just because it's not ideal yet absolutely does not mean it's not in power -- even powerful things take time to reach their full potential. When behaviors like this YC post talks about hadn't had any negative ramifications before, but now do, that's power.
Only to the extent that it doesn't get in the way of the hundred priorities ahead of global warming on the list. And all the pollution that isn't associated with a hot-button issue like global warming isn't even on the radar. Coal, for example, is something that's so damaging that there aren't even nut-job deniers arguing otherwise. Yet, during one of the debates of the 2012 election, Obama was arguing with Romney about which of them was more pro-coal.
> Similarly feminist ideology has made itself into the american public's view of the 'ideal', and anything that opposes it as unquestionably 'bad'
People are quite willing to embrace ideals but take little to no inconvenient action to work towards those ideals. Feminists have "power" in the same way environmentalists do. They can win a tiny victory here and there by making particularly egregious acts public,[1] but that's the extent of it.
[1] In 2012, environmentalists in Chicago were successful in shutting down Fisk and Crawford, two coal plants in Chicago that a study showed were costing the public $127 million per year in health costs: http://elpc.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/MidwestGeneration.... Only 598 more to go!
In any case, it is still an idealistic ideology, because then at what point does it declare/define 'victory'? That's never been made very clear, and despite the massive strides it has made in the past several decades, we're still talking about it like it's some totally unknown, underdog minority issue -- where are the goal posts? That's a rhetorical question because it's not supposed to have goal posts, just like how environmentalism doesn't -- it's an ideal, one of female rights that people should definitely strive for, but let's not make it out to be some sort of clear-cut political policy that has failed to be implemented, that just does the whole movement a disservice.
Not really. The federal executive branch is sort of unilaterally trying to do a bit using a legal framework not specifically designed for it, Congress has no clear commitment either way (the Republican Party holding a majority in the House and mostly opposing concrete action -- some members denying GW is real, some members opposing federal government action on environmental issues that might limit immediate business opportunity generally, and others just opposing any specific proposal related to global warming without necessarily having a clear ideological framework for general opposition), and some states are trying to do some things (and some states are trying to promote things directly opposed).
As a country, there's really nothing coherent going on.
The EPA does not exist to address global warming specifically. The claim I addressed was that "we as a country are trying to do something about global warming", not "we as a country are trying to do something about environmental issues more generally". Those are very different claims.
But in any case, global warming is an environmentalist issue, and the environmentalist ideology does have power -- whether or not the government has managed to take coherent action about it yet is not indicative of the significance of the issue within the nation, because like I said, it is not a simple issue to solve, and we are still doing more[0] than India and China to help it anyway. And like I said in my original comment, while there is obviously still much room for improvement, there's no need to undermine what we have done to fight it... we'd all be worse of if environmental progress completely stopped in the 60's. Still a shame that we haven't done more of course.
[0] actively regulating pollution is a form of action...
Leaving that aside, I think you'll find that a more careful look at the Pax Dickinson drama will reveal that it's not a particularly helpful example for this thread. There was a lot of stuff happening there.
The fact is that feminists have power in our society and the tech industry is relatively weak. We provide a great source of symbolic victories for them.
This is self-evidently false, so much so that I'm confused as to how you could have written this comment.
http://valleywag.gawker.com/business-insider-ctos-is-your-ne...
http://www.businessinsider.com/statement-2013-9
Just a bunch of tweets mocking feminists, liberals and Mel Gibson.
[edit: Tom I really don't understand how you think this disagrees with what I said above. How do these links imply any misconduct, or anything other than disagreeing with feminists? Are you asserting that opposing the welfare state or mocking Mel Gibson is what got him fired?]
You're talking about these tweets with rape jokes, tweets where he's an asshole toward poors, and "ironic" use of the N-word?
...
Are you high?
http://www.ranker.com/list/top-10-most-offensive-mel-gibson-...
As for the rest of it, if you want to argue that libertarianism rather than anti-feminism got him fired, square that viewpoint with Business Insider's statement about firing him. They didn't say he was too conservative, they said he disagreed with them on diversity.
Disagreeing with feminists and liberals is not misconduct. Neither is making fun of drunk celebrities.
It just makes (selfish) sense for Altman to try to appease them. It's bad for the industry - showing weakness will encourage more behavior of this type. (Think about why they are targeting a bunch of unlikeable low status geeks.) But it's good for YC to encourage them to target others
Some here have argued that it is useful because it makes things unambiguous and simple. I think the people who condone and/or engage this behavior (e.g. the kinds that are exemplified in the Forbes article) don't do so because they don't know any better or because "the rules of engagement" were not clearly stated in this regard.
So I think at least part of the motivation behind putting out a message like this explicitly, rather than including in, say, an investor legal agreement, has to be the desire to preempt allegations based on this point.
And it's exactly because the people engaging in this behavior know and disregard the "rules of engagement" that it's important to let them know that they will have more to lose.
And the way you do that is by stating it publicly, making YC itself accountable to the public and forcing them to actually act. That way, it's harder for such investors to convince themselves that when push comes to shove, YC wouldn't actually do anything.
I know this doesn't mean anything because I'm just some random Internet stranger you don't actually know, but as someone who has stuck up for your comments in the past, I've been made to feel embarrassed by this one.
I will, of course, get over both it and, later, myself.
You can criticize the format and language of the comment all you want but implying things like "I think you're too smart to believe in BS like this" is condescending.
I don't expect this comment to persuade most people. However, I do believe the argument I'm making here, and I believe it can persuade some people. HN is a pretty good crowd. For example, over a few years, I've observed the conversation about HFT on here has shifted wildly - people occasionally cite my articles, so I think I've contributed.
I've been convinced by Robin Hanson and others that many of the public arguments made (particularly by powerful figures) are signalling of the form I describe in this post. I believe it's a good explanation of why such things are posted.
The fact of the matter is that on merit, Sam Altman's post on this topic is nonsense. It attacks a straw man and draws inference by juxtuposition. See my post criticizing it (which mostly takes the perspective that it's an honest argument):
http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/sam_altmans_sexism_st...
Sam Altman is a smart guy. I seriously doubt that he wrote something so nonsensical as a real argument. The best explanation I can come up with for why so many smart people are posting silly things is like this is signalling.
I'm sorry you dislike my comment, but it is an attempt to explain my views rather than simply an attempt to "stick a fork in people's eyes".
My reading of Jessica's statement was that she was trying to make it clear that ycombinator wasn't accusing their customers without evidence.
Investors, in a real way, are Ycombinator's customers. Yes, sometimes your customers do bad things and you have to deal with it, sometimes dealing with it means making them no longer your customers. As much as possible, you want to set expectations about those sorts of situations ahead of time. But, you want to set those expectations in a way that don't make your innocent customers feel like they are being accused of anything.
When you are setting these sorts of expectations, it is easy to make it feel, to your customers, like you are assuming they are guilty without evidence, and that's not something you want your customers to feel. It is a mistake I've made myself. At one point, in response to one of my poorly-considered spammer-discouragement policies, a potential customer told me "we don't assume you are stupid; but we do assume you are a spammer." - you don't want to make your potential customers feel that way.
Second, Y Combinator could have prepared a code of conduct and sent it directly to the investors invited to participate in Demo Day. Demo Day is an invitation-only event and sending a code of conduct to invitees via email would have been a more effective way to reach the target audience than publishing a "Reminder to Investors" blog post which was clearly intended to be read by a broader audience.
I don't doubt that Y Combinator sincerely wants to quell this behavior, which is a good thing. But maximizing the good you do isn't always aligned with maximizing the PR you do.
It's a dick move and it's shit like this why many women shy away from participating in technology.
This is very true.
If "shit like this" is present in every field, it's a poor explanation of why women avoid technology but no those other fields.
Now if you want to rescue this hypothesis, you could point out that doctors aren't a bunch of low status nerds. But that's a naughty hypothesis, so I'm sure you won't go there.
The irony is that even though you believed that you made a rational counter-argument what you really did is describing your very own feelings with a comment that is betraying your insecurities.
That's a hypothesis, a claim about how the world works. That's the point I'm questioning.
I don't much care about your feelings, nor was I commenting on them. You can feel whatever you like. If you want to make status lowering comments ("betraying your insecurities"), have at it. I'm well aware that personal attacks and the like are one of the results of questioning the orthodoxy.
But that's exactly the problem, bro! It's a good thing to care about other people's feelings.
A different field might be, for example, perhaps nursing--traditionally a very female-heavy field.
I'm not aware of any such dataset, unfortunately.
Considering only gender policy, what is the most significant difference between doctors and engineers? Obviously: distribution among genders in medicine is much more balanced than in technology.
Stipulate that romantic overtures are as common in medicine as in technology. What basis do you have for your implied claim that the impact of such an overture is the same in medicine as it is in technology? It seems straightforward and reasonable to presume that the impact of an unwanted overture is much more powerful for someone who is part of a small minority, for whom the overture comes from a member of the overwhelming majority.
Michael O. Church has conjured an entire ethos in which he's been oppressed not just by venture capitalists but the entire industry they fund. He believes it so strongly that he has advocated violence to address the problem. And he's a guy, who feels locked out of the industry not because of a gender bias that has persisted overtly through pretty much all of human history, but instead due to unfair performance reviews.
From your comment history, you strike me as someone who has in his life actually talked to a woman. But comments like this force me to remind myself of that. Have you not talked to one who was shaken by being hit on by a guy in a work setting? I am not the suave, athletic bachelor you obviously are, and I've managed to hear this story from actual women repeatedly. If you have heard this story before, how are you managing to handwave it away so easily?
what is the most significant difference between doctors and engineers? Obviously: distribution among genders in medicine is much more balanced than in technology.
The key word here is "is". This was not true in the past. Yet somehow, medicine attracted women but tech didn't. At this historical point, did boy doctors not ask out girl doctors, but boy programmers did ask out girl programmers? Same for law, etc? Your "minority + asked out" theory predicts women can never escape minority status, which is evidently false.
If you want an explanation it needs to be specific to computing.
Have you not talked to one who was shaken by being hit on by a guy in a work setting? I am not the suave, athletic bachelor you obviously are...
I've heard this story before. I've heard of women being hit on in church gatherings also, yet church is full of women. Thus it fails as an explanation of why women are underrepresented in technology but not other fields.
Also, can I suggest leaving Michael O. Church alone? It's not necessary to drag him into a random conversation on topic completely unrelated to VC-istan.
You seem like the kind of person who would be irritated by the knowledge that he's missing something. You don't have a gnawing feeling that maybe you're missing something in this conversation?
My very specific claim: if you postulate a theory why tech lacks women, your theory must distinguish between technology and medicine/law/catholicism (catholicism has lots of gender bias and lots of women). "People ask other people out" does not make this distinction.
Incidentally, there is a third possibility which you seem to be glossing over. I believe gender bias exists but is not the cause of women being underrepresented in tech.
The medical professions evaluate gender trends by the number of women who go to medical school. Once you graduate medical school, you're on a track that leads straightforwardly to gainful employment. That allowed schools to be a focal point for policy changes to improve representation of women in the field. The same thing goes for law. My sister graduated UChicago law and got a lucrative, high-status biglaw job immediately based, as I understand it, pretty much on her track record in school.
No similar track exists for software, and, obviously, even less of a path exists in entrepreneurial technology, which is largely controlled by wealthy male gatekeepers.
Tangentially: a law or medical professor could be fired for aggressively propositioning a student. A successful investor can't be "fired".
But also: you dodged my question instead of addressing it. Do you actually believe that the experience of being targeted by sexual advances is the same if you're one women surrounded by men as it is if you're one of many women surrounded by an almost equal number of men?
I didn't dodge your question, I pointed out why the answer was irrelevant. There are two ways to debunk a theory: directly (by showing a premise is false) and by contradiction (showing it implies a false conclusion). I'm doing the latter.
As for how women feel about being asked out, in my experience the primary determinant is how attractive she finds the asker. To relate a real life experience, if a woman is surrounded by firefighters and one of them asks her out, she probably won't mind. Not that the anecdotes really matter (see the point above about argument by contradiction).
The difference between the high-status roles and the low-status ones isn't school, excepting possibly that an absurdly small subset of the industry (Stanford and MIT grads) have easier time avoiding helpdesk jobs.
The "rigid hierarchical track" you suggest exists for tech also doesn't exist. I have a single semester of university. If you want to make the pot rich enough, we can bet on whether I can get a full time job at Google or Apple. I'd warn you that I've got an information advantage on this bet.
Hiring in technology is warped and driven by bogus apocrypha. A tiny component of the overall demand is fed by truly credentialing universities. But the majority of the demand is fed by a pool of candidates not distinguished by the particulars of their degree. Instead, they're distinguished by ability to navigate hazing rituals.
Your last paragraph isn't an argument. It's what you'd like to believe is true. It doesn't even fit the anecdotal evidence we have here. Have you met a lot of VCs? I have. As a group, they tend to be attractive: fit, the product of school, career, and social tracks that build social (and athletic) skills. They're well dressed, which comes of having large amounts of disposable income. And yet, strangely: women founders appear not to be comfortable being propositioned by them. The only way your last graf works is if we assume that those women are simply lying.
The variance among law jobs in the first 5 years dwarfs those of a medical doctor. You cite your sister who got a biglaw job, which is more or less the legal equivalent of stanford -> google. Most lawyers don't get to biglaw just as most engineers don't work at google.
You've done a great job explaining why medicine has women, while law and computing don't.
But the majority of the demand is fed by a pool of candidates not distinguished by the particulars of their degree. Instead, they're distinguished by ability to navigate hazing rituals.
How does this differ from most other fields? Do you think HR, lawyers, accountants or management consultants don't have hazing rituals?
As for my last paragraph, it's simply an anecdotal observation. I'm not pushing it . I'm not accusing anyone of lying or disagreeing with their experience. I'm just pointing out that your theory predicts incorrect facts.
Law schools can exert pressure on law firms in ways that CS programs can't exert pressure on technology firms.
Do law firm hires endure hazing rituals like those in technology? I don't know. I doubt it. First-year associate hires aren't high-stakes the way tech hires are; the legal profession is structured around an "up or out" process that admits entrants to the profession mechanically. The technology profession as a rule does not, and relies intensely on status indicators.
You've agreed with me on that last point in the past, so I'd be surprised to hear you contest it now.
Here it's worth noting: the law profession does have gender equality issues; they just take place at a tier of the profession higher than where they happen in technology. But consider the implication of law forestalling the gender reckoning and tech front-loading it: entrants to the law field start amongst a relatively balanced cohort of coworkers. They get a foothold. They get experience working on real projects for partners. They get a track record. They have a different experience than minority entrants to technology.
Once again: the feeling of being singled out by your gender when you represent a tiny minority is different than being approached when you have a solid peer group of the same gender.
Hey: while I'm at it: I consult for F500 companies that build LOB apps. You can imagine that banks and hedge funds are more concerned about security than cat-sharing startups. Women are in my experience over the last ~9 years better represented in software jobs at non-software companies than they are in startups. Tech employees at banks and insurance companies are hired more mechanically and with less rubber-chicken voodoo than they are at startups. I don't think this is a coincidence.
I don't think I fully understand the preconditions for your theory, so let me try to carefully state it. Being asked out + diversity of work situations + mostly internal department rather than external firm + non-rigorous interview process => women won't go from 0 to 50%.
Did I miss any preconditions? If I did, could you carefully list them?
Fun fact: HR (lots of women) satisfies these properties, near as I can tell. HR drones certainly ask me stupid non-rigorous interview questions, I'm sure they ask the same of each other. So there should be a dearth of women in HR?
Incidentally, the process I'm doing here was described by Scott Alexander yesterday. Basically I'm "feynmaning" you - finding examples which satisfy your preconditions but not your conclusion. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/12/does-race-exist-does-cu...
You've agreed with me on that last point in the past, so I'd be surprised to hear you contest it now.
Let me repeat myself one more time. I don't disagree with you on this. I also don't disagree with your claims about people's subjective feelings. I don't think it's unique to tech, which makes it a poor explanation of a tech-specific phenomenon. Finance certainly uses similar interview techniques, and mid-office finance (besides IT) has no shortage of women.
Incidentally, if your observations about banks/f500 vs startups are correct and generalizeable, then your theory explains part of the discrepancy. Specifically, it explains the delta between startups and f500, but not the delta between f500 tech and f500 HR. It's not the only explanation that part of the discrepancy - risk aversion also works, and to me seems simpler. But I can't immediately reject your theory for that portion of the discrepancy.
EDIT: For those of you who think this is too harsh, you're proving my point. Sexism in tech will start to become less of a problem once people recognize that it's an issue. If you don't think it's an issue -- you're part of the problem.
I would revise to: If you don't understand why this needs to be done, you should read more and learn more until you do understand.
I completely, totally, 100% agree. And not only in tech, and the same with racism, homophobia, and other related issues.
But I don't agree that simple ignorance makes you part of the problem -- although I do agree that ignorance makes it more likely that you will perpetrate these kinds of problems accidentally.
As a white, heterosexual, privileged man I don't have a very good instinctive sense for the problems that those less privileged than me face. Gradually, but mostly four or so years ago, I decided I should learn some more, and started asking people and searching the net.
When I did this, I found learning about this to be a much more grueling process than it seems it should have been. In particular, I found some people (not all) who were more eager to belittle me for my ignorance than to simply to explain the problems that they have faced, or refer to me to some resource that would.
At the core I think that both of us agree: that it would be a very good thing if more people learned about racism, sexism, and related issues. I believe that your comment detracts from, rather than supports, this goal.
You don't change a culture of harassment by quietly warning people about who is a harasser. You change the culture by ostracizing people who behave that badly.
Look at what the founder has to lose in a false accusation: not only will their startup likely not be funded, they may have trouble getting work in any capacity. (Historically, women who have made sexual harassment charges have had trouble getting future jobs.)
She has more incentive to cover it up than to expose the harassment.
EDIT: of course this is coming from a nobody. I'm just curious.
It's maybe unfortunate it has to be this way, but investors should not hit on founders, full stop.
For those who didn't see this when it was making its way around, these are the two articles that have come up recently:
http://www.wired.com/2014/07/gender-gap/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/08/07/what-it...
This sounds like something a cartoon villain would say, but there's research that shows that the way men relate to their wives colors how they view women in their workplace. If you're a woman and your boss doesn't respect his wife's intellect, then it's going to be that much harder to make him respect your's.
This is a good plug for my general advice: make sure your employees have enough time to date outside of work.
[1] I never did this or was in a position to do this. And, speaking from general life experience, I would want someone to shake my shoulders vigorously and tell me "get over it, find someone else, there are plenty of fish in the sea," but people can't always see obvious things like this if/when they fall for someone.
A burden of being incredibly wealthy and influential, I suppose.
There are 6 billion people on this planet. It's not that hard to figure out as a YC investor: if it's a YC founder, they're no longer part of that pool. Period. I'm amazed at the amount of "but what if ..." discussion here
Even if 90% of the time that concern is unfounded, the mental effort you spend dealing with that exerts drag and hurts your performance. One of the things investors are grading you on is confidence!
This isn't difficult. I know techies have a reputation for being socially awkward but if you're suggesting that asking for someone's phone number in a business context could be mistaken for asking in a romantic context then you're wrong. It's very, very easy to define intention.
Power vs no power means too risky for unhealthy relationship.
For example a lot of VC firms won't invest in two companies in the same space. This ensures that they themselves don't have to pick which of their two portfolio companies is a winner in terms of advice, contacts, hiring help, etc. This is "baked in" to VC in a very, very obvious, no-exceptions kind of way.
So let's suppose that Anna is a founder at BoxFlix. And let's suppose that Gary is a VC with ABCD Partners. ABCD led Netflix's series A round (and since it's fictional, Netflix hasn't gone public yet). Gary is at demo day and couldn't possibly ever even HOPE to invest in BoxFlix no matter how compelling Anna and her team and company are; he's already in the Netflix deal. Further let's suppose that Gary primarily deals on the clean energy side of things, meaning that most of his personal/professional (they're often intermixed) contacts won't do Anna any good.
So could Gary ask Anna out on a date without it being inappropriate?
Let's suppose for the sake of argument that he tells Anna all this prior to his asking her out on a date such that she knows Gary and ABCD Partners will never invest in her company. In this case I think it's at the very least in a grey area and quite possibly not inappropriate at all.
Now if Gary conveniently doesn't mention that he or his company could never invest with BoxFlix, it could be argued that he's trying to bait & switch on Anna and that's a real problem.
Or if Gary led the investment in Netflix and sits on the board and remains highly involved in the company that could be inappropriate too, at least for Gary. Anna might not mind, but ABCD Partners surely would.
Disclaimer: I made all this stuff up. I live in Houston, not California and I don't really know anyone out there. If this seems too much like anything that's happened in real life I apologize and I'm happy to change the made-up names of Anna, Gary or ABCD Partners. It's all just to illustrate a point, not to make anyone feel bad.
EDIT: I wrote all this out because the original line is "Y Combinator has a zero tolerance policy for inappropriate sexual or romantic behavior from investors toward founders."
In that I read the word "inappropriate". If it was a strictly zero-tolerance policy (like schools have for guns, fake or real or toy or hand-formed-into-a-gun) then the word "inappropriate" wouldn't need to be there. By definition ALL romantic/sexual advances would be inappropriate.
So that leads me to believe that the folks at YC think it is possible for a VC and a founder to interact in a way that might end up romantic and that it's OK.
The other possibility is that they mean "no VC we invite can ever ask a founder out" but worded it poorly. I'd like to think that the folks at YC are smarter than that so I discount it as a possibility but there's still some chance that's what happened.
Furthermore, from a business standpoint, it's understandable that YCombinator doesn't want this kind of thing. It seems very dangerous for the company, without any advantage.
If you're a VC, you should be adept at assessing risk. If you think that the "risk" of working with female founders outweighs the potential upside, you're definitely not going to be touching my money and I'd rather not have any of yours.
If they're not outright bad investors, they are at least investing a suboptimal way.
Not saying, of course, that this justifies any kind of harassment, just that maybe some of these investors have learned in the hard way that their judgment gets clouded when dealing with women.
Best take him to the gym and do manly guy things like working out and hanging out in the steam room to prove his masculinity.
You can't assess that via the internet. You have to meet them.
That's rich. People who think like that should really take some time to read a few first-person accounts on sexism and misogyny in tech industry. Once you've read about how women have to worry about their appearance and behavior on a daily basis just to be able to somewhat tone down the sexism they're exposed to, men's complaints about how they might have to start worrying a bit more become laughable.
To illustrate, here's an excerpt from the Forbes story making rounds on Twitter [1]:
Unlike my male peers, who could wear anything from jeans and a hoodie to a well-tailored suit, I had to choose my attire carefully. Feminine but not sexy, structured but not form fitting, classy but not too expensive, lest I imply that I was bad at bootstrapping and not "scrappy enough," professional but not so stuffy that people would assume our product lacked creativity. My hair was almost always worn in a bun or pulled back conservatively.
During the ten years that I worked in international development, clothing was a tool to defuse gender, a strategy for gaining access to an almost exclusively male professional environment. We referred to it as "taking on the third gender." For all its self-regard as the most forward-thinking place on earth, it seemed I would need to use the same tactics in Silicon Valley.
[1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/08/07/what-it...
Where did you read anything about gender in that reminder from Jessica? That was guidance on behavior. I'm sure YC has strong positions on racism, but that doesn't in any way imply that VCs should be concerned about working with founders from different races/ethnicities.
Just don't be a jerk, and you'll be fine.
Personally, I see where you're coming from. I learn more about how sexism manifests itself in the tech industry every week, it seems. Even with good intentions and a lot of conscious thought about the issue, it doesn't seem extremely unlikely that some action I previously considered harmless could be taken the wrong way.
It might as well be a giant cult, where the "priests" (VCs and/or wealthy individuals in general) get to have sex with the women (people) of their choice. I am absolutely disgusted. The level of hypocrisy in this industry is horrendous. Until the Tech community can clean up its own act, it need not apply for 'cleaning up the world'.
There is a systemic attitude justifying these actions in the minds of these individuals. Just because they may be extremal outliers does not mean that their thinking was independent of their environment.
EDIT: I would like to add: And just because you write software, or helped build a company, or invested in a company that created a widely adopted piece of software, does NOT make you some sort of (semi-)savior of the world. I strongly believe that much of the chauvinism we are seeing is derived from the already large (undeserved) egotistical foundation much of S.V. sustains/feeds/nourishes itself off of.
[0] http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/12/14/vc-istan-6-th...
Depends on what behavior we're talking about, but the simplest answer is no - lots of inappropriate behavior is not illegal.
It's not an investor-founder story, but a related and eye-opening read is the story from the co-founder of Meebo, titled "Why I Now Believe the Glass Ceiling Is Real"[0].
[0] http://blogs.wsj.com/accelerators/2013/10/11/elaine-wherry-w...
This implies that some sexual or romantic behavior from investors toward founders would be considered appropriate. If that's not the intended message, inappropriate should be replaced with something like 'any and all'.
While I'm not in any startup circles at the moment I would be curious for some clarification. Is it ever acceptable for an investor to pursue a romantic relationship with a founder? After the founder is funded (by another investor), for example. Or if the founder initiates?
EDIT: anyone want to explain the down votes? I point out what I find to be a confusing point in the message and ask for clarification. I didn't even express an opinion on the overall matter one way or the other. I simply asked for clarification and made what I thought was a useful suggestion. In what way is anything I wrote offensive or otherwise worthy of being down voted?
No it doesn't. Grammatically, the "inappropriate" is used for vocal emphasis.
As a founder and MD of a company, quite simply, the answer is a bold NO.
Most of the opposite gender population is outside your company (or pool of possible investments). If you feel the urge, fish there, not in the tiny pond which you have a weird power relationship with. Getting romantically involved with people inside your company or which you're considering for investment is reprehensibly bad judgement as an owner or anyone in a position of authority and should obviously look like a Really Bad Idea (tm) to you if you are in that position of authority.
It's a bit like the old "should a teacher date a student" chestnut. Whether or not the student "initiates" is irrelevant. Just stay away from it, it's a terrible idea. If the founder/student "initiates", then they are the one acting inappropriately, and your thought should not be "hmm, maybe I should go along", it should be "oh shit, this could be a big problem, how do I get out of this tactfully?"
That's not to say I disagree with you on your overall point. I just found that argument to be a little too dismissive of the reason one might be dating within their company or pool of possible investments.
That's a stretch. I think most reasonable individuals reading the statement would conclude that "inappropriate" is an emphatic descriptor, and not a categorical divider.
What if you choose not to invest, date a founder, and then start to consider funding another startup that is in the same cohort and close to the founder you are dating? There could be questions about what information you have that you shouldn't.
It's a full-stop "don't do it." There's too much potential to hurt and divide the community and lots of smart, attractive people outside of YC.
OK YC how about counseling the person that did it instead of treating everyone else like trash.
"A reminder to Clergy people: no sexual abuse on children are permitted."
I think if I was a member of that profession, I would feel insulted.
EDIT: rerephrased according to comment (that may invalidate the commentors' opinions).
There are a lot of common sense things in this world. Washing behind your ears, changing your sheets... etc.
I'd compare it to police corruption: the problem isn't so much the few corrupt cops, but the fact that the rest of the police will cover for them.
Overall, I think it's good to make this explicit. People rarely harass / victimize up the power hierarchy.
Is there ascandal going on here somewhere?
Of course you don't see this happening. Of course you don't see discrimination in the workplace. Maybe - just for once - accept that the people who actually do face this stuff are telling you that it does happen, and that we should do something about it. Maybe try listening to a perspective - any one will do, really - that is different from your own.
The worst part it is the way it has become acceptable to bash "white dudes" for the color of their skins and/or their gender.
If this is "racism" or "discriminatory", it's the least effective ever, and any comparison to the biases experienced by women and people of color is insulting.
Firstly, discrimination in the workplace is not limited to "non-whites". Secondly, you cannot claim the supreme and unilateral right to determine what constitutes discrimination based on your race.
Simply stating "you're white and therefore you cannot see it" is both unreasonable, racist, and, if put forth as grounds for legislation, incredibly corrosive to the notion of rule of law.
The idea that only whites as a universal class are somehow unable to perceive discrimination is ridiculous and highly offensive.
You should apologize for your comment.
This isn't a super out there PC statement that is being made. It's simply saying that this is a professional event and the expectation is for the relationships to be kept professional. You know, how it should always be.
That's not tumblr craziness, that is just basic respect and professionalism.
Edit: I thought about refraining from saying this but it really should be said: your comment is so beyond idiotic that it merits nothing except pure disgust and abhorrence.
Your further comment just reinforces my impression that it is you who are severely lacking in the empathy department.
It'd be much less worse if this was a tech industry problem only. The sad reality is that we're knee-deep in shitty behavior.
And I want to stress, since some seem people to take the opposite of the charitable principle when reading posts, that this does not in any way excuse the tech industry. It just implies that it's not due to lack of socialization; it's a general problem of men.
[1] http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/11/one-in-four-u-s...
Source that this is the typical YC investor? Pretty sure this is an inaccurate generalization.
In hospitals. On the factory floor. In the retail outlet. At the fast food joint. Put the sexes together and we're still trying to figure out how to make it work, trying to break free of the cloistered, sexist past. In New York, Boston, Toronto, and London.
And ultimately you have to blame popular media to some degree. In movies or shows where attractive people work together, the plot of the movie virtually always has them coupling up. It seems, from a media perspective, that you can't professional work with someone of the opposite sex (talking specifically about that situation) without it becoming romantic.
While this particular (and pretty stringent at that) declaration of code of conduct is probably conducive to business and PR goals of YC, I'm far from convinced it will be advancing health of relationships between individuals concerned.
[1] http://www.careerbuilder.com/share/aboutus/pressreleasesdeta...
Rather than forced rape, you could say "consensual" relationships with 13 year olds, which was once the norm.
Or for a safer analogy, Bill Gates gives millions of dollars to solve real problems, and today is a top humanitarian if you look at what he's doing. However, he attained his wealth through aggressive, unethical business practices, and there are probably many who had their financial well-being destroyed as collateral damage.
As for you argument, I'm considering looks an asset to be employed alongside intellect, presentation/communication skills. I mean, I wouldn't want to live in a business enviroment where we're assigned numbers as our names, modulate our voices to sound the same, and use same unisex avatars in a VR-powered business conference all the time. Would you? That would alleviate all possible business-related concerns of yours.
Please continue traversing irrelevant nodes.
If you've read any of the previous Y Combinator statements on sexism against founders, you'd know that position being taken here is one of removing inefficiencies in the system. All the women being literally chased out by male investors who are seriously abusing their power just to get their rocks off is considered to be a huge opportunity cost. A female founder conference is a workaround, and it makes you sound really out of touch to complain about it.
Which is why I am saying, if you care about the people - which we happen to describe with the term "females" in this case - you should strive to include them, not to create conferences, events and groups that "protect" them by isolating them.
If you wanted to do ballet tomorrow, would you prefer a "boys-only" class or a "regular" one?
By the way, thanks for the time and the effort you invest in actually discussing with me instead of just downvoting my comment - I appreciate it a lot as it is the only way for me to have a chance to understand where I am wrong and where I am right. :)
In such a situation, I think providing some path for men to participate at all, and thus gradually shift the balance to the point where it no longer is a big deal, would trump the more abstract general concern of "let's not ever make anything about sex." I understand that ideal, but we're not there yet. We're in a remedial situation, where VC (and much of society, to be honest) is as of yet too immature to allow that to work.
edit: Using the word "inappropriate" makes the statement ambiguous because it states there is some sexual or romantic behavior that is "appropriate" (suitable or proper in the circumstances) [2].
If the intent here is to state that sexual or romantic behavior is inappropriate and there is a zero tolerance for this behavior, this statement fails to achieve that.
This kind of ambiguity is problem with corporate-speak in general.
Why would you write the following, which doesn't mean anything:
Y Combinator has a zero tolerance policy for inappropriate sexual or romantic behavior from investors toward founders.
When you could write:
Don't even ask founders out at demo day.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=explicit [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=appropriate
I think that's exactly what he did, and he got downvoted into oblivion for it.
Explicit enough for you?
For contrast, look at Gibbs and Abby, who do have a supervisor-supervised relationship with the same power dynamics as that between investors and entrepreneurs. In their case, the show goes out of its way to make sure everyone understands that their relationship, while affectionate, is neither romantic nor sexual.
Why? Because it would be super creepy if Gibbs, who is both Abby's boss and much older than her, suddenly made a pass at her out of nowhere.