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Comment by tuneladora | Hacker News Reader

I perfectly understand intolerance towards sexual harassment but I wonder what qualifies as "inappropriate romantic behavior" in this context. You can not ask a founder "on a date"? What's if is the other way around?

EDIT: of course this is coming from a nobody. I'm just curious.

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Correct: if your interactions with a founder are cabined by professional settings --- demo days, funding pitches, going for coffee to talk about their company --- romantic overtures are inappropriate. Similarly: if you're in process, at any stage, with a company, overtures to their founders are inappropriate.

It's important to understand WHY this is so: if you're an investor you are in a position of power over a founder. It is not possible in such a situation to make a romantic overture that is not tainted by the possibility that you are looking for a quid-pro-quo even if in fact you are not.

In addition to quid pro quo, making romantic overtures in professional settings sets up a barrier for women that doesn't exist for men. Men can go to coffee with a potential investor and know walking in the door that they're there to get a hearing about their business. But every woman that walks through that door has to fight off the concern that the meeting isn't about their company, but instead about their own personal availability.

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!

What about simply asking for his number?

Nope. The implication of quid-pro-quo would make any potential date/relationship/other an ethical mess.

Phone number for a business conversation? Of course.

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.

Any kind of romantic behavior is probably inappropriate, due to the power/incentive imbalance. A founder is trying to get money, an investor has money, and romantic overtures are really difficult to separate from the "getting money" problem.

exactly. The same reason its inappropriate for a professor/student, camp director/camp counsellor, adult/ child, prison guard/inmate etc etc.

Power vs no power means too risky for unhealthy relationship.

I sort-of agree with you and sort-of don't. I think there are situations where there isn't a power imbalance.

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.

In either case, it's inappropriate. Professionally, it creates a major conflict of interest. Personally, it create a power dynamic where the founder may be indebted to the founder and facilitate unethical interaction.

The other responses are excellent, but I'll add my two cents. There is good reason to interpret this language broadly. Its really shitty when someone you assumed was interested in you as a potential investment (or as a coworker or mentor or contact or just an ally in office politics), turns out to just be interested in getting into your pants. Hitting on someone at demo day is just the tip of the iceberg. This goes all the way down to asking out someone on your team. This shit is just toxic up and down.

I think in this context, investor <--> founder is analagous to boss <--> employee, so I guess you'd have to take similar steps to manage it i.e. recuse yourself from investment decisions regarding that company.

I guess it would be equally awkward. In such a case, the people involved should at least wait until there is no more professional connection between them.

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.

You definitely cannot ask out a founder on a date.

You wait until after demo day and the conflict of interest has cleared, before asking someone on a date. It's not that tough.

There's still a conflict of interest, even after Demo Day.

Still inappropriate after demo day. Investors are a tight knit group and retaliatory action is always a concern. The recent two exposes from two female founders both pointed to investors' power/influence as coercive factors, even if no specific deal is on the table.

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...

> When she asked why, he told her. “I don’t like the way women think,” he said. “They haven’t mastered linear thinking.” To prove his point, he explained that his wife could never prioritize her to-do lists properly. And then, as if he was trying to compliment her, he told Tucker she was different. “You’re more male,” he said.

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.

I dunno where I'm going with this, but, if I were a manager and wanted to date a subordinate, I imagine I could quit, get a another job, and then ask the person out.[1] Is this route not available to an investor? Are they in the position of "permanent boss" to a founder?

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.

Yeah, this is why I described it as "maybe unfortunate". I do believe there are roles where you will end up being "permanent boss" to a group of people, and short of losing all of your money/influence there's no way out.

A burden of being incredibly wealthy and influential, I suppose.

How about: You just don't do it, period.

Since there are some founders who go through YC more than once, that's not good enough.

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

That definition works for me.

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