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Comment by SkyMarshal | Hacker News Reader

Possibly prompted by this anonymous Forbes piece making the rounds on Twitter recently:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/08/07/what-it...

I can't imagine how utterly disheartened I'd be as an entrepreneur if I went to an investor's home and had an experience like that when starting out raising money.

Discouraging. Folks like "Masseuse" that most need to shape up are probably least likely to have the capacity to listen. Maybe it's because having wealth melts ones brain, or maybe a certain level of sociopathy is advantageous in accumulating wealth. However the cause-and-effect works out, I struggle to imagine a person who exhibits such behaviors being fixable through sound reasoning.

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.

IMO the biggest challenge would be making a system that will punish according to actual transgression, not according to perceived status. In reality, the slick investor type will get off the hook, but the virgin neckbeard programmer will get slammed for harassment and also for being a virgin neckbeard. Any ideas for fixing that?

I think you have to hit people in their image or their wallet. Slick investor types will have to publicly call out their peers' bad behavior. Slick investor types will have to lose out on a huge investments because they treated a pitch meeting like speed dating.

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.

The power dynamic of sex influences men's inappropriate behavior. The investor no doubt had a sexual fantasy when he invited the female CEO over to his house and began drinking wine and massaging her. He wanted his investment to be symbolic, to reduce her to a whore. This is misogyny.

You don't have to put thoughts into the investor's head or play armchair psychologist.

The investor acted misogynistic on the face of it. I don't know how playing thought police adds to this.

The anonymity in that article doesn't help. It doesn't matter how much money you have the kind of behavior described in that article is unacceptable. I like to think that the majority of technologists and entrepreneurs are humanists and they are in it to make the world a better place. I also like to think that if the article wasn't anonymous there would be non-violent collective action to make it known in no uncertain terms that kind of behavior is unacceptable from anyone.

>they are in it to make the world a better place

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.

Sure but you're not going to solve the immediate problem of the various imbalances in the tech world in terms of gender equality and general power imbalances if stuff like this continues to remain anonymous. It might not seem like it but by choosing where, how, and who I work for I'm making a deliberate choice. I know that this is a luxury and that not many people have it but I like to put that luxury to good use and not work for anyone or provide my expertise to anyone that is even peripherally related to whoever is in that article.

Well, if you go purely anonymous in all aspects, you prevent a lot of these things from even being an issue and rely only on the merit of the idea, quality of MVP, and thoroughness of the business plan - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8169051

I don't use Uber. I use Lyft. Why? Because Lyft is better people. Given the choice I'd rather support the better people. SF is full of startups that are indistinguishable in terms of technical merit, idea, business plan, etc. They are different though when it comes to the people.

How are the Lyft people better than the Uber people?

No 5000 orders and cancellation for one. One documented example http://valleywag.gawker.com/ubers-dirty-trick-campaign-again.... There was also another front page post recently that was an interview with Uber's CEO on the same matter.

Please fully describe how the age, race, gender, height, orientation, and religious aspects of employees for both Lyft and Uber are relevant and intertwined with the actions of the company. You say "better people" but I think you mean "acting ethically" and I see no relation to how that has anything to do with the above 6 descriptors I listed.

You may like to think that about entrepreneurs but you'd be almost clinically deluded if that was what you did think.

Really? Clinically deluded? I might have to push the date for my sabbatical then.

In short, that's easy for you to say. You aren't the one risking anything.

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.

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