Y Combinator to recruit more black entrepreneurs
usatoday.com
usatoday.com
The tech world is racist,and sexist. The VC world is way beyond racist or sexist ,it's a culture of nepotism.You cant change that.It's like electing a black president,you may look good abroad but at home noone is dumb enough to think anything has changed. It's even worse to consider minorities as "people that need help".We dont need help we need equality at first place,there is none.
> We dont need help we need equality at first place,there is none.
I don't disagree. Don't you believe that making special efforts to get minority groups into something can do more good than harm? Perhaps it depends on the details of how it's done but if done correctly I think it can help.
There isn't equality and there won't be equality anytime soon. That's why I believe deliberate effort has its place. It doesn't have to imply an imbalance of equality. Instead it can acknowledge the imbalance of perceived equality and aim to eradicate the false assumptions.
I don't for an instance claim that one race or sex is intrinsically more intelligent. But I'll admit that I do believe entire groups of people are marginalized and it creates an unleveled playing field. One which should be level.
It applies to many groups. People who are poor, black, hispanic, gay, women, obese, unattractive, etc.
If you fall into these groups you'll have felt some level of discrimination. Some more than others (i.e. someone who's poor, black and gay will have felt it more acutely than someone who's just gay).
I don't know. I think it this can be done in a respectful manner with good intent and without being derogative.
Would you disagree? If so what's the more realistic solution?
So don't take it personally. It isn't about you. It's about looking for the next big thing in a place that isn't as crowded with other treasure hunters.
Y Combinator and others in taking a stance in supporting women and black entrepreneurs are not doing it out of pity or niceness. They recognize the existence of bias on race and sex, which should have nothing to do with how successful an entrepreneur should be, and are trying to correct it. They stand to gain a competitive advantage if they are able to remove bias from their investment decisions, and they can make a real impact on the valley. Kudos to them.
First, Altruism aside, this will likely be a win for ycombinator. There are always opportunities to be had in targeting subgroups which others neglect.
And the problem with bias is that much of it is subconscious. Unless an organisation makes a conscious effort, it will likely discriminate.
This means there's an opportunity for YC to get easier access to the cream of the crop, merely by specifically recruiting. And articles like this are helpful too, as they'll signal to would be black entrepreneurs that they should not shy away from YC.
Second, this could be very important for future african-american entrepreneurs. Reference examples are so, so important. I (white male) did not become a programmer, despite a love for math and computers. I literally didn't have a single programmer in my extended family or circle of close friends. I played around with computers, but I had no idea what a programming language was until age 25.
(If this sounds incurious, think about what massive blind spots you yourself had until recently)
If YC can fund an african-american entrepreneur who succeeds massively, then this will inspire thousands of others.
The same arguments apply to recruiting women, and inspiring women. I applaud this move, and YC's earlier initiative to recruit women.
Could you elaborate? Here, the article states that 1% of all applicants are black. How can the demographics of those who apply at all be attributed to bias on Y Combinator's part, intentional or otherwise?
Growing up in a biased culture, it would be very, very, very difficult not to acquire any.
This idea has received some empirical validation from the implicit biases test. Some details here:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090617142120.ht...
Other studies have compared the performance of white vs. black names.
http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html
The evidence suggests that most people are biased, yet think they are not. Removing this unconscious bias from our society will take time.
So I meant that almost EVERYBODY is likely to discriminate, at least if current evidence pointing that way is correct.
Therefore, unless an organization takes conscious effort, it will discriminate. But on the bright side, merely by taking such conscious effort, an organization can both help itself AND help a disadvantaged group.
And leading the way forward is one mechanism to reduce unconscious bias. I am sure, for instance, that Obama's presidency has made today's children far less likely to be biased.
This is true if you're assuming that a more diverse group of entrepreneurs would be more likely to build businesses targeting a more diverse base of consumers.
In that case, one cannot underestimate the importance of geography and overestimate the importance of technology in targeting these groups. There are a number of lucrative demographic groups with significant and growing purchasing power that are under served or poorly served, in large part because many of the businesses which serve them (or would serve them) have difficulty accessing capital.
I doubt very much that a Silicon Valley-based program like Y Combinator, which obviously focuses on technology, would be an effective incubator for new businesses targeting many of these groups because you realistically have to be on the ground in the geographic regions they dominate and you have to be prepared to employ less technology, or technology in a different fashion than the typical Silicon Valley startup.
Believe it or not, the story below is actually the very-shortened version.:
I as a male with Nigerian-born-and-raised parents can tell my story about how I didn't know a single thing about start-ups or SV/bayarea scene or anything until 2007. So I went to school in CSU Hayward and got my BSCS __only__ because I wanted to make videogames. All my college friends talked about becoming videogame betatesters and I wanted to make games. A classmate of mine got me my first job in AT&T as an analyst. Before this job the only computers I've been exposed to was my home Win95 computer on dial-up and the unix terminal on school campus; oh and writing programs in BASIC on AppleII's in junior highschool and that wasn't even a class. It just happened that there was a teacher who was a geek and brought his computers to school for kids like me to play with. I probably owe that teacher a lot. My dad being in a job involving fortran & punch-cards helped to. When I first saw a bunch of computers networked together, I had no idea what that meant. Windows SAMBA mounts and copying files between 2 machines blew my freakin' mind in 2002. Computers talk to each other?! I had AOL and no idea how the internet worked until a few weeks after starting at AT&T; then I got AT&T DSL and it was horrible so I hardly used the internet. AT&T was always putting enterprise software books in the lobbies so that's all I knew existed; expensive proprietary tools. It was only one day, after like 5 yrs, I got fed up with AT&T and tried to leave but couldn't. I used computerjobs.com to attempt finding another job. Found out that all my skills in writing ABAP programs for SAP, JCL on OS/2, tools like QuickTest & LoadRunner didn't actually mean anything when only a few major corps have the money to pay for the licenses of said softwares. Also, the VB macros I wrote for MSExcel and got me so much praise at AT&T turned out to not be a high-demand skill. I was floored; I had no idea. I really thought I was highly skilled and could find a job anytime I wanted. At one point I thought my email just didn't work, but a few tests proved that not to be the case. Then one day I got even more frustrated and tried to get into Pixar. I learned how to use Alias(purchased by Autodesk) Maya and sent a resume. They called me back, but I didn't get the job because I didn't know enough of a programming language called "python".(Maya has python bindings for automation 'n stuff)
Python? What's that? I went to go find all the info I could on this strange programming language. Tried to apply to Pixar again after learning some but they never replied me again. Then I searched online to look at resumes of people who have Pixar on them to see where they worked before ending up at Pixar. I saw a bunch of companies I have never heard of. Remember, AT&T was my first job out of school and my internet was unusable. Almost all my coworkers were old enough to be my parents and 99% of them had no interest in computers beyond just using them as they were trained 5+ years ago. The only companies that came up in conversation were corps like Oracle & HP. Looking up all the companies I saw on these resumes, I eventually stumbled upon the term "start up". What's a start-up? Oh, a company that just started! That makes sense, I guess a company has to start from something. So where do I find these start-ups? OH! They're all around me!!! San Francisco is less than an hour away! Whoa there's a whole bunch!!!!! Look at these salaries! AT&T was just paying me $46k! Okay, so what kind of tools do they use? What? Linux? What's that? Oh, I remember Redhat in school for one of my classes. What's mysql? Why not Oracle? Nobody likes Windows? What's a Macbook? Why are all these people so young and happy-looking? They don't have to wear a suit & tie to work?
My internet was so bad and AT&T couldn't fix it after multiple calls, so I switched to Comcast because I needed to start downloading all kinds of stuff. I bought a laptop at this time as well. This way I now had 2 computers in my house(yes, a house. I got it in 2003 when they were just giving houses to anyone who walked in off the street) and I could learn more about what an IP address is and how 2 computers talk to each other.
This was in 2006, so by 2007 I fully discovered the world of Linux and open-source in general. Found out that Windows the OS isn't not the same thing as the computer. That I could delete & reformat the Harddrive with Linux without physically destroying the computer. Fully comprehended what open-source meant to my career. Free software meant that my skills followed me to any company I went to. Knowing how to use JMeter instead of LoadRunner, Selenium instead of Quicktest, mysql instead of Oracle - I've increased my skillset and I didn't have to rely on anyone to buy some $80k license before my skills became usable. Learned some more skills that were hot at the time and started applying. This is when I learned that start-ups liked Craigslist so that was the only place I used for my job-search. One memorable phone-interview was with babycenter.com. The lady interviewing me used all kinds of profanity on the phone. While I personally don't use profanity, I found it amazing that start-ups were so care-free that they can just F-bomb people during an interview like it's nothing. Eventually I ended up in a start-up with about 8 people. My family was freaking out that I was about to leave a huge company like AT&T to work with 8 people in San Francisco.... but I did it anyway and from there it's all roses, rainbows and puppies. My career goals have changed though so I don't seek Pixar like I use to.
The overall idea here is that it's totally possible to grow up right in this bay area, even get a BSCS, and not know about any of the tech scene going on right under your nose if you're not around those kinds of people. My family wasn't rich but way better off than the inner-city, low income kids. If I didn't know about the BayArea tech-scene until 2007, it's easy for me to imagine them not having a clue even today.
NOTE: That house I got in 2003? I totally should have been one of the people that got foreclosed on; but the extreme jump in my salary after leaving AT&T saved me.
If there's discrimination, isn't that purely the fault of the Y Combinator organisers (in this instance), and is this article then an admission that they've discriminated in the past?
Systematic discrimination due to unequal access to infrastructure really, really sucks for the black community as a whole, but if you managed to overcome it as an individual there are multiple interrelated reasons why you have a massive advantage in startups/tech that you probably aren't aware of yet.
Firstly, the market is ruthless. You can't lie to yourself or others in a startup -- the thing you're doing really has to work, so the decisions you're making have to be right. You're white, had a great education, and a well-padded resume? If you don't make precisely the right choices, the market couldn't care less, your company will die. Now, white well educated people with well-padded resumes will probably have easier access to venture capital, but that brings me to my next point.
In my (totally unscientific) experience, skin color, education, and experience has no correlation whatsoever with fluid intelligence (essentially, how well you make decisions without knowledge). In a big company, fluid intelligence doesn't really matter all that much -- the culture is well established, you aren't that important, and if you can just play ball the way everyone else does, you'll do ok. Not so in a startup. In a startup you're dealing with completely new territory, so you have to figure things out from scratch, all the time. You might as well take your knowledge, and your experience, and your education, and throw it all away because it will make a zilch of difference. Fluid intelligence is everything because you have to figure everything out from scratch.
All the white, well-educated, experienced young men who have relatively easy access to VC capital? Without fluid intelligence and wits about them, they'll just burn through it and be left with nothing at the end. The market is ruthless -- it doesn't care. So you're on equal footing.
Finally, the space is hyper-competitive and even in a recession there is too much capital chasing too few good ideas. All those white, traditional, middle aged male VC partnerships really need a win. And I mean really, because if they don't get one they won't raise the next fund, and if they don't raise the next fund they won't be able to pay property taxes and their kids's private school tuitions, and they really, really don't want to end up there. Don't like black people? Have unacknowledged bias? Too bad -- your kids are going to public school next year. So if you come in with a killer idea and the seeds of a working business, you bet they'll invest. The pressure's too high not to. They might care what you look like, but the market doesn't care about them. The market is ruthless and indifferent, and forces them to act ruthless and indifferent, because if they act on their prejudices their fund will die.
This is getting a bit long, so here's my TL;DR: if you've been discriminated against your whole life and want to start a company, don't get discouraged. The market is ruthless and indifferent -- it doesn't care about you, or me, or anyone. For you, that's an advantage. Build something people want and you will be rewarded.
Isn't this really the key here? I agree with your other arguments about ultimately needing to have fluid intelligence etc. But assuming two people (one white, one black) have the same amount of intelligence, smarts etc, but one raises $10 million from Sequoia and the other doesn't. That pretty much makes the difference between succeeding and failing. There are ideas which are so world-changing or brilliant that the market and VC's just can't ignore their eventual prominence (Google maybe?). There are other ideas which need lots of capital and talent injection in order to nurture them to the point where they are big.
Once you get to product/market fit, you'll get capital no matter who you are or where you come from. The market pressure is too strong for people not to invest.
It is widely established that the more similar someone is to you, the more likely you are to "connect" and establish rapport and understanding with that person. Like you alluded to, this is at least part of the reason why "white, well-educated, experienced young men have relatively easy access to VC capital". VC partners are predominantly well-educated caucasian folks, along with a significant minority of South Asian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern partners. The partners, even the ones trying to fight their biases, will have a natural inclination to connect and understand entrepreneurs that are similar to themselves. I am absolutely guilty of such psychological forces myself, as much as I hate to admit it.
Additionally, we have to look at sales. The people you are going to be selling to, whether it be fortune 500 CIOs or SF startup founders, again are predominantly caucasian. Like with the VC situation, all things being equal, you are more likely to "connect" with your point of contact if you have a lot in common with them. If you are starting a B2B SaaS company, Sales is even more critical than the money you raise from VCs. VCs will be much more inclined to actively fight their biases in order to find the best investments, since so much is on the line for them. I don't think you can say the same thing, or at least not nearly to the same extent, for many of the people you would be selling to. Statistically, it is thus advantageous to be caucasian.
Just being smarter and more capable may not be enough when your customers' psychology is hard-wired to be against you, even if they are not conscious of it. Perhaps this is less of an issue if you are building something that does not involve a face to face sales process on a frequent basis. But the existence of such forces cannot and should not be forgotten or overlooked.
I had some other comments, but the way you put this has really made me rethink them. I'll just say that if you make it to YC, then you're clearly doing something right.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0484384/ (The Color of Fear)
There are pieces of it on YouTube apparently:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nmhAJYxFT4
I once decided to investigate racism more. In addition to reading academic materials I also tried reading magazines intended for black women and found a section on how not to scare your white boss with your hair. There was all kinds of stuff like that, and it was both shocking and depressing. I just had no idea.
There is.
> isn't that purely the fault of the Y Combinator organisers (in this instance)
Some of the fault likely is, likely through unacknowledged bias. But discrimination comes in far more systemic forms: if you're a black child you're far more likely to attend a school with concentrated poverty than a white student. You're twice as likely to have teachers that are brand new, or have very little experience. You're less likely to be offered advanced classes. And boom, by the time you're applying for college, you're already behind the curve.
> and is this article then an admission that they've discriminated in the past?
They likely haven't actively discriminated against black applicants. But by not doing anything to further outreach, yeah, they kinda have.
I am also "white" and in 25-49 group (towards the upper end, though), grew up in a different country, had my first home PC during the second year of MS degree with money earned from giving private lessons. None of my friends in the 80s had PCs. I am still struggling to bring my coding skills up to par caused from such a late start. I was not "privileged" in any way or form.
I'm now volunteering at a poor neighborhood high school in Chivago, teaching them Python and helping the FRC Team do the programming. I don't for this because I felt sorry for my privileges, I do it because it's the right thing to do.
Certain aspects of life may be correlated with skin color, we still shouldn't lump the two together.
I think the privileged label is overused these days (esp online), but the way I see it is that I've (apparently) got it slightly easier than a black person.
Doesn't mean I didn't work hard to achieve what I have, and my parents were fairly poor, but I didn't have other people looking at me and dismissing me because of my skin colour.
Some people are more "privileged" than me, some less.
It's a scale of difficulty, and people love to label and classify.
It's hard to tell in the general case and it's still an open research subject in the empirical literature [1]; but for the specific case of labor inequality, there is consistent evidence that race differences in access to networks is one key roadblock --especially in the high-tech sector, where hiring 'through the vine' is common and encouraged [ibid, pp.15-16]. This is one aspect in which outreach efforts like sama's alone can make a huge difference.
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2915460/pdf/nihm...
It shouldn't (and often doesn't) matter what you look like, where you came from, or who you are. What really matters is the value produced for others by what you do.
This sounds like a great step in promoting that property to those who may not have experienced it before. I have a feeling it may work out real well for lots of people.
So why exactly do they need to recruit more black people? Instead of like, everyone?
For example: Africa is currently going through a mobile phone revolution. Want to see staggering growth numbers? Look at mobile banking in Nigeria and Kenya. Look at what Sproxil is doing to combat counterfeit prescriptions.
Hell, in lots of places mobile phone air time is becoming as important as local currencies. Think a lily-white Stanford graduate would see a market in top up cards? I bet you they wouldn't!
Maybe you don't realize but your comment is quite racist. So, you think by virtue of being black, every African-American somehow has an inherent understanding of African nations.
Here's a excerpt from Jumpa Lahiri's book The Namesake about similar sentiments for a second generation Indian-American man talking to friends of his white girlfriend about getting sick while visiting India:
"But you must be lucky that way"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, you must never get sick."
"But you're Indian," Pamela says frowning, "I'd think the climate wouldn't affect yo, given your heritage."
"Pamela, Nick's American," Lydia says ... "He was born here."
I never mentioned African Americans in my comment. It seems that you're taking "black" to mean "African American", but that's not what my comment said. Nor the article, for that matter.
The article says:
"It's adding black colleges to its recruiting swing this fall, as well as reaching out to groups with strong ties to the black community to increase the pool of applicants, Altman said."
I very much doubt that when Altman said "the black community" and "black colleges" he had in mind people from African countries or black skinned people from India.
African Americans in the US. African entrepreneurs that come to American colleges, like Ashifi Gogo of Sproxil that I mentioned before. "Black skinned people from India"? Sure, them too.
All those groups are underrepresented in technology and could bring valuable perspective to what matters to the African American community, the Nigerian community, the Indian community, the Afro-Caribbean community, ...
But we've gone down a rabbit hole here. The point I was making through example was that underrepresented groups - blacks, Hispanics, women - have different perspectives that deserve attention, because there are damn good ideas there.
you have to cast a wide net to do that.
Just curious. (And glad you're making the effort.)
> It's adding black colleges to its recruiting swing this > fall, as well as reaching out to groups with strong ties > to the black community to increase the pool of applicants, > Altman said.
We previously wouldn't have applied to Y combinator because of remarks like these:
"I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg. There was a guy once who we funded who was terrible. I said: ‘How could he be bad? He looks like Zuckerberg!’”
--Paul Graham, New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/magazine/y-combinator-sili...)
Seeing as not even a Stanford degree and overpriced American Apparel hoodie can make us look like Mark Zuckerberg.
...but hey---this move by Sam actually seems like a good sign!
If you go with the original title it suggests one of two things:
1. Y Combinator has avoided hiring black engineers up to this point and will now stop (which I know is untrue)
2. Y Combinator will specifically hiring black engineers over other races (which sounds like a bad idea)
It may be racist to regard skin color in recruiting decisions but I think this will not end up being used against YC since most people don't care as long as whites are not favoured. I guess it's regular csr marketing.
1. For the minority this makes them feel like they "need help" and they are "not good enough" unless they are given an unfair advantage
2. For the majority, it makes them feel sidelined and at an unfair disadvantage when applying
YC needs to just promote entrepreneurship and not colour. For the record, I am a coloured man, unfortunately not black to be able to take advantage of this latest "minority giveaway"