Female Founders Conference – Live Stream [video] | Hacker News Reader

Female Founders Conference – Live Stream [video]

live.femalefoundersconference.org

82 pointsjtcchan33 comments

Jessica Livingston is giving a killer talk. I love her point of view as a non-technical partner at YC and her huge role as a judge of character

Damnit. I'm having a hard time playing the live stream.

Exactly. I think a lot of us nerds underestimate how vital of a skill that is, to be able to evaluate personal skills of a person. Someone could be a great programmer, but if he can't work well with others he'll be more of a detriment to the team rather than being helpful.

They have written books on the subject:

http://guykawasaki.com/you_have_to_lov/

There's a lot of interesting research on "judging character". I particularly recall reading in "Thinking, Fast and Slow" (Kahneman) that subjective judgement was consistently worse than even relatively arbitrary objective judgements. I believe this study was conducted in army recruitment and so obviously may not be universal. Very thought-provoking notetheless.

EDIT: ... that's not to cast any aspersions on any particular people involved here, I'm just trying to make a general point that "intuition" or "judgment" may not actually be as good as we think they are.

The vibe I get is that it isn't character they're really trying to judge. They're really trying to calculate whether a person is palatable to downstream players. I think there's likely some market risk associated with various personalities and they need to address it somehow even if there's no quantitative approach.

A wild experiment would be to test their judgment system by planting a few charming serial killers in their "character judgment" sample pool. My hypothesis is that the charming serial killers would pass at a higher rate.

I really liked her take on her judging interactions, especially during the technical conversations. I think having an outside (even slightly outside) perspective is incredibly useful

I attended the conference today and it was awesome! An amazing opportunity to hear from and meet so many amazing women.

Does anyone know when the videos will be uploaded to youtube? It appears the event is over.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQ-uHSnFig5NECe5MbTzq...

I must say I am disappointed that the Female Founders Conference did not address the challenges that women of color face in tech. Not a comment, nothing.

Looking at the list 5 out of 12 (42%) of the women speaking were not white.

They were free to speak about whatever they wanted it seemed?

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