Comment by mreiland | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mreiland | Hacker News Reader

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Here's the relevant quote from the article.

> I knew the founders of many other companies pretty closely – their backgrounds, their revenue, their valuations, how much they raised. Sure, it’s comparing apples and oranges, but one company (with a 6’ tall, attractive white, male CEO) that was pre-product and just a few LOIs raised over a million with 3x the valuation. A smaller B2B company that had 10% of our revenue raised the same amount as us, at twice the valuation. Another B2C company, with a quarter of our revenue and much stronger, well-funded competitors, raised 3x what we raised, at twice the valuation. The main difference? They were all run by all male founders.

I don't believe any reasonable person is going to read that and walk away believing the author wasn't implying that white men get funded easier than women.

That's right -- the article is saying that white guys (especially tall and handsome ones -- remember that short guys oh wait you already know) have less difficulty than many other people in the funding game. But in this discussion, the claim a few posts above was that the article says that white guys have it easy. Different.

It's like claiming A greater than B means A very large, if we're talking about, say, real numbers. But just because a .5 percent chance is bigger than a .2 percent chance doesn't imply that either of these numbers is very large.

In particular, it's useful to play with numbers because it reminds you that a very small difference in funding rates at the beginning may compound, leading to big differences later. If a few important investors get distracted by the idea of dating you or don't take you seriously because of small biases, that may have a substantial long-term impact.

The term 'easy' is also relative, stop trying to be pedantic.

The tone doesn't seem to reflect 0.2 -> 0.5, more like 0.1 -> "sure thing, impossible not to get funded"

I guess not everybody perceived the tone in the same way. It seemed much more neutral to me.

The question is for what reason. She's making an argument that was the only difference. With support & evidence.

Easier, not easy.

someone needs to read up on their IFF logic tables.

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