also, "pre-birth" and "pre-kindergarten"
Basically you need to invest in fundamentals while the asset itself is at its cheapest, and "not yet existing" may happen to be among the cheapest states of the asset
The way to expand this opportunity is not to focus on the first 99.99999% of history, but the next ten years. You add nothing and take significant amounts away from that. I'm sick of your negativity. Here's a fact: I'm not asian, but asians are far more likely to get funded. SO WHAT! How does that change whether I'm taking the time to build something?
Michael go build something. Anyone can call people names. People should downvote your negative comments on sight. Besides being policy here, anyone who is downvoting you is literally creating good in the world. Because you are actively preventing the expansion of a culture of building. We might not have the power to get a sixty year old who had to go work early in life and received no formal education funded, regardless of this person's merits or ideas. But we can - and should, are required to - downvote you, and contribute to a positive culture where in five years, when that person is sixty-five, and has spent the past five years building something, he can be.
[1] the definition of which is that it is not new, not useful, not insightful, and adds absolutely nothing while being negative. Similar to if you said to a commenter: "by the way YOU SUCK at every skill, when compared to Mozart at music". This is undeniably true, he started at the age of four and specialized very hard. It is a comment nobody would disagree with on a literal level. It is also an absolutely worthless comment that adds nothing: the only reason anyone would write it is so that they could say the word "YOU SUCK" and then weasel out of it. Of course you should get downvoted, so hard you delete your comments which add nothing. Go build something, Michael.
Notice how you cannot do this?
All he said was that people's success and failures are to a large degree determined when they are born, which is true. The genes you're born with, the socioeconomic demographic you're born into, your parent's level of involvement, etc are all determined before you're born. That's factual. It is only with extreme effort and perseverance that one can counter acts of fate. It is possible, just unlikely.
How does Michael expressing this truth justify your personal rant against him?
If he had phrased it the way you just did (in your middle paragraph) it would have been fine. He didn't, he just posted something inflammatory. so your middle paragraph is a lot better, it took thought rather than just writing down a literal truth. (it is also something nobody would disagree with, including me, and you certainly wouldn't have been downvoted for it.) If you had been the one to write the comment, I'd have also appreciated your suggestions as to what can be done about it systemically. your paragraph is quite productive, and an important point.
as a matter of fact, what do you suggest we do? (I mean concrete steps.) should funds try to set quotas for minorities, for example? (this is a genuine question, and I'm asking you littletimmy.)
It will require a multi-pronged effort, ranging from trying to implement better labor laws to improve parental involvement and reduce stress among the poor, better community health plans to counter poor nutrition, better public schooling through investing in teacher's salaries etc. Maybe after 20 years of doing that we're going to see minorities improve their standards.
But considering that any such long-term approach will be blocked immediately by the free-market enthusiasts, I fear there is nothing much that we can do. That raises a more important question: is fight against the machine even possible?
Now, on this topic, maybe it would be possible to establish a matching fund (maybe crowd-sourced, angellist style?) that gives some amount of matching funding in order to incentivize those VCs investing in demographic outliers, lowering the potential economic risks to investing in first-time, first-generation founders and non-Stanford/MIT grads.