simplemind

How would you know? We all know investors who only have male-founded companies in their portfolios.

They haven't to date, right?

Sadly, I sometimes worry that explicit moves like this deter investors from working with female founders. If the risk is, "I have to watch every little thing I say/joke with a female founder lest I get blacklisted", if I was a VC, I might choose to avoid female founders altogether. Wonder if the better solution involves more carrot and less stick.

Small nit, but guessing this is crow's flight distance which doesn't equal path distance. Regardless, this still isn't surprising. Short rides happen all the time.

There is a difference between mistakes and errors of judgment and "gender-based harassment or discrimination". Someone may be harassed for a different reason than their gender. For example a personal vendetta or abuse of power vs. systemic discrimination against women (or men or other).

We live in a society where secret detention is practiced. Where a relatively short time ago, we interned Japanese people.

Who cares about your anti-depressants.

A program like this perhaps isn't that big of a deal to a white, upper middle class family in Cambridge, but it's a threat to a Muslim man with a minivan, wife and two kids in Michigan who is afraid to call his mother in Pakistan because he might get flagged. And that's just today -- tomorrow it could be a Chinese family, a Jewish one (countries have been there before), a Mormon one or whatever our democratic mob fears at any given time...

It's all fun and games until there's a fascist dictator.

Not to be nitpicky, but NC did distinguish itself from Proposition 8 in banning civil unions and domestic partnerships, too.

NC is a wonderful place, I was making the comment that now it's just a little harder to recruit great people there. Perception matters when scaling a company. Starting a 10 person team is probably fine. Scaling to a 100-200 team gets that much harder.

This isn't a political statement, it's a comment about culture as it relates to recruiting valuable and scarce talent. Startup culture tends to be highly meritocratic. It lends itself to openness toward who you are as an individual as long as you work hard, work smart and achieve.

Given this, I can't imagine trying to recruit the best and the brightest to NC given recent developments when there are more accepting places like NY, Silicon Valley, Seattle, etc. There are a ton of talented people who wouldn't want to live there. I'll concede that there may be others who want to live there more because of what went down, but those same people could be recruited almost anywhere without a meaningful depreciation in quality of life.