tatianajosephy

I have a strong sense that online work - on CrowdFlower, Mechanical Turk, or Elance - could be the path forward for someone like Jaime. Please do note: I work for CrowdFlower.

The beauty of online work is its promise of operating as a meritocracy. Access to the labor market is not about who you know, or how you appear, but about your ability to perform. Everything about Jaime, from his diligence to his incredible cataloguing memory, struck me as a perfect fit for the type of work that's readily available online: data collection, cleaning and labeling.

Even better, this type of work is going to become a larger and larger part of labor market as the machine learning field grows and the need for clean training data grows along with it.

PG's main - and strongest - point is this:

YC's MO is to spot value where other VCs don't. When YC started, it invested in young founders. PG is saying that YC now sees female founders in the same light: as marginalized (aka, undervalued), therefore presenting a great investment opportunity.

If the valley's smartest VCs are becoming "Bullish on Women", to use Warren Buffett's phrase [1]), PG's essay is big news for women.

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/02/leadership/warren-buffett-wo...

We'd love to see you at CrowdFlower. Email forthcoming.

The advantage of sharing the individuals' stories is not only for preventing scammers. Connecting with recipients would be hugely motivating for your donor base. DonorsChoose.org is an excellent example of an online charity that built a scalable feedback loop into its donation process (I ran marketing there for a few years). At DonorsChoose.org, donors fund teachers' projects, and then teachers submit pictures online of the project taking place in the classroom. It brings donors back over and over again.

Radical concepts that sound really good. Unfortunately, productivity is very difficult to measure. Isn't it possible that productivity would have been higher if the 37signals team were working 5 days a week instead of 4? How does one measure this?

pg, I'm curious why you haven't blacked out Hacker News today. Would love to know your thought process.

Funny... my listed interests are in business and tech (true), and I've been identified as a male (not true). From Google: "Based on the websites you've visited, we think you're interested in topics that mostly interest men." Ouch!