Has YC ever funded a company with a Black founder?

"In the US Census, people who originate from the original peoples of the East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia are classified as part of the Asian race; while peoples from Siberia, Central Asia, and Western Asia are classified as "White".

Thanks for the link, though.

If it were, there would be no need for moderation. We would never need to flag posts or have moderators kill them, because the voting by the smart people making judgments would drive unworthy posts off the front page without any discussion or intervention.

There are a lot of reasons why moderation needs to trump voting, but that's probably even more OT. For now, I hope you accept that we should be smart, we should exercise our judgment, AND we should sometimes kill a discussion even if it's popular.

p.s. Of course, an argument that moderation trumps voting isn't an argument that this post needs moderation. It gratifies your intellectual curiosity, I get that. So far it doesn't gratify mine, but it could be that I have read an awful lot about this topic over the years and I would like to see an HN discussion have more to say than what I've already read on Reddit over the years, on UseNet, in editorials, and so forth.

Yes, things are so bad.

And it must be more than "European" naiveté if you don't believe that people naturally discriminate for people who look like them, or believe the same things as they do.

Its the nature of the human beast to not be rational.

> Isn't tech a business of ideas anyway?

Ah, but now that you mention it... most of us are hiding our faces (and ethnicities) behind our websites copy. So even a B2C company on the internet doesn't have to worry about stereotypes harming their first impressions.

Look at Justin.tv, just how many of Michael Seibel's[1] customers and clients do you think know that he is black?

[1] http://www.blackenterprise.com/2010/08/28/40-next-michael-se...

We wound up building a pretty miz alpha because I had no clue what I actually wanted to create to solve the problem I had in mind. Got very minimal traction, worked at a quant hedge fund to bootstrap. Learned to program (LAMP + JS) during the nights and weekends, launched a beta, got basic ("this could be interesting") level traction. Pitched angels, got funded, now working on an html5 based mobile website to capture the function our users find most interesting.

In general, I haven't experienced any discrimination or racial issues as yet. To be quite frank, the most helpful people have not been my color. This surprised me quite a bit because in the finance world where I interned all throughout school there's a strong "cultural networking" focus where you are connected with multiple career mentors, some of whom were "diversity" mentors.

With regard to my venture, I took the "open" approach and told everyone my idea in hopes of bouncing it around and making it better. In so doing, I met a lot of really interesting people of all colors who have served as advisors/friends/partners to this day. The startup community seems to be very much merit based and quantitative. If you have skills, traction, etc. you'll get looks but you wont get a handout for any reason unless you hustle for it.

(You should check out black web 2.0, http://blackweb20.com they have an interesting community of people in tech.)