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VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality

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Re: VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality

#111

Post by hckr_news »

mad182 wrote: post #61
hckr_news wrote: post #30

VCs shouldn’t be the gatekeepers to capital. The game is rigged. Who gets funding is decided by arbitrary metrics, inherent biases, and already established networks. Personally I’m planning on bootstrapping my own business and don’t plan on asking a VC for a hand.

Of course they should. Investors have every right to choose where to invest however they want, it's their money and nobody is entitled to it.

Technically it's not their individual money. VC money is typically a pool of money collected from wealthy individuals and funds.

Re: VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality

#112

Post by phonon »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #45

> Black women are the most educated group when you look at the number of associate and bachelor’s degrees earned within each demographic. Can anyone confirm this? When I follow the links, I get to this source: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=72 That bar chart doesn't say anything to me about inter-demographic data. It looks confined to each demographic; i.e. women earn more degrees than men within each d…

https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2016/06/07/no-black-w...

Re: VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality

#113

Post by rayiner »

s4n1ty wrote: post #84
digitaltrees wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much evidence would ever convince you? How much evidence of racism do you need? How about red lining that continued until the 90s which locked black families out of home ownership? There is so much evidence available that demanding evidence at this point is more a sign of willful blindness than intellectual rigor.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "red lining" in the 1990s and how this constitutes evidence of bias by Google against hiring black women in 2020? You seem irritated by a simple request to support a claim with evidence, which is strange.

I grew up in a wealthy white neighborhood in the 1990s. My neighbor was a Caltech/Stanford grad that needed help building some RF measurement equipment, which I did as a summer job during high school. That evolved into a job programming a driver for spectrum analyzers, which evolved into a job developing software for embedded systems. By the time I graduated college, I had a guaranteed engineering job and a bunch of connections in the field.

There were no black people in my neighborhood. I don’t recall any in my elementary school classes. Thanks to housing segregation—the legacy of redlining—they were elsewhere, in neighborhoods where there were few if any people with Caltech and Stanford degrees. You don’t think that makes a difference?

Re: VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality

#114

Post by anon102010 »

sahaskatta wrote: post #60
anon102010 wrote: post #41

She asks why her husband gets more of a response (a sign of the racism she is facing). - Her linkedin doesn't show what her major was as an undergrad. - After 4 years of working she was a powerlifting coach. - Then boom, in 2017/2018 she is an owner of two gyms and in 2019 she is trying to get benchmark to invest in her app. Her Husband: Google Engineer Masters in CS from Berkeley / Undergrad in CS Started companies…

Just to add a counterpoint. I raised a $2M seed for Smartcar. I had no college degree as I had dropped out. I had no prior work experience. I had no team. The product was still an early prototype. MANY of the founders I know who've also raised similar sized rounds from top VCs have stories quite like mine.

Her point is that her husband got more responses. My guess - her husband would get more responses than you as well.

As someone who also took time off (and built apps) from college, the fact that I'd built some apps (that got write-ups) was a big positive for my early career, even if just prototypes. But I was at a top education org before taking time off so I'd already proven I could get into a reasonable place.

No need to disclose, but your and my story tends to work if you (and or others on team) got into a place like an Ivy or a UC or top liberal arts, majoring in CS or engineering, then dropped out (aka were into the entrepreneurial space)

I think it works a lot less well with an undisclosed and possibly non-tech background.

If you had a path like hers then I am very impressed, your deck or prototype must have been compelling. But very often there are some other proof points (top school acceptance / cs majors etc). That is almost silicon valley cliche at this point.

An awesome scenario would be if someone focused on black led businesses in terms of VC and made a killing.

Re: VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality

#115

Post by thinkindie »

mad182 wrote: post #61
hckr_news wrote: post #30

VCs shouldn’t be the gatekeepers to capital. The game is rigged. Who gets funding is decided by arbitrary metrics, inherent biases, and already established networks. Personally I’m planning on bootstrapping my own business and don’t plan on asking a VC for a hand.

Of course they should. Investors have every right to choose where to invest however they want, it's their money and nobody is entitled to it.

The very point of the article, I guess, is pointing out those VCs that rode the wave around BLM topics just for the sake of their own public image without even delivering anything close to their pledge.

Re: VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality

#116

Post by cowpig »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #54
hckr_news wrote: post #30

VCs shouldn’t be the gatekeepers to capital. The game is rigged. Who gets funding is decided by arbitrary metrics, inherent biases, and already established networks. Personally I’m planning on bootstrapping my own business and don’t plan on asking a VC for a hand.

If it's their private capital, why shouldn't they be their own gatekeepers?

I think the comment you replied to was probably framed from different perspectives:

Parent assumes "we should do what is best for the common good"

Your reply assumes "we should do whatever best protects individual liberties"

Re: VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality

#117

Post by anotherfounder »

localcrisis wrote: post #107
anotherfounder wrote: post #75

I'm so glad she wrote this, and that she named names! As a female founder (not black though), we went through a similarly congnitively dissonant process. A-List investors who would publicly talk about supporting female founders would behave the worst (esp. female investors, Hi Aileen!), investors whose entire brand was around supporting ethical startups (or insert any similar alternative movement) would be the least…

had the same experience with Aileen. Many VCs, founders, and DNI leaders have echoed that All Raise is primarily a way for VCs to improve their personal brand around women in tech. They don't make investments, don't run substantial programs, and spend much of their time/money on PR. If these VCs were serious, they would commit X% of investments or X% of investment dollars to the groups they publicly support in panel…

Agreed.

What is frustrating about these investors (and YC) is that it all is very surface level. I'm sure they believe they are doing the right thing but all of their assumptions, ideas, pipelines, and teams, all are informed by those biases. And there isn't enough being done to deconstruct that. For example, what does it mean to say 'too early' to an under-represented founder? who is the comparison to? How many of your last X investments or team members came from Stanford or ex-FAANG?

Let's put in place processes, time allocations, smaller programs. And let's put all of this in place first for those raising their first rounds - the angel or the mythical pre-seed.

Re: VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality

#118

Post by zentiggr »

xibalba wrote: post #15

The author of this article cites as evidence of racism higher response to her husband's solicitations of VCs than her own. However, comparing their resumés, its pretty easy to see that this is unlikely to be attributable to racism. Husband has founded multiple start-ups that were acquired, is technical, and worked at Google and YouTube. Meanwhile, the author has personal trainer and gym owner as experience.

And VCs who stated in public that they were open to changing their criteria and actually helping that less experienced founder flat out didn't live up to the words they said in public.

That's what she called out very specifically.

Re: VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality

#119

Post by amb23 »

I don't know how to flag this thread to the mods, but--hey mods, can we lock these comments? It's disheartening to see threads on women/minorities in tech on Hacker News get strong, negative reactions from the community like some of what's written here. I would hope the forum can hold itself to higher standards than what I'm reading here.

Re: VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality

#120

Post by anotherfounder »

anticonformist wrote: post #103
anotherfounder wrote: post #75

I'm so glad she wrote this, and that she named names! As a female founder (not black though), we went through a similarly congnitively dissonant process. A-List investors who would publicly talk about supporting female founders would behave the worst (esp. female investors, Hi Aileen!), investors whose entire brand was around supporting ethical startups (or insert any similar alternative movement) would be the least…

Many white male founders have had the exact same story with VCs. If they were black or women they might have assumed it was a matter of VCs being racist or sexist. But this is probably wrong. Because of these three attributes, one is not like the others. "I’m a Black woman, mom of three, and I don’t have an Ivy League degree." Because, regardless of their own race or gender, VCs are highly connected members of the Iv…

This is where intersectionality comes in. Her experience is especially worse because she is Black woman AND because she doesn't have an Ivy league degree AND she doesn't have a FAANG experience.

Believe me, it is much worse when after every negative interaction, you have to check if it was because you are female, or black or X. White male founders will not have to worry about that additional male tax.

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