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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

#141

Post by zbentley »

s4n1ty wrote: post #89
avilay wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And given that a majority of "Ex-Google" engineers are males, where does that leave a woman (or any under-represented group) founder? She is not asking for money "just because" she is a woman. She is asking for a fair chance. And we need to give folks from under-represented communities a more than fair chance to combat inherent selection bias.

Perhaps the reason a majority of engineers are male is that men are more likely to be interested in engineering. This is a very insightful paper exploring the subject, written by a Google engineer: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...

Not only has that particular piece been debunked, shredded, put back together, debunked, shredded again, and (metaphorically) left in the dumpster, but it's totally irrelevant to this thread.

Interest in running a company or technology is not at issue. You have a bunch of founders in this thread with demonstrable (as in: they have founded companies) interest in doing these things, and they're having trouble getting over the line because of bias.

Perhaps the VCs they pitched to read the same paper, and jumped to the same conclusions you did. If so, that's super fucked up.

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

#142

Post by rayiner »

tomp wrote: post #126
rayiner wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So VCs pass the buck to Google, and Google passes the buck to universities. And universities presumably pass the buck to K-12 education, and the whole thing circles back to an abstract debate about “fixing the educational system” (which we have been trying to do for decades with zero results). Do you see why people are mad?

> Do you see why people are mad? Because it's an extremely hard problem, and it's easier to be abstractly mad and hope someone else solves it, than to come up with concrete practical effective solutions?

“Fix the educational system and hope disparities resolve themselves” is not a “concrete practical effective solution.” It’s a cop out.

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

#143

Post by bhupy »

s4n1ty wrote: post #125
rayiner wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are unquestionably advantages to growing up wealthy, but that's a question of class, not race.

In this case, it appears as though you can draw a straight line from racial redlining policies to the current status quo elite profession pipeline.

While you're correct that it's a question of class — class is unfortunately downstream of racial policies the long term effects of which we've never quite fixed.

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

#144

Post by SamReidHughes »

digitaltrees wrote: post #68
s4n1ty wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But if there are hurdles to black women getting hired at places like Google, isn’t your explanation just passing the buck? What is the evidence that there are hurdles for black women getting hired at Google? For example, does their representation differ significantly from, say, the rate at which they graduate with CS degrees?

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.

Such evidence needs to actually be quantifiable in such a way that you have a sense of how big an effect it has. You might compare economic performance against immigrants whose parents were red-lined out of America until the 90's. It's easier to migrate to NYC from West Philly than from Nigeria.

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

#145

Post by rayiner »

s4n1ty wrote: post #125
rayiner wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are unquestionably advantages to growing up wealthy, but that's a question of class, not race.

Questions of class are questions of race because in America, the median wealth of black households is 1/8 that of white households. Apart from that, even upper middle class black people tend to be excluded from these opportunities because tech entrepreneurs live in upper middle class white neighborhoods instead of upper middle class black neighborhoods. It’s a chicken and egg problem.

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

#146

Post by postsantum »

graeme wrote: post #8

This post would be a lot more persuasive with the pitch deck, or some growth numbers, or something indicating the app is in fact on a success track and is the type of app that is potentially VC scale. I found no mentions on reddit. On google there is a single review on Capterra, no other results. The Canadian ios app has no reviews, can’t check US on my phone. The Google play version has 88 reviews, but all but 3-4 o…

Notice how these comments on GP are of nearly same length, which is a dead giveaway, because paid commenters have guidelines regarding length threshold

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

#147

Post by digitaltrees »

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 am not irate. I am pointing out a lack of seriousness in demanding evidence for a proposition that is obvious on its face. If you don’t see that black people, in America, have deliberately, systematically, and consistently faced discrimination and destruction of their wealth and ability to accumulate wealth it is willful ignorance not thoughtful insistence on fact based reasoning.

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

#148

Post by zbentley »

tomp wrote: post #130
sonofaplum wrote: post #43

The nature of VC being what it is, it's extremely difficult to prove racism at the level of proof that most HN readers seem to need. 99.99% of all startup ideas are bad, 99.99% of all apps are terrible, so how can we know if she was rejected for being black, or for just being another supplicant denied by the VC gods? The email thing is the strongest evidence she provides, but obviously, a doubting mind can find other…

Of all the possible explanations, "racism" seems especially unlikely, given that so many in tech are Asians. Or is this some new kind of racism, where in tech it's "pro-Asian anti-black" racism while in sports (in particular basketball) it's "anti-Asian pro-black"? Occam's Razor says it's not racism.

On the contrary, both of those are documented phenomena in their respective industries. Not all racist narratives are the same. For example, a bigoted narrative of "Asians are weak" may work against that group in sports, but not in software.

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

#149

Post by nyczomg »

anotherfounder wrote: post #105
nyczomg wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"in the end they would invest only in the hottest SAAS startup by an ex-Googler." If that was her main point, fair. But she's out there naming names and strongly implying that they didn't help her due to their racism and/or sexism. That's a pretty nasty accusation to throw at someone. And the names she named were the people who bothered to reply to her at all - they just didn't spend an adequate amount of effort on h…

I can see that naming those who didn't even respond could be more appropriate. My takeaway is that you feel let down the most by those who have the most talk, hence higher expectations, which, it seems to me is the gist of the article.

I don't see how that would be constructive either. If people start getting called out for ignoring emails, that's going to be a lot of noise. And for anecdotes like this, it's impossible to know why said email was ignored. Should the assumption always be bad faith like racism/sexism? What if they just weren't interested and didn't even realize the email came from a woman or POC? Should they be obligated to seek out the sex/race of the person emailing them to know if it's appropriate to ignore them?

I totally get your point that it's crappy for VCs to talk the talk and act like they want to help under-represented people, but then go back to business as usual. That sucks. And I completely believe that it is harder out there for woman and people of color. But I don't think that naming names based on anecdotes like this actually helps. I wish I had better ideas, but I really don't think this is it.

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

#150

Post by digitaltrees »

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.

Red lining was a government sanctioned practice of refusing to underwrite and subsidize mortgages in neighborhoods that had large minority populations.

Why do I need to google and Wikipedia link for you?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

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