VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by callalex » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 11:00 PM UTC

huffmsa wrote: post #37

atlasunshrugged wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as why VCs wouldn't respond to emails, from my brief time working at a VC firm I think the logic was either 1) We don't want to start a conversation and give them false hope and 2) Not replying makes it seem like we're too busy and important to respond to everyone (and also there was some thought process of we don't owe anyone anything in the same way the average person doesn't feel obligated to respond to spa…

But they responded to her husband, but not her. Supposedly the same content, same info. Just the sender was different. Unless of course you think she's not being entirely truthful.

“Same content, same info. Just the sender was different”

When it comes to early-stage investment and company building, the sender is a huge part of the contents of the message.

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

#172

Post by anotherfounder » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 11:01 PM UTC

It is amazing to me if that the entire conversation on the thread is about her credibility, and not at all towards the systems that lead to blogposts such as these. It isn't one interaction, or one round or one app, these are system issues!

I think it is more interesting to discuss how all of the investor assumptions, ideas, pipelines, and teams, all are informed. 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?

Maybe YC can take the lead here? @mwseibel?

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

#173

Post by tptacek » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 11:12 PM UTC

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?

Other industries faced similar problems and materially improved representation. Ours steadfastly refuses, and instead comes up with increasingly silly special pleadings. The last CS gender debate I saw devolved to an argument about the behavior of monkeys in laboratories. People saying there isn't a problem in the industry are making an extraordinary claim, and pretending otherwise.

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

#174

Post by callalex » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 11:13 PM UTC

thinkindie wrote: post #115

mad182 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just because some rich a-hole tweets and blogs something doesn’t mean that anybody actually believes them. In fact, most people have a decent BS detector, see these fluff statements for what they are, roll their eyes, and move on with their life.

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

#175

Post by harryh » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 11:16 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #173

tomp wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Other industries faced similar problems and materially improved representation. Ours steadfastly refuses, and instead comes up with increasingly silly special pleadings. The last CS gender debate I saw devolved to an argument about the behavior of monkeys in laboratories. People saying there isn't a problem in the industry are making an extraordinary claim, and pretending otherwise.

At least some other industries with problems (law, medicine) have an oversupply of practitioners that is limited by cartel behavior. This does make this problem a bit more tractable.

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

#176

Post by jbay808 » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 11:16 PM UTC

oh_sigh wrote: post #33

gnicholas wrote: post #19

Seems like the most compelling evidence of racially-disparate treatment is that she got no responses when reaching out via her own email address, but received some responses when reaching out via her husband's (he is an Asian-American man with a recognizably Asian name). Assuming the emails sent were identical, this would be pretty solid evidence of bias. One potential confounding issue is that her husband is a forme…

Her name is "Nerissa Zhang" - unless they are looking through for profile pictures of her or something, wouldn't they assume she is Asian as well? At least for me, "Nerissa" is a name of unknown origin, maybe Greek. Zhang is clearly Chinese. I would assume the person was Chinese or at least 50% Chinese if I was forced to guess about their race/ethnicity.

Do people usually change their email accounts when they marry and take their partner's name?

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

#177

Post by tptacek » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 11:16 PM UTC

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.

No, the disadvantage is racialized. White households at the 10th, 50th, and 90th percentile of income live in neighborhoods where the median income is a double digits percentile higher than black households at the same income level, and the effect amplifies the lower your household income is.

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

#178

Post by tomp » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 11:22 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #173

tomp wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Other industries faced similar problems and materially improved representation. Ours steadfastly refuses, and instead comes up with increasingly silly special pleadings. The last CS gender debate I saw devolved to an argument about the behavior of monkeys in laboratories. People saying there isn't a problem in the industry are making an extraordinary claim, and pretending otherwise.

Ours in an industry with extremely low barriers to entry (you don't even need a degree!), no formal credentialism and therefore much more meritocratic, but on the other hand without the enhanced social status of say law or medicine. I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this point, or if it has any relevance on the representation, but suffice to say, you can't really compare it with "other" (probably law & medicine, not trucking & nursing) industries that are invariably completely different.

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

#179

Post by tptacek » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 11:24 PM UTC

harryh wrote: post #175

tptacek wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other industries faced similar problems and materially improved representation. Ours steadfastly refuses, and instead comes up with increasingly silly special pleadings. The last CS gender debate I saw devolved to an argument about the behavior of monkeys in laboratories. People saying there isn't a problem in the industry are making an extraordinary claim, and pretending otherwise.

At least some other industries with problems (law, medicine) have an oversupply of practitioners that is limited by cartel behavior. This does make this problem a bit more tractable.

I think that's a fair point! There needs to be a sustained effort across the board, I think; the solution will be iterated, and involve continued lifts both from the labor supply and the demand side of industry.

What worries me is that we have a coordination problem, and if you snipe at efforts to make employers retain more URMs, you're damaging the case for the pipeline to supply more URMs.

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

#180

Post by tptacek » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 11:26 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #178

tptacek wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other industries faced similar problems and materially improved representation. Ours steadfastly refuses, and instead comes up with increasingly silly special pleadings. The last CS gender debate I saw devolved to an argument about the behavior of monkeys in laboratories. People saying there isn't a problem in the industry are making an extraordinary claim, and pretending otherwise.

Ours in an industry with extremely low barriers to entry (you don't even need a degree!), no formal credentialism and therefore much more meritocratic, but on the other hand without the enhanced social status of say law or medicine. I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this point, or if it has any relevance on the representation, but suffice to say, you can't really compare it with "other" (probably law & medic…

Most practitioners in our industry are fed to it through the university pipeline. It's not interesting to this particular discussion to note that the pipeline can be bypassed by especially motivated people, because it's the task of the industry to make sure that URMs don't need to clear a higher bar for motivation and resourcefulness than the median practitioner does.