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

#221

Post by nradov » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 4:07 AM 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.

Harvey Mudd College has achieved gender parity in CS graduates.

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

#222

Post by s4n1ty » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 4:09 AM UTC

pvg wrote: post #218

s4n1ty wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, there is a real "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" vibe to the whole woke thing. Creeps me out. Hope I'm not speaking too soon, but it seems like actual liberals on the left are finally waking up to this Kafkaesque ideology they've been making excuses for [1] [1] https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMqZ2PPOLik [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMqZ2PPOLik

Fortunately the zoomers aren't fooled by the woke millennial nonsense.

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

#223

Post by dang » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 4:22 AM UTC

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...

You did so much damage in this thread, and this comment is so ridiculously off topic, that I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

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

#224

Post by SamReidHughes » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 4:24 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #213

SamReidHughes wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Immigrants who come to the US do so with a substantial advantage in social capital, if not economic capital. Someone whose parents are professionals in Nigeria has a huge leg up from someone whose parents were excluded from professional jobs due to segregation in the US, even if the immigrant comes to the US initially with limited financial resources.

Most of what you need to get into engineering and CS is good performance at quantitative and logical reasoning. Scoring >=700 on the math SAT will put you in the top 33% of Asian test-takers and top 1% of black test-takers. How much of that ratio do you think is caused by Asian kids having parents with better financial resources?

Last I checked, age 18-24 college enrollment rates are 45% of white women, 41% of black women, 39% of white men, and 33% of black men. How much parental financial resources do these students need in order to sign up for Computer Science 101 -- which has basic high school algebra as a prerequisite -- and find out they like it?

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

#225

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 5:04 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #180

tomp wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#226

Post by Pyxl101 » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 5:14 AM UTC

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.

If black people are graduating with CS degrees at a lower rate than other groups related to the population at large, and having a CS degree is a criterion of getting the job, then we should expect jobs that require CS degrees to have fewer black people for reasons that have nothing to do with racism in the hiring process. (The same is true for any other dimension you care to slice on)

Why do fewer black people graduate with CS degrees relative to the population than Indian or Asian people? That's a topic to understand better if you consider this a problem that you'd like to fix. Have you heard of the stereotype of "Asian parents", that drive their kids very hard to succeed academically? From many personal acquaintances, that effect is real, especially for immigrant parents. Meanwhile in some areas, in black culture, trying to succeed academically is "acting white" and is frowned upon.

It's a hard problem to solve and it may require changing the culture of populations gradually over time. You could start by looking what percent of families are single-parent grouped by race:

https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/107-children-in...

According to that data set, 65% of black families were single-parent in 2018, by far the grouping with the highest percentage in that data set, compared to 15% for Asian and Pacific Islanders, or 24% for non-hispanic whites. If you want to fix education and the success that comes after it, then you probably need to start by fixing the families in which children are raised.

It's difficult to succeed academically, and pay for and succeed in college, without two parents to support you.

Now why is that, the difference in single-parent families? I don't know the answer. We can keep popping the stack, looking for solutions in each layer like that, and finding problems at the next layer. Solutions won't be easy.

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

#227

Post by thaumasiotes » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 5:19 AM UTC

towaytie4567 wrote: post #181

Why is it that African-Americans (not including Black Africans in this) tend to seek acceptance into White institutions and power structures, instead of building parallel ones? For instance, TiE[1] (The Indus Entrepreneurs) was specifically set up to fund Indian founders. At the time, there was pervasive bias (not that it doesn't exist today) against Indians as being good enough only as rank-and-file engineers, but n…

This has been attempted; it was a piece of Louis Farrakhan's policy platform. African-Americans haven't made it work (and are unlikely to in the future); they can't outcompete the institutions of the general culture.

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

#228

Post by digitaltrees » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 5:36 AM UTC

Pyxl101 wrote: post #226

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.

If black people are graduating with CS degrees at a lower rate than other groups related to the population at large, and having a CS degree is a criterion of getting the job, then we should expect jobs that require CS degrees to have fewer black people for reasons that have nothing to do with racism in the hiring process. (The same is true for any other dimension you care to slice on) Why do fewer black people gradua…

You don’t think the tends you cite were deliberately cultivated by Jim Crow and the war on drugs?

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

#229

Post by jjeaff » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 5:37 AM UTC

Jommi wrote: post #208

mad182 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this is relevant. If both the product and her CV are weak, the racism card doesn't hold up. If I was deciding if I want to invest money in some app, I'm pretty sure seeing most of the reviews are poor quality fakes would be a lot more important factor than founders race.

You're mistaking the forest for the trees. You could go look at a handful of other funded apps and evaluate their reviews. You're going to find similar things. My point was that you don't need to get into a more subjective, personal quip, as the arguments brought by others (eg. The CV) here are already strong enough to dismiss the racism claim.

I think you are also missing the forest for the trees. The point of her post is that she submitted the exact same proposal to the exact same VCs from her husband's email instead of her own and actually started getting responses for the first time.

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

#230

Post by jjeaff » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 5:40 AM UTC

EB66 wrote: post #55

huffmsa wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course she isn't, but that's the point. Black women are extremely underrepresented, hired and funded. You can't say "well we're not going to fund you without a good track record, even though it's damn near impossible for you to build a track record because we won't fund or hire you. Good luck". You can't say "we're going to fund more black founders, but only those who've already been proven a safe, reliable commod…

I think you're underestimating the impact of being an ex-Googler. VCs are inundated with mobile app pitch decks from all kinds of random people with no relevant experience. Receiving a pitch deck from an ex-engineer of a highly respected software firm is going to make that pitch stand out. It lends instant credibility. EDIT: looking at his LinkedIn, it's clear that he has way more experience and an established track…

The ex googler husband was on the front page of both pitch decks with the same title as CTO in both cases. The only difference was that it came from his email account the second time.