251–260 of 261 posts
I'm on easy mode (white and male), but I had no network and no prestigious previous employers or schools to point to when starting on my company a few years ago. There were many points when I felt like raising money would be impossible, but I eventually did so. In case it might help someone who's feeling hopeless and has it much harder than I did due to their background, here are a few things I've learned about how t…
Even if her business idea was bad, or her app didn't have traction, or her LI profile was not impressive enough, she deserved, at the very least, the following: * Access to VCs, she had to use her husband's email to get access. * Some constructive and personalized feedback. This does not have to be very detailed, a couple of no-BS sentences will do the trick. I get that VCs are too busy to respond to each and every e…
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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?
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Ok, so you wouldn't respond. But then would you respond when a man sent you the exact same idea? Because that's exactly what happened here.
An unknown man with her qualifications? No. A man, woman, or rhinoceros with a stellar résumé like her husband's, who I may also know personally, considering that I was on their contact list? Maybe. Let us please stop pretending that the glaring difference between these two people is their race or gender and not a vast gulf of experience and credibility.
It seems that what happened is they didn't so much as glance at the pitch deck when "Nerissa Zhang" sent it to them. But then did when "James Zhang" sent them the same deck.
Because if they had looked at the deck when Nerissa sent it to them, they would have recognized James and also saw his impressive resume.
So if they are publicly proclaiming that they want to invest more in underrepresented groups, I don't think only reading emails from people with names like "James" in their contact list is going to make much progress towards that.
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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.
Or maybe that’s because her husband has a LinkedIn page which is easily googleable and mentions three years of working in Google, and she has zero relevant experience.
Or maybe they only look up the senders of the emails before deciding to even open the pitch deck. Seems rather odd.
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An unknown man with her qualifications? No. A man, woman, or rhinoceros with a stellar résumé like her husband's, who I may also know personally, considering that I was on their contact list? Maybe. Let us please stop pretending that the glaring difference between these two people is their race or gender and not a vast gulf of experience and credibility.
I'm not sure why you are saying that. At least to my understanding of the article, the exact same pitch with the first page having the exact same CEO/CTO founder combo was sent. So if they so much as glanced at the 'team' page, they should have seen the ex-googler if they knew him. It seems that what happened is they didn't so much as glance at the pitch deck when "Nerissa Zhang" sent it to them. But then did when "J…
You're right, that's exactly what they did, because many of them knew him. They were from his contact list. I respond to basically every email from people I know, even if I think it's stupid. Emails from random people have to pass a much higher bar to get a response, and low-effort ideas with fraudulent reviews aren't going to clear that bar.
I used to be a freelancer. People would constantly ask me to build "the next Google" or "Facebook for X" that would assuredly make us both billionaires. I learned not to give them the time of day. If a friend or successful colleague did the same, I would respond out of courtesy if nothing else. If I really respected them I'd even entertain the possibility that I was wrong about their idea and hear them out.
There are some very obvious innocent explanations for this situation, but you seem to want it to be an instance of bigotry. In my experience this is a mindset that cannot be argued with, so I think I'm done here. Have a good night.
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> 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.
I've certainly seen intellectually rigorous studies of discrimination against Black people, mostly involving sending out resumes where there is no notable difference other than the implied ethnicity of the applicant. This post on the other hand claiming that discrimination in the mortgage industry in the 90s means that google must be practising racial discrimination today IS willful blindness in the place of intellectual rigor.
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I think he's asking for evidence of Google's racism, not racism in general. Google can't 'fix racism' to hire more African Americans, they can only prevent it in their hiring process.
That’s the thing about systematic racism, each individual actor or firm can claim their actions aren’t racist and yet in the aggregate the effects exist and emerge. Then we get VCs pledging to take deliberate steps to address the problem and they turn out to be vaporware.
However you didn't claim that no actor was being racist regardless, you claimed that the redliners were being racist, which is true. So go after them and their children, not Google.
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…
I feel heartbroken seeing the responses to you and her. I'm a woman, but not a minority. I alter my writing style and my authorial voice every day to be less femme and more "neutral." And these exchanges confirm what I'd feared. It breaks my heart that the first reaction by our community isn't to integrate her lived experience, but to question it. It is to question her being and (implicitly) her right to be in these…
Everybody has a "lived experience" and we don't integrate the "lived experience" of others without scepticism because that would make us easy to con.
>It is to question her being and (implicitly) her right to be in these spaces.
I'll question her right explicitly to be in those spaces. Nothing she has made impresses me and I wouldn't give her money in the VC's shoes.
>There's a lot of work to be done in the industry. And I hope that this is a moment of personal growth and reflection for most involved. There will be a day when these replies will be looked as antiquated. I look forward with hope to that day.
Your blind belief in peoples lived experiences led you to seemingly get hoodwinked by somebody who develops mediocre products backed by seemingly fraudulent reviews. You're so caught up in your own superiority that you fail to reflect on the ideological blind spot that makes you easy to con.
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…