Live data from Hacker News

Female Founders

paulgraham.com

1–10 of 634 posts

Re: Female Founders

#2
I recently published a statistical analysis of the proportion of female founders who receive funding from VC firms and accelerators such as Y Combinator to male founders: https://medium.com/p/2613f58e5082

Year over year, the female participation in YC batches has been improving: http://i.imgur.com/MCLqUm3.jpg

Re: Female Founders

#4
"It's hard to argue I'm biased against female founders when I have a female cofounder myself."

No matter how the rest of the essay is, this honestly doesn't mean jack and insults the intelligence of his critics, no matter how off-the-mark they were. He goes on to note other, more meaningful statistics, which is great, but this sentence alone is kind of laughable.

Re: Female Founders

#5
From the essay's footnotes:

> The 13% number is from a study we did ourselves

What 13% number? I don't see the number 13 mentioned anywhere else on the page. I suppose it's related to this line:

> In the current YC batch, 16 out of 68 companies, or 24%, have female founders. That's almost twice the rate at which VCs fund such companies

...but if so, it could be stated more explicitly.

Re: Female Founders

#7
I don't know about female founders, but I always thought that given the readership, pseudocode problems placed as job adverts in some of the puzzle magazines would get a lot of interesting candidates, many of them middle aged women who have been solving a variety of logic puzzles daily for decades, entirely for their own amusement. I bet some of them could code like demons, if given the impetus.

Re: Female Founders

#8
post #4

"It's hard to argue I'm biased against female founders when I have a female cofounder myself." No matter how the rest of the essay is, this honestly doesn't mean jack and insults the intelligence of his critics, no matter how off-the-mark they were. He goes on to note other, more meaningful statistics, which is great, but this sentence alone is kind of laughable.

I agree. Isn't Jessica his wife?

edit: the downvote was predictable, although still disappointing. I was simply pointing out that picking your wife as a cofounder should not be used as proof that you are not biased against women. Honestly, PG's argument would be stronger as a whole if he removed that line from the essay.

Re: Female Founders

#9

  Like mediocre people in any field, they're fighting
  the last war, and the last war was won by Mark Zuckerberg.
My curiosity has been piqued. Does the author have point of view previously stated on Zuckerberg?

Where does Zuckerberg stand merit wise? I see him in the news headlines often with his smiling picture. What makes him more clever than the rest of you.

Re: Female Founders

#10

I don't know about female founders, but I always thought that given the readership, pseudocode problems placed as job adverts in some of the puzzle magazines would get a lot of interesting candidates, many of them middle aged women who have been solving a variety of logic puzzles daily for decades, entirely for their own amusement. I bet some of them could code like demons, if given the impetus.

Like Lindsay - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2534733/Victorias-...
Post reply on HN