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A Reminder To Investors

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: A Reminder To Investors

#211

Post by mtrimpe »

equoid wrote: post #189
mtrimpe wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are always 'circles' where this is considered appropriate behaviour. In the fashion world there are a few photographers which almost openly do this, known to us mostly because they got so used to it they put their dick in a girls mouth unannounced and rather than suck it she talked to the press about it. [1] An old colleague worked at an IT company thirty years or so ago and on the upper management floor, as he…

Exploiting a position of power or influence so that one can "get away with it" does not mean that it was ever considered appropriate behaviour.

I meant considered appropriate within their moral framework.

I wrote it to stress that it's often group behavior, with the enablers and supporters that go along with it, and that you shouldn't think about it in terms of the 'lone distraught person.'

Just to be clear: I would never, ever, wish to be associated in any manner with a person or organization that operates on such a moral framework.

Re: A Reminder To Investors

#212

Post by srcreigh »

simplemind wrote: post #100

Sadly, I sometimes worry that explicit moves like this deter investors from working with female founders. If the risk is, "I have to watch every little thing I say/joke with a female founder lest I get blacklisted", if I was a VC, I might choose to avoid female founders altogether. Wonder if the better solution involves more carrot and less stick.

It's the same effect, I think, that has caused your comment to receive a number of upvotes but very little (i.e. zero at the time of writing) agreement in the child comments.

Personally, I see where you're coming from. I learn more about how sexism manifests itself in the tech industry every week, it seems. Even with good intentions and a lot of conscious thought about the issue, it doesn't seem extremely unlikely that some action I previously considered harmless could be taken the wrong way.

Re: A Reminder To Investors

#213

Post by acabrahams »

balls187 wrote: post #198
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #155

So here's what I think it comes down to: You're an investor. You're at demo day. There's this female founder, and you think she's hot. You interact with her purely professionally, but you still feel the chemistry, and you think she does, too. You want to ask her out, because you think there might be something there. So what do you do? You resign from your role as a VC/investor. That's what it's going to cost. Then yo…

>But if asking her out isn't worth more to you than your job is, then leave things professional. Quit your job just to ask a woman out? Asking a woman out you recently met isn't sexual harassment. Some advice to your specific example: 1. Don't do it during demo day. She's a founder, and that's her time to meet with investors. 2. If you are planning on investing in her company- potential conflict of interest. Don't ge…

Yes. You are generalizing. Massively. There is no possible situation in which a VC I had met could ask me out without making me feel extremely uncomfortable, to put it lightly.

There are lots of logical reasons for this reaction, and I will list some of them briefly. 1) Power of VC network is implicit threat to 'play nice' and go along with it, even if VC in question has no intention of being nasty in any way. 2) The power imbalance already implicit in VC/founder relations makes 'asking me out' incredibly tense. 3) It would make me doubt myself- "Is every other VC I am talking to (since they are 90% men) just interested in me for that reason?".

So follow the OP's advice. And just don't do it.

Re: A Reminder To Investors

#214

Post by icebraining »

StandardFuture wrote: post #143
brogrammer90 wrote: post #93

This is no surprise. There's no metro area in the USA as cringe worthy as SV when it comes to relationships between men and women. Sexually frustrated neck beards and moderately attractive women do not mix. I can't even count the number of times a coworker has confessed his love to another, get rejected, then go out of his way to sabotage their career.

Does this come from the fact that most "computer nerds" spend their lives (whether by choice or 'lot in life') in pure isolation (if not physically then mentally)? In other words, does this void of 'sociality' in their life lead them to completely lack sympathy, empathy, and general kindness towards others? And does our tech environment (that encourages that lifestyle) also 'justify' that this mentality is not only o…

I see no reason to believe that the tech industry is any more sexist than any other industry with an overwhelming male dominance. For example, a poll from just a couple of years ago reported that one in four women reports workplace sexual harassment[1].

It'd be much less worse if this was a tech industry problem only. The sad reality is that we're knee-deep in shitty behavior.

And I want to stress, since some seem people to take the opposite of the charitable principle when reading posts, that this does not in any way excuse the tech industry. It just implies that it's not due to lack of socialization; it's a general problem of men.

[1] http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/11/one-in-four-u-s...

Re: A Reminder To Investors

#215

Post by lsc »

7Figures2Commas wrote: post #98
tptacek wrote: post #4

Such a simple thing to write, but so useful. Waiting excitedly to see who else will follow suit. Good call.

I guess I'm not as easily impressed as you are. Sam Altman recently wrote[1], "Yes, it’s awful to hear the horror stories of wildly inappropriate behavior from investors to the entrepreneurs pitching them. (Unfortunately, stories like these are not super rare, but because there’s a big cost to going public with them, most never get told. My hope is that YC has enough leverage at this point to make it clear that this…

> Jessica's statement subtly suggests that this behavior is less common, and that the vast majority of the investors Y Combinator works with are above engaging in it.

My reading of Jessica's statement was that she was trying to make it clear that ycombinator wasn't accusing their customers without evidence.

Investors, in a real way, are Ycombinator's customers. Yes, sometimes your customers do bad things and you have to deal with it, sometimes dealing with it means making them no longer your customers. As much as possible, you want to set expectations about those sorts of situations ahead of time. But, you want to set those expectations in a way that don't make your innocent customers feel like they are being accused of anything.

When you are setting these sorts of expectations, it is easy to make it feel, to your customers, like you are assuming they are guilty without evidence, and that's not something you want your customers to feel. It is a mistake I've made myself. At one point, in response to one of my poorly-considered spammer-discouragement policies, a potential customer told me "we don't assume you are stupid; but we do assume you are a spammer." - you don't want to make your potential customers feel that way.

Re: A Reminder To Investors

#216

Post by cousin_it »

wbharding wrote: post #208
SkyMarshal wrote: post #70

Possibly prompted by this anonymous Forbes piece making the rounds on Twitter recently: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/08/07/what-it...

Discouraging. Folks like "Masseuse" that most need to shape up are probably least likely to have the capacity to listen. Maybe it's because having wealth melts ones brain, or maybe a certain level of sociopathy is advantageous in accumulating wealth. However the cause-and-effect works out, I struggle to imagine a person who exhibits such behaviors being fixable through sound reasoning. The battle to get scummy dudes…

IMO the biggest challenge would be making a system that will punish according to actual transgression, not according to perceived status. In reality, the slick investor type will get off the hook, but the virgin neckbeard programmer will get slammed for harassment and also for being a virgin neckbeard. Any ideas for fixing that?

Re: A Reminder To Investors

#217

Post by DrJokepu »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #156
DrJokepu wrote: post #57

You apply for a job or you build a startup and you want to be a professional. You want to do awesome things. Then someone else comes around, whether from a position of power or not and displays romantic or sexual interest towards you. No matter how polite it is, it irreversibly changes the previously professional relationship in a very discomforting way. It's a dick move and it's shit like this why many women shy awa…

Do you believe that this "dick move" is absent in other fields with lots of women? Specifically, do you believe doctors and lawyers ask each other out less than techies? If "shit like this" is present in every field, it's a poor explanation of why women avoid technology but no those other fields. Now if you want to rescue this hypothesis, you could point out that doctors aren't a bunch of low status nerds. But that's…

I was not making an hypothesis, I was describing how situations like this make people feel and then I described how that makes me feel.

The irony is that even though you believed that you made a rational counter-argument what you really did is describing your very own feelings with a comment that is betraying your insecurities.

Re: A Reminder To Investors

#218

Post by tptacek »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #157
rayiner wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's something that everyone knows to pay lip service to, in the same way that everyone pays lip service to being "green." But are you going to say with a straight face that environmentalists are in a position of power?

When is the last time an A-C level exec at a tech company was fired for being insufficiently green?

The premise of this question is that execs have been fired for being "insufficiently diverse" or "insufficiently feminist". But there's a difference between not believing that anthropogenic global warming is a problem that demands changes to the way industry is run, and doing things that have the overt effect of creating barriers for women in the industry.

Leaving that aside, I think you'll find that a more careful look at the Pax Dickinson drama will reveal that it's not a particularly helpful example for this thread. There was a lot of stuff happening there.

Re: A Reminder To Investors

#219

Post by Thimothy »

TheCowboy wrote: post #200
simplemind wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you know? We all know investors who only have male-founded companies in their portfolios.

Then they're effectively "leaving money on the table" by avoiding female founders, because they're being too risk-averse. The risk of false accusations that will blow up are too small to worry about. If they're not outright bad investors, they are at least investing a suboptimal way.

I wonder if male investors are actually acting rationally leaving women out of their portfolios. I mean, we all know how a pretty face can scramble the thought processes of a male, and there actually are scientifically verified cognitive biases [1] that work against rational thinking in a multi-gender environment.

Not saying, of course, that this justifies any kind of harassment, just that maybe some of these investors have learned in the hard way that their judgment gets clouded when dealing with women.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

Re: A Reminder To Investors

#220

Post by dfxm12 »

hashberry wrote: post #161
SkyMarshal wrote: post #70

Possibly prompted by this anonymous Forbes piece making the rounds on Twitter recently: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/08/07/what-it...

The power dynamic of sex influences men's inappropriate behavior. The investor no doubt had a sexual fantasy when he invited the female CEO over to his house and began drinking wine and massaging her. He wanted his investment to be symbolic, to reduce her to a whore. This is misogyny.

You don't have to put thoughts into the investor's head or play armchair psychologist.

The investor acted misogynistic on the face of it. I don't know how playing thought police adds to this.

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