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YC Open Office Hours for Black and Hispanic Founders

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: YC Open Office Hours for Black and Hispanic Founders

#101

Post by hardwaresofton »

mwseibel wrote: post #88
hardwaresofton wrote: post #73

First, I want to state that I'm glad YC is making such a step to help struggling founders. While I don't run a startup, I'm super divided on this post, and here's why: A) It seems both condescending and racist at the same time (i.e. you're a minority in SV? surely you're doing terrible - let us help. You're white in SV? you must be doing great, move along we're not looking to help you) -- As others have stated, it's…

I think you can't look at open office hours in a vacuum. YC does tons of outreach - for example: college tour, startup school, Stanford startup class, speaking at conferences around the world, blog posts with advice to founders, etc. Most importantly, YC has an open application process and you don't have to have any sort of connection to get in. Open Office Hours is just another tool we can use to do outreach to star…

Again, I think the outreact YC is doing is amazing, and I applaud them for doing it. I'd rather have this kind of conversation (about the wording of something like this) rather than not have the outreach effort exist at all.

Honestly the point of my comment was to do with tact and wording. It's super clear that YC is trying it's best to be accessible to all, and to do the right thing by groups that may feel marginalized (whoever they may be) -- however with the current hubbub (that has no end in sight) around these issues, a great deal of tact should be applied.

More than 0 people feel that the whole "diversity" spiel is antagonistic, as well as more than 0 people feeling that it's completely justied/the opposite. It's a touchy subject, and I feel that wasn't respected by this post. Yes, you want to help a specific group of society that you see struggling, but it's also divisive to make it seem like a group is inherently more valuable for no reason other than the color of their skin, or life choices, or whatever.

Re: YC Open Office Hours for Black and Hispanic Founders

#102

Post by falsestprophet »

How does this program define Hispanic?

Does it include the over 100 million Spanish speakers in the Americas of European descent? What about the 26 million white Americans of Latin American descent?

What about 100 million "Latino" Portuguese speaking Brazilians of other than predominantly European and Asian descent?

French is also a "Latin"/Romance language. Do the predominantly white Québécois count as Latino? What about the Métis, who are both indigenous Americans and speakers of a Romance language.

What about Native Americans who speak English rather than a Romance language? What if the Native Americans learned Spanish in high school?

What about the hundreds of millions of people from China and India and elsewhere in Asia who grew up in materially worse conditions than any ghetto in the United States?

Re: YC Open Office Hours for Black and Hispanic Founders

#103

Post by tptacek »

officialchicken wrote: post #96
tptacek wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not defensive about criticisms of this YC program, although I find all of them preposterous. My hackles are, however, raised by the virulent strain of HN comments written by anonymous users confidently asserting that they understand the motives of people they've never met. The word "probably" in the comment upthread is where the switch flipped in my brain that made me respond. Oh really? Probably, you say? Please…

Since when can anon's can post on HN? Where's the word "probably" in my response that set you off? How can or why should I respond to you about assertions made by others? Please stop projecting your need for social justice on me, for or against - my only assertion is 'follow the money', and that's more of a fact of life of living in the USA than anything else.

And if I didn't miss it already, I wouldn't be surprised at a diversity-focused startup fund announcement some time very soon. In this light, this announcement is probably a test/market research for that fund.

Please do go on.

Re: YC Open Office Hours for Black and Hispanic Founders

#104

Post by mwseibel »

Alupis wrote: post #44
6stringmerc wrote: post #30

You planning to open up such a thing for the handicapped as well? I mean, until the ACA came along, I pretty much took a risk-aversion pattern career path so I wouldn't get thrown into the "prexisting condition" abyss, and I'm probably not alone here. Personally speaking, a lot of handicapped folk I've met through the years are quite clever, innovative, and determined, because starting life at the plate with a 3-2 co…

> You planning to open up such a thing for the handicapped as well? This is part of the problem with things like this - while good intentioned, it inevitably alienates another equally oppressed group. Why can't we just have "Office Hours" and make it absolutely clear it's for anyone -- and actually follow through with the intent. It just seems silly to says "these here are for only this one small group - and that's h…

I mentioned this below point below - but I'll make it again here. We do tons and tons of outreach at YC. We meet/talk to thousands of founders a year. With open office hours our goal was to have a way to do targeted outreach which we think is important to close the demographic gap in startups. Open Office Hours should be seen in the context of all the other outreach we do instead of in isolation.

Re: YC Open Office Hours for Black and Hispanic Founders

#105

Post by mattdeboard »

santaclaus wrote: post #6

This is very exciting! Is the program open to those of Brazilian descent?

Brazil has such a mixed demographic though. Like I don't care what your personal racial heritage is, but I was wondering, like, if an American resident says, "I'm Brazilian", what does that mean? Especially if they're of African descent. Would e.g. YC automatically just count them as Hispanic even though they're not actually Hispanic, just because they're "brown" (or white, or black, or whatever else) and Brazil is a South American country?

edit: Relevant article http://www.allinportuguese.com/blog/2013/02/25/are-portugues...

Also, how would YC handle, like, a Japanese Chilean immigrant?

Re: YC Open Office Hours for Black and Hispanic Founders

#106

Post by tcdent »

johnathanNYC wrote: post #87

As someone who is both (afro-latino), I'm really excited about this. After reading the majority of the comments, I'm a little disappointed. It seems that many do not understand that being white and male in the United States, by default, affords many privileges that monitories struggle to obtain. If there any questions about this, I'd be happy to answer. Curious to why the word Hispanic was used instead of Latino. If…

I'm curious what privileges you perceive, or know to be true, for non-minorities.

I absolutely agree there is a problem. I've heard many first-hand accounts of violence and disrespect from all races. I'm interested in a solution that doesn't just take the labels from a pie chart and reinforce the dividing lines between what ultimately is one group.

Re: YC Open Office Hours for Black and Hispanic Founders

#107

Post by bakhy »

tcdent wrote: post #42

The explicit nature of identifying these groups by race is off-putting, mostly because it is short-sighted. Racial identification can't be the solution if the ultimate goal is to end racial disparity. This obviously isn't the first or last program YC implements, but as some point the message has got to become more sophisticated to accomplish the core goal. YC is a numbers game. This simply encourages stereotypically…

i disagree with the anti-identification claim. if we indeed do not "see race", then how can we even talk about racism, let alone fix it? this may seem trivial, but it is important. as a gay guy, i've heard similar arguments from people (like, "i don't care about sexuality, as long as you're a good person"), and i believe in good intentions, but many people do "see race", and that creates a social situation where people are disadvantaged because of it.

as i said in another comment here, social context is key and should not be ignored. if the scale is tipped to one side, you have to add weight to the other one if you want to balance it out.

Re: YC Open Office Hours for Black and Hispanic Founders

#108

Post by tptacek »

tcdent wrote: post #106
johnathanNYC wrote: post #87

As someone who is both (afro-latino), I'm really excited about this. After reading the majority of the comments, I'm a little disappointed. It seems that many do not understand that being white and male in the United States, by default, affords many privileges that monitories struggle to obtain. If there any questions about this, I'd be happy to answer. Curious to why the word Hispanic was used instead of Latino. If…

I'm curious what privileges you perceive, or know to be true, for non-minorities. I absolutely agree there is a problem. I've heard many first-hand accounts of violence and disrespect from all races. I'm interested in a solution that doesn't just take the labels from a pie chart and reinforce the dividing lines between what ultimately is one group.

Example: I have an African American neighbor one block over that I see regularly. He works in IT/devops. Like every IT person, he gets yelled at by random people at work all the time; it's a high-stress job. But when he gets visibly frustrated, he's The Angry Black Man. Dipshit coworkers complain that they don't feel safe.

It is an example of a white male privilege that being frustrated and swearing at your computer screen is unlikely to result in a white male being put on a PIP for having a "threatening demeanor".

There are probably hundreds of things like this.

Re: YC Open Office Hours for Black and Hispanic Founders

#109

Post by falsestprophet »

johnathanNYC wrote: post #87

As someone who is both (afro-latino), I'm really excited about this. After reading the majority of the comments, I'm a little disappointed. It seems that many do not understand that being white and male in the United States, by default, affords many privileges that monitories struggle to obtain. If there any questions about this, I'd be happy to answer. Curious to why the word Hispanic was used instead of Latino. If…

There are 27 million white/European Americans of Hispanic descent in the United States today.

There are over 200 million white people and over 4.5 million Asian people living in Latin America.

Do you mean Latinos of descent other than European and Asian?

Re: YC Open Office Hours for Black and Hispanic Founders

#110

Post by mwseibel »

briholt wrote: post #39
staunch wrote: post #4

> Black, Hispanic, Women, Veterans, and International founders. I think it's great that YC is concerned about helping non-elite people. What about just focusing on helping poor people compete in Silicon Valley in general? Does anyone think wealthy founders of any kind need more help than poor founders of any kind?

You would think all the efforts towards social outreach would focus on poverty as their #1 criteria - the most direct and obvious criteria of people in need - but they almost never do. The problem is these programs are created by upper-class people in their media-social bubble, cobbled together from the arbitrary championings within that bubble. Unfortunately poverty doesn't have a strong, dedicated representative in…

In the larger context of YC outreach to thousands of founders a year why is a special program for targeted outreach creating harm?
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