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Female founders who've had a great 2016

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Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#31

Post by tptacek »

exstudent2 wrote: post #28
tptacek wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even a valid observation about BLM.

We're way off topic but again I support BLM and do feel economics play a role.

Black Lives Matter could consist predominantly of wealthy white people and it would remain coherent as a movement.

Similarly: there simply is a profound gender imbalance in technology, and celebrating progress toward correcting that imbalance is reasonable regardless of the underlying economic story.

It is reasonable to have concerns both about the structural privileges afforded to wealthy people in technology and the gender gap. What's not reasonable is to use one issue as a cudgel to beat back concerns about the other. If you think the tech gender gap doesn't matter, you'll have to argue that directly.

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#32

Post by [deleted] »

xkiwi wrote: post #9

I lookup your list due to curiosity. So far I am on the third one, and I learned few thing from it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pKR212H5vQ #1 Y Combinator hosted a Female only founder conferences in the year of 2015. Where is the Male only founder conference? #2 She explain why her spirit animal is a beaver in the video 23:13. Later she explained how a small honey beaver can take down the lion king. The method i…

[deleted]

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#33

Post by dang »

exstudent2 wrote: post #23

BLM is a group that represents economically disadvantaged people. This list is pulled from the upper most echelons of society. Do you think it's ok to represent the wealthy as somehow oppressed? Please don't take my question as an attack, I'm genuinely curious how people who support these initiatives view wealth.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13260049 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#34

Post by bsder »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #4
dominotw wrote: post #2

Links to the lists 1. https://techcrunch.com/gallery/18-more-female-founders-whove... 2. https://techcrunch.com/gallery/21-female-founders-who-killed... I looked up people from first list on linkedin to see what path they took to end up there. One commonality that immediately obvious is studying at Ivy league/private university. Perhaps a more inspiring new year list would have been " where you are born doesn't seal…

I couldn't agree more. Sometimes it feels like upward mobility is limited in the very institutions we uphold as breaking those boundaries.

Partially. But I suspect it's more a case of attending one of those expensive institutions signals "Having the freedom to fail." If you attended one of those institutions, you have backup if things blow up.

People whose parents struggled to send them to college aren't starting startups. They're probably paying off loans and attempting to bank money for 5-10 years. At which point, they probably start a family and still won't be starting a startup.

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#35

Post by xkiwi »

minimaxir wrote: post #15
xkiwi wrote: post #9

I lookup your list due to curiosity. So far I am on the third one, and I learned few thing from it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pKR212H5vQ #1 Y Combinator hosted a Female only founder conferences in the year of 2015. Where is the Male only founder conference? #2 She explain why her spirit animal is a beaver in the video 23:13. Later she explained how a small honey beaver can take down the lion king. The method i…

See previous discussions about the Conference addressing this line of logic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7326418

Thanks, that explained a lot.

One side demanded equal opportunity, but actually have greater opportunity than other side. However equal opportunity does not guarantee equal outcome.

I will check the list 10 years from now.

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#36

Post by Joeboy »

dmsv wrote: post #11

I always feel sad when I see these lists. I've always heard once we have female founders then we will see companies that are useful to women. But all those companies looks so useless to me. I think the problem is that they're targeted toward rich women. I hope someday people will create companies for poor women.

I thoroughly agree about some of these (artisanal tampons, eyebrow pomade), but Open Bionics is a great thing and some of the others definitely look like worthwhile ventures.

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#37

Post by dang »

exstudent2 wrote: post #12
thesimpsons1022 wrote: post #8

why is it so applauded that privileged women do well. Look at these people, from the most privileged backgrounds possible who worked at places like Mckinsey. Yet because they are women we somehow pretend they had it hard. Give us a list of people who aren't from the most privileged backgrounds possible, regardless of gender or race.

It's extra annoying that they've co-opted the Rosie the Riveter iconography. As if these people know anything about blue collar labor (male or female). The people on this list, Techcrunch publishing the list, and it showing up on the HN front-page basically sums up why I (and others) view "women in tech" as little more than class warfare against males who didn't have the privilege to go to Harvard.

> little more than class warfare against males who didn't have the privilege to go to Harvard

There's obviously a good point to be made about class here, but when you optimize for provocation rather than exploration, that's ideological battle. Not only is that not thoughtful discussion in its own right, it damages that possibility for the rest of us. In other words, comments like this are actively destructive to Hacker News, regardless of the position they argue for—indeed, the thing they damage most is thoughtful discussion of their own argument.

We wouldn't ban an account for a single comment like this, but we've explained this to you many times and asked you to stop abusing HN this way. Since you can't or won't stop, we've banned your account. These topics are divisive enough even without commenters coming to the well to poison it, and HN's requirement for thoughtful discussion is easy enough to follow for anyone who consciously chooses to.

Edit: There are other comments in this thread making a similar point about class but more in the form of inchoate rage. Obviously, inchoate rage is not thoughtful discussion, so those comments also break the site guidelines. Yet I'd rate them as less abusive than this one. One can still connect with the human feeling behind them, which is exactly what is missing in the hardened ideologue reciting predefined positions.

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#38

Post by danso »

exstudent2 wrote: post #23

BLM is a group that represents economically disadvantaged people. This list is pulled from the upper most echelons of society. Do you think it's ok to represent the wealthy as somehow oppressed? Please don't take my question as an attack, I'm genuinely curious how people who support these initiatives view wealth.

I appreciate the question and I don't take it as an attack, nor do I think the topic is an easy one. My rough analogy was just meant to argue that focusing on the achievements of women entrepreneurs does not significantly devalue the achievements of men entrepreneurs, as the status quo is heavily weighted in favor of men. I wasn't saying that women entrepreneurs were facing the same burden as what BLM fights against, just that some people think that BLM is "racist" against non-blacks.

To put it another way, most people agree with MLK Jr's dream of people not being judged by the color of their skin. At the same time, MLK Jr. also argued that racial equality wouldn't just come about on its own after victories for the civil rights movement, but would require a concerted effort by society to make up for past inequality:

> "Whenever the issue of compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic."

http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2014/04/martin_luther...

It's indisputable that the achievements of female founders are not as significant as what male founders have achieved. Part of the way to encourage potential female founders is to celebrate what female founders have done so far, even if on certain metrics (e.g. market cap) they are far behind men.

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#39

Post by unclebucknasty »

bsder wrote: post #34
akhilcacharya wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't agree more. Sometimes it feels like upward mobility is limited in the very institutions we uphold as breaking those boundaries.

Partially. But I suspect it's more a case of attending one of those expensive institutions signals "Having the freedom to fail." If you attended one of those institutions, you have backup if things blow up. People whose parents struggled to send them to college aren't starting startups. They're probably paying off loans and attempting to bank money for 5-10 years. At which point, they probably start a family and stil…

I don't know about this theory. There is no shortage of people, including right here on HN, who've founded businesses.

I'd like to see the rate at which alum from these schools found businesses vs everyone else; also, the percentage of successful founders in both groups.

I do think that parentage counts in other ways, including as part of the overall network to which these folks have access.

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#40

Post by kaitai »

exstudent2 wrote: post #25
tptacek wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BLM is a group that exists to call attention to the ways that American society structurally devalues the lives of African Americans, most significantly by stubbornly assuming that African Americans killed by police officers (and by their surrogates, such as homeowners patrolling their property with firearms) represent justifiable homicides. It is not primarily an economic justice movement and cannot therefore reasona…

I'm not attacking BLM. I support it. This list however I don't support because the members are from wealthy backgrounds and are being presented as needing extra help.

How is this list presenting these people as needing extra help? They're all on the list because they have successful companies or had successful funding rounds, and also fall in the category of 'female'.

If it was 'top Silicon Valley founders' no one would think 'needs extra help'; if it was 'top Midwest founders' probably HNers would think 'needs extra help'. There's nothing in the article format that says 'needs extra help' -- that idea is brought by the reader.

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