Thank you HN for instantly voting this up to the top.
A woman builds a big business from scratch and rather than wondering why it took so long for her to get funding we instantly latch on to a second-hand report that she might've had a falling out with someone before her site even started taking off.
Ignoring the fact that this isn't incompatible with the presentation at all or that there's plenty of male founders who we know pulled shitty moves in the beginning; why exactly did we vote this up this quickly?
I think HN has a very low tolerance for bullshit, no matter what your background or situation is. If you had a tech co-founder, then parted ways with them before getting funding, then advertise yourself has being solo with no co-founder people are going to call you on it.
She says "no tech cofounder" when she was looking around for funding, and mentions it only to the extent that it makes it more difficult to get funding. The next slides are all about the technical team.
Plenty of "co-founders" disappear in early stage startups that take a long time to get going, and at that point they're no longer co-founders, they were just associated people.
I think that HN has a very low tolerance for some sorts of bullshit. But it apparently it has a high tolerance for bullshit questions about people that aren't involved with a startup's current success.
It's important to get your facts right before you leap to someone's defense, or castigate others for withholding judgement. If you look at vadsye's link[1] to the Nov 2011 investment announcement, you'll see that Sarveet is given equal billing as the then tech leader.
Something - I don't know what, but she's certainly not being forthright about it - must have happened between then and the new "this is what a real CTO looks like" guy took over.
So there's enough there that merits hesitating before making a woman-in-tech hero of her. It's not misogynistic to say so either.
It's a sad, sad state of affairs. Especially seeing the points for my comment cycle up and down as rapidly as they are. 12,4,7,4,7,1 so far :(
After reading Sam's last two blog posts I just decided to reconsider and apply to YC after all; but the atmosphere here is so toxic that I can't help but feel that I'd spend more energy on dealing with YC misogyny than actually participating.
I wouldn't let the atmosphere on HN deter you from applying to YC. YC is far from perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than a semi-anonymous internet forum.
I had a female (technical) cofounder, and her general take on YC was that she was treated well by the partners, and didn't encounter any blatant sexism from the batch, but many founders in the batch were young techie guys who gravitated toward conversing with other guys, so she really only got to know a subset of the batch (other women, plus the minority of male founders who were comfortable talking to women). Also, she felt there was a general assumption (among the batch, not the partners) that male founders were technical, but female founders were non-technical, which affected how people interacted with her in subtle ways. YC could do more to educate founders about unconscious bias (and for all I know, they have), but at least in our batch, I think that would have been considered somewhat beyond the scope of the program. I don't think she'd ever characterize it as "YC misogyny."
HN, on the other hand, is probably more representative of the attitude of the tech world at large, and possibly a bit worse. YC-founder HN comments are almost universally more civil and enlightened than the bulk of the comments on the site.
Apply to YC, or don't, that decision is yours. But as long as you're in the tech world, you're not going to avoid any extra sexism by avoiding YC.
This is a very informative comment. Sounds like a familiar environment to me. To the person you were responding to, sounds like YC still may have a lot to offer but you'll have to figure out if you can deal with the low-grade non-intentional but still-present social exclusion.
1. I can't say since I haven't been through YC, but I imagine that HN, a site that's open to every joe schmoe on the internet, is not a good reflection of the population that's accepted to YC (probably the most exclusive start-up accelerator).
2. I don't know the truth of the original claim (presumably neither do you). My question is this, if the original claim that there was a technical co-founder that got pushed out is true, is it toxic for dogfood123 to state it?
I guess I'm saying it seems like its premature to say it's 'toxic'. I agree that if there are malicious users making up lies about female founders, that's toxic. OTOH, if the claim is true, I struggle to see how talking about reality is toxic.
If I may, I would dearly hope that YC itself, rather than a loosely affiliated internet forum where anyone can participate, has orders of magnitude less misogyny.
Also, if anyone was wondering why pg was trying out comment endorsement, this is why. I wouldn't be surprised if Hacker News was shut down entirely in the future. I wonder if it is the principal discouraging factor for female applicants to YC.
FWIW, why not apply, go meet the people in person, then decide if there will be more misogyny than useful participation.
Thanks for checking out my profile. If you'd dug a bit further you'd have found [1] that I am indeed a transgender [2] bisexual male.
That means that unless I closet myself for YC, which I'm getting a bit old for, I'm likely to have a significantly worse experience than the average woman would.
Suspicion of impropriety heightens concern, probably due to self-preservation instincts. Someone you don't trust implicitly is more likely to seem suspicious to you if there's a claim of impropriety that can't immediately be explained away by any other currently-available information. When you do implicitly trust someone, much less concern is attributed, even without additional information. This applies uniformly without regard to gender - unless the person viewing the claim is biased towards a particular gender, such as misogynists and misandrists.
It was upvoted because it's weird, there's no simple explanation, and people are concerned.
Because the title was: 'Single, female, non-tech founder with no team...and her first 1 million users' and HN thrives on drama and pointing out things that are inaccurate.
Sorry, when someone writes a presentation or do a talk, he's probably being pushed by something:
1. To get his self-esteem to a higher level. Lots of people do talking for this. And they say lots of bullshit to attract your attention and boost their selves.
2. To genially tell the truth and help people. My guess is that this is the minority.
A woman builds a big business from scratch and rather than wondering why it took so long for her to get funding we instantly latch on to a second-hand report that she might've had a falling out with someone before her site even started taking off.
Ignoring the fact that this isn't incompatible with the presentation at all or that there's plenty of male founders who we know pulled shitty moves in the beginning; why exactly did we vote this up this quickly?