Many white male founders have had the exact same story with VCs.
If they were black or women they might have assumed it was a matter of VCs being racist or sexist. But this is probably wrong.
Because of these three attributes, one is not like the others.
"I’m a Black woman, mom of three, and I don’t have an Ivy League degree."
Because, regardless of their own race or gender, VCs are highly connected members of the Ivy League.
VCs don't like poor people for the same reason most rich people don't for thousands of years. They believe that poor people are losers. And why would an investor want to bet on a loser?
That is exactly part of the problem, though. The thing about systemic racism and sexism, versus just regular racism and sexism, is that they're entangled (or worse, encoded) into the existing systems. You can't really solve the issues without unraveling the systems.
Regular racism and sexism is when the reason you're not given a chance is because of direct racial or gender-based bias. Systemic racism and sexism can additionally include scenarios where the systems in place (such as the private Ivy League club) might not necessarily be intentionally racist or sexist, but rather just incidentally racist or sexist.
From the article, when a venture fund hides their email or contact information, that's not directly racist or sexist. However, if it prevents people outside of your existing network from contacting you, and your existing network happens to be underrepresented on the basis of color or gender, then it's certainly going to help perpetuate the already-existing under-representation in your network, regardless of whatever the root cause of it may be.
More rich women and rich black people joining the VC network would not solve the problem. And yet that's the conclusion this thinking leads to. It's the author's solution as well and doesn't address the real problem at all.
What portion of non-rich people make up the VC network? It's definitely lower than the percentage of women or black people. No one is more "underrepresented" than non-rich people.
VCs are the 1%. Their target of exclusion is the 99%. Most don't care about race or gender. They will overlook almost any attribute if they see dollar signs, race, gender, and even someone's poor background. Because their primary concern is money.
And since VCs hate poor people. And they know this about each other. Even those VCs that don't hate poor people will be more reluctant to fund poor people because they know other VCs are assholes. If other VCs will discriminate then the company may have trouble raising money and is more likely to fail. This is one of the major the systemic problem.
One type of bias does not preclude the other. In this case, one may even strengthen the other. The argument that VCs discriminate on wealth strengthens the argument of systemic racial and gender-based bias, given the disparities in income and wealth between races and genders. This is the indirect nature of systemic bias I was describing.
This is where intersectionality comes in. Her experience is especially worse because she is Black woman AND because she doesn't have an Ivy league degree AND she doesn't have a FAANG experience.
Believe me, it is much worse when after every negative interaction, you have to check if it was because you are female, or black or X. White male founders will not have to worry about that additional male tax.
Her experience is the same. Zero funding is zero funding. Your experience cannot be worse than "received no money" when it comes to raising money. It is a binary outcome.
She's receiving equal treatment.
But she's expecting and explicitly asking for preferential treatment based on the her belief that VCs have promised it.
It could be that these VCs were never intending to offer preferential treatment. Or that they meant that they would offer preferential treatment to black members of the Ivy League. Neither of these answers would be surprising.
That number is wildly inaccurate but even so, it's no doubt very different from the bad old days:
Certain private universities, most notably Harvard, introduced policies which effectively placed a quota on the number of Jews admitted to the university. According to historian David Oshinsky, on writing about Jonas Salk, "Most of the surrounding medical schools (Cornell, Columbia, Pennsylvania, and Yale) had rigid quotas in place. In 1935 Yale accepted 76 applicants from a pool of 501. About 200 of those applicants were Jewish and only five got in." He notes that Dean Milton Winternitz's instructions were remarkably precise: "Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all."
If Jews are extremely over-represented (with respect to their share in the US population, which is about 1.7%), shouldn't there be an affirmative action for non-jewish students?
so this is saying Yale accepted 5 jews out of 76 students accepted overall. That's still a whopping 6% of all students accepted even though they make up < 2% of the population. How is that the bad?
Jews have always had it pretty good in the US, don't know what there really is to complain about.
Remember that it is not "your" team but that you are just a member of the team, in good standing, with the relevant experience, that is volunteering to take on some additional responsibility.
Focus on the job at hand. Don't get into unnecessary political disputes. You're a tech lead, so keep it technical and focused on solving business problems.
Be kind and understanding of people's personal issues. It's a marathon, not a sprint, so it's fine if people's productivity goes up and down over time. As long as they contribute well over time, there should be no problem.
Make sure people take time off. Burn out sneaks up on people. Taking weeks off regularly is essential.
Do plenty of grunt work yourself, don't pawn it all off.
Write the most documentation and help your teammates write theirs.
Share the credit. Credit the team and individual team members frequently. Point out when people do well.
Downplay failures. Unless a mistake is malicious, you should blame the technology and the processes in place rather than the people involved. Humans make mistakes and it's through technology and process that we avoid them causing damage. Fixing the weakness in your technology or process is what really matters.
Most of all: lead by example. You should be an exemplar team member. Not perfect; no one is. Not an expert in every dimension; no one is. You should simply perform your duties in a way that your teammates could emulate with success.
There are a hundred other things, of course. That's just a few ideas.
Reforming the H-1B to do what it was intended to do would mean eliminating 99% of the visas that are granted.
It turns out that the entire H-1B program has been a massive scam. It was created and promoted by American Big Tech companies to make them money at the expense of American citizens. It's been a trillion dollar theft from lower and middle class Americans into the hands of the 1%.
Without the H-1B in place, these companies would be working to fix America's education system, paying more in salary to workers, and lifting more Americans into the middle class.
The program has been beneficial in many ways but the overall effect has been to use foreigners as a weapon against citizens.
One of the most reprehensible aspects has been the propaganda by the Big Tech companies. They're pretending to care about America's melting pot and helping immigrants, but they're importing primarily the wealthiest immigrants. They're damaging America and other countries at the same time, all in the name of money.
I'm guessing the '99%' number is hyperbole, because that would roughly equal around 60K H1B active visa holders so far and it doesn't make sense at all.
Besides, most of the "legitimate" companies, pay good wages (this would be pretty much any company in the bay area). I'm not sure if you know this, but almost all H1Bs negotiate their offers in the valley (and in places like NYC/Chicago/Atlanta).
There's an additional overhead to the company hiring H1Bs as well, it's somewhat cost prohibitive in general.
Are you a software developer? Most people seem to underestimate the work software developers do, it's definitely not a simple "desk job".
That said, I've made my peace with this, if a majority of the people think that they don't want high skilled immigrants in the country (as opposed to say, low farm labor, which hires way more H-visas). I'm cool with it, I'm making my way to Canada anyway, and my current employer is ok with it.
The impression I get is that Americans don't want to do "dirty" jobs, like farm labor, clearly the latest Executive Order exempted them. Somehow, that it is morally acceptable to vie for the high paying jobs, while outsourcing the "dirty" jobs to immigrants.
Citation needed. In both India & China, H-1B has given millions of talented people a pathway to learn new skills and earn a vastly increased income, and many of them have returned to their home countries to found their own companies and spread the wealth. So while the implementation of the program remains pretty broken, and the jury is out on their net impact to America, from a global POV the visas have definitely been a plus.
>Without the H-1B in place, these companies would be working to fix America's education system, paying more in salary to workers, and lifting more Americans into the middle class.
Without this system, companies would move a lot of jobs to Canada(which has a much easier immigration system) and to India and East Europe etc. Which would hurt the general economy real hard.
Those big tech companies already have international offices. Why wouldn't they have just expanded those offices?
Investing in education etc is not really the job of companies in our capitalist system. They could not capture enough of the value to justify the cost, especially given the very long lead times.p
> Those big tech companies already have international offices. Why wouldn't they have just expanded those offices?
Because they still want to hire lots of Americans. They just don't want to pay them market prices. So they bring in H1-Bs to lower wages. If they hired them overseas, there wouldn't be that effect:
From the article above:
"Research by Daniel Costa, of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, and Howard University political science professor Ron Hira, found that 60% of H-1B workers receive lower-than-average wages for their job and region. Google, Facebook and Apple “take advantage of program rules in order to legally pay many of their H-1B workers below the local median wage for the jobs they fill,” Costa and Hira said in an Economic Policy Institute paper."
I'd personally like to see the US adopt a systematic and generous immigration system like Canada's. But the H1-B system has mostly been a farce, used as a weapon against American workers. There are exceptions, but overall, it's most benefited the big tech company stockholders.
> Because they still want to hire lots of Americans. They just don't want to pay them market prices. So they bring in H1-Bs to lower wages. If they hired them overseas, there wouldn't be that effect:
Wow, it takes skill to come up with an argument like that. How do you imagine this conversation happens at MegaCorp_0 between HR and a Hiring manager?
HR: “I know you need someone who has Skill_0, but we want to reduce wages so it has to be a h1b...”
Let's say that this was honestly true. H-1Bs have been around for what, 30ish years now? If we assume that the sole purpose of H-1Bs was to lower wages, then we should've seen slow wage growth or wage depression for software engineers.
But the reality seems to be the opposite which is that salary growth for H-1B positions seems to be among the highest wages in the country. It seems absurd to make that claim considering many other countries pay software engineers far less and America is considered an outlier with how much we tend to be paid.
This isn't to say that H-1Bs aren't abused because H-1Bs themselves do tend to be paid a lot less and come with a whole host of restrictions that make job seeking difficult. But overall I don't think the claim that it depresses wages necessarily holds water. If anything what would be likely is companies expanding international offices (which many already are doing) so that they can have access to the same cheap labor pool and avoid paying the absurd SV rates for Americans.
There are some convincing studies that suggest otherwise. Combined with the fact that tech CEOs speak openly that salaries are too high, and conspire with each other to lower them, it seems fairly likely this is what's happening.
Specifically, this study, which is convincing to me, but always interested in other ideas. This one is a kind of natural experiment so the data are randomized (because companies are awarded via lottery): https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/h1b.pd...
If the people creating US technology weren't permitted to move here, the center of mass of the world's tech industry would shift somewhere else with sane immigration policies, probably Toronto. US persons who want to work in technology would have to emigrate to find jobs.
You can't just eliminate the vast majority of the people who work in an industry, and expect it to still exist.
His biological father was not involved in his life and had no bearing on whom he became. That's like pointing out that the Night Stalker's father was an immigrant.
Steve Jobs wouldn't have existed in the first place without his biological father.
He certainly wouldn't have been born in the US, gotten adopted into the particular family that he was, and received the opportunities that he did had his bio father not emigrated.
I had to look up who the Night Stalker was, now I wish I hadn't. Not going to be able to sleep now :-/
The author seems to have missed the true root cause here here. Which was exposing VNC and NoMachine to the internet in the first place. These services should have been accessed through ssh port forwarding (or using a VPN). Password auth should always be disabled on ssh and keys should be used.
Very few daemons are secure enough to expose to the open internet. OpenSSH is one of the few.
(And, if possible, even network access to ssh should be blocked by the cloud provider's firewall. Access should only be permitted from the user's public IP)
LOL, I was wondering how long it would be before someone commented, ignoring the entire first part of his post and blames the victim. Not that long it turns out!
As I was wading through paragraph after paragraph where the author acknowledged fault and berated himself for it, I was thinking, "This is annoying, but I know if he doesn't write all this crap, someone out there will just ignore everything else he writes. They probably will anyways..."
And sure enough, here you are!
Moral of this story for people who write things online: Don't worry about the critics. You can't please them no matter what you write, or how much you bow and scrape and beg forgiveness for your human frailty up front, there will always be someone who will be a jerk.
I think police should have better procedures in place to try to prevent shooting dogs. It definitely happens more than it should.
That said, bites are incredibly dangerous and not something to downplay. This is pure ignorance. No infectious disease doctor is likely to agree that dog bites are always a "minor wound." People are hospitalized, lose limbs, and die from infections caused by bites. Puncture wounds should always be treated by a doctor.
Even a small dog can inflict a dangerous wound. Kicking a dog is a good way to get a bitten on the foot. Restraining a dog without injury is extremely difficult.
Police should employ pepper spray against dogs, or maybe there's a better technology available that they should start using.
But, when there is a legitimate case where a police officer reasonably fears that a dog is about to bite them, they should be be free to shoot. This is basic self-defense against great bodily injury. Every American has this right, not just police.
It's on owners to do their best to prevent police from interacting with their unrestrained dogs. That doesn't mean it's always the owners fault if a police officer is forced to shoot a dog. Sometimes it's just a bad situation and no one is really at fault.
I have friends who read gas meters for many years. This is a job that involves coming in contact with dogs of all sizes and demeanor.
If a gas company can handle sending some 18 yo kids into thousands of backyards a week to deal with dogs then I'm sure law enforcement officers can be trained to handle dogs with the same outcomes that the gas company sees (no amputations from dog bites to my knowledge.)
There is no equivalence between a meter reader and a police officer's situation. Some subset of police interactions may be similar but many will be very different. A police officer's interaction is much more likely to be heated, urgent, close quarters, and unavoidable. A meter reader can just leave if necessary, which is what they do.
For example, police officers frequently have to enter a home during a domestic dispute with a dog that is riled up due to its owners having a physical altercation.
"It's on owners to do their best to prevent police from interacting with their unrestrained dogs."
This there is the problem. Why should the general public be afraid of police when on a daily basis their dogs do interact with other professionals and workers?. This is because of fear inculcated by their behavior and there is no recourse later.
Police are doing a very different job than any other service worker likely to interact with a dog (as I explained in the other comment).
The general public has very little interaction with police officers at all. A random member of the general public should have approximately zero fear of their dog being shot.
The people having their dogs shot are usually doing something to attract the attention of police and/or not being responsible with the care of their dogs.
In other cases police officers are wrongfully shooting dogs. These are almost certainly the minority of cases but clearly this number should be as close to zero as possible. Police officers should be fired and sued in cases of negligence.
I'd recommend you abandon this idea. What attracts most people to YC is money, connections, and advice. It doesn't sound like you're in a position to offer these things.
If you need help figuring out to work on, Startup School is a good option. Reading Paul Graham's essays on ideas should help. His advice is not all applicable to people outside his bubble but his advice on ideas is excellent.
Choosing the idea is the most critical thing you will do. The difference between an idea that seems good and one that is actually good can be very difficult to determine. Sometimes the easiest thing to do is to launch multiple projects and see which gets traction. In any case, the ability to iterate on multiple projects and then multiple versions is a hugely powerful ability.
I'd recommend you focus on solving some problems you have experienced personally. Want a GIF meme generator for your Discord channel? Do that. Or anything regardless of how trivial it is but just focus on making it grow. Worry about the financial aspects after you have learned how to make something succeed. Maybe you will find that your project can't be easily monetized but at least you will learn what market success feels like for the next project. Or you can decide to do only things that might have a good financial outcome, that could work too, but it still would be very good to solve a problem you have experienced.
This applies in any case where one language is more complex than another. You can write almost any style of any language in C++, for example.
The problem is that every team ends up writing in their own subset of these languages, which means it's impossible to ever really achieve expertise. Each team's definition of the language is different, and no one has worked on every team. Ergo no one in the world is actually a C++ expert at any given company's "version" of C++, even if you know every C++ feature independently. You have to follow the style guide which tells you what subset of the language to use and how to use it. This isn't an insurmountable problem but it is a problem. Rust has the same issue.
With Go, everyone can feel free to use the entire language and every team's code ends up looking and feeling incredibly familiar, making it straightforward to contribute to most parts of any code base.
> This applies in any case where one language is more complex than another. You can write almost any style of any language in C++, for example.
True, but my point was primarily that Rust and Go share many of the same patterns. Structs, methods and interfaces can look nearly identical.
This matters in my view when people think you need to go the most efficient and complex way to achieve similar goals as you might in Go. You were fine with performance loss in Go, so why complicate your life in Rust?
It's, at least to me, a useful lesson. Using every tool is a form of premature optimization. Go forced me not to do that, sure. Rust doesn't, sure. So I do hold more responsibility in Rust than I do in Go, but that doesn't mean I can't learn the positives of Go _(boring code/etc)_ without suffering some of the extremes of their decisions _(no enums, pattern matching, etc)_.
> With Go, everyone can feel free to use the entire language and every team's code ends up looking and feeling incredibly familiar, making it straightforward to contribute to most parts of any code base.
Yea, it's a trade-off I suppose. My problem with that though is when I realized I don't like Go's version of verbosity and spreading out logic. I've had pages full of helper functions just to do some minor iteration mapping, flattening, etc.
Having every team keep to the same standard of _(in my view)_ bad still feels bad. Consistent, sure, but consistently bad.
> With Go, everyone can feel free to use the entire language and every team's code ends up looking and feeling incredibly familiar, making it straightforward to contribute to most parts of any code base.
And it goes a step further. I read Go library code and it looks just like code I would have written. It's easy to understand and makes sense.
It's not any particular feature that makes a language a mess. It's the interaction between the features. It's a bit like mixing paint, it's very easy to end up with greyish poop.
Go was designed by very experienced programmers that understood the cost of abstraction and complexity well.
They didn't do an absolutely perfect job. It's probably true that Go would be a better language with a simplified generics implementation, enums, and maybe a bit more. That they erred on the side of simplicity shows how they were thinking. It's an excellent example of less is more.
Most programmers never gain the wisdom and/or confidence to keep things boringly simple. Everyone likes to use cool flashy things because it makes what can be a boring job more interesting.
But if your goal is productivity, and the fun comes from what you accomplish, then the code can be relatively mundane and still be very fun to write.
Precisely, and this is one area where go fails completely. The features don't interact well at all!
Tuple returns are everywhere, but there are no tools to operate on them without manually splitting the halves, checking conditionally if one of them exists, and returning something different based on each possibility. Cue the noise of subtly-different variants of `if res, err := nil; err != nil` in every function.
Imports were just paths to repositories. Everything was assumed to just pull from the tip of the branch, and this was considered to be just fine because nobody should ever break backwards compatibility. They've spent years trying to dig themselves out from under this one.
Everything should have a default zero value. Including pointers. So now we go back to having to do manual `nil` checking for anything that might receive a nil. But thanks to the magic of interfaces, if you call a function that returns a nil interface pointer, it will directly fail a nil comparison check! This is completely bonkers.
Go has implicit implementation of interfaces which makes exhaustive checking of case statements impossible. So you type-switch and hope nobody adds a new interface implementation. So you helpfully get strong typing everywhere except for the places you're most likely to actually mess something up.
Go genuinely feels like a language where multiple people each had their pet idea of some feature to add, but nobody ever came together to work on how to actually make those features work in concert with one-another. That anyone could feel the opposite is absolutely incomprehensible to me.
Given that I am involved in the Rust project I'm very likely biased, but given that I've focused on the learnability of the language (diagnostics and ergonomics) I have a bit of context on this subject.
When designing a language there are intrinsic (what things the project wants to focus on, be they features of the language or the associated tooling that affect the language, like generics or compilation speed) and extrinsic (external impositions like being able to run on certain platforms, or interfacing with existing technologies like being able to run a statically linked binary in Linux or being able to debug using gdb or calling C libs without runtime translation) design constraints. All languages have (or should have) an objective of being easy to learn, pick up and use long term. It might just not be the top priority.
For the sake of argument you can take Python where expressiveness at runtime and clean syntax are prioritized over speed, Go where fast compilation and multithreaded microservices are prioritized over more complex language features, and Rust where fast binaries and expressiveness are prioritized over ergonomics (when push comes to shove this is the case, otherwise you wouldn't need to call `.clone()` or add `&` to arguments when calling a method ever), you can see how these objectives permeate every decision throughout the language.
When it comes to Rust in particular, I feel it is still a boring language despite the appearance of too many features, precisely because of how they interact between them and fit together naturally. It is not the best fit for every use case, but it is one of the projects out there that is embracing the fact that it can't be as easy to learn as it could be (without sacrificing some of the constraints that make it interesting as a systems language), but we can rely on the compiler being a necessary part of the developer toolchain to make the compiler understand the user's intent when they do things that make sense from extrapolated misunderstanding of the language and help them write the "correct" code instead. This has the added benefit that reading the code is easier because you have to "guess" much less what it is doing. Remember that if the code can confuse a parser it will also confuse humans. On the opposite end of the spectrum you have JavaScript, where it's grammar has a lot of optional or redundant ways of doing the same thing (think semicolon insertion), which makes the act of reading and debugging code harder. This is a reasonable approach in a case like the web, less so in a compiled language that can evolve independently from the end users' platform.
This is the main issue I have with app security. It would be great if one could deny network access to apps. I would be much more willing to install many apps if I knew they would keep the data local and not be able to send my data to some insecure cloud service for sale to the highest bidder behind my back.
It would be cool if app stores showed which apps require network access and which don't.
That is cool but now you're relying on some random third-party app developer for your security/privacy. Even if they're good people, there's nothing to stop them from selling it to some jerk that will enable their own apps to bypass it and/or enable other shady developers to bypass it for money.
This kind of software can also be difficult to get right. There may be ways to easily bypass it.
If Google did this, I'd seriously consider going back to Android.
If they were black or women they might have assumed it was a matter of VCs being racist or sexist. But this is probably wrong.
Because of these three attributes, one is not like the others.
"I’m a Black woman, mom of three, and I don’t have an Ivy League degree."
Because, regardless of their own race or gender, VCs are highly connected members of the Ivy League.
VCs don't like poor people for the same reason most rich people don't for thousands of years. They believe that poor people are losers. And why would an investor want to bet on a loser?