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One advantage startups have over established companies is that there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. For example, I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon. But you’re not allowed to ask prospective employees if they plan to have kids soon. Whereas when you’re starting a company, you can discriminate on any basis you want about who you start it with.
– Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, in How to Start a Startup
Christopher Steiner’s The Disruptor in the Valley in Forbes discusses how this essay, along with Paul’s Harvard talk, eventually inspired red-hot technology incubator YC. He doesn’t include this quote, alas, and also doesn’t mention the reports in the Mercury News and Wall Street Journal of YCs #diversityfail or Tereza Nemessanyi’s XX Combinator. I guess they didn’t fit in with the article’s subtitle: “Paul Graham’s Y Combinator has stormed Silicon Valley and pioneered a better way to build a company.”
YC has indeed had a huge impact. Christopher reports that YC typically puts about $15-$20K into the companies in return for a 5% equity stake; with over 400 companies in their portfolio they’re a powerful force in the tech startup world. With the help of a lot of gushing coverage in the TechCrunch and their buddies in the tech press, 30 of their of the 36 startups in the most recent crop incubator have gotten funding since Demo Day in August, many of them over $1 million. Collusion is soooo hot these days so it’s as good a time for a fluff piece as any.
Paul’s The New Funding Landscape predicts that the cozy win/win/win dynamics will continue for a while:
The super-angels will try to undermine the VCs by acting faster, and the VCs will try to undermine the super-angels by driving up valuations. Which for founders will result in the perfect combination: funding rounds that close fast, with high valuations.
It’s such a perfect combination for the overhelmingly white male worlds of tech founders, incubators like YC and TechStars, angel and “super-angel” investors (many of them ex-entrepreneurs), VCs, and the tech press that covers it all that recently people have started to question whether it’s a bubble. Paul thinks not, and the word doesn’t come up in Christopher’s article.
There’s plenty of good stuff though. Jessica Mah, co-founder and CEO of inDinero and several other YC entrepeneurs have some good perspectives.* There’s also a nice description of how the YC mafia protect and collaborate with each other and “regard Graham as their sensei”. Greg from YC investor Sequoia Capital, TechCrunch’s Michael, and AngelGate bad and good guys “foul-mouth Dave” and Ron (who’s invested in 20 YC companies and helped Michael sell out to AOL ) all illustrate this nicely in the article, sharing different ways YC is great. The early reviews on Hacker News, one of the hubs of the community, laud the article as a great portrait of Paul and praise him for “giving back to the community in such a sustainable, profitable way.”
The Big Interview describes a key part of the YC selection process: the hot 10-minute session founders go through with all five partners bearing down and asking questions at the same time. And no proprietries! What does Paul look for?
It really paints a picture of the so many meetings in the high-tech world: a multi-way competition showing off whose smartest and most powerful and who’s got the balls, people with the power ganging up on somebody looking for help, sadism masked with “it’s for your own good.” If YC really feels so terrible about seeing founders’ hands shaking during the interview, why not create a less hostile environment?
Paul contributes a side-bar, the all-male What it takes (also posted as What We Look for in Founders). It’s a very interesting ad, making it clear to founders and investors what YC is selecting and training for. The ideal YC founders are cockroach-like in their determination,** ready to give up on their dreams, intelligent, and naughty. They care about “big moral questions”, but aren’t into “observing proprietries.” They delight in breaking rules, although of course not “rules that matter” to Paul.
Unfortunately there isn’t any discussion the implications of these criteria. For example, the YC universe now has hundreds of companies trained in an overwhelmingly-male environment that legitimizes discrimination against women. Maybe for them this isn’t a big moral question and all stuff about equality is just rules that don’t matter, but others disagree. What impact does this have on the tech scene as a whole? As women in technology continue to improve their skills in highlighting discrimination, and other incubators emerge, what are the likely implications for YC?
And speaking of pink elephants, there’s a huge collective blindspot here. YC’s companies, selected on the basis of criteria that favor young guys and with the mindset that discrimination against women is a competitive advantage, get great training in what it takes to build a product and a business. Then they’re covered by the overwhelmingly-male tech and business press, funded by the overwhelmingly male super-angel and VC worlds, and acquired by companies run and owned mostly by guys those same angels and VCs have invested in. Lucky founders then share their wisdom with and invest in the next generation of startups. Repeat.
You don’t by any chance think they’re collectively missing most of the best opportunities?
As Cindy Gallop says, guys talking to guys about guys create a closed loop where what passes for innovative becomes increasingly less and less so. Paul’s comments about VCs in footnote 3 of “The New Funding Landscape” apply just as well to YC’s current success:
They could make it self-perpetuating if they used it to get all the best new startups. But I don’t think they’ll be able to. To get all the best startups, you have to do more than make them want you. You also have to want them; you have to recognize them when you see them, and that’s much harder.
Indeed. YC has gender bias and other forms of discrimination institutionalized so deeply in their culture and their selection criteria that it’ll be a very disruptive “pivot”. And probably very entertaining, too!
Update, Jan 2011: Dynamite conclusion still needed 
See the comments for observations about Hacker News since the original draft.
* although as I discuss at somewhat greater length in a comment in Tissue turgor and Y Combinator’s secret sauce, it would have been great to hear from other women too. Most glaringly, Jessica Livingston is Y Combinator co-founder and married to him and she doesn’t even get a quote and a sidebar? It also would have been nice to hear from Amanda Peay of Message Party, author of I’m a Female YC Founder and You Can Be Too.
** more on founders as cockroaches in Liz Gannes’ summary of the recent YC startup school on GigaOm. Congrats to GigaOm for closing another $2.5 million in funding in a very cluttered space . And while we’re at it, congrats to Liz who along with Ina Fried is joining All Things Digital.
Image credit: Pink Elephants by Rakka, via Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons
jon | 13-Nov-10 at 7:28 am | Permalink
Every Hacker News member has a popularity rating (also known as karma), based on the number of times people have voted for and against your posts and comments. The right to downvote a comment is reserved to people who have been on HN a while. It used to be that you could downvote once your karma was 200; alas, just as I neared the 200 mark, they changed the bar to 500. No downvoting for me!
Recently, there’s been a chunk discussion of the TSA: pilots pushing back against the choices between a strip search and groping, EPIC’s lawsuit, etc. So when Deborah wrote an excellent “what you can do” blog post, I thought it was worth posting to HN. It quickly got enough votes to make it to the front page, and then the pushback started: RiderOfGiraffes announced he’d be “flagging” posts about the TSA, and suddenly all my comments started getting downvoted. My karma took a hit.
I asked the community how I should respond, and got a couple of interesting responses. Here’s some of what nkurz had to say:
Given Paul’s point about “breaking the rules, just not the ones that matter,” I expressed my astonishment to me that people downvote a post based on something so superficial. The response:
jon | 13-Nov-10 at 7:43 am | Permalink
YC just added a couple more partners, Paul Buchheit and Harj Taggar. Here was my comment
YuriNiyazov responded
His comment got 18 points (upvotes minus downvotes).
Mine: -2.
HN folks like to pride themselves on being evidence-based, so I replied with a quote from an LA Times interview with one of the new partners talking about how YC had actually approached him a while ago — contradicting Yuri. The results?
-2 for this comment as well. Sigh.
As jodrellblank said in a reply to my original question
Well said. About those collective blindspots …
jon | 24-Nov-10 at 8:00 am | Permalink
When I checked the HN discussion, the top-ranked comment included this:
I objected:
And immediately got downvoted — making my point for me.
jon | 24-Nov-10 at 8:46 am | Permalink
Right. Heaven forbid that minorities should be able to discuss topics they’re interested in.
There’s some good stuff in the discussion, including various suggestions for how simple tweaks in the software could let people who aren’t interested in a particular topic avoid seeing it. Most of it, though, focused on the TSA topics. I waded into it and my popularity took a beating — for example in this interaction:
Eventually Paul Graham weighed in.
Interesting. Enough people in the community want to discuss the TSA that the stories making it to the front page even despite the penalty and people with a policy of flagging all of them. And rather than giving people options to choose the stories they’re not interested in, Paul silently modified the algorithm to remove stories he sees as a danger. Good to know.
Alas, Paul didn’t reply to my follow-on question (which of course immediately got voted down, although later recovered a little). Somebody else did, though, and I think he captured the attitude large segments of the HN community have towards conformity very nicely.
jon | 24-Nov-10 at 6:55 pm | Permalink
Ha. I just checked Hacker News, and the top story is Bruce Schneier’s 2006 Refuse to be Terrorized.
Yeah really.
jon | 30-Nov-10 at 2:54 pm | Permalink
On TechCrunch, Leena Rao reports
Seems like a great deal, and a huge business advantage for all these companies that believe it’s okay to discriminate. Leena also notes
jon | 06-Dec-10 at 12:30 pm | Permalink
In a discussion of conference anti-harassment policies follower commented that Potentially “being different” in addition to standing up and out can be a daunting prospect.. JonnieCache dismised this as “laughable considering how much talk there is in the hacker world of defying convention, challenging conventional wisdom, standing out from the crowd, changing the world and associated platitudes.” Unsurprisingly, I saw things differently:
To which he replied
Looking at the voting … follower’s original post got 2 points; JohnnieCache’s and my first response were at 5 points; our second points were at 3 and 4 respectively. It’s a small data set, but what I come away thinking is that half the guys on HN wouldn’t react well to hot pink jeans on a guy. How non-conformist!
jon | 10-Dec-10 at 9:29 am | Permalink
jon | 10-Dec-10 at 9:37 am | Permalink
In a discussion about Why intelligent communities will always fail, nhangen comments:
I replied something along the lines of “sounds like HN to me.”
jon | 22-Dec-10 at 4:58 pm | Permalink
From Hot Startups Lack Female Employees (even as applicants)
jon | 23-Dec-10 at 11:44 pm | Permalink
wushupork (aka Pek Pongpaet) replied
which as you can imagine delighted me no end. But guess what?
My comment was downvoted anyhow.
jon | 24-Dec-10 at 12:00 am | Permalink
On HN, mattmanser commented:
Paul’s reply
At which point I jumped in with:
The voting?
Paul’s original article: 314 points
Matt’s comment: 6
Paul’s reply: 38
me: 0
Because heaven forbid anybody should point out that one of the guys running YC is confusing two basic business concepts.
jon | 24-Dec-10 at 5:55 pm | Permalink
In a thread on a rape survivor being arrested after refusing a patdown led to a question on why this is an interesting phenomenon (as opposed to reposting interesting 5- to 10-year old essays from guys, which seems to be accepted de facto as “news”). here was my reply:
Somewhat surprisingly I got upvoted — but the thread still got killed. I guess civil liberties are particularly threatening on Hacker News if they involve a challenge to rape culture.
Liminal states :: Life imitates art imitates life? | 18-Jan-11 at 2:08 pm | Permalink
[...] my comic novel-in-progress. The scene’s set on a discussion forum that’s modeled after Hacker News: startup founder: ladzzz.com is like Quora meets Foursquare with questions guys want to know [...]
jon | 19-Jan-11 at 1:03 pm | Permalink
A CoderStack article looking at gender differences between math, IT, and computing in UK teens sparked an entertaining discussion on HN, including this:
Yeah really. For example here’s what yummyfajitas had to say.
So I jumped in.
Looks like yummyfajitas (aka Chris Stuccio, Postdoctoral Instructor at NYU’s Courant Institute) doesn’t understand the definition of “ad hominem” argument. Yes, I am saying that a guy saying that it’s an open question whether women are as intelligent as men is an example of a sexist and self-serving attitude. It’s not an “argument” of any kind, it’s definitional. And it’s not “ad hominem” because it’s about the attitude rather than the person. Sheesh. What are they teaching post-docs these days?
There’s lots of funny stuff elsewhere in the thread too. My karma took a small hit, but it was well worth it.
jon | 19-Jan-11 at 4:49 pm | Permalink
Meanwhile, on Twitter:
Restructure! | 22-Jan-11 at 9:54 am | Permalink
Karma is interesting. The geek manifestations of myself typically get upvoted because of geek groupthink, but the anti-sexist manifestations of myself typically get downvoted because of sexist-male groupthink.
Given that I share certain values with others on HN, I agree with nkurz, but not for the “purple mohawk” reason. HN doesn’t want to be like reddit, and we want quality over quantity. I think HN has already jumped the shark a while ago, but I think the “broken window” theory works for online comments, and acceptance of free-form comments can spiral into badly-spelled and poorly thought-out comments.
Yes, when I clicked on the pushback link, your lack of capitalization hurt my eyes, and I might just be trying to rationalize my aesthetic preferences, but … I think clear communication and writing are very important, and a good writer writes for the reader, not for herself, meaning that you shouldn’t write in a lazy way without capitalization, as it’s more difficult for the reader. Additionally, not everyone on the Internet speaks English as a first language, so punctuating properly and writing proper sentences would aid in communicating to a larger audience.
jon | 24-Jan-11 at 4:42 pm | Permalink
Thanks for the comment, Restructure. I have similar experiences with comments – plus I get downvoted for activism stuff too. Oh well, it comes with the territory.
Overall I’ve got mixed feelings about the quality of comments on HN. There are some truly outstanding ones; but there’s also a lot of incorrect statements made very forcefully, opinion described as fact, veiled attacks, power games, deference to famous commenters, etc. etc. When it’s a topic that I know something about, I’m frequently struck by how bad the voting is — a couple of recent examples are the Drake equation and Tunisian Facebook activists. Overall it’s a much higher-noise experience for me than I remember Slashdot being for several at its height. More accuratly Slashdot had waaaaay more noise comments, but was a good experience browsing with Score >= 4.
> I think clear communication and writing are very important, and a good writer writes for the reader, not for herself, meaning that you shouldn’t write in a lazy way without capitalization, as it’s more difficult for the reader.
It’s a good point about how all-lower-case text may be harder for some people to read. On HN, I do it because trying to intentionally stand out from the others and get readers out of their usual cognitive zone at least a little — a pure-text equivalent of the way Brecht’s musical theater company used to intentionally sing against the beats for City of Mahogany. Also, aesthetically I personally consider lower-case more aesthetic.
I can see certainly prefer why people might not like all-lower-case post, but it seems a stretch to go from there to a downvote. To me that seems like paying more attention to form rather than content, and applying a different standard (downvoting because this post could be better, as opposed to downvoting beause it doesn’t add value to the discussion). But, reasonable minds differ. One of my takeaways from the discussion was to use correct capitalization on comments where I actually cared about whether or not I was upvoted, so it’s good learning on my part.
jon | 24-Jan-11 at 4:50 pm | Permalink
Also …
> a good writer writes for the reader, not for herself
I’m on HN as an activist and an entrepreneur; so I’m writing for particular purposes. In HN’s role as “the new Slashdot”, is there a way to leverage if for civil liberties activism? As somebody who will probably do another startup, how can I effectively use it to get visibility in HN’s audience? And as somebody who’s looking for business opportunities, what do YC’s and HN’s shared blind spots reveal about where I should be looking?
Of course I also want to please my readers by informing and entertaining them, but those aren’t my only goals.
Restructure! | 31-Jan-11 at 7:11 am | Permalink
Interesting. If I didn’t know the comment you showed me and your replies came from you, I would think this person was “trolling”. I’ve been called a troll, too, for speaking against the status quo, so I don’t mean to suggest that perception of “trolling” is objective.
Ideally, I don’t want non-tech discussion mixed in with “Hacker News”, because I find that off-topic discussion is more likely to have sexism and assumptions about a common meatspace state of being (male, white, etc.).
jon | 18-Feb-11 at 8:12 am | Permalink
Thanks again for response, Restructure … a great conversation!
I can see why people would take my comment as trolling. Wikipedia’s definition of a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.” Of course, “on-topic” is subjective — more on that in the next comment.
The screenshot on the right is a great example of Hacker News as a platform for civil liberties activism. During Get FISA Right’s Super Bowl Sunday Make some noise against the Patriot Act campaign. Hacker News was the second biggest source of traffic, primarily from from a comment I left in very popular thread. It wasn’t even a great comment — I think it only got two votes. From an activist’s perspective, imagine the impact of getting a link on the front page of Hacker News at the right time. Just like Slashdot, Reddit, and occasionally even Digg, it should be a valuable platform for privacy and civil rights.
For the last prong of the troll definition, well, yeah, I am trying to provoke both an intellectual and emotional response — as I do with most things I write. I want people on HN to intellectually realize that it’s important for them to get involved with this issue, and feel increasingly ashamed and defensive when they don’t.
So when you add it all up, it’s either a novel approach to social media strategy and grassroots activism as performance art … or trolling. Or both, I suppose.
In terms of non-tech vs. tech discussions, from my perspective the sexism is pervasive … unsurprisingly, given Paul Graham’s views and the presence of hundreds of companies who have been trained in the belief that discrimination against women is a business advantage. And there’s plenty of other assumptions about common meatspaces state of mind in the tech threads that I find just as odious: techie-elitist, privileged, heteronormative, ageist, anti-privacy, unwilling to challenge dominance structures.
So one way to try to change that — or at least to make contact with the people there who don’t want it to be that way — is to broaden the discussion and include meta issues. I wonder if at some level this is why Paul Graham sees civil liberties as such a danger.
jon | 18-Feb-11 at 9:01 am | Permalink
asmosoinio possted Why I stopped travelling to the US and largely stopped doing business in the US to HN, got a couple hundred votes and sparked another firestorm of controversy. The top comment is by edw519 (karma 49228) saying “I have bit my tongue for a long time about this great community’s slipping quality, but honestly, how does shit like this make it to the top of Hacker News. Flagged.” The reply is by tptacek (karma 57896) vehmemently agreeing, once again saying we shouldn’t talk about TSA issues, and complaining about groupthink. davidw (karma 21912) chimes in, thanking edw519 for breaking the rules by flagging it and saying something. And so it goes.
But not everybody saw it that way.
As part of the discussion, Luc had a plausible suggestion for what people who thought the site wa going downhill to do. For once, tptacek and I agree:
jon | 23-May-11 at 7:55 pm | Permalink
At least for me, Paul’s latest experiment really reduced Hacker News’ value, so I’m spending much less time there. But the underlying question of how political the site should be is still being fought out. With the Obama administration proposing the “IP PROTECT” internet censorship act up in Congress and other stories like PATRIOT Act renewal and the key role web 2.0 startup NationBuilder in the Scottish elections, there continue to be a trickle of political stories on the front page. In a thread on Whatever happened to the no-politics rule?”, top-ranked YC commenter tptacek suggested one of the reasons:
Hmm, I wonder who he’s talking about?
Hiiii!!!!!! (Waves)
It’s a tricky situation. As tptacek says, the site was conceived back in 2007 as “Reddit without the noise” by a bunch of people who saw politics, civil liberties, and cat pictures as noise. As the site’s become successful and an entree into the world of YCombinator and friends, it’s attracted a lot of people — many of whom see civil liberties (including being able to travel by air without being groped) as very relevant to our day-to-day entrepenurial lives.
And even more importantly, the world has changed since 2007. In the US, there’s Startup America (high-profile government support for entrepeneurship) and the entrepeneurial community is attempting to organize for the Startup Visa Act. Less positively, domain seizures, IP PROTECT, the aftermath of Wikileaks, and increased use of National Security Letters and gag orders make civil liberties be a key business concerns for every web-based startup conversely. Internationally, Arab Spring highlights entrepeneurs’ and new technology’s role in politics, and Falun Gong’s lawsuit against Cisco shows new categories of risks for companies.
So HN either will have to evolve to see these kinds of political issues as within scope, or lose relevancy to a lot of entrepeneurs — and contribute to a collective blindspot for YC companies.
jon | 24-May-11 at 9:28 am | Permalink
Julia Adkins | 24-May-11 at 10:39 am | Permalink
Hi Paul,
I’ve got a great idea for the beverage industry, which uses toxic sweetners like aspertame, (known to cause brain cancer, but the FDA aproved it anway), splenda, made from chlorine, and nutrasweet. I know of a great non toxic sweetner that isnt being utilized.
Thanks,
Julia
jon | 26-May-11 at 9:58 am | Permalink
You’d think that the federal government threatening to shut off all flights to and from Texas would meet Hacker News’ guideline “of interest to hackers” (at least the ones in or doing business with people in Texas — or New York, where they’re talking about passing a similar local ordinance). And you’d be right: this story was in the top ten when I checked HN this morning even despite getting an automatic penalty because it had TSA in the title. When I went back, though, it was marked as [dead] … flagged, presumably, by the lolcat brigade of tptaceck and friends.
jon | 17-Jun-11 at 7:56 am | Permalink
redpill27 put together a nice “best of” site, making it easy to see the highest-rated comments for any user. Here’s a few other reactions:
Here’s my top-rated comments. Unsurprisingly, there’s nothing in my top 20 about the TSA, civil liberties, or diversity anywhere near the top — or for that matter software engineering. Looks like I don’t align all that well with the HN zeitgeist.
jon | 17-Jun-11 at 8:09 am | Permalink
Looks like my response to Welcome Sam, Garry, Emmett, and Justin, announcing Y Combinator’s four new partners, once again didn’t align with the HN zeitgeist — but at least it got a response from Paul Graham
Here was my reply, linking off to an excellent interview by Pemo Theodore that also featured Launch Bit founders Jennifer Chin and Elizabeth Yin:
Pemo adds
jon | 20-Jun-11 at 11:23 am | Permalink
Intersectionality and you! The comment’s from the Hacker News discussion of Wayne Sutton’s Two 11-year-old entrepreneurs learned the hard way what it’s like to be a minority in tech during Startup Weekend that’s a very HN-ish combination of racism and ageism and confused thinking masked as rhetorical questions and attacks.
Coincidentally enough I’m working on a blog post about my own experiences with teen entrepeneurs and diversity at Seattle Startup Weekend (here’s a teaser) … for the purposes of this thread, though, I want to highlight how much information is lost in the HN discussion by not having votes available. There are some very good comments (for example dgabriel’s points about why we’re not in a post-racial society and nkassis’ suggestion of using AppInventor for Android) mixed in with the bad there … what percentage of HN readers see it the way I do? Alas, no good way to know.
jon | 20-Nov-11 at 9:21 am | Permalink
Paul Graham responded in the Hacker News discussion by tweeting a link to photos of Rails conferences, and went on to explain
Well no, not really. As thaumaturgy explains:
November 24: on Outlier, Michael W Ellison posted some reflections on Ries’ posts, including
Unsurprisingly, folks on HN disagree.
December 20: in a Bloomberg inverview with Emily Chang, Paul once again described things in terms of a filter:
The guys on Hacker News generally liked this framing, although I wasn’t convinced … and while I appreciated his response, I didn’t find it particularly persuasive.
jon | 22-Dec-11 at 5:04 pm | Permalink
Meanwhile, on Hacker News:
As Paul Graham said a year ago, explaining his decision to censor stories about the TSA.
Indeed!
jon | 12-Jan-12 at 8:20 am | Permalink
January 19:
HN didn’t go dark on January 18, although did put a black box over its logo to show opposition to SOPA. But civil liberties now seem to be a fairly entrenched topic …
jon | 08-Mar-12 at 9:35 am | Permalink
Will Hacker News’ new-found awareness of civil liberties translate to more tolerance of discussing the TSA? Early returns are promising. The top story on Hacker News yesterday was Jonathan Corbett’s viral video:
And today “Blogger Bob’s” weak response on the TSA Blog is on the front page as well. Here’s how Paul Graham characterized it:
Indeed. Others on the thread make some excellent points too. In fact it’s a very normal Hacker News discussion.
Looks like the TSA is now on topic