This post would be a lot more persuasive with the pitch deck, or some growth numbers, or something indicating the app is in fact on a success track and is the type of app that is potentially VC scale.
I found no mentions on reddit. On google there is a single review on Capterra, no other results.
The Canadian ios app has no reviews, can’t check US on my phone. The Google play version has 88 reviews, but all but 3-4 of them are from Jan 26-Feb 2, with only one since, in May.
So some evidence of traction, product market fit, growth, or the general idea behind the app (pitch deck) would help with the argument.
The author does highlight an issue of how to get funded if you don’t have an existing network though. Network based introductions seems to be the norm for VC from what I’ve heard. And to be clear, there may be racism involved: my point is it’s hard to tell without knowing more about the app’s and whether it seems plausibly a fit for VC. Once an app has been around for a year you need more evidence of traction.
Edit: I should mention that if the app is indeed somewhere between “can be bootstrapped” and “needs VC investment” then there are are new options like Tinyseed aimed at this middle ground of company. Another commented pointed out that a competing app has 1-10 employees, which is not VC scale.
101 ratings with all but two being 5-stars. I hesitate to say that the positive reviews are largely fake, but it sure seems like it. Broken English and vague praise for the app characterize most of the reviews.
For example: "My friend recommended to me for experiencing this app. At the fist time, I didn't know this application could bring benefits to me. However, after all I use this app more frequently because its advantages. Very useful!"
What? Further, all 5-star reviews with the exception of one were written between 01/28/2020 and 01/30/2020. That leaves exactly three reviews of the 101 written outside this two-day window. Massive red flag.
I was a customer at one of their gyms and the app was garbage. It frequently crashed and there were huge bugs with basic stuff like the dates I'd be billed for renewal being wrong. I didn't realize I was still subscribed and they charged me ~$250 for a month where I didn't even go in.
Unethical Life Pro Tip (takeaway): Pay people to submit five star reviews about your competitor’s product that obviously look fake. Bonus points if they're all submitted on the same day.
But this is relevant. If both the product and her CV are weak, the racism card doesn't hold up. If I was deciding if I want to invest money in some app, I'm pretty sure seeing most of the reviews are poor quality fakes would be a lot more important factor than founders race.
You're mistaking the forest for the trees. You could go look at a handful of other funded apps and evaluate their reviews. You're going to find similar things.
My point was that you don't need to get into a more subjective, personal quip, as the arguments brought by others (eg. The CV) here are already strong enough to dismiss the racism claim.
I think you are also missing the forest for the trees. The point of her post is that she submitted the exact same proposal to the exact same VCs from her husband's email instead of her own and actually started getting responses for the first time.
Or maybe that’s because her husband has a LinkedIn page which is easily googleable and mentions three years of working in Google, and she has zero relevant experience.
I don't think any VC would like to be attached to the app if the author were to be committing fraud under the FTC Act. Not only are the app reviews suspicious, but the testimonial pictures[0] are definitely faked.
This isn't very acceptable to say at the moment (hence the throwaway account), but it seems like it would make a lot more sense for preferential treatment to come earlier in the pipeline. That is, instead of VCs using race as a major factor in determining who to fund (especially 1M+ rounds), race and other similar factors can be used to help provide training, networking, and other opportunities that help give historically under-served populations more of a fighting chance to someday be in a position to raise funding.
This is even more unacceptable to say right now, but many of us white males get ignored by VCs and we know it isn't because of our race or gender. It's because VCs won't fund you if they don't think you'll make a 50-100x or more return for their LPs.
Notice how these comments on GP are of nearly same length, which is a dead giveaway, because paid commenters have guidelines regarding length threshold
Except that her experiment changed three variables: her husband is male and Asian and an ex-Google engineer, while she is none of those. So it's not possible to draw the conclusion that the difference in response comes only from race.
(To be clear, I personally believe that race & gender do have an impact in the response from VCs, I just don't think her experience proves it.)
But if there are hurdles to black women getting hired at places like Google, isn’t your explanation just passing the buck?
People aren’t happy with the status quo, where one of our most important and creative industries is nearly devoid of people who make up more than 1 in 10 Americans. In view of that, I don’t think it passes muster to say that “we don’t discriminate against black women, we just look for Founders in places that are nearly exclusively white/Asian.” Pipelines need to be reformed.
I worked at Google, and if racism is present in the hiring process, it's to the benefit of minorities. Google would (at least during my time there) jump through a lot of hoops give POCs and women on-site interviews, and the review process was scrubbed of racial information. Many employees took it upon themselves to avoid using gendered language in their reviews as well, to avoid that possibly playing a role.
That being said, over the course of ~50 on-site interviews I conducted there, only 2 were Black, and they were both from Africa, not the United States. The reality is, African Americans are woefully under represented in computer science well upstream of companies that would love to hire them. Even if you assume all corporations are evil, hiring more POCs would be in their best interest at this point just to avoid lawsuits and to have better optics.
So VCs pass the buck to Google, and Google passes the buck to universities. And universities presumably pass the buck to K-12 education, and the whole thing circles back to an abstract debate about “fixing the educational system” (which we have been trying to do for decades with zero results). Do you see why people are mad?
Because it's an extremely hard problem, and it's easier to be abstractly mad and hope someone else solves it, than to come up with concrete practical effective solutions?
Other industries faced similar problems and materially improved representation. Ours steadfastly refuses, and instead comes up with increasingly silly special pleadings. The last CS gender debate I saw devolved to an argument about the behavior of monkeys in laboratories. People saying there isn't a problem in the industry are making an extraordinary claim, and pretending otherwise.
Ours in an industry with extremely low barriers to entry (you don't even need a degree!), no formal credentialism and therefore much more meritocratic, but on the other hand without the enhanced social status of say law or medicine. I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this point, or if it has any relevance on the representation, but suffice to say, you can't really compare it with "other" (probably law & medicine, not trucking & nursing) industries that are invariably completely different.
Most practitioners in our industry are fed to it through the university pipeline. It's not interesting to this particular discussion to note that the pipeline can be bypassed by especially motivated people, because it's the task of the industry to make sure that URMs don't need to clear a higher bar for motivation and resourcefulness than the median practitioner does.
At least some other industries with problems (law, medicine) have an oversupply of practitioners that is limited by cartel behavior. This does make this problem a bit more tractable.
I think that's a fair point! There needs to be a sustained effort across the board, I think; the solution will be iterated, and involve continued lifts both from the labor supply and the demand side of industry.
What worries me is that we have a coordination problem, and if you snipe at efforts to make employers retain more URMs, you're damaging the case for the pipeline to supply more URMs.
I feel like this problem was easier to solve in other industries. For instance for doctors or lawyers there was a long line of women who wanted to be doctors and lawyers but couldn't because of institutional barriers.
All we had to do was remove the barriers.
Software is harder. I see three places we are losing women. First is women who never even consider the field, the second is women who drop out of car in college, and the third is women who switch fields from cs.
We're losing the most women in the first step in the pipeline and I've tried to convince so many of my girl friends to join software because I work half as much and make twice as much as them. But despite this they all had absolutely no interest in joining. They mostly had two fears. One was they wouldn't be good at it, but overwhelmingly the fear was they wouldn't like it.
The second was women who switch in college. I only know 2 women who started off cs and switched. One switched because she didn't like it. The other switched because she felt intimidated because she was put in a class with people like myself who had years of coding experience in a classroom, summer camps, and as a hobby before our first class in CS.
For the third leak in the pipeline all the women I know who left, left because they didn't enjoy the work. Some because they wanted to feel more connected to their work and people, moving from software to roles like therapist and teacher.
I think it's incredibly important we try to get women into tech. Women those women who would enjoy it lives would be better, consumers would enjoy better software, and our industry would be healthier.
But I think to do that it's important we use identify the right root causes.
I one of which is treating devs like rockstars aka children with specialized skills that need to be managed instead of professionals similar to engineers.
But I don't think sexism plays a big part. It exists,and it should be eliminated, every female dev I've talked to has experienced it. But none of them mentioned it as a reason they were thinking of leaving software.(at the professional level, I think it's more impactful at the college level where you have a bunch of kids who have no idea how to talk to women, and peer groups are more influential). But all my friends who are doctors and lawyers also experienced sexism, and in most cases far worse than the devs.
Repeating myself here: I believe the solution to this will be iterated, and will require work both on the supply and on the demand side; it's in part a coordination problem. Industry will need to put in a big lift without immediate significant returns, because otherwise there's little incentive for the pipeline to correct itself. Correcting generations of obstacles to participation isn't easy.
Radical affirmative action. Not radical in the rioting / revolution understanding of the word, but in its application.
So, if the issue with systematic racism is such that it endangers the foundational core of American society, it's time to take a big risk: literally pull random people to sit on VC and companies boards, in skilled jobs, etc. (a bit like the Diversity Visa Lottery the US already does for immigration). And train them on the job.
Sure, there will be issues here and there, but it would definitely solve the issue once and for all. It wouldn't even have to be explicitly racial. If it's truly random, you would end up with an accurate representation of the population.
It would also desegregate schools and neighborhoods, too, because with such a disruption people would have to move to match their new jobs.
Now, an exception should be made of course for professions where an error would mean life or death (or injury): doctors, airline pilots, etc. But I suspect 95% of careers at least could be desegregated in this way.
And perhaps an exception for jobs that truly require special abilities: professor of physics, professional athlete, etc.
If you want to label 'not having much power or responsibility' as 'passing the buck' that's your prerogative, but poo colored glasses hide reality just as well as the rose colored kind. If they're striving to create equal opportunity for their employees, then Google is doing everything they have a responsibility to do in my book.
How much evidence would ever convince you? How much evidence of racism do you need? How about red lining that continued until the 90s which locked black families out of home ownership? There is so much evidence available that demanding evidence at this point is more a sign of willful blindness than intellectual rigor.
If black people are graduating with CS degrees at a lower rate than other groups related to the population at large, and having a CS degree is a criterion of getting the job, then we should expect jobs that require CS degrees to have fewer black people for reasons that have nothing to do with racism in the hiring process. (The same is true for any other dimension you care to slice on)
Why do fewer black people graduate with CS degrees relative to the population than Indian or Asian people? That's a topic to understand better if you consider this a problem that you'd like to fix. Have you heard of the stereotype of "Asian parents", that drive their kids very hard to succeed academically? From many personal acquaintances, that effect is real, especially for immigrant parents. Meanwhile in some areas, in black culture, trying to succeed academically is "acting white" and is frowned upon.
It's a hard problem to solve and it may require changing the culture of populations gradually over time. You could start by looking what percent of families are single-parent grouped by race:
According to that data set, 65% of black families were single-parent in 2018, by far the grouping with the highest percentage in that data set, compared to 15% for Asian and Pacific Islanders, or 24% for non-hispanic whites. If you want to fix education and the success that comes after it, then you probably need to start by fixing the families in which children are raised.
It's difficult to succeed academically, and pay for and succeed in college, without two parents to support you.
Now why is that, the difference in single-parent families? I don't know the answer. We can keep popping the stack, looking for solutions in each layer like that, and finding problems at the next layer. Solutions won't be easy.
I think he's asking for evidence of Google's racism, not racism in general. Google can't 'fix racism' to hire more African Americans, they can only prevent it in their hiring process.
That’s the thing about systematic racism, each individual actor or firm can claim their actions aren’t racist and yet in the aggregate the effects exist and emerge.
Then we get VCs pledging to take deliberate steps to address the problem and they turn out to be vaporware.
If each individual actor or firm is not being racist than no racism, systemic or not, exists in the aggregate.
However you didn't claim that no actor was being racist regardless, you claimed that the redliners were being racist, which is true. So go after them and their children, not Google.
Such evidence needs to actually be quantifiable in such a way that you have a sense of how big an effect it has. You might compare economic performance against immigrants whose parents were red-lined out of America until the 90's. It's easier to migrate to NYC from West Philly than from Nigeria.
Immigrants who come to the US do so with a substantial advantage in social capital, if not economic capital. Someone whose parents are professionals in Nigeria has a huge leg up from someone whose parents were excluded from professional jobs due to segregation in the US, even if the immigrant comes to the US initially with limited financial resources.
Most of what you need to get into engineering and CS is good performance at quantitative and logical reasoning. Scoring >=700 on the math SAT will put you in the top 33% of Asian test-takers and top 1% of black test-takers. How much of that ratio do you think is caused by Asian kids having parents with better financial resources?
Last I checked, age 18-24 college enrollment rates are 45% of white women, 41% of black women, 39% of white men, and 33% of black men. How much parental financial resources do these students need in order to sign up for Computer Science 101 -- which has basic high school algebra as a prerequisite -- and find out they like it?
Concrete evidence of discriminatory activities, concrete evidence of policies which systemically exclude people who happen to be black for no bona-fide reason (Think "We're looking for a culture fit" more than "We want an employee from a prestigious school").
Combined with a sufficient quantity or data, and especially with some sort of trend that implies black underrepresentation.
I've certainly seen intellectually rigorous studies of discrimination against Black people, mostly involving sending out resumes where there is no notable difference other than the implied ethnicity of the applicant. This post on the other hand claiming that discrimination in the mortgage industry in the 90s means that google must be practising racial discrimination today IS willful blindness in the place of intellectual rigor.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by "red lining" in the 1990s and how this constitutes evidence of bias by Google against hiring black women in 2020?
You seem irritated by a simple request to support a claim with evidence, which is strange.
I grew up in a wealthy white neighborhood in the 1990s. My neighbor was a Caltech/Stanford grad that needed help building some RF measurement equipment, which I did as a summer job during high school. That evolved into a job programming a driver for spectrum analyzers, which evolved into a job developing software for embedded systems. By the time I graduated college, I had a guaranteed engineering job and a bunch of connections in the field.
There were no black people in my neighborhood. I don’t recall any in my elementary school classes. Thanks to housing segregation—the legacy of redlining—they were elsewhere, in neighborhoods where there were few if any people with Caltech and Stanford degrees. You don’t think that makes a difference?
In this case, it appears as though you can draw a straight line from racial redlining policies to the current status quo elite profession pipeline.
While you're correct that it's a question of class — class is unfortunately downstream of racial policies the long term effects of which we've never quite fixed.
No, the disadvantage is racialized. White households at the 10th, 50th, and 90th percentile of income live in neighborhoods where the median income is a double digits percentile higher than black households at the same income level, and the effect amplifies the lower your household income is.
The Reardon, Fox, Townsend paper. You can just go read it. If you come back with rebuttals to the paper, I'd appreciate if you'd source them comparably. Thanks!
Please stop responding to every comment asking for a source, it’s incredibly unhelpful. If that’s honestly all you got from this discussion about inequality then I truly feel sorry for you.
Questions of class are questions of race because in America, the median wealth of black households is 1/8 that of white households. Apart from that, even upper middle class black people tend to be excluded from these opportunities because tech entrepreneurs live in upper middle class white neighborhoods instead of upper middle class black neighborhoods. It’s a chicken and egg problem.
I suspect it's being pointed out that racial discrimination doesn't just start at age 30 when applying for a job at Google, it impacts many key points of development and opportunity along the way. Perhaps true support of black founders takes this truth into consideration, especially if a business idea is solid.
I am not irate. I am pointing out a lack of seriousness in demanding evidence for a proposition that is obvious on its face. If you don’t see that black people, in America, have deliberately, systematically, and consistently faced discrimination and destruction of their wealth and ability to accumulate wealth it is willful ignorance not thoughtful insistence on fact based reasoning.
Red lining was a government sanctioned practice of refusing to underwrite and subsidize mortgages in neighborhoods that had large minority populations.
Why do I need to google and Wikipedia link for you?
Of course she isn't, but that's the point. Black women are extremely underrepresented, hired and funded.
You can't say "well we're not going to fund you without a good track record, even though it's damn near impossible for you to build a track record because we won't fund or hire you. Good luck".
You can't say "we're going to fund more black founders, but only those who've already been proven a safe, reliable commodity."
I think you're underestimating the impact of being an ex-Googler. VCs are inundated with mobile app pitch decks from all kinds of random people with no relevant experience. Receiving a pitch deck from an ex-engineer of a highly respected software firm is going to make that pitch stand out. It lends instant credibility. EDIT: looking at his LinkedIn, it's clear that he has way more experience and an established track record than just working at Google.
Also, don't forget that it was the husband who had the LinkedIn connections to the pitch deck recipients. Race, gender and experience aside, you're obviously more likely to get a response from recipients who already know you (or are friends of friends) than from recipients who are total strangers to you.
If the author was also an ex-engineer of a highly respected software firm and had the same LinkedIn connections, then you would have a much stronger anecdotal case that racism or bias was the cause of being ignored.
The ex googler husband was on the front page of both pitch decks with the same title as CTO in both cases. The only difference was that it came from his email account the second time.
But that assumes that people looked at the deck. You can't make that assumption, they might look only at the person sending them the deck, then decide to look at the deck.
In fact, she said she sent out the deck from her own e-mail and linked-in account. So, that means it was probably easy to get her husband's linked-in when he sent it out.
You could make the case that people claiming to want to help minorities, should at least spend time reading the deck, but that doesn't mean that anyone was racist/sexist in this particular instance. It seems like even after sending it out by the husband, nobody was very interested.
Run your own experiment then. Send requests with identical LinkedIn profiles and just change the race or gender. I’ll bet you $10,000 you’ll get more responses as a white man. Let me know if you want to take the bet.
I'm so glad she wrote this, and that she named names!
As a female founder (not black though), we went through a similarly congnitively dissonant process. A-List investors who would publicly talk about supporting female founders would behave the worst (esp. female investors, Hi Aileen!), investors whose entire brand was around supporting ethical startups (or insert any similar alternative movement) would be the least interested in that aspect (Hi Spero Ventures!) All of that, along with a healthy dose of rudeness.
In our experience, those at the very very top of the totem pole gave us the fairest chance, and those below them, were the very worst. In the end, it was hard no to feel that an investor's Twitter persona was a sham, in the end they would invest only in the hottest SAAS startup by an ex-Googler.
FWIW, I know my experience was not alone. There are tons of now well-funded female founders who will echo this sentiment. I just wish there was a way to have a public list of those who walk the talk and those who just tweet the walk..
EDIT: Adding something from thread below to focus more on solutions, and providing perspective on why what is happening is not enough.
>...What is frustrating about these investors (and YC) is that it all is very surface level. I'm sure they believe they are doing the right thing but all of their assumptions, ideas, pipelines, and teams, all are informed by those biases. And there isn't enough being done to deconstruct that. For example, what does it mean to say 'too early' to an under-represented founder? who is the comparison to? How many of your last X investments or team members came from Stanford or ex-FAANG?
> Let's put in place processes, time allocations, smaller programs. And let's put all of this in place first for those raising their first rounds - the angel or the mythical pre-seed.
"in the end they would invest only in the hottest SAAS startup by an ex-Googler."
If that was her main point, fair. But she's out there naming names and strongly implying that they didn't help her due to their racism and/or sexism. That's a pretty nasty accusation to throw at someone. And the names she named were the people who bothered to reply to her at all - they just didn't spend an adequate amount of effort on her to not be called out like this. She called out the only people who would give her the time of day! I think any VC who sees this article will know what to do from now on...
I can see that naming those who didn't even respond could be more appropriate. My takeaway is that you feel let down the most by those who have the most talk, hence higher expectations, which, it seems to me is the gist of the article.
Both strategies are inappropriate because they assume that anything less than funding her startup is an act of bigotry.
I wouldn't have responded to her because I don't think her startup is particularly interesting or likely to be profitable. It's a low-effort idea. Easy to replicate, easy to cut the middle man out of, and has been done multiple times before. "Naming names" of people who declined to waste their money on your bad idea isn't social justice, it's entitlement.
A man, woman, or rhinoceros with a stellar résumé like her husband's, who I may also know personally, considering that I was on their contact list? Maybe.
Let us please stop pretending that the glaring difference between these two people is their race or gender and not a vast gulf of experience and credibility.
I'm not sure why you are saying that. At least to my understanding of the article, the exact same pitch with the first page having the exact same CEO/CTO founder combo was sent. So if they so much as glanced at the 'team' page, they should have seen the ex-googler if they knew him.
It seems that what happened is they didn't so much as glance at the pitch deck when "Nerissa Zhang" sent it to them. But then did when "James Zhang" sent them the same deck.
Because if they had looked at the deck when Nerissa sent it to them, they would have recognized James and also saw his impressive resume.
So if they are publicly proclaiming that they want to invest more in underrepresented groups, I don't think only reading emails from people with names like "James" in their contact list is going to make much progress towards that.
> It seems that what happened is they didn't so much as glance at the pitch deck when "Nerissa Zhang" sent it to them. But then did when "James Zhang" sent them the same deck.
You're right, that's exactly what they did, because many of them knew him. They were from his contact list. I respond to basically every email from people I know, even if I think it's stupid. Emails from random people have to pass a much higher bar to get a response, and low-effort ideas with fraudulent reviews aren't going to clear that bar.
I used to be a freelancer. People would constantly ask me to build "the next Google" or "Facebook for X" that would assuredly make us both billionaires. I learned not to give them the time of day. If a friend or successful colleague did the same, I would respond out of courtesy if nothing else. If I really respected them I'd even entertain the possibility that I was wrong about their idea and hear them out.
There are some very obvious innocent explanations for this situation, but you seem to want it to be an instance of bigotry. In my experience this is a mindset that cannot be argued with, so I think I'm done here. Have a good night.
I don't see how that would be constructive either. If people start getting called out for ignoring emails, that's going to be a lot of noise. And for anecdotes like this, it's impossible to know why said email was ignored. Should the assumption always be bad faith like racism/sexism? What if they just weren't interested and didn't even realize the email came from a woman or POC? Should they be obligated to seek out the sex/race of the person emailing them to know if it's appropriate to ignore them?
I totally get your point that it's crappy for VCs to talk the talk and act like they want to help under-represented people, but then go back to business as usual. That sucks. And I completely believe that it is harder out there for woman and people of color. But I don't think that naming names based on anecdotes like this actually helps. I wish I had better ideas, but I really don't think this is it.
I have zero business experience whatsoever. That said, I wouldn't have invested in her business for the simple reason she made it too easy to cut out the middleman. She intends to make money by hooking people up with personal trainers but there's nothing stopping said trainers and clients from just doing business themselves after she's done the work of connecting them.
That’s something a VC could say instead of silence. Helping someone build their business would be incredibly supportive. However it seems that no VCs were interested in doing that.
Having been a VC-backed wannabe for a period of time (and pitched some well known investors), I learned that most investors would rather not offer that kind of feedback because it inevitably raises counterpoints which extends the conversation they didn't want to have in the first place. A simple "no, thank you" let's them get on with their day.
It sucks for the founders but that's really just the nature of being a "salesperson" in any field - constant rejection and little insight.
The people who did reply are the same ones that did not reply when they received the exact same pitch from his email instead of hers. The ex-googler CTO was on both pitches.
I feel heartbroken seeing the responses to you and her. I'm a woman, but not a minority. I alter my writing style and my authorial voice every day to be less femme and more "neutral." And these exchanges confirm what I'd feared.
It breaks my heart that the first reaction by our community isn't to integrate her lived experience, but to question it. It is to question her being and (implicitly) her right to be in these spaces.
Few have asked what they can do to help. Fewer have offered to help. Instead, commentators have noted her track record. Their comments seem to approach her as if she was the sole founder. She's not. They're equal partners. Why is one given a courteous reply and the other shown the door? Is it not a good signal that she was able to find and work with a highly qualified co-founder? And build the seed of a good team? Isn't it a famous industry maxim to invest in teams?
More disappointing are the comments questioning her accomplishments based on her marriage. They're negating her lived experience and drive based on whom she married. And they're saying that perhaps she owes all of her success - including the gyms - to him. In this very forum, she has been reduced to but an extension of him. And that's heartbreaking.
There's a lot of work to be done in the industry. And I hope that this is a moment of personal growth and reflection for most involved.
There will be a day when these replies will be looked as antiquated. I look forward with hope to that day.
>They're equal partners. Why is one given a courteous reply and the other shown the door?
Is it not a good signal that she was able to find and work with a highly qualified co-founder? And build the seed of a good team? Isn't it a famous industry maxim to invest in teams?
Her story is a bit inconsistent here. She says that she e-mailed pitch decks from her e-mail and then sent the same message from her husband's account. Of the two responses she mentions one asked for her pitch deck and the other only responded after a Linked In message. So it doesn't seem like she was sending the same message and/or she was sending messages to people that her husband had a prior relationship with.
I downloaded the app and it's nothing special. It also looks like they bought a bunch of fake 5 star reviews at the end of January. There's nothing exciting there and nothing about her background that would lead anyone to believe that she would be a successful founder. Her pitch deserves to be binned and the only reason that it wouldn't would be because of some personal connection her husband had.
> It also looks like they bought a bunch of fake 5 star reviews at the end of January.
I took a look and yeah it's pretty obvious this is what happened. There are 88 reviews total, and all but three of them occurred in the 7-day period between 26-Jan and 02-Feb, of which all were 5-star reviews.
It seems like this sorry if thing should be easy for Google to flag?
>It breaks my heart that the first reaction by our community isn't to integrate her lived experience, but to question it.
Everybody has a "lived experience" and we don't integrate the "lived experience" of others without scepticism because that would make us easy to con.
>It is to question her being and (implicitly) her right to be in these spaces.
I'll question her right explicitly to be in those spaces. Nothing she has made impresses me and I wouldn't give her money in the VC's shoes.
>There's a lot of work to be done in the industry. And I hope that this is a moment of personal growth and reflection for most involved. There will be a day when these replies will be looked as antiquated. I look forward with hope to that day.
Your blind belief in peoples lived experiences led you to seemingly get hoodwinked by somebody who develops mediocre products backed by seemingly fraudulent reviews. You're so caught up in your own superiority that you fail to reflect on the ideological blind spot that makes you easy to con.
Many VCs, founders, and DNI leaders have echoed that All Raise is primarily a way for VCs to improve their personal brand around women in tech. They don't make investments, don't run substantial programs, and spend much of their time/money on PR.
If these VCs were serious, they would commit X% of investments or X% of investment dollars to the groups they publicly support in panel after panel after tweet after TechCrunch interview.
What is frustrating about these investors (and YC) is that it all is very surface level. I'm sure they believe they are doing the right thing but all of their assumptions, ideas, pipelines, and teams, all are informed by those biases. And there isn't enough being done to deconstruct that. For example, what does it mean to say 'too early' to an under-represented founder? who is the comparison to? How many of your last X investments or team members came from Stanford or ex-FAANG?
Let's put in place processes, time allocations, smaller programs. And let's put all of this in place first for those raising their first rounds - the angel or the mythical pre-seed.
Curious why would VC ever agree to do that unless it was mandated in the prospectus of the fund and the LPs were onboard. VCs serve the LPs not the general public.
Are you saying that you felt you received unfair treatment, like if you had been a man you would have been received better? Or are you saying that these VCs publicly talked about making an extra effort for female founders but you did not feel that they made those efforts. I 100% agree with making exceptions for female/PoC founders so that inroads can be made to start erasing pre-conceived notions of what a founder should look like, just wondering which area the VCs failed in, or maybe both?
Problem is it's not the VC's job to help minorities. And even if one VC chooses to do so, they might make their fund less competitive compared to other funds.
We can make a simple law:
If a VC has to operate in US, they must reserve X amount for the minorities.
If VCs think it's unfair and that minorities are not good investment then VCs can figure out how to "uplift" the minorities by creating much needed programs and network for them.
VCs invest into your track record and the ability to put together and retain a good team. "Ex-Google" is a good signal that the person can at the very least _technically_ do what they are promising to do, once they take the cash.
What's your track record?
Nobody has ever promised that money will be given for phenotype traits alone.
And given that a majority of "Ex-Google" engineers are males, where does that leave a woman (or any under-represented group) founder?
She is not asking for money "just because" she is a woman. She is asking for a fair chance. And we need to give folks from under-represented communities a more than fair chance to combat inherent selection bias.
> And given that a majority of "Ex-Google" engineers are males, where does that leave a woman (or any under-represented group) founder?
It leaves them as a statistical someone with an objectively poor resume.
If you want more women founded companies, you need more women engineers. If you want more women engineers, you need more women cs majors. If you want more women cs majors, you need more women interested in and excelling at math in high school.
It may not be 'fair' that the statistical woman has a 'worse' resume, nor is it 'fair' that the statistical rich kid has a 'better' one, but its asinine to address fairness at the narrow end of the funnel.
So, just leaving the issue unsolved for probably around 20 years or so and letting under-represented groups play catch-up.
There are a lot more meaningful and effective actions that can be implemented now, which would correct things in a shorter length of time. I do think that the 'pipeline' is the fundamental way to fix the issue -- but I think that the best way of creating that interest is to present those under-represented groups in our society now, rather than later.
Reading her email and responding, or downloading the app, would be some fair chances. There’s plenty of evidence in the article linked at the top of this page that that did not happen. Take a look.
It baffles me that people constantly make this low-effort "read the article" remark as if (A) it's not explicitly against the rules here, and (B) it's impossible for two people to read the same article and draw different conclusions from it.
But I digress. I can put myself in the shoes of a VC for a second and know that based on a quick glance at the app's website and app store page, I wouldn't invest in it either. It's unoriginal, unlikely to be profitable, and the reviews are suspicious at best. No need to download it to see that.
Not reading or responding isn't unfair. VCs get inundated with proposals like hers. I'm a white guy who used to do freelance work. I've sent out hundreds of personalized cold emails to businesses looking for work, and got responses to maybe 5 of them, all of which were negative or "we'll keep your information on file". Maybe my sales pitch sucks. Maybe my portfolio sucks. Or maybe they just weren't interested in what I was offering. Maybe that's the case for her, too. Where's the evidence that either of us were treated unfairly? I am not entitled to anyone's time or money and neither is she.
Have we reached the point where not responding to a cold email is an act of bigotry? I myself get inundated with messages from recruiters. I respond only to the tiny fraction that are actually interesting and relevant to my skillset. It never even occurred to me to respond or not based on the gender or race of the recruiter. Does that make me a bigot?
When you (the VC) say you want to help Black founders, and then do not respond to a Black founder while responding to a non-Black founder for the same product, then yeah, that is bigotry.
You did so much damage in this thread, and this comment is so ridiculously off topic, that I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Not only has that particular piece been debunked, shredded, put back together, debunked, shredded again, and (metaphorically) left in the dumpster, but it's totally irrelevant to this thread.
Interest in running a company or technology is not at issue. You have a bunch of founders in this thread with demonstrable (as in: they have founded companies) interest in doing these things, and they're having trouble getting over the line because of bias.
Perhaps the VCs they pitched to read the same paper, and jumped to the same conclusions you did. If so, that's super fucked up.
>Damore's memo was reasonable, accurate, and the criticism to it has been, like yours, entirely without substance.
The Wikipedia article on Damore's memo lists a number of substantive criticisms[0]. For convenience, I'll list them here:
This Vox article[1] gives a brief background of Damore's argument from biological essentialism. It references the general consensus that the premise (that cultural and sociological gender roles result from innate and immutable differences in gender biology and neurology) has been discredited[2,3], as well as a Stanford research paper[4] which concludes “Through a rather constructivist approach most studies show that no scientific experiment has proved the existence of systematic and/or significant biological sex differences in most cognitive functions.”
This BBC article[5] mentions a criticism by a cognitive scientist, This Intelligencer article[6] lists numerous criticisms and rebuttals by scientists, referencing this Quora article by an evolutionary scientist[7], and another criticism from studies of gender and STEM[8].
Now, that's as many as I've been willing to list because I'm now thoroughly bored of hunting down sources, but there are many others I haven't listed if you want to do the research yourself. Now granted, wikipedia also lists a number of counter-criticisms, but that alone doesn't render the criticism invalid, it merely demonstrates the existence of a controversy.
I'm leaving this comment here for future reference, and referring to it every time I notice someone bringing up the myth that Damore's memo is based on rock-solid, unassailable science, or that no "substantive" criticisms have or can been made.
Starting with the first critique in your list of citations, the Vox article - third paragraph:
> He uses primarily stereotyped misconceptions about men and women to argue that “gender gaps [do not always] imply sexism,” and declares that “discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech” is “misguided and biased” as well as “unfair, divisive, and bad for business.”
The question of stereotyping is addressed in the memo itself:
> I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes. When addressing the gap in representation in the population, we need to look at population level differences in distributions. If we can't have an honest discussion about this,then we can never truly solve the problem.
Can you point to where in Damore's memo he relies on stereotyped misconceptions? I've read it many times and I didn't see anything fitting that characterization.
No. You cannot pepper a thread with demands for people to source their arguments and then confront a wall of sources with your own ad hoc thoughts. Source your rebuttals comparably. You set the bar, now clear it yourself.
I haven't demanded anything of anyone, but for some reason you're telling me what I cannot do. Are you a moderator?
Where people have made scientific claims I've asked them for the source of their information. This is a reasonable question - not a "demand".
When someone replies to you citing another argument, it's reasonable to read that argument and to point out any flaws in it if you see them. That's what I did here. Was I not supposed to read it?
My argument doesn't rely on any citation other than Damore's memo itself, since it is the topic of discussion. I've already provided a link to that but here it is again for convenience: [1]
I followed the witch hunt against Damore very closely both at the time and since.
Without exception, every single critique I've read of Damore's memo is either a straw man, ad hominem, or a combination of both.
If you know of any counterexamples I'm happy to review them, but please pick the strongest argument rather than a long list[2]
Yeah, there is a real "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" vibe to the whole woke thing. Creeps me out.
Hope I'm not speaking too soon, but it seems like actual liberals on the left are finally waking up to this Kafkaesque ideology they've been making excuses for [1]
> She is not asking for money "just because" she is a woman.
That's why I asked to see the track record. You won't get anywhere in this business without a track record. Moreover, if you do have a track record being a woman is an advantage these days, not a disadvantage. There are a lot of VCs chomping at the bit to invest into women- and minority-led startups. But they won't give you money if they don't have some degree of certainty that you can do what you're promising to do.
Ex-Google was a meaningful distinction 15 years ago. Today it does not remotely entitle you to being funded.
Many VCs today recognize that Google is an extremely bureaucratic place that does not resemble a startup and I know more than a few who view Google experience as a negative signal.
And that would be accurate, to a large extent. But it's also one of the few remaining _technically competent_ places that does not hire people who can't code.
That is why I qualified my statement by saying that the prospective founder would be _technically_ capable, not capable in general. If anything, they could be less organizationally capable, but that can be resolved with the right co-founder.
To put it into more concrete terms: say you had a million dollars and would want to allocate it towards a bet in order to potentially turn it into a lot more. Who would _you_ pick, someone with tech aptitude credentials (which a substantial stint at Google as an engineer all but guarantees), or someone with no discernible credentials?
Note that I'm not even mentioning race here. Race/gender/sexual orientation is 100% irrelevant in this calculation unless it actually confers an increased chance of turning $1M into $10M. E.g. as an investor I'd probably prefer a gay person to lead a gay dating service, just for the domain expertise. I'd still require that they have technical and/or business chops, however.
> VCs invest into your track record and the ability to put together and retain a good team. "Ex-Google" is a good signal that the person can at the very least _technically_ do what they are promising to do, once they take the cash.
> Nobody has ever promised that money will be given for phenotype traits alone.
Who knew, thanks for enlightening me. Let's just say that I have VCs emailing me now.
I assume you are genuinely asking this but I wish I had more energy to dissect it but the fact that you would need to explain that or assume that I mean that one should be funded by phenotype are two quick examples of that condescension. I hope someone else on this thread can explain more in detail..
It all just boils down to the reality of the VC world and that is that none of them have a clue what they are doing.
They might as well bring in a psychic to pick their investments. But they can't let their LPs know that. They've got to justify their fee and so they will do it the safest way possible which is to be copycats or at most choose the most defensible options.
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.
The author of this article cites as evidence of racism higher response to her husband's solicitations of VCs than her own. However, comparing their resumés, its pretty easy to see that this is unlikely to be attributable to racism. Husband has founded multiple start-ups that were acquired, is technical, and worked at Google and YouTube. Meanwhile, the author has personal trainer and gym owner as experience.
I think the larger point the author was trying to make was don't give lip service to specifically going out of your way to try and help Black founders if you're still going to use the exact same credentialing signals you always do: track record where someone has worked, name brand of their school, etc.
One might argue that without the special consideration these VC's rushed to say they would give, how would someone like the author ever have an established track record of starting/selling their businesses in the first place?
I'm frankly still expecting VC's to make decisions on what they think is going to be most profitable for them, full-stop. But plenty of other firms like large consulting firms, do set aside people and resources to work with non-profits for example. Why couldn't VC's do the same to try and level the playing field and eliminate some of these inherent advantages the well connected/well credentialed have? A "no" is potentially fine, but how you deliver that "no" can make all the difference.
> I think the larger point the author was trying to make was don't give lip service to specifically going out of your way to try and help Black founders if you're still going to use the exact same credentialing signals you always do: track record where someone has worked, name brand of their school, etc.
I think that's the mistake all these companies are making. They need to make it clear if it's their intent to help black founders, provided, all other things are equal / held constant.
That is if two people have the same or similar background and qualifications but they just happened to be different race then to not always pick the white guy cause, hey, we look alike or belonged to the same frat.
It should leave no room for interpretation as: "hey, you're black, let me throw some money at you cause you happen to be black."
Yes. Exactly this. If a VC is going to use the same filters for inbound deals. The same networks to connect to founders, the same metrics and stats. Then all their rhetoric is BS.
Are you arguing for equality, or affirmative action? (I am not going to take a stance on which one is the right choice, but I do think you are conflating the two.)
The VCs said that they want to fund more black-founded startups. But, if we assume you are correct about why they responded to the queries from the husband's e-mail, that means that they'll consider a proposal from someone with startup experience while rejecting that same proposal from someone without startup experience. Which, given that they've not been funding black people, means they're going to continue not funding black people, which means that their claim to want to fund more black-founded startups is just words and not actions.
And VCs who stated in public that they were open to changing their criteria and actually helping that less experienced founder flat out didn't live up to the words they said in public.
The nature of VC being what it is, it's extremely difficult to prove racism at the level of proof that most HN readers seem to need. 99.99% of all startup ideas are bad, 99.99% of all apps are terrible, so how can we know if she was rejected for being black, or for just being another supplicant denied by the VC gods?
The email thing is the strongest evidence she provides, but obviously, a doubting mind can find other reasons that her husbands email would get responses but hers wouldn't.
We do know, however, that African Americans are greatly under represented in tech, in startups and in VC. There are many interlocking reasons for this, and its not unreasonable to expect that racism, whether conscious or unconscious, is one of them. (Why should tech, uniquely in American society, be immune from racism?). Because there are so many interlocking reasons, it's easy for each individual link in the chain of tech to deflect blame to the other links (business can blame the pipeline, colleges can blame the high schools, high schools can blame the financial structures etc etc etc).
So, is it reasonable to expect individual VCs to make a stand against racism instead of doing what comes naturally to them? (trying desperately to make money). Not really!
However, I do think it's reasonable to expect, that VC's who make big pronouncements about what their firm is going to do to combat racism should be expected to follow through with it! And guess what, given all the interlocking problems that prevent black people from founding companies, VC's probably aren't going to be able to follow through on that mission by relying on business as usual of warm intros only, five minute pitch reviews, blow off emails.
Just level with us. We are all adults. Just say, I'm not actually that interested in explicitly helping black founders, I just want to keep trying to make money the way I've been doing it. Conversely, if you do give juicy quotes to the press, then be prepared to walk the walk.
I'm in VC and there are many reasons why I and my peers are not interested in yet another software product selling to gyms. They are extremely fragmented, hard to access, low ACV customers who are already well served by products like MindBody. I've seen a ton of marketplaces for personal trainers as well.
The reality is that the chance a VC responds to a cold outbound email is already near 0. I get these in my LinkedIn inbox almost all the time and they are very rarely good because the founders with great companies are not going out of their way to cold email people. I doubt that most of the VCs she's talking about spent enough time to even realize it was a WoC.
I had one of the responses questioning the story (I wrote it would be more persuasive with the pitch deck or an explanation for why the app was in VC territory)
But I completely agree with you about the hypocrisy of asking for emails from black founders and then ignoring them.
And also agree that requiring a warm intro as the only way to reach a VC is a real barrier. It may be a good test (“Can you hustle enough to reach me”), but is objectively harder if you’re not in a certain set.
The author's point about VC firms providing no contact information disproportionately impacting minority founders who don't have network connections is also a good one, and fixable.
Whether or not they publish contact details, someone without a 'pedigree' or serious traction is far more likely to end up in meetings with VCs by applying to well-known accelerators like YC than by reaching out directly to VCs. This is the primary way that founders without a network get plugged in.
There can obviously be bias issues at the accelerator level too, so I'm not saying it's a solution, but you can be sure that someone will at least take a look at your application.
There are accelerators that focus on under represented groups, Morgan Stanley has one. Like you said, once you’re in accelerator you can quickly build out your network .
On the contrary, both of those are documented phenomena in their respective industries. Not all racist narratives are the same. For example, a bigoted narrative of "Asians are weak" may work against that group in sports, but not in software.
I think the argument here is suffering as the business is questionable, though I wholeheartedly agree that pointing a founder to a blog post and pretending that counts as mentorship is bullshit.
> none of the VCs I contacted even tried downloading my app (I use Intercom daily to see all the new users trying our app). They dismissed its worth without even giving it a shot.
Fair, but I just had a look at the app store - this had two reviews since late January (when about ninety-five 5* reviews were posted over a few days), and neither were positive.
Additionally, a cursory search for personal trainer apps will turn up dozens of well-rated alternatives. Putting myself in the mind of a VC, I would be hard-pressed to invest or advise the founder of such a company.
Would love to learn more about why the VCs wouldn’t respond to her emails, though - seems like another failure to meet the commitment.
As far as why VCs wouldn't respond to emails, from my brief time working at a VC firm I think the logic was either 1) We don't want to start a conversation and give them false hope and 2) Not replying makes it seem like we're too busy and important to respond to everyone (and also there was some thought process of we don't owe anyone anything in the same way the average person doesn't feel obligated to respond to spam emails)
It seems like the author could search and replace “racism” with “sexism” and put out an otherwise similar article based on her experience having to use her husband’s LinkedIn rolodex to reach these people.
I think it’s shameful that VCs make empty promises to support black founders - but it’s also not surprising. Most of the people paying lip service to racial equity now didn’t give a shit six weeks ago before it was fashionable to do so. But empty promises are par for the course as they’ve been for decades. My experience living in Minneapolis where George Floyd was murdered is that the same people suddenly promising to fix the problem are the ones who created it.
VCs only want to make money. The author raised insufficient evidence that she was a victim of racism. If any unfair discrimination occurred it’s more likely sexism. But the simplest explanation is also the most likely: the VCs just weren’t interested in her pitch.
The author seems clear to me that she is considering both racism and sexism.
> Curiously, when I used my husband’s email to send our pitch, that’s when I started getting some responses. Do VCs only read pitches submitted by men? Do they prefer to hear from someone who is Asian rather than Black?
So she assumes bad faith but isn’t sure of the exact nature of that bad faith, meanwhile the merits of her pitch or business idea are not even a factor in her discussion of why she could have been rejected. (Let’s see, a personal trainer app when people are quarantined ...)
I’ve seen numerous other founders here on HN handle rejection with more humility and constructive resolve. I don’t think the author is doing herself - or her husband - any favors with this kind of response.
The reality is that VCs are genuinely inclined to fund black founders since their funds are overwhelmingly old white men.
This is an industry that cares a lot about not generating controversy. VCs got hit hard by Me Too- Lightspeed, Kleiner, Binary, Sherpa, 500 Startups, and others all imploded or let people go due to allegations of sexism.
It's a Partner based business where, in general, they rarely hire a new senior Partner and cut them in on the carry.
Investing in black founders and hiring minority junior VCs ends up being the easiest way to brand themselves as racially equitable.
I think it isn't just as simple as wanting to fund black founders. If you do not understand how systems work and actively fix them, you are unlikely to be helpful to black founders.
I'm on easy mode (white and male), but I had no network and no prestigious previous employers or schools to point to when starting on my company a few years ago. There were many points when I felt like raising money would be impossible, but I eventually did so. In case it might help someone who's feeling hopeless and has it much harder than I did due to their background, here are a few things I've learned about how the game is played:
- Talking to investors is a waste of time in the beginning. It's much better to focus on getting into an accelerator first.
- Never talk to one investor at a time. That gives them all the leverage. It's better to schedule many meetings with many different investors all in a one or two week period.
- Timing is everything. Don't talk to investors before you're ready to even if they say it's "just a casual coffee". They are looking for reasons to rule you out. Try to only talk to investors at inflection points where a graph of some important metric is going steeply up and to the right.
- Move on quickly. Unless an investor is obviously enthusiastic by the end of the first pitch, they are highly, highly unlikely to invest. Don't waste time answering their questions or getting their "feedback" or giving them additional meetings if they seem skeptical. Just move on to the next one.
- Don't ask for introductions from investors who turned you down. These are actually anti-endorsements that significantly decrease your chances with the investors you get introduced to this way.
Seems like the most compelling evidence of racially-disparate treatment is that she got no responses when reaching out via her own email address, but received some responses when reaching out via her husband's (he is an Asian-American man with a recognizably Asian name). Assuming the emails sent were identical, this would be pretty solid evidence of bias.
One potential confounding issue is that her husband is a former Google engineer, and she doesn't mention having any similar experience. It wouldn't be surprising if a VC's vetting process involved checking linkedin to see what experience the person had, and giving points to former FAANG engineers (note: I am not in this category).
Regardless, it's still pretty lousy that VCs that claim to want to help certain types of founders don't even respond to inbound inquiries.
Her name is "Nerissa Zhang" - unless they are looking through for profile pictures of her or something, wouldn't they assume she is Asian as well? At least for me, "Nerissa" is a name of unknown origin, maybe Greek. Zhang is clearly Chinese. I would assume the person was Chinese or at least 50% Chinese if I was forced to guess about their race/ethnicity.
You can route old account emails to new and answer people from new account. It's quite seamless, to new people you give the new email. At least I knew few people who have done it after name change, but marriage and taking new name is less common nowadays than it used to be I guess.
Any particular instance is not proof of racism. But I suspect VCs as an industry is biased against Black people because of its closed network nature and the lack of black founders in general for the VCs to pattern match. This should be especially acute for early stage investing when much relied on intuition and the "quality of the team".
I’m curious about the email thing too. If she was using the ceo@bright email in the blogpost, I can see that getting filtered before any human read the contents, otherwise it’d be foolish to not give the time of day to a person who fits their advocacy profile, regardless of the business’ viability.
So they're vetting out black women because they haven't had the necessary experience, because hiring and funding is biased against them, particularly because they haven't had the necessary experience.
it’s not VCs responsibilities to cultivate people worthy of VC-level funding. and from all the college outreach i’ve seen in the past several years, FAANGs are absolutely desperate for women and minority engineers. companies are doing plenty
Maybe its VCs responsibility to respect what they say in public and give disadvantaged founders the extra support and consideration they said out loud in public?
Companies can't be doing plenty if they say 'we will help this imbalance' and then don't.
She reached out to VCs that pledged to support the Black community of founders. Beside the fact that we have seen VCs pouring money into all possible kind of failing business (WeWork anyone? Wag?), you can't require the same profile parameters from an underrepresented community otherwise their pledges were empty. If they spotted some of the weak points that many found in this discussion (poor product reviews etc), they could have at least provided an honest feedback, some contacts or else. I guess that before money, these cases are showing no interests at all in supporting Black founders (sometimes intros or contacts are way more valuable than money).
She asks why her husband gets more of a response (a sign of the racism she is facing).
- Her linkedin doesn't show what her major was as an undergrad.
- After 4 years of working she was a powerlifting coach.
- Then boom, in 2017/2018 she is an owner of two gyms and in 2019 she is trying to get benchmark to invest in her app.
Her Husband:
Google Engineer
Masters in CS from Berkeley / Undergrad in CS
Started companies and managed employees.
15 years experience - 40 apps developed. Top 10 apps
Multiple successful exists (to zynga then another one to google).
Talking about being successful as a gym owner etc she says folks can assume its because black folks were helped out.
"They assume it’s because they’re somehow lucky or exceptional or that they gained success because of help from white people. This—of course—isn’t true, but it’s an idea that continues to spread, sending the message that Black professionals require help from white people to build their careers."
"We need to put an end to the lie that Black people are still in need of white folks’ help,” she continues. “What we need is the freedom to live, work, and act without white people and white institutions disproportionately targeting us and stopping us from building the success we are already capable of building on our own."
I raised a $2M seed for Smartcar. I had no college degree as I had dropped out. I had no prior work experience. I had no team. The product was still an early prototype.
MANY of the founders I know who've also raised similar sized rounds from top VCs have stories quite like mine.
Her point is that her husband got more responses. My guess - her husband would get more responses than you as well.
As someone who also took time off (and built apps) from college, the fact that I'd built some apps (that got write-ups) was a big positive for my early career, even if just prototypes. But I was at a top education org before taking time off so I'd already proven I could get into a reasonable place.
No need to disclose, but your and my story tends to work if you (and or others on team) got into a place like an Ivy or a UC or top liberal arts, majoring in CS or engineering, then dropped out (aka were into the entrepreneurial space)
I think it works a lot less well with an undisclosed and possibly non-tech background.
If you had a path like hers then I am very impressed, your deck or prototype must have been compelling. But very often there are some other proof points (top school acceptance / cs majors etc). That is almost silicon valley cliche at this point.
An awesome scenario would be if someone focused on black led businesses in terms of VC and made a killing.
THIS, thank you for acknowledging that! It often feels like there are two lanes, there is all this talk of the steps to get on the fast lane, and then you realize there are some people who just got put in the fast lane, and you are still supposed to be 'working' towards getting in the fast lane.
It is frustrating that happens all over the place. Even YC - if I had a penny for every male founder that got into YC without an idea or just a new idea and then if that penny was taken away for every female founder who had a product that was doing well, well, I would be in real debt!
1. You think people are actually looking at her LinkedIn before the racial email filtering kicks in? You could easily test that, I suspect the implicit bias kick in right at the name and email stage. About 20 years ago, before LinkedIn, my dad sent resumes with his Brazilian name and an anglicized version. It was like 10:1 greater response to the Anglo version, and he changed our family name shortly after.
2. If the dynamic she describes existed her whole life wouldn’t it make sense that she has had a harder time building the LinkedIn profile and credentials her husband did? Not to take away from his accomplishment, he clearly worked hard and is talented, but one can’t take advantage of opportunities if they are not available by systematic design whether implicit or intentional.
Ah, so they meant they're only going to invest in and help black founders who've already had some other VC take a chance on and are safe investments.
Got it. Someone else needs to actually "venture" and take a risk. You'll just sit back and tweet about how you'd love to help, but your LPs say it's too risky.
Many vc's do like past success (even white on white candidates, if you have had multiple successful exists you are much more likely to be funded).
VCs arguably are taking less risk. Now sometimes it stuff like capital domination (I think super stupid)
They like seeing what you've done yourself. You've built x / y / z - delivered this and that - great. This can be big if you don't have an exit yet.
Or proof in pudding - good traction already, good pitch deck etc.
etc.
It's not clear what she's done herself. Even her gym ownership success is complicated by potential involvement of her husband even though she goes to some lengths to say it's racist to assume the ownership was result of some help.
And her philosophy is that she doesn't want help from white folks, just for them to get out of the way. Then she's applying to benchmark vs Harlem capital? Its confusing.
If there is VC racism, doesn't that also mean there is a market opportunity for VC money to focus exclusively on African American tech startups. Even if there aren't many, there appears to be zero competition selecting investments.
The author is rightfully frustrated. But instead of focussing on lack of interest in their app, maybe there's a bigger opportunity here.
In principle yes. I can think of a few possible problems though:
1. You’re focussing on a much smaller subset of the market. It may be hard to find enough investments
2. It is probably illegal.
3. You may not get the best VC’s. The best VC’s will focus on total return and probably fund from a wide pool to find rare outliers that may grow huge. So founders may have worse VC experiences. VC includes mentorship, network etc, so this could hamper startup success.
4. You may also not get the best African American startups. The very best will be able to get attention from the top VC firms. So, there will be an adverse selection problem for any VC specializing in African American startups
#2 is probably the main reason no one has tried. But #3 and #4 in combination are also deadly.
But, if discrimination is a factor in startup funding, there would certainly be a market opportunity for VC’s to focus more attention on underserved groups.
Edit: Another poster points out backstage capital is doing this. So, maybe it doesn’t violate any laws? I’ll be very interested to see how their returns are over time. They fund women and people of color. They may well have hit on a market opportunity.
Someone in the thread linked a Tim O’Reilly interview where his partner pursued the “invest more in women and people of color” strategy and it seems to be working for him.
In addition to diversity, he also selected different types of businesses. More medium size, not the rocketships.
That bar chart doesn't say anything to me about inter-demographic data. It looks confined to each demographic; i.e. women earn more degrees than men within each demographic, but that doesn't say anything about Black women vs. White men vs. Hispanic men vs. White women
That bar chart does link to another report breaking down the share of degrees awarded by race.
e.g. we see that for academic year 2015-2016, whites earned 65% of bachelor's degrees and blacks earned 11%. The estimate of the US population for 2019 [note, 2019 is not 2015] currently visible in Wikipedia says that whites are 60.4% of the population and blacks are 13.4%.
Throwing in another assumption, we'll just say that of whites and blacks, each group is exactly half male and half female.
Thus, in our population of 60400 whites and 13400 blacks, with 20,000 degrees earned between them:
- The whites earned 17,105 degrees.
- The blacks earned 2,895 degrees.
- Of the black degrees, 1,853 went to black women, and 1,042 went to black men.
- Of the white degrees, 9,579 went to white women, and 7,526 went to white men.
- There are 30200 white men, 30200 white women, 6700 black men, and 6700 black women.
- The rate of earning a bachelor's degree is 31.7% [note: we made this number up. It is useful only for comparing to the other three groups] for white women, 24.9% for white men, 27.7% for black women, and 15.6% for black men. White women are noticeably more educated than black women are.
The original claim lumped in associate degrees along with bachelor's degrees. This might make that claim true. However, it would be hard to blame someone for viewing an associate degree as a negative rather than a positive signal.
(Final note: population share of the United States is not the same thing as population share of those of college age in the United States.)
this. tldr, undergrad degrees awarded to Blacks are highly skewed towards women. Somehow this has been misinterpreted across the web as Black women being the most educated group.
Sequoia is primarily a Series A investor, without seeing the deck and traction/usage/retention/revenue metrics, it's really hard to make definitive conclusions at least with regards to that one example.
In the context of wrong stage/check size, Alfred's response was reasonable.
The part about Nguyen was frustrating. It's hard to imagine a more honest hypocrisy than explicitly saying, on the record, that one will be forthcoming and helpful towards the marginalized, and ending up being just as dismissive and unengaged as everybody else.
I get the sentiment, but Ha was more helpful than she realized. I've been in this game from both sides the table. From this post, it's pretty clear she does lack basic knowledge.
She needs to understand how VCs are evaluating her business, what metrics and data she needs to show, and what types of businesses are even a match for the VC model.
Ha's post covers much of that. And having been in VC, the fact Ha even spent time giving advice is more than 90% of cold reachouts to VC can expect with a Google resume or not.
VCs write these 101 posts because they want founders to know when it's time to come to them and how to present the info. That's very much what she makes it seem she needed.
FWIW, we had the same experience with the other Spero VC: Shripriya Mahesh. She has a lot of blogposts around investing in startups that level the playing field, and not once did that topic come up in our conversations. And she isn't the only investor. A general rule of thumb we learnt: more an investor talks about a topic, less likely is that they care.
There is a hidden asterisk: *as long as you are ex-FAANG doing a SAAS startup, in a competitive round. SWM? Hidden bonus bingo!
I felt similarly. There are a lot of things one could do to help, short of funding. Even taking the time to write a longer and more personal email would not be nothing. On the other hand, the article says she did schedule a meeting with the author ("albeit a month out"). It doesn't say what happened at the meeting.
It's an app for personal trainers to help them organize their business. Not a big niche, and there are other apps in that space.[1] That one is from Fitii, which has software for trainers, customers, and gyms, talking to each other. Crunchbase shows Fitii as being from Melbourne, AU, with "1-10 employees". In that situation, VC funding seems unlikely.
It is amazing to me if that the entire conversation on the thread is about her credibility, and not at all towards the systems that lead to blogposts such as these. It isn't one interaction, or one round or one app, these are system issues!
I think it is more interesting to discuss how all of the investor assumptions, ideas, pipelines, and teams, all are informed. And there isn't enough being done to deconstruct that. For example, what does it mean to say 'too early' to an under-represented founder? who is the comparison to? How many of your last X investments or team members came from Stanford or ex-FAANG?
Even if her business idea was bad, or her app didn't have traction, or her LI profile was not impressive enough, she deserved, at the very least, the following:
* Access to VCs, she had to use her husband's email to get access.
* Some constructive and personalized feedback. This does not have to be very detailed, a couple of no-BS sentences will do the trick.
I get that VCs are too busy to respond to each and every email they get, but they, and every one of us in the tech sector who is in a position to do so, needs to walk the extra mile to pull in people from under-represented communities who are trying to get in.
I'm not sure why this article is so controversial. Whether her app deserved funding or not wasn't what the main point of the article was. No one is saying they are obligated to fund a startup because a person is black.
If VCs want to claim to put effort into supporting black founders, then they should follow through on that with their actions. They had committed to meeting and helping black founders. Ignoring emails and generic responses is in no way helping. They could have still said no and been more accommodating as they claimed they would do.
VCs' duty is to act in the interests of their limited partners, so they have to make investments that they think will generate the highest returns, within the fund's investment mandate.
It may make sense for the activists to apply pressure on the limited partners (many of these being institutions with some social / public angle, such as pension funds, university endowments or sovereign and municipal funds) to demand higher diversity of founders from the venture funds they invest in.
Some large-scale investors have a history of adopting a social or environmental based elements in their investment strategy (for example, Norway's SWF divesting from coal and oil companies) - probably similar moves (but aimed at equal opportunities for all backgrounds) can be demanded from major US based asset management institutions - I don't see why, just to take an example, Harvard's board of trustees can't agree to that - even if that change is not directly aimed at generating the highest return on investment, it may be the right move from the longer term societal development perspective and for the university's brand value.
I don't know how to flag this thread to the mods, but--hey mods, can we lock these comments? It's disheartening to see threads on women/minorities in tech on Hacker News get strong, negative reactions from the community like some of what's written here. I would hope the forum can hold itself to higher standards than what I'm reading here.
In order for internet communities to thrive, you need to install some sense of "psychological safety." I'm using this term in the same vein that Google uses when they say that psychological safety is the foundation needed to build highly effective, high-performing teams. (It has nothing to do with "safe spaces" and whatnot.)
On this thread, a female founder made the top comment with a personal experience relating to the article, only to get inundated by comments telling her she was wrong (from one commenter in particular). Similar reactions were found to the article itself. Yet someone's lived experience is just that; it's their perspective on their own, true personal experience. Calling perspective "untrue" right off the bat is like a form of internet gaslighting; it stifles open dialogue.
If we want have good conversations online--something that's incredibly hard to do, yes--we need to give space to the people who share their experiences. I'm disheartened because I look to Hacker News for open commentary on issues and problems in the tech industry, and it's sad to see that dialogue overrun with people who just want to tell others they're wrong. If it takes locking a thread to improve the overall conversation, and get back a sense of "psychological safety" needed for those good conversations--so be it.
Why is it that African-Americans (not including Black Africans in this) tend to seek acceptance into White institutions and power structures, instead of building parallel ones? For instance, TiE[1] (The Indus Entrepreneurs) was specifically set up to fund Indian founders. At the time, there was pervasive bias (not that it doesn't exist today) against Indians as being good enough only as rank-and-file engineers, but not as founders or leaders [2]. TiE was instrumental in funding some of the earliest Indian founders many of whom are successful VCs today. They effectively forced the White VC power structure to sit up and take notice. Today, there is a flourishing ecosystem of Indian VCs and founders.
On a related note, as an Indian, I'm envious of what China is doing today - they realized pretty early that the Western world order would never have a place for China as equals. Hence, they began to develop viable alternatives to Western technology and institutions. Those efforts are beginning to bear fruit today. The borderline insanity and paranoia that the West has developed [3] about China is justification enough for those efforts.
Venture Capital started out as high-risk, high-reward high technology investments. Genentech, LSI, Teradyne, BTU International, and Apple. As Sam Altman, Thiel et al, and others have noted, VC lost its way since the late 80s and started focusing on widgets and "blitzkrieg" capital. The point of differentiation shifted from proprietary semiconductor or recombinant DNA technology to the ability to deploy large amounts of capital at scale, quickly.
What has mattered has also shifted. Uber's ride hailing solution was a revolution, of sorts, but it was an incrementalist one. The breakthrough that led to the production of synthetic insulin was a transformative one. Uber isn't a sustainable business. Genentech is still alive and kicking.
The personality types that are chosen for to create a business where the only metric of "innovation" is growth and genentech are different. In one, Steve Woz is a viable co-founder. In the other, he simply isn't, and is filtered out actively and implicitly.
There is discrimination in Venture Capital, that much is clear. But this issue makes it far worse. As it creates an ineffable bar that is vague and entirely defined in the VC's head. It is easier to answer the question if someone is a genius. Because genius is genius no matter the gender identity or race. A scientific or technological breakthrough is a breakthrough. No matter the origin. But the ability to "blitzkrieg" a business? Who knows.
When the only metric for success is rapid growth, and the only way for rapid growth to be predicted is for it to happen, it creates a murky set of rubrics and metrics where the number of bad companies by white/asian, cis-male founders who went to Stanford outnumber the number of great ones by people who don't qualify for those checkmarks.
The new system delivers sub-par returns and it is obvious that an alternative is needed. Despite great work being done by people like 1517 fund, Sam Altman's new firm, YC, Founder's Fund, Lux Capital etc, the industry isn't actively seeking out people with potential breakthroughs. It is creating artificial barriers to their success. Personally, the most significant sign that something is wrong with the ecosystem is that a potential breakthrough in phenotypic screening of pharmaceutical molecules wasn't sought out https://www.daphnia-labs.com , but the "Uber for X" by Template Stanford Founder Y will be.
It is also apparent that an alternate financing system is needed for companies that aren't technologically innovative, such as Nerissa's but aren't quite small businesses either. Companies that do fall under the "high-growth potential" label, while lacking the other qualities.
The blurring between VC, traditional PE, and small business banking have led to sub-par outcomes for all involved.
VCs shouldn’t be the gatekeepers to capital. The game is rigged. Who gets funding is decided by arbitrary metrics, inherent biases, and already established networks. Personally I’m planning on bootstrapping my own business and don’t plan on asking a VC for a hand.
The very point of the article, I guess, is pointing out those VCs that rode the wave around BLM topics just for the sake of their own public image without even delivering anything close to their pledge.
Just because some rich a-hole tweets and blogs something doesn’t mean that anybody actually believes them. In fact, most people have a decent BS detector, see these fluff statements for what they are, roll their eyes, and move on with their life.
Yes, I did. But that does not mean they will invest in startups which they believe will bring negative returns or that don't otherwise suit their portfolio.
It's not their private capital - most VCs are investing the funds of 'limited partners' such as pension funds, university endowments, etc. So in essence VCs are gatekeepers which make decisions regarding startups who will or wil not get access to someone else's money.
But anyway, it does not change the fact that it’s not public money, it’s money belonging to someone and that someone trusted VC to make decisions be motivated by capital gain not by social justice and fairness.
Capitalists only pretending to care about an issue to improve their image while continuing to only optimize purely for profit instead of taking additional risk to do the right thing? Shocking. /s
Please don't post flamebait or snark to Hacker News. Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines? Both of those are deprecated, and there's this, too:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
The part where she doesn't get a response when using her email but does when using her partner's email is pretty convincing. There are many studies that gauge racism in hiring by sending out resumes that only differ in candidate's name.
Wow. This post was marked dead within a minute of it being posted. I "vouched" for it, though given my pariah status on HN for calling out SV on social issues (such as racism), I'm surprised my "vouch" had any affect.
I have a lot more to say but HN doesn't really welcome my point of view, so...
That site has been banned on HN for 7 years, for whatever reason. Posts get autokilled when a site is banned.
You're certainly not a pariah on HN. But would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebaity comments? You've done it a lot, and those comments usually get downvoted, which is a correct use of downvotes. Your point of view is as welcome as anyone else's, if you'd express it more substantively.
There are lots of reasons why a site might get banned, but the main ones are when they are spam or consistently a source of off-topic or low-quality articles.
In this case it's hard to say because 2013 was a long time ago. It might have been because someone was oversubmitting or trying to promote the site on HN. That's another reason why we might ban a site.
This site looks like an online magazine focused on the SF Bay Area. When I look at the submissions I see a penchant for sensational titles and a lot of articles that aren't on topic for HN, but also a few articles that would make good HN submissions, except possibly for the titles. Two examples of good ones:
My experience in trying to raise capital is pretty similar to the author's, and I'm a white guy. However, I don't think that detracts from her point.
If the system were more meritocratic, the demographics of people being funded would more closely match the demographics of the world. But it's actually a game of personal connections, theater, and psychological manipulation that has little relation to competence in most business domains.
I think VC (and financial) culture in general is totally broken and far from meritocratic, unless you feel that getting good at the wealthy-capitalist-image-of-success-signaling metagame is a measure of some kind of merit.
Structural racism ensures that whites have better access to education/experience from an early age. By the time VCs get involved, it may well be meritocratic.
An insidious effect of racism is that one can explain any negative interaction through that lens if one is inclined. Based on her post, I don't actually see racism, I see someone with a stronger background and more bona fides being more successful at pitching than someone with less of those things. In most other situations, HN commenters would be saying something like 'anecdotes are not data'. I think it's hard to draw large scale conclusions of a 'different reality' from this.
I found no mentions on reddit. On google there is a single review on Capterra, no other results.
The Canadian ios app has no reviews, can’t check US on my phone. The Google play version has 88 reviews, but all but 3-4 of them are from Jan 26-Feb 2, with only one since, in May.
So some evidence of traction, product market fit, growth, or the general idea behind the app (pitch deck) would help with the argument.
The author does highlight an issue of how to get funded if you don’t have an existing network though. Network based introductions seems to be the norm for VC from what I’ve heard. And to be clear, there may be racism involved: my point is it’s hard to tell without knowing more about the app’s and whether it seems plausibly a fit for VC. Once an app has been around for a year you need more evidence of traction.
Edit: I should mention that if the app is indeed somewhere between “can be bootstrapped” and “needs VC investment” then there are are new options like Tinyseed aimed at this middle ground of company. Another commented pointed out that a competing app has 1-10 employees, which is not VC scale.