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Jessica Livingston

• deleted 11y ago
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  • kelukelugames 11y ago
    I'm not sure if these tactics have ever worked in the entire history of human romance. Maybe men just like bragging to women to feel better.
  • G79YAX 11y ago
    I realise I'm opening a can of very sensitive worms here, but just so I'm clear from that recount... 1. Jessica was asked by a man if she was on her own or on a date 2. She responded that she co-founded Y-Combinator 3. He asked if she had some startups in her portfolio that other investors had overlooked, and asked for her contact details 4. She told him to contact PG All that left her "shaken" - "'I’m not crazy, right?' she said. “He was hitting on me? He was offering to invest in our weaker companies as a way to get me on a date, right? Did that just happen? [...] Livingston said she wasn’t sure if this man was just flirting, actually attempting to talk investments, or offering venture funding for a date." If that kind of interaction in public leaves someone "shaken" I struggle to understand how they manage go about their day without having a nervous breakdown. She was spoken to by an unknown man, and politely dismissed him. How that is worthy of an entire news article leaves me shocked. I am not denying there are gender/harassment issues in tech, but this is hardly one of them. EDIT: To clarify, as per one commenter's response, my shock is at the news article, not Jessica's (supposed) response.
    • striking 11y ago
      Hold up. Before this turns into an HN firestorm, PG's essay notes: > Jessica was mortified, partly because the guy had done nothing wrong, but more because the story treated her as a victim significant only for being a woman, rather than one of the most knowledgeable investors in the Valley. You're exactly right, it was sensationalism. They acknowledged that with > After that she told the PR firm to stop.
      • Zikes 11y ago
        It's unfortunate that such sensationalized articles tend to get so much attention. They make it all the more difficult to have a reasoned discussion on the matter, because they introduce so much "outrage fatigue".
    • Natsu 11y ago
      One of the points in PG's essay is that the story told there is bogus. It was supposed to be a story about Jessica as one of the most knowledgeable investors in SV. It got turned into something about sexism over a non-event, as far as she was concerned.
      • wpietri 11y ago
        Important tip for dealing with journalists: they aren't there to write your story. They'll be writing their story. And what that story is has a lot more to do with what they and their readers find interesting than what you want readers to know. In particular, that piece came out at a time where the general public was discovering that women in tech get a heap of bullshit that men in tech mainly don't. I'm surprised that she was surprised that telling a story like that got attention; it seems like an obvious thing for a PR person to have prepped her for.
    • griffinmb 11y ago
      The several times I've ever been quoted in a blurb/paper/article, it was taken horribly and embarrassingly out of context. So, in my experience, these quotes almost certainly don't reflect reality.
    • ElComradio 11y ago
      It is true that the vast majority of companies engage in spin and carefully consider what is said from a PR perspective. Examples of this are so obvious and ubiquitous, it would be insulting to most HN readers to point them out. So, why should we not be equally skeptical when it's YC? Do we consider them above brand management and putting a positive spin on a mistake by an exec?
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• samstave 11y ago
  Great article. Only one typo "[pg] is better at some things (that) [sic] Jessica is" But I do have to say, wow, there was a lot of really new information in this post, to me, and I also could feel the emotion and passion in it. It's nice when someone gets praised in such a manner - regardless of if its from their SO, because I felt that there was a lot of objectivity in this post as well.
• pc 11y ago
  I'm delighted that this essay exists. Jessica helped out in so many different ways during the early days of Stripe that I can barely remember half of them. (John and I became interested in startups in large part as a result of reading Founders at Work. And then, because John and I were immigrants without credit history, our residence of the Bay Area started with Jessica helping to convince a landlord to rent a place to us. Once the company was underway, whenever John and I had a major decision to make, figuring things out generally involved biking over to Jessica's and PG's place for an invariably clarifying discussion. I recall one particular decision that John and I had been debating for weeks. We just couldn't decide. Jessica's response, when asked, was immediate and adamant. We were surprised but trusted her. John and I often remark at how differently (and, I'm confident, worse) things would have ended up had Jessica not convinced us to make that call.)
  • simonebrunozzi 11y ago
    What an amazing book, still to this day.
  • rabidonrails 11y ago
    Any chance you'd let us in on what that decision/disagreement was about - even in the abstract?
  • bradgessler 11y ago
    I remember thinking to myself in summer of 2008, "YC would cease to exist if it weren't for Jessica." You could just tell she was the glue that held the whole thing together and kept things on track. Take note world. Really happy to see this essay published.
  • namikaze 11y ago
    Can you please share the story that led to weeks of debates but was so clear to Jessica? It is very interesting to see how insights or intuition can help make decisions.
  • throwaway1985 11y ago
    I think Jessica should have become the president of YC. Then this essay won't be needed as her achievements will be very visible. Imagine a woman leading the most prestigious VC company or incubator. She will be seen as a role model by many women who wants to get into tech. Instead, she just fades into the background.
• SwellJoe 11y ago
  I would think most founders who've been through YC would recognize Jessica's importance in the equation, so it's interesting that it is some sort of secret in the industry at large. Even early on, before her first book was published, she was obviously on top of, and involved in, everything. She was the primary point of contact for damned near everything for founders. So, it's an interesting phenomenon that even with such a preponderance of evidence, the story that gets told and re-told mostly leaves her out. Our industry has so many internalized prejudices that are invisible unless and until you're looking for them, it can seem perfectly normal for the story to be about a lone man building an empire with a few supporting characters. If the story were framed as building a "family", rather than a business empire, would Jessica's role be more prominent in the telling? I think one could tell it either way, but the tech industry doesn't have language for that, even though I think some of the best companies were as much a family as an empire (early HP, for example). Gender roles are weird, is what I'm trying to say, and the tech industry is more rigid than many.
  • Natsu 11y ago
    Just from PG's essays alone, I've always known how important she was. I remember him making it very clear, so it's sad that the media hasn't really given her proper credit. I don't blame her about not wanting to deal with journalists, though, after all that. I wouldn't either.
    • jsprogrammer 11y ago
      I have not read all of PG's essays, but the few things that I have read here, talking about Jessica Livingston, including this essay, set her up as a magic oracle, sitting in obscure silence, judging everyone (on which basis, it is never revealed, except for appeals to "character", through a Social Radar). I don't disbelieve that is how it happens, but to me it just seems all a bit too magical. Like, founders should be betting their entire business that this person who won't talk to you can correctly divine your entire past and future trajectories just by watching you talk to her husband? Otherwise, they won't accept you into their family? It's a bit of a turn off and vaguely cult-like.
• kelukelugames 11y ago
  The take away for me is no matter how good you are, you still need to sell yourself.
  • dmix 11y ago
    *if you care about public recognition from journalists (or bloggers might be the better word) who fail to properly research their subjects.
  • dasil003 11y ago
    In my estimation the desperate desire to be recognized is behind some of the worst cultural shift in SV in the last 20 years. The article even states specifically how Jessica's very strengths would be undermined by becoming more visible. If your comment is because you failed to recognize Jessica's talents, you should ask yourself whether that has negatively impacted her life in any way?
    • kelukelugames 11y ago
      What? I have no idea what your question is getting at.
  • talsraviv 11y ago
    I understand why you might arrive at that conclusion, but think about another level: What did Jessica Livingston lose or miss out on by not promoting herself to the public? I would argue that she missed out on nothing that matters.
    • nostrademons 11y ago
      I think that's the calculus that she figured on when she made the decision not to be a public figure. I suspect that the recent articles playing up her role are because she & YC realized that there is something they're missing out on: millions of potential female founders are not starting companies because they don't have strong role models. This hurts YC in a financial sense, but even beyond that: if your mission is to increase the amount of startups and innovation in the world, then having half the world's population disqualify themselves because they don't have many good examples of it being done before is losing out.
• mbrock 11y ago
  Founders at Work, her book of founder interviews, is stunningly good. I'm not surprised she's key to YC.
  • pavornyoh 11y ago
    >Founders at Work, her book of founder interviews, is stunningly good. It is indeed. I wish she will write more books or even essays like PG. I am excited to see if Founders at Work will one day be in an audio format.
  • guiomie 11y ago
    I bought this book out of curiosity 2 years ago. I did not google the author. I'm glad to know she is the one behind it. I also own her husbands book.
  • myth_buster 11y ago
    I agree. I found that the best part was that founders went on length answering the questions. The text could be verbatim or it could be how the book is edited. I usually find interviews annoying as the interviewer interjects a lot, breaking the chain of thought, diverging the discussion or some times cutting them off to inject their own opinions. This book I thought had none of that. And I learned a lot reading it. As for PG's essay, I think I came across this exact content some place else (my memory fails me).
  • commandar 11y ago
    I've had this book in my Kindle library for ages. I think this thread is going to push me to finally get around to reading it. I've heard nothing but good things both about the book and about what she's done for YC.
  • hudibras 11y ago
    The interview with the founder of Hot or Not is an all-time classic. Edit: I just re-read it and it's still as awesome as I remember. This would actually make a great movie, much better and more exciting than the Facebook or Apple films.
• EXC_BAD_ACCESS 11y ago
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• angelbob 11y ago
  I'm never sure how to reconcile PG's stance of "our founders are good people" / "X-ray vision for character" with some of the things that some of the portfolio companies do. For instance, the vigorous, long-lasting and constantly denied spamming that AirBnB did off CraigsList with fake names, or some of the early Reddit fake accounts and general puffing-up (which was, to be fair, less bad.) Maybe business tactics are explicitly not part of what PG and Jessica consider "good character"? It seems increasingly clear that they mean something different by it than I do.
  • nvader 11y ago
    This could be the distinction you're looking for in pg's own words: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/665962369890123776 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/665962369890123776
    • gohrt 11y ago
      IOW: Step on toes and throw elbows, but don't smash kneecaps. Know the line.
      • angelbob 11y ago
        Yeah. Makes me very curious where they draw the line. Because it is not obvious from outside.
  • kelukelugames 11y ago
    Easy. It's not considered bad if the founders are good people. All humans are exceptional at rationalizing.
  • S4M 11y ago
    She did also miss Live Coding[0] - or maybe she didn't interview the founder. After reading that thread, it's hard to believe that YC has a magic filter of bad people, which is basically what PG claims when he mentions the "Social Radar". [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486476
• zubspace 11y ago
  So, what's her secret? Is it something you can learn, is it experience, x-ray vision you either have or have not? Are women better suited for this job? What clues are you looking for while talking to founders? Is there something like a 'perfect' character or does she make a list of positive and negative traits? Are some traits more important than others?
  • yason 11y ago
    I would bet a lot that it's nothing really you could analyze in terms of rational thinking but that it's still something that everybody has. Everyone, including you, do get different feelings from different people. Maybe there's that uncle you're just not that comfortable with to begin with, or your neighbour who always lightens you up somehow. But the problem is that focusing on thoughts and modelling your impression by thinking masks these feelings off. Thus, most people don't realize how their feelings change when they move from place to place and from person to person. The feelings can be seen in your body language but in the worst case you're completely oblivious to them yourself. Typically you just grow a blurred sense of anxiety or ease, much like a moving average of what you've felt that day. Now imagine you do get a slight grasp of all that, and begin to practice it. Maybe you can find a way to "feel" different people, maybe you observe how your feeling changes when stepping into an elevator with different people each time. Maybe you find some other way to sift through people and try to get a feeling from each one. There are infinite number of ways to practices and they are all equally hard. Sensing can be really hard because, today, everyone is always going, talking, making noise, and acting busy. It's impossible to deal with a lot and try to get a feel of a person at the same time. I think something similar was described in the article: you need to be out of the focus, you have to have some space around you to make this connection with your feelings. However, for some reason, your body tends to like breathing. Focusing on breathing tends to tone down the active parts of brain and emphasize your sensibility to your feelings going through your body. Maybe that is the reason martial arts emphasize breathing a lot. So, it might be that you find yourself breathing slowly and steadily in the elevator, maybe gazing out to the wall during the ride, and just practice sensing what the feeling is each time, with different people. The more you practice, the better you get. Usually, as with practice, there are turning points where you just suddenly "get it", or at least you will get a glimpse of it if nothing else. Maybe at some point you begin to associate these feelings with an idea, or rather, an intuition. This is where you learn to put meaning in the feelings. A lot of times these feelings tend to be unexplainable. You don't know how, but your answer is "no". Or "yes". Or whatever you were seeking to know. In fact, the surefire sign that the feeling produces a genuine intuition in you is that you can't make yourself explain it. You're still practicing but now you need to practice trust. You get readings, some of which are noise from your mind and some are signals, from your body and based on genuine feelings, and you need to learn to trust your judgement on which one you heard. Becoming more sensible is not a game. You can't game it: what you need to do is surrender. Also note that it is absolutely not a one-way street. By changing how you perceive your surroundings and the people out there also changes you. You will not be the same person who is asking about this and who eventually gets the answer. It's also nothing mystical nor magical, it's just something humans can do but very rarely choose to do by a conscious choice. Foot note: I've been a very sensitive person since I was kid. So has my wife. It seems all so normal here now. Many a years back, it was truly comforting to realize that there are others like me. I've chosen to increase my sensitivity during the early adulthood by relying more on it. What you use will get bigger, I guess it's like what a muscle would do. It's also not a general trait or objective capability: it's very personal. What and how I feel the world is completely different from how Jessica Livingstone feels the world. Or my wife. Or anyone else. But the truths I feel myself are only applicable in my own life, so that is fine.
• metaphorm 11y ago
  thanks PG for writing this. it needed to be said.
• austenallred 11y ago
  I would guess that (almost?) all successful startups have a lot going on behind the scenes that doesn't make it into the press. My company isn't even particularly successful, but it's incredibly difficult for us to get anyone who writes about us to mention that I'm a co-founder (not the founder, let alone the fact that the community that does most of the important work) and that there's an entire team behind what we're doing (that it's not "my" thing). The single-man myth is just a lot sexier, even if false. There are great founders, to be sure, but every time you talk to the person who is the "single man" they talk about how the company is successful because of a fantastic team. In fact, a lot of the work of a founder is assembling a great team and making them work well together. I don't think I've ever seen an exception to that - even Jobs, Musk, etc. In fact, the real moral of the story is that the tech press is almost entirely bullshit, and that is mostly to be avoided.
  • tptacek 11y ago
    Yep! This was the first thing I took away from the post, too. Like, more people know about me than about Dave Goldsmith or Jeremy Rauch, but of the three of us I was the least important to the kind of success Matasano found. "Because I'm a writer" is a kind of highfalutin' way of saying "because I'm super noisy". :)
    • mode80 11y ago
      HN may be noisy, but PG is all signal
      • swombat 11y ago
        I think the word "noisy" can have multiple meanings :-)
  • birken 11y ago
    Yup, as an early employee of a very successful company, I know the opposite side of this. The ratio of key contributions between founders:early employees is probably between 2:1 and 1:1, while the ratio of tech press is about 1000:0. And you are dead on with the co-founder and founder thing. The tech press really has a founder and "single-person" fetish in the way they write their stories. Basically, don't value yourself based on what the tech press writes about you. If you are the one getting the press: you actually aren't that great; if you aren't getting the press: who cares. I understand that PG is writing this article because he feels it is unfair he gets written about too much and Jessica not enough, but the real crux of the issue is that the tech press is so stupid it doesn't matter. I mean just look at that article that was written about Jessica...
• sparkzilla 11y ago
  I made a newsline of Jessica Livingston, that compiles many of her interviews: http://newslines.org/jessica-livingston/ http://newslines.org/jessica-livingston/
  • pavornyoh 11y ago
    This is neat. Thank you.
• matrix 11y ago
  Thanks for this PG, it's wonderful to see Jessica get the long overdue credit she deserves. That essay is also comforting for me on a personal level because like Jessica, I'm uneasy with attention, public speaking, etc and that's a tough thing to struggle with when you're a startup founder, where a big part of your job is to be the affable, extroverted face of the company. The thought of doing a YC or similar interview makes me sweat, even though I know what I'm building is awesome, cool and valuable. If ever Jessica is giving lessons on how to get over that, sign me up please!
• deleted 11y ago
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  • dasil003 11y ago
    Probably she was just sick of the misinformation out there despite not wanting to engage with it personally. If she didn't want pg to publish this obviously he wouldn't have.
• tptacek 11y ago
  All the great teams I've worked on had the "family-like" property Paul Graham talks about here. The first really great company I worked at was explicit about being family-oriented; they'd bring everyone's family to the office and cook dinners, had Christmas at the founders house, that sort of thing. I left that company and joined a different sort of family, which was more of a bar-fighting sort of family but still had that vibe. Then I started my first company, which cratered, and which did not have that family feel at all, despite it being largely a group of people who were friends in real life. I felt like we got part of the way there with Matasano (at least in the Chicago office, which was our largest), but not all of the way. It's tricky to pull off! I really only want to work at companies that have that feel, for the rest of my career. It makes a huge difference. Also: if Jessica Livingston can generate that kind of culture on demand, that's definitely a reason to be impressed by her!
  • larrys 11y ago
    For a business purposes, part of the benefit of "that family thing" is that it would tend to make employees less likely to jump ship because of a personal connection and bond. This is also the reason why in business (the reverse example) it's important (generally and depending on the circumstances) to keep an arms length relationship. If your brother in law is, for example, the contractor doing work and renovating your home, your hands are tied more than if it's someone that you don't have a personal connection to. Weighed against the potential upside of getting a bad job from someone who has no relationship with you at all of course. (Details and the parties involved matter as with anything).
    • jsprogrammer 11y ago
      You're close to describing emotional blackmail. >it would tend to make employees less likely to jump ship because of a personal connection and bond. Employees should jump ship if the business sucks. It shouldn't matter how nice the owners are to you, if the business itself is no good, you shouldn't stay around and support it.
      • tptacek 11y ago
• larrys 11y ago
  "After that she told the PR firm to stop." Oh wow I disagree with this totally. One reporter gives a bad slant to a story and that is enough to make you give up on setting up and getting other PR? What am I missing here? Anyone who has ever appeared in a story in the news (I have multiple times) knows they always get things wrong and always angle to story to what they think is something interesting that will allow them to sell advertising. That is the business they are in. With all due respect to Jessica (who I don't know) this sounds to me very thin skinned and not exactly an example of overcoming adversity in the entrepreneurship world. Of course it's her right to not do interviews if she doesn't feel like doing them but the way PG presents the story it's as if this one incident was enough to sour her taste (and there were no other factors at play). Edit: As would be expected say something (not delicately or gently enough) about anyone closely associated with YC and get downvoted. Maybe that's just because people will pay attention to the comment more and tend to react more emotionally than rationally. Edit#2: As far as those who say "YC is successful Jessica doesn't need to be in the limelight it's important to realize that people read these essays who are not in that position. Or even close. So perhaps PG could have pointed that out in a more direct way so that those learning from his writings could understand the nuance of the decision.
  • tptacek 11y ago
    She didn't want PR for its own sake. She wanted to get a message out, and the tech press was less interested in the message than in how many clicks they could milk out of any drama involving YC.
    • larrys 11y ago
      So you are saying that she figured that out after 1 bad interview and didn't know it about the press prior to hiring a PR firm?
    • larrys 11y ago
      Well perhaps she learned a lesson that if you are going to "lead" with a tasty vignette like that the rest of your message will be lost. So it's a lesson learned, right? Next interview she would perhaps not do the same thing and simply save the story for PG.
• tomasien 11y ago
  The fact that the tone and method of delivery for various conversations affects who participates in them and how was lost on me for most of my life.
• rokhayakebe 11y ago
  "The less energy people expend on performance, the more they expend on appearances to compensate." J.L.
• edavison1 11y ago
  It's uncomfortable to me that Paul Graham felt he had to write this. In particular, his enumeration of Jessica Livingston's 'Social Radar' as if it is some kind of superpower reads to me like a long list of the virtues emotionally unintelligent hacker dudes lack, like he felt forced to justify her role in the founding of YC. I could be overreacting but I also find it telling that he doesn't praise her for business acumen (until that blip at the end about data), but rather for her intuitive judgments. Not a very interesting character portrait, and has an slightly weird sniff about it.
  • austenallred 11y ago
    It seems to me that you're projecting
    • 001sky 11y ago
      Objectively, there is more to it. It might be uncomfortable, but sometimes a little coaching is useful feedback. Take a look at what happened to Ronda Rousey over the weekend. Complete lack of preparation. A cornerfull of yes men..."your doing great"...after round #1 etc. Unknown challenger meanwhile was methodically breaking her down. Point is there is a balance to he had from motivation and positive re-inforcement with some actual feedback...so you don't get blindsided. I think the only real questions is about whether that convo is best in in public vs private. There is some awkward in this essay. Some of it seems un-neccesary, and maybe could have been re-worked to make the points hit home without it.
    • pbhjpbhj 11y ago
      Can you expand on your comment please?
  • wpietri 11y ago
    That seems like a fair concern to me. Like you, the piece strikes me as subtly and uncomfortably gendered. As a hacker myself, my emotional intelligence was never that great. But I think this was vastly compounded by being a guy; society didn't expect me to develop much in the way of emotional skills. A big thing that changed that for me was doing in-person tech support in college. About 10% of the job was knowing facts. The rest was helping humans in very human ways. When, years later, the term "emotional labor" [1] came around, it made a lot of sense to me. I may not have been natively good at it, but you don't have to have talent to get skill. It just takes more work. So when he talks about emotional radar and her being the mom and whatnot, it all strikes me as a false dichotomy, one I've worked hard to avoid. It's especially odd to me in a piece about society treating a woman as lesser. [1] Lots of good stuff on the topic in this amazing Metafilter thread: http://www.metafilter.com/151267/Wheres-My-Cut-On-Unpaid-Emotional-Labor http://www.metafilter.com/151267/Wheres-My-Cut-On-Unpaid-Emo...
• pm24601 11y ago
  Its sad - that she isn't out there more: setting a visible example for other women. But it is by her choice, and I am glad she has the choice. As men, we should make tech more accommodating to women. It is interesting that if Jessica was really a man "Jessie" how would the experiences have been. (i.e. founders ignoring "him", assuming "he" was a secretary, etc.) Of course, I better make sure I don't fall into this trap! Update: Interesting state of affairs. My comment is being downvoted.
  • ElComradio 11y ago
    Good idea. While you are at it- Don't bias based on weight. Don't bias on college/university. Don't bias on motivation to change the world. Don't bias on environmental/gender/racial activism or lack thereof. Don't bias based on the presence of a lumbersexual-style beard. Don't bias based on sense of humor. Don't bias based on political opinions. Don't bias based on social anxiety and bombing an interview because of freezing. Don't bias based on age. Don't bias against dressing well or wearing a suit.
• wpietri 11y ago
  On the one hand, good for PG for speaking up. On the other, how can one write a piece about persistent discrimination against a woman without mentioning societal gender discrimination as a thing? He even asks the question, "If Jessica was so important to YC, why don't more people realize it?" His answer: he's vocal and she doesn't seek attention. Those may be true, but that's not enough to answer the question. As the NYT just wrote, even famous female economists get slighted like this: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/12/upshot/even-famous-female-economists-get-no-respect.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/12/upshot/even-famous-female-...
  • hebdo 11y ago
    I suggest you read the essay again. PG clearly writes that Jessica's way of dealing with people is by listening. And she's damn good at that. It is harder to listen when you speak, or when everybody watches your every move.
    • wpietri 11y ago
      Thanks, I read it twice. But as with the economists I link to, this happens even to women who are perfectly vocal. I submit that there is something else going on here besides her just being naturally quiet.
      • Kluny 11y ago
        Yes, there is. It's the undercurrent of sexism that runs through almost every human encounter. But that undercurrent can run deep or shallow depending on whether the people involved acknowledge it and actively try not to let it affect their decisions. This essay is a great effort at making the undercurrent shallower.
        • wpietri 11y ago
          Oh, definitely. As I said, I appreciate him speaking up. But in speaking up for his woman while reinforcing sexist notions and ignoring how this happens to other women, it has a "two steps forward, one step back" feel to me. I appreciate the piece, but I'm disappointed as well.
• brownbat 11y ago
  > "There's a sort of Gresham's Law of conversations." Generalized, this explains why a lot of the really cool, thoughtful, and kind people I know seem to fly under the radar. And it suggests that moderating a discussion forum means constantly pushing uphill.
  • agarden 11y ago
    It also provides an explanation for why national political conversations are so awful.
  • jolhoeft 11y ago
    I wonder what the direction of causation is. Perhaps the issue is not the cool, thoughtful, and kind are pushed out of the forums, but they are successful in engaging people on a personal level and are less motivated to go public. The obnoxious, however, however tend to get avoided on the personal level and find it easier to get an audience in a public forum.
• guelo 11y ago
  pg was famous among programmers before YC so it makes sense that everyone considered it pg's new venture. It's the same with Stackoverflow being considered Spolsky and Attwood's venture even though there were a bunch of other cofounders. Also, the publicity. pg was public in a bunch of ways that Jessica wasn't.
• billions 11y ago
  Livingston's book, Founders at Work is the most insightful book on startups I have read. In hindsight it was her ability to bring out the core of the founders' character that made the book so informative.
  • ericd 11y ago
    Yeah, probably my favorite book on startups for that reason.
• urs2102 11y ago
  Having read posts on both HN and hearing from other founders, I'd always assumed for years that it was common knowledge that Jessica was so integral to YC. Then again, I have noticed some of the changing narrative on the founding of YC and it's good that pieces like this are being written to prevent erasure. I've heard her speak both times at Columbia and have only heard wonderful things about her, so I'm glad this piece exists - hopefully the narrative will shift back to what I had thought it was in the future.
• robg 11y ago
  Surprised the essay doesn't mention Founders At Work, a great read that is really well done and likely very difficult given the breadth of the interview subjects. Seems like a perfect reflection on its author.
• cjbenedikt 11y ago
  Is it just me or did the article not mention her contribution to the sector with the SAFE note? One of the best additions to financing early startups.
• mchu4545 11y ago
  Any guys here who identify with Jessica's personality?
  • darkstar999 11y ago
    Of course there are.
• Kluny 11y ago
  Thanks for writing this. I've been reading your essays for years and Jessica's name has never entered my radar. It really means something, to hear that not only is the female cofounder a central part of the team, but that we've never heard of her because she avoids the spotlight. It makes me think twice about stories of companies that don't seem to have any women in them - perhaps they are there, but they've been written out of the story.
• flinty 11y ago
  http://recode.net/2014/08/21/ycs-jessica-livingston-was-hit-on-by-a-vc-on-the-way-to-this-interview/ http://recode.net/2014/08/21/ycs-jessica-livingston-was-hit-... this is the article in question?
  • tomsun 11y ago
    Wow. To call this article a fluff piece is an insult to fluff pieces.
• bootload 11y ago
  "Jessica knows more about the qualities of startup founders than anyone else ever has." Putting these qualities onto paper would make good reading.
  • nosequel 11y ago
    http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/dp/1430210788 http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/d... As you wished.
    • bootload 11y ago
      thx @nosequel, I've got this book and have to re-read it asking that question. What I was thinking was a book more along the lines of specifically defining the characteristics then giving examples.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• shahryc 11y ago
  thanks for sharing this --- puts a lot in context!
• rdl 11y ago
  I wonder if it's easier to judge people's honesty/character/civility/etc. if they're interacting mainly with other people under your observation, rather than with you directly. I suspect so.
  • sneak 11y ago
    This might be another form of the "are they rude to waitstaff?" test.
  • nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Yes, it is. The reason is you can focus 100% on observing them, their body language, their words, and the dynamic of the conversation. Talking to them means you also have to be participating in the discussion. Additionally, with their focus on you, they are adapting their own style to how you react to it. You have to sort of do the same. That makes the patterns harder to see. So, many people that do this try to detach themselves. That Jessica further keeps the image or at least visitors' assumption that she might be just a secretary is straight brilliant: almost nobody pays attention to such people. That let's her stay either 100% or nearly so focused on her evaluation of them. There are two modifications that have shown to be superior. One is that one or more of the interviewers have the same ability to read people. As I said, the difficulty makes these rare people. However, you do see this among talented negotiators, intelligence types, and so on. The other one is keeping the assessor outside the room but with full visual and audio to pick up the unconscious cues plus a feedback mechanism. This might be a computer or earpiece for one or more interviewers. The reason is that the character assessment might run into situations where it's too vague to make the assessment. So, the person assessing might give a suggestion to the interviewers for how to prod the person to get a specific reaction. This might happen a little or a lot if the overall team has worked together a lot. Eventually, the interviewers get so good at spotting these situations and remembering how they were handled that they intuitively create these opportunities for the remote reviewer without being asked. The results are a more detailed and effective evaluation. Such a setup is not for everyone. Many prefer just having one or more people talking with another doing more listening and people watching. That's Y Combinator's setup. Many high-stakes interviews or negotiations use the latter method though with lots of effectiveness. That you can read the reviewer while the reviewer can read you probably helps a lot. ;)
• zensavona 11y ago
  "At one of the first she did, the reporter brushed aside her insights about startups and turned it into a sensationalistic story about how some guy had tried to chat her up as she was waiting outside the bar where they had arranged to meet. Jessica was mortified" Interestingly I read the article he refers to earlier today and I was really surprised (I took it at face value, apparently I should have been wiser) to read that someone like Jessica was so "shaken" by a guy hitting on her in what sounded like not-that-aggressive a way to me. I've never met her, but I've read enough online about her to have the opinion that she probably isn't someone who gets off on playing the victim.
  • ziedaniel1 11y ago
    You misunderstood -- she was mortified that the reporter's story focused only on that.
    • biot 11y ago
      She was mortified about the reporter's story and she was apparently shaken up during the interview with the reporter, who quotes her as saying: “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just still really shaken up. That’s never happened to me before.” Not having been there (and tending to give people the benefit of the doubt) it sounds like the VC guy thought she might have been there for an unrelated Match.com event (in which case asking her about that doesn't appear inappropriate) and, when he found out she is an investor, he switched gears to VC mode and asked if there were any opportunities there. Imagine you were at a bar and you saw an attractive person and started to inquire as to whether they are single, etc. You find out they are happily involved in a relationship already, but that they're a developer and they're waiting for some coworkers. If you work for a company that is hiring developers, you might ask them if they're open to exploring new opportunities. Absent any "creepy" signals, it seems unreasonable for them to conclude that you are offering an interview or a job in exchange for a date. Without knowing more information regarding body language, tone of voice, and so on it's entirely possible that she simply misread his intentions. Especially since the article concludes with: “What if he wasn’t hitting on me? What if I totally misunderstood?” she said. Conversations flow. I sometimes get confused when female friends abruptly change the conversation and I'm left asking them what in the world topic B has to do with topic A, only to hear the response that they mentally switched gears to the new topic and the two are totally unrelated. I find men tend not to do that without some signal that the topic just switched.
• masonhipp 11y ago
  Excellent read. Especially interesting trying to figure out all of the behind the scenes reasons for writing this essay, timing, content, etc. My co-founder is a woman and we have a somewhat similar dynamic: she doesn't write as much, doesn't like the publicity or argument that sometimes happens with a position in business: but at the end of the day she helps create a feeling of family in our team. I don't know if it is gender-based or just her personality, but it's nice to see someone in a similar (albeit much more successful) position getting some recognition.
• hashberry 11y ago
  "She had the last word. Everything we did as an organization went through her first—who to fund, what to say to the public, how to deal with other companies, who to hire, everything." Everything??? "She also hates fighting. She can't do it; she just shuts down." Oh, so not everything.
• jessaustin 11y ago
  The existence of people like Jessica is not just something the mainstream media needs to learn to acknowledge, but something feminists need to learn to acknowledge as well. There are successful women who don't like to fight. Which means if the public conversation about women consists of fighting, their voices will be silenced. It's my impression (primarily from lurking) that the more nuanced, observant conversation tends to take place in less publicized fora, which while not exactly closed are at least so little publicized that they are not "public". Sometimes this is termed a "safe space", sometimes the essential characteristics are arranged without calling it that. Anyway the conversations are very much "here's my impression; it's different than yours but we can agree on at least these things" and "I'm sorry but that is just so far out of bounds that we'll have to part ways and not try to work this out". There's a conversation, but not a debate. Maybe some would lament the "filter bubble" aspect of such an arrangement, because after all everyone should prefer to debate each point to death, but in fact not everyone does prefer that. (Of course, I do, but I'm slowly learning not to assume everyone else is like me.) It's tempting to put this all on "the feminists", but that is selling ourselves short. We can all listen without speaking, long enough to realize that feminism is not monolithic and that many feminists are aware of women like Livingston. The ignorance of the media and the Twitterati is a property of them, not of all of feminism. (Of course much of feminism is, for want of a better word, "masculine" in the sense of wanting to dialogue each point until we have a party line for everyone to toe, but much of feminism is not that.)
  • cauterized 11y ago
    Part of the problem is that every time the fact that it needs discussing is brought up, there's a group of reactionaries that turns it into a fight -- thus not giving us a chance to have that conversation without it turning into a brawl. You don't even have to be belligerent about it. Just say "maybe we should discuss the gender imbalance in tech and startups" in a public forum, and you're guaranteed a flamewar.
• 20years 11y ago
  Jessica sounds awesome! It is nice to see YC allow her to add value based on her strengths rather than forcing her into roles where her strengths would be lost.
• achow 11y ago
  > If bad founders succeed at all, they tend to sell early. The most successful founders are almost all good. I wonder what chances these people would have if they were to apply to YC now: Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey etc.
• Sevzinn 11y ago
  What is "PG"? I think it's Paul Graham, but I think it's really pointless to make that acronym.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • dang 11y ago
    We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10576051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10576051 and marked it off-topic.
  • brudgers 11y ago
    Though sometimes I refer to Graham as PG when commenting on Hacker News, I consciously try not to because I've not met him and I try to separate the feeling of intimacy that stems from having constructed a virtual Paul Graham from the actual person I have not met. Within the context of Y Combinator it probably makes a lot of sense, but on Hacker News, it draws a bit of a circle around insiders and outsiders. I don't think it's intentional, but I don't think it's particularly constructive either. Not knowing what "PG" means can be taken at face value. People can still write amazing comments and submit great news items without knowing or caring who "PG" signifies. I think you make a fair point. Hacker News is constantly growing and Paul Graham has been less active for many months and since Sam Altman became the public face of Y Combinator, Graham has been less visible and the ability to recognize all the Ycombinator partners by Hacker News user name isn't particularly valuable.
    • Sevzinn 11y ago
      Okay, "Sam". Just "Sam".
  • DanBC 11y ago
    pg is the username of Paul Graham on HN, so it's an acronym that he uses.
    • Sevzinn 11y ago
• JMiao 11y ago
  my first company, thesixtyone, would've never happened if it weren't for jessica. she welcomed me to yc teas when i was just a starry eyed idea dude from los angeles (hello, xobnis and zenters!), and she also saved our face and investment after i naively bumbled pg's verbal offer.
• pitchups 11y ago
  Great essay. Besides setting the record straight on Jessica's key role in the founding and growth of YC, it also offers a rare glimpse into how and why YC became the juggernaut it is today. "The overall atmosphere was shockingly different from a VC's office on Sand Hill Road, in a way that was entirely for the better." The rest of the essay is filled with words like family, mom, character, culture, authenticity, good(ness), social radar etc. Words you would hardly ever associate with a successful business - let alone a big time, successful VC firm on Sand Hill Road or anywhere else. It sounds like a crazy way to run a company based on such fuzzy concepts. But remarkably, these soft, fuzzy concepts appear to be a key part of YC's huge success - and not some cold, calculated decision making. In a way this bears out one of PG's other theories - that hugely successful startups usually start out with ideas that look really bad or crazy. And in YC's case, the most successful startup to come out of YC may be regarded as YC itself! Edit: Would like to add a key part of their approach seems to have been to throw out the old, tried and true approach, think from first principles and build the company and culture in a way that they felt comfortable with - and not how it was "supposed to be done".
• mattmaroon 11y ago
  I still remember, back in 2007, sitting in the old Mountain View office when Jessica came out and yelled "Matt Maroon! I just love that name." I had been a little nervous until that but for some odd reason that was calming. Those of us in YC knew she wasn't just PG's girlfriend.
• orliesaurus 11y ago
  we live in a messed up place where women are undermined no matter how great or influential they are. we, society, need to stop doing that. good write up - let's see what happens next.
• dtf 11y ago
  Here's an older piece by Jessica herself, on being a social radar, and the "mom" of the family: http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/the-social-radar-what-i-did-at-y-combinator http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/the-social-radar-what-i-... (I posted this partly due to the predictable reaction to PG's use of the word mom.)
• erroneousfunk 11y ago
  So Paul Graham had a girlfriend with an English degree and a background in marketing, and he brought her on to handle their marketing at YC. She was jokingly called the "mom" of the company, and she handled all the "social stuff" while they did all the "technical stuff" People assumed she was the secretary, and, according to her husband, she was okay with that. She's stayed out of the limelight because she's "sensitive," "modest," "shrank from engaging," was "mortified" on a previous encounter with the press. I mean, this is nothing against Jessica or her character -- there's absolutely nothing wrong with being non-technical, an introvert, or preferring to stay out of the limelight, but it doesn't exactly speak volumes that YC is promoting her like this, in response to YC starting out as a "one-man show," and some of the other accusations against them. "No, really, my girlfriend was around to be the work mom and handle the social stuff!" Just seems a little tone deaf.
  • Retric 11y ago
    YC is a VC company and people skills are central to making that work. Remember, one of the main things PG said he actually did was "We all had dinner together once a week, cooked for the first couple years by me." There main problems where not building servers, but "How do you recognize good founders?"
  • brchsiao 11y ago
    Please reread the essay. She was not "a girlfriend with an English degree" he "brought on to handle marketing." > Y Combinator is fundamentally a nexus of people, like a university. It doesn't make a product. What defines it is the people. Jessica more than anyone curated and nurtured that collection of people. In that sense she literally made YC. You seem to be assuming that pg wrote this essay to boost YC's reputation. Actually it feels like he wrote it to correct an injustice. A large one, I'd add, considering it's gone on for most of a decade.
    • erroneousfunk 11y ago
      Okay, I stand corrected. She was his girlfriend with an English degree and a background in marketing who was brought in to "curate and nurture a collection of people." I'm not commenting on whether or not the injustice was corrected -- I think it's important to give recognition to peoples' contributions and achievements. It still seems fairly tone deaf, all things considered.
• iandanforth 11y ago
  Jessica, Any chance you could write up what it means to have social radar? Right now you might as well substitute the word "magic." What is it that you see that other people don't? Do you score especially highly on reading micro-expressions (http://www.paulekman.com/micro-expressions/ http://www.paulekman.com/micro-expressions/)? Is this a familial trait? What is your subjective experience when talking to a 'faker?' Have you ever tried to track you first impressions against later behaviors? I'm super curious about what seems to be a real life superpower!
  • mettamage 11y ago
    I'm not Jessica (just a guy on HN), but I do want to add that my social radar increased a bit by doing Vipassana meditation (= body-scan meditation). Or perhaps I should say social intelligence, since I didn't look at the character of people, but I felt what people were feeling quite intensely. Body-scan meditation allows for the insula in your brain to develop (more than normal). Note that the insula maps to the body in a visceral sense. In my experience, this results in that everything that you will see you will also feel. So that means when you see a facial expression, you will feel it as well in a quite intense fashion. The most interesting example was when my best friend went to the movie Oblivion the evening after a 10 day meditation retreat. He told me he felt like he was in it. Caveat: you do need to meditate (aka 'feel your body') every day to keep up this level of 'social intelligence' (for lack of a better word). If you'd want to know more about it, search for: Search Inside Yourself written by Chade-Meng Tan. He worked as a software engineer Google and writes from a software engineer's mind.
    • rudolf0 11y ago
      Sorry, but how do you know this isn't some kind of placebo, exactly? This reads like pseudoscience. I do believe some people are certainly better at determining honesty and character than others. But without any sort of blind testing, or even some kind of empirical foundation or proposed specific techniques, it's very difficult to know for sure if a particular person really is better than average or not.
      • 11y ago
• larryfreeman 11y ago
  Thanks, PG. From my vantage point, authenticity is probably the not-so-secret ingredient of YC. This is a great essay and I hope that it impacts others not only in shining a light on the important contributions made by Jessica in the founding of YC but also in showing that one important tactic in the fight against sexism is to make sure to give credit when credit is due.
• motoboi 11y ago
  At certain point in the article, he describes her aversion to give talks and talk to the press. This makes me think that YC Combinator should upgrade from a school of entrepreneurs to a school of entrepreneurs advisers (which will create their own school of entrepreneurs). Something like going from a simple school to a school that trains teachers and them to a school that trains teachers how to train a new teacher of teachers. At this point, you can achieve self-sustenability. Wouldn't be great if YC model was replicated around the world (given the basic pre-requisites)? TL:DR It would be nice if YC Combinator tought people how do what Paul Graham does, the whole package.
  • josephpmay 11y ago
    I think YC does that already, just not particularly publicly. I think the effects of the YC network are a good indicator that this is going on.
  • itchyouch 11y ago
    As rare as good founders are to find, i'd argue that it's even rarer to find founder founders like PG & Jessica. Not to say that people like PG & Jessica are so rare that it couldnt happen via an institution, (i'd ague that most of the yc alumni could become founder founders), but the circumstances to become a PG & Jessica require a rare blend of both personal character development beyond just authenticity and a perfect alignment of opportunity to make for such an incubator. As soon as the process of an art form is institutionalized, one of the first things to go tend to be authenticity to the form of process and policy. It isn't that there is anything inherently wrong with institutionalizing something, but that authenticity and relationship development inherently do not scale, and the simplest way to make it scale is to exchange relationships for process & policy. Many day to day decisions could be made into an algorithm optimizing for the greater good, yet opportunities would be lost to scenarios akin to that of the scene in iRobot where the robot saves the adult man instead of the young girl from drowning because the robot calculated that the man had a higher chance of survival. decisions like these are where character is paramount.
  • theoh 11y ago
    Jesus. Yes, there are different roles. The whole point of the original link is to acknowledge the contribution of Jessica Livingston in a maybe intuitive "tacit knowledge" register. So multiple divergent roles need to be cultivated. But please, this is not a "Futamura projections" scenario where building factories to build factories is called for. It would be the first time in the history of the world... right? http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.219431.12& http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.219431....
• ecesena 11y ago
  I knew Jessica and Paul were married, and implicitly assumed this was pre-YC. I read with interest the data point that they were "already dating" at the time. I was wondering if you could share any data on success/failure of startups where 2 co-founders are in a relationship, and if/how this is rated in yc applications.
• dfraser992 11y ago
  Character is indeed very important, and in my view (given all the ^%&*$ I've been through with the one -and probably never again- startup I was involved with) the most important factor in any business. I wish I knew Jessica and that she'd could have warned me... She sounds like an "essential" person to know. You are a lucky man, PG
• theoh 11y ago
  "(As we later learned, it probably cost us little to reject people whose characters we had doubts about, because how good founders are and how well they do are not orthogonal. If bad founders succeed at all, they tend to sell early. The most successful founders are almost all good.)" A little Manichaen?
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• highCs 11y ago
  > It was also how we picked founders who were good people. I've read about qualities of good startup founders. Wondering now, what are the qualities of good people? (real question) What have you found? What should I read?
• KeepTalking 11y ago
  >> Incidentally, if you saw Jessica at a public event, you would never guess she hates attention, because (a) she is very polite and (b) when she's nervous, she expresses it by smiling more. on point(b) - I do this too. I have seen that very few people pick up on this queue. I smile and hide my nervous energy.
• danbmil99 11y ago
  Having been hiding in the woodwork during YC's early days, this rings so true.
• darkroasted 11y ago
  The existence of people like Jessica is not just something the mainstream media needs to learn to acknowledge, but something feminists need to learn to acknowledge as well. There are successful women who don't like to fight. There is another lesson here for feminists that PG does not fully articulate. In my experience, most women are similar to Jessica in that they do not fit naturally into an alphadog founder type role. The time-honored tradition for such women to be part of accomplishing great things, is to partner with an alphadog mate. Unfortunately, modern feminism is all about turning women into men, rather than guiding women to fit in as complements and partners to a strong man. If Jessica was so important to YC, why don't more people realize it? Partly because I'm a writer, and writers always get disproportionate attention. And also because she was not listed as involved when YC was first founded. I assume that Jessica was "The Fourth Man wants to remain anonymous for now"? https://web.archive.org/web/20050324095016/http://ycombinator.com/about.html https://web.archive.org/web/20050324095016/http://ycombinato...
• nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Now that I know about her, she seems pretty awesome. Great work, Jessica! I especially respect that she stays out of the press battles to focus on productive things. It's wiser because they're a trap anyway. The post gave a perfect example of that where they just tried to set her up for ratings. She seems to be playing her hand incredibly well as a ninja and sage behind the scenes. Such people don't get much press but are essential to many of the best organizations. Most are fine with the former because the pride is in the latter. :)
• ghufran_syed 11y ago
  I am a huge fan of Ms Livingston's book, and would love to see a follow-up work. I have no firsthand knowledge whatsoever regarding her work as a yc founder, but I certainly have no reason to doubt the views of many yc alumni who have commented on her importance at YC. However, as a father of two daughters who are started to find their way in the tech world, I'm a little confused and disappointed by this post by Mr Graham. If Ms Livingston's wishes are to remain in the background, then Mr Graham should respect that. If she has apparently changed her mind and wishes to take on a higher profile, she should speak for herself, not have 'the man' explain things to the world on her behalf, which wrongly implies she cannot do so herself.
• pg_is_a_butt 11y ago
  stop whining about your girl, bro
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• FD3SA 11y ago
  > The existence of people like Jessica is not just something the mainstream media needs to learn to acknowledge, but something feminists need to learn to acknowledge as well. There are successful women who don't like to fight. Which means if the public conversation about women consists of fighting, their voices will be silenced. And therein lies the problem. Professional feminists are extremely vocal radicals that do not represent the majority of women. Their statistics and talking points tend to be universally unsound and inflammatory, and they are at this point more accurately described as a racist and sexist hate group. So the question is, why are they deemed the authority on so many issues in the mainstream media? Why does PG even acknowledge their nonsensical demands, or try to engage with them to defend Jessica? Anyone who has lived a day on this planet understands that empirical reality is immutable, and ideologies cannot alter them. So when feminists for example, state matter-of-factly that "biology is a social construct", why are they allowed to continue speaking nonsense? Meanwhile, brilliant academics who debunk feminist propaganda like Helena Cronin [1] are nowhere to be found in the media. Perhaps women like Jessica Livingston and Helena Cronin need to take an active stance against radical feminists, and not dignify their accusations with a response other than: "please educate yourself before attempting to open a dialogue regarding these issues." AKA: Do not feed the trolls. 1. https://edge.org/conversation/helena_cronin-getting-human-nature-right https://edge.org/conversation/helena_cronin-getting-human-na...
  • kbart 11y ago
    A really good comment, I'd like to hear from downvoters their arguments against it.
• the_watcher 11y ago
  I highly recommend Founders at Work to anyone who hasn't read it. Jessica is an absolutely incredible interviewer (in my opinion, one of the more underrated skillsets out there, probably because we're used to such generic interviews). This essay highlights some of her strengths that helped her write such an incredibly insightful book. PG is right, she simply has a knack for asking extremely illuminating questions and getting insightful or informative responses.
• artur_makly 11y ago
  As a husband-wife co-founder team, I totally can relate. Having my wife's female intuition ( yes it really exists.. it's like a heat-sensing radar and magic 8ball all-in-one ) see her in action: https://www.instagram.com/p/zA41aSKM9C/?taken-by=juicycanvas https://www.instagram.com/p/zA41aSKM9C/?taken-by=juicycanvas The challenge is that 99% of my time is spent on so many righ-brain tasks..i practically become a 'vulcan' so when a customer email or PR challenge or new biz dev opp comes flying in.. its very easy to just mis-read it or reply in a curt almost cold way. Luckily she QA's all our communication with a filters yet undiscovered by scientists. Deb i love you darlin! Where would we be without you!
• orionblastar 11y ago
  Yes the Startups and new programmers are sort of like another gold rush, almost everyone is getting into it. You have to have social radar to sniff out the fakes and bad founders that would be bad investments and not able to finish a project. PR firms and news media and SJW always try to paint women as victims, but don't talk about female founders like Jessica Livingston as a success who went on to help many founders start many startups and get them successful. It is politics mostly from the left that uses victimhood to sell stories and get ratings and attention. I'd like to read stories about successful female founders and how they got success through hard work and being able to use social radar to detect fakes and bad founders and find ways to advise founders and help people out and give tips for starting up a company. So often on HN you see a link submitted about sexism in IT or racism or some other social justice cause and it usually gets flagged because it causes a lot of trolling and voting down of comments for disagreeing with them. I'm glad to read one about a female founder that isn't political and talks about her strengths and how she worked on a team to get things done and deserves more credit. I think HN needs more of this positive news about female founders rather than articles about sexism in IT or racism or whatever. We need real life examples to get females and minorities to study STEM and get into more startup jobs. When they are victimized, they decide not to study STEM because they think they would be discriminated against, and really that isn't the case at YC which has no discrimination and judges based on authenticity and who is a good founder. Not everyone is given credit, for example Steve Jobs is given credit for fixing Apple but he had a team of people helping out to find out which products cost more to support than they bring in and come up with new ideas for new products to bring in more revenue. The same with Bill Gates and Microsoft he had a team of people as well. Jessica Livingston needs more recognition, and if I was doing PR I would list her accomplishments, I would write about her social radar and spotting fakes and bad founders, I would write about how she helped startups and got them going. I would never try to make her into a victim, I would focus on her strengths and skills instead.
• ggchappell 11y ago
  Footnote #3 is worth pointing out, I think: > The existence of people like Jessica is not just something the mainstream media needs to learn to acknowledge, but something feminists need to learn to acknowledge as well. There are successful women who don't like to fight. Which means if the public conversation about women consists of fighting, their voices will be silenced. > There's a sort of Gresham's Law of conversations. If a conversation reaches a certain level of incivility, the more thoughtful people start to leave. I imagine that this idea applies to many situations. Replace "feminists" and "[successful] women" with something else.
  • jforman 11y ago
    I'm scared for the future of Congress. What thoughtful person would want to enter that environment?
  • tedks 11y ago
    Feminists will never "acknowledge" this as some grand triumph of feminism because the message it ultimately sends to girls is, if you want to co-found an incubator, start fucking a man who can help you. Is that a feminist message?
    • mattmaroon 11y ago
      It would take a horribly misogynistic person to think that's the message of PG's post or what happened. The message I'd take out of it: a woman is one of the most influential and successful people in tech. And she does it all behind the scenes while being kind and compassionate.
      • tedks 11y ago
        That's the narrative. This is the real misogyny: >And she does it all behind the scenes while being kind and compassionate. So: 1. Women should fuck men. 2. Women should stay behind the scenes. 3. Women should be "kind and compassionate" (are you one of those people that tells women they should "smile more" as well?). If this blog post was a book or a movie I wouldn't read it or watch it because even if the female co-star is an actually impressive character it would be so annoying that she was shoehorned into a love interest role and doubly annoying that she was constantly shoved into the background. Humans remember narratives, not facts, and so this isn't really a feminist story.
• chaostheory 11y ago
  Great essay that should leave no doubt for credit where it's due. What I find strange is that pg would even have to explain all of this in an essay after all this time since none of this is new to me (or I would imagine many people in the start up scene) since it's been mentioned so many times in different interviews. Then again it was also strange that a Bay Area vc wasn't able to recognize Jessica in either Palo Alto or Mountain View and start making some weird remarks towards her.
• pbhjpbhj 11y ago
  >A lot of the applicants probably read her as some kind of secretary, especially early on, because she was the one who'd go out and get each new group and she didn't ask many questions. // Yet elsewhere it's noted that one of the candidates pointed out that Livingston asked the fewest but most pointed questions. This makes me wonder if anyone ever did think that Livingston was "some kind of secretary" [and what's wrong with that] or if that assumption just plays to the conclusion that sex rather than, say, hot-headed assertiveness or attention seeking is the reason for the disparity in public perceptions of Livingstone and Graham. [I'm talking speculatively, I don't know either of these people]. Given the nature of the essay I find this, in the footnotes, quite peculiar: >No one understands female founders better than Jessica. // Why does she only understand female founders the best - that would presumably be because females are inherently different in some characteristics pertinent to being founders? Why is this not "No one understands founders better ..." is there someone who does understand founders better but for some reason is unable to understand female founders as well as they do male founders. Surely this is the answer to the question posed on notability if others are better at understanding founders who are male, for some reason, then as more founders are male [it seems, I don't have stats on this, just going with my perception of the consensus] it would stand to reason that those best able to understand the largest cadre of founders are most notable - this understanding we're told is the vital element in the field after all. The inclusion of the word "female" here is the key one way or another. >The person who knows the most about the most important factor in the growth of mature economies—that is who Jessica Livingston is. // It almost looks like Graham is saying, but perhaps not wanting to say, that the sex of his co-founder is the key element in reaching a broader base of founders? I'm not at all saying Livingston isn't the best person in the World in this role, but Graham's footnote leads away from that conclusion. On a slightly different focus: >There are successful women who don't like to fight. // People. There are successful _people_ who don't like to fight; unless you're saying their sex is the reason they don't like to fight or that this characteristic is peculiar to women then why do people have to force sexual bivalence all the time. The inference that follows that all [successful] men do like to fight is doubly unhelpful IMO.
• tyoung 11y ago
  I am in House Livingston.
• donlzx 11y ago
  So, Jessica is the Socrates for YC, and YC is the Socrates for YC start-ups. Successful founders are usually doers that often make bold adventures and can execute plans efficiently and ruthlessly, but they need consultant guidance from a wise person. I guess this is the YC's success formula?
• adamtheclayman 11y ago
  Quad Congress models would easily support Married Teams. Generally speaking, the plan was four interpendent voices, rather than a "bilayer family" "social membrane". In a Livingston-Graham sample case, this would equate to Livingston with an X Peer and two Y Peers. As an altarnative, if the first proves familially unstable or unequal for any reason, it could be reconfigured as Livingston-Graham, with an additional X' and Y' sharing the Quad. Sex-quadraphonic balance can be attained across the Racist Districts on Consistent District Cross-Couplings, with Moderate Racist Flexion on Regional Race Mobilities to heterodyne and finetune the balance signal requirement. The photographic concerns are true nightmares for wide swaths of otherwise calmpetitive entries. Athletic, popular telegenic builds are important, perhaps, for beauty model message lift, but can be delimited to at most a single "M. Universe" position on a STEAM, supporting and attending more frontally to the popularity contest loads. It is not inaccurate to say that sub 6'2'' height is a leading bar on Precedential Candidacy today. It's mixed in with "Bearing".. people like to look up with eyes awonder, as a middle school student looks up to teachers, as someone larger and morer authoritative, by stature-default, than they are. Height is selected for by the NBA and Major Party Presidency Preparation Teams, because it's single-player, winner-takes-all, with large "coat-tailed" entrailments in single-party, singleton, hierarchically solitary (hence faction- and funder- in-group, out-group hierarchy repositionings vulnerable), winner-takes-all districts. With Quad Seats, Triple Teams, or Duets carrying "Minority Report" Rites and Rights, with Heterodox and Heterodyne Perceptive Traits and Internal Flat Third, Fourth, Fifth, and even Sixth Why? Concensus Formative Pressures, rather than External Seniority-and-Until-Death-Do-Us-Part-Incumbancy Orderings that easily move into Lonely Singleton Courtroom Showdowns and "Loop Audio" Repetitions to try to effect "culture change" through decamillions of repeated argument impressions, rather than deeper choice architextures and technical pivot search facilitating longer-term Learning Network and Learning Platform Centripetal Calmpromise. My sense is that on Social Radar review, a Quadraphonic Castling of Congress, with Incumbant Protection, will strike Livingston, J. as not only doable, but a near-optimal thesis for Congressional Decisional Algorithm Optimization. Certain incredibly important algorithmic reformatory questions, like civilizational tithing, can be set on a 10 Year "Protected Experimental Platform" Timer, to clear space for other discussions, and clear out testably bad and "not even wrong" deeply misframed theses more permanently with "accept truth or lose your shirt" market betting side-markets.
• develfib 11y ago
  yes
• jessaustin 11y ago
  How is that this post has 1605 points (and counting), but 'urs2102 only has 648 karma? This is not a complaint, I'm just curious.
• graycat 11y ago
  It's really nice to see a man really, really in love with his wife! Mother Nature really likes that! For how she is so good with personality radar, IIRC recently there was a research paper that confirmed that already in the crib the girls are paying attention to people and the boys, to things. So the girls are making eye contact, understanding facial expressions, smiling, and, thus, eliciting protective emotions from adults while the boys are trying to hack the latch on the crib and install Wi-Fi and an real-time, embedded Linux in the toy fire truck on the floor! So, with some nerd men and a really feminine woman, there's no contest -- on personality radar, no way will the men catch up with the woman! Congrats PG, you just achieved "the greatest prize life has to offer".
• htchang_ycombi 11y ago
  I've been thinking about this essay and reading all those comments for a few days now. I am looking for a company where people are not arrogant, and where self-confidence and outspokenness is not a proof of someone's talent, and where everyone gets a fair chance of recognition, without having to brag and show off. Those traits are not in my own personality. I am smart though. It looks like YC can be a good place for that. Unfortunately, and as I was being told personally, this kind of place is very hard to find. So all those comments makes me a bit sad, because it's basically an exception in this world. While it's good that someone speaks about JL's talents, there's actually a lot of places where someone absolutely has to show other abilities in order to be recognized.