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> Diversity continues to be an issue in SaaS. Only 11% of founding teams include a non-male and 21% include a non-white founder I find this line absolutely inf

> Diversity continues to be an issue in SaaS. Only 11% of founding teams include a non-male and 21% include a non-white founder I find this line absolutely infuriating. And I'm disappointed it's right at the start. Must there always be an issue when the data doesn't suit a worldview? Why compromise a survey 's integrity with your own bias? It costs virtually $0 these days to start a SaaS company, regardless of gender, ethnicity or religious creed. Look at the emerging African & Indian markets to see absolutely remarkable people hustling & making things happen with having very very little.

tarsinge 7y ago
Racial statistics also only make sense in the US where skin color is associated with usually only one culture/origin, and while it's understandable in this specific context be aware than in other countries this is plain racism (and also illegal in some like France) because of the complexity and multi culturally and background that exist between a similar skin color. Now sure there are socio-economics realities correlated but in that case instead of using skin color as a proxy (which again only works in the US) the correct thing to do is to use directly the variables of that socio-economics background, like education, income level, parent's wealth, ...
- cambalache 7y ago
  Why are you downvoted? Americans are right when they say people from outside do not understand certain things about Americans (like the second amendment or why car culture is so prevalent) but many don't apply that standard to themselves. In many countries race is not a big deal.
- beardedman 7y ago
  You have many countries with racial stats. I also referred to the gender "issue" - not only race.
  - tarsinge 7y ago
    I don't think gender has the same statistics relevance issue, because the distribution is more uniform across the socioeconomic spectrum. Edit: to clarify, I am not debating wether or not the gender and racial "issue" should be highlighted in the survey, just that the racial stats as they are are not statistically relevant to draw conclusions (at least in non US countries).
europr 7y ago
Europe is planning to introduce a new version of GDPR addressing this. If your company sells to females, you should have at least 50% women in your company's leadership. And you need to keep records for at least 10 years to prove that at no point ever did your company's female to male ratio go below 50%. Also, if a woman visits your site, you should have explanatory popups which explain this new benefit. You know, just in case they somehow didn't know about it because they just landed on Earth after their trip to Mars. You also cannot add to your prices just for compliance, and if you do, the prices should be increased for males also. Lastly, if you ask people whether they are male or female before they enter your site, you may be fined up to $10 million Euros. And if you are a woman who resides in Europe and don't like this law, you cannot choose to opt out, but you are welcome to renunciate your country's citizenship.
thulecitizen 7y ago
> Must there always be an issue when the data doesn't suit a worldview? Why compromise a survey 's integrity with your own bias? Hello. Might I remind you of the Global North's historic and continued plundering of the Global South (developing countries)? Or should we forget about all of that? > It costs virtually $0 these days to start a SaaS company Yes, if you have a big cultural inheritance (which was itself plundered and stolen and appropriated from other countries). Oh yes, and you need a big trust fund and upper class parents, or at the least a pedagogical mentor who stimulates you, nourishes your curiosity. By saying this you are showing me the holy ground you are standing on. There are many hands who touch your life every day: feeding you, making your clothes, your electronics, etc. Check out the True Cost (2015): https://youtu.be/OaGp5_Sfbss?t=32 https://youtu.be/OaGp5_Sfbss?t=32, or 'Steve Jobs: The Man In The Machine': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhWKxtsYrJE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhWKxtsYrJE Two key areas one can focus on: 1) imperial intellectual property machine - the work of Ruth Okediji is revealing with this: http://www.commonlii.org/sg/journals/SGJlIntCompLaw/2003/14.pdf http://www.commonlii.org/sg/journals/SGJlIntCompLaw/2003/14.... and 2) Corporatist/institutionalized plundering since the colonial era: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/britain-stole-45-trillion-india-181206124830851.html https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/britain-stole-45-t... Please would you consider these and try to understand their implications on today's reality?
- hecatoncheires 7y ago
  So you give the example of Britain plundering India. Explain to me why Indians in America are the most successful ethnic group in the country then, at almost twice the median income of white people? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U... By your logic of white "holy ground" whites should obviously be at the top of the list, no? Instead Indians and East Asians are.
  - thulecitizen 7y ago
    What is there to explain? I am not challenging the intelligence of one ethnicity over another, that seems to be your argument here. My argument is that we tell countries in the Global South to use strategy B (free competition) to try to become ‘successful’ like us, when actually we ourselves used strategy A (infant industry protection and export subsidies) [1]. In other words, we give them advice we ourselves didn’t follow, and then blame them for not having ‘caught up’ and become ‘developed’. The delivery mechanisms for rich cultural inheritances, and use of the best time-saving strategies, are increasingly made artificially scarce through a combination of (1) the money system, and (2) through the IP system (the Aaron Swartz Doc. is great on this). Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley because of the US Intellectual Property regime. To understand this deeper, I'd implore you to check out the work of Guy Standing [2]: "…today, a tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created. ‘Rentiers’ of all kinds are in unparalleled ascendancy and the neo-liberal state is only too keen to oblige their greed. Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions." The reviewer of Chang’s book then goes on to write: "Rather than a “free market,” the neoliberal global economy praised as “free trade” by policy wonks is actually “a global framework of institutions and regulations that enable elites to maximise their rental income.” Standing says 31% of Western corporate profits today, as opposed to 17% in 1999, are in industries where profits are rents on artificial scarcities like patents, copyrights and trademarks enforced under the neoliberal treaty regime established in the ’90s. To take one example, Apple — thanks to patents, copyrights and trademarks — runs a 40% gross profit on the iPhone. Two-thirds of drug research is funded by taxpayers, while patents add $140 billion to the annual price of drugs in the United States. And Standing makes short work of the propaganda myth in favor of so-called “intellectual property”; rather than being a reward for innovation, the main actual purpose of patents is to prevent others from innovating. This is especially egregious, considering that most of the new technologies and products under patent were developed with heavy taxpayer R&D subsidies, and then enclosed for private profit. Alongside rents on the artificial scarcity of ideas, the state provides enormous rents to the propertied classes through the enclosure of land and natural resource commons, dating back to the enclosure of peasant land in early modern Europe, the engrossment of land (both vacant and native-occupied) in settler societies like America and Australia, the hacienda system in Latin America, the nullification of peasant land rights by colonial powers in Asia and Africa, and the looting of oil and mineral resources. Property claims to all these forms of looted land and resources have persisted in the hands of Western capital under neocolonialism, and one of the main functions of the state is to enforce such titles — in the name of “defending private property rights” — against attempts at reclamation by their rightful owners.” [1] Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective by Ha-Joon Chang (2002) [2] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corruption-capitalism-guy-standing/ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...
snowboardJim 7y ago
Comments like this are the reason I hardly ever visit HN anymore
Alex3917 7y ago
> It costs virtually $0 these days to start a SaaS company The average cost of raising a kid in a middle class family is around 250K. What percentage of micro SaaS founders do you think had less than double or triple that (inflation adjusted) spent on them between when they were born and when they founded their companies? If founding a SaaS company is free, it's only in the same sense that gas for a Tesla doesn't cost anything. Being one person who has the liberal arts / social science background to understand people, and can also code, and can also design, and can also do marketing, requires many hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of education -- even if it's just sitting around in the library for a few years instead of working. There are definitely people who are wildly successful without that kind of background, but I don't think they're representative of the typical people building micro SaaS companies. Keep in mind you're really only able to learn to code if you're able to read English at a proficient level, which only ~13% of Americans are able to do.
- friendlybus 7y ago
  13% of America is literate enough to code??
- csa 7y ago
  > Keep in mind you're really only able to learn to code if you're able to read English at a proficient level, which only ~13% of Americans are able to do. Proficiency is measured on a scale — it is not binary. What specific level of proficiency are you referring to, and what is your source for saying that this is the minimum level needed to learn to code. I will go out on a limb and say that your 13% is folks who can read at a 12th grade level (or thereabouts). Note that in the literature, this does not refer to the reading level of an average 12th grader, rather the level that curriculum developers aim to have 12 graders read at. Also, what level of coding are your referring to? I will just say straight up that I can teach and have taught kids who have little or no knowledge of English how to code (e.g., with Scratch), so I think you may need to make your assumptions a bit more transparent.
  - Alex3917 7y ago
    Source: https://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF https://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF > Also, what level of coding are your referring to? Just being a working developer. For which the main skill is just being able to read and understand the documentation for new languages, frameworks, libraries, etc.
codegeek 7y ago
I think it has more to do with socio-economic background than your race/gender/ethnicity etc by default. You used the example of Indian markets. If you look at who the founders are, most of them are middle-upper middle class where they don't have to worry about basic needs on a daily basis. Again, I am sure you can find the rags to riches story anecdotally but running a business myself (non white male founder), I can tell you that socio-economic status helps tremendously. Yes, you can still start a SAAS business regardless due to lower barrier to entry but you are only thinking about servers/software type of cost and not the opportunity cost that most lower middle class to poor people have to give up on. It almost always comes down to your socio-economic status and I am in the "big risk taker" group. When I started my business, I could totally risk not working for a year or two without it causing significant damage to my family's socio-economic status/needs. Yes, my income went down significantly and it was still a risk but a heavily calculated one. Even if the business failed, I would be able to get back to the corporate life easily since I had put in 10+ years of experience by that time and had financial stability to do this.
ivanhoe 7y ago
It costs zero if you're a student living with parents who feed you and provide for you. If you have to pay the bills while working on the project then it costs the money you'll need to survive those 6+ months, or it costs you your free time and social life and sleep if you're moonlighting. Depending on your gender, ethnicity or religious creed (and immigration and parental status) it might be significantly harder for you to pull it.
- beardedman 7y ago
  > It costs zero if you're a student living with parents who feed you and provide for you. False. Hence me mentioning those other markets where the economic climate is must worse than the US - yet you have people making it work. Kenya/Nigeria fantastic examples.
  - ivanhoe 7y ago
    In Kenya also just some people manage to do it. I'd bet there's no many single parents among them, just like there's no them in US. Or people having to do multiple part-time shitty jobs to pay the bills. Or people that have to take care of their parents or siblings. It's highly dependable on your social and financial situation if you'll be able to run a business, any business including SaaS.
dang 7y ago
Please don't rush from the first detail that infuriates you to the HN thread to post about it. That's the opposite of intellectual curiosity, the guiding value of this site. Curiosity looks around to see what's new; fury rushes to react to something old. It also breaks the site guidelines because (a) it will probably start a flamewar, and (b) such discussions are basically always the same. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Instead, wait until the first infuriated rush subsides, and then reflect on what a thoughtful post might say, and how it might contribute to curious conversation. If you can't think of anything like that, it's the better part of valor not to post. This is the reflexive/reflective distinction: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20reflexive%20reflect&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

tarsinge 7y ago

Racial statistics also only make sense in the US where skin color is associated with usually only one culture/origin, and while it's understandable in this specific context be aware than in other countries this is plain racism (and also illegal in some like France) because of the complexity and multi culturally and background that exist between a similar skin color. Now sure there are socio-economics realities correlated but in that case instead of using skin color as a proxy (which again only works in the US) the correct thing to do is to use directly the variables of that socio-economics background, like education, income level, parent's wealth, ...

cambalache 7y ago
Why are you downvoted? Americans are right when they say people from outside do not understand certain things about Americans (like the second amendment or why car culture is so prevalent) but many don't apply that standard to themselves. In many countries race is not a big deal.
beardedman 7y ago
You have many countries with racial stats. I also referred to the gender "issue" - not only race.
- tarsinge 7y ago
  I don't think gender has the same statistics relevance issue, because the distribution is more uniform across the socioeconomic spectrum. Edit: to clarify, I am not debating wether or not the gender and racial "issue" should be highlighted in the survey, just that the racial stats as they are are not statistically relevant to draw conclusions (at least in non US countries).

europr 7y ago

Europe is planning to introduce a new version of GDPR addressing this. If your company sells to females, you should have at least 50% women in your company's leadership. And you need to keep records for at least 10 years to prove that at no point ever did your company's female to male ratio go below 50%. Also, if a woman visits your site, you should have explanatory popups which explain this new benefit. You know, just in case they somehow didn't know about it because they just landed on Earth after their trip to Mars. You also cannot add to your prices just for compliance, and if you do, the prices should be increased for males also. Lastly, if you ask people whether they are male or female before they enter your site, you may be fined up to $10 million Euros. And if you are a woman who resides in Europe and don't like this law, you cannot choose to opt out, but you are welcome to renunciate your country's citizenship.

thulecitizen 7y ago

> Must there always be an issue when the data doesn't suit a worldview? Why compromise a survey 's integrity with your own bias? Hello. Might I remind you of the Global North's historic and continued plundering of the Global South (developing countries)? Or should we forget about all of that? > It costs virtually $0 these days to start a SaaS company Yes, if you have a big cultural inheritance (which was itself plundered and stolen and appropriated from other countries). Oh yes, and you need a big trust fund and upper class parents, or at the least a pedagogical mentor who stimulates you, nourishes your curiosity. By saying this you are showing me the holy ground you are standing on. There are many hands who touch your life every day: feeding you, making your clothes, your electronics, etc. Check out the True Cost (2015): https://youtu.be/OaGp5_Sfbss?t=32 https://youtu.be/OaGp5_Sfbss?t=32, or 'Steve Jobs: The Man In The Machine': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhWKxtsYrJE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhWKxtsYrJE Two key areas one can focus on: 1) imperial intellectual property machine - the work of Ruth Okediji is revealing with this: http://www.commonlii.org/sg/journals/SGJlIntCompLaw/2003/14.pdf http://www.commonlii.org/sg/journals/SGJlIntCompLaw/2003/14.... and 2) Corporatist/institutionalized plundering since the colonial era: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/britain-stole-45-trillion-india-181206124830851.html https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/britain-stole-45-t... Please would you consider these and try to understand their implications on today's reality?

hecatoncheires 7y ago
So you give the example of Britain plundering India. Explain to me why Indians in America are the most successful ethnic group in the country then, at almost twice the median income of white people? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U... By your logic of white "holy ground" whites should obviously be at the top of the list, no? Instead Indians and East Asians are.
- thulecitizen 7y ago
  What is there to explain? I am not challenging the intelligence of one ethnicity over another, that seems to be your argument here. My argument is that we tell countries in the Global South to use strategy B (free competition) to try to become ‘successful’ like us, when actually we ourselves used strategy A (infant industry protection and export subsidies) [1]. In other words, we give them advice we ourselves didn’t follow, and then blame them for not having ‘caught up’ and become ‘developed’. The delivery mechanisms for rich cultural inheritances, and use of the best time-saving strategies, are increasingly made artificially scarce through a combination of (1) the money system, and (2) through the IP system (the Aaron Swartz Doc. is great on this). Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley because of the US Intellectual Property regime. To understand this deeper, I'd implore you to check out the work of Guy Standing [2]: "…today, a tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created. ‘Rentiers’ of all kinds are in unparalleled ascendancy and the neo-liberal state is only too keen to oblige their greed. Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions." The reviewer of Chang’s book then goes on to write: "Rather than a “free market,” the neoliberal global economy praised as “free trade” by policy wonks is actually “a global framework of institutions and regulations that enable elites to maximise their rental income.” Standing says 31% of Western corporate profits today, as opposed to 17% in 1999, are in industries where profits are rents on artificial scarcities like patents, copyrights and trademarks enforced under the neoliberal treaty regime established in the ’90s. To take one example, Apple — thanks to patents, copyrights and trademarks — runs a 40% gross profit on the iPhone. Two-thirds of drug research is funded by taxpayers, while patents add $140 billion to the annual price of drugs in the United States. And Standing makes short work of the propaganda myth in favor of so-called “intellectual property”; rather than being a reward for innovation, the main actual purpose of patents is to prevent others from innovating. This is especially egregious, considering that most of the new technologies and products under patent were developed with heavy taxpayer R&D subsidies, and then enclosed for private profit. Alongside rents on the artificial scarcity of ideas, the state provides enormous rents to the propertied classes through the enclosure of land and natural resource commons, dating back to the enclosure of peasant land in early modern Europe, the engrossment of land (both vacant and native-occupied) in settler societies like America and Australia, the hacienda system in Latin America, the nullification of peasant land rights by colonial powers in Asia and Africa, and the looting of oil and mineral resources. Property claims to all these forms of looted land and resources have persisted in the hands of Western capital under neocolonialism, and one of the main functions of the state is to enforce such titles — in the name of “defending private property rights” — against attempts at reclamation by their rightful owners.” [1] Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective by Ha-Joon Chang (2002) [2] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corruption-capitalism-guy-standing/ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...

snowboardJim 7y ago

Comments like this are the reason I hardly ever visit HN anymore

Alex3917 7y ago

> It costs virtually $0 these days to start a SaaS company The average cost of raising a kid in a middle class family is around 250K. What percentage of micro SaaS founders do you think had less than double or triple that (inflation adjusted) spent on them between when they were born and when they founded their companies? If founding a SaaS company is free, it's only in the same sense that gas for a Tesla doesn't cost anything. Being one person who has the liberal arts / social science background to understand people, and can also code, and can also design, and can also do marketing, requires many hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of education -- even if it's just sitting around in the library for a few years instead of working. There are definitely people who are wildly successful without that kind of background, but I don't think they're representative of the typical people building micro SaaS companies. Keep in mind you're really only able to learn to code if you're able to read English at a proficient level, which only ~13% of Americans are able to do.

friendlybus 7y ago
13% of America is literate enough to code??
csa 7y ago
> Keep in mind you're really only able to learn to code if you're able to read English at a proficient level, which only ~13% of Americans are able to do. Proficiency is measured on a scale — it is not binary. What specific level of proficiency are you referring to, and what is your source for saying that this is the minimum level needed to learn to code. I will go out on a limb and say that your 13% is folks who can read at a 12th grade level (or thereabouts). Note that in the literature, this does not refer to the reading level of an average 12th grader, rather the level that curriculum developers aim to have 12 graders read at. Also, what level of coding are your referring to? I will just say straight up that I can teach and have taught kids who have little or no knowledge of English how to code (e.g., with Scratch), so I think you may need to make your assumptions a bit more transparent.
- Alex3917 7y ago
  Source: https://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF https://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF > Also, what level of coding are your referring to? Just being a working developer. For which the main skill is just being able to read and understand the documentation for new languages, frameworks, libraries, etc.

codegeek 7y ago

I think it has more to do with socio-economic background than your race/gender/ethnicity etc by default. You used the example of Indian markets. If you look at who the founders are, most of them are middle-upper middle class where they don't have to worry about basic needs on a daily basis. Again, I am sure you can find the rags to riches story anecdotally but running a business myself (non white male founder), I can tell you that socio-economic status helps tremendously. Yes, you can still start a SAAS business regardless due to lower barrier to entry but you are only thinking about servers/software type of cost and not the opportunity cost that most lower middle class to poor people have to give up on. It almost always comes down to your socio-economic status and I am in the "big risk taker" group. When I started my business, I could totally risk not working for a year or two without it causing significant damage to my family's socio-economic status/needs. Yes, my income went down significantly and it was still a risk but a heavily calculated one. Even if the business failed, I would be able to get back to the corporate life easily since I had put in 10+ years of experience by that time and had financial stability to do this.

ivanhoe 7y ago

It costs zero if you're a student living with parents who feed you and provide for you. If you have to pay the bills while working on the project then it costs the money you'll need to survive those 6+ months, or it costs you your free time and social life and sleep if you're moonlighting. Depending on your gender, ethnicity or religious creed (and immigration and parental status) it might be significantly harder for you to pull it.

beardedman 7y ago
> It costs zero if you're a student living with parents who feed you and provide for you. False. Hence me mentioning those other markets where the economic climate is must worse than the US - yet you have people making it work. Kenya/Nigeria fantastic examples.
- ivanhoe 7y ago
  In Kenya also just some people manage to do it. I'd bet there's no many single parents among them, just like there's no them in US. Or people having to do multiple part-time shitty jobs to pay the bills. Or people that have to take care of their parents or siblings. It's highly dependable on your social and financial situation if you'll be able to run a business, any business including SaaS.

dang 7y ago

Please don't rush from the first detail that infuriates you to the HN thread to post about it. That's the opposite of intellectual curiosity, the guiding value of this site. Curiosity looks around to see what's new; fury rushes to react to something old. It also breaks the site guidelines because (a) it will probably start a flamewar, and (b) such discussions are basically always the same. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Instead, wait until the first infuriated rush subsides, and then reflect on what a thoughtful post might say, and how it might contribute to curious conversation. If you can't think of anything like that, it's the better part of valor not to post. This is the reflexive/reflective distinction: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20reflexive%20reflect&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....