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We need to stop introducing artificial racist/sexist affirmative action policies and instead stick to including people based on merit. The injection of this ide

We need to stop introducing artificial racist/sexist affirmative action policies and instead stick to including people based on merit. The injection of this ideology everywhere is pernicious, unnecessary, and discriminatory.

jtsiskin 6y ago
Although hopefully becoming weaker over time, people still hold biases against different groups. Until these biases don’t exist it makes sense to be aware of them and try to correct
- baskire 6y ago
  what is racism? To me giving someone a benefit due to their skin color is racist. Affirmative action is racist in nature. A good test is to replace the race with “white European”. And if the statement offends it’s racist.
  - skitout 6y ago
    Do we agree that current VC, mostly because of unconscious bias, are racist and sexist ? Then what do you suggest to change this situation ? I am not super comfortable with counsious positive discrimination as a momentary tool to correct a discriminatory situation (with negative impact on the whole society), but it is hard to imagine solutions without using this tool.
    - baskire 6y ago
      My belief comes from personal experience. That social mobility is alive and well but can take multiple generations. There’s Plenty of VCs who came from poverty, who’s parents came from poverty, or who’s grandparents came from poverty. When looking at that Kind of timescale from 1920s till now, I don’t believe the system has had enough time. Civil rights, racial rights, and gender rights are relatively new concepts. My belief is over the next 30-50 years the forces of market capitalism will address the issue.
      - skitout 6y ago
        So to you this is not a problem that VC and investors discriminate negatively people based on their gender of race ?
- Waterfall 6y ago
  How do you correct it? By holding racist thoughts of your own that you assume this race thinks that of that one and correct for it without judging them by their actions?
skitout 6y ago
The fact is (this is fact, not ideology) VCs tend to : -discriminate positively White and Asian men because they are White and Asian man independently of their merit -discriminate negatively all other people because they are women, black people... independently of their merit In France Oussama Ammar (the local Paul Graham) clearly advice to female entrepreneur, and to Black and Arab entrepreneur to preferably choose a business or strategy where they can bootstrap cause raising fund will be harder to them. Recently there have been many post about black entrepreneurs and VCs. And there is an interesting HBR article [1] showing some biais in investing in woman startup in Sweden (country known for its gender equality) These racist and sexist bias and discrimination has two consequences : - Lack of fairness as merit is clearly not the only thing taken into consideration ; with positive unfair impact for White men, and negative unfair impact for women, Black people... - "Bad" investment by the VC, that could have much better by investing based on "merit" and not (unconsciously) on skin color or gender. This has negative impact on the VC companies... and more generally on the economy. So finding ways to judge startup more on merit, being able to lower the bias is also a business decision that make sense and that will have positive impact on the VC performance and the economy. Getting more diversity in the VC firm just do it (and if VC are biased against black and woman startuper, we can imagine such bias used to be true for hiring people) [1] https://hbr.org/2017/05/we-recorded-vcs-conversations-and-analyzed-how-differently-they-talk-about-female-entrepreneurs https://hbr.org/2017/05/we-recorded-vcs-conversations-and-an...

jtsiskin 6y ago

Although hopefully becoming weaker over time, people still hold biases against different groups. Until these biases don’t exist it makes sense to be aware of them and try to correct

baskire 6y ago
what is racism? To me giving someone a benefit due to their skin color is racist. Affirmative action is racist in nature. A good test is to replace the race with “white European”. And if the statement offends it’s racist.
- skitout 6y ago
  Do we agree that current VC, mostly because of unconscious bias, are racist and sexist ? Then what do you suggest to change this situation ? I am not super comfortable with counsious positive discrimination as a momentary tool to correct a discriminatory situation (with negative impact on the whole society), but it is hard to imagine solutions without using this tool.
  - baskire 6y ago
    My belief comes from personal experience. That social mobility is alive and well but can take multiple generations. There’s Plenty of VCs who came from poverty, who’s parents came from poverty, or who’s grandparents came from poverty. When looking at that Kind of timescale from 1920s till now, I don’t believe the system has had enough time. Civil rights, racial rights, and gender rights are relatively new concepts. My belief is over the next 30-50 years the forces of market capitalism will address the issue.
    - skitout 6y ago
      So to you this is not a problem that VC and investors discriminate negatively people based on their gender of race ?
Waterfall 6y ago
How do you correct it? By holding racist thoughts of your own that you assume this race thinks that of that one and correct for it without judging them by their actions?

skitout 6y ago

The fact is (this is fact, not ideology) VCs tend to : -discriminate positively White and Asian men because they are White and Asian man independently of their merit -discriminate negatively all other people because they are women, black people... independently of their merit In France Oussama Ammar (the local Paul Graham) clearly advice to female entrepreneur, and to Black and Arab entrepreneur to preferably choose a business or strategy where they can bootstrap cause raising fund will be harder to them. Recently there have been many post about black entrepreneurs and VCs. And there is an interesting HBR article [1] showing some biais in investing in woman startup in Sweden (country known for its gender equality) These racist and sexist bias and discrimination has two consequences : - Lack of fairness as merit is clearly not the only thing taken into consideration ; with positive unfair impact for White men, and negative unfair impact for women, Black people... - "Bad" investment by the VC, that could have much better by investing based on "merit" and not (unconsciously) on skin color or gender. This has negative impact on the VC companies... and more generally on the economy. So finding ways to judge startup more on merit, being able to lower the bias is also a business decision that make sense and that will have positive impact on the VC performance and the economy. Getting more diversity in the VC firm just do it (and if VC are biased against black and woman startuper, we can imagine such bias used to be true for hiring people) [1] https://hbr.org/2017/05/we-recorded-vcs-conversations-and-analyzed-how-differently-they-talk-about-female-entrepreneurs https://hbr.org/2017/05/we-recorded-vcs-conversations-and-an...