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Thoughts on YC's Female Founders Conference

91 points by mbellotti 13y ago

zaidf 13y ago
I don’t know why this comment struck me as odd … maybe it’s because the only people I know who identify themselves specifically as “nontechnical cofounders” are women. This means that you seriously need to go meet more founders. There are probably as many non-tech founders who are men as tech founders. These founders(such as Alexis from reddit) have filled the role in a very similar manner as Jessica describes.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- bryanlarsen 13y ago
  Sure, but I think her point stands. They don't identify themselves as a nontechnical cofounder: they're the business guy, the money guy, the sales guy or the industry guy. Using a negative to describe one's own role comes across as very self-deprecating.
  - zaidf 13y ago
    Alexis has a record of identifying himself as the non-technical founder. So do many, many other founders. Just do a google on this query to see founders describing themselves as non-technical: non-technical founder site:news.ycombinator.com
    - sachitgupta 13y ago
      Adding to zaidf, more examples: http://www.quora.com/Non-Technical-Co-Founders/How-do-I-provide-value-to-my-startup-as-a-non-technical-cofounder http://www.quora.com/Non-Technical-Co-Founders/How-do-I-prov...
    - bertil 13y ago
      From what I remember, those describe themselves as ‘the business guy’ or ‘the marketing guy’ but give advice, mainly about the attitude to have to fellow ‘non-technical co-founders’, assuming often openly that they do have a needed skill-set, that happens not to be code.
      - zaidf 13y ago
        The precise word that is used to describe your role in specific situations matters a lot less than knowing what it encompasses in whole. No one is saying anywhere that you should go out of your way to tell investors that your duties include cleaning the toilet and ordering food. No, to investors you are in charge of keeping lights on; in a meeting to discuss a partnership you assume charge of user growth; when it's time for lunch you assume charge of being the pizza boy/girl.
        bertil 13y ago
        > The precise word that is used to describe your role in specific situations matters a lot less The main point made by people studying career imbalance between genders seems to be that it tends to do at a statistical level.
  - enra 13y ago
    What I remember about Alexis saying was that he was the non-technical founder, and pretty much did I kind of weird stuff all the time like coming up with an mascot for the site. You can take pride in it and it shows if you do. I've heard and seen times all kinds of founders, non-technical and technical ones, saying that their role is fetching pizza on launch day, fixing the toilet, answering the phone, calling angry customers or doing what ever job is required. It's the job of the founder, and it's humbling not demeaning. You come up and build the initial product, you take care of the business, you grow the team and in the end if there isn't anyone else to do something, you do it yourself if needs taking care of.
  - kn0thing 13y ago
    This is simply baseless. I'm very proudly the non-technical founder of reddit, which I've always been very frank about. I've got citations galore. Drafting the blog post right now. http://alexisohanian.com/on-being-a-proud-non-technical-founder http://alexisohanian.com/on-being-a-proud-non-technical-foun...
- facepalm 13y ago
  Also, I think male founders sometimes also have to do 15 meetings a day to raise money, it is not an ordeal only female founders go through.
- earbitscom 13y ago
  Yeah, I tell people all of the time that I am a non-technical founder. I often do it to explain to other non-technical founders what they can be doing prior to finding a co-founder, because we had achieved a ton before we ever did.
thatthatis 13y ago
It occurred to me recently that if the goal is to eventually get to gender equality, female focused tech groups should set the proportion of their tickets available at x% female, y% male where x and y are the inverse of their proportions at some equivalent male dominated group. Over time, this policy should pull men and women together instead of apart. What good is it if women only know other women and men only know other men?
- soneca 13y ago
  I do think that there is good in a only women conference. But i also do think that your suggestion is incredibly smart. Minimize criticism of those who think this is sexism, while keeping its goal of both making a statement that there is inequality and providing inspiration to women - and still giving a chance to a few men understand how difficult can be to be on a environment dominated by the other gender.
- 001sky 13y ago
  Nothing is wrong with your point, but you are applying a 1->N scaling strategy to a 0->1 problem. That is to say, this type of event is brings people together because n=small, and the act of concentration brings more scaling effects that a larger act of dispersion. Over time, this will shift...and your preferred methods will make more sense in a context where dispersion is more important than concentration. But it is a good point to make that neither one is perfect or viable as a standalone method.
  - wellboy 13y ago
    Very technical analysis, but it actually makes sense! :)
  - thatthatis 13y ago
    I disagree slightly with your categorization of the problem. I think your characterization, while accurate in itself, is missing the "otherizing" and "in-grouping" that happens if we only foster no-boys-allowed special interest groups. Lets say a given women in tech event is phenomenally successful, that means that men are now precluded from attending a key event. Whether consciously or unconsciously men understand this and have a discentive to making the group phenomenally successful. The more successful it is, the worse the world becomes for the average man's career. When it is x%/y% it puts things into a different category. In x%/y% all success is shared. 1) Men interested in attending these female focused events would have a vested interest in increasing both the size of the female event (-> more male tickets) and increasing the % of women at other events (-> more male tickets). If I, as a man, wanted to attend the YC female founders conference as it was just held, there is no way I can - so it isn't worth me spending any time on. If however, the event had an x%/y% structure, one of the ways I could gain admission would be to actively bring women into tech (I assume this would be a large part of the selection criteria by which the small number of men get admitted). Everyone's interests are now aligned. 2) The connections formed between the small number of men and the large number of women at x%/y% female events are connections that will act as a bridge to getting more women at the regular events. It's well demonstrated in organizational behavior that even small amounts of conscious cross department interaction leads to greater sharing of ideas and follow on connections in both groups. 2b) I'm concerned that most female focused groups are only creating in-group connections. Meaning the approach they're taking leads to B0->B1 and eventually B1->BN (where the existing tech scene is already at AN as a boy's club). Which is to say, they're creating a silo of connections. We shouldn't be looking at the problem as "How do we create the best shadow tech scene for women." But rather, "how do we make the tech scene gender neutral." 3) By making these groups x%/y% you put men in the tech scene in a more acutely aware state. "You can't go in there, it's women only" is easy to parse as a group of 'others.' Human psyches are pretty good at dealing with blanked exclusions -- its a rival tribe, which is fine, I have my own tribe. The situation of "You could go in there, but it's very hard to get in because they only let in x% men" makes the problem tangible, evaluative, and solvable. Long story short on this point, I think with x% men, men feel the exclusion in a stronger and more productive way. Men would feel excluded in a way that is more productive for society if events were x%/y%. In the current state of affairs, nobody can write a blog post titled "How I hacked my way into a men's ticket to the YC women's conference." 3b) Right now 90% of the tech scene has no skin in the game for getting in more women. Some may have philosophical beliefs or take a very long term view and thus work towards female events happening anyways. But, x%/y% would mean we can a much larger portion of the 90% working on the problem in a way that has tangible near term benefits for everyone. Finally, we as a society only really permit discriminatory subgroups like this when the size of the subgroup is very very small. "Men in teaching," "Women in tech." By setting up "women in tech" groups as permitted discriminatory subgroups we are betting against these groups ever achieving parity. Because, when they do achieve anything even approaching parity they'll have to reconstitute. Think League of Women voters -- they're now a league of concerned voters of all genders, but their historical permitted discriminatory subgroup focus hampers their activities to this day. x%/y% means the group will never have to go through an identity crisis or a period where it is in the grey area of whether it is still acceptable to keep their historical membership barriers.
Udo 13y ago
It's expected that every word anybody said during that conference will be scrutinized beyond what's appropriate, simply because it's such a touchy subject. That's probably the reason why the video of the conference was already taken offline today while I was watching it (edit: it's not, see below). Generally I think it would be more productive if judgements weren't done on a hair trigger, because that's what makes this topic so toxic when in fact it shouldn't be. Personally I found the presentations very entertaining and insightful - and even though I didn't have the opportunity to watch the panel to the end, I was struck by the impression that for the most part these were normal startup stories. That's a good thing, because it means while there is work to do when it comes to making the playing field fairer to women founders, we're at a state where the main issue is not "how to cope with my gender" but "how do we get our startup off the ground". The area where I believe much more work is required is how we get more woman programmers started. The article touches very slightly on that, but then misses the mark: > To get a male founder to admit he doesn’t write the code his startup depends on you have to twist his arm. With a female founder it’s the second sentence out of her mouth. As if to say “PS - don’t take me seriously” A completely different way to read this is that people who code don't have a lot of status in circles of non-programmers. So a non-technical founder might in fact expect to be taken more seriously by professing hacking ignorance. One reason why non-technical women founders are quick to volunteer that info might be a subconscious reflection of that nerd stigma, and of course that's probably a large reason why women don't become programmers as often as men in the first place. It seems to me that perception of social status is the core issue. To be fair though it was a founders' conference, not a female hackers conference.
- pg 13y ago
  That's probably the reason why the video of the conference was already taken offline today while I was watching it. No, we took the video offline because one of the speakers hadn't realized the talks were being filmed. It will be back once we edit that one out.
  - gmays 13y ago
    Understandable, but also unfortunate. I saw the whole original talk and thought it was amazing. It's rare to get that kind of honesty, especially from a unique point of view. Unfortunately, our community has a way of punishing honesty like that, which is part of the reason we have so many unnecessary failures.
jpeg_hero 13y ago
Filed under: no good deed goes unpunished.
the_rosentotter 13y ago
An unrelated nitpick (this is HN after all): The white-on-black text really bothered me. I am seeing ghosting a few minutes after reading the piece (which I read in its entirety because it was pretty good).
mbesto 13y ago
> It wasn’t just that she referred to herself as a nontechnical cofounder it’s that she repeatedly diminished herself and her own qualifications at a conference supposedly organized to stop other women from doing the same thing. Has no one ever pointed out to Jessica that at the end of the day YC is an investment company and that she was the only YC cofounder with actual investment experience? That, if anything, she was the ONLY ONE of that group even remotely qualified to be there? Not a tagalong in her boyfriend’s company who has to constantly apologize for her presence. Interesting that was the OP's response. I simply took it as her being humble, not diminutive - so for me, her message was clearly delivered - take pride in whatever it is you do and do it well, regardless of role or sex. Interestingly, after hearing her keynote I thought she was the "technical" co-founder (she had investment experience in a investment based company) and pg was the non-technical co-founder (he was the hustler and gained the attention of the developers they would fund and match them up with investors).
gmays 13y ago
I posted my thoughts on the conference in another related thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7334744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7334744 But since it's relevant, I'll post them again here. TL;DR: I thought the conference was awesome and look forward to watching it streamed again next year. Here's my original comment: This was a great conference. I didn't attend (I'm male), but I watched the livestream and learned a lot from the speakers. I especially liked the conference because I learned about the female perspective. My wife isn't a startup founder, but has a similarly stressful job (flies F/A-18's in stressful, life-threatening situations), with similar hours (14hrs/day and often weekends), in a similar environment (male-dominated Marine Corps). I often wonder how she'll manage her work when we have kids...everything from pregnancy to making time for the kids when she's busy. It's easier for me since I work at home now, but she'll deal with the same challenges that some of the founders mentioned. And knowing her, she'll feel incredibly guilty for not being around. Anyway, I enjoyed the conference, learned a lot, and look forward to it next year.
kyro 13y ago
An overall well-balanced article, but I find it hard to believe that Jessica meant anything more regarding non-technical founders than someone having to carry their weight by taking care of the majority of non-technical tasks in a startup whose product is likely wholly technical. I've heard male non-technical founders recount memories of making coffee for coders to keep them happy. If anything, she gave a more accurate depiction of the role than someone who calls themselves the business or product guy.
pg_is_a_butt 13y ago
SEXIST EVIL DISCRIMINATORY
btrautsc 13y ago
> when you’re the nontechnical cofounder, your job is everything that’s nontechnical’ including grocery shopping and errand running. I don’t know why this comment struck me as odd As a non-technical cofounder, this is the truth. I'm not sure what expectations at large are, but I can corroborate this story and believe it should be most 'non-technical' cofounders expectation of reality. Take out trash, buy office furniture, go on sales calls, arrange the company insurance plan, order dinner on late nights, line up investor meetings, talk to users... I could literally go on forever - those are off the top of my head from last week. Technical cofounders (and employees) should be maximizing their impact by doing technical aspects - other founders should be selling, marketing, building the business, and sometimes have to order food, clean up the office, or go see the company lawyers/ accountants/ & run errands.
- nicoles 13y ago
  Agreed. Even as simply the 'less' technical cofounder, if I can spot an opportunity to increase my more-technical team members time coding, I do it.
mountaineer 13y ago
If you're interested in following the results of this conference and/or discovering more female founders, technical or not, I made a large Twitter list [1] to keep up to date. [1] https://twitter.com/ryanwi/lists/female-founders https://twitter.com/ryanwi/lists/female-founders
pron 13y ago
This kind of article shows why we need more women in tech. Many, many more. Critical and insightful but also respectful and modest. One thing that was missing, though, was politics. Politics in the true sense of the word, namely, the power struggles in the tech society which give rise to the current status quo. Also, she says, "No one pretended tech was a meritocracy". The thing is, tech is a meritocracy, and that's part of the politics of tech. Meritocracy, of course, is a joke. It is not a desirable state of affairs, because it should be obvious that "merit" is a false currency used to justify what is, rather than work toward what should be. It is the quintessential naturalistic fallacy. It amazes me time and again how people can take the term seriously, which only demonstrates how dangerous it is. Such a blatant, perverted joke, a dystopia that some intelligent people mistake for a utopia. Wikipedia says this: "Although the concept has existed for centuries, the term "meritocracy" was first coined in the 1950s. It was used by British politician and sociologist, Michael Young in his 1958 satirical essay, The Rise of the Meritocracy, which pictured the United Kingdom under the rule of a government favouring intelligence and aptitude (merit) above all else... In this book the term had distinctly negative connotations as Young questioned both the legitimacy of the selection process used to become a member of this elite and the outcomes of being ruled by such a narrowly defined group." I still can't fathom how meritocracy can be taken as anything but a negative. I mean, the first question that comes to mind (or, rather, the second after "what is merit") is, "who has merit and why, and who does not?" Once this question is asked, it is immediately apparent that any attempt to paint "meritocracy" in a positive light is ludicrous.
- lexcorvus 13y ago
  work toward what should be Ay, there's the rub: what should we work toward? This issue almost never gets discussed, except by implication. We hear over and over how we "need more women in tech". But even if everyone agreed that we do, how much more is enough? Should we stop after reaching 33% women? 50%? 60%? Often we hear the vague assertion that the percentage of women in tech should be close to the percentage of women in the general population—you can hear it echo every time the word "underrepresented" gets uttered—but this assertion is rarely justified. And indeed we can see how potentially absurd this criterion is by applying it to cases that don't serve the same political ends as "more women in tech"—i.e., by observing that women are "underrepresented" in prison, men are "underrepresented" in the daycare industry, etc. (Putting more women in prison isn't often offered as a way to stick it to the Patriarchy.) The assumption that increasing the percentage of women in tech is virtuous—quite a different goal, mind you, from encouraging all interested parties (female or not) to pursue the subject—pervades our discourse, to the point where "improve the percentage of women in tech" and "increase the percentage of women in tech" have become synonymous. To see through this trick, simply consider the similar case of the percentage of college graduates who are female. Women currently constitute approximately 57% of college graduates; i.e., women are overrepresented by a gap of around 14% vs. men. The question then arises: what would it mean to "improve" this percentage? We see in a flash that "equality" has nothing to do with it—I have never seen any mainstream source call for "improving the percentage of women among college graduates" by decreasing that percentage—unless, of course, by "equality" we mean that having women overrepresented among college graduates will help address other inequalities, such as the preponderance of male CEOs, male professors, and male billionaires. In this case, we simply return to the beginning: what should we work toward? Should we strive for proportional gender representation in every field of human endeavor? Unless men and women (and, indeed, all people) are perfectly identical, this is a prescription for eternal conflict—a fair characterization, I'd say, of our lamentable status quo.
nawitus 13y ago
" and deal with the boys" Well.. that started out pretty sexist.
- muhuk 13y ago
  Not so much sexist as it is derogatory. Implies immaturity.
- Crake 13y ago
  Saying "and deal with the girls" would get a lot of guys in trouble these days. Women too if you're on the internet where your gender is indeterminate, since feminists will get mad at you and assume you're an Oppressive Male.
bertil 13y ago
> Giving the idea of “separate but equal” another try and seeing if it plays in our favor this time? I think that this is a key point about that conference, and TED Woman. That and the implied paramount of sexism idea that if they let men talk, there are going to be chauvinist pig, because that’s indistinguishable from having a penis.
chacham15 13y ago
I think that this article misses one main point about Jessica Livingston: that she is different from other women; she said so herself. Not all women have the same type of personality. That is not a bad thing. "With a female founder it’s the second sentence out of her mouth. As if to say “PS - don’t take me seriously”" This is the point in which the author goes too far. Jessica knows that everyone at YC values her word. How many times has pg said that he often looks to Jessica about funding a group? For someone with a different personality, that statement might be more accurate, but I highly doubt it is for Jessica Livingston. In conclusion, everyone is different. Men are different from other men and women are different from other women. Do not assume that a statement means something because of the gender of the person saying it without taking into account the personality of the person.
deleted 13y ago
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projectileboy 13y ago
Putting on the conference was a great idea and was well executed, and I think is an important contribution towards improving the odds for female founders. To Jessica and the rest of the YC crew, thanks from the community. Please don't be discouraged by negative comments from the minority.
rachellaw 13y ago
The first half sounds like an echo-chamber hugbox The second sounds useful, but mainly because the content was useful. Did any of the conference address what a female founder is specifically? I'm still concerned that a Female Founders Conference would exclude men or people of other genders. Yes it's great to have a platform to stand as a woman, but what about trans* or non-traditional genders? Where do they go then? The whole idea of feminism is inclusion, which means including trans, queer and other genders and YES including men too.
- Crake 13y ago
  As a gender and sexual minority, I try to stay clear of feminists. (At least, when someone says they are one, I get wary.) They're some of the most GSM hostile people I've met. >The whole idea of feminism is inclusion, which means including trans, queer and other genders and YES including men too. Mainstream feminism doesn't agree, except for when someone wants to start an equal rights movement for another demographic, like men or GLBT. Then they start acting like patent lawyers. I would suggest looking into egalitarianism, which lacks the gender supremacy aspect of feminism. You can continue to identify as a feminist, that's fine and 100% up to you...but you're going to spend more time fighting other feminists about what "feminism" means than doing anything else. :/
  - rachellaw 13y ago
    Well that's the problem with preconceptions of feminism. Egalitarianism was originally a spinoff from 60s feminism (lead by Stein, Haraway, Latour etc) They actually went one step beyond that human equality, but suggested that machines/objects were on par with humanity since it augmented human intelligence (Engelbart). The problem nowadays is that feminism has turned into a splinter pile of infighting groups who, honestly, don't know what feminism is. Feminism has nothing to do with female superiority, it was simply put forward (along with queer theory, post-colonialism) as a framework to analyze society.
mnavada 13y ago
I attended the conference. Being "non-technical" doesn't mean you're doing less important or less challenging work. You're part of a team, and you should be proud of it. My husband and I have a startup. Yes, he is the technical side of the team. As the CEO, I mainly shape the vision for the product, strategize on how we grow, and am in charge of marketing. When we discuss our technical strategies, learning how to code is not enough. The vision for the company guides the technical decisions. Just because I don't sit and code our product also doesn't mean that I'm clueless about the major tech decisions we make. For example, in choosing whether or not to build our products with PHP or Python, I had to learn the pros and cons of each language, and then we made the decisions together. BTW, Python it is :) During the talk, there was a push to have more girls who code. And rightly so, since women are grossly underrepresented. But for now, I actually think that it's great to have women who have the confidence to found companies without being technical. As Kathryn from The Muse explained, Alex, her co-founder learned how to code. Necessity is the mother of invention. As for what I got out of the conference, in brief, I learned that the talks I loved were the ones where the founder was humble and matter-of-fact.
wiwillia 13y ago
I refer to myself as the non-technical co-founder all the time. I'm a male, and the CEO of our company. In my personal experience, I've never heard anyone equate "non-technical co-founder" to a term used only by female founders. I also find that many of the entrepreneurs and founders I meet are incredibly humble (disarmingly so - the founders of Dropbox and Airbnb have zero ego). I don't know if there's any YC alumn who would say that Jessica is anything less than essential within YC.
tyoung 13y ago
If I wasn't married to my cofounder, I would have the saddest love life.
jlehman 13y ago
First thing that surprised me about the Female Founder’s Conference is that it was all women. I find this whole line of reasoning a little off, given the stats mentioned in YC's blog here: http://blog.ycombinator.com/highlights-from-ycs-first-female-founders-conference http://blog.ycombinator.com/highlights-from-ycs-first-female... The first paragraph mentions: We’d originally planned to host the event at our office, which could fit about 150 attendees. 1,200 impressive applications later, we decided to move the event to the Computer History Museum where we could accommodate three times the people. Given that all 450 accepted attendees were women, I can assume that some women were rejected. Would it have made sense to reject qualified women to this event in place of qualified men? Personally, I think not.
slowmotiony 13y ago
When can we expect YC's Male Founders Conference?

91 points by mbellotti 13y ago

zaidf 13y ago

I don’t know why this comment struck me as odd … maybe it’s because the only people I know who identify themselves specifically as “nontechnical cofounders” are women. This means that you seriously need to go meet more founders. There are probably as many non-tech founders who are men as tech founders. These founders(such as Alexis from reddit) have filled the role in a very similar manner as Jessica describes.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
bryanlarsen 13y ago
Sure, but I think her point stands. They don't identify themselves as a nontechnical cofounder: they're the business guy, the money guy, the sales guy or the industry guy. Using a negative to describe one's own role comes across as very self-deprecating.
- zaidf 13y ago
  Alexis has a record of identifying himself as the non-technical founder. So do many, many other founders. Just do a google on this query to see founders describing themselves as non-technical: non-technical founder site:news.ycombinator.com
  - sachitgupta 13y ago
    Adding to zaidf, more examples: http://www.quora.com/Non-Technical-Co-Founders/How-do-I-provide-value-to-my-startup-as-a-non-technical-cofounder http://www.quora.com/Non-Technical-Co-Founders/How-do-I-prov...
  - bertil 13y ago
    From what I remember, those describe themselves as ‘the business guy’ or ‘the marketing guy’ but give advice, mainly about the attitude to have to fellow ‘non-technical co-founders’, assuming often openly that they do have a needed skill-set, that happens not to be code.
    - zaidf 13y ago
      The precise word that is used to describe your role in specific situations matters a lot less than knowing what it encompasses in whole. No one is saying anywhere that you should go out of your way to tell investors that your duties include cleaning the toilet and ordering food. No, to investors you are in charge of keeping lights on; in a meeting to discuss a partnership you assume charge of user growth; when it's time for lunch you assume charge of being the pizza boy/girl.
      - bertil 13y ago
        > The precise word that is used to describe your role in specific situations matters a lot less The main point made by people studying career imbalance between genders seems to be that it tends to do at a statistical level.
- enra 13y ago
  What I remember about Alexis saying was that he was the non-technical founder, and pretty much did I kind of weird stuff all the time like coming up with an mascot for the site. You can take pride in it and it shows if you do. I've heard and seen times all kinds of founders, non-technical and technical ones, saying that their role is fetching pizza on launch day, fixing the toilet, answering the phone, calling angry customers or doing what ever job is required. It's the job of the founder, and it's humbling not demeaning. You come up and build the initial product, you take care of the business, you grow the team and in the end if there isn't anyone else to do something, you do it yourself if needs taking care of.
- kn0thing 13y ago
  This is simply baseless. I'm very proudly the non-technical founder of reddit, which I've always been very frank about. I've got citations galore. Drafting the blog post right now. http://alexisohanian.com/on-being-a-proud-non-technical-founder http://alexisohanian.com/on-being-a-proud-non-technical-foun...
facepalm 13y ago
Also, I think male founders sometimes also have to do 15 meetings a day to raise money, it is not an ordeal only female founders go through.
earbitscom 13y ago
Yeah, I tell people all of the time that I am a non-technical founder. I often do it to explain to other non-technical founders what they can be doing prior to finding a co-founder, because we had achieved a ton before we ever did.

thatthatis 13y ago

It occurred to me recently that if the goal is to eventually get to gender equality, female focused tech groups should set the proportion of their tickets available at x% female, y% male where x and y are the inverse of their proportions at some equivalent male dominated group. Over time, this policy should pull men and women together instead of apart. What good is it if women only know other women and men only know other men?

soneca 13y ago
I do think that there is good in a only women conference. But i also do think that your suggestion is incredibly smart. Minimize criticism of those who think this is sexism, while keeping its goal of both making a statement that there is inequality and providing inspiration to women - and still giving a chance to a few men understand how difficult can be to be on a environment dominated by the other gender.
001sky 13y ago
Nothing is wrong with your point, but you are applying a 1->N scaling strategy to a 0->1 problem. That is to say, this type of event is brings people together because n=small, and the act of concentration brings more scaling effects that a larger act of dispersion. Over time, this will shift...and your preferred methods will make more sense in a context where dispersion is more important than concentration. But it is a good point to make that neither one is perfect or viable as a standalone method.
- wellboy 13y ago
  Very technical analysis, but it actually makes sense! :)
- thatthatis 13y ago
  I disagree slightly with your categorization of the problem. I think your characterization, while accurate in itself, is missing the "otherizing" and "in-grouping" that happens if we only foster no-boys-allowed special interest groups. Lets say a given women in tech event is phenomenally successful, that means that men are now precluded from attending a key event. Whether consciously or unconsciously men understand this and have a discentive to making the group phenomenally successful. The more successful it is, the worse the world becomes for the average man's career. When it is x%/y% it puts things into a different category. In x%/y% all success is shared. 1) Men interested in attending these female focused events would have a vested interest in increasing both the size of the female event (-> more male tickets) and increasing the % of women at other events (-> more male tickets). If I, as a man, wanted to attend the YC female founders conference as it was just held, there is no way I can - so it isn't worth me spending any time on. If however, the event had an x%/y% structure, one of the ways I could gain admission would be to actively bring women into tech (I assume this would be a large part of the selection criteria by which the small number of men get admitted). Everyone's interests are now aligned. 2) The connections formed between the small number of men and the large number of women at x%/y% female events are connections that will act as a bridge to getting more women at the regular events. It's well demonstrated in organizational behavior that even small amounts of conscious cross department interaction leads to greater sharing of ideas and follow on connections in both groups. 2b) I'm concerned that most female focused groups are only creating in-group connections. Meaning the approach they're taking leads to B0->B1 and eventually B1->BN (where the existing tech scene is already at AN as a boy's club). Which is to say, they're creating a silo of connections. We shouldn't be looking at the problem as "How do we create the best shadow tech scene for women." But rather, "how do we make the tech scene gender neutral." 3) By making these groups x%/y% you put men in the tech scene in a more acutely aware state. "You can't go in there, it's women only" is easy to parse as a group of 'others.' Human psyches are pretty good at dealing with blanked exclusions -- its a rival tribe, which is fine, I have my own tribe. The situation of "You could go in there, but it's very hard to get in because they only let in x% men" makes the problem tangible, evaluative, and solvable. Long story short on this point, I think with x% men, men feel the exclusion in a stronger and more productive way. Men would feel excluded in a way that is more productive for society if events were x%/y%. In the current state of affairs, nobody can write a blog post titled "How I hacked my way into a men's ticket to the YC women's conference." 3b) Right now 90% of the tech scene has no skin in the game for getting in more women. Some may have philosophical beliefs or take a very long term view and thus work towards female events happening anyways. But, x%/y% would mean we can a much larger portion of the 90% working on the problem in a way that has tangible near term benefits for everyone. Finally, we as a society only really permit discriminatory subgroups like this when the size of the subgroup is very very small. "Men in teaching," "Women in tech." By setting up "women in tech" groups as permitted discriminatory subgroups we are betting against these groups ever achieving parity. Because, when they do achieve anything even approaching parity they'll have to reconstitute. Think League of Women voters -- they're now a league of concerned voters of all genders, but their historical permitted discriminatory subgroup focus hampers their activities to this day. x%/y% means the group will never have to go through an identity crisis or a period where it is in the grey area of whether it is still acceptable to keep their historical membership barriers.

Udo 13y ago

It's expected that every word anybody said during that conference will be scrutinized beyond what's appropriate, simply because it's such a touchy subject. That's probably the reason why the video of the conference was already taken offline today while I was watching it (edit: it's not, see below). Generally I think it would be more productive if judgements weren't done on a hair trigger, because that's what makes this topic so toxic when in fact it shouldn't be. Personally I found the presentations very entertaining and insightful - and even though I didn't have the opportunity to watch the panel to the end, I was struck by the impression that for the most part these were normal startup stories. That's a good thing, because it means while there is work to do when it comes to making the playing field fairer to women founders, we're at a state where the main issue is not "how to cope with my gender" but "how do we get our startup off the ground". The area where I believe much more work is required is how we get more woman programmers started. The article touches very slightly on that, but then misses the mark: > To get a male founder to admit he doesn’t write the code his startup depends on you have to twist his arm. With a female founder it’s the second sentence out of her mouth. As if to say “PS - don’t take me seriously” A completely different way to read this is that people who code don't have a lot of status in circles of non-programmers. So a non-technical founder might in fact expect to be taken more seriously by professing hacking ignorance. One reason why non-technical women founders are quick to volunteer that info might be a subconscious reflection of that nerd stigma, and of course that's probably a large reason why women don't become programmers as often as men in the first place. It seems to me that perception of social status is the core issue. To be fair though it was a founders' conference, not a female hackers conference.

pg 13y ago
That's probably the reason why the video of the conference was already taken offline today while I was watching it. No, we took the video offline because one of the speakers hadn't realized the talks were being filmed. It will be back once we edit that one out.
- gmays 13y ago
  Understandable, but also unfortunate. I saw the whole original talk and thought it was amazing. It's rare to get that kind of honesty, especially from a unique point of view. Unfortunately, our community has a way of punishing honesty like that, which is part of the reason we have so many unnecessary failures.

jpeg_hero 13y ago

Filed under: no good deed goes unpunished.

the_rosentotter 13y ago

An unrelated nitpick (this is HN after all): The white-on-black text really bothered me. I am seeing ghosting a few minutes after reading the piece (which I read in its entirety because it was pretty good).

mbesto 13y ago

> It wasn’t just that she referred to herself as a nontechnical cofounder it’s that she repeatedly diminished herself and her own qualifications at a conference supposedly organized to stop other women from doing the same thing. Has no one ever pointed out to Jessica that at the end of the day YC is an investment company and that she was the only YC cofounder with actual investment experience? That, if anything, she was the ONLY ONE of that group even remotely qualified to be there? Not a tagalong in her boyfriend’s company who has to constantly apologize for her presence. Interesting that was the OP's response. I simply took it as her being humble, not diminutive - so for me, her message was clearly delivered - take pride in whatever it is you do and do it well, regardless of role or sex. Interestingly, after hearing her keynote I thought she was the "technical" co-founder (she had investment experience in a investment based company) and pg was the non-technical co-founder (he was the hustler and gained the attention of the developers they would fund and match them up with investors).

gmays 13y ago

I posted my thoughts on the conference in another related thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7334744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7334744 But since it's relevant, I'll post them again here. TL;DR: I thought the conference was awesome and look forward to watching it streamed again next year. Here's my original comment: This was a great conference. I didn't attend (I'm male), but I watched the livestream and learned a lot from the speakers. I especially liked the conference because I learned about the female perspective. My wife isn't a startup founder, but has a similarly stressful job (flies F/A-18's in stressful, life-threatening situations), with similar hours (14hrs/day and often weekends), in a similar environment (male-dominated Marine Corps). I often wonder how she'll manage her work when we have kids...everything from pregnancy to making time for the kids when she's busy. It's easier for me since I work at home now, but she'll deal with the same challenges that some of the founders mentioned. And knowing her, she'll feel incredibly guilty for not being around. Anyway, I enjoyed the conference, learned a lot, and look forward to it next year.

kyro 13y ago

An overall well-balanced article, but I find it hard to believe that Jessica meant anything more regarding non-technical founders than someone having to carry their weight by taking care of the majority of non-technical tasks in a startup whose product is likely wholly technical. I've heard male non-technical founders recount memories of making coffee for coders to keep them happy. If anything, she gave a more accurate depiction of the role than someone who calls themselves the business or product guy.

pg_is_a_butt 13y ago

SEXIST EVIL DISCRIMINATORY

btrautsc 13y ago

> when you’re the nontechnical cofounder, your job is everything that’s nontechnical’ including grocery shopping and errand running. I don’t know why this comment struck me as odd As a non-technical cofounder, this is the truth. I'm not sure what expectations at large are, but I can corroborate this story and believe it should be most 'non-technical' cofounders expectation of reality. Take out trash, buy office furniture, go on sales calls, arrange the company insurance plan, order dinner on late nights, line up investor meetings, talk to users... I could literally go on forever - those are off the top of my head from last week. Technical cofounders (and employees) should be maximizing their impact by doing technical aspects - other founders should be selling, marketing, building the business, and sometimes have to order food, clean up the office, or go see the company lawyers/ accountants/ & run errands.

nicoles 13y ago
Agreed. Even as simply the 'less' technical cofounder, if I can spot an opportunity to increase my more-technical team members time coding, I do it.

mountaineer 13y ago

If you're interested in following the results of this conference and/or discovering more female founders, technical or not, I made a large Twitter list [1] to keep up to date. [1] https://twitter.com/ryanwi/lists/female-founders https://twitter.com/ryanwi/lists/female-founders

pron 13y ago

This kind of article shows why we need more women in tech. Many, many more. Critical and insightful but also respectful and modest. One thing that was missing, though, was politics. Politics in the true sense of the word, namely, the power struggles in the tech society which give rise to the current status quo. Also, she says, "No one pretended tech was a meritocracy". The thing is, tech is a meritocracy, and that's part of the politics of tech. Meritocracy, of course, is a joke. It is not a desirable state of affairs, because it should be obvious that "merit" is a false currency used to justify what is, rather than work toward what should be. It is the quintessential naturalistic fallacy. It amazes me time and again how people can take the term seriously, which only demonstrates how dangerous it is. Such a blatant, perverted joke, a dystopia that some intelligent people mistake for a utopia. Wikipedia says this: "Although the concept has existed for centuries, the term "meritocracy" was first coined in the 1950s. It was used by British politician and sociologist, Michael Young in his 1958 satirical essay, The Rise of the Meritocracy, which pictured the United Kingdom under the rule of a government favouring intelligence and aptitude (merit) above all else... In this book the term had distinctly negative connotations as Young questioned both the legitimacy of the selection process used to become a member of this elite and the outcomes of being ruled by such a narrowly defined group." I still can't fathom how meritocracy can be taken as anything but a negative. I mean, the first question that comes to mind (or, rather, the second after "what is merit") is, "who has merit and why, and who does not?" Once this question is asked, it is immediately apparent that any attempt to paint "meritocracy" in a positive light is ludicrous.

lexcorvus 13y ago
work toward what should be Ay, there's the rub: what should we work toward? This issue almost never gets discussed, except by implication. We hear over and over how we "need more women in tech". But even if everyone agreed that we do, how much more is enough? Should we stop after reaching 33% women? 50%? 60%? Often we hear the vague assertion that the percentage of women in tech should be close to the percentage of women in the general population—you can hear it echo every time the word "underrepresented" gets uttered—but this assertion is rarely justified. And indeed we can see how potentially absurd this criterion is by applying it to cases that don't serve the same political ends as "more women in tech"—i.e., by observing that women are "underrepresented" in prison, men are "underrepresented" in the daycare industry, etc. (Putting more women in prison isn't often offered as a way to stick it to the Patriarchy.) The assumption that increasing the percentage of women in tech is virtuous—quite a different goal, mind you, from encouraging all interested parties (female or not) to pursue the subject—pervades our discourse, to the point where "improve the percentage of women in tech" and "increase the percentage of women in tech" have become synonymous. To see through this trick, simply consider the similar case of the percentage of college graduates who are female. Women currently constitute approximately 57% of college graduates; i.e., women are overrepresented by a gap of around 14% vs. men. The question then arises: what would it mean to "improve" this percentage? We see in a flash that "equality" has nothing to do with it—I have never seen any mainstream source call for "improving the percentage of women among college graduates" by decreasing that percentage—unless, of course, by "equality" we mean that having women overrepresented among college graduates will help address other inequalities, such as the preponderance of male CEOs, male professors, and male billionaires. In this case, we simply return to the beginning: what should we work toward? Should we strive for proportional gender representation in every field of human endeavor? Unless men and women (and, indeed, all people) are perfectly identical, this is a prescription for eternal conflict—a fair characterization, I'd say, of our lamentable status quo.

nawitus 13y ago

" and deal with the boys" Well.. that started out pretty sexist.

muhuk 13y ago
Not so much sexist as it is derogatory. Implies immaturity.
Crake 13y ago
Saying "and deal with the girls" would get a lot of guys in trouble these days. Women too if you're on the internet where your gender is indeterminate, since feminists will get mad at you and assume you're an Oppressive Male.

bertil 13y ago

> Giving the idea of “separate but equal” another try and seeing if it plays in our favor this time? I think that this is a key point about that conference, and TED Woman. That and the implied paramount of sexism idea that if they let men talk, there are going to be chauvinist pig, because that’s indistinguishable from having a penis.

chacham15 13y ago

I think that this article misses one main point about Jessica Livingston: that she is different from other women; she said so herself. Not all women have the same type of personality. That is not a bad thing. "With a female founder it’s the second sentence out of her mouth. As if to say “PS - don’t take me seriously”" This is the point in which the author goes too far. Jessica knows that everyone at YC values her word. How many times has pg said that he often looks to Jessica about funding a group? For someone with a different personality, that statement might be more accurate, but I highly doubt it is for Jessica Livingston. In conclusion, everyone is different. Men are different from other men and women are different from other women. Do not assume that a statement means something because of the gender of the person saying it without taking into account the personality of the person.

deleted 13y ago

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projectileboy 13y ago

Putting on the conference was a great idea and was well executed, and I think is an important contribution towards improving the odds for female founders. To Jessica and the rest of the YC crew, thanks from the community. Please don't be discouraged by negative comments from the minority.

rachellaw 13y ago

The first half sounds like an echo-chamber hugbox The second sounds useful, but mainly because the content was useful. Did any of the conference address what a female founder is specifically? I'm still concerned that a Female Founders Conference would exclude men or people of other genders. Yes it's great to have a platform to stand as a woman, but what about trans* or non-traditional genders? Where do they go then? The whole idea of feminism is inclusion, which means including trans, queer and other genders and YES including men too.

Crake 13y ago
As a gender and sexual minority, I try to stay clear of feminists. (At least, when someone says they are one, I get wary.) They're some of the most GSM hostile people I've met. >The whole idea of feminism is inclusion, which means including trans, queer and other genders and YES including men too. Mainstream feminism doesn't agree, except for when someone wants to start an equal rights movement for another demographic, like men or GLBT. Then they start acting like patent lawyers. I would suggest looking into egalitarianism, which lacks the gender supremacy aspect of feminism. You can continue to identify as a feminist, that's fine and 100% up to you...but you're going to spend more time fighting other feminists about what "feminism" means than doing anything else. :/
- rachellaw 13y ago
  Well that's the problem with preconceptions of feminism. Egalitarianism was originally a spinoff from 60s feminism (lead by Stein, Haraway, Latour etc) They actually went one step beyond that human equality, but suggested that machines/objects were on par with humanity since it augmented human intelligence (Engelbart). The problem nowadays is that feminism has turned into a splinter pile of infighting groups who, honestly, don't know what feminism is. Feminism has nothing to do with female superiority, it was simply put forward (along with queer theory, post-colonialism) as a framework to analyze society.

mnavada 13y ago

I attended the conference. Being "non-technical" doesn't mean you're doing less important or less challenging work. You're part of a team, and you should be proud of it. My husband and I have a startup. Yes, he is the technical side of the team. As the CEO, I mainly shape the vision for the product, strategize on how we grow, and am in charge of marketing. When we discuss our technical strategies, learning how to code is not enough. The vision for the company guides the technical decisions. Just because I don't sit and code our product also doesn't mean that I'm clueless about the major tech decisions we make. For example, in choosing whether or not to build our products with PHP or Python, I had to learn the pros and cons of each language, and then we made the decisions together. BTW, Python it is :) During the talk, there was a push to have more girls who code. And rightly so, since women are grossly underrepresented. But for now, I actually think that it's great to have women who have the confidence to found companies without being technical. As Kathryn from The Muse explained, Alex, her co-founder learned how to code. Necessity is the mother of invention. As for what I got out of the conference, in brief, I learned that the talks I loved were the ones where the founder was humble and matter-of-fact.

wiwillia 13y ago

I refer to myself as the non-technical co-founder all the time. I'm a male, and the CEO of our company. In my personal experience, I've never heard anyone equate "non-technical co-founder" to a term used only by female founders. I also find that many of the entrepreneurs and founders I meet are incredibly humble (disarmingly so - the founders of Dropbox and Airbnb have zero ego). I don't know if there's any YC alumn who would say that Jessica is anything less than essential within YC.

tyoung 13y ago

If I wasn't married to my cofounder, I would have the saddest love life.

jlehman 13y ago

First thing that surprised me about the Female Founder’s Conference is that it was all women. I find this whole line of reasoning a little off, given the stats mentioned in YC's blog here: http://blog.ycombinator.com/highlights-from-ycs-first-female-founders-conference http://blog.ycombinator.com/highlights-from-ycs-first-female... The first paragraph mentions: We’d originally planned to host the event at our office, which could fit about 150 attendees. 1,200 impressive applications later, we decided to move the event to the Computer History Museum where we could accommodate three times the people. Given that all 450 accepted attendees were women, I can assume that some women were rejected. Would it have made sense to reject qualified women to this event in place of qualified men? Personally, I think not.

slowmotiony 13y ago

When can we expect YC's Male Founders Conference?