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What We Learned From 40 Female YC Founders

412 points by katm 12y ago

djb_hackernews 12y ago
> One of the most consistent patterns is how many founders wished they'd learned to program when they were younger. I wonder what some of the reasons would lead them to have this wish. Is it a matter of having a missing skillset that slowed down growth of their startups or they later found that the really liked to write software and regret not finding out until later in life. Or possibly other reasons?
- tomp 12y ago
  I'd say it's two things: (1) programming is relatively useful compared to other skills you can learn by yourself in your childhood, and (2) it's relatively hard, in the sense that it requires a long time to learn. Many people I meet who see how well-paid programmers are wish the same thing; founders probably doubly so (since programming is such a big part of most modern startups).
- debacle 12y ago
  Being able to interface with a computer on an instruction level basically allows you to circumvent the mathematical limitations of our biological pattern matching apparatuses. Learning to program is to thinking as learning to drive is to traveling.
  - kyberias 12y ago
    I don't see any obvious reason for you being downvoted but maybe you should elaborate on this: "mathematical limitations of our biological pattern matching apparatuses".
    - debacle 12y ago
      I'm getting downvoted because I made a comment below about how I was more interested in the statistics behind this phenomenon than the people, and apparently that's not okay. This post was at +4 before people started downvoting all of my comments on this discussion. I'm not too worried about it. Some people need to cling to that iota of power that an inverted triangle can offer.
    - cwal37 12y ago
      Probably because it's way over the top. That comparison proposes that people who can't program have a huge mental deficit compared to those who can. There are plenty of programmers out there who are not particularly proficient at thinking, and plenty of extremely intelligent people who aren't programmers. It's a needlessly breathless and self-congratulatory comparison, with limited perspective on the outside world.
      - alexbecker 12y ago
        I don't think the comparison means that programmers can think better than non-programmers, but that computers can (for certain problems) and that programmers can take advantage of that.
- zxcvvcxz 12y ago
  Seems fairly obvious. A lot of web startups need little more than an MVP to be effective for proving the concept or even gaining users and revenue. Something that can probably be put together in 3 months. Being able to do this yourself - a skill accessible to anyone who coded for a few years - seems like a better alternative than haggling over 120k/yr developers and dealing with the struggles of no product / no dev / no money. Either of those factors could lead to gaining the others. So instead of having none, you could be the dev!
  - k__ 12y ago
    This. Keeping minimal viability isn't just about the software itself. As a founder you have other problems than dealing with people that don't give you money or even cost you. Every person who contributes to the product is a possible help and a possible problem.
  - Alex3917 12y ago
    This is absolutely true, and teaching myself to code is one of the best decisions I've ever made for exactly these reasons (and more). That said, I'm not upset that I wasn't a CS major in college. While there are certain things that I'll probably never have the skills to build, at the same time I see so many CS majors making fundamental product and business errors that I'm able to recognize and at least hopefully avoid thanks to previous experience in other areas. Knowing how to code is really important, but there are other skills and knowledge areas that are important also. We absolutely need people who are really good at coding and CS to the point where that's all they focus on. But for everyone else, what's important isn't so much when you learned to code but rather what you've spent your time learning and doing in general.
- dmor 12y ago
  Seems kind of like how many people wish they'd found their significant other, or their dream job, earlier in life. They would have found happiness and fulfillment sooner. I started programming at 14 and I think it had a huge influence on my approach to problem solving and learning in general, so maybe some people also see that and wish they could have experienced that influence from a young age, too.
- danielweber 12y ago
  I suspect that the community values people more who started coding earlier, even if that isn't of actual value, and they want to clear that credential. The use of proxies (instead of actual skill) should make any professional nervous. You might be perfectly suited for all the proxies now, but in 5 years maybe all the proxies will change. You'll go to interviews and find out that the metagame changed on you. That can be interesting in Pokémon, but it's a hell of a way to earn a living.
- mercer 12y ago
  See, what fascinates me is that it might be possible that many of these founders would not have become founders if they'd gotten 'hooked' on programming at a young age. Perhaps the very fact that they did other things, possibly more outward and social in nature, gave them the characteristics that led to them becoming founders. I've found it's generally not a good idea to play these kinds of 'what if' games, because it's easy to pick the stuff you'd like to do different, but much harder to see the unintended, undesired consequences this different path might've had. Furthermore, I believe that saying 'I wish I had done x' can also cause a passive attitude that keeps one from 'doing x now anyways'. But I must admit that I have little evidence to show for this belief...
corndoge 12y ago
What's so special about female founders? Where's the "What We Learned From 40 Male YC Founders"?
- _almosnow 12y ago
  Sexist YC, check your privilege girls. Edit: the parent comment I replied to was deleted, I won't delete mine bc I don't care but be aware that context changes everything.
- sbilstein 12y ago
  They're incredibly underrepresented relative to relative population of US, even relative population of eng. grads, etc.
- debacle 12y ago
  A piece titled "What We Learned From 40 YC Founders" would probably be equivalent to "What We Learned From 40 Male YC Founders." If YC wants to cater to women and see that percentage of their applicants grow, they need to analyze their current stock.
  - corndoge 12y ago
    That's /exactly/ the problem. Why should we be catering to women? Why are they so special? Why can't we just be gender-neutral and write some pieces about males for once?
    - CapitalistCartr 12y ago
      For once??? Most of the articles written ARE about males. Unless it specifies, as this one does, the default is males. "Why should we be catering to women?" Why are we currently so heavily catering to men?
      - tomp 12y ago
        Really, most articles are about people and we're catering to people.
mentos 12y ago
Computer science is the language of the future. It bothers me that I spent so many years learning latin/french/italian when their real world applications are very limited relative to say C/Java/Python which are much more important foreign languages to be learning in school.
- vvpan 12y ago
  I generally understand the sentiment, but your are really comparing apples and trigonometry.
  - eah13 12y ago
    I'd disagree with that. I think coding languages are in a very real sense human languages. They have less history, less literature, less culture, and different uses but they have history, literature, culture, and uses just like any language.
    - vacri 12y ago
      Only if you consider computers to be people. Human languages are for communicating with humans. Programming languages are for communicating with computers. For example, this week I've been hanging out on a couple of open-source project IRC channels. People aren't talking to each other in Python or Java on those channels.
      - juliangregorian 12y ago
        "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." --SICP
      - BrandonM 12y ago
        Programming languages are absolutely for communicating with humans. Source comments are just one trivial proof of that.
        12y ago
debacle 12y ago
Not to be callous, but I'm not really interested in any of these founders as people. I would be much more interested in an aggregated feedback discussion about how (or if) startups with female founders are different, what YC did right for them, what it didn't, etc.
- nostrademons 12y ago
  You can't actually understand startups without understanding the people behind them. This is a hard lesson born from experience: when I was younger I was just interested in the mechanics, and thought that if I learned enough about the technology, the business, the financing aspects, etc. I'd find success. What ultimately happened was that I gave up (temporarily, it turned out, but it took me 6 years to pick it up again), because I didn't understand myself. When the stress picks up and you're knee-deep in building a product, a lot of the decisions you make, of necessity, have to be on autopilot. And if you don't understand your emotions and the emotions and background of everyone else in the ecosystem, you'll be fighting that force instead of working with it.
klunger 12y ago
If they wanted to back up this claim "...from the start I've made sure YC had an environment that is supportive of women," they would provide affordable childcare.
- debacle 12y ago
  Because men aren't responsible for children in the same way women are? Your comment is incredibly sexist.
  - tomp 12y ago
    It's a pretty accurate and factual observation that most of the burden of child-care falls on mothers, either time- or money-wise.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    When you have companies offering to freeze eggs it's a reasonable point to make about childcare -- society pretty much makes women responsible for children. The nice thing about making a workplace more suitable for women with children is that you're also making it more suitable for men with children.
- dugmartin 12y ago
  I don't think affordable childcare is a women's only issue. Men have children too.
  - pistle 12y ago
    Nobody says that it's only a women's issue. But, if that servers your rhetorical needs, you keep putting those words in peoples' mouths. Childcare is vastly a burden born by women, thus considered a women's issue. That doesn't mean "there are no men who are burdened by childcare." It means that, in aggregate, the impact falls far more on the women. It's so egalitarian of you to not want it to be so, but until women are paid the same and men are taking on equal responsibilities (in aggregate) with the child rearing, the feigned "equality uber alles" cry is the fight song of the MRA. "I found an outlier, therefore WOE ARE THE MEN MEN MEN!!"
pskittle 12y ago
"Not surprisingly, most of the women were domain experts solving a problem they themselves had. That's something that tends to be true of successful founders regardless of gender." How much domain experience is necessary to solve the problems you have. isn't that something you learn/pick up once you start solving em?
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > How much domain experience is necessary to solve the problems you have. isn't that something you learn/pick up once you start solving em? If you are a domain expert when you start, then the problems you have are more likely to be real, significant problems in the domain, and your attempted solutions are more likely to be both novel and well-considered in terms of the problem than is the case for someone with less domain expertise at the outset.
  - pskittle 12y ago
    edited you make fair points. However the most common advice you get is , "focus on user experience". Most domain experts focus more on the tech as opposed to users. Also some of the great/successful startups have been started and run buy people who've never done it before.
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > However the most common advice you get is , "focus on user experience". Most domain experts fail to do that. A domain expert scratching their own itch often is unwittingly focussing on UX of the target audience, which is one of the reasons that open source tools by and for developers that don't have a lot of deliberate focus on UX beyond what works for the people building it often are fairly good, while the same kind of things built by developers in more consumer-oriented markets often have very bad UX. Ultimately, its the same principle as dogfooding -- the most effective way to really understand UX deeply is for the developer to be the target user.
      - 12y ago
jandrewrogers 12y ago
The importance of learning to program at an earlier age conflates two patterns in my opinion. I benefitted immensely from teaching myself how to program at a young age but that is not why I have the computer science and software skills I do today per se. It is an artifact, not a requirement. Computer science skills roughly follow a sigmoidal curve over time with long tails at the top and bottom. You really do not become useful as a programmer until you hit the hockey stick part of that curve. There is no substitute for time in the field to get to the hockey stick part. The primary advantage of learning programming when you are much younger is that you essentially burn down some of that initial time investment before you are really paying attention to how long it actually takes to be an effective programmer. You do not hit the hockey stick faster, it just seems like it to other people because you started down the path to get there earlier. This is discouraging to people that start in college or later because there really is no shortcut to time spent doing it. The people that become good programmers faster usually just started earlier, it isn't necessarily that they are naturally more skilled. Nonetheless, the time required to become a good programmer is not that onerous in the big picture. The key is sticking with it even when the payoff seems distant. As an added comment, people that do well at the top of the hockey stick, where there return on additional investment is diminished, do tend to be the people that started much earlier. Again, this is not due to talent per se but the same people sufficiently obsessed with computer science to teach themselves at a young age also have the obsession to learn and master the more esoteric parts after they've become excellent programmers even though the practical utility is much less in practice.
- GuiA 12y ago
  Agreed. I would add that this applies to pretty much any skill, not just programming.
- eah13 12y ago
  > this is not due to talent per se but the same people sufficiently obsessed with computer science to teach themselves at a young age also have the obsession to learn and master the more esoteric parts after they've become excellent programmers even though the practical utility is much less in practice Agreed. I'd add this thought: code is a human language and like all languages fluency is most easily developed as a child but immersion and repetition can help adults develop it too.
dmritard96 12y ago
"In the most recent batch (W15), we asked about gender on the application form for the first time. The percentage of startups we accepted with female founders was identical to the percentage who applied." There are application videos and have been for a while. And each founder has names listed on the application. With https://gender-api.com/ https://gender-api.com/ you could probably figure out gender without asking explicitly and could have done so acceptably well with previous classes. I would be curious what the stats look like back tested against each class over time.
- eah13 12y ago
  +1 to back-testing the stats. Edit: whoa, downvoters! This comment was about getting more information to inform productive discussion. Not sure who would disagree with that?
pskittle 12y ago
Also the link to the female founders conference has last years dates. http://www.femalefoundersconference.org/ http://www.femalefoundersconference.org/
- katm 12y ago
  It's updated now - just refresh!
  - pskittle 12y ago
    great! thank you
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
eah13 12y ago
This is a great story and project. An apology (in the original sense) of Jessica's work for those who think that the experiences of these individuals don't matter: What I think people don't get about Jessica's interviews is that they're part of a scientific process of understanding what makes great founders and great companies. Many discredit qualitative, observational scientific data. But for new, rare, or poorly understood phenomena, observation is the only way to make scientific progress. In engineering the phenomena are often well understood, common, and within the discipline, familiar. In this case deductive logic, reasoning from known principles, is quite fruitful; but its success biases engineers against inductive reasoning. But for other subjects, such as what makes a great startup founder, or what makes a great female startup founder, the inductive method is much more fruitful. This is not some anomaly: all sciences started with observation and the inductive method. These are the beginnings of insight, generating hypotheses to be tested. We're still quite early in our understanding of startups, and even more so in our understanding of female-founded startups, that this approach is not just warranted, it's the only way to make true progress. Jessica is like the Jane Goodall of startup science. Even though she's studying individual founders she's ultimately helping us understand more about ourselves.
- delluminatus 12y ago
  I agree that this is a great project. But, do you think it's right to call this a "scientific process of understanding"? It seems to me that the field (as it were) is simply in a pre-scientific phase of exploration and experimentation. Once we have a concrete basis for performing repeatable, independent experiments to (dis)prove concrete hypotheses, then the field will have entered a scientific stage.
  - eah13 12y ago
    No, though I don't think you're alone in drawing the line of science around deduction. I think of science as a cycle: Phenomenon > observation > Induced hypothesis > Method choice > Deduction via metrics > Phenomenon ... Starting at "a concrete basis for performing repeatable, independent experiments" is a skyhook. Scientists have a hand in generating that "basis" and it's called inductive logic. I think we agree on the fact that the production of knowledge involves the testing of hypotheses but not whether the generation of hypotheses via observation of phenomena is part of science. Semantic, I suppose, but I think it's crucial to take the rudder so to speak by developing hypotheses deliberately.
ddebernardy 12y ago
The first paragraph, and the implicit message that females were in unusual need of help and support, struck me as belittling and patronizing... which is probably not the desired PR outcome. :-| It seems to me though that a much better way to convey the right message would be to compile a "what we learned from 100 VC founders" and ensure that diversity is absolutely all over the sample: females, muslims, african americans, non-US natives, gays and lesbians, whatever. Doing so would convey the implicit message that diversity is normal.
- danielweber 12y ago
  Not everyone goes through life seeking to be offended.
- bbcbasic 12y ago
  Nah. Better to address the issues explicitly.
d0m 12y ago
One sure thing is that having a child and a startup is a hell more difficult. I applaud founder moms/dads.
- tptacek 12y ago
  We had our first a year into the first startup I founded myself, and our second just before I left for a senior role at another startup. Balancing work and home responsibilities is always hard. Having a young family might not be an especially difficult burden for founders.
  - d0m 12y ago
    It might be an unrealistic ideal, but I hope that when I'll be a father, I'll be able to give it my 100%. I don't like the idea of always considering "Should I spend time with my kids" vs "Should I do my best to make the startup succeed". I think this is what scares me the most about having a startup and a young family at the same time.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      What's unrealistic about this is the idea that you'd ever, under any circumstances, give 100% of yourself to your children. That's not a grown-up perspective on parenthood.
      - jamesdelaneyie 12y ago
        I think the point is that a healthy work/life balance would allow you to give 100% of yourself to the child at the particular moment you're with them. Not having to check an email when you're reading them a bedtime story. Being able to take a week off and not have an excess work-related ruminations badgering the gullet in the background of a family-holiday that detract from you're daughter saying "DAD! WATCH THIS!" unobserved pool splashes
tptacek 12y ago
I've been coding since I was ~13. I can understand why people who haven't might have valid reasons to wish they'd started earlier. I'd just say: beware self-fulfilling prophecies and selection bias. Lots of really excellent software people I've worked with got late starts. Lots of people who started early coasted or are still coasting. In the 25 years I've been coding, only a few years worth of that time really grew me as a developer, so what you work on has just as much impact as how long you've been working on it. Work with a bunch of different enterprise L.O.B. developers to get a sense of what I'm saying here. The average age of a backoffice developer is higher, meaning they have more experience. Hiring in enterprises is regimented, meaning that they tend to come from CS backgrounds. Are they uniformly high quality developers? No. In fact: there's a stigma attached to coming from a long stint in enterprise development. As a lever for getting more women engaged with startups, the idea that an early start is important makes even less sense. Much of the day-to-day work that happens even at companies with difficult problem domains is rote and uncomplicated. A few years experience is more than enough to lead a typical web project, and, more importantly, to have a sense for whether a dev team is firing on all cylinders and to authoritatively manage it. Obvious subtext/bias here: I do not believe that starting women in software development earlier is going to resolve the gender gap. By all means, start early; there's nothing wrong with that. It's just probably not the root of the problem.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  I agree. I've been coding for decades,but it's a handful of years that made the vast majority of difference. That's not to say you don't learn some things every year, but the major progress is concentrated in a few years (and they aren't all at the start!)
  - SixSigma 12y ago
    As also someone who started coding at 13 and now mid-40s, mine too has been quantum evolution. Usually from needing a particular technology for a project and then learning it or just a didactic itch I scratched. Novel coding techniques distract you from solving the problem and exploring the novel for its own sake is a common pitfall in the programming world. 10 Solve problems with tools you know 20 Learn new tools 30 GOTO 10
jgdreyes 12y ago
I think this is a great project. But one quote stood out: > Interestingly, many said it got them attention for being unusual, and that they'd used this to their advantage. This is what I have experienced as well. But do I want to be `unusual`? Instead, let's strive for making it a norm that female developers are just as common and just as good as their male counterparts. Stop looking at me like I'm some freak for being a competent woman developer.
jkmcf 12y ago
I wish my parents had let me take more shop classes, because right now I'm interested in home renovation. The thing is, you don't know where your future interests will take you. Even if you are exposed to stuff when you are younger, you may hate it regardless of how great the presentation may be. I personally think encouraging women, or anyone for that matter, to be programmers/scientists/mechanics is missing the point. You have to encourage people to find passions, be proactive, enjoy learning, and make these a habit. Life isn't static. I also think the "gender gap" is a fallacy. It's true that all professions could be more welcoming to people of different persuasions, but it would be more interesting to know the gap between "people who want to do X but feel excluded" and the "people who are already doing X".
- joycey 12y ago
  The issue isn't just that the gender gap in tech exists and should be fixed. The bigger issue is that the gap exists, and is actually getting worse over time. There are half as many women studying CS today as there were in the 80's [0]. I think it's much more believable that cultural factors that have inadvertently hurt women have caused this than asserting that the innate interests of women have evolved in the past few decades. You believe the "gender gap" is a fallacy because you believe tech is a meritocracy but the fact is that there are less women in tech. That means that either tech is not a meritocracy because there are subtle biases that women have to work against, or that women are inherently uninterested in tech. If you refuse to be skeptical of the fact that maybe, just maybe, tech is not really a meritocracy, then you will never be able to acknowledge the fact that subtle sexist microaggressions exist and affect the numbers we see. [0] http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-wom...
  - chrishynes 12y ago
    Or is it possible, just possible, that freedom has increased in the past few decades? Women can now choose whatever they want to do rather than being guided down the path of housewivery or a couple of other vocations? Maybe the underlying desires that were always there are being revealed, rather than "innate interests evolving". But no, you'd rather dismiss that possibility out of hand and presume that "subtle sexist microaggressions" halved the number of women in tech. Are you suggesting that women have it twice as bad in tech now as they had in the 80s?
logn 12y ago
Generally, I think the value of programming at an early age is that you have the time and context to develop an earnest interest in programming. You're doing it for fun. And then when you proceed to take courses on it, you're genuinely excited to learn, and you're not just struggling for a passing grade. Most of this is just the broken nature of schooling.
iufwe87 12y ago
I am from India and on H1B visa in United States. I still don't understand why there is more hustling in recent years about women participation ? Be it playing games, developing games, women in tech or women in NFL or women in ______ ( fill in blank here). I studied engineering in India from one of the premier university and 30 % of my class were girls. Toppers of the class for all 4 years were girls. I know at least 50-80 girls from India and China in my linkedin contacts who are actively engaged int tech. Keeping aside social problems faced by women in India for a bit ( and excluding poor people) , still there is very high participation from girls / women in India. Throughout my education of 1st to 12th grade there were more girls than more boys in my class. So my question is ---- 1. Why is US only facing this problem of women in ..... ? 2. Is this some political gimmick being played for 2016 preparation ( and I ask with all seriousness without affiliation to any party ) I have always considered people in US are more vocal about their rights, responsibilities and more aware of problems in general. Lately though, I see lots of thought policing happening, view manipulation going on at large. My last and most important question is , 3. Since you folks are now actively advertising and creating social conditions for women's participation in tech are you not depriving them of their freedom to choose whichever path women in US prefer ? In an ideal scenario, women would have tech as one of choice for career and not necessarily manipulative information representing tech is only best choice career.
- kelukelugames 12y ago
  I have some thoughts on 2 and 3. 2. I wholly support helping underrepresented minorities in tech because I believe in fairness. But anytime gender or race is involved, then the topic is political by definition. I follow the White House on twitter and a ton of their tweets are about equal pay. Both Romney and McCain addressed this issue during their campaigns and were criticized for their responses. Yes, it is a political tool. But just because politicians are involved does not make it a gimmick. 3. I agree that the ideal scenario is for tech to be one of the career choices. The problem is people are pushed away from certain fields. Coming to the US to work on a H1B is made easier because many Indians and Chinese have done it before us. Having people who look like me achieve something is a great self confidence boost and motivator. Unfortunately, other minorities groups do not have this benefit. Perhaps Neil deGrasse Tyson can explain it better than me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inz1sdhsMCU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inz1sdhsMCU
deleted 12y ago
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Splartacus 12y ago
"Do you know," suddenly continued Posdnicheff, "that this power of women from which the world suffers arises solely from what I have just spoken of?" "What do you mean by the power of women?" I said. "Everybody, on the contrary, complains that women have not sufficient rights, that they are in subjection." "That's it; that's it exactly," said he, vivaciously. "That is just what I mean, and that is the explanation of this extraordinary phenomenon, that on the one hand woman is reduced to the lowest degree of humiliation and on the other hand she reigns over everything. See the Jews: with their power of money, they avenge their subjection, just as the women do. 'Ah! you wish us to be only merchants? All right; remaining merchants, we will get possession of you,' say the Jews. 'Ah! you wish us to be only objects of sensuality? All right; by the aid of sensuality we will bend you beneath our yoke,' say the women. "The absence of the rights of woman does not consist in the fact that she has not the right to vote, or the right to sit on the bench, but in the fact that in her affectional relations she is not the equal of man, she has not the right to abstain, to choose instead of being chosen. You say that that would be abnormal. Very well! But then do not let man enjoy these rights, while his companion is deprived of them, and finds herself obliged to make use of the coquetry by which she governs, so that the result is that man chooses 'formally,' whereas really it is woman who chooses. As soon as she is in possession of her means, she abuses them, and acquires a terrible supremacy." "But where do you see this exceptional power?" "Where? Why, everywhere, in everything. Go see the stores in the large cities. There are millions there, millions. It is impossible to estimate the enormous quantity of labor that is expended there. In nine-tenths of these stores is there anything whatever for the use of men? All the luxury of life is demanded and sustained by woman. Count the factories; the greater part of them are engaged in making feminine ornaments. Millions of men, generations of slaves, die toiling like convicts simply to satisfy the whims of our companions. "Women, like queens, keep nine-tenths of the human race as prisoners of war, or as prisoners at hard labor. And all this because they have been humiliated, because they have been deprived of rights equal to those which men enjoy. They take revenge for our sensuality; they catch us in their nets. "Yes, the whole thing is there. Women have made of themselves such a weapon to act upon the senses that a young man, and even an old man, cannot remain tranquil in their presence. Watch a popular festival, or our receptions or ball-rooms. Woman well knows her influence there. You will see it in her triumphant smiles. "As soon as a young man advances toward a woman, directly he falls under the influence of this opium, and loses his head. Long ago I felt ill at ease when I saw a woman too well adorned,--whether a woman of the people with her red neckerchief and her looped skirt, or a woman of our own society in her ball-room dress. But now it simply terrifies me. I see in it a danger to men, something contrary to the laws; and I feel a desire to call a policeman, to appeal for defence from some quarter, to demand that this dangerous object be removed. "And this is not a joke, by any means. I am convinced, I am sure, that the time will come -- and perhaps it is not far distant -- when the world will understand this, and will be astonished that a society could exist in which actions as harmful as those which appeal to sensuality by adorning the body as our companions do were allowed. As well set traps along our public streets, or worse than that. The Kreutzer Sonata -- Lev Tolstoy
fillskills 12y ago
Even as a male entrepreneur, this collection is pure gold. So much to learn. Thank you for doing this. Any chance this series could be made as videos? I would like my daughter to see them as she grows up.
mikeleeorg 12y ago
This is probably impossible to do, but it would be very interesting to contrast these anecdotes with anecdotes from women who could have become technology startup founders, but didn't for some reason. YC's stories are awesome and these entrepreneurs will serve as important role models for young women. They unfortunately contain a "survivor bias" though, and there may be many other hidden factors preventing other potential female entrepreneurs from following in their footsteps. I don't mean this as a criticism at all though. This effort by YC is a tremendous first step and for the sake of my daughter and young girls everywhere, I hope they continue. EDIT: I'd love to hear the sentiment behind the downvotes. Hopefully I didn't come across critical of YC's effort here; that wasn't my intention at all. This is an important issue and I suspect the stories of those who were deterred are just as informative as those who have gotten this far.
skywhopper 12y ago
Interesting stuff. One detail I'd like to respond to. Jessica writes: And as YC has grown, so has the number of female partners. Now there are four of us and we are not tokens, or a female minority in a male-dominated firm. At the risk of offending my male colleagues, who will nevertheless understand what I mean, some would claim it's closer to the truth to say that that we run the place. Many times women find themselves in the situation where they are the more responsible employees, working harder than the men, taking care of the details many men overlook for far longer, and too often earning far less money and respect. So I just hope that Jessica and the other female partners are being compensated consummate to their contribution to the success of YC.
- girvo 12y ago
  While I'm not disagreeing with your point, I'd like to point out that > working harder than the men, taking care of the details many men overlook for far longer, and too often earning far less money and respect is a problem not just for women, but something I see constantly across our industry in general. Definitely something we should deal with better. Thankfully, the steps we should be taking to bring more women into this industry and deal with this problem are possibly interrelated, so it's one of the many cases where we can help everyone :)
brlewis 12y ago
I'm interested in reading more findings from the 40 stories in addition to the ones Jessica describes, but I'm too lazy to read all 40. If you've read them, what did you find interesting?
xchip 12y ago
What they should do is to marry men that want to stay at home taking care of the kids.
timedoctor 12y ago
For women who also want to have children at the same time as co-founding a startup, I think it's important not to underestimate how difficult this is. When my wife was first breastfeeding I timed how long she spent breastfeeding and changing nappies and bathing the young baby. It was LITERALLY over 9 hours per day (timed to the minute). To think that it's possible to ALSO run a startup at the same time is in my opinion crazy. With older children it's a lot easier but still difficult. I have several female friends who are also successful entrepreneurs. Some seem to make it work with their family life, but my experience is with most that they have a very hard time and that it often devastates their family life and relationships. So yes there examples of women who run a company and also have young children, but I think they are the exception rather than the rule. For women who do not want to have children, or who are not going to have children for many years in the future, no issue.
- marvin 12y ago
  No need to single out women in this context. If you want to be a father that's there for your children, both on the infant stage and later stages of their lives...being in a top-level leadership position is simply not possible. Ditto for most other career paths that require your undivided attention. Cultural norms is the only reason we single out women in this context. A lot of people don't appreciate the level of dysfunction that can occur in other areas of life simply from being ambitious and hard-working. I personally know many professionals that I greatly admire and respect (while acknowledging that I would never make the sacrifices they do to be where they are), but I'm sure as hell glad I'm not married to them.
StronglyTyped 12y ago
I'm in a graduate CS program. Half, maybe more, of my cohort is female.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
My experience raising three daughters is that they were always very aware of what others were doing. Their male peers were pretty uninformed (as I expect I was as a teen). I observed that the men were much more inclined to pursue an "unusual" activity (ie not what other people are doing)than the women were. It seemed motivated not by feeling "weird" rather it appeared to be motivated to not do something that their friends were not interested in participating with them. From a sense of inclusion they didn't spend group time on activities that other members of the group were not interested in. I worked with my middle daughter to build a knitting pattern illustrator in Perl[1]. She and her friends could talk for hours about knitting, which is essentially programming as Jacquard proved, because they all were interested in the ways to produce interesting weaves. My friends were interested in talking about computers when I was a teen because we were interested in machines that could 'compute'. The question I wonder about is if the disparity goes away when women develop group activities around programming. [1] I liked the pun of using Perl for a knitting application.
cauterized 12y ago
As a woman in software development (and a former founder) what I appreciate most about this collection of stories is that rather than men sitting around hypothesizing about why someone else whose experience probably doesn't match their own made different choices than they did, it tells actual women's stories. The ongoing discussion of gender in computing needs more of this. Next, I would love to see (for contrast) the stories of some women who did drop out or who considered STEM majors/careers but ultimately chose other directions. Any takers?

412 points by katm 12y ago

> One of the most consistent patterns is how many founders wished they'd learned to program when they were younger. I wonder what some of the reasons would lead them to have this wish. Is it a matter of having a missing skillset that slowed down growth of their startups or they later found that the really liked to write software and regret not finding out until later in life. Or possibly other reasons?

tomp 12y ago
I'd say it's two things: (1) programming is relatively useful compared to other skills you can learn by yourself in your childhood, and (2) it's relatively hard, in the sense that it requires a long time to learn. Many people I meet who see how well-paid programmers are wish the same thing; founders probably doubly so (since programming is such a big part of most modern startups).
debacle 12y ago
Being able to interface with a computer on an instruction level basically allows you to circumvent the mathematical limitations of our biological pattern matching apparatuses. Learning to program is to thinking as learning to drive is to traveling.
- kyberias 12y ago
  I don't see any obvious reason for you being downvoted but maybe you should elaborate on this: "mathematical limitations of our biological pattern matching apparatuses".
  - debacle 12y ago
    I'm getting downvoted because I made a comment below about how I was more interested in the statistics behind this phenomenon than the people, and apparently that's not okay. This post was at +4 before people started downvoting all of my comments on this discussion. I'm not too worried about it. Some people need to cling to that iota of power that an inverted triangle can offer.
  - cwal37 12y ago
    Probably because it's way over the top. That comparison proposes that people who can't program have a huge mental deficit compared to those who can. There are plenty of programmers out there who are not particularly proficient at thinking, and plenty of extremely intelligent people who aren't programmers. It's a needlessly breathless and self-congratulatory comparison, with limited perspective on the outside world.
    - alexbecker 12y ago
      I don't think the comparison means that programmers can think better than non-programmers, but that computers can (for certain problems) and that programmers can take advantage of that.
zxcvvcxz 12y ago
Seems fairly obvious. A lot of web startups need little more than an MVP to be effective for proving the concept or even gaining users and revenue. Something that can probably be put together in 3 months. Being able to do this yourself - a skill accessible to anyone who coded for a few years - seems like a better alternative than haggling over 120k/yr developers and dealing with the struggles of no product / no dev / no money. Either of those factors could lead to gaining the others. So instead of having none, you could be the dev!
- k__ 12y ago
  This. Keeping minimal viability isn't just about the software itself. As a founder you have other problems than dealing with people that don't give you money or even cost you. Every person who contributes to the product is a possible help and a possible problem.
- Alex3917 12y ago
  This is absolutely true, and teaching myself to code is one of the best decisions I've ever made for exactly these reasons (and more). That said, I'm not upset that I wasn't a CS major in college. While there are certain things that I'll probably never have the skills to build, at the same time I see so many CS majors making fundamental product and business errors that I'm able to recognize and at least hopefully avoid thanks to previous experience in other areas. Knowing how to code is really important, but there are other skills and knowledge areas that are important also. We absolutely need people who are really good at coding and CS to the point where that's all they focus on. But for everyone else, what's important isn't so much when you learned to code but rather what you've spent your time learning and doing in general.
dmor 12y ago
Seems kind of like how many people wish they'd found their significant other, or their dream job, earlier in life. They would have found happiness and fulfillment sooner. I started programming at 14 and I think it had a huge influence on my approach to problem solving and learning in general, so maybe some people also see that and wish they could have experienced that influence from a young age, too.
danielweber 12y ago
I suspect that the community values people more who started coding earlier, even if that isn't of actual value, and they want to clear that credential. The use of proxies (instead of actual skill) should make any professional nervous. You might be perfectly suited for all the proxies now, but in 5 years maybe all the proxies will change. You'll go to interviews and find out that the metagame changed on you. That can be interesting in Pokémon, but it's a hell of a way to earn a living.
mercer 12y ago
See, what fascinates me is that it might be possible that many of these founders would not have become founders if they'd gotten 'hooked' on programming at a young age. Perhaps the very fact that they did other things, possibly more outward and social in nature, gave them the characteristics that led to them becoming founders. I've found it's generally not a good idea to play these kinds of 'what if' games, because it's easy to pick the stuff you'd like to do different, but much harder to see the unintended, undesired consequences this different path might've had. Furthermore, I believe that saying 'I wish I had done x' can also cause a passive attitude that keeps one from 'doing x now anyways'. But I must admit that I have little evidence to show for this belief...

corndoge 12y ago

What's so special about female founders? Where's the "What We Learned From 40 Male YC Founders"?

_almosnow 12y ago
Sexist YC, check your privilege girls. Edit: the parent comment I replied to was deleted, I won't delete mine bc I don't care but be aware that context changes everything.
sbilstein 12y ago
They're incredibly underrepresented relative to relative population of US, even relative population of eng. grads, etc.
debacle 12y ago
A piece titled "What We Learned From 40 YC Founders" would probably be equivalent to "What We Learned From 40 Male YC Founders." If YC wants to cater to women and see that percentage of their applicants grow, they need to analyze their current stock.
- corndoge 12y ago
  That's /exactly/ the problem. Why should we be catering to women? Why are they so special? Why can't we just be gender-neutral and write some pieces about males for once?
  - CapitalistCartr 12y ago
    For once??? Most of the articles written ARE about males. Unless it specifies, as this one does, the default is males. "Why should we be catering to women?" Why are we currently so heavily catering to men?
    - tomp 12y ago
      Really, most articles are about people and we're catering to people.

mentos 12y ago

Computer science is the language of the future. It bothers me that I spent so many years learning latin/french/italian when their real world applications are very limited relative to say C/Java/Python which are much more important foreign languages to be learning in school.

vvpan 12y ago
I generally understand the sentiment, but your are really comparing apples and trigonometry.
- eah13 12y ago
  I'd disagree with that. I think coding languages are in a very real sense human languages. They have less history, less literature, less culture, and different uses but they have history, literature, culture, and uses just like any language.
  - vacri 12y ago
    Only if you consider computers to be people. Human languages are for communicating with humans. Programming languages are for communicating with computers. For example, this week I've been hanging out on a couple of open-source project IRC channels. People aren't talking to each other in Python or Java on those channels.
    - juliangregorian 12y ago
      "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." --SICP
    - BrandonM 12y ago
      Programming languages are absolutely for communicating with humans. Source comments are just one trivial proof of that.
      - 12y ago

debacle 12y ago

Not to be callous, but I'm not really interested in any of these founders as people. I would be much more interested in an aggregated feedback discussion about how (or if) startups with female founders are different, what YC did right for them, what it didn't, etc.

nostrademons 12y ago
You can't actually understand startups without understanding the people behind them. This is a hard lesson born from experience: when I was younger I was just interested in the mechanics, and thought that if I learned enough about the technology, the business, the financing aspects, etc. I'd find success. What ultimately happened was that I gave up (temporarily, it turned out, but it took me 6 years to pick it up again), because I didn't understand myself. When the stress picks up and you're knee-deep in building a product, a lot of the decisions you make, of necessity, have to be on autopilot. And if you don't understand your emotions and the emotions and background of everyone else in the ecosystem, you'll be fighting that force instead of working with it.

klunger 12y ago

If they wanted to back up this claim "...from the start I've made sure YC had an environment that is supportive of women," they would provide affordable childcare.

debacle 12y ago
Because men aren't responsible for children in the same way women are? Your comment is incredibly sexist.
- tomp 12y ago
  It's a pretty accurate and factual observation that most of the burden of child-care falls on mothers, either time- or money-wise.
- DanBC 12y ago
  When you have companies offering to freeze eggs it's a reasonable point to make about childcare -- society pretty much makes women responsible for children. The nice thing about making a workplace more suitable for women with children is that you're also making it more suitable for men with children.
dugmartin 12y ago
I don't think affordable childcare is a women's only issue. Men have children too.
- pistle 12y ago
  Nobody says that it's only a women's issue. But, if that servers your rhetorical needs, you keep putting those words in peoples' mouths. Childcare is vastly a burden born by women, thus considered a women's issue. That doesn't mean "there are no men who are burdened by childcare." It means that, in aggregate, the impact falls far more on the women. It's so egalitarian of you to not want it to be so, but until women are paid the same and men are taking on equal responsibilities (in aggregate) with the child rearing, the feigned "equality uber alles" cry is the fight song of the MRA. "I found an outlier, therefore WOE ARE THE MEN MEN MEN!!"

pskittle 12y ago

"Not surprisingly, most of the women were domain experts solving a problem they themselves had. That's something that tends to be true of successful founders regardless of gender." How much domain experience is necessary to solve the problems you have. isn't that something you learn/pick up once you start solving em?

dragonwriter 12y ago
> How much domain experience is necessary to solve the problems you have. isn't that something you learn/pick up once you start solving em? If you are a domain expert when you start, then the problems you have are more likely to be real, significant problems in the domain, and your attempted solutions are more likely to be both novel and well-considered in terms of the problem than is the case for someone with less domain expertise at the outset.
- pskittle 12y ago
  edited you make fair points. However the most common advice you get is , "focus on user experience". Most domain experts focus more on the tech as opposed to users. Also some of the great/successful startups have been started and run buy people who've never done it before.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > However the most common advice you get is , "focus on user experience". Most domain experts fail to do that. A domain expert scratching their own itch often is unwittingly focussing on UX of the target audience, which is one of the reasons that open source tools by and for developers that don't have a lot of deliberate focus on UX beyond what works for the people building it often are fairly good, while the same kind of things built by developers in more consumer-oriented markets often have very bad UX. Ultimately, its the same principle as dogfooding -- the most effective way to really understand UX deeply is for the developer to be the target user.
    - 12y ago

jandrewrogers 12y ago

The importance of learning to program at an earlier age conflates two patterns in my opinion. I benefitted immensely from teaching myself how to program at a young age but that is not why I have the computer science and software skills I do today per se. It is an artifact, not a requirement. Computer science skills roughly follow a sigmoidal curve over time with long tails at the top and bottom. You really do not become useful as a programmer until you hit the hockey stick part of that curve. There is no substitute for time in the field to get to the hockey stick part. The primary advantage of learning programming when you are much younger is that you essentially burn down some of that initial time investment before you are really paying attention to how long it actually takes to be an effective programmer. You do not hit the hockey stick faster, it just seems like it to other people because you started down the path to get there earlier. This is discouraging to people that start in college or later because there really is no shortcut to time spent doing it. The people that become good programmers faster usually just started earlier, it isn't necessarily that they are naturally more skilled. Nonetheless, the time required to become a good programmer is not that onerous in the big picture. The key is sticking with it even when the payoff seems distant. As an added comment, people that do well at the top of the hockey stick, where there return on additional investment is diminished, do tend to be the people that started much earlier. Again, this is not due to talent per se but the same people sufficiently obsessed with computer science to teach themselves at a young age also have the obsession to learn and master the more esoteric parts after they've become excellent programmers even though the practical utility is much less in practice.

GuiA 12y ago
Agreed. I would add that this applies to pretty much any skill, not just programming.
eah13 12y ago
> this is not due to talent per se but the same people sufficiently obsessed with computer science to teach themselves at a young age also have the obsession to learn and master the more esoteric parts after they've become excellent programmers even though the practical utility is much less in practice Agreed. I'd add this thought: code is a human language and like all languages fluency is most easily developed as a child but immersion and repetition can help adults develop it too.

dmritard96 12y ago

"In the most recent batch (W15), we asked about gender on the application form for the first time. The percentage of startups we accepted with female founders was identical to the percentage who applied." There are application videos and have been for a while. And each founder has names listed on the application. With https://gender-api.com/ https://gender-api.com/ you could probably figure out gender without asking explicitly and could have done so acceptably well with previous classes. I would be curious what the stats look like back tested against each class over time.

eah13 12y ago
+1 to back-testing the stats. Edit: whoa, downvoters! This comment was about getting more information to inform productive discussion. Not sure who would disagree with that?

pskittle 12y ago

Also the link to the female founders conference has last years dates. http://www.femalefoundersconference.org/ http://www.femalefoundersconference.org/

katm 12y ago
It's updated now - just refresh!
- pskittle 12y ago
  great! thank you
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

eah13 12y ago

This is a great story and project. An apology (in the original sense) of Jessica's work for those who think that the experiences of these individuals don't matter: What I think people don't get about Jessica's interviews is that they're part of a scientific process of understanding what makes great founders and great companies. Many discredit qualitative, observational scientific data. But for new, rare, or poorly understood phenomena, observation is the only way to make scientific progress. In engineering the phenomena are often well understood, common, and within the discipline, familiar. In this case deductive logic, reasoning from known principles, is quite fruitful; but its success biases engineers against inductive reasoning. But for other subjects, such as what makes a great startup founder, or what makes a great female startup founder, the inductive method is much more fruitful. This is not some anomaly: all sciences started with observation and the inductive method. These are the beginnings of insight, generating hypotheses to be tested. We're still quite early in our understanding of startups, and even more so in our understanding of female-founded startups, that this approach is not just warranted, it's the only way to make true progress. Jessica is like the Jane Goodall of startup science. Even though she's studying individual founders she's ultimately helping us understand more about ourselves.

delluminatus 12y ago
I agree that this is a great project. But, do you think it's right to call this a "scientific process of understanding"? It seems to me that the field (as it were) is simply in a pre-scientific phase of exploration and experimentation. Once we have a concrete basis for performing repeatable, independent experiments to (dis)prove concrete hypotheses, then the field will have entered a scientific stage.
- eah13 12y ago
  No, though I don't think you're alone in drawing the line of science around deduction. I think of science as a cycle: Phenomenon > observation > Induced hypothesis > Method choice > Deduction via metrics > Phenomenon ... Starting at "a concrete basis for performing repeatable, independent experiments" is a skyhook. Scientists have a hand in generating that "basis" and it's called inductive logic. I think we agree on the fact that the production of knowledge involves the testing of hypotheses but not whether the generation of hypotheses via observation of phenomena is part of science. Semantic, I suppose, but I think it's crucial to take the rudder so to speak by developing hypotheses deliberately.

ddebernardy 12y ago

The first paragraph, and the implicit message that females were in unusual need of help and support, struck me as belittling and patronizing... which is probably not the desired PR outcome. :-| It seems to me though that a much better way to convey the right message would be to compile a "what we learned from 100 VC founders" and ensure that diversity is absolutely all over the sample: females, muslims, african americans, non-US natives, gays and lesbians, whatever. Doing so would convey the implicit message that diversity is normal.

danielweber 12y ago
Not everyone goes through life seeking to be offended.
bbcbasic 12y ago
Nah. Better to address the issues explicitly.

d0m 12y ago

One sure thing is that having a child and a startup is a hell more difficult. I applaud founder moms/dads.

tptacek 12y ago
We had our first a year into the first startup I founded myself, and our second just before I left for a senior role at another startup. Balancing work and home responsibilities is always hard. Having a young family might not be an especially difficult burden for founders.
- d0m 12y ago
  It might be an unrealistic ideal, but I hope that when I'll be a father, I'll be able to give it my 100%. I don't like the idea of always considering "Should I spend time with my kids" vs "Should I do my best to make the startup succeed". I think this is what scares me the most about having a startup and a young family at the same time.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    What's unrealistic about this is the idea that you'd ever, under any circumstances, give 100% of yourself to your children. That's not a grown-up perspective on parenthood.
    - jamesdelaneyie 12y ago
      I think the point is that a healthy work/life balance would allow you to give 100% of yourself to the child at the particular moment you're with them. Not having to check an email when you're reading them a bedtime story. Being able to take a week off and not have an excess work-related ruminations badgering the gullet in the background of a family-holiday that detract from you're daughter saying "DAD! WATCH THIS!" unobserved pool splashes

tptacek 12y ago

I've been coding since I was ~13. I can understand why people who haven't might have valid reasons to wish they'd started earlier. I'd just say: beware self-fulfilling prophecies and selection bias. Lots of really excellent software people I've worked with got late starts. Lots of people who started early coasted or are still coasting. In the 25 years I've been coding, only a few years worth of that time really grew me as a developer, so what you work on has just as much impact as how long you've been working on it. Work with a bunch of different enterprise L.O.B. developers to get a sense of what I'm saying here. The average age of a backoffice developer is higher, meaning they have more experience. Hiring in enterprises is regimented, meaning that they tend to come from CS backgrounds. Are they uniformly high quality developers? No. In fact: there's a stigma attached to coming from a long stint in enterprise development. As a lever for getting more women engaged with startups, the idea that an early start is important makes even less sense. Much of the day-to-day work that happens even at companies with difficult problem domains is rote and uncomplicated. A few years experience is more than enough to lead a typical web project, and, more importantly, to have a sense for whether a dev team is firing on all cylinders and to authoritatively manage it. Obvious subtext/bias here: I do not believe that starting women in software development earlier is going to resolve the gender gap. By all means, start early; there's nothing wrong with that. It's just probably not the root of the problem.

waterlesscloud 12y ago
I agree. I've been coding for decades,but it's a handful of years that made the vast majority of difference. That's not to say you don't learn some things every year, but the major progress is concentrated in a few years (and they aren't all at the start!)
- SixSigma 12y ago
  As also someone who started coding at 13 and now mid-40s, mine too has been quantum evolution. Usually from needing a particular technology for a project and then learning it or just a didactic itch I scratched. Novel coding techniques distract you from solving the problem and exploring the novel for its own sake is a common pitfall in the programming world. 10 Solve problems with tools you know 20 Learn new tools 30 GOTO 10

jgdreyes 12y ago

I think this is a great project. But one quote stood out: > Interestingly, many said it got them attention for being unusual, and that they'd used this to their advantage. This is what I have experienced as well. But do I want to be `unusual`? Instead, let's strive for making it a norm that female developers are just as common and just as good as their male counterparts. Stop looking at me like I'm some freak for being a competent woman developer.

jkmcf 12y ago

I wish my parents had let me take more shop classes, because right now I'm interested in home renovation. The thing is, you don't know where your future interests will take you. Even if you are exposed to stuff when you are younger, you may hate it regardless of how great the presentation may be. I personally think encouraging women, or anyone for that matter, to be programmers/scientists/mechanics is missing the point. You have to encourage people to find passions, be proactive, enjoy learning, and make these a habit. Life isn't static. I also think the "gender gap" is a fallacy. It's true that all professions could be more welcoming to people of different persuasions, but it would be more interesting to know the gap between "people who want to do X but feel excluded" and the "people who are already doing X".

joycey 12y ago
The issue isn't just that the gender gap in tech exists and should be fixed. The bigger issue is that the gap exists, and is actually getting worse over time. There are half as many women studying CS today as there were in the 80's [0]. I think it's much more believable that cultural factors that have inadvertently hurt women have caused this than asserting that the innate interests of women have evolved in the past few decades. You believe the "gender gap" is a fallacy because you believe tech is a meritocracy but the fact is that there are less women in tech. That means that either tech is not a meritocracy because there are subtle biases that women have to work against, or that women are inherently uninterested in tech. If you refuse to be skeptical of the fact that maybe, just maybe, tech is not really a meritocracy, then you will never be able to acknowledge the fact that subtle sexist microaggressions exist and affect the numbers we see. [0] http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-wom...
- chrishynes 12y ago
  Or is it possible, just possible, that freedom has increased in the past few decades? Women can now choose whatever they want to do rather than being guided down the path of housewivery or a couple of other vocations? Maybe the underlying desires that were always there are being revealed, rather than "innate interests evolving". But no, you'd rather dismiss that possibility out of hand and presume that "subtle sexist microaggressions" halved the number of women in tech. Are you suggesting that women have it twice as bad in tech now as they had in the 80s?

logn 12y ago

Generally, I think the value of programming at an early age is that you have the time and context to develop an earnest interest in programming. You're doing it for fun. And then when you proceed to take courses on it, you're genuinely excited to learn, and you're not just struggling for a passing grade. Most of this is just the broken nature of schooling.

iufwe87 12y ago

I am from India and on H1B visa in United States. I still don't understand why there is more hustling in recent years about women participation ? Be it playing games, developing games, women in tech or women in NFL or women in ______ ( fill in blank here). I studied engineering in India from one of the premier university and 30 % of my class were girls. Toppers of the class for all 4 years were girls. I know at least 50-80 girls from India and China in my linkedin contacts who are actively engaged int tech. Keeping aside social problems faced by women in India for a bit ( and excluding poor people) , still there is very high participation from girls / women in India. Throughout my education of 1st to 12th grade there were more girls than more boys in my class. So my question is ---- 1. Why is US only facing this problem of women in ..... ? 2. Is this some political gimmick being played for 2016 preparation ( and I ask with all seriousness without affiliation to any party ) I have always considered people in US are more vocal about their rights, responsibilities and more aware of problems in general. Lately though, I see lots of thought policing happening, view manipulation going on at large. My last and most important question is , 3. Since you folks are now actively advertising and creating social conditions for women's participation in tech are you not depriving them of their freedom to choose whichever path women in US prefer ? In an ideal scenario, women would have tech as one of choice for career and not necessarily manipulative information representing tech is only best choice career.

kelukelugames 12y ago
I have some thoughts on 2 and 3. 2. I wholly support helping underrepresented minorities in tech because I believe in fairness. But anytime gender or race is involved, then the topic is political by definition. I follow the White House on twitter and a ton of their tweets are about equal pay. Both Romney and McCain addressed this issue during their campaigns and were criticized for their responses. Yes, it is a political tool. But just because politicians are involved does not make it a gimmick. 3. I agree that the ideal scenario is for tech to be one of the career choices. The problem is people are pushed away from certain fields. Coming to the US to work on a H1B is made easier because many Indians and Chinese have done it before us. Having people who look like me achieve something is a great self confidence boost and motivator. Unfortunately, other minorities groups do not have this benefit. Perhaps Neil deGrasse Tyson can explain it better than me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inz1sdhsMCU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inz1sdhsMCU

deleted 12y ago

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Splartacus 12y ago

"Do you know," suddenly continued Posdnicheff, "that this power of women from which the world suffers arises solely from what I have just spoken of?" "What do you mean by the power of women?" I said. "Everybody, on the contrary, complains that women have not sufficient rights, that they are in subjection." "That's it; that's it exactly," said he, vivaciously. "That is just what I mean, and that is the explanation of this extraordinary phenomenon, that on the one hand woman is reduced to the lowest degree of humiliation and on the other hand she reigns over everything. See the Jews: with their power of money, they avenge their subjection, just as the women do. 'Ah! you wish us to be only merchants? All right; remaining merchants, we will get possession of you,' say the Jews. 'Ah! you wish us to be only objects of sensuality? All right; by the aid of sensuality we will bend you beneath our yoke,' say the women. "The absence of the rights of woman does not consist in the fact that she has not the right to vote, or the right to sit on the bench, but in the fact that in her affectional relations she is not the equal of man, she has not the right to abstain, to choose instead of being chosen. You say that that would be abnormal. Very well! But then do not let man enjoy these rights, while his companion is deprived of them, and finds herself obliged to make use of the coquetry by which she governs, so that the result is that man chooses 'formally,' whereas really it is woman who chooses. As soon as she is in possession of her means, she abuses them, and acquires a terrible supremacy." "But where do you see this exceptional power?" "Where? Why, everywhere, in everything. Go see the stores in the large cities. There are millions there, millions. It is impossible to estimate the enormous quantity of labor that is expended there. In nine-tenths of these stores is there anything whatever for the use of men? All the luxury of life is demanded and sustained by woman. Count the factories; the greater part of them are engaged in making feminine ornaments. Millions of men, generations of slaves, die toiling like convicts simply to satisfy the whims of our companions. "Women, like queens, keep nine-tenths of the human race as prisoners of war, or as prisoners at hard labor. And all this because they have been humiliated, because they have been deprived of rights equal to those which men enjoy. They take revenge for our sensuality; they catch us in their nets. "Yes, the whole thing is there. Women have made of themselves such a weapon to act upon the senses that a young man, and even an old man, cannot remain tranquil in their presence. Watch a popular festival, or our receptions or ball-rooms. Woman well knows her influence there. You will see it in her triumphant smiles. "As soon as a young man advances toward a woman, directly he falls under the influence of this opium, and loses his head. Long ago I felt ill at ease when I saw a woman too well adorned,--whether a woman of the people with her red neckerchief and her looped skirt, or a woman of our own society in her ball-room dress. But now it simply terrifies me. I see in it a danger to men, something contrary to the laws; and I feel a desire to call a policeman, to appeal for defence from some quarter, to demand that this dangerous object be removed. "And this is not a joke, by any means. I am convinced, I am sure, that the time will come -- and perhaps it is not far distant -- when the world will understand this, and will be astonished that a society could exist in which actions as harmful as those which appeal to sensuality by adorning the body as our companions do were allowed. As well set traps along our public streets, or worse than that. The Kreutzer Sonata -- Lev Tolstoy

fillskills 12y ago

Even as a male entrepreneur, this collection is pure gold. So much to learn. Thank you for doing this. Any chance this series could be made as videos? I would like my daughter to see them as she grows up.

mikeleeorg 12y ago

This is probably impossible to do, but it would be very interesting to contrast these anecdotes with anecdotes from women who could have become technology startup founders, but didn't for some reason. YC's stories are awesome and these entrepreneurs will serve as important role models for young women. They unfortunately contain a "survivor bias" though, and there may be many other hidden factors preventing other potential female entrepreneurs from following in their footsteps. I don't mean this as a criticism at all though. This effort by YC is a tremendous first step and for the sake of my daughter and young girls everywhere, I hope they continue. EDIT: I'd love to hear the sentiment behind the downvotes. Hopefully I didn't come across critical of YC's effort here; that wasn't my intention at all. This is an important issue and I suspect the stories of those who were deterred are just as informative as those who have gotten this far.

skywhopper 12y ago

Interesting stuff. One detail I'd like to respond to. Jessica writes: And as YC has grown, so has the number of female partners. Now there are four of us and we are not tokens, or a female minority in a male-dominated firm. At the risk of offending my male colleagues, who will nevertheless understand what I mean, some would claim it's closer to the truth to say that that we run the place. Many times women find themselves in the situation where they are the more responsible employees, working harder than the men, taking care of the details many men overlook for far longer, and too often earning far less money and respect. So I just hope that Jessica and the other female partners are being compensated consummate to their contribution to the success of YC.

girvo 12y ago
While I'm not disagreeing with your point, I'd like to point out that > working harder than the men, taking care of the details many men overlook for far longer, and too often earning far less money and respect is a problem not just for women, but something I see constantly across our industry in general. Definitely something we should deal with better. Thankfully, the steps we should be taking to bring more women into this industry and deal with this problem are possibly interrelated, so it's one of the many cases where we can help everyone :)

brlewis 12y ago

I'm interested in reading more findings from the 40 stories in addition to the ones Jessica describes, but I'm too lazy to read all 40. If you've read them, what did you find interesting?

xchip 12y ago

What they should do is to marry men that want to stay at home taking care of the kids.

timedoctor 12y ago

For women who also want to have children at the same time as co-founding a startup, I think it's important not to underestimate how difficult this is. When my wife was first breastfeeding I timed how long she spent breastfeeding and changing nappies and bathing the young baby. It was LITERALLY over 9 hours per day (timed to the minute). To think that it's possible to ALSO run a startup at the same time is in my opinion crazy. With older children it's a lot easier but still difficult. I have several female friends who are also successful entrepreneurs. Some seem to make it work with their family life, but my experience is with most that they have a very hard time and that it often devastates their family life and relationships. So yes there examples of women who run a company and also have young children, but I think they are the exception rather than the rule. For women who do not want to have children, or who are not going to have children for many years in the future, no issue.

marvin 12y ago
No need to single out women in this context. If you want to be a father that's there for your children, both on the infant stage and later stages of their lives...being in a top-level leadership position is simply not possible. Ditto for most other career paths that require your undivided attention. Cultural norms is the only reason we single out women in this context. A lot of people don't appreciate the level of dysfunction that can occur in other areas of life simply from being ambitious and hard-working. I personally know many professionals that I greatly admire and respect (while acknowledging that I would never make the sacrifices they do to be where they are), but I'm sure as hell glad I'm not married to them.

StronglyTyped 12y ago

I'm in a graduate CS program. Half, maybe more, of my cohort is female.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

My experience raising three daughters is that they were always very aware of what others were doing. Their male peers were pretty uninformed (as I expect I was as a teen). I observed that the men were much more inclined to pursue an "unusual" activity (ie not what other people are doing)than the women were. It seemed motivated not by feeling "weird" rather it appeared to be motivated to not do something that their friends were not interested in participating with them. From a sense of inclusion they didn't spend group time on activities that other members of the group were not interested in. I worked with my middle daughter to build a knitting pattern illustrator in Perl[1]. She and her friends could talk for hours about knitting, which is essentially programming as Jacquard proved, because they all were interested in the ways to produce interesting weaves. My friends were interested in talking about computers when I was a teen because we were interested in machines that could 'compute'. The question I wonder about is if the disparity goes away when women develop group activities around programming. [1] I liked the pun of using Perl for a knitting application.

cauterized 12y ago

As a woman in software development (and a former founder) what I appreciate most about this collection of stories is that rather than men sitting around hypothesizing about why someone else whose experience probably doesn't match their own made different choices than they did, it tells actual women's stories. The ongoing discussion of gender in computing needs more of this. Next, I would love to see (for contrast) the stories of some women who did drop out or who considered STEM majors/careers but ultimately chose other directions. Any takers?