Comment by dheera
2 years ago
-> went to stanford or harvard -> funded (no questions asked)
I'd edit this to
-> white male went to stanford or harvard -> funded (no questions asked)
Source: I know lots of female and non-white Harvard grads who didn't get funded. I'm a non-white MIT grad and also found funding very, very difficult even when we had a product. We almost continuously had to spend >1/2 of our working hours just trying to get funding. Hundreds and hundreds of coffee chats plus travel time. We were building hardware, so bootstrapping wasn't an option.
White male Harvard grads I know routinely got funded very quickly, though. They often had time to get actual work done. Even still, most of them didn't succeed in the end.
Hardware is a different category and doesnt really fit the traditional VC model. Also, indians/east asians are the majority in tech, not the minority. Plenty of examples of open discrimination in big tech from those groups
I'm not white either but seriously, this mindset of "victimization of non-white people" needs to stop. I'd rather be taken seriously for my merits than my minority privileges (due to DEI for example).
> I'd rather be taken seriously for my merits
Me too. The reality is that people don't always take my merits seriously.
I'm male though. Females have it much worse. I have heard lots of horror stories (both behind their back in "locker room talk" and directly from them) where their actual merits are effectively ignored and all focus is on their body. It's insane.
> Females have it much worse
The entire concept of "warm introductions" is harmful to women.
Because most VC partners, CEOs etc are men. And so you have this power imbalance where young, women founders feel like they are forced to build relationships with typically older men.
And like you said there are plenty of horror stories (my partner was one) where this power imbalance gets abused.
What we need are data. Then set up funds that scoop up the good ideas left on the table by this dumb money if it exists.
You're looking at it backwards. White people get an automatic advantage because they're white. Any advantages given to minorities are an attempt to balance the game.
> White people get an automatic advantage because they're white.
By whom? By other white people? Homophily is a real phenomenon in every ethnicity.
But if you're saying that white people get advantages by non-white people, then it's a cultural issue of those non-white people who, for some reason, have internalized racism (look up inferiority syndrome).
It is possible it is racism but it is likely to be measurement error, sampling error, and/or specification error, assuming you have not ruled those out.