It's probably my European naiveté talking here, but I seriously wonder if and why that matters to you. Most of us belong to some kind of "minority" in some fashion, sometimes it's visible from the outside, sometimes not. Are things in the USA really so bad that it matters what color your skin is? Isn't tech a business of ideas anyway?
I have worked with fewer than 10 black men and women in a technical role in my entire career; spanning hundreds of teams and nearly a hundred customers and employers.
It matters because opportunity and outcomes aren't equal. The problem isn't purely the IT scene, but one of the greatest challenges the United States faces.
Why aren't there more male nurses? Why aren't there more female mechanics?
I also don't know where you are working, but I've only worked on 10 teams (I'm in software development) and there were at least a few black guys on each of my teams. But, I tend not to look at color. I look at the person.
Yes, things are so bad.
And it must be more than "European" naiveté if you don't believe that people naturally discriminate for people who look like them, or believe the same things as they do.
Its the nature of the human beast to not be rational.
> Isn't tech a business of ideas anyway?
Ah, but now that you mention it... most of us are hiding our faces (and ethnicities) behind our websites copy. So even a B2C company on the internet doesn't have to worry about stereotypes harming their first impressions.
Look at Justin.tv, just how many of Michael Seibel's[1] customers and clients do you think know that he is black?
[1] http://www.blackenterprise.com/2010/08/28/40-next-michael-se...
Do they really, naturally? I don't think that many people are walking around, constantly repeating an inner mantra like "I'm a middle-aged white male", always comparing everyone against what they themselves look like in the mirror? Who does that?
> Its the nature of the human beast to not be rational.
It's my experience that most humans only think like "beasts" if they have been conditioned to do so. It's not like we have to force ourselves to be rational all the time, is it? Being somewhat rational, friendly and compassionate should be the default position.
> Ah, but now that you mention it... most of us are hiding our faces (and ethnicities) behind our websites copy.
That's true, and I'm happy about this option. I certainly wouldn't have such a great time on the net if people could actually hear or see me. But being black is not the same as being ugly.
> just how many of Michael Seibel's[1] customers and clients do you think know that he is black
How many care?
That does not mean there aren't black developers (I've worked with and known quite a few) - but the counts are a lot lower than other races.
I'm gay, and am bootstrapping my own startup. I have never wondered how many other startup founders are gay .. because that's not what it's about!
Focus man
I've found it rarely even comes up, unless you're talking about family with coworkers or something, and by that point you're probably already hired/funded/'in' and will have already overcome any potential stereotypes that someone might otherwise have had about you.
Gees, do you really believe race does not matter in europe?
In Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" he tells the story of Bill Gates and Bill Joy - two prolific programmers. The key similarity between them was their unfettered access to a computer growing up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United... Indicates that US Blacks earn less on average. Perhaps a good number of black kids don't have a computer to spend the required time needed to realize the power.
Perhaps donating your old computer to inner-city and after school programs would help a kid realize that. Wishing won't do anything, but if you've got computers "lying around" that you were going to get rid of, there are programs that distribute them to people who could use them.
Google turned up: http://www.computerswithcauses.org/
Not yet, but what usually happens after the answer to "how many X are black?" comes back "not proportional to Y"?
With regard to racism, if we avoid the discussion altogether, we are simply avoid the pain of being reminded that it exists. The appropriate response is not to shy away from the conversation, but to open yourself to it. Answer the question based on the facts, but address the question of "why" separately. There may very well be good reasons why. There may not. We should strive to understand the difference.
I try to fight the urge to set up defenses to conversations I think may be going a certain direction. By putting up our defenses early, we only strengthen the divide rather than break it down.
Discussions of minority participation in technology and entrepreneurship goes on ad nauseaum elsewhere. If it is to come up here out of the blue, we ought to have some interesting angle to YCombinator funding. For example, if we know that YCombinator funds double the proportion of the rest of the industry, that would be interesting and new.
If we have no evidence of anything interesting or new, the question hardly seems like Hacker News. If it's a simple question, an email to Paul Graham would probably obtain a simple answer.
I respect you a great deal and that's why I'm disappointed in this comment. It's not only because it's uncharacteristically obtuse, but because it smacks of a disturbing syndrome I've seen in some fellow black people who've "made it."
In situations where race comes up, people with this issue go out of their way to let their non-black peers know that they are not interested in discussing race ... unlike all those other blacks they may have heard about. It's no different from a woman trying to fit in with male colleagues by going out of her way to slam any female colleague who files a sexual harassment complaint. It's sad, unnecessary, and adds nothing substantive to the discussion. Let's not look down our noses at other people to make ourselves looks bigger.
The question of whether a black person has ever been picked for YCombinator is interesting and at the very least certainly shouldn't be verboten.
Anything that good hackers would find interesting. [...] anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
I was at PyCon as well, and observed the exact same anecdote that the OP describes. At my company's booth, the only minorities I can think of who talked to us were more than likely visiting from Europe, Asia, or South America. Therefore, I'm curious, and I'm interested to see the response; not from accusing Y Combinator of racism, as some seem to suggest, but merely to get some data on minority penetration into our field.
There is no "standard" for the front page. We're all smart people, and we can be trusted to make judgments.
Based on the other comments here, it seems as though the sample size would surely be too small to give us any meaningful amount of confidence in such statistics.
What makes Michael Seibel special is not because he is Black but because he has succeeded at least on some level where many have tried and failed. So your last sentence "...was just wondering if anyone that looks like ME has EVER made it." is really coming from a wrong angle IMO.
1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat...
That said, I'd argue that unless you grew up with computers and were interested in programming them early in life you probably aren't the startup type. Your income level affects this, obviously if you can't get your hands on a computer then you're not going to be able to do much. As a geek I never had any "role models" or other things that set me on my path. Nor did my parents encourage tech. Nor did my friends. I was, and in many ways, still am something of a lone geek amongst non-geeks. I believe "role models" to be a meaningless cop-out.
"In the US Census, people who originate from the original peoples of the East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia are classified as part of the Asian race; while peoples from Siberia, Central Asia, and Western Asia are classified as "White".
Thanks for the link, though.
I would say, in general, very few tech founders come out of poverty. I'd also say that relatively few come out of <$50k households (plenty of exceptions, here, of course). Most of the American founders I know come from pretty flush backgrounds.
Of course, I also read that the majority of funded startups are founded by people born outside of the states.
We have people that we idolize but its not because of common-place programming ability or merely their job but because of what they've achieved----Bill Gates with Microsoft, Linus Torvalds with Linux, etc.
Programmers seem to usually be self-described 'geeks' and thus like programming for its own sake.
We have to reach out to them. We need to show them the possibilites available to them in our field. We need to show them how much freedom you can have, and how lucrative software development can be.
And most of all, we need to show them how much fun building software can be. I'm not the only one who loves this stuff, right?
But it still comes down to getting the word out. What's the best way to do it? I don't know, but it's on my agenda to find out once I've achieved some form of success.
They focus mostly on the basic tenets of entrepreneurship but I would love to see more minority programmers coming out of underprivileged schools and situations.
As far as investors go, I doubt that they have any aversion to supporting entrepreneurs of any background. This is one industry that I would presume is more of a meritocracy than society at large. As I said on my tumblr a while back (http://bit.ly/g7jCAF) investors can see the green inside all of us :-)
There are many discussions going on about women in technology startups. The greater question is not why there aren't more founders, but why there arent more minority/female students in academia. Most of your founders are going to be a subset of those in academia anyway, so why not look at the problem closer to the source?
We intend to do this by operating a program within our company, starting with community computer and science lab, promoting to a group work day with interactive collaboration, then eventually fitting a child's interest in a role with a second-seat internship at each employee's desk.
This is all early stage of process, but 20 years of thinking and experimentation. If I'm able to build my current venture out, my next will be promoting these early programs to help expand young people's thinking (and hopefully help them make themselves their own role model) about science and technology.
http://www.prb.org/Articles/2007/CrossoverinFemaleMaleColleg...
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2009/section1/indicator11.as...
To wit: Females have dominated academia for a couple decades now.
Also, it should be pointed out that many founders are college dropouts or even high school dropouts, so I'd be interested in some sort of citation of evidence that one can assume most founders will be a subset of academia.
I know in my college, in my two majors (mechanical engineer & computer science, 2007-2010) it was about 80/20 male/female in ME and 70/30 male/female in CS. The girls average was likely higher than the guys. I don't see how they are "dominating". You're numbers show there are more guys than girls in college - which was also true of my college which overall was 60/40 female/male. That doesn't mean there are more girls in majors related to startups like the ones we are talking about here (which I would highly doubt you can find numbers to say that).
Role Models: There is no black Bill Gates. Not everyone is a trailblazer and for the rest of us role models play a huge "role" when choosing a career path. This is especially true for the black community. It becomes much easier to convince yourself, and your parents, that your passion is a valid career choice if you can point to an existing success story.
Access to technology: When I was a kid growing up I was the only one of my friends whose family owned a computer thanks to my dad being a programmer. Kinda hard to develop a passion for programming without one of those. Before tech skills became a requirement for any decent job computers were seen as expensive and unnecessary so everyone else was told "we'll get you one when you get to high school / college."
However, as I apply these these theories to today, Obama is president and just about every kid, rich or poor, has daily access to a computer. I'm guessing in 5 years time, when the next generation begins their careers, the number of black programmers will increase drastically all on its own.
That said I do know a good number of black network engineers and sys admins so I'm completely lost as to why programming is the only IT profession with such a huge discrepancy. Any theories?
My friends from outside of school, however, STILL refer to me as "that corporate nigga". But since I know them from places like my neighborhood or sports teams where clics and social standings didn't exist there were no detrimental effects to being a nerd.
Anybody at any high school who is known as a programmer is going to be teased to some extent. What kept you from giving into the peer pressure?
(Off the top of my head of the YC companies I believe Heyzap, Auctomatic, SnapTalent, and Rapportive all had British-Asian co-founders)
I suspect that YC would be wise to try and recruit diversity, having different perspectives, backgrounds and world views among founders at the the dinners and other places, would probably make all the startups stronger.
Latinos or Hispanics are an ethnic group, not racial, there are white, black, native american, and asian latinos.
Why?
Are you assuming that different races might have different strengths (on average)? If so, that assumption implies that, again on average, a purely merit based system will result in less diversity than the general population.
To the extent that race correlates with culture and culture has an effect on strengths, the same applies.
So, remind me why diversity is important?
However, I'm still looking for an answer to my question - why should YC care about diversity?
At present because of the technology boom in Africa, one's ability to skillfully work with different technologies is revered by others. Consequently, more Africans are tackling various fields in technology, especially computer science, with the same motivation and determination that was dedicated to traditional fields such as tropical medicine and electrical engineering.
Assuming that there might be something "unattractive" about being black -- a big assumption but one I'm willing to play along with for purposes of this thread -- how about fat people? Old people? People who don't live in cities? People who didn't go to an ivory league college? Conservatives? People who have physical defects?
On a few occasions, it's been stated that basically you need to look "cute", "serious", or various other quasi-bullshit phrases. It's a logical follow-up question to start asking about exactly which attributes people find attractive.
But I'm not sure what difference it makes. If your startup depends on YC, they probably don't want you. It's like the old thing about only asking for a loan when you don't need the money.
While you can count up various attributes and report on them, that's a long way from a causal relationship. Maybe no black people applied. Maybe there were only 2 black people that applied, but they were both joke applications. There's simply no useful information you can gather from a count. At least not that I can see. Perhaps you can develop a suspicion that the odds are stacked against you, but if you're looking for reasons to think the odds are stacked against you, hell, just go look at the stats for startups in general. No need to add anything else in there.
I guess I just don't understand your point. It doesn't seem very productive, no matter what the answer is.
http://mixergy.com/lawrence-watkins-great-black-speakers-int...
http://mixergy.com/ephren-taylor-interview/
Both are black founders - but there's so much more on Mixergy that you should check out. Andrew Warner is pretty awesome at that stuff.
I particularly liked Ephren's interview, I've been listening to Mixergy for a number of months now and he is still a stand-out for me.
EDIT I just remembered that Peter Gruber tells a great story about Magic Johnson pitching him on a chain of movie theaters. http://mixergy.com/peter-guber-interview/
So I'm an old fat ugly-looking guy. According to you, I should be looking for other folks like me who made it? This will somehow be inspirational?
And what good, exactly, does finding another person who _looks_ like me going to accomplish? What the hell difference does it make?
Have you ever visited or not visited a web site because of the way the person who created it looks? Ever purchased or not purchased an app because of the religion or heritage of the developer?
YC, if they have any sense in their heads, should care about traction, scalability, and success potential. None of that is based on attributes like this. If it is, I've never heard of it. (And it makes no sense)
Now perhaps you can make a case that things like this play a role with finding investors, but AFAIK YC has made it clear -that not every entrant has to have a beauty pageant investor track.
Here's a question I could get behind: Let's say I want to find funding. What sorts of things that I can control -- looks, haircut, attitude, etc -- make the biggest superficial difference to investors?
I'd like to hear a lot more about that. Wonder if anybody has any data?
We wound up building a pretty miz alpha because I had no clue what I actually wanted to create to solve the problem I had in mind. Got very minimal traction, worked at a quant hedge fund to bootstrap. Learned to program (LAMP + JS) during the nights and weekends, launched a beta, got basic ("this could be interesting") level traction. Pitched angels, got funded, now working on an html5 based mobile website to capture the function our users find most interesting.
In general, I haven't experienced any discrimination or racial issues as yet. To be quite frank, the most helpful people have not been my color. This surprised me quite a bit because in the finance world where I interned all throughout school there's a strong "cultural networking" focus where you are connected with multiple career mentors, some of whom were "diversity" mentors.
With regard to my venture, I took the "open" approach and told everyone my idea in hopes of bouncing it around and making it better. In so doing, I met a lot of really interesting people of all colors who have served as advisors/friends/partners to this day. The startup community seems to be very much merit based and quantitative. If you have skills, traction, etc. you'll get looks but you wont get a handout for any reason unless you hustle for it.
(You should check out black web 2.0, http://blackweb20.com they have an interesting community of people in tech.)
I got some great advice from a Berkeley professor about increasing diversity in the workplace. I had issues giving preferential treatment to resumes that came in just because I thought diversity was important and he suggested I post job openings in places that are already heavily black/latino/etc.
I thought it was a great idea, but they aren't easy to find.
-Angela Benton Founder, Black Web 2.0
And he is the technical guy of the pair.
At one point, out of 7 or 8 undergrads in a research group I was with, more than half had completed PhDs and I think the rest of us (I was the lone white student in the group) had picked up MS degrees.
A number of the higher-quality students from this institution were heavily recruited by big corps with eyes on increasing minority hires and diversity rates.
What I mostly know is that successful CS students from this institution had their choice of top-notch careers or academic research opportunities. As a school (and my general region), not much emphasis was placed on entrepreneurship. Maybe both facts come into play with startup culture today.
Don't know what that might say about the games industry, if at all, just putting it out there.
There have been several discussions about this topic, including my own: "Startup America Should Look Like America" http://bit.ly/fuqcBB.
There are groups that are forming to address the need for diversity in the tech world.
The "Black Founders" Kickoff Launch Event is on Thursday, March 24th, 2011 at www.meetup.com/BlackFounders/events/16882191/ The Plancast event details are here: http://plancast.com/p/4cq2
We've recently launched four "Building While Brown" groups on facebook: Bay Area: http://on.fb.me/hyJJhM, NYC http://on.fb.me/fF2lXW, DC|VA http://on.fb.me/gf4beu and the RTP http://on.fb.me/dZCrnj
I only ask these questions because I think they are important. I applied to YC and just had a conversation w/ someone who applied also however at the time of application we were both single founders.
I consider myself technical but I'm sure not as technical as many of you since I've only dealt in front-end web development. YC does have super specific criteria for applying, they are looking for a certain type of founder (or team of co-founders) so it would be helpful to this discussion to know.
I think it also depends on the idea/start-up submitted. Part of the review process does seem like they are looking at the entrepreneur but it also seems like they are looking at the entrepreneur (or team) and their ability to execute on the idea.
Just my thoughts...
That said, how to correct this? E.g. Stanford University has no quota and doesn't yield on admission standards, but does a good job actively recruiting qualified minority students. Does YC recruit at all?
I consider myself to be a good person and I don't actively discriminate against people based on things like race, but I simply can't help this reflex. Sad, huh?
