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From their website, http://startup52.com/

>Because we are founder-centric, we place huge emphasis on the capabilities of the founding team and then the diversity profile. For accepted non-diverse teams, we work with you to help you diversify your team with your next hires.

This seems like the most blatant disregard of meritocracy in the tech world yet, and particularly as they're not just employing for a position in which a slight better performance by a less diverse candidate would hardly affect the success of the company, but instead it's an accelerator which is betting entirely on a small number of individuals to have the skill-set necessary to build a billion dollar company.

You assume:

1) Merit is an understood and measurable trait

2) Merit is measurable to a fairly fine degree

3) Diversity does not, in and of itself, increase chances of success

For #3, there's research showing you're assumption is wrong. You can also make an analogy to any other kind of investing, where if you do the same thing as everyone else, your results will be average.

1) You're somewhat right; 'displayed capability' would likely be better.

2) It doesn't have to be perfectly or flawlessly measurable to be worth measuring and net a positive result.

3) There's definitely more measurable, tested validity behind typical 'meritocratic' factors used by employers for recruiting than there is for diversity. For example, does the average Stanford student vs NYU student have less differentiation than a Black vs White Stanford student?

You're arguing against the 'measurability' and 'increased chance of success' of these factors (education, work experience) in favor of race or gender or sexual orientation.

If you truly want diversity, you'd find much more of it from ten individuals of the same race who all originated from different countries with different cultures. The difference between Americans of different races, by comparison, is much, much smaller.

One thing I am very irritated about is how 100% of these diversity advocates (read "opportunists trying to capitalize on the trend") use some research that says how diverse companies performed better than non-diverse.

There are so many things wrong about this I don't even know where to start.

First of all "diverse company had higher returns than the median" is such a bullshit. This is called a "correlation". There is absolutely NO causality between the two factors and yet these people say "diverse company => higher returns". Stuff like this where there can be so many variables is not something you should draw an easy conclusion on.

Second, "higher than median" is NOT something investors are looking for. They are looking for the Googles and the Facebooks. A lot of these outlier companies were actually far from diverse when they were startups.

Third, these are interpretations with agenda. And everyone with the same agenda uses these results to "scientifically" back up their claims. It's equivalent to cigarette companies funding research to prove that cigarettes are not bad for health.

I DO believe that diverse team is SOMETIMES good (but not always), but I just don't like how these opportunists are manipulating the narrative in the name of "science", just so they can profit from it.