If that's true for harassment, it's even more true for other things that would put you on YC's shitlist; after all, genuine misunderstandings and misfortunes routinely kill VC deals, but if that happens with a YC firm you already have to know it's costing your VC firm reputation.
Don't you "accuse" a restaurant of having subpar food or service when reviewing on Yelp? When I read restaurant reviews I take certain ones with a grain of salt, unless I hear the same problems coming up in multiple different reviews. These accusations can have a material impact on the restaurant, similar to the impact it might have on a VC. Hopefully, no person will take one review as a final judgment on a VC, but if a pattern emerges people should proceed with caution.
Yeah, I think a service like this becomes much more effective when both positive and negative reviews can be posted. Also would help a lot if you could see analytics on the review, like average rating from each gender. Then it would be much more clear who is biased.
Hmm. Not sure about it. Food and service are somewhat objective. For a lot of reviews will average quite well. In the current climate if 99 founders says they are not harassed and one says they were, if it goes public the outrage machine will side with the one, reputation will be destroyed and there is no way for the accused to defend himself.
That is how the world works currently. Like it or not. And most often than not there will be no court case in which he will be able to clear his name or be proven guilty and made to pay for it.
Sexual harassment is both a terrible thing and being accused is also terribly potent weapon.
Of course we cannot demand X > 1 reports. Because even one time is too much. See the problem? Zero tolerance is easy to abuse. Some tolerance is disregard for victims. Shitty situation all the way.
Reviewing a restaurant and accusing someone of sexual harrassment are not even remotely in the same ballpark of potential for long long-term damage to someone's reputation, family, career, and future.
True. Up until about five minutes ago, accusing a VC of sexual harassment has substantially less effect than a bad Yelp review.
That aside, his point stands. Personal testimony is evidence. Seriously people deciding whether to act on personal testimony have a variety of heuristics and tools for deciding to what extent they weight a particular piece of evidence.
This is easy to dispute. A lot of restaurants operate on a razor's edge of profitability. More restaurants fold every year than VC firms. Restaurants tend to be operated by middle class people with weaker backup plans than venture capital firms, which are staffed by investment bankers, most of whom have Ivy League pedigrees --- in fact, most of whom collect 2/20 on funds invested no matter how bad the quality of their dealflow gets.
Meanwhile, these same VCs that people on this thread are champing at the bit to defend routinely create blacklists of founders, which they'll share with competitors to fuck people over. If they don't like you, they'll take meetings with you, telling you the whole time that they can't wait to get you a term sheet, and then take your slide deck and their notes from the meeting and send them to portfolio companies and other VCs for competitive intel†.
It's a little silly to think we're going to feel sorry for these people in this situation.
Really, the distinction is that it's important to some people that we all believe a large fraction of sexual harassment complaints are bogus. It's got nothing to do with the impact of YC shunning you, and everything to do with the politics of the issue.
† Ask me how I know this. But, I mean, you already know how I know this.
YC has, from what I've been told, been doing stuff like this for years. Not just for harassment, but also for all the other bad-actor stuff VCs do to startup founders (think: stuff like ruthless term sheet recision).
It's things like this that make it hard for me to be totally down on YC, despite disquieting things about its culture. It's hard to argue that it hasn't been an unalloyed good for founders.
Throwaway acc, but maybe there's the case of Andrew Torba? He was obviously fed up with the culture at YC and posted this facebook comment remarking his distaste.
"All of you: fuck off. Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling bullshit and shove it.
I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a President into office, cucks."
Torba was kicked out of YC "for speaking in a threatening, harassing way toward other YC founders". His reply:
You cucks will be happy to know that YC has blacklisted me and removed me from the network to not trigger more founders. This is why I do what I do. This is why am loud and proud with my free speech and will continue to be. John Levy called me and said that because said "build the wall" I am now removed from the network. I guess YC has to build a wall to keep out people who want national borders. Sad!
I don't know if this is considered "disquieting" but it is an example of someone being removed for their speech.
I read the Facebook thread that spurred Torba's removal from YC and I can't imagine any business in the world that would have retained someone who spoke to colleagues the way Torba did, so that's definitely not what disquiets me about YC.
Oh no I said "cuck" and called people "elitists" how terrible! The horror! I called it exactly as I saw it. They are more worried about virtue signaling and being politically correct than building businesses. I triggered international founders because god forbid I want national security for my own country, which happens to be the same country where YC is based and where most of YC's companies exist and thrive. Too damn bad. There are other conservatives/Trump supporting YC founders who are utterly terrified to speak publicly about their political beliefs after they saw what YC did to me. Also, I've had dozens of founders reach out to me and tell me that they changed their mind about applying to YC. I stand by what I said and I'd say it again.
I tried to vouch a sibling comment of Torba's, because shadowbanning people who call you out isn't going to change anyone's mind. If he's wrong, let him show himself to be so; attempting to no-platform him just keeps the question open.
That's not "shadowbanning". First, if you "showdead=true", you can see the comments and who wrote them. Second, that sibling comment was flagged off the site by users, not by some insidious shadowbanning apparatus.
The "shadowbanning" regime that Paul Graham ran involved people being quietly banned from the site without being told; they would write comments and the site would do its best to make them believe everyone could see those comments, when in fact nobody could.
A sibling comment of mine, not of yours. It's [dead], but not [flagged].
Not all dead comments get that way by user flags. Some users' comment histories reveal a point past which there are only stillborns. I'm not sure that referring to shadowbanning here in the past tense is accurate. And "insidious" is your word, not mine. I don't disagree with the practice in general. I do consider it probably counterproductive in this case.
What are you 12 years old? Try being harassed for months by the YC network of founders for "coming out" pro-Trump, then get back to me about "muh cyberbullying."
>It's hard to argue that it hasn't been an unalloyed good for founders.
I can't agree with this without knowing who is on what list and why. There's way too much room for bad judgement to get in the way.
Having said that, I'm making a very minor point here, since of course you can say the same about every single business and who they will or won't work with.
If you don't trust YC to be pro-founder, then you should be very concerned about YC, because they're enormously powerful.
I can't convince you either way. It would be pointless to debate it. Reasonable people might disagree. I'll only say that I don't know any founders, including people who have gone through YC and not felt they got much out of it, that don't agree with me that YC is far, far on the "founder" site of the "founder vs. capital" spectrum.
I have less respect for the argument that YC might be pro-founder but would prioritize some secret conspiracy to inflate harassment claims above the welfare of their portfolio companies. (I don't see you making that argument, just heading it off.)
For what it's worth: I have no connection to YC, and am openly critical of Sam Altman.
When the exit its very low value and investors fight for the scraps YC donates is shares to the founders, in my opinion it doesn't get more founder friendly than this.
I am more curious what their criteria is for adding someone to the list would be. Is it simply number of reports?
Do they give a warning to a person if they received 1 single report, and then if they receive more over the years then they get added?
Bad behaviour usually continues in part because a person believes they're getting away with it. If there's an early signal that they're in fact not getting away with it, then that would be beneficial to everyone for them to hear about it - the person harassing and the community at large.
And that in and of itself is part of the problem of why these lists are hard to create and maintain.
The problem here has less to do about YC maintaining a list and more to do about the people reporting incidents to YC. Sorry, but people are ruthless, and I can see this being abused by founders who may feel vengeful they didn't get funded.
If the list was based on convicted sexual harassers, then so be it, but if it's based on feedback reviews, it'll be ripe for abuse. This is going to have tricky sociological impacts in the VC community that won't actually solve the problem.
The presumption here is that the list will be abused by founders more than the VCs it was explicitly created to enumerate do their position vis a vis founders.
I think that attitude is no small part of why this problem is as deeply rooted as it is.
That is: which is the greater harm? Founders getting abused by VCs without this list, or VCs getting accused by founders with it? Maybe it reflects my categories and biases more than reality, but I know which way I'm inclined to err, there.
Well founders discovered to be abusing such a list would instantly cut themselves off from future YC attention. Reputation extends to all the parties in any potential deal.
Of course they're hard to create and maintain, and of course they're more complicated than simply a count of the number of complaints.
The idea that there's something unusual about this is pretty silly. Businesses track the reputations of other businesses all the time. There's never any transparency in those lists, and people that fall on the wrong side of those lists never have any recourse.
Really, what we're arguing about here is the simple concept of "reputation". It's tough for message board nerds like us to hear this, but reputation in the real world is powerful, and it's not tracked in public Bugzillas. Ironically, the only upsetting thing that has happened here is that YC took the time to tell you about what they're doing.
This is special because someone could potentially get put on that list for sexual harassment. And a decent chunk of people here will never, in any practical sense, admit such a thing could occur. And even if such a thing could hypothetically occur, any consequences for the man involved should be delayed until after a jury trial.
Or (in the cases of sexual harassment or racial discrimination only) admit there could be behavior which may not rise to the level of criminality but still is a good reason to cause potential partners to shun you.
People can potentially get put on that list for all kinds of things, though, none of which they'd want to be on the list for. Consequences for investor behavior never wait for a jury trial. It's a reputation economy, how would that even work?
> admit there could be behavior which may not rise to the level of criminality
Very little bad investor rises to the level of criminality. And most bad investor behavior is still a good reason for yc to shun you.
> Businesses track the reputations of other businesses all the time.
I know of no business that regularly tracks the reputation of any _individuals_ in a database as part of it's regular business practice (the individual part is important) and that isn't part of it's model to disclose to involved parties. Uber would be a good example of someone that does this, but at least you can see a users rating at the time.
> The idea that there's something unusual about this is pretty silly.
I never said it was unusual. I think you're honing in on the wrong thing on this thread - which is the presumption that people are disgusted that these tactics happen. I more concerned that they are actively tracking it in a "review style" database and the data is only access by a select few (which is the presumption here).
> I know of no business that regularly tracks the reputation of any _individuals_ in a database as part of it's regular business practice (the individual part is important) and that isn't part of it's model to disclose to involved parties.
Not only do venture capitalists do this kind of tracking, but they collude with each other to share informal blacklists and whitelists. There may be no group of people operating in American commerce with less of a moral high ground on this issue than venture capital firms.
What's more, there's not much you can do about it. Ultimately, they're not employers. They're investors. You can't coerce people into investing.
> each other to share informal blacklists and whitelists.
Exactly, informal. That's my point. The suggestion here isn't that informal lists exist, its that they are publicly announcing that it's being formalized. That's what makes this a big deal.
I still feel like you're not reading what I'm writing and keep trying to make a point responding to a wider discussion in this thread.
I suspect that YC's goal is to identify people who can be trusted with access to its ecosystem. There is a difference between someone who is on 'their good behavior' due to fear of being caught and someone inherently inclined to try and do the right thing. 'Character' is one way of describing that difference.
So you know founders that went through YC and don't feel like they got much out of it? I wouldn't want you to break any confidences, but I'd be interested in hearing more such folks and what they think of YC.
First thought is that if pretty experienced founders who are starting a company in a space YC isn't experienced in(e.g. biotech 5 years ago) went through it they might not get much out of it.
I spent a lot of time getting peoples' takes on their yc experiences back in like 2011. What I found is that no one really says "yc was bad for us". Even companies that didn't survive got immediate press credibility, money, etc.
If you think about it, the worst case for a company that goes through yc is that it's neutral. They can't really hurt anything — when companies fail (or struggle) it's never because of yc. There are hundreds of reasons companies fail.
So the tl;dr; is that people probably won't ever say "yc was bad for us", and companies that come out doing well won't think "yc wasn't great for us".
Curious to hear your point of view on Sam Altman. I don't know him personally (only met him twice at public events), but from what I have read and listened, I tend to like him a lot. Your perspective might be really useful.
It's hard to argue that it hasn't been an unalloyed good for founders.
Given that such a list can't have a high degree of transparency attached to it for a number of legal and practical reasons, it would be hard to argue anything in particular about it.
Again, if that's true for a list of harassing VCs, it's doubly true for all the other stuff that gets recorded by YC on VC reports. I'm going to be more candid than I should, in the interest of not wasting time: the only reason people are freaking out about this list is:
1. It's been described as a "blacklist" and people have a visceral reaction to that particular term, even though the moral equivalent of blacklists occurs in every other business situation in which reputation is tracked.
2. There's a political/ideological interest, heavily represented on Internet message boards, in trying to establish the notion that sexual harassment and gender inequality are overblown issues.
If you don't trust YC, this shouldn't be the issue that worries you about them; they've been using their influence this way for years and years, and they haven't told you a single thing about it. The only thing that's really happening here in this announcement is that YC is being open about it for this particular issue --- obviously, in order to put VC firms on notice.
There are things I don't trust YC with, but defending the interests of founders just isn't one of them.
Finally: we should all recognize that no matter how much we might want a transparent process that gives each and every one of us all the information we need to judge YC's actions, in the real business world we virtually never get anything like that, and this won't be any different.
There's a political/ideological interest, heavily represented on Internet message boards, in trying to establish the notion that sexual harassment and gender inequality are overblown issues.
Therein lies the big disadvantage of the politics of outrage. Any movement that can't organize itself to make the tactical climb onto the moral high ground will continue to wallow in the lowland quagmires of outrage. The most unreasonable of one side will anger the most unreasonable of the other in an unending cycle of recruitment through the viral nature of outrage on social media. The "leaderless" movements of the 21st century are just this, and are just doing this.
There's nothing that involves subtlety and sophistication to understand which is going to benefit from "discussion" in a state of outrage. Racism and sexism in the 21st century are two topics which fit this. For example my "lived experience" tells me that racist micro-aggressions exist, they often coexist with forms of sexually charged transgressive psychological warfare. However, my lived experience also informs me that going around in a militant, accusatory state to combat such things is like emotional carpet bombing -- in that there is an almost complete certainty of hurting your own cause in the long term in several ways. (By causing collateral damage to innocents, for one.)
So is there a point to getting upset about Y Combinator's list? No. Just about anyone has bigger fish to fry. It's also a good idea to steer clear of both such controversies and the broken individuals who might seek to exploit such controversies. If someone is upset about such a thing, it probably means there's some kind of magical thinking going on and there's a need for some introspection. (Y Combinator isn't an oracle, pg and everyone involved are just ordinary human beings, and your feelings of security about the world shouldn't depend on a world view that requires woo-woo thinking.)
(tptacek -- I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I think this is the right place to say these things.)
EDIT:
Finally: we should all recognize that no matter how much we might want a transparent process that gives each and every one of us all the information we need to judge YC's actions, in the real business world we virtually never get anything like that, and this won't be any different.
tl;dr -- If one doesn't think YC has their head in the right place, one shouldn't be doing business with them.
It will probably work very well for YC. Corporations started the trend of multiculturalism despite the fact that it clashed with the widespread "melting pot" approach to different cultures at the time. Even though multiculturalism has hurt our society and led to a disdain of American culture, it helps corporations by increasing the labor pool, and thus will remain in effect.
The same forces that have made multiculturalism the norm will make "multigenderalism" a norm: Money. Tech workers are some of the highest paid workers in America right now. With such a pushback against outsourcing(and with as much outsourced already as they can get away with), YC and lots of other big names are trying their darndest to increase the labor pool in some other way.
This isn't unlike Uber or Yelp ratings, where someone's reputation will affect their ability to make money. It's not perfect, but it at least provides some accountability.
Income will definitely be affected by getting on this list. See above, where tptacek says:
"More likely, since pretty much every VC in the valley needs access to the YC dealflow, becoming persona non grata with YC will force VC firms to make personnel changes."
But still, this will probably be good on balance. False accusations of this sort will certainly be something to watch out for, but now victims of real sexual harassment will have recourse.
I am assuming the access to this list will be tightly guarded. So the only way to protect the women of the valley from these VCs is by having a partner friend at YC who will look up the list for you and give yay/nay answers?
More likely, since pretty much every VC in the valley needs access to the YC dealflow, becoming persona non grata with YC will force VC firms to make personnel changes.
This is only way VC firms can be motivated to actively punish the bad actors. Unless, it hurts their dealflow, they are not incentivized to act. Pledges and warnings' only go so far.
> since pretty much every VC in the valley needs access to the YC dealflow
Do they though? It seems every demo day some VC posts up a blog about how they are not fans of demo day anymore for X, Y and Z reasons and that they're no longer attending.
Don't get me wrong YC is great and all but you make it sound like most of the VCs need YC but so many companies outside of YC get funding I'm not convinced that's even close to the truth.
> More likely, since pretty much every VC in the valley needs access to the YC dealflow
Dealflow is everything in the VC community, but this is pure hyperbole. Statistically speaking, there are way more companies that drive VC returns that come from outside of YC than the ones that come from it.
I see clearly how reasonable people can disagree about how important access to YC deals are to a tech VC firm, and that it's useful to have the counterpoint here on the thread.
I am assuming the access to this list will be tightly guarded.
This seems to be the case so far (YC has kept track of "problem VCs" for a long time), but I don't see why it should be. One of the few things more powerful than "if you sexually harass a YC founder, you'll be shunned by all future YC founders" is "if you sexually harass a YC founder, you'll be shunned by everybody".
Because you get 90% of the public benefit by making a VC persona non grata with YC, but eliminate ~80% of the drama? This seems like an extraordinarily reasonable tradeoff.
I've never thought of YC as being particularly averse to drama. And given that much of the drama would be news stories about how YC is trying to protect women from being sexually harassed, I really don't see the downside for them.
These situations aren't good analogs for several reasons.
1. If someone's "crime" is just having communist ideals, then it's not a crime at all. It's actually protected by the Constitution, although that doesn't apply to an employment situation of course. Harassing someone is often a crime.
2. Hollywood's blacklist prevented people from accessing their primary source of income. The consequences were extreme. The people who might be affected by this blacklist are not people who will starve or die because they aren't getting enough deals.
3. Accusing someone of communism doesn't have the blowback for the accuser that's equivalent to accusing someone of harassment. It's embarrassing, risky, and shameful for someone to publicly talk about sexual harassment.
There's a need for a mechanism to hold VCs accountable for bad behavior. There wasn't such a need for the Hollywood Blacklist.
YC's proposal isn't a perfect mechanism, and it's definitely possible the wrong people will be held accountable. But nothing could be a perfect system in he-said-she-said scenarios.
If YC is erring on the side of accidentally punishing VCs rather than allowing women to be harmed, I'd rather see the VCs punished, as they're the ones with vastly disproportionate power.
What mechanism prevents me fabricating stories about my competitors or people I just don't like in order to get them blacklisted as happened during McCarthyism? That seems the be the problem they were unable to solve back then.
John of England on the subject: "No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land."
Ok. You've now reported that to me, the Keeper of the List. Prove your claim. Prove that you're credible.
Seriously, it's not as easy as, "Someone made a complaint. Ban the subject for life." There will be people who will be evaluating the credibility of the claims.
The fact that this database is being run by actual people involved in the industry who have a sense of how to assign credibility to a story based on knowing the people involved, and not by a computer that is blindly appending to a list when you make an API call.
There's also the convenient fact that when you ask people about incidents of harassment, they tend to go "I'm sorry she felt uncomfortable" instead of "I never did it." The responses of creeps Chris Sacca, Justin Caldbeck, Pavel Curda, Dave McClure, and Marc Canter to the recent accusations against them are excellent examples of this. So, you can just ask them.
One could argue that while harassing women is absolutely reprehensible, it is not comparable to the damage communism did in the countries it affected. Personally I think both of these things should be heavily discouraged in civil society.
But in the US, you're constitutionally protected for having any ideas you want. You can have the most dangerous, damaging ideas. You can talk about them, as long as you don't incite anyone to violence.
Regardless of the societal harm or ultimate consequences, ideas are not the same category as harassment.
Power corrupts, but it isn't instantaneous and it isn't as if there aren't good people who can resist that tendency. Y Combinator represents an aggregation of power, and so it's likely that someone, somewhere will be tempted to abuse such power. The "lowest cost" and most likely form of this would be through a false accusation of someone who only has marginal standing.
You can say this for just about any organization which has power. This is why transparency is often a good check for power. In cases where transparency isn't practical, then there is the larger granularity of the market. Where this breaks down is in very acute concentrations of power. The realist view acknowledges that power is contextual, and that contextual abuses will happen. Sometimes the world is imperfect and you're going to have to leave for more peaceful pastures.
Throughout all of the above, you can recognize "the good" in their magnanimity and their protection of the dignity and rights of individuals -- even extending this to the accused. I forget who said it, but the true test of character is not in how someone treats those they need, it's how they treat those they don't need.
I think it's very reasonable to be concerned about the level of influence YC has amassed. I'm not super concerned because I had raised funds in the valley before YC existed and I'm pretty confident that YC is a massive improvement for founders. But either way: sure, YC is very powerful.
I would just push back on the idea that it's somehow out of bounds for them to have lists of potential business partners they won't want to work with in the future. Businesses do this all the time. All YC has done here is actually told us about one of those lists.
So you think it is unfair that YC could have consequences simply from being accused of abusing their influence without being able to defend themselves?
Those tweets look like they are taking events massively out of context and adding assumptions. I could see someone asking someone else to watch their kids. That happens often in real life if someone is genuinely warm person and is usually a joke/compliment.
The second one I 100% doubt it went that way. There is no way a VC would ever say to someone "hey can you find a white male to replace you as ceo of your company? thanks!". That is some serious r/thatHappened material.
Given the rest of Adora's tweets she comes off as extremely focused/biased towards women's issue and harassment. I don't know her but I wouldn't be surprised if she embellished events to fit her agenda.
I know I don't have all the information, but just on first glance--
I think it's pretty inappropriate for a VC to ask an entrepreneur who is at demo day (presumably pitching) to babysit their kids, unless they had known each other for many months as friends, which seems very unlikely given the context.
It could be ok in context. Maybe it wasn't. But just commenting that you think someone is good with kids shouldn't be offensive. If the VC literally wanted the demoer to watch their kids then sure that's not ok.
The general idea of creating lists of people who are bad actors is an interesting (and controversial) idea.
On one side, there should be a ledger of people doing shitty things, even if the behavior isn't illegal. Who wants to work with assholes? No one. If there's a record of people's bad behavior then future founders can save themselves a lot of suffering by simply knowing to avoid these people.
On the other side, what standards are used to put someone on this list in the first place? Are multiple offences required? Seems like without a process of submitting good evidence of people's poor behavior there's a lot of room for abuse. If this list actually becomes a tool that people rely on to select their investors I would start to be concerned by the potential abuse of power.
I'm curious how others feel about this idea of putting people on lists.
I agree with you that putting people on the lists, especially because it is hidden and you don't know criteria can be problematic. That is, in theory the only thing against this.
In practice, everything about this initiative is good.
I don't think Maajid Nawaz is going to win because he'll have to prove real damages from the SPLC (horribly erroneously, in my opinion) labeling him an "anti-Muslim extremist". Being put on a blacklist by YC might result in damages that are easier to prove, though.
YC will have to make a discoverable false statement of actual fact. They're unlikely to publish a list, and what they do reveal to YC founders is unlikely to be phrased as simply as SPLC's statements about Nawaz.
I think this is less likely to be legally complicated than you think. Consider: YC has been doing this for years already.
Not even the same sort of thing. I hope Maajid Nawaz wins, because SPLC has abandoned universal ideals and has become short sighted and partisan. However, it's also within the rights of people and organizations to associate or not associate. It's not like they're a bakery. Their business isn't to sell a cake to any presentable customer who can afford one. Their business is to select and foster winners in starting businesses, and staying clear of controversies is certainly germane to that.
EDIT: When it comes to conferences and professional organizations, I think those things are more like a bakery than like YC. A programming conference is in the business of fostering discussion of and dissemination of information about programming. A code of conduct is fine for such an organization, but a politicized code of conduct has no place in such an organization. There's something clearly wrong with politicized code of conduct in a non-political organization that makes a subset of its members uneasy. There is no place for intolerance in a liberal humanist multicultural society, and people who want to use the bureaucracy of non-political organizations to alienate their political opponents are intolerant people who have given up on convincing people. Such people want to bully people into doing what they want. What they are doing is only the softest form of intolerance.
I hope they're very careful with this. If even a couple of unscrupulous founders threaten a VC with false accusations in order to secure funding (ie blackmail), then VCs will stop taking meetings with female founders. Game theory can be used to make sure this doesn't backfire, so hopefully they consult a good game theorist.
There's a Reddit AMA happening right now with a current batch founder and they said, "There's an... internal investor database with founder grading and info-passing," so I wonder if that's where the blacklisting is happening.
Though this is a real problem to solve, what about false accusations? If all it takes is an accusation (or two) to destroy someone's career then I see a huge problem with this.
I don't see why you've been down-voted, this is a serious concern. This sort of power can make or break somebody's career. I don't like the idea of somebody who works with me being able to destroy my career with no or weak evidence.
At the very least there needs to be consequence for false accusations if the punishment is so severe (destroying the reputation of a venture capitalist). The process should also be open to scrutiny once judgment is passed.
I personally don't like the way society is going. If I was a good looking woman with a warped moral compass, I would consider ganging up with several other women and blackmailing ourselves a few million dollars. As a venture capitalist with such a claim against you and no evidence to prove your innocence, you'll likely lose or be forced to pay up.
Well this is not going to encourage VCs to want to work with women founders. Even if you never harass anyone why take the risk of ending up on the banned list.
I've heard of people who refuse to ever be alone with anyone of the opposite gender. IIRC they were megachurch pastors who had legitimate reason to fear that even a hint of an accusation would be a career-ending event.
No, Mike Pence does it for religious reasons, to avoid the abstract possibility of sexual temptation and to further the idea of men and women having separate roles in life. It's a popular practice among evangelicals (and other conservative religious groups, like fundamentalist Muslims and orthodox Jews). It's known as the Billy Graham rule. He also doesn't go to events where alcohol is being served without his wife; she will presumably protect him from any loose women.
Also, as far as I remember he only mentioned meals, not meetings in general.
Well some people are paranoid, but that is not the point I was making :)
When I used to be a professor I would refuse to have "closed door" meetings with any student (male or female) on my own because the risk of a false accusation was just too high - I saw too many careers ruined by crazy students [1].
If a student wanted a private meeting with me over some issue (99.9% of the time it was about their marks) I would drag in a colleague.
1. If you think I am joking I managed to avoid getting caught up into two legals cases brought by disgruntled students. In one of the cases I was the only academic staff member in the whole department that was not accused.
If I was a VC I would be very concerned about having a private meeting with any founder I didn’t know well.
One of my closest friends in college was accused of rape by a girl in his class. She said on her way home from a frat party he raped her.
My friend was arrested, and the whole campus had posters of him up. Eventually the girl said she lied and just wanted attention.
After that, she got off without anything but a warning - but my friend would go around school and people would cuss him out and vandalize his things and eventually he went from a 3rd year CS student to dropping out and now lives with his parents and has deep depression (it's been 5 years?).
No one ever did anything to help him, the girl never got any penalty and it ruined his life.
Not getting into "guilty until proven innocent"; all this is going to accomplish is attach a huge risk factor to women who are seeking investors making their life harder than it already is. Hell is paved with good intentions.
Guilty until proven innocent? This is disgusting, it will get abused
If YC has their head in the right place, then such abuses will be figured out, and will effectively flag the abusers. If YC doesn't have their head in the right place, you really didn't want to do business with them in the first place.
Hell is paved with good intentions.
In some ways, the beginning of the 21st century really isn't all that different from the beginning of the 20th or the 19th!
How is this any different than discriminating based on hearsay? I.E. what happens if you get on such a list without any resources to defend yourself? This experiment has been tried before (Mccarthyism). It did not end well!
This also assumes that the accusing women are being entirely truthful, honest, and acting in good faith which unfortunately is not always the case.
Clearly few in the comments are in favor of this, but it's curious why.
My supposition is that sexual harassment is too grey. It's ill defined. It's hard to know how to 100% avoid it when flirting with someone. If someone can define the exact point hitting on someone goes from acceptable flirting to unacceptable harassment, then we could all rest easy. But without that, it's incredibly worrying to accidentally do something that ruins your career.
Is there a place for coworkers falling in love or making love in 2017? Maybe not. Maybe so. But I think it's sort of sad how much we are repressing human sexuality if not.
This one is pretty cut and dried. When there's a power disparity between two people, flirting's not ok.
You can be against investors and bosses making passes at the people who have to make them happy without wanting to ban workplace romances entirely. Big companies have been doing this for years.
This one is pretty cut and dried. When there's a power disparity between two people, flirting's not ok.
Well, there's flirting and then there's flirting.
Real-life example, which I observed from the sidelines:
.
Mr. A is a new hire.
Mrs. B is the senior non-management team member.
Someone gets flowers sent to them. Mr. C decides it would be amusing if they ended up on Mrs. B's desk, with a note saying they're from Mr. A.
An hour or two later when Mr. A realizes he's just being hazed and still has a job, he decides to take the joke and run with it. This leads to several years of the most absurd and blatant come-ons you can imagine.
Several years later, Mrs. B is the official team lead and Mr. A is reporting to her. The blatant flirting and absurd come-ons are still exactly the same as they've always been.
.
The only concern about whether this is OK, is if some outsider were to see and take it seriously enough to cause trouble with HR.
It's not that hard, dude — and I say that being nontrivially Aspie, and profoundly bad at these kinds of social cues. The point where it becomes "unacceptable" is subtle and situational, but not terribly ambiguous.
A good generalization: presumably, you like this person. Why would you want that — or you — to be a thing that is unpleasant for them? That should be the place you're operating from: what's good (or, at the very least, not bad) for them, not what you want out of the situation.
That said, here's a few tests you can use:
If you have any kind of authority over the other person (or them over you), don't even start.
If it's unwelcome, stop immediately. Apologize if it's warranted. Go out of your way not to make it worse.
If you're in any kind of doubt about whether it's appropriate or welcome, it probably isn't. Err on the side of caution.
If you still want to try, a good place to start is probably an honest, respectful, "Hey, so I think I've got some feelings here, but I don't want that to be a problem for you."
If you do that and you're told it's not OK (whether explicitly, or implicitly, thorough the lack of an enthusiastic response) DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES CONTINUE, unless that response changes.
"Unless that changes" doesn't mean polling for state changes. That's creepy.
That's all I've got, offhand. This list isn't remotely exhaustive. It's survivorship bias, but I've never been sued for harassment, nor my employers because of me. And, like I said, I'm not good at this stuff.
My mom married her boss, my dad. So I'm not sure the authority part is cut and dry.
But the rest seems like good albeit no-full proof pointers.
If you want to flirt with a same-level employee, I don't think there is actually a guaranteed way to make a first move with zero liability. It seems we agree there is inherent risk in making any move, whether its just 1 time or not.
I know it's not the specific kind of "risk" you're referring to, but the notion of trying to engage with human intimacy in a way that avoids risk sounds like it would be pretty Pyrrhic — or, at best, hollow — if it were even possible.
The most startling thing here is the form headline takes: "X is compiling a blackist of Y accused of Z".
Notice the word is "accused" and not "guilty". Now I am not going to accuse YC of running a star chamber: I assume (without knowing) that they are fairly responsible with their blacklist. But the principle is still worrying.
Like most institutions, private companies are not able to hold trials and rigorously tell guilt from innocence, so whenever they set out to police others they must do so on some lesser evidence.
It is our right to shun others because we suspect them without proof of something bad. Perhaps it is even our right to gang together and ostracise such, but society suffers when that is the norm.
Typical standards for these sorts of things are a presumption of innocence until shown otherwise, which can be to varying degrees of certainty: preponderance of evidence (i.e. "more likely true than not"), clear and convincing evidence ("quite likely true"), or beyond a reasonable doubt.
I would hope that at least a preponderance of evidence standard is used, beyond just the leveling of an accusation. Considering the consequences for the accused, clear and convincing is probably a better standard.
I'm sorry about that, I was not trying to editorialize the headline at all, I changed the first part to "YC" because the original headline was too long:
"This influential Silicon Valley firm is compiling a blacklist of venture capitalists accused of harassing women"
It appears the WaPo changed the headline:
"This influential Silicon Valley firm is spearheading a blacklist of venture capitalists accused of harassing women"
I don't mind the summary since it, and both versions of the WP headline you mention match the pattern "X is compiling a blackist of Y accused of Z".
My concern with the headline is not about how they are written, it is about what real aspects of society they reflect. If those reflections are accurate, then the headlines are not a problem at all.
And if the headlines don't relfect realtiy, that's WP's problem, not yours.
160 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadThere you go - he needs to go on the list and be blacklisted now. He has been accused of harassing women now. It's a fact!
That is how the world works currently. Like it or not. And most often than not there will be no court case in which he will be able to clear his name or be proven guilty and made to pay for it.
Sexual harassment is both a terrible thing and being accused is also terribly potent weapon.
Of course we cannot demand X > 1 reports. Because even one time is too much. See the problem? Zero tolerance is easy to abuse. Some tolerance is disregard for victims. Shitty situation all the way.
That aside, his point stands. Personal testimony is evidence. Seriously people deciding whether to act on personal testimony have a variety of heuristics and tools for deciding to what extent they weight a particular piece of evidence.
Meanwhile, these same VCs that people on this thread are champing at the bit to defend routinely create blacklists of founders, which they'll share with competitors to fuck people over. If they don't like you, they'll take meetings with you, telling you the whole time that they can't wait to get you a term sheet, and then take your slide deck and their notes from the meeting and send them to portfolio companies and other VCs for competitive intel†.
It's a little silly to think we're going to feel sorry for these people in this situation.
Really, the distinction is that it's important to some people that we all believe a large fraction of sexual harassment complaints are bogus. It's got nothing to do with the impact of YC shunning you, and everything to do with the politics of the issue.
† Ask me how I know this. But, I mean, you already know how I know this.
It's things like this that make it hard for me to be totally down on YC, despite disquieting things about its culture. It's hard to argue that it hasn't been an unalloyed good for founders.
"All of you: fuck off. Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling bullshit and shove it.
I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a President into office, cucks."
https://www.buzzfeed.com/nitashatiku/trump-supporting-startu...
Torba was kicked out of YC "for speaking in a threatening, harassing way toward other YC founders". His reply:
You cucks will be happy to know that YC has blacklisted me and removed me from the network to not trigger more founders. This is why I do what I do. This is why am loud and proud with my free speech and will continue to be. John Levy called me and said that because said "build the wall" I am now removed from the network. I guess YC has to build a wall to keep out people who want national borders. Sad!
I don't know if this is considered "disquieting" but it is an example of someone being removed for their speech.
The comment stayed dead. So it goes.
The "shadowbanning" regime that Paul Graham ran involved people being quietly banned from the site without being told; they would write comments and the site would do its best to make them believe everyone could see those comments, when in fact nobody could.
Not all dead comments get that way by user flags. Some users' comment histories reveal a point past which there are only stillborns. I'm not sure that referring to shadowbanning here in the past tense is accurate. And "insidious" is your word, not mine. I don't disagree with the practice in general. I do consider it probably counterproductive in this case.
I can't agree with this without knowing who is on what list and why. There's way too much room for bad judgement to get in the way.
Having said that, I'm making a very minor point here, since of course you can say the same about every single business and who they will or won't work with.
I can't convince you either way. It would be pointless to debate it. Reasonable people might disagree. I'll only say that I don't know any founders, including people who have gone through YC and not felt they got much out of it, that don't agree with me that YC is far, far on the "founder" site of the "founder vs. capital" spectrum.
I have less respect for the argument that YC might be pro-founder but would prioritize some secret conspiracy to inflate harassment claims above the welfare of their portfolio companies. (I don't see you making that argument, just heading it off.)
For what it's worth: I have no connection to YC, and am openly critical of Sam Altman.
Do they give a warning to a person if they received 1 single report, and then if they receive more over the years then they get added?
Bad behaviour usually continues in part because a person believes they're getting away with it. If there's an early signal that they're in fact not getting away with it, then that would be beneficial to everyone for them to hear about it - the person harassing and the community at large.
The problem here has less to do about YC maintaining a list and more to do about the people reporting incidents to YC. Sorry, but people are ruthless, and I can see this being abused by founders who may feel vengeful they didn't get funded.
If the list was based on convicted sexual harassers, then so be it, but if it's based on feedback reviews, it'll be ripe for abuse. This is going to have tricky sociological impacts in the VC community that won't actually solve the problem.
I think that attitude is no small part of why this problem is as deeply rooted as it is.
That is: which is the greater harm? Founders getting abused by VCs without this list, or VCs getting accused by founders with it? Maybe it reflects my categories and biases more than reality, but I know which way I'm inclined to err, there.
The idea that there's something unusual about this is pretty silly. Businesses track the reputations of other businesses all the time. There's never any transparency in those lists, and people that fall on the wrong side of those lists never have any recourse.
Really, what we're arguing about here is the simple concept of "reputation". It's tough for message board nerds like us to hear this, but reputation in the real world is powerful, and it's not tracked in public Bugzillas. Ironically, the only upsetting thing that has happened here is that YC took the time to tell you about what they're doing.
Or (in the cases of sexual harassment or racial discrimination only) admit there could be behavior which may not rise to the level of criminality but still is a good reason to cause potential partners to shun you.
> admit there could be behavior which may not rise to the level of criminality
Very little bad investor rises to the level of criminality. And most bad investor behavior is still a good reason for yc to shun you.
I know of no business that regularly tracks the reputation of any _individuals_ in a database as part of it's regular business practice (the individual part is important) and that isn't part of it's model to disclose to involved parties. Uber would be a good example of someone that does this, but at least you can see a users rating at the time.
> The idea that there's something unusual about this is pretty silly.
I never said it was unusual. I think you're honing in on the wrong thing on this thread - which is the presumption that people are disgusted that these tactics happen. I more concerned that they are actively tracking it in a "review style" database and the data is only access by a select few (which is the presumption here).
I bet recruiting firms do.
The employees, apparently, don't usually get access to their U5.
What's more, there's not much you can do about it. Ultimately, they're not employers. They're investors. You can't coerce people into investing.
Exactly, informal. That's my point. The suggestion here isn't that informal lists exist, its that they are publicly announcing that it's being formalized. That's what makes this a big deal.
I still feel like you're not reading what I'm writing and keep trying to make a point responding to a wider discussion in this thread.
First thought is that if pretty experienced founders who are starting a company in a space YC isn't experienced in(e.g. biotech 5 years ago) went through it they might not get much out of it.
If you think about it, the worst case for a company that goes through yc is that it's neutral. They can't really hurt anything — when companies fail (or struggle) it's never because of yc. There are hundreds of reasons companies fail.
So the tl;dr; is that people probably won't ever say "yc was bad for us", and companies that come out doing well won't think "yc wasn't great for us".
In the UK, people can ask to see any information on them stored on a computer. Which is why blacklists are done on cardfile even today.
You're right, too, almost all the stuff that would be a black mark against an investor is an accusation.
Given that such a list can't have a high degree of transparency attached to it for a number of legal and practical reasons, it would be hard to argue anything in particular about it.
1. It's been described as a "blacklist" and people have a visceral reaction to that particular term, even though the moral equivalent of blacklists occurs in every other business situation in which reputation is tracked.
2. There's a political/ideological interest, heavily represented on Internet message boards, in trying to establish the notion that sexual harassment and gender inequality are overblown issues.
If you don't trust YC, this shouldn't be the issue that worries you about them; they've been using their influence this way for years and years, and they haven't told you a single thing about it. The only thing that's really happening here in this announcement is that YC is being open about it for this particular issue --- obviously, in order to put VC firms on notice.
There are things I don't trust YC with, but defending the interests of founders just isn't one of them.
Finally: we should all recognize that no matter how much we might want a transparent process that gives each and every one of us all the information we need to judge YC's actions, in the real business world we virtually never get anything like that, and this won't be any different.
Therein lies the big disadvantage of the politics of outrage. Any movement that can't organize itself to make the tactical climb onto the moral high ground will continue to wallow in the lowland quagmires of outrage. The most unreasonable of one side will anger the most unreasonable of the other in an unending cycle of recruitment through the viral nature of outrage on social media. The "leaderless" movements of the 21st century are just this, and are just doing this.
(Yes, I am seemingly obliged to repost this. I will repost this as many times as I can manage! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc )
There's nothing that involves subtlety and sophistication to understand which is going to benefit from "discussion" in a state of outrage. Racism and sexism in the 21st century are two topics which fit this. For example my "lived experience" tells me that racist micro-aggressions exist, they often coexist with forms of sexually charged transgressive psychological warfare. However, my lived experience also informs me that going around in a militant, accusatory state to combat such things is like emotional carpet bombing -- in that there is an almost complete certainty of hurting your own cause in the long term in several ways. (By causing collateral damage to innocents, for one.)
So is there a point to getting upset about Y Combinator's list? No. Just about anyone has bigger fish to fry. It's also a good idea to steer clear of both such controversies and the broken individuals who might seek to exploit such controversies. If someone is upset about such a thing, it probably means there's some kind of magical thinking going on and there's a need for some introspection. (Y Combinator isn't an oracle, pg and everyone involved are just ordinary human beings, and your feelings of security about the world shouldn't depend on a world view that requires woo-woo thinking.)
(tptacek -- I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I think this is the right place to say these things.)
EDIT:
Finally: we should all recognize that no matter how much we might want a transparent process that gives each and every one of us all the information we need to judge YC's actions, in the real business world we virtually never get anything like that, and this won't be any different.
tl;dr -- If one doesn't think YC has their head in the right place, one shouldn't be doing business with them.
The same forces that have made multiculturalism the norm will make "multigenderalism" a norm: Money. Tech workers are some of the highest paid workers in America right now. With such a pushback against outsourcing(and with as much outsourced already as they can get away with), YC and lots of other big names are trying their darndest to increase the labor pool in some other way.
This isn't unlike Uber or Yelp ratings, where someone's reputation will affect their ability to make money. It's not perfect, but it at least provides some accountability.
"More likely, since pretty much every VC in the valley needs access to the YC dealflow, becoming persona non grata with YC will force VC firms to make personnel changes."
But still, this will probably be good on balance. False accusations of this sort will certainly be something to watch out for, but now victims of real sexual harassment will have recourse.
Do they though? It seems every demo day some VC posts up a blog about how they are not fans of demo day anymore for X, Y and Z reasons and that they're no longer attending.
Don't get me wrong YC is great and all but you make it sound like most of the VCs need YC but so many companies outside of YC get funding I'm not convinced that's even close to the truth.
Dealflow is everything in the VC community, but this is pure hyperbole. Statistically speaking, there are way more companies that drive VC returns that come from outside of YC than the ones that come from it.
This seems to be the case so far (YC has kept track of "problem VCs" for a long time), but I don't see why it should be. One of the few things more powerful than "if you sexually harass a YC founder, you'll be shunned by all future YC founders" is "if you sexually harass a YC founder, you'll be shunned by everybody".
Wouldn't a list of VC that behave professionally be better?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist
1. If someone's "crime" is just having communist ideals, then it's not a crime at all. It's actually protected by the Constitution, although that doesn't apply to an employment situation of course. Harassing someone is often a crime.
2. Hollywood's blacklist prevented people from accessing their primary source of income. The consequences were extreme. The people who might be affected by this blacklist are not people who will starve or die because they aren't getting enough deals.
3. Accusing someone of communism doesn't have the blowback for the accuser that's equivalent to accusing someone of harassment. It's embarrassing, risky, and shameful for someone to publicly talk about sexual harassment.
There's a need for a mechanism to hold VCs accountable for bad behavior. There wasn't such a need for the Hollywood Blacklist.
YC's proposal isn't a perfect mechanism, and it's definitely possible the wrong people will be held accountable. But nothing could be a perfect system in he-said-she-said scenarios.
If YC is erring on the side of accidentally punishing VCs rather than allowing women to be harmed, I'd rather see the VCs punished, as they're the ones with vastly disproportionate power.
More on why this is very hard: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
John of England on the subject: "No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land."
Seriously, it's not as easy as, "Someone made a complaint. Ban the subject for life." There will be people who will be evaluating the credibility of the claims.
There's also the convenient fact that when you ask people about incidents of harassment, they tend to go "I'm sorry she felt uncomfortable" instead of "I never did it." The responses of creeps Chris Sacca, Justin Caldbeck, Pavel Curda, Dave McClure, and Marc Canter to the recent accusations against them are excellent examples of this. So, you can just ask them.
You're being had.
Regardless of the societal harm or ultimate consequences, ideas are not the same category as harassment.
LOL fuck off
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist
"She also tweeted that Y Combinator had disinvited an investor who was trying to replace a female chief executive with a white male"
Should it be the best person for the job, male or female alike?
You can say this for just about any organization which has power. This is why transparency is often a good check for power. In cases where transparency isn't practical, then there is the larger granularity of the market. Where this breaks down is in very acute concentrations of power. The realist view acknowledges that power is contextual, and that contextual abuses will happen. Sometimes the world is imperfect and you're going to have to leave for more peaceful pastures.
Throughout all of the above, you can recognize "the good" in their magnanimity and their protection of the dignity and rights of individuals -- even extending this to the accused. I forget who said it, but the true test of character is not in how someone treats those they need, it's how they treat those they don't need.
I would just push back on the idea that it's somehow out of bounds for them to have lists of potential business partners they won't want to work with in the future. Businesses do this all the time. All YC has done here is actually told us about one of those lists.
Yeah, that's not how it works.
I dug up the original tweet:
"Last month another investor asked a female founder/CEO to search for a white male to replace her as CEO. Also uninvited."[1]
[1] https://twitter.com/nolimits/status/845065946834386946
The second one I 100% doubt it went that way. There is no way a VC would ever say to someone "hey can you find a white male to replace you as ceo of your company? thanks!". That is some serious r/thatHappened material.
Given the rest of Adora's tweets she comes off as extremely focused/biased towards women's issue and harassment. I don't know her but I wouldn't be surprised if she embellished events to fit her agenda.
I think it's pretty inappropriate for a VC to ask an entrepreneur who is at demo day (presumably pitching) to babysit their kids, unless they had known each other for many months as friends, which seems very unlikely given the context.
- some misogynist, probably
On one side, there should be a ledger of people doing shitty things, even if the behavior isn't illegal. Who wants to work with assholes? No one. If there's a record of people's bad behavior then future founders can save themselves a lot of suffering by simply knowing to avoid these people.
On the other side, what standards are used to put someone on this list in the first place? Are multiple offences required? Seems like without a process of submitting good evidence of people's poor behavior there's a lot of room for abuse. If this list actually becomes a tool that people rely on to select their investors I would start to be concerned by the potential abuse of power.
I'm curious how others feel about this idea of putting people on lists.
In practice, everything about this initiative is good.
Yes, yes they will: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2017/06/23/maaj...
I don't think Maajid Nawaz is going to win because he'll have to prove real damages from the SPLC (horribly erroneously, in my opinion) labeling him an "anti-Muslim extremist". Being put on a blacklist by YC might result in damages that are easier to prove, though.
I think this is less likely to be legally complicated than you think. Consider: YC has been doing this for years already.
EDIT: When it comes to conferences and professional organizations, I think those things are more like a bakery than like YC. A programming conference is in the business of fostering discussion of and dissemination of information about programming. A code of conduct is fine for such an organization, but a politicized code of conduct has no place in such an organization. There's something clearly wrong with politicized code of conduct in a non-political organization that makes a subset of its members uneasy. There is no place for intolerance in a liberal humanist multicultural society, and people who want to use the bureaucracy of non-political organizations to alienate their political opponents are intolerant people who have given up on convincing people. Such people want to bully people into doing what they want. What they are doing is only the softest form of intolerance.
AMA link for those interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/6najyy/im_a_found...
At the very least there needs to be consequence for false accusations if the punishment is so severe (destroying the reputation of a venture capitalist). The process should also be open to scrutiny once judgment is passed.
I personally don't like the way society is going. If I was a good looking woman with a warped moral compass, I would consider ganging up with several other women and blackmailing ourselves a few million dollars. As a venture capitalist with such a claim against you and no evidence to prove your innocence, you'll likely lose or be forced to pay up.
Also, as far as I remember he only mentioned meals, not meetings in general.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Graham_rule
When I used to be a professor I would refuse to have "closed door" meetings with any student (male or female) on my own because the risk of a false accusation was just too high - I saw too many careers ruined by crazy students [1].
If a student wanted a private meeting with me over some issue (99.9% of the time it was about their marks) I would drag in a colleague.
1. If you think I am joking I managed to avoid getting caught up into two legals cases brought by disgruntled students. In one of the cases I was the only academic staff member in the whole department that was not accused.
If I was a VC I would be very concerned about having a private meeting with any founder I didn’t know well.
My friend was arrested, and the whole campus had posters of him up. Eventually the girl said she lied and just wanted attention.
After that, she got off without anything but a warning - but my friend would go around school and people would cuss him out and vandalize his things and eventually he went from a 3rd year CS student to dropping out and now lives with his parents and has deep depression (it's been 5 years?).
No one ever did anything to help him, the girl never got any penalty and it ruined his life.
If YC has their head in the right place, then such abuses will be figured out, and will effectively flag the abusers. If YC doesn't have their head in the right place, you really didn't want to do business with them in the first place.
Hell is paved with good intentions.
In some ways, the beginning of the 21st century really isn't all that different from the beginning of the 20th or the 19th!
This also assumes that the accusing women are being entirely truthful, honest, and acting in good faith which unfortunately is not always the case.
My supposition is that sexual harassment is too grey. It's ill defined. It's hard to know how to 100% avoid it when flirting with someone. If someone can define the exact point hitting on someone goes from acceptable flirting to unacceptable harassment, then we could all rest easy. But without that, it's incredibly worrying to accidentally do something that ruins your career.
Is there a place for coworkers falling in love or making love in 2017? Maybe not. Maybe so. But I think it's sort of sad how much we are repressing human sexuality if not.
You can be against investors and bosses making passes at the people who have to make them happy without wanting to ban workplace romances entirely. Big companies have been doing this for years.
If you're in their management chain, and you get involved with them, you've actually exposed them to significant risk.
But for reference it was:
> so as long as you're a lower level employee you're in the clear?
Clearly the answer to this question is no. The flow chart of bad behavior is much larger than that.
Well, there's flirting and then there's flirting.
Real-life example, which I observed from the sidelines:
.
Mr. A is a new hire.
Mrs. B is the senior non-management team member.
Someone gets flowers sent to them. Mr. C decides it would be amusing if they ended up on Mrs. B's desk, with a note saying they're from Mr. A.
An hour or two later when Mr. A realizes he's just being hazed and still has a job, he decides to take the joke and run with it. This leads to several years of the most absurd and blatant come-ons you can imagine.
Several years later, Mrs. B is the official team lead and Mr. A is reporting to her. The blatant flirting and absurd come-ons are still exactly the same as they've always been.
.
The only concern about whether this is OK, is if some outsider were to see and take it seriously enough to cause trouble with HR.
A good generalization: presumably, you like this person. Why would you want that — or you — to be a thing that is unpleasant for them? That should be the place you're operating from: what's good (or, at the very least, not bad) for them, not what you want out of the situation.
That said, here's a few tests you can use:
If you have any kind of authority over the other person (or them over you), don't even start.
If it's unwelcome, stop immediately. Apologize if it's warranted. Go out of your way not to make it worse.
If you're in any kind of doubt about whether it's appropriate or welcome, it probably isn't. Err on the side of caution.
If you still want to try, a good place to start is probably an honest, respectful, "Hey, so I think I've got some feelings here, but I don't want that to be a problem for you."
If you do that and you're told it's not OK (whether explicitly, or implicitly, thorough the lack of an enthusiastic response) DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES CONTINUE, unless that response changes.
"Unless that changes" doesn't mean polling for state changes. That's creepy.
That's all I've got, offhand. This list isn't remotely exhaustive. It's survivorship bias, but I've never been sued for harassment, nor my employers because of me. And, like I said, I'm not good at this stuff.
(This comment was edited bigly.)
My mom married her boss, my dad. So I'm not sure the authority part is cut and dry.
But the rest seems like good albeit no-full proof pointers.
If you want to flirt with a same-level employee, I don't think there is actually a guaranteed way to make a first move with zero liability. It seems we agree there is inherent risk in making any move, whether its just 1 time or not.
HN Gender skew is kind of the obvious explanation.
Notice the word is "accused" and not "guilty". Now I am not going to accuse YC of running a star chamber: I assume (without knowing) that they are fairly responsible with their blacklist. But the principle is still worrying.
Like most institutions, private companies are not able to hold trials and rigorously tell guilt from innocence, so whenever they set out to police others they must do so on some lesser evidence.
It is our right to shun others because we suspect them without proof of something bad. Perhaps it is even our right to gang together and ostracise such, but society suffers when that is the norm.
Empirically, we seem to be too far in the direction of "innocent until proven guilty." This allows people to prey on others unchecked.
It can swing back too far in the other direction, but a healthy balance is probably best.
I would hope that at least a preponderance of evidence standard is used, beyond just the leveling of an accusation. Considering the consequences for the accused, clear and convincing is probably a better standard.
You can't know this without knowing how many of the allegations are false.
I don't think we'd want a court hearing to decide if a particular grudge can be held.
"This influential Silicon Valley firm is compiling a blacklist of venture capitalists accused of harassing women"
It appears the WaPo changed the headline: "This influential Silicon Valley firm is spearheading a blacklist of venture capitalists accused of harassing women"
NewsDiff still has the original: http://newsdiffs.org/article-history/https%3A/www.washington...
It would definitely be good for the mods to change the title to reflect the new WaPo headline.
My concern with the headline is not about how they are written, it is about what real aspects of society they reflect. If those reflections are accurate, then the headlines are not a problem at all.
And if the headlines don't relfect realtiy, that's WP's problem, not yours.
People deserve the opportunity to defend themselves.