Why was gender chosen as one of the key attributes that makes you stand out? Why not where you went to school, which country/state you're from? Your family income while growing up? Your college degree? There are plenty of things that make you more unique than your gender.
> There are fewer example of female solo founders — or even female CEOs — who have successfully raised large amounts from venture capitalists. In biotech & moonshot companies, the numbers are especially disastrous.
Why is that disastrous, given that you have to be obsessed and highly risk tolerant to found a new moonshot company? That's why men are more common here. It's not some conspiracy. They are simply more likely to be obsessed, unbalanced and take on risk. Crazy, if you like. See also the most dangerous jobs, and a curious lack of concern about those being dominated by men.
VCs don't care about gender or any other irrelevant attribute one bit when investing and that notion is simply absurd. Just as absurd as thinking that prisons are biased against women as a way to explain why it's mostly men in jail.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Maybe you don't think you owe them better, but you definitely owe this community better if you're participating in it.
I already replied to you elsewhere in this thread, but this is the exactly sort of generic ideological flamewar comment that we ask HN users not to post here. Nothing this predictable can be interesting in HN's sense of that word—and worse, it guarantees a degenerating discussion. No more of this please.
It's fine to point out a relevant bit of the article, but please omit swipes. That first bit of your comment more than outweighs any of the good you're contributing here, and your post would be just fine without it.
Because unfortunately gender matters when trying to raise money to start a business. Investors factor it in to their investment decisions. Sometimes they do it on purpose (i.e. Are you going to have kids? Will men in ___ industry take you seriously to do deals with or want to join your team? If I give her money, will she sleep with me?) and sometimes they don't do it on purpose (i.e. Misgivings of whether she can "lead", "be tough", manage money, take risks. More doubts than a man with similar or lower credentials).
Last I read something like 97% of venture funding goes to men. 57% of bachelors degrees are earned by women. So it's not like there is a lack of women who can set and accomplish long term goals and manage money.
That's all conjecture. If VCs get a sense that a male moonshot founder wants work life balance, for example, they are unlikely to invest. It's not about gender and discriminating on that kind of surface level. There are always exceptions of course, but it's not useful or reality based to extrapolate those into the rule.
Some more stats to think about, which seem to avoid these kind of conspiracies about bias or patriarchy: 93% of prison inmates are men. 70% of homeless are men. 97% of preschool and kindergarten teachers are women. 1.9% of carpenters are women.
Please don't take HN threads into generic gender flamewar. It's tedious and repetitive and inevitably nasty—not what this site is for. We want thoughtful, curious conversation about different things here.
Do VCs give women less money, or do women convince less VCs to give them money? Does personality play a role in your ability to convince somebody to give you large sums of money? Is there some kind of similarity between men that do not receive funding and women that do not receive funding? Interesting questions that would be worth investigating, instead of just accusing the majority of VCs of (even sub conscious) sexism.
In her case, her gender clearly makes her stand out because men are statistically the overwhelming majority in the field.
Someone who came from a trade school or an underrepresented state might choose to bring these points forward instead, to share their insights with fellow working class founders.
Please consider this recent story on HN, One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks [1] (methodology: searched HN for "man" and took the first story, sorted by date). Count the number of comments that focus on the subject's gender. I couldn't find any. Contrast that to this story -- well over half are about nothing but gender, and almost all mention it. Why is that?
"Man" , in traditional usage, refers to any human being. "One man's x" is also a common phrase used to mean any single person struggling or striving towards a particular goal.
This is completely different to what is happening in this post, where the gender is being called out as an attribute of particular interest.
I'm not looking to argue for or against either side here, but:
"How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female founder" =/= simply referring to a woman as a woman.
"How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, male founder" would certainly prompt questions about why male is relevant, particularly more so than attributes like low-income, immigrant, dropout, etc.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. Nothing new will come of this, nor anything interesting—just more nastiness. We're trying for curious conversation here.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. Nothing new will come of this, nor anything interesting—just more nastiness. We're trying for curious conversation here.
I look on algolia for a thread which is actually equivalent to the one you posted, and I did find one.
Unfortunately it has only one comment, so it doesn't make the point I intended it to.
I can only submit my opinion, which is that "Why one woman stole 47M academic papers – and made them all free to read" would not focus on Alexandra Elbakyan's gender.
There's an actual difference between the headline you chose (and the headline of the article below) and the headline of the OP.
Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. This is just going to lead to repetitive and increasingly nasty discussion—as indeed it has, like clockwork, in this subthread.
Honestly i'd be more interested in how she managed to make them cough up 11M for dogs vitamins.
I mean, if they had solid science why wouldn't they work on human? Or would that sounds to much like theranos?
She is ok with taking money from people who are know sexual predators, but can't find a female investor interested in the project.
"female investors were harder to find, slower to reply, ghosted me more often, did much more diligence, and were harder to convert."
Despite the sex-baiting in the title, really good article with tons of actionable, non-obvious advice! I like that the founder/writer is so technically oriented, she clearly strategizes & structures her thoughts very well and I think that probably helped her with such an amazing deal (well, it looks amazing, given her starting point - though I don’t know how much of her company she gave up for that...)
The title isn't sex-baiting. The fact that the founder is female is extremely relevant to raising money. I wish that weren't the case.
The problem ranges from light sexism (skepticism over whether she can "lead" and "be tough") to blatant misogyny (trying to exchange money for sex and blackballing her from deals if she refuses or talks about it). Those are things that men mostly do not have to deal with when raising money.
> blatant misogyny (trying to exchange money for sex and blackballing her from deals if she refuses or talks about it). Those are things that men mostly do not have to deal with when raising money.
True that that's something men mostly don't have to deal with when raising money, but it's also something that makes it easier, not harder, for women to raise money compared to men.
It's also a weird thing to describe as "misogyny"; it sounds more like a problem with liking women than disliking them.
Things like systematically schedule 150 VC interviews in 4 weeks and analyse their reactions to specific words/phrases. Very geeky, very appropriate for HN. Only a true nerd would do that.
But I really don’t see why sex would have anything to do with it.
> But I really don’t see why sex would have anything to do with it.
“Crunchbase data show that not only did total funding to female-led startups fall this year, but the proportion of dollars to female-only founders also declined, to 2.3 percent, compared to 2.8 percent in 2019.”
Congrats, also for being honest and mentioning you previously worked in VC and had ivy-league connections.
Myself and my co-founder never had time to go network or sell to investors, building a product just took 200% of our time. Having a moonshot idea and big market didn't matter.
We just didn't have the connections or the time to build them. Looking back that is all that mattered. They didn't care we had customers and revenue and a good deck or market.
VCs are necessary to accelerate progress. Especially in tech companies where R&D is so expensive up front and yet scales well when it's done. And a side effect of VCs is that it's more expensive to operate in the same industry as one.
because the competition has VCs or deep pockets and to compete effectively and get visibilty in the market you need more money than what you can generate by bootstrapping. and no, you cannot convince people to just work for equity.
Yeah, much less a working product. Tech vc is sprinkling money around hoping to grow magic. If you have revenue it probably isn’t speculative magic revenue.
Exactly, if you making money it suggests there is a market , that means there must be competitors....even though every unicorn start up ends up with many competitors...and if there are competitors it's not venture fundable..
when asked if there are competitors, regardless of what we answered, the answer was wrong. that again proves my point that all that matters is that investors know you, and that requires a lot of time, which becomes extremely expensive if you are in silicon valley, and only affordable if you are already rich or have a family that’s rich, and do not have to build a product.
I bet you hate Elizabeth Holmes. I wish your sex wasn't relevant, but unfortunately it still is. I genuinely wish you well. We've seriously needed more (hell, any) diversity in our leaders and decision makers for a very long time.
Interesting that she had a much easier time raising from men than women. She mentions having a CRM with 150+ investors, so presumably this isn't just random chance based on a small number of interactions.
One possible reason is that men may have been actively looking to invest in female founders for diversity reasons. Female investors wouldn't feel the same pressure for gender diversity among their portfolio companies.
Yeah, please don't post these piece of crap blogposts with such strong wording that "women and minorities *ARE* penalised".
For a forum that requests scientific rigour for sometimes even the most trivial claims, HN really does let these affirmative posts get away without any scrutiny. No doubt ONLY because of fear of being labeled a racist/sexist/x-ist.
The blog post takes some very controversial claims and tries to pass it off as facts:
- "We know that in the U.S., there is still a power and status gap between men and women and between whites and nonwhites." - the gap between men and women can and has been explained by choice of profession, seniority, temperamental differences. Same thing with nonwhites, if you're an immigrant from Mexico or a brother from the ghetto, for sure you'll have a harder time than Ivy league educated kid from the suburbs. It doesn't have to be sexism and racism respectively.
Now I'm just throwing sh*t against the wall and seeing what sticks, but maybe colleagues just don't appreciate when someone takes up work time with their social justice agendas instead of working. I recall several months ago there was a link to a blogpost suggesting that blacks are being ignored during meetings due to racism. OR, maybe they just happen to have nothing worthwhile to say? How do we know? How do we determine? It seems in the current political climate, we don't need to, with accusations of racism you're always guilty until proven innocent and it's up to you to prove it otherwise(good luck proving a negative). I know that a few times when I spoke up in meetings I was ignored. Why? Because on those occasions I had nothing of value to add, but maybe I should find an x-ism cause and write accusatory blogposts to champion it.
I'm not claiming that racism/sexism/unfair discrimination based on arbitrary features don't exist. They do. But sometimes you're not doing well not because you're discriminated, but because you're not good enough for one reason or another. Being accused of crimes one didn't commit and put into prison by a systemically corrupt institution - racism(true story too, happened to Allen Iverson). Not doing well at something? Maybe sometimes it's worth to examine what YOU can do instead of jumping to the racist/sexist card to absolve yourself of all personal responsibility for your failures.
The "piece of crap blogpost" details their data and methodology and gives a link to the published paper that the "piece of crab blogpost" is about.
Because you aren't attacking data or methodology I have to assume your post reflects more issues you are struggling with than issues raised by the paper. Of course, I'm sure the data and methodology have flaws or need further research. It's not within my skillset to judge it. But these things are almost never perfect or the end all.
HN doesn't "request scientific rigour". If you imagine something like that, of course you're going to find reams of counterexamples. That's not because other people are being inconsistent, it's because you imagined something untrue.
If you want to post something nuanced and relevant about your own experience, that's great. But whatever your experience has been, inflating it into grandiose claims on classic flamewar territory is not going to end well—and is also much less interesting. We don't want gender war here. It's tawdry, repetitive, and boring.
Can the title be renamed to the correct title, which is currently "How I raised a $11M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech moonshot"
If you try bookmarking the page, it currently says $5.1M, which was inserted by HN bookmarklet during submission, then manually edited to $5M to fit within the 80 character maximum. The sub-heading of the article says:
> In January 2020 I closed a $5.1M seed round, my first financing for my first company. I’ve closed another ~$6M since then. This is how I raised that first round.
Yeah, the h1 article title inside the page changed, but the actual "title" attribute that you see in your browser tab is $5.1M (hence the confusion, I assume).
I agree. To me, moonshot is the intersection of incredibly high impact and significant technical uncertainty. Drug discoveries all have technical uncertainty. But extending the life of dogs does not scream incredibly high impact.
It would be different if this were pitched as a way to get to human life extension.
Unless you are also doing a dog-related startup, I don't think that´s relevant.
I also dislike almost everything about dogs, but unless an office becomes "pet-friendly" (=dog-friendly because no one is going to bring their cat/parrot/turtle/fish to the office), is unlikely you will ever notice.
This is a brilliant article, and gets better towards the bottom. I'm sure there are a lot of articles like this, but she's very honest about the process. It's rare to see people document what they wish they did better, when it's so expensive to make mistakes here.
There's some solid SOPs in here too, and it works whether you're doing an app company or trying to land a job, assuming you have the credentials.
This would be a good comment if not for the word "just", which makes it sound like a shallow dismissal. ("Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
The link to relevant other work is most welcome, of course.
"Just", because the blog post sounds like it was doing fundamental basic research on longevity based on brand new ideas ("I was chatting with some friends about how I thought I had an idea for how to make dogs live longer."), instead of commercializing on existing research. It wasn't my intention to be dismissive.
I think your comment is fine. One could read it and be like “wow! Are they running a lab too?” and once you find out this person role is really connecting the money to this preexisting science, the term “just” is warranted. It’s not negative, it’s a recognition that they aren’t running their own lab as well.
I believe you about your intent, but intent doesn't communicate itself in internet comments, so the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate. In this context the word "just" is very much a trope of shallow dismissals ("why don't you just", "can't you just", "this is just", etc.), so the ambiguity went against you.
Everyone builds on work of someone else. A lot of scientific research fails to translate to commercially viable product; that is not a trivial task.
Plus, in this precarious phase, further discoveries are possible. Few things work exactly the same way in labs and in the real world. Usually, some anomalies are observed that actually widen our understanding of the problem.
This article got a lot of user flags. That's bad—it's obviously a substantive article, squarely on topic for HN and not sensational, ideological, or predictable. Even a quick skim is enough to see that it doesn't break down along any of the obvious faultlines for this general topic. That not only means it shouldn't have been flagged, it makes it HN gold. If you've been wielding the flag club that indiscriminately...please stop! Accounts that do that lose their flagging rights.
It's not legit to flag an article just because you don't like the general category. There must also be something about the specific article itself that's demonstrably bad for HN (for example, maybe the article doesn't contain substantial new information, is gratuitously baity, or is mostly fuel for internet drama). None of that is the case here—quite the opposite. This is just the sort of article we should welcome, so we can have substantive discussions about relevant issues instead of hurling the same old nasty platitudes at each other yet again. (Can a platitude be nasty? or do I need a different word?)
A thousand thank-yous to the user who took the time to email about this while the thread was still fresh; I wasn't focused on the HN front page just then, but I got the heads-up. If you ever want to make a big difference to HN quality, emailing hn@ycombinator.com when you notice solid, substantive content not getting the attention it deserves (whether because of flags or for any other reason) is one of the highest-leverage contributions you can make!
That information isn't public. I'm a mod here (in case that wasn't clear), so I looked at the private data.
Edit: if you meant what you can tell from public information: (1) sudden drops in rank, as walterbell points out downthread—(edit: but it's important to know that sudden drops in rank can also be because of the flamewar detector, which is unrelated to flags), and/or (2) the [flagged] annotation, which appears when flags outweigh upvotes by a certain threshold.
I assume they were asking how does a non-mod tell if it's flagged so they can report it to you? (aka when it says [flagged] next to it or something, or drops off the front page rather quickly, etc)
[flagged] and [dead] aren't the same, but if enough flags occur relative to upvotes, the thread will eventually also become [dead] - however, not if there's an active discussion already. So 'showdead' might not do much for you in this specific situation.
Especially for those of us where top software can be very critical, but who are not in the software business and are committed to efforts in other areas of technology.
I can only imagine the challenges you have been facing are on the increase.
I don't understand this comment. Below we see plenty of dead comments posted at an earlier time, which seems to illustrate some existence of fuel for internet drama.
At this time the first 50% of the comment page does not discuss gender so it clearly turned out right, but they were posted after the dead comments. If a fresh article has the majority of comments being people warring about gender then the option given to users is either to ignore the war, flag it, or engage in the discussion. Having seen that multiple times it is often easier and uses less time and energy to simply flag the article regardless of how great the article actually is. The flag would not be a comment about the quality of the article, but rather the climate and culture for which it was posted in.
The important question is when the flagging occurred by the users. If the flagging occured when most comments were culture warring, and the moderators find that to be inappropriate, then it would be good to know for future reference. If most users pressed the flag button long after the discussion switched to be more productive then I can understand what dang is talking about, but from his post I can't determine that.
Is there a documented HN policy that high-quality articles can be censored on HN because of low-quality comments? Why not allow time for low-quality comments to be downvoted/flagged and high-quality comments to arrive? If good articles could be rapidly flagged/censored, how could discussions ever "switch to be more productive"?
Yes, because if an article is particularly good, it's not fair for disgruntled users to be able to sink it by posting shitty comments. That would be a big loophole.
If the article were garden-variety flamebait then it would be a different story (no pun intended) – but this was such a clear case of the opposite.
The best thing is to give us a heads-up at hn@ycombinator.com. That could be either "hey, there's a really good article getting unfairly flagged" (a user did that last night and it was extremely helpful) or it could be "hey, there's a really good article getting a lot of flamewar comments". Actually it could also simply be "hey, there's a really good article that hasn't gotten any attention yet". (People often send those for their own articles, but that's a little less noble and not what I'm talking about here.)
You can see the common denominator there: "a really good article". There aren't very many of those. Just as the most important thing for startup investors is not to miss the best startups, the most important thing for HN is not to miss the best articles.
Thanks for answering. Not being able to use the flag feature when a article is being used as fuel for culture war is an answer to the question I had. Emailing sounds like a useful feature through I doubt I will be using it myself. What I find as being an really good article getting unfairly flagged might be very different from others.
A standard version that I often see is when articles get sunk by shitty comments are when the author is controversial. The negative comments are focusing on the author, and often that dominated the article comments until the article get flagged to death. Fair? No. It is however a pattern that keep repeating itself.
Yes, that's a problem. It requires human intervention to fix it, and that inevitably includes interpretation and judgment calls and no doubt bias too. We try to be as unprejudiced as we can and stick to HN's first principles, but people have such vastly different perspectives that satisfying everyone is out of the question. Still, it's not entirely subjective, and one's ability to stick to first principles gets better with practice.
I don't recognize this bit though: "Not being able to use the flag feature when a article is being used as fuel for culture war". That doesn't sound like what I said and certainly isn't what I meant. Edit: oh, I see what you mean - "being used as fuel for culture war" is your rephrasing of what I described as "shitty comments". Don't take this absolutely, though. The median case is that both the article and the comments are garden-variety culture war; those are legit to flag. I'm just saying that you shouldn't flag indiscriminately. We want some discernment when an article clears, let's say, the 95th percentile of thoughtfulness.
hey dang, I'm the author. Thanks for cleaning everything up - I'm sometimes a bit nervous when my work gets posted on HN for what happened here. I really appreciate you & the HN team being so proactive in fixing it!
My understanding is that dog-related food/medicine/nutritional supplements have a lot lower bar than human-grade equivalents, when it comes to regulatory clearance. On one hand, that makes me very skeptical that this would actually be more than a snake oil in its first 5 years of existence. On the other hand, I imagine that this could be an interesting "proving ground" for potential human-grade longevity solutions. I think that's the real moonshot.
> The reasons we do not have an approved aging drug today are not due to the science - the biological blockers to a first-generation aging drug have been clear for at least ten years. The primary reasons there are no approved aging drugs today are much more tricky - they are regulatory, societal, structural, and cultural.
> For the last years, I’ve been a researcher in academic aging labs, worked in aging-focused venture capital and early-stage aging drug development startups, and am now the founder of the aging biotech Loyal. The common theme of my work has been trying to find the highest leverage way to support and accelerate the first aging drug approval.
1. Is it even possible to bootstrap a biotech fund if you’re not rich (min 10mil net worth)? The author doesn’t really say why they even need funding but I imagine biotech has a lot of up front costs.
2. Given how you can “game” your pitches - from the VCs perspective isn’t this bad? Wouldn’t that mean potentially bad companies could “con” you into funding them? I wonder what the downside is of being strictly objective is (if possible).
"Given how you can “game” your pitches - from the VCs perspective isn’t this bad? Wouldn’t that mean potentially bad companies could “con” you into funding them?"
It's pretty similar to gaming job interviews. But in my experience, VCs are very good at reading between the lines, to the point that they sometimes understand the pitch better than the person making it. I don't see anything here as gaming it though. Some VCs even recommend you do something similar.
"I wonder what the downside is of being strictly objective is (if possible)."
The best investments often have a lot of strengths and a lot of weaknesses. Being strictly objective usually emphasizes the weaknesses more. A lot of VCs look for strengths, but these are often unique and poorly defined.
To a large extent investing is about pattern-matching. You are basically looking at the same situations day-in, day-out for years. You see what works, try to fit it in a box, etc.
This is kind of a doubled-edged sword situation though. After a certain point, you just start blocking situations out mentally. You try to take shortcuts by just looking for X. You don't react when the world starts changing. If you are in an environment where your sample is very tainted (which happens in VC), it is also very easy to actually get reinforced on situations that aren't optimal (this is why most VC funding goes to people who know each other).
I would characterise myself as someone unusually able to switch my thinking when required and I still have a long list of rules that seem basically arbitrary to an outsider (for example, if the CEO has a knighthood, the company will likely do very poorly)...and no pattern is foolproof (the obvious example is Tesla, I don't tend to invest in companies where the CEO is a habitual bullshitter...most of the time that rule works, in that case it didn't work so well).
But investing is about pattern-matching, it can be extremely arbitrary. If you are looking to raise money, I would consult with someone who understands the market you are trying to raise in (i.e. so you can pitch to that pattern...I don't think it will improve your odds of success but it will mean that the funder understands what the situation is), and remember not to take it personally.
Tesla is exactly what I mean -- they wouldn't pass most checklists. Elon has plenty of weaknesses but he has proven to be able to build good companies again and again.
I wouldn't say it's pattern matching. That works great for stocks and established companies, but with "moonshots", you're looking for things that have not existed before. Everyone looks for the next Zuckerberg, Bezos, Gates, Musk, whatever, but the pattern is there is little pattern.
Certainly, it's possible to sell certain VCs on borderline-fraudulent visions of the future, the so-called Investor Storytime pitch. I'm think of Juicero, YikYak, WeWork, etc.
However, that doesn't mean that to be a fraud-resistant VC you shouldn't be looking for a story, or that as a founder you're pulling a fast one by having a narrative in your pitch.
To understand something, you need to make connections. To convince someone to invest, you need to get the investors to understand what your business is and why it's going to grow and make money. Connecting a series of facts and ideas from a starting point to an end IS the definition of a narrative.
That's just how humans interact, disseminate information, and learn. Even technical work (and pure math!) does this.
This author leads with her gender. Could a man have raised as much (or any) money as the author did without a customer or any experience or a demo version of the product?
Honestly, it’s crazy. We back incredible women who end up spending at least four times fundraising than similarly qualified men, consistently get offered lower valuations, and end up raising less capital. It’s fucked up — the three solo female founders we backed are some of the best performers in our fund I so that makes me wonder how many incredible women aren’t getting funded at all who would also crush if they had the resources.
>Loyal is developing drugs to extend dog lifespan and healthspan.
Wow this is a huge undertaking. I wish you luck and I don't mean that sarcastically! If you can do that to a dog, it seems trivial to extend to humans. Have any drugs or supplements extended dog lifespan in the literature? Rapamycin I guess?
Increasing a dog's lifespan by 5 years is massively noticeable. I've never seen a 20-year old dog.
Adding 5 to a human's health is beneficial but isn't nearly as noticeable.
This is ignoring the magnitude of differences between dogs and humans. They're mammals, sure...
I can't recall just how many "successful trial on rats" stories have we gotten on HN that have to be tempered by reality in the comments.
Edit- As a dog owner myself, I'm also hoping the OP succeeds of course! Nearly every day I have a "memento mori" thought about my pet, and it's extremely depressing.
pardon me but 5 years of my life doesn't seem un-noticeable or less noticable at all, and I would certainly notice it much more than for dogs (much as I love them)
I don't think you actually would. A large portion (probably the majority) of American adults could extend their lifespan by 5 years by making simple lifestyle changes. They opt not to.
The second and third sentence of this do not support the first.
It's true that a lot of people (all over the world) make lifestyle choices which probably shorten their lifespan. Although I think you're understating the simplicity of losing significant weight / quitting smoking / drinking less, all of which are things which are notoriously difficult.
It does not follow that those people wouldn't notice an additional five years of lifespan. Of course they would, it's five years!
If someone was selling pills you could take twice a day to add five years of lifespan, the number of people who would take them is broadly limited by the number who could afford to.
It is also important to note 'where' you are adding the five years. An additional five years of infirmity at the end of life? Pass. An additional five years of relatively healthy mid-60s? Sign me up.
Extending lifespan is less useful than extending the healthy/active part of the lifespan. Like reading the fine print on the side of the packaging or the bottom of the contract, you need to pay attention to the details. This is why lifestyle changes tend to be more important than pills which treat conditions that used to kill our parents or grandparents, the former usually increase the odds you will still be walking around and taking care of yourself in your late 80s while the latter might just mean that you add five years to the amount of time that some nursing home will drain your estate while you are bed-ridden in some warehouse for the elderly.
I still disagree. I spent a lot of time in nursing homes when I was a teenager and am quite confident that adding five years of elderly life would not only not be noticed by many people who are just whiling away their later years, a lot of them wouldn’t even want it. You’re assuming that a magic pill adding five years of longevity would either distribute those years equally or primarily extend youthful years, but it’s not at all clear that that’s the case.
I met a woman in the park who said she had a dog like mine that lived to 20, then drowned in a swimming pool. I didn't know whether to offer congratulations or commiserations.
"The most notable benefit of using the dog for genetic studies is that dogs get many of the same diseases as humans, with a similar frequency, and the same genetic factors are often involved."
I would look at treatment for humans first for solutions to the dog's problems. I don't think it's as developed as medical research in humans or livestock for that matter. Proper breeding and genetic testing might actually be the solution.
> If you can do that to a dog, it seems trivial to extend to humans.
Nothing about taking treatments that work in one species and transferring them to another is trivial. You really can’t even assume that it would remain effective. Every single failed clinical trial of a drug was back up by previous animal studies showing efficacy, but it’s just not guaranteed to translate.
Any of the mainstream brands like Purina. They have excellent science behind their food and it will keep your pet healthy. They have a brand to defend, after all. If they made pets sick, they’d be done for.
>It’s a VC’s job to keep the door open. Many were ‘blown away’, then passed before the second meeting. This is normal.
I'm sometimes working with US-Americans and not being US-American myself, I feel like this is also a US-cultural thing? In important meetings with US stakeholders I struggle to read the room because everything is always 'awesome' and 'amazing', there's rarely upfront criticism. Honest feedback has to be pried out of people later at the bar.
I think this is valuable knowledge for non-US people trying to get into US-style work and funding.
1) VCs want to keep the door open for later by not outright saying "No.", since there's no incentive for them to do otherwise.
2) VCs follow the herd (need social proof), so they will often wait for that area to blow up, or wait for another VC will be the "lead."
3) VCs today would rather be late investors after the concept is proven and they can move hundreds of millions of dollars around to get even more hundreds of millions.
Also note that VCs like to imply that they have integrity, but that's often not true:
1) They've had meetings to collude against YC (documented in the press.)
2) Silver Lake Partners revokes employee shares if you leave before 4 years ("In it to win it.") (documented in the press.)
It's not just a VC thing. There is a greater delta if you didn't grow up in this particular US culture.
As a German (15+ years in the US) formerly in SF now in Seattle I see big discrepancies in what I perceive as genuine feedback from coworkers or the general public compared to what I'd expect back in Germany.
Of course VCs go even farther to keep all doors open. That to me is more of the same I observe from most folks.
I don't agree, and think that the distinction between polite encouragement and the enthusiastic affirmations of VCs is important to understand if you're going to engage with startup fundraising. There is something specific and unintuitive going on in these meetings, and people from Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, and Tulsa are routinely caught out by it.
I don't disagree with you, it's just that I find your comment to downplay the significant baseline cultural difference of which you may or may not be aware (I don't know what culture you grew up with). This is something to which OP had referred but your comment essentially had been dismissive of by attributing this entirely to differing behavior of VCs compared to baseline US culture.
A founder from a different cultural background seeking funding or advice from US VCs must understand the baseline US culture and then how to interpret VC behavior relative to that culture.
EDIT: To provide a specific example: What is considered polite encouragement to a Californian comes across as very strong / enthusiastic encouragement to a German. Polite is relative to culture. Initially people unfamiliar with the culture may take the words of the random Californian or the VC at face value - both appearing equally enthusiastic observed this way.
Reminds my previous job as a PM, where I had to deal with many nationalities. Germans were always: Yes/No, this is good/this is crap instead of 'well, you know,it depends,and it could be improved, considering everything it's not too bad'.
Very accurate. Trying to explain to people this is cultural and not my individual personality is a tough sell though.
It's a bit tiring having to praise things you don't believe in to provide honest feedback. In German culture the strong separation between work persona (with a shared mission on behalf of the company / shareholders / customers) and personal life makes it pretty easy to be straightforward at work. People don't define themselves by their job unlike in the US (or certainly SF) where one of the first questions may be "what do you do (for work)?".
From my perspective US colleagues overcommit (say yes to too many things) but don't ask enough detailed question to design solutions that can be of high quality. I'm not surprised you'll find Germans frequently saying that something is crap :D Germans tend to be cautious upfront, asking many questions (to understand scope and to mitigate risks). This often seems unnecessary to the visionary leaders, but a tactician will understand the importance for execution. Nothing wrong with saying "No, we can't do that. But if we reduce the scope, or change this or that we could deliver something."
In the end there are many cultural differences that are subtle but profound. Invisible to either side and usually expressed as what appear to be individuality / personality differences. It takes a lot of experience to understand which elements must be attributed to culture.
I think in this situation, it's more that an investor could be impressed, but think it's too risky. She also brought up that she had a lot of angles on how to solve the problem, which made investors nervous.
It's a pretty common flow. Many people are "impressed" or "blown away" or "love the team" etc etc.
The responses are all platitudes and I've learned to ignore things that are "positive feedback".
Today, the only thing that says an investor is in when they sign and send the money. Up until money in the bank, it doesn't matter how nice or how tough a potential investor is.
Unless you're the hottest startup, this is probably the most realistic way to treat all meetings and understand that it really is a grind.
That reminds me of that call with Triplebyte where they said I "had about the highest score ever" on their screening test. I knew immediately they were full of it and totally dishonest.
"Actions speak louder..." Don't buy any of it except as an act and going through the motions so they can pat themselves on the back.
Real feedback means adversarial criticism, weaknesses, and examination of the business. However, they can leave their "passenger's seat driving" suggestions at the door too, unless they're really useful.
If anyone is ever going down the VC route, they're going to be married to them. Who wants to be married to a liar who can't speak truth or honestly?
They don't want to be wrong. And their reasons for not investing are usually "haven't seen enough proof" or "don't have conviction about the market". Reasons you can't respond to and are, usually, safe.
The primary reason for VCs not investing is because their other VC friends have not yet invested. It’s like the old saying, “Nobody wants to invest until somebody invests, then everyone wants to invest”.
It's something I have noticed as well. Also really interesting ways to essentially say "that won't work". Lots of fluffing, backpatting and trying not to tell anyone they are wrong directly.
That was also something in Japan I noticed though, everything is amazing and great and it couldn't possibly be wrong just differing levels of great.
I'm from the US grew up in the Valley but lived in the UK for a startup for a short while. It's both a byproduct of career hierarchal corporate obedience and social success façade (see also: modern campus culture of Ivy Leagues and Pac12s). It's absolutely awful for mental health or getting things done.
More practically, it's a problem when people try so hard to be liked that they throw away respect by being too "nice." As such, they're not your friends or anyones friend, they're toxically-positive, inherently dishonest, and cowardly "yes men." It's a dishonest, time-/energy-wasting, and an untrustworthy cultural- and communication-style. People like these are a liability because they won't go anywhere far except to the diplomatic corps parties, UN-sponsored social ventures, and sing Kum ba yah. (Wantreprenuers and dumb money dispensers.) You have to be radically honest with yourself and others before you can attain and grow anything substantial.
Besides, VC investment is only essential if it's a capital-intensive venture or velocity-constrained by lack of capital. Having more capital isn't useful in and of itself without a plan and a strategy to deploy it to something that's already established, like water on a seedling. This is why chasing VC is worthless: sales of viable product cures all, including bringing VC interest.
Very nice very nice as borat would say but the big piece missing in the rant is mindless ambition. Thats what keeps the lights on when shit hits the fan.
Whether people are superficial corporate robots or without real friends or follow all kinds of meaningless ritual etc doesnt matter if they are driven. Why? Because thats who you end up relying on when competing against other people who are mindlessly driven.
How are you going to compete with people who are more driven than you - "the do whatever it takes" brigade? Ranting takes away focus and thought from answering that question honestly to yourself.
This! That term that describes perfectly my impression of many people from the U.S.A. It's maybe just a cultural thing, but I have a lot of trouble working together with people who have this sort of attitude.
> People here are incredibly disagreeable, especially in the last 5-10 years.
Never been to the USA in the last 10 years, but I interact regularly with usians, and this is not my experience at all. All of them have been extremely nice people, without a trace of disagreeableness.
What irks me, is that they are constantly giving unwarranted and over the top praise. I find this very disturbing. In France this attitude is invariably interpreted as ironic mockery. And if they spoke French I would be genuinely offended by such attacks.
I guess a whole bunch of my opinions and experience based on reading about the different tech scenes. I'm not factoring in things like "employee happiness as a separate vector" (in my opinion, in this argument, that's "second place consolation prize" for Europeans justifying why their tech scene is better). I'm assuming that however terrible the US scene is claimed to be, it's can't be bad in the sense that any badness has not destroyed its productivity. It's still no. 1.
To me the point of a tech scene is to be large. As in dollar value. Generate capital in terms of valuations, market cap, revenue and funding for new ventures.
Attempt to summarize the experiences, readings that contribute to my view:
Number of startups in US. Size of tech companies. US tech scene companies ranking in world's largest organizations. Personal experience with those companies.
Size of China market. Number of Chinese tech billionaires. Number of massive Chinese tech companies, and their ranking in world's biggest companies/tech companies.
I don't think any hard analysis of the data is going to disprove my claim that world tech scene's are ranked: US, China (close second)
But if it did that would certainly be very interesting and high value information to me! :p :) xx
I think that's caused by the capital available to the US which made people adapt and learn how to use that capital to grow massively (see growth hacking).
You also have generations of successful entrepreneurs staying in the US and teaching the next generation. Entrepreneurship in EU is mostly a joke, good entrepreneurs are hard to find.
And still, despite of this, people working in Europe seems to be much happier (even if they're poorer) than in the US.
My experiences with USA companies haven't been positive (very immature working culture of burning your employees) but I was always impressed at how the founders (some from the US, some immigrating from outside) managed to rake in a casual few millions at demo day just by saying they want to solve problems for a certain audience.
My company got 10k€ for 10% after fighting for months (some more money came later thanks to an angel I sourced), which were not even enough money to incorporate a company in the country I was.
> You also have generations of successful entrepreneurs staying in the US and teaching the next generation. Entrepreneurship in EU is mostly a joke, good entrepreneurs are hard to find.
Uh, what? Wrong, at least for Germany, which is littered with internationally successful small and medium-sized companies. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelstand .
Edit: Unless you were refering to the kind of "entrepreneur" that burns millions of USD in VC money over the span of a couple years, fails to create anything that anyone is willing to actually pay money for, but produces a lot of insightful blog posts in that time. Yes, we don't have a lot of those here yet, but we're working on it.
They probably did mean that, and believe it or not, Americans are actually OK with that.
American entrepreneurial culture includes a strong dose of "It's OK to lose a million dollars a hundred times if the next one makes a billion dollars". Some think that's part of the reason the US is the country that generates the FAANG(M)s. They throw money at the wall and make big wins off of what sticks, if most of it doesn't.
It's arguable whether that's actually beneficial for the world (is there any of the MANGAFs you don't feel uncomfortable about?), but it certainly accomplishes something. If only making the US rich.
The gap between bombastic marketing (esp. in the VC/startup world, but also self-promo) and reality must be mentally devastating. US has a serious, nationwide medication problem.
Honesty has its upsides, the (financial) success of an "awesome amazing disruptive changing-the-world-again-this-week" mindset notwithstanding.
It seems to be mainly a west coast thing. "Good vibes" always bordering on fake vibes.
East coast seems to be more willing to tell you that your idea sucks, you suck, and your grandma sucks too. Unfortunately they're also way less likely to give your company a decently sized investment and valuation, so there's that.
That's my experience with Germans. They are as subtle as a chainsaw. I love it. They give me low latency instant feedback of the situation which allows me to act upon.
As someone who loves drinking in bars, but has had colleagues who don’t drink alcohol, I will add that this puts non-drinkers at a distinct disadvantage.
Everything is crap. By default. Almost everything is "not bad", "fine", or at best "pretty good". You will almost never hear a French person describe anything as "awesome", "great", "fantastic" or "brilliant" (unless they’ve spent too much time in the US or work in startup la la land).
But crap also is "not bad", "fine", or sometimes even "pretty good".
So, how does one tell the difference?
Easy! It’s all in the contemptuous tone, annoyed dismissive look, sneering smirk and distracted disdainful wave of the hand!
I've read elsewhere that their approach involves using rapamycin - a drug used by transplant patients. Apparently, it has been reviewed positively as a potential anti-aging agent for humans [0]. The unique approach here is to treat animals, rather than humans, and thus avoid the extensive and expensive trials that human testing would require.
Rapamycin can have bad side effects, especially on the kidneys and making the patient more susceptible to bacterial infections. Wise to look at dogs, if that is the case.
I actually just read your linked article a couple days ago... It's thesis is that the main side effects are easily detectable and reversible, and therefore greatly preferable to the aging-related problems that rapamycin keeps at bay. (ie, if you get a bacterial problem, lay off the rapamycin and maybe take a quick round of antibiotics. OTOH, If you get Alzheimer's, well...)
The story with kidneys is a bit stranger. Heavy rapamycin use seems to trip up 'normal' levels in insulin-related measurements, but this may have a lot more to do with the body being in a different state than the usual measurements are calibrated for, and doesn't seem to be causing diabetes in practice. (to paraphrase, perhaps badly: in many ways, rapamycin acts like artificial calorie restriction, which does strange things to insulin handling anyways.)
"We are NOT developing rapamycin or metformin for dog aging. None of our drugs in development are a classic longevity drug that you will have heard of. Most have never been previously described as aging drugs." – https://twitter.com/celinehalioua/status/1398335368567480325
Kudos to her for landing investors for this idea, but her plan was actually to optimize her pitch for potential investors, and given enough pitches she eventually found a few who pulled the trigger. To me, this is not really a sign of a strong idea for a company, but rather a sign of a good saleswoman. I would expect companies with much better, stronger concepts to land funding much faster.
Also, I think most people vastly overestimate the level of competence of VCs and especially the degree of due diligence that they do. They are just as easily wooed by great presentations and the typical sales tricks. Cases in point: WeWork, Theranos, etc.
> Also, I think most people vastly overestimate the level of competence of VCs and especially the degree of due diligence that they do. They are just as easily wooed by great presentations and the typical sales tricks. Cases in point: WeWork, Theranos, etc.
Remember when more than one millionaire funded Juicero? I remember.
It seems that VCs are either following the herd or buying the vision. The latter is a safe risk to take because the timescales of some projects are 10+ years which means the VC can delay the inevitable (firm goes to zero) with a slim chance that the returns will be huge. Personally I have tried and failed to raise VC money, as a result I have some sour grapes when I see firms raise $20mn+ for moon shot ideas that make no sense to me. Having said that I would rather be beholden to my firm's customers, customers who pay for an unsubsidized product that meets a market need, today.
If so a 'saleswoman' who "was previously a Ph.D. candidate at Oxford in a relevant field & have a B.Sc. in neuroscience from UT Austin" though.
Also when it comes to VCs, you gotta sell it. Or perish. And if you are gonna sell it, you better have some strategies. This is independent of how good your idea is. Maybe there will be an utopia where VCs consider things only on merit, but that is not the general reality right now.
249 comments
[ 123 ms ] story [ 4903 ms ] thread> There are fewer example of female solo founders — or even female CEOs — who have successfully raised large amounts from venture capitalists. In biotech & moonshot companies, the numbers are especially disastrous.
you can disagree, but her answer is right there
VCs don't care about gender or any other irrelevant attribute one bit when investing and that notion is simply absurd. Just as absurd as thinking that prisons are biased against women as a way to explain why it's mostly men in jail.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
GP was quoting the article in that sentence.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Last I read something like 97% of venture funding goes to men. 57% of bachelors degrees are earned by women. So it's not like there is a lack of women who can set and accomplish long term goals and manage money.
Some more stats to think about, which seem to avoid these kind of conspiracies about bias or patriarchy: 93% of prison inmates are men. 70% of homeless are men. 97% of preschool and kindergarten teachers are women. 1.9% of carpenters are women.
How many women want to grind away for years on a startup vs men? Probably far less.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27254719
This is completely different to what is happening in this post, where the gender is being called out as an attribute of particular interest.
"How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female founder" =/= simply referring to a woman as a woman.
"How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, male founder" would certainly prompt questions about why male is relevant, particularly more so than attributes like low-income, immigrant, dropout, etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Unfortunately it has only one comment, so it doesn't make the point I intended it to.
I can only submit my opinion, which is that "Why one woman stole 47M academic papers – and made them all free to read" would not focus on Alexandra Elbakyan's gender.
There's an actual difference between the headline you chose (and the headline of the article below) and the headline of the OP.
It's the phrase "as a".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11125166
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I mean, if they had solid science why wouldn't they work on human? Or would that sounds to much like theranos?
She is ok with taking money from people who are know sexual predators, but can't find a female investor interested in the project. "female investors were harder to find, slower to reply, ghosted me more often, did much more diligence, and were harder to convert."
Weird
The problem ranges from light sexism (skepticism over whether she can "lead" and "be tough") to blatant misogyny (trying to exchange money for sex and blackballing her from deals if she refuses or talks about it). Those are things that men mostly do not have to deal with when raising money.
True that that's something men mostly don't have to deal with when raising money, but it's also something that makes it easier, not harder, for women to raise money compared to men.
It's also a weird thing to describe as "misogyny"; it sounds more like a problem with liking women than disliking them.
Do you have a citation for that? Because the article links a blog (that links a paper) that seems to say otherwise:
https://medium.com/janeventurecapital/female-founders-you-de...
Things like systematically schedule 150 VC interviews in 4 weeks and analyse their reactions to specific words/phrases. Very geeky, very appropriate for HN. Only a true nerd would do that.
But I really don’t see why sex would have anything to do with it.
“Crunchbase data show that not only did total funding to female-led startups fall this year, but the proportion of dollars to female-only founders also declined, to 2.3 percent, compared to 2.8 percent in 2019.”
Source: https://news.crunchbase.com/news/global-vc-funding-to-female...
You've done the very thing you're complaining about, guaranteeing a flamewar. That breaks the site guidelines. Please don't do that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Good" in this context refers to the expected value of the subthread the comment leads to, as described here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
We're particularly trying to avoid the online callout/shaming culture here because it leads to more bad things; please don't practice that here.
Myself and my co-founder never had time to go network or sell to investors, building a product just took 200% of our time. Having a moonshot idea and big market didn't matter. We just didn't have the connections or the time to build them. Looking back that is all that mattered. They didn't care we had customers and revenue and a good deck or market.
...did you care? If you had customers and revenue, why did you need VC?
She's a bay natural
Flagged as irrefutable
One possible reason is that men may have been actively looking to invest in female founders for diversity reasons. Female investors wouldn't feel the same pressure for gender diversity among their portfolio companies.
https://hbr.org/2016/03/women-and-minorities-are-penalized-f...
For a forum that requests scientific rigour for sometimes even the most trivial claims, HN really does let these affirmative posts get away without any scrutiny. No doubt ONLY because of fear of being labeled a racist/sexist/x-ist.
The blog post takes some very controversial claims and tries to pass it off as facts: - "We know that in the U.S., there is still a power and status gap between men and women and between whites and nonwhites." - the gap between men and women can and has been explained by choice of profession, seniority, temperamental differences. Same thing with nonwhites, if you're an immigrant from Mexico or a brother from the ghetto, for sure you'll have a harder time than Ivy league educated kid from the suburbs. It doesn't have to be sexism and racism respectively.
Now I'm just throwing sh*t against the wall and seeing what sticks, but maybe colleagues just don't appreciate when someone takes up work time with their social justice agendas instead of working. I recall several months ago there was a link to a blogpost suggesting that blacks are being ignored during meetings due to racism. OR, maybe they just happen to have nothing worthwhile to say? How do we know? How do we determine? It seems in the current political climate, we don't need to, with accusations of racism you're always guilty until proven innocent and it's up to you to prove it otherwise(good luck proving a negative). I know that a few times when I spoke up in meetings I was ignored. Why? Because on those occasions I had nothing of value to add, but maybe I should find an x-ism cause and write accusatory blogposts to champion it.
I'm not claiming that racism/sexism/unfair discrimination based on arbitrary features don't exist. They do. But sometimes you're not doing well not because you're discriminated, but because you're not good enough for one reason or another. Being accused of crimes one didn't commit and put into prison by a systemically corrupt institution - racism(true story too, happened to Allen Iverson). Not doing well at something? Maybe sometimes it's worth to examine what YOU can do instead of jumping to the racist/sexist card to absolve yourself of all personal responsibility for your failures.
Because you aren't attacking data or methodology I have to assume your post reflects more issues you are struggling with than issues raised by the paper. Of course, I'm sure the data and methodology have flaws or need further research. It's not within my skillset to judge it. But these things are almost never perfect or the end all.
https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/amj.2014.0538
Certainly not as much as men like women, on average.
I keep "rediscovering" this, so maybe others need to be told/reminded.
If you want to post something nuanced and relevant about your own experience, that's great. But whatever your experience has been, inflating it into grandiose claims on classic flamewar territory is not going to end well—and is also much less interesting. We don't want gender war here. It's tawdry, repetitive, and boring.
> In January 2020 I closed a $5.1M seed round, my first financing for my first company. I’ve closed another ~$6M since then. This is how I raised that first round.
It would be different if this were pitched as a way to get to human life extension.
Please, please, please name this firm. For the good of all founders.
I also dislike almost everything about dogs, but unless an office becomes "pet-friendly" (=dog-friendly because no one is going to bring their cat/parrot/turtle/fish to the office), is unlikely you will ever notice.
There's some solid SOPs in here too, and it works whether you're doing an app company or trying to land a job, assuming you have the credentials.
The link to relevant other work is most welcome, of course.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Plus, in this precarious phase, further discoveries are possible. Few things work exactly the same way in labs and in the real world. Usually, some anomalies are observed that actually widen our understanding of the problem.
GitHub just commercialized git in the beginning.
DataStax <> Cassandra.
Armory.io <> Spinnaker.
AWS <> *
It's not legit to flag an article just because you don't like the general category. There must also be something about the specific article itself that's demonstrably bad for HN (for example, maybe the article doesn't contain substantial new information, is gratuitously baity, or is mostly fuel for internet drama). None of that is the case here—quite the opposite. This is just the sort of article we should welcome, so we can have substantive discussions about relevant issues instead of hurling the same old nasty platitudes at each other yet again. (Can a platitude be nasty? or do I need a different word?)
A thousand thank-yous to the user who took the time to email about this while the thread was still fresh; I wasn't focused on the HN front page just then, but I got the heads-up. If you ever want to make a big difference to HN quality, emailing hn@ycombinator.com when you notice solid, substantive content not getting the attention it deserves (whether because of flags or for any other reason) is one of the highest-leverage contributions you can make!
Edit: if you meant what you can tell from public information: (1) sudden drops in rank, as walterbell points out downthread—(edit: but it's important to know that sudden drops in rank can also be because of the flamewar detector, which is unrelated to flags), and/or (2) the [flagged] annotation, which appears when flags outweigh upvotes by a certain threshold.
http://hnrankings.info/27307977/
I guess I should turn on the show dead to see flagged posts
It works. Nasty banalities could be used too. Slightly different meaning but both reflect what is happening.
Especially for those of us where top software can be very critical, but who are not in the software business and are committed to efforts in other areas of technology.
I can only imagine the challenges you have been facing are on the increase.
At this time the first 50% of the comment page does not discuss gender so it clearly turned out right, but they were posted after the dead comments. If a fresh article has the majority of comments being people warring about gender then the option given to users is either to ignore the war, flag it, or engage in the discussion. Having seen that multiple times it is often easier and uses less time and energy to simply flag the article regardless of how great the article actually is. The flag would not be a comment about the quality of the article, but rather the climate and culture for which it was posted in.
Dang, is this a problem?
If the article were garden-variety flamebait then it would be a different story (no pun intended) – but this was such a clear case of the opposite.
The best thing is to give us a heads-up at hn@ycombinator.com. That could be either "hey, there's a really good article getting unfairly flagged" (a user did that last night and it was extremely helpful) or it could be "hey, there's a really good article getting a lot of flamewar comments". Actually it could also simply be "hey, there's a really good article that hasn't gotten any attention yet". (People often send those for their own articles, but that's a little less noble and not what I'm talking about here.)
You can see the common denominator there: "a really good article". There aren't very many of those. Just as the most important thing for startup investors is not to miss the best startups, the most important thing for HN is not to miss the best articles.
A standard version that I often see is when articles get sunk by shitty comments are when the author is controversial. The negative comments are focusing on the author, and often that dominated the article comments until the article get flagged to death. Fair? No. It is however a pattern that keep repeating itself.
I don't recognize this bit though: "Not being able to use the flag feature when a article is being used as fuel for culture war". That doesn't sound like what I said and certainly isn't what I meant. Edit: oh, I see what you mean - "being used as fuel for culture war" is your rephrasing of what I described as "shitty comments". Don't take this absolutely, though. The median case is that both the article and the comments are garden-variety culture war; those are legit to flag. I'm just saying that you shouldn't flag indiscriminately. We want some discernment when an article clears, let's say, the 95th percentile of thoughtfulness.
https://www.celinehh.com/aging-field
> The reasons we do not have an approved aging drug today are not due to the science - the biological blockers to a first-generation aging drug have been clear for at least ten years. The primary reasons there are no approved aging drugs today are much more tricky - they are regulatory, societal, structural, and cultural.
> For the last years, I’ve been a researcher in academic aging labs, worked in aging-focused venture capital and early-stage aging drug development startups, and am now the founder of the aging biotech Loyal. The common theme of my work has been trying to find the highest leverage way to support and accelerate the first aging drug approval.
1. Is it even possible to bootstrap a biotech fund if you’re not rich (min 10mil net worth)? The author doesn’t really say why they even need funding but I imagine biotech has a lot of up front costs.
2. Given how you can “game” your pitches - from the VCs perspective isn’t this bad? Wouldn’t that mean potentially bad companies could “con” you into funding them? I wonder what the downside is of being strictly objective is (if possible).
This was an enlightening article. Good find.
It's pretty similar to gaming job interviews. But in my experience, VCs are very good at reading between the lines, to the point that they sometimes understand the pitch better than the person making it. I don't see anything here as gaming it though. Some VCs even recommend you do something similar.
"I wonder what the downside is of being strictly objective is (if possible)."
The best investments often have a lot of strengths and a lot of weaknesses. Being strictly objective usually emphasizes the weaknesses more. A lot of VCs look for strengths, but these are often unique and poorly defined.
This is kind of a doubled-edged sword situation though. After a certain point, you just start blocking situations out mentally. You try to take shortcuts by just looking for X. You don't react when the world starts changing. If you are in an environment where your sample is very tainted (which happens in VC), it is also very easy to actually get reinforced on situations that aren't optimal (this is why most VC funding goes to people who know each other).
I would characterise myself as someone unusually able to switch my thinking when required and I still have a long list of rules that seem basically arbitrary to an outsider (for example, if the CEO has a knighthood, the company will likely do very poorly)...and no pattern is foolproof (the obvious example is Tesla, I don't tend to invest in companies where the CEO is a habitual bullshitter...most of the time that rule works, in that case it didn't work so well).
But investing is about pattern-matching, it can be extremely arbitrary. If you are looking to raise money, I would consult with someone who understands the market you are trying to raise in (i.e. so you can pitch to that pattern...I don't think it will improve your odds of success but it will mean that the funder understands what the situation is), and remember not to take it personally.
I wouldn't say it's pattern matching. That works great for stocks and established companies, but with "moonshots", you're looking for things that have not existed before. Everyone looks for the next Zuckerberg, Bezos, Gates, Musk, whatever, but the pattern is there is little pattern.
However, that doesn't mean that to be a fraud-resistant VC you shouldn't be looking for a story, or that as a founder you're pulling a fast one by having a narrative in your pitch.
To understand something, you need to make connections. To convince someone to invest, you need to get the investors to understand what your business is and why it's going to grow and make money. Connecting a series of facts and ideas from a starting point to an end IS the definition of a narrative.
That's just how humans interact, disseminate information, and learn. Even technical work (and pure math!) does this.
Wow this is a huge undertaking. I wish you luck and I don't mean that sarcastically! If you can do that to a dog, it seems trivial to extend to humans. Have any drugs or supplements extended dog lifespan in the literature? Rapamycin I guess?
Increasing a dog's lifespan by 5 years is massively noticeable. I've never seen a 20-year old dog.
Adding 5 to a human's health is beneficial but isn't nearly as noticeable.
This is ignoring the magnitude of differences between dogs and humans. They're mammals, sure...
I can't recall just how many "successful trial on rats" stories have we gotten on HN that have to be tempered by reality in the comments.
Edit- As a dog owner myself, I'm also hoping the OP succeeds of course! Nearly every day I have a "memento mori" thought about my pet, and it's extremely depressing.
It's true that a lot of people (all over the world) make lifestyle choices which probably shorten their lifespan. Although I think you're understating the simplicity of losing significant weight / quitting smoking / drinking less, all of which are things which are notoriously difficult.
It does not follow that those people wouldn't notice an additional five years of lifespan. Of course they would, it's five years!
If someone was selling pills you could take twice a day to add five years of lifespan, the number of people who would take them is broadly limited by the number who could afford to.
Extending lifespan is less useful than extending the healthy/active part of the lifespan. Like reading the fine print on the side of the packaging or the bottom of the contract, you need to pay attention to the details. This is why lifestyle changes tend to be more important than pills which treat conditions that used to kill our parents or grandparents, the former usually increase the odds you will still be walking around and taking care of yourself in your late 80s while the latter might just mean that you add five years to the amount of time that some nursing home will drain your estate while you are bed-ridden in some warehouse for the elderly.
Little dogs can live to 20.
I met a woman in the park who said she had a dog like mine that lived to 20, then drowned in a swimming pool. I didn't know whether to offer congratulations or commiserations.
So solving the problem for dogs first might be a clever way round much of that!
we’ve cured MS and sepsis in rats like 20 times now. Doesn’t mean much for us.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4068608/
"The most notable benefit of using the dog for genetic studies is that dogs get many of the same diseases as humans, with a similar frequency, and the same genetic factors are often involved."
My home field uses chinchillas a lot. Cardiologists use pigs. etc.
https://peterattiamd.com/richardmiller/
[1] https://rapamycintherapy.com/
* https://www.rejuvenatebio.com/ (Gene therapy for mitral valve disease in dogs)
* https://dogagingproject.org/ (Involved rapamycin which is already known to increase lifespan in model organisms)
* https://www.vaika.org/ Reverse transcriptase inhibitors in dogs to increase healthspan/lifespan.
Nothing about taking treatments that work in one species and transferring them to another is trivial. You really can’t even assume that it would remain effective. Every single failed clinical trial of a drug was back up by previous animal studies showing efficacy, but it’s just not guaranteed to translate.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/lotto-winner...
What are the chances of the average seed-funded web startup still being around in five years? Can't be much over 1%.
Source: a vet friend
[0] https://newscenter.purina.com/LifeSpanStudy
I'm sometimes working with US-Americans and not being US-American myself, I feel like this is also a US-cultural thing? In important meetings with US stakeholders I struggle to read the room because everything is always 'awesome' and 'amazing', there's rarely upfront criticism. Honest feedback has to be pried out of people later at the bar.
I think this is valuable knowledge for non-US people trying to get into US-style work and funding.
1) VCs want to keep the door open for later by not outright saying "No.", since there's no incentive for them to do otherwise.
2) VCs follow the herd (need social proof), so they will often wait for that area to blow up, or wait for another VC will be the "lead."
3) VCs today would rather be late investors after the concept is proven and they can move hundreds of millions of dollars around to get even more hundreds of millions.
Also note that VCs like to imply that they have integrity, but that's often not true:
1) They've had meetings to collude against YC (documented in the press.)
2) Silver Lake Partners revokes employee shares if you leave before 4 years ("In it to win it.") (documented in the press.)
3) Shocking personal anecdotes.
As a German (15+ years in the US) formerly in SF now in Seattle I see big discrepancies in what I perceive as genuine feedback from coworkers or the general public compared to what I'd expect back in Germany.
Of course VCs go even farther to keep all doors open. That to me is more of the same I observe from most folks.
A founder from a different cultural background seeking funding or advice from US VCs must understand the baseline US culture and then how to interpret VC behavior relative to that culture.
EDIT: To provide a specific example: What is considered polite encouragement to a Californian comes across as very strong / enthusiastic encouragement to a German. Polite is relative to culture. Initially people unfamiliar with the culture may take the words of the random Californian or the VC at face value - both appearing equally enthusiastic observed this way.
It's a bit tiring having to praise things you don't believe in to provide honest feedback. In German culture the strong separation between work persona (with a shared mission on behalf of the company / shareholders / customers) and personal life makes it pretty easy to be straightforward at work. People don't define themselves by their job unlike in the US (or certainly SF) where one of the first questions may be "what do you do (for work)?".
From my perspective US colleagues overcommit (say yes to too many things) but don't ask enough detailed question to design solutions that can be of high quality. I'm not surprised you'll find Germans frequently saying that something is crap :D Germans tend to be cautious upfront, asking many questions (to understand scope and to mitigate risks). This often seems unnecessary to the visionary leaders, but a tactician will understand the importance for execution. Nothing wrong with saying "No, we can't do that. But if we reduce the scope, or change this or that we could deliver something."
In the end there are many cultural differences that are subtle but profound. Invisible to either side and usually expressed as what appear to be individuality / personality differences. It takes a lot of experience to understand which elements must be attributed to culture.
The responses are all platitudes and I've learned to ignore things that are "positive feedback".
Today, the only thing that says an investor is in when they sign and send the money. Up until money in the bank, it doesn't matter how nice or how tough a potential investor is.
Unless you're the hottest startup, this is probably the most realistic way to treat all meetings and understand that it really is a grind.
That reminds me of that call with Triplebyte where they said I "had about the highest score ever" on their screening test. I knew immediately they were full of it and totally dishonest.
"Actions speak louder..." Don't buy any of it except as an act and going through the motions so they can pat themselves on the back.
Real feedback means adversarial criticism, weaknesses, and examination of the business. However, they can leave their "passenger's seat driving" suggestions at the door too, unless they're really useful.
If anyone is ever going down the VC route, they're going to be married to them. Who wants to be married to a liar who can't speak truth or honestly?
That was also something in Japan I noticed though, everything is amazing and great and it couldn't possibly be wrong just differing levels of great.
I'm from the US grew up in the Valley but lived in the UK for a startup for a short while. It's both a byproduct of career hierarchal corporate obedience and social success façade (see also: modern campus culture of Ivy Leagues and Pac12s). It's absolutely awful for mental health or getting things done.
More practically, it's a problem when people try so hard to be liked that they throw away respect by being too "nice." As such, they're not your friends or anyones friend, they're toxically-positive, inherently dishonest, and cowardly "yes men." It's a dishonest, time-/energy-wasting, and an untrustworthy cultural- and communication-style. People like these are a liability because they won't go anywhere far except to the diplomatic corps parties, UN-sponsored social ventures, and sing Kum ba yah. (Wantreprenuers and dumb money dispensers.) You have to be radically honest with yourself and others before you can attain and grow anything substantial.
Besides, VC investment is only essential if it's a capital-intensive venture or velocity-constrained by lack of capital. Having more capital isn't useful in and of itself without a plan and a strategy to deploy it to something that's already established, like water on a seedling. This is why chasing VC is worthless: sales of viable product cures all, including bringing VC interest.
Whether people are superficial corporate robots or without real friends or follow all kinds of meaningless ritual etc doesnt matter if they are driven. Why? Because thats who you end up relying on when competing against other people who are mindlessly driven.
How are you going to compete with people who are more driven than you - "the do whatever it takes" brigade? Ranting takes away focus and thought from answering that question honestly to yourself.
Some evidence of this is required.
Stop looking at it as competing with others and compete with yourself instead?
This! That term that describes perfectly my impression of many people from the U.S.A. It's maybe just a cultural thing, but I have a lot of trouble working together with people who have this sort of attitude.
Never been to the USA in the last 10 years, but I interact regularly with usians, and this is not my experience at all. All of them have been extremely nice people, without a trace of disagreeableness.
What irks me, is that they are constantly giving unwarranted and over the top praise. I find this very disturbing. In France this attitude is invariably interpreted as ironic mockery. And if they spoke French I would be genuinely offended by such attacks.
I’m American but have mostly lived abroad for decades, and I still find his disorienting for the first few days of any trip back.
To me the point of a tech scene is to be large. As in dollar value. Generate capital in terms of valuations, market cap, revenue and funding for new ventures.
Attempt to summarize the experiences, readings that contribute to my view:
Number of startups in US. Size of tech companies. US tech scene companies ranking in world's largest organizations. Personal experience with those companies.
Size of China market. Number of Chinese tech billionaires. Number of massive Chinese tech companies, and their ranking in world's biggest companies/tech companies.
I don't think any hard analysis of the data is going to disprove my claim that world tech scene's are ranked: US, China (close second)
But if it did that would certainly be very interesting and high value information to me! :p :) xx
You also have generations of successful entrepreneurs staying in the US and teaching the next generation. Entrepreneurship in EU is mostly a joke, good entrepreneurs are hard to find.
And still, despite of this, people working in Europe seems to be much happier (even if they're poorer) than in the US.
My experiences with USA companies haven't been positive (very immature working culture of burning your employees) but I was always impressed at how the founders (some from the US, some immigrating from outside) managed to rake in a casual few millions at demo day just by saying they want to solve problems for a certain audience.
My company got 10k€ for 10% after fighting for months (some more money came later thanks to an angel I sourced), which were not even enough money to incorporate a company in the country I was.
Uh, what? Wrong, at least for Germany, which is littered with internationally successful small and medium-sized companies. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelstand .
Edit: Unless you were refering to the kind of "entrepreneur" that burns millions of USD in VC money over the span of a couple years, fails to create anything that anyone is willing to actually pay money for, but produces a lot of insightful blog posts in that time. Yes, we don't have a lot of those here yet, but we're working on it.
American entrepreneurial culture includes a strong dose of "It's OK to lose a million dollars a hundred times if the next one makes a billion dollars". Some think that's part of the reason the US is the country that generates the FAANG(M)s. They throw money at the wall and make big wins off of what sticks, if most of it doesn't.
It's arguable whether that's actually beneficial for the world (is there any of the MANGAFs you don't feel uncomfortable about?), but it certainly accomplishes something. If only making the US rich.
The gap between bombastic marketing (esp. in the VC/startup world, but also self-promo) and reality must be mentally devastating. US has a serious, nationwide medication problem.
Honesty has its upsides, the (financial) success of an "awesome amazing disruptive changing-the-world-again-this-week" mindset notwithstanding.
East coast seems to be more willing to tell you that your idea sucks, you suck, and your grandma sucks too. Unfortunately they're also way less likely to give your company a decently sized investment and valuation, so there's that.
If they seem to be grudgingly impressed, you are golden.
It's an eye opening experience.
Oh and it’s arguably unhealthy too.
Everything is crap. By default. Almost everything is "not bad", "fine", or at best "pretty good". You will almost never hear a French person describe anything as "awesome", "great", "fantastic" or "brilliant" (unless they’ve spent too much time in the US or work in startup la la land).
But crap also is "not bad", "fine", or sometimes even "pretty good".
So, how does one tell the difference?
Easy! It’s all in the contemptuous tone, annoyed dismissive look, sneering smirk and distracted disdainful wave of the hand!
What a great culture to be born in.
As another post said, ignore everything said, the only thing that matters is when their money hits your account.
Judge people by how many questions they have about the project rather than by what they say.
In a society programmed to respond "I'm good" to "How are you", you gotta stretch a bit. Maybe people like you will make the difference.
Best of luck in business.
https://imgur.com/gallery/8Afg58W
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6814615/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11357-020-00274-1
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31586989/
The story with kidneys is a bit stranger. Heavy rapamycin use seems to trip up 'normal' levels in insulin-related measurements, but this may have a lot more to do with the body being in a different state than the usual measurements are calibrated for, and doesn't seem to be causing diabetes in practice. (to paraphrase, perhaps badly: in many ways, rapamycin acts like artificial calorie restriction, which does strange things to insulin handling anyways.)
Also, I think most people vastly overestimate the level of competence of VCs and especially the degree of due diligence that they do. They are just as easily wooed by great presentations and the typical sales tricks. Cases in point: WeWork, Theranos, etc.
Remember when more than one millionaire funded Juicero? I remember.
This is one of the most important qualities you need if you are building a company.
Also when it comes to VCs, you gotta sell it. Or perish. And if you are gonna sell it, you better have some strategies. This is independent of how good your idea is. Maybe there will be an utopia where VCs consider things only on merit, but that is not the general reality right now.