Racism at a Venture Backed Startup

10 points by brlimie ↗ HN
When I was 21, I started a company with two Harvard business school students. We got into an accelerator. I worked as the technical cofounder for three months until we raised millions of dollars from top venture capitalists. During that time, the CEO had me work 100 hours a week building features for the company. On the first day of work, he called me a crackpot. I’m a black woman. He criticized my appearance and my voice. He went through my emails. He attacked me every day calling me crazy. If I hadn’t done good work for the company, we would have never raised millions. At the end of the three months, he and his partner tricked me into giving my shares away after realizing that he was going to lose control of the board. Has anyone experienced racism as a cofounder of a venture backed company? What did you do?

2 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 7.6 ms ] thread
Beyond racism some of these things happen a lot in startups. As a black person as well, i might have experienced this in a much lower stakes, for example, hired at a startup.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22091777 The behaviour sounds totally unacceptable. "Is there a way to do this without making it painfully apparent to him that he's being diluted to 10%?" Zuck.

(comment deleted)