Every time I've been asked to fill out a demographic survey at work, or during a job application, there's always an option to decline to provide the information. I would expect the same to be true here. If it weren't I don't see how they would win a court case to defend it.
> nothing VCs and founders like more than an annual discussion of their sexual preferences
Which is then reported to and retained by the state! Why the fuck would we maintain centralised databases of minorities?! What happens if Mississippi or Florida copy this precedent?
We've come a long way since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When it was debated, the great liberal Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey himself stood on the Senate floor during debate on the measure and declared: “I will start eating the pages” of the law if anyone can find a clause that calls for quotas, preferences or racial balance in jobs or education - https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-02-20-mn-34094-...
Of course, there are still no quotas. Just that, if you don't meet the non-existent quotas, that is evidence for the illegal discrimination prosecution against you.
It looks like this is just a reporting requirement and no quotas are mandated. I imagine the intent is to indirectly push companies to improve diversity through embarrassment by public numbers.
However, these are private individuals funding private ventures with private money, as far as I know, so why the government should be involved at all in that process other than taxation isn't clear to me.
This is one step in a long march. If you can remember this march, the next step is obvious.
The Civil Rights Act didn't directly ban using IQ tests for hiring/promotions, yet that's how the courts eventually interpreted it [1]. More recently, a test specifically made to evaluate teachers was declared racist and discriminatory [2], mostly based on disparate pass rates, but in part also on requiring some "cultural knowledge". Ironic, since imparting culture is a large part of a teacher's job - outside of STEM, nearly all knowledge is culturally biased (i.e. there is greater emphasis on US history in the US than in Poland).
I'm not really sure how you read those and think the shady activity is on the part of the government. You're missing the left foot of the march which is, "people discover an 'unbiased' assessment that gives them the results they want and then standardize on it." And then the right foot is the courts not being stupid and smacking it down for obvious racism.
I guarantee you if IQ wasn't a measure that affluent white privately educated men did well at it would have never been adopted as a measure.
Asians do better on IQ, Asians do better in college. What happened wasn't that we stopped caring about IQ or college, instead those who oppose them started treating Asians as white and saying they don't count.
So it seems like the people who change like the wind here aren't those in favor of merits.
>I guarantee you if IQ wasn't a measure white people did well at it would have never been adopted as a measure.
Even scientists who say the black-white IQ gap is not in part due to genetic factors agree that it does measure intelligence to some extent: that is, people with higher intelligence do better on average on IQ tests, even if each IQ point is not a numeral unit adding to your intelligence 'score.' All this said, why would you assume that people using this tests only are doing so for biased reasons?
it's still not clear what IQ measures, in the grand scheme of things. and i think this is the bulk of its problem. what sort of intelligence? relevant for what? unfortunately, the laziest among us who see these standardize tests are easy way to do their job embraced it wholeheartedly and have deployed it wickedly. at what point should an IQ test be taken? and what's its expiry date? mr. cipolla wrote his seminal basic laws of human stupidity[0] some 70 years after IQ tests were introduced. perhaps not important in the grand scheme of things but one wonders why there's not even as much as a mere allusion.
I'll invoke Godwin given the obvious connection, the Jews "only" had to wear stars. Similar situations happen again, and again, and again throughout history, and those that forget history...
More direct comparison would be Jews were excluded from Colleges for the same reason Asians are excluded today
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universities_and_antisemitism
Fears of overrepresentation. Doing too well on the grading standards
If I say "your race/gender distribution should at least vaguely resemble that of the general population" is that a quota?
Is it a quota if I say a fair coin should yield heads at least 49% of the time? What about if I demand that a six-sided die have a normal distribution and not be weighted for cheating purposes?
Thank you! We need to be training female nurses and teachers to be truck drivers and male truck drivers to be teachers. Only then will we have a fair society.
I'll assume you're not arguing against letting women be nurses/teachers, and are instead arguing that we need more male nurses and teachers.
In which case, yeah? Gender bias in medicine has proven negative effects both for patients and physicians. If we do everything right to knock down barriers, we should eventually see more male nurses and more male teachers. Why shouldn't we? What's wrong with a man being a nurse?
So is this an argument against fairness? Are you saying that it's OK for me to discriminate against you based on your race or gender, since those are parts of who you are as a "whole person"? Or do parts of you not count as the whole person? Should I be able to discriminate against you based on any disabilities you have through no fault of your own, since those are parts of your "whole person" and can limit your job performance?
If a large pool of people like "we have a thousand employees" has a demographic balance that is wildly different from gen pop you at least need a good explanation for how it got that way. There are plenty of ways to explain it, but it's unreasonable to just assume "it's fine, I'm sure nothing bad happened" on faith.
‘If a large pool of people like "we have a thousand employees" has a demographic balance that is wildly different from gen pop you at least need a good explanation for how it got that way.‘
This is a control freak / bureaucrat / authoritarian dream. Endless work to keep up with ever moving targets, and since everyone will be out of compliance at various times it means it’s ripe for selective enforcement.
Also, do you believe that different cultures/groups of people may have different preferences? Is it crazy to think that may affect their career choices and preferences? Should the state then mandate them to enter a profession at a higher rate?
This is something you'd at least do a little research to demonstrate instead of just expecting people to accept, on faith, that "our company is 5% female because of ladies' preferences", or things of that nature.
I said "wildly different" on purpose, we're not talking about "your workforce is 45% female instead of 47% female" here. It really is big differences - like if you pull up a MS diversity report they're around 30% female when the US population is ~50% female. This is a big discrepancy. You can come up with lots of plausible explanations but if you want to be believed, shouldn't you have a little data? Or should we just shrug off the potential of massive inequality because it doesn't personally affect us as far as we know?
What I see is a lot of people terrified of simply releasing the data because the data will look, in many cases, very bad. I think if people want to advocate against any sort of intervention - perfectly reasonable to not want intervention - they should be able to support their case with data.
That makes no sense. You don't just hire people out of the whole general population, you hire people with skills you need. If a tech startup hires engineers those will be mostly male. Not because the startup is sexist, but because there are more male engineers around.
The united states has a population of ~332 million as of 2021 numbers. You're saying that a software startup's selection of available engineers is so limited that it's not possible to approach general population demographics?
In 2021 alone, over 100k people graduated with bachelor's degrees in computer science. That sample size is too small to approach general population demographics?
Okay, let's lower the bar. Why doesn't your staffing at least approximate the demographics of computer science graduates? Or even narrowing it further - let's say your startup needs the absolute best - people with PhDs in computer science? (According to the 2021 numbers, ~2500 people and 25% female)
You can argue over what the numbers should look like and how we should achieve those numbers but it's a cop-out to claim it's impossible or "too hard" due to a limited supply of hires.
> You're saying that a software startup's selection of available engineers is so limited that it's not possible to approach general population demographics?
Yes, because engineers don't follow general population demographics.
> In 2021 alone, over 100k people graduated with bachelor's degrees in computer science. That sample size is too small to approach general population demographics?
Yes. Again, that sample too does not follow population demographics.
> Okay, let's lower the bar. Why doesn't your staffing at least approximate the demographics of computer science graduates?
It does. Which is why I said "mostly" (but not exclusively) male. However that is not a "lowered bar", that is the only possible way things can work out. Unless you argue that a number of male engineers should be systematically doomed to never be hired in the name of equality, because otherwise we cannot reach your perfect demographic distribution.
The problem is selective enforcement.
"your race/gender distribution should at least vaguely resemble that of the general population"
Does this get applied to the NBA, benching the majority black teams and getting some 5'6 Asian or Hispanic males onto the court who Represent America?
Generals get promoted for having more women or people of color promoted under their command. When the casualty reports come in and white men are dying on the battlefield as disproportionate rate, double their demographics do we have generals saying "your race and gender distribution should at least vaguely resemble that of the general population" so we aren't going to send white men on the front lines anymore, we're going to get some diverse front line soldiers until our casualty rates look like America?
Explicit quotas would probably be preferable to the current state of affairs. The fact that they're implicit means that, as soon as you bring them up, someone can play dumb and claim that they don't exist. It precludes having an honest discussion or even knowledge of how distorting the quotas are.
Implicit quotas are preferable; if it really matters someone can ignore them. People try strategies of "we'll force the situation to be broken and then they'll have to fix it!" every so often in politics. It often doesn't work with terrible consequences. People lack the imagination to look at a bad situation and easily come to a consensus about how to improve it.
It is much better to enforce things by social expectation. Then enforcement measures can be changed piecemeal.
If the startup is tiny (less than 10) then I would give the benefit of the doubt to the company. At that size, it’s mostly tapping your network and not having any full time recruiters who can prioritize things other than “I need somebody, anybody! Help!”
Depends on the proportion of women in the hiring pool you're drawing from. If you have 5 employees and your hiring pool is 80% men, then in an entirely unbiased world, you'd still expect a third of 5-employee startups to have no women.
While you might have a point, it seems that the bill only applies to the founding team anyway. And it's not just about race and gender, but also sexual orientation. So when you're raising investment, you need to disclose your sexual orientation to your investors. I'm sure you'll be able to "decline to say," but what kind of perverse (no pun intended) incentives will this create? Will you get more investment if you say you're gay? Will you need to prove it?
My last job was quite diverse - I don't know the exact numbers, but there were definitely a lot of women (technical staff too! scientists etc.).
However, literally all of them were in the "drug development" part of the company (lab work, biochemistry, biology, etc - I don't know the specifics of what they do because I've no idea about biology/chemistry).
There were zero women in ML/tech departments.
Discrimination? Clearly the company had a culture that was open to hiring women.
But the fact is, women programmers (i.e. not biologists that learn programming as they need to) are simply so rare it's unrealistic to expect startups to hire them.
This might be true for big companies. If you are small you can very easily end up with all men with no bias at all because there are more men than women in the tech labor pool.
A 5 or 10 person company with all men is easily chance. A 100 person company with all men is probably either intentionally discriminating or doing something that really turns off female applicants.
So a New York VC with one Californian investment would be required under California law to report on their Massachusetts-based founders? Or is it just in respect of their Californian nexus?
Also, why wouldn’t they specify a penalty? Why punt that to California’s already-burdened courts?
> Also, why wouldn’t they specify a penalty? Why punt that to California’s already-burdened courts?
The current law appears to be about collecting data to help understand the state of the industry and its trends. They’re probably hoping that enough data will come in without a stink that they don’t have to chase down any holdouts at all.
Explicitly specifying a penalty means more political negotiating and more analysis about what statutory penalty structure suits the different potential offenders. If you’re hoping you don’t have to actively enforce the law at all, you can skip that.
That's how law enforcement generally works in the US, yes. We accept the risk that some innocent people will be punished in order to enforce law, and put safeguards in place to try and prevent it. You can disagree with that of course.
Sure, but victimhood is selectively enforced.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/07/07...
There are protected groups and unprotected groups. When people believe that sexism is only something men do and racism is only something white people do, you're going to get unequal treatment under the law. Law not being as blind as people wish. It turns into the law being applied differently when it comes to holding classified documents depending on if you have a (D) or an (R) after your name
I don't like how diversity seems to default to racial diversity. The diversity I like is more perspective based. Someone willing to challenge my assumptions, constraints, and train of thought, not just a different color of skin.
Yes, and we don't have much diversity of thought. There is another story on the frontpage now - preaching the benefits of technological conformism by saying everyone should use the popular and boring technology of the day.
Generally, the whole profession is degrading to a state where any kind of innovation is shunned upon and the only "innovation" is rehashing the same concepts in a slightly different and slightly more complicated way.
There are not too many "let's build a website in D" companies or anything which is not utterly boring, inoffensive, bland and lacking any creativity.
I don't agree, I feel you misrepresented the tone and the meaning by twisting it into:
> preaching the benefits of technological conformism by saying everyone should use the popular and boring technology of the day.
This is a disingenuous way to describe the article.
The article is just saying that when you're writing important programs that matter for your business, use the most stable technology that has the features you need. Because it is stable, and has the most community resources. In other words, don't gamble your business on risky technology choices just because they're new.
That's difficult to argue with IMO, especially when the author explicitly endorses experimenting with personal projects.
One can both be for equality and recognize this mandate sets the stage for flagrant corruption.
If there were a mandate to invest in companies with founders who had certain attributes, it would be the most literal possible tokenization of those people, as their companies would be traded among investors as compliance credits. Let me be the first to set up a superpac hedge fund that runs a secondary over the counter market for these shares that takes institutional money in VC firms and puts it into an opaque portfolio of these companies in exchange for a compliance blessing. It's so brilliant, the only real problem I have is what to name the polycule.
Given the investors need exposure to them for their portfolio compliance, it creates the incentive within the company to actually do nothing from a growth and product perspective, and just loot whatever investment money investors were trying to throw at them to achieve their own mandates.
Not only would it reinforce prejudices against people with said attributes because they have been set up to fail and actively rewarded for being corrupt with the investor money, it creates a layer of politically controlled front companies who effectively tax venture portfolios without any accountability for where the money goes. The data is all you need to create a de-facto private tax system with a political party as the beneficiary. This scheme has nothing to do with diversity.
Perhaps I am missing something, but this magic entity you seek to form — why would it be a superPAC? What utility would that bring you in this circumstance?
Because as the main shareholder for the portfolio, the PAC would have the board seats to install the CEO and executives in each company, who could be trusted to return the money to the PAC and its causes in exchange for skimming the lucre and keeping the scheme going. It's a patronage operation.
I'm mainly missing why investors would go for the corrupt minority fake company shabang, when they could, y'know, write the same check to some minority founders who maybe didn't meet their usual selection heuristics[1] but seemed to have built a decent MVP in a decent market and have a bit of knowhow and lot of drive to grow it.
[1]young men, brand name college, already based near Sand Hill Road, nerdy humour, not the sort of person that would shoot hoops... all the important stuff
young women, brand name college, already based near Sand Hill Road, nerdy humour, not the sort of person that would shoot hoops... all the important stuff
This hypothetical only holds true if so-called “tokenized” founders don’t have an inherit desire to succeed on the same level as any other founder.
I really can’t think of any founder I’ve ever met who would not take a pot of money because of certain strings attached (though I’ve heard of extremely privileged founders who can say yes/no based on track record or reputation). In fact, I see founders contort their vision every which way to meet specific investment criteria.
Similarly, I don’t know any VC who at least wouldn’t try to be in compliance AND find good investments. Maybe they would try and then default to the perspective you’ve described but I think it’s much more likely they would try to cook the stats (given the overall lack of accountability in the space) before propping up some “token” founder-in-name-only (again, an assumption I’d challenge).
Because we have a lot of people who are oppressed based on their race. The real question is why is America so obsessed with oppressing people based on race?
While no quotas are mentioned, it does seem like this is the tip of a very slippery slope.
This is clearly well-intentioned but at the same time feels like a bad idea.
I have a startup. The team is 2 people including myself. If I have a friend in CA offer to invest, do I have to subject myself to reporting that my cofounder is LGBTTTQQIAP+? Or that we're both left handed? Or that we're both WASP as hell? Where does it end?
Understandable in this context that comments would be very negative about looking at statistics relating to race, gender, national origin, etc. of how investors place money. After all, the start-up world is economics at its most meritocratic (is that a word? well it should be). And any constraints of this kind on how investors place their money is gonna have some downsides, many of which are discussed here, if at times in a somewhat overwrought way. Plus, yes, we've seen pretty nasty issues with affirmative action in other contexts, which we wouldn't want to replicate here.
But, alas! the cat is out of the bag as it were. Because there's more than one side to an issue like this. So, when leading VCs and investors determined, companies run by Black women weren't getting very much startup funding at all, they lined up to support The Fearless Fund, a significant, though not exactly huge, capital pool for early funding of ventures started by women of color, which they describe as "bridging the gap" by which they mean, the extremely small number of women of color who ever get funding. Yes, probably it's for what they conceive to be PR reasons, but whatever, I would have thought that the goal being equality of opportunity, and there being no law specifically covering it, that would leave it to the realm of politics and bloviating. But not so!
Encourged by the current antipathy of our Supreme Court for anything resembling affirmative action, a conservative legal group has sued, claiming that racial preference of this kind is prohibited. As a former lawyer I would have asked, just what law prohibits discrimination in investing? Because most lawyers up to recently thought, it wasn't covered. But the clever conservative lawyers point to 42 USC 1981, a Reconstruction alway that asserts, all people are entitled to the same right to contract as White people have. (How they talked back then)
Now, say, this lawsuit against The Fearless Fund succeeds. Well, hmm, that would mean every VC investment decision is subject to section 1981, and yes, it would give non-white people the right to sue if they had evidence of bias in the funding decision. In other words, if it actually succeeds, this lawsuit charging discrimination against The Fearless fund, a rather extreme effort to prohibit totally voluntary efforts by some big time investors to remediate a pretty obvious problem of a minority group's lack of access to capital, wow! suddenly,a pretty major new legal issue for VCs and other private capital enterprises to deal with, in every investment decision they make. And if ever there was a deep pocket for lawyers to pursue...I drop a veil over the scene.
So, just to add this to the discussion, this conservative attack on The Fearless Fund seems to me a far more dangerous to VCs than this California law. Because, yes, folks, there are issues with discrimination in how investment firms hand out capital. I've observed some nasty instances first hand. Please don't live in a dream world where you think it doesn't happen. (I personally think, due to the extreme polarization of most people's beliefs on this subject, it's rather less than most liberals think and rather more than most conservatives do.) Nevertheless from my perspective, another set of legal rights is pretty clearly not the best way to address it.
Because, if The Fearless Fund can be challenged as discriminatory, so can any other fund, that's how it works (well more or less, anyway - nobody who knows anything about it would accuse our legal system of being excessively consistent.) And that's a far greater threat to investors than a somewhat voluntary reporting requirement for VCs.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadWhich is then reported to and retained by the state! Why the fuck would we maintain centralised databases of minorities?! What happens if Mississippi or Florida copy this precedent?
Of course, there are still no quotas. Just that, if you don't meet the non-existent quotas, that is evidence for the illegal discrimination prosecution against you.
However, these are private individuals funding private ventures with private money, as far as I know, so why the government should be involved at all in that process other than taxation isn't clear to me.
The Civil Rights Act didn't directly ban using IQ tests for hiring/promotions, yet that's how the courts eventually interpreted it [1]. More recently, a test specifically made to evaluate teachers was declared racist and discriminatory [2], mostly based on disparate pass rates, but in part also on requiring some "cultural knowledge". Ironic, since imparting culture is a large part of a teacher's job - outside of STEM, nearly all knowledge is culturally biased (i.e. there is greater emphasis on US history in the US than in Poland).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20220714122944/https://www.wsj.c...
I guarantee you if IQ wasn't a measure that affluent white privately educated men did well at it would have never been adopted as a measure.
So it seems like the people who change like the wind here aren't those in favor of merits.
Even scientists who say the black-white IQ gap is not in part due to genetic factors agree that it does measure intelligence to some extent: that is, people with higher intelligence do better on average on IQ tests, even if each IQ point is not a numeral unit adding to your intelligence 'score.' All this said, why would you assume that people using this tests only are doing so for biased reasons?
[0]: http://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidit...
[0]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-017-0001-5
[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39946-9
There are no explicit quotas. Every time someone is held out as not being diverse enough, there is a quota implied.
Is it a quota if I say a fair coin should yield heads at least 49% of the time? What about if I demand that a six-sided die have a normal distribution and not be weighted for cheating purposes?
In which case, yeah? Gender bias in medicine has proven negative effects both for patients and physicians. If we do everything right to knock down barriers, we should eventually see more male nurses and more male teachers. Why shouldn't we? What's wrong with a man being a nurse?
If a large pool of people like "we have a thousand employees" has a demographic balance that is wildly different from gen pop you at least need a good explanation for how it got that way. There are plenty of ways to explain it, but it's unreasonable to just assume "it's fine, I'm sure nothing bad happened" on faith.
This is a control freak / bureaucrat / authoritarian dream. Endless work to keep up with ever moving targets, and since everyone will be out of compliance at various times it means it’s ripe for selective enforcement.
Also, do you believe that different cultures/groups of people may have different preferences? Is it crazy to think that may affect their career choices and preferences? Should the state then mandate them to enter a profession at a higher rate?
I said "wildly different" on purpose, we're not talking about "your workforce is 45% female instead of 47% female" here. It really is big differences - like if you pull up a MS diversity report they're around 30% female when the US population is ~50% female. This is a big discrepancy. You can come up with lots of plausible explanations but if you want to be believed, shouldn't you have a little data? Or should we just shrug off the potential of massive inequality because it doesn't personally affect us as far as we know?
What I see is a lot of people terrified of simply releasing the data because the data will look, in many cases, very bad. I think if people want to advocate against any sort of intervention - perfectly reasonable to not want intervention - they should be able to support their case with data.
Men live shorter lives than women do that must mean there’s systemic discrimination against men.
In 2021 alone, over 100k people graduated with bachelor's degrees in computer science. That sample size is too small to approach general population demographics?
Okay, let's lower the bar. Why doesn't your staffing at least approximate the demographics of computer science graduates? Or even narrowing it further - let's say your startup needs the absolute best - people with PhDs in computer science? (According to the 2021 numbers, ~2500 people and 25% female)
You can argue over what the numbers should look like and how we should achieve those numbers but it's a cop-out to claim it's impossible or "too hard" due to a limited supply of hires.
Yes, because engineers don't follow general population demographics.
> In 2021 alone, over 100k people graduated with bachelor's degrees in computer science. That sample size is too small to approach general population demographics?
Yes. Again, that sample too does not follow population demographics.
> Okay, let's lower the bar. Why doesn't your staffing at least approximate the demographics of computer science graduates?
It does. Which is why I said "mostly" (but not exclusively) male. However that is not a "lowered bar", that is the only possible way things can work out. Unless you argue that a number of male engineers should be systematically doomed to never be hired in the name of equality, because otherwise we cannot reach your perfect demographic distribution.
92% of the 5840 occupational deaths in 2006 were men. Why isn't it closer to 50%?
Generals get promoted for having more women or people of color promoted under their command. When the casualty reports come in and white men are dying on the battlefield as disproportionate rate, double their demographics do we have generals saying "your race and gender distribution should at least vaguely resemble that of the general population" so we aren't going to send white men on the front lines anymore, we're going to get some diverse front line soldiers until our casualty rates look like America?
It is much better to enforce things by social expectation. Then enforcement measures can be changed piecemeal.
Until you make enemies with a public prosecutor or someone politically well-connected. Then all the legal ambiguity is turned against you.
My last job was quite diverse - I don't know the exact numbers, but there were definitely a lot of women (technical staff too! scientists etc.).
However, literally all of them were in the "drug development" part of the company (lab work, biochemistry, biology, etc - I don't know the specifics of what they do because I've no idea about biology/chemistry).
There were zero women in ML/tech departments.
Discrimination? Clearly the company had a culture that was open to hiring women.
But the fact is, women programmers (i.e. not biologists that learn programming as they need to) are simply so rare it's unrealistic to expect startups to hire them.
A 5 or 10 person company with all men is easily chance. A 100 person company with all men is probably either intentionally discriminating or doing something that really turns off female applicants.
There are, at least in US immigration. It's just not something Americans need to deal with, so it goes under the radar.
> (ii) No adverse action will be taken against the founding team member if they decline to participate in the survey.
> (iii) The aggregate data collected for each demographic category will be reported to the department.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
Also, why wouldn’t they specify a penalty? Why punt that to California’s already-burdened courts?
The current law appears to be about collecting data to help understand the state of the industry and its trends. They’re probably hoping that enough data will come in without a stink that they don’t have to chase down any holdouts at all.
Explicitly specifying a penalty means more political negotiating and more analysis about what statutory penalty structure suits the different potential offenders. If you’re hoping you don’t have to actively enforce the law at all, you can skip that.
how do you balance one with another?
just take the overreach as cost of doing good deeds improving real victims lives?
I don’t need to say anything more about them given the context of this comment
You are describing many people I've met, not one of them would be counted in these diversity reports.
Generally, the whole profession is degrading to a state where any kind of innovation is shunned upon and the only "innovation" is rehashing the same concepts in a slightly different and slightly more complicated way.
There are not too many "let's build a website in D" companies or anything which is not utterly boring, inoffensive, bland and lacking any creativity.
> preaching the benefits of technological conformism by saying everyone should use the popular and boring technology of the day.
This is a disingenuous way to describe the article.
The article is just saying that when you're writing important programs that matter for your business, use the most stable technology that has the features you need. Because it is stable, and has the most community resources. In other words, don't gamble your business on risky technology choices just because they're new.
That's difficult to argue with IMO, especially when the author explicitly endorses experimenting with personal projects.
Innovation == using new tech to solve problem and create value.
If there were a mandate to invest in companies with founders who had certain attributes, it would be the most literal possible tokenization of those people, as their companies would be traded among investors as compliance credits. Let me be the first to set up a superpac hedge fund that runs a secondary over the counter market for these shares that takes institutional money in VC firms and puts it into an opaque portfolio of these companies in exchange for a compliance blessing. It's so brilliant, the only real problem I have is what to name the polycule.
Given the investors need exposure to them for their portfolio compliance, it creates the incentive within the company to actually do nothing from a growth and product perspective, and just loot whatever investment money investors were trying to throw at them to achieve their own mandates.
Not only would it reinforce prejudices against people with said attributes because they have been set up to fail and actively rewarded for being corrupt with the investor money, it creates a layer of politically controlled front companies who effectively tax venture portfolios without any accountability for where the money goes. The data is all you need to create a de-facto private tax system with a political party as the beneficiary. This scheme has nothing to do with diversity.
[1]young men, brand name college, already based near Sand Hill Road, nerdy humour, not the sort of person that would shoot hoops... all the important stuff
young women, brand name college, already based near Sand Hill Road, nerdy humour, not the sort of person that would shoot hoops... all the important stuff
I really can’t think of any founder I’ve ever met who would not take a pot of money because of certain strings attached (though I’ve heard of extremely privileged founders who can say yes/no based on track record or reputation). In fact, I see founders contort their vision every which way to meet specific investment criteria.
Similarly, I don’t know any VC who at least wouldn’t try to be in compliance AND find good investments. Maybe they would try and then default to the perspective you’ve described but I think it’s much more likely they would try to cook the stats (given the overall lack of accountability in the space) before propping up some “token” founder-in-name-only (again, an assumption I’d challenge).
Edited for spelling.
This is clearly well-intentioned but at the same time feels like a bad idea.
I have a startup. The team is 2 people including myself. If I have a friend in CA offer to invest, do I have to subject myself to reporting that my cofounder is LGBTTTQQIAP+? Or that we're both left handed? Or that we're both WASP as hell? Where does it end?
Is it though?
"You shall know a tree by its fruits."
If the result was shit, especially after repeated attempts... the intention was shit.
But, alas! the cat is out of the bag as it were. Because there's more than one side to an issue like this. So, when leading VCs and investors determined, companies run by Black women weren't getting very much startup funding at all, they lined up to support The Fearless Fund, a significant, though not exactly huge, capital pool for early funding of ventures started by women of color, which they describe as "bridging the gap" by which they mean, the extremely small number of women of color who ever get funding. Yes, probably it's for what they conceive to be PR reasons, but whatever, I would have thought that the goal being equality of opportunity, and there being no law specifically covering it, that would leave it to the realm of politics and bloviating. But not so!
Encourged by the current antipathy of our Supreme Court for anything resembling affirmative action, a conservative legal group has sued, claiming that racial preference of this kind is prohibited. As a former lawyer I would have asked, just what law prohibits discrimination in investing? Because most lawyers up to recently thought, it wasn't covered. But the clever conservative lawyers point to 42 USC 1981, a Reconstruction alway that asserts, all people are entitled to the same right to contract as White people have. (How they talked back then)
Now, say, this lawsuit against The Fearless Fund succeeds. Well, hmm, that would mean every VC investment decision is subject to section 1981, and yes, it would give non-white people the right to sue if they had evidence of bias in the funding decision. In other words, if it actually succeeds, this lawsuit charging discrimination against The Fearless fund, a rather extreme effort to prohibit totally voluntary efforts by some big time investors to remediate a pretty obvious problem of a minority group's lack of access to capital, wow! suddenly,a pretty major new legal issue for VCs and other private capital enterprises to deal with, in every investment decision they make. And if ever there was a deep pocket for lawyers to pursue...I drop a veil over the scene.
So, just to add this to the discussion, this conservative attack on The Fearless Fund seems to me a far more dangerous to VCs than this California law. Because, yes, folks, there are issues with discrimination in how investment firms hand out capital. I've observed some nasty instances first hand. Please don't live in a dream world where you think it doesn't happen. (I personally think, due to the extreme polarization of most people's beliefs on this subject, it's rather less than most liberals think and rather more than most conservatives do.) Nevertheless from my perspective, another set of legal rights is pretty clearly not the best way to address it.
Because, if The Fearless Fund can be challenged as discriminatory, so can any other fund, that's how it works (well more or less, anyway - nobody who knows anything about it would accuse our legal system of being excessively consistent.) And that's a far greater threat to investors than a somewhat voluntary reporting requirement for VCs.