Disclaimer: I grew up in the same town as he did, and I really don't like him very much.
I think he's taking the easy way out. It's easy to shame people because it's negative.
What I'd like to see him do is approach someone like Khan Academy and work with them to get more women & minorities learning the skills needed to work in high-tech. He should work on reforming the education system and get younger kids (of any race) knowing that it's OK to be smart and build stuff.
Going after board appointments and funding is probably the right way to build forward motion, though. There's a real capital acquisition problem for female and minority founders, which generally leads them to seek funding from regions less-experienced in tech investments and less plugged into the industry. Board members in the tech world are almost uniformly white guys, which is IMO a performance and innovation problem as much as an optics problem.
Improving diversity in STEM is a hard problem, because it begins with fetal and early childhood development and goes all the way through adulthood. But improving executive culture by increasing access for qualified persons can be done now.
Asians (East and South) are themselves underrepresented in board appointments, though, so I feel like they're actually part of the larger discussion.
One thing I've seen a couple of times is kind of an ethnic version of a reverse IPO, where minority-managed funds use pedigreed white guys to get them access to more desirable investments in exchange for discounted capital. There's a market failure in there based on a kind of ambiguously structural racism, but it's also gotten a couple of projects off the ground that otherwise might not have been able to get the right kind of term sheet.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 29.2 ms ] threadI think he's taking the easy way out. It's easy to shame people because it's negative.
What I'd like to see him do is approach someone like Khan Academy and work with them to get more women & minorities learning the skills needed to work in high-tech. He should work on reforming the education system and get younger kids (of any race) knowing that it's OK to be smart and build stuff.
Improving diversity in STEM is a hard problem, because it begins with fetal and early childhood development and goes all the way through adulthood. But improving executive culture by increasing access for qualified persons can be done now.
A lack of minorities in tech is secondary to this clown. He's a divisive self-promoter, and has been for decades.
One thing I've seen a couple of times is kind of an ethnic version of a reverse IPO, where minority-managed funds use pedigreed white guys to get them access to more desirable investments in exchange for discounted capital. There's a market failure in there based on a kind of ambiguously structural racism, but it's also gotten a couple of projects off the ground that otherwise might not have been able to get the right kind of term sheet.