I remember reading that attractive women is discriminated against in certain situation, fundraising being one of those (men will probably do better in fundraising). Although in aggregate of everything in life, I wouldn't be surprised if they (attractive women) still fare better than ugly "anything".
Just shave it off. Bald heads have actually been shown to be a positive status indicator, probably because it takes serious confidence to pre-emptively shave off all your hair. Besides, I've always thought bald heads look way better than a head with patches of hair on it.
Marc Andreesen for example has a suboptimal head structure for baldness, however I'd venture to say straggles of the remaining hair would look worse.
Shaved head > BLding head IMO
Sure. I agree that shaving is better than the desperate attempt to cling to the last remaining follicles look.
However, shaving your head does not necessarily mean you're going to look "good", aka Jason Statham mode. A lot of people just look like eggs or aliens when they shave their heads.
Being a young man who's balding might seem depressing, but I can certainly think of something far more depressing. Propecia's labeling was recently updated to say that erectile dysfunction may be permanent, even if you stop taking the drug.
I have zero trouble believing that VCs are biased, but this is a terrible terrible study.
First, their study collected literally zero data about venture capitalists. Their first experiment looked at "pitch competitions", where people give speeches and/or submit business plans to a set of judges, and the judges pick a winner. This is distinct from events like Demo Day because there is no follow-up or due diligence: choices are made solely based on the speech/written plan. For obvious reasons, these "competitions" usually don't involve serious money. Picking three at random from Google, the first prizes were $1,000, $3,000, and "a meeting with Andreesen Horowitz", plus a bunch of discounts from Rackspace and so on.
The second and third experiments were even sillier. They literally recruited a bunch of random people on Mechanical Turk, asked them to watch a pitch video, and then asked them to judge which company they thought was more likely to succeed.
And even if you did a study showing that VCs invested in men more often, that wouldn't mean VCs are biased: you have to control for a bunch of other factors too. If, eg. startup employees preferred to work for companies run by attractive men, a perfectly unbiased VC would invest in attractive men more often, just because their companies were objectively doing better.
I'm not sure if there's any quicker and more effective way to draw a metric ton of scrutiny and skepticism on a study than to have the two words "mechanical turk" somewhere in your paper. Classic.
Called it called it motherfucking called it. From the 2013 post:
An archetypical case of chickenhawking occurs in The Office, wherein the clueless middle manager Michael Scott develops a (one-sided) mancrush on sociopathic temp worker, Ryan Howard. Ryan is visibly creeped out by Michael’s intense interest in his personal life, but uses Michael’s support and devotion to launch his career, catapulting far beyond him. Michael is, of course, oblivious to Ryan’s character flaws, but it’s actually those defects that enable him to have the juicy personal life. The chickenhawk’s protege needs to be psychopathic to do many of the despicable things for which the chickenhawk himself lacked the courage when he was young.
One thing that business chickenhawking is not, I’ll note, is gay. It seems to be an entirely heterosexual phenomenon that originated in the red-meat-for-breakfast, three-martini-lunch, dinner-at-a-strip-club MBA-culture crowd (that now dominates the Valley, through VC). The hawks tend to be middle-aged and married with children, or at least outwardly heterosexual. The chickens tend to be young “Game”-spitting psychopaths who, while insubstantial without money, would (once produced) be able to tear through party girls like a late-April tornado.
The motivation of the “hawk” is clear: it’s a midlife crisis phenomenon. Most of the marquee venture capitalists came up not through technology, but rather, through the MBA culture. They were aiming to be working on billion-dollar deals and crashing third-world currencies. Instead, they’re hawking techie cantrips out in California. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not what they wanted. In addition, they sacrificed their 20s to get there. Instead of partying and drugging and whoring, they were working 90-hour weeks, and too overweight to run “Game” thanks to all the takeout they ate. In middle age, they panic about having done their 20s all wrong, and look to cling to a young psychopath through whom they can live vicariously. The trade is this: the hawk ensures the chicken’s career and lines him up with an enormous income that he doesn’t have to work hard to get. In exchange, the chicken tosses back stories about weekend debauchery.
There are plenty of VC-funded founders who are obvious beneficiaries of chickenhawking, but I won’t give names.
Is there gay chickenhawking, or female chickenhawking? I have no idea. All of the examples that I have seen involve heterosexual men. However, I tend to doubt that it exists among gays or women. Chickenhawking is, to a large degree, based on the objectification of women– the idea that reckless, high-frequency sexuality (in addition to heavy drug use) in a man’s 20s is a “rite of passage” and that “tricking” women by pumping money (and “Game” advice) into some otherwise uninteresting loser, in order to prove that “women” are “whores”, is a worthy use of investors’ money. Chickenhawking is what you get when the corporate patriarchy of the 1950s meets the crass, status-obsessed, casual sex meat market of the 2010s.
Chickenhawking is a somewhat fascinating topic, although an ugly one. There’s a lot more I could say about it and its sociological ramifications, but it’s fundamentally depressing and I don’t see it worth it to double this article’s already large word count. I bring it up because it’s the Achilles’ heel of VC-istan. It’s massively embarrassing to the established players, and it’s one of the most powerful cultural variables in determining whether a young VC-istani’s career will succeed or fail.
I don’t think there’s a huge epidemic of chickenhawking in Silicon V...
The existing series is great but it's too good-natured to represent what Silicon Valley actually is. It represents investors as straightforwardly intelligent (one is even female!) and socially awkward rather than as callous manipulators who wreck careers and fund psychopaths to settle scores.
Just as Better Call Saul is a bit more light-hearted than Breaking Bad was (at least toward the end), there needs to be a hard-line honest SV series that focuses on the chicken-hawking and the unethical activity. The existing Silicon Valley is excellent, don't get me wrong. It's just that comedy isn't the best format for representing the tragedy of a national economy losing its ability to innovate due the defective personalities of a small number of laughably untalented individuals.
Take a look at "Halt and Catch Fire" which is now in season 2. It is set in the 1980's but follows the birth and death of early computer companies and pioneers.
Maybe attractive people (that is, clean cut, white attractive people) are more likely to come from upper middle class backgrounds, which means they already have substantial money supporting them their entire lives, so they not only fit in better, but are in much better positions to be starting companies & pitching VCs.
Time to start a fund that only invests in ugly people. "ButterFace Ventures' investment thesis entails value generation through arbitraging network effects across the lower end of the visual anthropomorphic spectrum"
If getting VC funding is considered partly as a sales job, then Bill Porter's story may be interesting. Consistency in 'top selling' requires qualities like determination & efforts. Natural born 'attractive people' generally are not inclined to put in that extra effort just because they, in their lives so far, probably didn't need to.
Wiki: Bill Porter born with cerebral palsy, was unable to gain employment, but refused to go on disability. Porter eventually convinced Watkins Incorporated to give him a door-to-door salesman job, selling its products on a seven-mile route in the Portland area. He eventually became the top seller for the company.
Porter also likely benefited from emotionally manipulating his clients to buy stuff out of a sense of charity. That works on the general public face to face, but not other parts of industry.
44 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 94.3 ms ] threadSo uh, they do worse, then.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150213-the-downsides-of-be...
To pull off the shaved head successfully you need to have a strong jaw and squarish face. Not all faces are created equal.
However, shaving your head does not necessarily mean you're going to look "good", aka Jason Statham mode. A lot of people just look like eggs or aliens when they shave their heads.
Being a young man who's balding might seem depressing, but I can certainly think of something far more depressing. Propecia's labeling was recently updated to say that erectile dysfunction may be permanent, even if you stop taking the drug.
First, their study collected literally zero data about venture capitalists. Their first experiment looked at "pitch competitions", where people give speeches and/or submit business plans to a set of judges, and the judges pick a winner. This is distinct from events like Demo Day because there is no follow-up or due diligence: choices are made solely based on the speech/written plan. For obvious reasons, these "competitions" usually don't involve serious money. Picking three at random from Google, the first prizes were $1,000, $3,000, and "a meeting with Andreesen Horowitz", plus a bunch of discounts from Rackspace and so on.
The second and third experiments were even sillier. They literally recruited a bunch of random people on Mechanical Turk, asked them to watch a pitch video, and then asked them to judge which company they thought was more likely to succeed.
And even if you did a study showing that VCs invested in men more often, that wouldn't mean VCs are biased: you have to control for a bunch of other factors too. If, eg. startup employees preferred to work for companies run by attractive men, a perfectly unbiased VC would invest in attractive men more often, just because their companies were objectively doing better.
Here's a link to the original paper: http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/Brooks%20Huan...
Ctrl+F "chickenhawking".
Called it called it motherfucking called it. From the 2013 post:
An archetypical case of chickenhawking occurs in The Office, wherein the clueless middle manager Michael Scott develops a (one-sided) mancrush on sociopathic temp worker, Ryan Howard. Ryan is visibly creeped out by Michael’s intense interest in his personal life, but uses Michael’s support and devotion to launch his career, catapulting far beyond him. Michael is, of course, oblivious to Ryan’s character flaws, but it’s actually those defects that enable him to have the juicy personal life. The chickenhawk’s protege needs to be psychopathic to do many of the despicable things for which the chickenhawk himself lacked the courage when he was young.
One thing that business chickenhawking is not, I’ll note, is gay. It seems to be an entirely heterosexual phenomenon that originated in the red-meat-for-breakfast, three-martini-lunch, dinner-at-a-strip-club MBA-culture crowd (that now dominates the Valley, through VC). The hawks tend to be middle-aged and married with children, or at least outwardly heterosexual. The chickens tend to be young “Game”-spitting psychopaths who, while insubstantial without money, would (once produced) be able to tear through party girls like a late-April tornado.
The motivation of the “hawk” is clear: it’s a midlife crisis phenomenon. Most of the marquee venture capitalists came up not through technology, but rather, through the MBA culture. They were aiming to be working on billion-dollar deals and crashing third-world currencies. Instead, they’re hawking techie cantrips out in California. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not what they wanted. In addition, they sacrificed their 20s to get there. Instead of partying and drugging and whoring, they were working 90-hour weeks, and too overweight to run “Game” thanks to all the takeout they ate. In middle age, they panic about having done their 20s all wrong, and look to cling to a young psychopath through whom they can live vicariously. The trade is this: the hawk ensures the chicken’s career and lines him up with an enormous income that he doesn’t have to work hard to get. In exchange, the chicken tosses back stories about weekend debauchery.
There are plenty of VC-funded founders who are obvious beneficiaries of chickenhawking, but I won’t give names.
Is there gay chickenhawking, or female chickenhawking? I have no idea. All of the examples that I have seen involve heterosexual men. However, I tend to doubt that it exists among gays or women. Chickenhawking is, to a large degree, based on the objectification of women– the idea that reckless, high-frequency sexuality (in addition to heavy drug use) in a man’s 20s is a “rite of passage” and that “tricking” women by pumping money (and “Game” advice) into some otherwise uninteresting loser, in order to prove that “women” are “whores”, is a worthy use of investors’ money. Chickenhawking is what you get when the corporate patriarchy of the 1950s meets the crass, status-obsessed, casual sex meat market of the 2010s.
Chickenhawking is a somewhat fascinating topic, although an ugly one. There’s a lot more I could say about it and its sociological ramifications, but it’s fundamentally depressing and I don’t see it worth it to double this article’s already large word count. I bring it up because it’s the Achilles’ heel of VC-istan. It’s massively embarrassing to the established players, and it’s one of the most powerful cultural variables in determining whether a young VC-istani’s career will succeed or fail.
I don’t think there’s a huge epidemic of chickenhawking in Silicon V...
The existing series is great but it's too good-natured to represent what Silicon Valley actually is. It represents investors as straightforwardly intelligent (one is even female!) and socially awkward rather than as callous manipulators who wreck careers and fund psychopaths to settle scores.
Just as Better Call Saul is a bit more light-hearted than Breaking Bad was (at least toward the end), there needs to be a hard-line honest SV series that focuses on the chicken-hawking and the unethical activity. The existing Silicon Valley is excellent, don't get me wrong. It's just that comedy isn't the best format for representing the tragedy of a national economy losing its ability to innovate due the defective personalities of a small number of laughably untalented individuals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series...
Definitely darker with back stabbing, manipulation, egos, fortunes won and lost, etc.
http://www.amc.com/shows/halt-and-catch-fire
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/relationships/11707591/Why-me...
Wiki: Bill Porter born with cerebral palsy, was unable to gain employment, but refused to go on disability. Porter eventually convinced Watkins Incorporated to give him a door-to-door salesman job, selling its products on a seven-mile route in the Portland area. He eventually became the top seller for the company.