News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:What I Didn't Say by bambax on Monday December 30, 2013 @05:04PM (#6987332)
Yes. The whole problem of every controversy involving YC rests on the fact that there's no control population.

The great majority of YC alumni are young white males. Every time the issue is raised of some minority or another being under represented, the answer is invariably that the process is completely fair and that the problem lies somewhere upstream.

That may be so. But wouldn't it be interesting to have some proportion of YC selected purely randomly and see what happens?

Re:What I Didn't Say by VLM on Monday December 30, 2013 @05:20PM (#6987427)
Well that just does it. Someone needs to found a YC funded startup to use standardized A/B testing to implement outsourced founder evaluation as a service. Keep your finances and negotiators and mentors in house, but think of this similar to an outsourced credit check, call it a ... credibility check or something.

To say it would be high risk / low volume / high cost service would be an understatement. And just defining success would be hard. But a hard problem is a good startup problem. And you could probably pivot into (or out of?) employee interviewing.

I guess you could bootstrap as some kind of outsourced HR lady to ask those annoying anxiety producing interview questions (you know the typical HR lady questions, like explain your worst attibute, or tell me about your greatest failure, or the classic when did you stop beating your wife? (kidding about the last one)). This is a legit business opportunity to help small biz do the "HR" questions at an interview and formalize the reporting of multiple candidates, and could pivot into this A/B testing of startup founders once some cash starts flowing.

I'm not kidding about this. Someone else with more spare time that me, take it and run.