In the fashion world there are a few photographers which almost openly do this, known to us mostly because they got so used to it they put their dick in a girls mouth unannounced and rather than suck it she talked to the press about it. [1]
An old colleague worked at an IT company thirty years or so ago and on the upper management floor, as he described it, the secretaries were all paid $200k/yr and up to be, essentially, professional hookers.
It is almost certainly a problem in some circles in the tech investors industry as well.
This is just a, very welcome, statement to tell investors that if they want to be such an investor they'll be locked out of YC forever and to tell founders that they can expect to be backed up when they report this.
[1] http://jezebel.com/i-felt-a-dick-pressing-into-my-face-terry...
I wrote it to stress that it's often group behavior, with the enablers and supporters that go along with it, and that you shouldn't think about it in terms of the 'lone distraught person.'
Just to be clear: I would never, ever, wish to be associated in any manner with a person or organization that operates on such a moral framework.
And just as technically it has been unacceptable in practice that won't change anything.
Sam Altman recently wrote[1], "Yes, it’s awful to hear the horror stories of wildly inappropriate behavior from investors to the entrepreneurs pitching them. (Unfortunately, stories like these are not super rare, but because there’s a big cost to going public with them, most never get told. My hope is that YC has enough leverage at this point to make it clear that this is unacceptable and we will not continue to work with investors who do it.)"
Today, Jessica Livingston writes, "Nearly all the investors we know are completely upstanding and professional, but even one inappropriate incident is too many."
Sam's statement implies that this behavior is more common than most folks would like to believe, and that Y Combinator is prepared to punish investors who engage in it. Jessica's statement subtly suggests that this behavior is less common, and that the vast majority of the investors Y Combinator works with are above engaging in it.
Which one is it?
The truth is probably somewhere in between, and it doesn't really matter. Both are explicitly stating that this behaviour is not tolerated and bears consequences.
Given the size of the investor pool and apparent prevalence of this behavior, the "nearly all the investors we know are completely upstanding and professional" statement is preposterous. There is simply no way for anybody to know all of the investors who are behaving badly, and the "even one inappropriate incident is too many" statement minimizes the regularity with which it is clear this behavior is occurring by subtly suggesting that these are isolated incidents.
Your suggestion that I somehow claimed most investors working with YC are harassing women is so absurd as to be comical. I don't know what your agenda is, and frankly don't care, but if you're going to try to distort what I wrote, I'm confident you can do a better job.
Is it possible that YC affiliates with higher-caliber VCs that are less prone to this behaviour?
Is it possible that "super rare" occurrences and "mostly unreported" occurrences are both very low numbers, to the point that YC can expect not to have any incidents?
I think the answers to both could be yes, but I don't know if anyone has numbers to support anything. Anecdotal evidence from often anonymous founders indicates that there is a problem, but I honestly don't know how out-of-control it is.
Either way, good on Sam and Jessica for addressing the issue.
My reading of Jessica's statement was that she was trying to make it clear that ycombinator wasn't accusing their customers without evidence.
Investors, in a real way, are Ycombinator's customers. Yes, sometimes your customers do bad things and you have to deal with it, sometimes dealing with it means making them no longer your customers. As much as possible, you want to set expectations about those sorts of situations ahead of time. But, you want to set those expectations in a way that don't make your innocent customers feel like they are being accused of anything.
When you are setting these sorts of expectations, it is easy to make it feel, to your customers, like you are assuming they are guilty without evidence, and that's not something you want your customers to feel. It is a mistake I've made myself. At one point, in response to one of my poorly-considered spammer-discouragement policies, a potential customer told me "we don't assume you are stupid; but we do assume you are a spammer." - you don't want to make your potential customers feel that way.
Second, Y Combinator could have prepared a code of conduct and sent it directly to the investors invited to participate in Demo Day. Demo Day is an invitation-only event and sending a code of conduct to invitees via email would have been a more effective way to reach the target audience than publishing a "Reminder to Investors" blog post which was clearly intended to be read by a broader audience.
I don't doubt that Y Combinator sincerely wants to quell this behavior, which is a good thing. But maximizing the good you do isn't always aligned with maximizing the PR you do.
"Dear feminists and rabble rousers, we recognize your power. We are on your team. We will genuflect in the direction of those things you consider holy. Please don't target us."
(For those unfamiliar with the term, "powertalk" is the in-group language of powerful people.)
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/11/the-gervais-principle-i...
YC is attempting to appease the internet bullies and avoid unwanted media attention (witness the Paul Graham sexism non-incident), not convey facts.
I know this doesn't mean anything because I'm just some random Internet stranger you don't actually know, but as someone who has stuck up for your comments in the past, I've been made to feel embarrassed by this one.
I will, of course, get over both it and, later, myself.
I don't expect this comment to persuade most people. However, I do believe the argument I'm making here, and I believe it can persuade some people. HN is a pretty good crowd. For example, over a few years, I've observed the conversation about HFT on here has shifted wildly - people occasionally cite my articles, so I think I've contributed.
I've been convinced by Robin Hanson and others that many of the public arguments made (particularly by powerful figures) are signalling of the form I describe in this post. I believe it's a good explanation of why such things are posted.
The fact of the matter is that on merit, Sam Altman's post on this topic is nonsense. It attacks a straw man and draws inference by juxtuposition. See my post criticizing it (which mostly takes the perspective that it's an honest argument):
http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/sam_altmans_sexism_st...
Sam Altman is a smart guy. I seriously doubt that he wrote something so nonsensical as a real argument. The best explanation I can come up with for why so many smart people are posting silly things is like this is signalling.
I'm sorry you dislike my comment, but it is an attempt to explain my views rather than simply an attempt to "stick a fork in people's eyes".
You can criticize the format and language of the comment all you want but implying things like "I think you're too smart to believe in BS like this" is condescending.
Some here have argued that it is useful because it makes things unambiguous and simple. I think the people who condone and/or engage this behavior (e.g. the kinds that are exemplified in the Forbes article) don't do so because they don't know any better or because "the rules of engagement" were not clearly stated in this regard.
So I think at least part of the motivation behind putting out a message like this explicitly, rather than including in, say, an investor legal agreement, has to be the desire to preempt allegations based on this point.
And it's exactly because the people engaging in this behavior know and disregard the "rules of engagement" that it's important to let them know that they will have more to lose.
And the way you do that is by stating it publicly, making YC itself accountable to the public and forcing them to actually act. That way, it's harder for such investors to convince themselves that when push comes to shove, YC wouldn't actually do anything.
It just makes (selfish) sense for Altman to try to appease them. It's bad for the industry - showing weakness will encourage more behavior of this type. (Think about why they are targeting a bunch of unlikeable low status geeks.) But it's good for YC to encourage them to target others
Similarly feminist ideology has made itself into the american public's view of the 'ideal', and anything that opposes it as unquestionably 'bad' -- to say there's no power in that sort of collective consciousness about any issue is ignorant. Just because it's not ideal yet absolutely does not mean it's not in power -- even powerful things take time to reach their full potential. When behaviors like this YC post talks about hadn't had any negative ramifications before, but now do, that's power.
Only to the extent that it doesn't get in the way of the hundred priorities ahead of global warming on the list. And all the pollution that isn't associated with a hot-button issue like global warming isn't even on the radar. Coal, for example, is something that's so damaging that there aren't even nut-job deniers arguing otherwise. Yet, during one of the debates of the 2012 election, Obama was arguing with Romney about which of them was more pro-coal.
> Similarly feminist ideology has made itself into the american public's view of the 'ideal', and anything that opposes it as unquestionably 'bad'
People are quite willing to embrace ideals but take little to no inconvenient action to work towards those ideals. Feminists have "power" in the same way environmentalists do. They can win a tiny victory here and there by making particularly egregious acts public,[1] but that's the extent of it.
[1] In 2012, environmentalists in Chicago were successful in shutting down Fisk and Crawford, two coal plants in Chicago that a study showed were costing the public $127 million per year in health costs: http://elpc.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/MidwestGeneration.... Only 598 more to go!
In any case, it is still an idealistic ideology, because then at what point does it declare/define 'victory'? That's never been made very clear, and despite the massive strides it has made in the past several decades, we're still talking about it like it's some totally unknown, underdog minority issue -- where are the goal posts? That's a rhetorical question because it's not supposed to have goal posts, just like how environmentalism doesn't -- it's an ideal, one of female rights that people should definitely strive for, but let's not make it out to be some sort of clear-cut political policy that has failed to be implemented, that just does the whole movement a disservice.
Not really. The federal executive branch is sort of unilaterally trying to do a bit using a legal framework not specifically designed for it, Congress has no clear commitment either way (the Republican Party holding a majority in the House and mostly opposing concrete action -- some members denying GW is real, some members opposing federal government action on environmental issues that might limit immediate business opportunity generally, and others just opposing any specific proposal related to global warming without necessarily having a clear ideological framework for general opposition), and some states are trying to do some things (and some states are trying to promote things directly opposed).
As a country, there's really nothing coherent going on.
The EPA does not exist to address global warming specifically. The claim I addressed was that "we as a country are trying to do something about global warming", not "we as a country are trying to do something about environmental issues more generally". Those are very different claims.
But in any case, global warming is an environmentalist issue, and the environmentalist ideology does have power -- whether or not the government has managed to take coherent action about it yet is not indicative of the significance of the issue within the nation, because like I said, it is not a simple issue to solve, and we are still doing more[0] than India and China to help it anyway. And like I said in my original comment, while there is obviously still much room for improvement, there's no need to undermine what we have done to fight it... we'd all be worse of if environmental progress completely stopped in the 60's. Still a shame that we haven't done more of course.
[0] actively regulating pollution is a form of action...
Leaving that aside, I think you'll find that a more careful look at the Pax Dickinson drama will reveal that it's not a particularly helpful example for this thread. There was a lot of stuff happening there.
The fact is that feminists have power in our society and the tech industry is relatively weak. We provide a great source of symbolic victories for them.
This is self-evidently false, so much so that I'm confused as to how you could have written this comment.
http://valleywag.gawker.com/business-insider-ctos-is-your-ne...
http://www.businessinsider.com/statement-2013-9
Just a bunch of tweets mocking feminists, liberals and Mel Gibson.
[edit: Tom I really don't understand how you think this disagrees with what I said above. How do these links imply any misconduct, or anything other than disagreeing with feminists? Are you asserting that opposing the welfare state or mocking Mel Gibson is what got him fired?]
You're talking about these tweets with rape jokes, tweets where he's an asshole toward poors, and "ironic" use of the N-word?
...
Are you high?
http://www.ranker.com/list/top-10-most-offensive-mel-gibson-...
As for the rest of it, if you want to argue that libertarianism rather than anti-feminism got him fired, square that viewpoint with Business Insider's statement about firing him. They didn't say he was too conservative, they said he disagreed with them on diversity.
Disagreeing with feminists and liberals is not misconduct. Neither is making fun of drunk celebrities.
Good call.