Blitzscaling Diversity
When John Lilly brought up the question of diversity during the Sam Altman Q&A session, I was sort of expecting to hear a canned “There’s a lot of work to be done” response, so it was very refreshing to hear Sam’s straight-to-the-point response, “The Bay Area feels like it has gotten less diverse in its founding teams. Stanford is much more diverse than the people in this room. […] Diversity is not as hard as people make it seem.” I have closely been following the news of Y Combinator’s new office hours program for Black and Hispanic founders, and after hearing Sam’s response, I have a better understanding of why that program came into existence. Sam believes that diversity in the tech industry can be addressed now, with real, concrete actions. And I agree with that 100%.
Unfortunately, when the existing demographic figures released by large tech companies such as Facebook and Google are so bleak, they may paint the diversity problem as one that is unsolvable or at least too complex for any one individual to make a significant positive impact. Someone may look at the numbers and think, “There’s nothing I can do,” and then just give up, ignoring the issue altogether. But individuals can make a difference. There are very concrete steps that anyone can take now to address diversity. I even outlined a few of them at the end of an earlier Medium post on “Race and Gender Demographics Among Computer Science Majors at Stanford” (https://medium.com/@jcueto/race-and-gender-among-computer-science-majors-at-stanford-3824c4062e3a).
Sam mentioned that “Being quick and decisive correlates almost exactly with our successful founders.” This remark made me wonder: if Silicon Valley’s most successful companies are overwhelmingly founded by individuals who are quick and decisive, then why has the industry’s response to the diversity problem been so underwhelmingly slow and unsubstantial?
I’ve been thinking about this question, and I think that this speaks to a larger problem in the tech industry — that entrepreneurs and tech industry professionals for the most part are not applying the skills that have made them successful within the narrow scope of Silicon Valley’s private sector to other areas. Why are we not seeing the rapid prototyping of solutions to create a more inclusive workplace culture or to identify more women and minority candidates?
The founders that made the quick decisions on what features to have ready at launch may be slow to act when it comes to diversity. And then the issue does not get addressed until the company has grown so large that its frightfully homogeneous workforce makes for bad press. But by discarding diversity in the early stages, startups may be missing out on key opportunities to maximize their impact and growth. As Sam Altman pointed out, even in at the founding level, “Diversity is a clear win.”
This class is all about blitzscaling. I wonder — can we blitzscale diversity? Can we take the ideas that make it possible for a company to go from 1 employee to 100 employees and apply them to help a company go from hiring 1 woman to hiring 100 women?
