Words
Paul Graham, Valleywag, and The Fate of Every Woman in Technology Startups
“All my life I had to fight. I had to fight my daddy. I had to fight my uncles. I had to fight my brothers. A girl child ain’t safe in a family of men, but I ain’t never thought I’d have to fight in my own house!”
Sophia (as played by Oprah Winfrey), The Color Purple
Intro
There’s been some furor over recent comments made by Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, in Jessica Lessin’s “The Information.” Like all great journalists, it seems their publication has mastered the art of manufacturing controversy. Evan Solomon, Benjy Weinberger, and several others have written some great pieces offering insight. Lessin previously wrote for the Wall Street Journal, where Apple CEO Tim Cook recently wrote an op-ed on workplace equality.
Cook writes, “As we see it, embracing people’s individuality is a matter of basic human dignity and civil rights. It also turns out to be great for the creativity that drives our business. We’ve found that when people feel valued for who they are, they have the comfort and confidence to do the best work of their lives.”
I believe we need to address the cultural issues internally within the technology community, and we need more fair practices for the technology industry. We need to double down on “winners,” and broadcast men and women who don’t fit the profile of the stereotypical Silicon Valley founder. One role model can inspire a generation of young people to follow in that person’s footsteps, just as Hewlett and Packard inspired Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Gates and Jobs have inspired Zuck and Drew Houston, and those latter two continue to inspire the next generation of technology leaders.
To whom much is given, much is required
This whole thread is interesting, but I’ll reference a tweet from Aston Motes: “Forward-thinking technologists spend a lot of time justifying the status quo on social issues.”
I’m always curious to learn the perspective of people who know the person in question, as the insight, however biased, may be prescient. I know Aston did Y Combinator and publicly he seems to be calling on Paul to take more leadership on this issue. When Paul started Y Combinator he was a massive underdog. So were hackers in general. From his point of view, smart technical nerds were disenfranchised by MBA-types, now the balance of power has shifted. Would you fault him for continuing in his original mission to help fellow hackers, however homogenous the group may be?
Here’s a quote from the same interview demonstrating why he may still view himself and his band of Merry hackers as underdogs:
So he’s done perhaps more than anyone to make the game fair for startup founders in general, if also male hackers in specific, but he’s basically saying it’s not his fault or his problem — he didn’t force someone like a Zuck to learn to code, his point was Zuck, Drew Houston, and the Aston Motes of the world learned themselves for their own benefits. Based on a sample size of several hundred founders, perhaps he’s concluded the “ideal” founder is a hacker who began early.
The Hacker archetype is a 20-something, hoodie-wearing, white male. He grew up with enough economic privilege to be able to teach himself programming as a teen. He’s so consumed by computing that he no time for such trivia as social skills or a dress sense. His drive and ambition to “innovate”, “disrupt” and “change the world” leave him with little patience for rules or standards of conduct. His mantra is “Move Fast and Break Things” (especially other people’s things). He’s the Silicon Valley realization of two tropes rolled into one: the pioneer and the self-made man (who is almost always a man, and almost never self-made). Benjy Weinberger, “Hacking Prejudice in Silicon Valley.”
The platonic form of The Hacker is, of course, Mark Zuckerberg.
The Issues
There are three issues to be dissected here:
1. The role reversal of the non-technical founder and technical founder, and why this happened. (See: Lean Startup, Amazon Web Services, Ruby on Rails, node.js, and the decreasing cost to launch a software application).
2. The question of the young hacker as a “minority,” or oppressed group by virtue of the inequality, and if Paul is in fact helping all founders by making it better for the few. One could argue that Hacker News, his essays, his insight, and his startups add immense value to all people regardless of creed, orientation, ethnicity, gender, or nationality.
3. What next? It seems there are phenomenal organizations like girls who code, black girls code, Hackbright academy, code.org, Code2040, women2,0 and many others who are “criticizing by creating” the change that is necessary. It seems that it would be prudent to support these organizations, and if necessary, create new ones that address unmet needs.
However, I think there are two elephants in the room: lack of male empathy in the United States for women in the workplace — and technology startups are the norm, not an exception if the recent articles on sexism in the military, corporations, and even churches are any indication; not justification, but an important point. The second elephant is the dearth of any major “wins,” for technical women. Marissa Mayer in this regards is much more important than Sheryl Sandberg, specifically for the technology industry.
Outro
Mark Zuckerberg and “The Social Network,” has helped inspire a generation of coders. It’ll be important from a micro-level to address the acute issues on an operational basis; jokes, language, and behavior that make women uncomfortable in the workplace and other cultural issues we face that don’t create a friendly workplace. At a macro level it’s finding the winners and doubling down on them, and I think clearly that means venture capital and angel investors who have a women focus, as there is no “blind test,” in funding startups as there is for the Vienna Orchestra.
As Tim Cook wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal, “If our coworkers cannot be themselves in the workplace, they certainly cannot be their best selves. When that happens, we undermine people’s potential and deny ourselves and our society the full benefits of those individuals’ talents.”
It’s all — not just one individual’s — responsibility to make this happen.
Thanks to Aston, Teri, and Stewart for reading drafts of this post.
