Marc Benioff is one of Paul Ryan's big donors.... maybe he should start paying taxes with action instead of talking about it in self serving press interviews
chief diversity officers will make a corporation more diverse - that is their job. companies that do PR around their diversity are not doing it right - D&I is an industry competitive advantage. The most diverse organizations in the Fortune 1000 outperform their industry median financial returns by 35%. I agree the 'covert' manner works but the role of chief diversity officers is critical to the macroeconomic impact of globalizing and increasing market representation in our modern workforces.
Yes - I have an hour every Saturday I put aside for a weekly mentoring meeting. I have a lot of people reach out to me for advice, but as a founder I don't have time to meet every request. Instead, I have my Saturday afternoon hold each week for a call or coffee with people who reach out for guidance on hiring engineers, fundraising, starting a startup so there is a controlled time slot for mentoring meetings. Being a founder is really hard, we're a startup that is post revenue, post seed venture, post product market fit - but everything just seems more complex as we get bigger and there are more failures all the time with bigger consequences. These mentor meetings with founders just starting out give me a healthy pause to realize how far we've come and I feel better knowing I can help other new founders not feel so alone in the early stage process.
Will hacker news ever be able to stamp out misogyny in this community? I really hope so. Whenever an article gets posted about my startup (we're a women led team) the comments section get's real sexist really quickly - look forward to the day that finally changes.
The female founders conference is probably one of the best days of the year. I saw so many friends, women I know on the Internet, and I cried tears of joy three times during the speeches. It's hard to be what you can't see. Jessica and Kat have done an AMAZING job of putting female founders in front of us so we can look and say, hey you know, Kathryn Minshew did YC, I CAN DO IT TO.
Even though our startup didn't make it into the last YC batch, we're applying again. We love the community, we love the yc philosophy and approach to building products and we want to inspire other women just like us to apply.
Thank you for writing this letter and sharing what we all think, yesterday was incredible.
When I first moved to the valley (as a writer) I found I had so much in common with my new friends who were software engineers. Our personality traits were similar, and we wore hoodies and stayed up all night. I'm actually a brilliant math student but writing was the skill set I pursued. I'm really glad you wrote this -- there are so many fascinating parts of software engineering and bright minds whom I would love to learn more insights from!
I can relate to this article so much!! I'm in my late twenties and I sleep in like a teenager. The mornings are so painful for me. I also eat a lot of pasta.... so will try this new trick!
This isn't surprising. Uber is scaling so quickly and in the race to get more cars on the road it's avoiding proper driver background checks. These are important hires that should be more thorough, in each city. As a woman, this is my worst nightmare. I only ride lyft now because I know the drivers spend time with Lyft's staff and there is a vetting process.