I'm delighted that this essay exists. Jessica helped out in so many different ways during the early days of Stripe that I can barely remember half of them.
(John and I became interested in startups in large part as a result of reading Founders at Work. And then, because John and I were immigrants without credit history, our residence of the Bay Area started with Jessica helping to convince a landlord to rent a place to us. Once the company was underway, whenever John and I had a major decision to make, figuring things out generally involved biking over to Jessica's and PG's place for an invariably clarifying discussion.
I recall one particular decision that John and I had been debating for weeks. We just couldn't decide. Jessica's response, when asked, was immediate and adamant. We were surprised but trusted her. John and I often remark at how differently (and, I'm confident, worse) things would have ended up had Jessica not convinced us to make that call.)
I think Jessica should have become the president of YC. Then this essay won't be needed as her achievements will be very visible. Imagine a woman leading the most prestigious VC company or incubator. She will be seen as a role model by many women who wants to get into tech. Instead, she just fades into the background.
Can you please share the story that led to weeks of debates but was so clear to Jessica? It is very interesting to see how insights or intuition can help make decisions.
I remember thinking to myself in summer of 2008, "YC would cease to exist if it weren't for Jessica." You could just tell she was the glue that held the whole thing together and kept things on track.
Take note world. Really happy to see this essay published.
All the great teams I've worked on had the "family-like" property Paul Graham talks about here.
The first really great company I worked at was explicit about being family-oriented; they'd bring everyone's family to the office and cook dinners, had Christmas at the founders house, that sort of thing.
I left that company and joined a different sort of family, which was more of a bar-fighting sort of family but still had that vibe.
Then I started my first company, which cratered, and which did not have that family feel at all, despite it being largely a group of people who were friends in real life.
I felt like we got part of the way there with Matasano (at least in the Chicago office, which was our largest), but not all of the way. It's tricky to pull off!
I really only want to work at companies that have that feel, for the rest of my career. It makes a huge difference. Also: if Jessica Livingston can generate that kind of culture on demand, that's definitely a reason to be impressed by her!
Personally, I've seen companies exploit this whole family-like atmosphere.
It might work in the beginning, with younger workers, but always seems to fail.
Whenever I hear were all one big family here, I automatically go to the Manson Clan. I just can't help it.
Maybe I've seen this family-thing used by the wrong parents--too many times? In the end, when the family finds out who's really making the big money; the family plan falls apart. Of course the parents are usually the last ones to find out they don't have a tight knit family, but a group of siblings who feel exploited. (Yes, many of the exploited employees are lucky to even have a job, but that's another story.) There are a few founders who put there money where their mouths are, but they seem rare.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but abused by too many rich guys--in order to get their company going.
I give respect, and loyality to a parent who came from nothing, and put everything on the line to get the family off the ground. Yes--that's a family. I'll buy the family thing.
The rich dudes who are backed by rich dudes don't get the same respect. See rich boys can take chances with cheap money. It's just two different worlds.
I don't want to argue with anyone. I know I don't have the greatest attitude. I've just seen too much injustice in the financial world, and when people start up with the family-thing; it just reminds me were in a bubble, with too much cheap money only certain guys have access to.
My first internship, while I was still in college, was with just this type of company. We did e-Learning materials; our products were basically self-contained websites, with video content and scripted subtitled text, distributed on CDs. This was 2002 or so, so it was super bleeding edge then.
It was a great company to work for. The product was really interesting. I got to learn so many random things - how tires are made, the warning signs of traumatic brain injuries, how the propellant for the Space Shuttle's SRBs was mixed, etc.
But the best part was the family atmosphere of the company. The owner was a business professor full time and this was his side project. We were always small - just a few interns, a few part-time people (mostly students) and just a couple full-time employees. Him and his wife always took an interest in everyone that worked for them. Getting a home-cooked meal and a night of poker once a week was a nice perk for a poor college student.
After my internship, I was hired on part-time, then full-time after I graduated until I left for a different opportunity. But to this day they're still one of the favorite companies I've ever worked for. It was such a positive experience for me and has caused me to continue to seek out companies with that type of atmosphere.
For a business purposes, part of the benefit of "that family thing" is that it would tend to make employees less likely to jump ship because of a personal connection and bond.
This is also the reason why in business (the reverse example) it's important (generally and depending on the circumstances) to keep an arms length relationship. If your brother in law is, for example, the contractor doing work and renovating your home, your hands are tied more than if it's someone that you don't have a personal connection to. Weighed against the potential upside of getting a bad job from someone who has no relationship with you at all of course. (Details and the parties involved matter as with anything).
On that note, I am convinced that the fact I started GrantTree with my girlfriend (now wife) as a cofounder (or rather I was the cofounder, since she provided the unstoppable sales energy that shoved the business into existence) was an essential building block to creating this sort of culture. When you're literally dating your cofounder, unless you're the kind of person who keeps secrets from your partner/spouse or orders them about, it ensures the kind of transparent, respectful, balanced relationship which I think is likely to lead to what you describe.
Probably not a surefire way to achieve this - and certainly not the only one - but I thought I'd share.
My first encounter with the concept was the PeopleWare book that described such teams with principles for how to attempt to create them. Stories like the Black Team of bug hunters terrorizing half-assed employees at IBM were great. Way later on, Pirates of Silicon Valley... the only one Woz endorses as accurate... portrayed that Steve Jobs used an extreme version of that strategy to make Apple what it was.
Not to mention, the few places I've worked like that were the only ones where I looked forward to going to work and gave it that extra percent of effort. Didn't even feel like work. Wonder if that's the experience for everyone else. All employers should at least to attempt to create such an environment as good things just seem to emerge from it.
And as this excellent post show, it can work wonders in startup incubators too.
> The first really great company I worked at was explicit about being family-oriented; they'd bring everyone's family to the office and cook dinners, had Christmas at the founders house, that sort of thing.
This sounds horrid. I don't want to spend Christmas with my boss, and I definitely don't want to have dinner in the office, ever.
"Sorry Grandma, can't make it for Christmas, have to go see my boss instead"?
I would guess that (almost?) all successful startups have a lot going on behind the scenes that doesn't make it into the press.
My company isn't even particularly successful, but it's incredibly difficult for us to get anyone who writes about us to mention that I'm a co-founder (not the founder, let alone the fact that the community that does most of the important work) and that there's an entire team behind what we're doing (that it's not "my" thing).
The single-man myth is just a lot sexier, even if false. There are great founders, to be sure, but every time you talk to the person who is the "single man" they talk about how the company is successful because of a fantastic team. In fact, a lot of the work of a founder is assembling a great team and making them work well together. I don't think I've ever seen an exception to that - even Jobs, Musk, etc.
In fact, the real moral of the story is that the tech press is almost entirely bullshit, and that is mostly to be avoided.
Yup, as an early employee of a very successful company, I know the opposite side of this. The ratio of key contributions between founders:early employees is probably between 2:1 and 1:1, while the ratio of tech press is about 1000:0. And you are dead on with the co-founder and founder thing. The tech press really has a founder and "single-person" fetish in the way they write their stories.
Basically, don't value yourself based on what the tech press writes about you. If you are the one getting the press: you actually aren't that great; if you aren't getting the press: who cares.
I understand that PG is writing this article because he feels it is unfair he gets written about too much and Jessica not enough, but the real crux of the issue is that the tech press is so stupid it doesn't matter. I mean just look at that article that was written about Jessica...
Yep! This was the first thing I took away from the post, too. Like, more people know about me than about Dave Goldsmith or Jeremy Rauch, but of the three of us I was the least important to the kind of success Matasano found.
"Because I'm a writer" is a kind of highfalutin' way of saying "because I'm super noisy". :)
For the companies you've heard of, the median number of names you remember of people who work there is zero. For some companies you pay attention to, it might be one (typically the CEO), or two, or maybe more if you have a deeper relationship with them. If you work there it might even be hundreds. But once a company gets to a certain size nobody remembers everyone's name.
Similarly for bands or movies. The lead may be male or female, but either way, nobody except the most obsessed fan or people who worked there is going to remember more than a few names. The closing credits give you a more accurate picture of how many people it takes to make a movie, but that's not the story anyone can remember.
The press knows this already. If you're going to interact with them, you need to understand their need to tell a good story, or nobody's going to read the article.
So I think we can't blame the press for this (much). They could tell slightly more complicated stories, but they're still going to be inaccurate, and you won't remember all the names anyway.
If anything, blame how human memory works, and keep in mind that no matter what stories you read, the world isn't really story-shaped.
> In fact, the real moral of the story is that the tech press is almost entirely bullshit, and that is mostly to be avoided.
Any interaction I've had with the tech press from the "written about" side of things (or reading about close friends) has given me less and less faith in what I read about those I don't know.
It's probably wise to enjoy "business biographies" as lying somewhere on the floor closer to the fiction aisle than the non-fiction.
Most stories are pitched by PR firms (or the other side of the same coin, attempted take-downs). Either way, they're ready-fire-aim -- finding facts to fit a conclusion.
First and foremost they are stories -- written by someone attempting, under deadline, to fit messy, complicated reality into a simple, entertaining narrative to hold your eyeballs.
Think of them as professional fan (or anti-fan) fiction.
Even long-form articles and books that interview many people, while admirable efforts, present a pretty small slice of reality.
It's kind of like that "overnight success, ten years in the making" thing. People want the clickbait, the sensationalist stories, even though they are almost never representative of real life. That's because the media's incentives are to get a lot of eyeballs, and not necessarily to provide an accurate retelling of events, which means they'll take the divisive, explosive angle whenever they can, whether the tone is negative (woman being harassed) or positive (mythical superhuman Steve Jobs accomplishes mythical feat all by himself), because that's what gets people clicking.
I'm not convinced that it's because the single-man myth is sexier. It's probably just easier to not go into detail (make that as short as possible) on that part of the story because it isn't the most interesting part to the layperson.
I would think most founders who've been through YC would recognize Jessica's importance in the equation, so it's interesting that it is some sort of secret in the industry at large. Even early on, before her first book was published, she was obviously on top of, and involved in, everything. She was the primary point of contact for damned near everything for founders.
So, it's an interesting phenomenon that even with such a preponderance of evidence, the story that gets told and re-told mostly leaves her out. Our industry has so many internalized prejudices that are invisible unless and until you're looking for them, it can seem perfectly normal for the story to be about a lone man building an empire with a few supporting characters. If the story were framed as building a "family", rather than a business empire, would Jessica's role be more prominent in the telling? I think one could tell it either way, but the tech industry doesn't have language for that, even though I think some of the best companies were as much a family as an empire (early HP, for example).
Gender roles are weird, is what I'm trying to say, and the tech industry is more rigid than many.
I'm never sure how to reconcile PG's stance of "our founders are good people" / "X-ray vision for character" with some of the things that some of the portfolio companies do.
For instance, the vigorous, long-lasting and constantly denied spamming that AirBnB did off CraigsList with fake names, or some of the early Reddit fake accounts and general puffing-up (which was, to be fair, less bad.)
Maybe business tactics are explicitly not part of what PG and Jessica consider "good character"? It seems increasingly clear that they mean something different by it than I do.
> The existence of people like Jessica is not just something the mainstream media needs to learn to acknowledge, but something feminists need to learn to acknowledge as well. There are successful women who don't like to fight. Which means if the public conversation about women consists of fighting, their voices will be silenced.
> There's a sort of Gresham's Law of conversations. If a conversation reaches a certain level of incivility, the more thoughtful people start to leave.
I imagine that this idea applies to many situations. Replace "feminists" and "[successful] women" with something else.
Any chance you could write up what it means to have social radar? Right now you might as well substitute the word "magic." What is it that you see that other people don't? Do you score especially highly on reading micro-expressions (http://www.paulekman.com/micro-expressions/)? Is this a familial trait? What is your subjective experience when talking to a 'faker?' Have you ever tried to track you first impressions against later behaviors?
I'm super curious about what seems to be a real life superpower!
On the one hand, good for PG for speaking up. On the other, how can one write a piece about persistent discrimination against a woman without mentioning societal gender discrimination as a thing?
He even asks the question, "If Jessica was so important to YC, why don't more people realize it?" His answer: he's vocal and she doesn't seek attention. Those may be true, but that's not enough to answer the question. As the NYT just wrote, even famous female economists get slighted like this:
>[3] The existence of people like Jessica is not just something the mainstream media needs to learn to acknowledge, but something feminists need to learn to acknowledge as well. There are successful women who don't like to fight. Which means if the public conversation about women consists of fighting, their voices will be silenced.
I suggest you read the essay again. PG clearly writes that Jessica's way of dealing with people is by listening. And she's damn good at that. It is harder to listen when you speak, or when everybody watches your every move.
I would think that if he focused the essay more on gender discrimination instead of just on Jessica, she would not be comfortable with or allow the essay to be published.
> Those may be true, but that's not enough to answer the question.
I think the "he's vocal and she's not" answer is a perfectly good answer to the question "why do people tend to ignore Jessica?", since it does seem to be the main reason. If the question had been "why do people tend to ignore women?" then maybe that NYT article might be relevant.
Great essay. Besides setting the record straight on Jessica's key role in the founding and growth of YC, it also offers a rare glimpse into how and why YC became the juggernaut it is today.
"The overall atmosphere was shockingly different from a VC's office on Sand Hill Road, in a way that was entirely for the better."
The rest of the essay is filled with words like family, mom, character, culture, authenticity, good(ness), social radar etc. Words you would hardly ever associate with a successful business - let alone a big time, successful VC firm on Sand Hill Road or anywhere else. It sounds like a crazy way to run a company based on such fuzzy concepts. But remarkably, these soft, fuzzy concepts appear to be a key part of YC's huge success - and not some cold, calculated decision making. In a way this bears out one of PG's other theories - that hugely successful startups usually start out with ideas that look really bad or crazy. And in YC's case, the most successful startup to come out of YC may be regarded as YC itself!
Edit: Would like to add a key part of their approach seems to have been to throw out the old, tried and true approach, think from first principles and build the company and culture in a way that they felt comfortable with - and not how it was "supposed to be done".
I wonder what the direction of causation is. Perhaps the issue is not the cool, thoughtful, and kind are pushed out of the forums, but they are successful in engaging people on a personal level and are less motivated to go public. The obnoxious, however, however tend to get avoided on the personal level and find it easier to get an audience in a public forum.
I still remember, back in 2007, sitting in the old Mountain View office when Jessica came out and yelled "Matt Maroon! I just love that name." I had been a little nervous until that but for some odd reason that was calming.
Those of us in YC knew she wasn't just PG's girlfriend.
The existence of people like Jessica is not just something the mainstream media needs to learn to acknowledge, but something feminists need to learn to acknowledge as well. There are successful women who don't like to fight. Which means if the public conversation about women consists of fighting, their voices will be silenced.
It's my impression (primarily from lurking) that the more nuanced, observant conversation tends to take place in less publicized fora, which while not exactly closed are at least so little publicized that they are not "public". Sometimes this is termed a "safe space", sometimes the essential characteristics are arranged without calling it that. Anyway the conversations are very much "here's my impression; it's different than yours but we can agree on at least these things" and "I'm sorry but that is just so far out of bounds that we'll have to part ways and not try to work this out". There's a conversation, but not a debate.
Maybe some would lament the "filter bubble" aspect of such an arrangement, because after all everyone should prefer to debate each point to death, but in fact not everyone does prefer that. (Of course, I do, but I'm slowly learning not to assume everyone else is like me.) It's tempting to put this all on "the feminists", but that is selling ourselves short. We can all listen without speaking, long enough to realize that feminism is not monolithic and that many feminists are aware of women like Livingston. The ignorance of the media and the Twitterati is a property of them, not of all of feminism. (Of course much of feminism is, for want of a better word, "masculine" in the sense of wanting to dialogue each point until we have a party line for everyone to toe, but much of feminism is not that.)
I can't claim to have jl's "x-ray vision", but I think I've gotten a lot better at this. Possibly because I'm not naturally good at this, so I have to do it consciously.
The way in for me was English literature. Since the modern novel, writing in English focuses on revealing character through what someone does or says. Why do they choose this word and not another? By their actions, what can you learn about what's going on in their head?
Turns out that works pretty well in real life too.
A trivial example: I had a supervisor who I would say had problems with role-reversing. While ostensibly the boss, this person really wanted other people to notice what a difficult time they were having. Again I figured this out just through word choice. Some people, in the boss role, express their vision as "we need to do this"; with this boss it was more like "nobody is supporting me, so you all need to step up". Instead of performing confidence, they performed their personal discomfort, which is a cry for others to show that they care.
I think most people would realize that this is annoying, but look a little deeper, to see the need that's behind that. This is someone who habitually fears abandonment. (Maybe that's even why they took the boss role.)
So, all it took was a tiny comment every now and then from me, to allay their fears, and our relationship dramatically shifted for the better.
Now, this kind of personal attention can be just kindness. You can use it to give people around you the motivation they need to succeed. But in this case, the neediness was sort of a bottomless pit, so it made me seriously question ever working with this person again.
Most people are broadcasting all kinds of things about themselves, almost painfully strongly. It's just that for the most part, nobody is picking up on it. Developers in particular usually don't want to pick up on it.
There is no special key, no special pattern that unlocks one's extraordinary performance in a given area. Some people happen to have the right combination of brains, experience, commitment, and luck. And they leave the world impressed.
You could literally ask the same questions about Mozart or Einstein. Let me try that: what's their secret? Can you learn it? Is it experience, something you either have or have not? Are men better suited for the job? What clues are you looking for while analyzing a theory? Is there something like a 'perfect' symphony, or did he make a list of positive and negative tone patterns? Are some chords more important than others?
Talk less and learn to watch and listen. You will be amazed at how better your instincts become.
I think her traits are what make her good at this. She doesn't like attention and is more of an introvert. These traits probably make her very good at listening and a great observer of people.
Most introverts I know are very good at judging people because they don't want the attention on themselves.
Yes, practically all of the core traits PG describes are typical feminine traits. This is a nice piece because it explains how critically important the feminine touch is, and how easy it is to ignore that because most females don't care much about their personal fame, they mostly care about helping people and being useful.
While PG has described the utility these traits have in running a "family" of founders, they're also extremely valuable in running an actual family. PG has really written an ode to womanhood in general, and whilst reading it, I think most of us will relate as we identify similar things in our wives and mothers.
This is not to detract from Jessica Livingston's specific ability to apply these to the world of VC, which undoubtedly takes a lot of skill and knowledge, but I think it's important that we recognize the value from these types of contributions is accessible and often regularly enjoyed by those of us who are lucky enough to have such stereotypically selfless women in our lives.
Read Goleman's Emotional Intelligence and maybe "Intuition at Work" to get started on this. You have to learn it straight from experience. I wrote a detailed description here:
There is no secret. People who do more observing tend to be more observant. Talk and type less and watch and listen more and in a decade or two you will be able to figure out other people's character pretty fast.
I would bet a lot that it's nothing really you could analyze in terms of rational thinking but that it's still something that everybody has.
Everyone, including you, do get different feelings from different people. Maybe there's that uncle you're just not that comfortable with to begin with, or your neighbour who always lightens you up somehow. But the problem is that focusing on thoughts and modelling your impression by thinking masks these feelings off. Thus, most people don't realize how their feelings change when they move from place to place and from person to person. The feelings can be seen in your body language but in the worst case you're completely oblivious to them yourself. Typically you just grow a blurred sense of anxiety or ease, much like a moving average of what you've felt that day.
Now imagine you do get a slight grasp of all that, and begin to practice it. Maybe you can find a way to "feel" different people, maybe you observe how your feeling changes when stepping into an elevator with different people each time. Maybe you find some other way to sift through people and try to get a feeling from each one. There are infinite number of ways to practices and they are all equally hard.
Sensing can be really hard because, today, everyone is always going, talking, making noise, and acting busy. It's impossible to deal with a lot and try to get a feel of a person at the same time. I think something similar was described in the article: you need to be out of the focus, you have to have some space around you to make this connection with your feelings. However, for some reason, your body tends to like breathing. Focusing on breathing tends to tone down the active parts of brain and emphasize your sensibility to your feelings going through your body. Maybe that is the reason martial arts emphasize breathing a lot. So, it might be that you find yourself breathing slowly and steadily in the elevator, maybe gazing out to the wall during the ride, and just practice sensing what the feeling is each time, with different people.
The more you practice, the better you get. Usually, as with practice, there are turning points where you just suddenly "get it", or at least you will get a glimpse of it if nothing else. Maybe at some point you begin to associate these feelings with an idea, or rather, an intuition. This is where you learn to put meaning in the feelings. A lot of times these feelings tend to be unexplainable. You don't know how, but your answer is "no". Or "yes". Or whatever you were seeking to know. In fact, the surefire sign that the feeling produces a genuine intuition in you is that you can't make yourself explain it. You're still practicing but now you need to practice trust. You get readings, some of which are noise from your mind and some are signals, from your body and based on genuine feelings, and you need to learn to trust your judgement on which one you heard.
Becoming more sensible is not a game. You can't game it: what you need to do is surrender. Also note that it is absolutely not a one-way street. By changing how you perceive your surroundings and the people out there also changes you. You will not be the same person who is asking about this and who eventually gets the answer. It's also nothing mystical nor magical, it's just something humans can do but very rarely choose to do by a conscious choice.
Foot note: I've been a very sensitive person since I was kid. So has my wife. It seems all so normal here now. Many a years back, it was truly comforting to realize that there are others like me. I've chosen to increase my sensitivity during the early adulthood by relying more on it. What you use will get bigger, I guess it's like what a muscle would do. It's also not a general trait or objective capability: it's very personal. What and how I feel the world is completely different from how Jessica Livingstone feels the world. Or my wife. Or anyone else. But the truths I feel myself are only applicable in my own life, so that is fine.
I wonder if it's easier to judge people's honesty/character/civility/etc. if they're interacting mainly with other people under your observation, rather than with you directly. I suspect so.
Thanks for this PG, it's wonderful to see Jessica get the long overdue credit she deserves.
That essay is also comforting for me on a personal level because like Jessica, I'm uneasy with attention, public speaking, etc and that's a tough thing to struggle with when you're a startup founder, where a big part of your job is to be the affable, extroverted face of the company. The thought of doing a YC or similar interview makes me sweat, even though I know what I'm building is awesome, cool and valuable. If ever Jessica is giving lessons on how to get over that, sign me up please!
> If bad founders succeed at all, they tend to sell early. The most successful founders are almost all good.
I wonder what chances these people would have if they were to apply to YC now: Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey etc.
[+] [-] pc|10 years ago|reply
(John and I became interested in startups in large part as a result of reading Founders at Work. And then, because John and I were immigrants without credit history, our residence of the Bay Area started with Jessica helping to convince a landlord to rent a place to us. Once the company was underway, whenever John and I had a major decision to make, figuring things out generally involved biking over to Jessica's and PG's place for an invariably clarifying discussion.
I recall one particular decision that John and I had been debating for weeks. We just couldn't decide. Jessica's response, when asked, was immediate and adamant. We were surprised but trusted her. John and I often remark at how differently (and, I'm confident, worse) things would have ended up had Jessica not convinced us to make that call.)
[+] [-] rabidonrails|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway1985|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] namikaze|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bradgessler|10 years ago|reply
Take note world. Really happy to see this essay published.
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|10 years ago|reply
The first really great company I worked at was explicit about being family-oriented; they'd bring everyone's family to the office and cook dinners, had Christmas at the founders house, that sort of thing.
I left that company and joined a different sort of family, which was more of a bar-fighting sort of family but still had that vibe.
Then I started my first company, which cratered, and which did not have that family feel at all, despite it being largely a group of people who were friends in real life.
I felt like we got part of the way there with Matasano (at least in the Chicago office, which was our largest), but not all of the way. It's tricky to pull off!
I really only want to work at companies that have that feel, for the rest of my career. It makes a huge difference. Also: if Jessica Livingston can generate that kind of culture on demand, that's definitely a reason to be impressed by her!
[+] [-] marincounty|10 years ago|reply
It might work in the beginning, with younger workers, but always seems to fail.
Whenever I hear were all one big family here, I automatically go to the Manson Clan. I just can't help it.
Maybe I've seen this family-thing used by the wrong parents--too many times? In the end, when the family finds out who's really making the big money; the family plan falls apart. Of course the parents are usually the last ones to find out they don't have a tight knit family, but a group of siblings who feel exploited. (Yes, many of the exploited employees are lucky to even have a job, but that's another story.) There are a few founders who put there money where their mouths are, but they seem rare.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but abused by too many rich guys--in order to get their company going.
I give respect, and loyality to a parent who came from nothing, and put everything on the line to get the family off the ground. Yes--that's a family. I'll buy the family thing.
The rich dudes who are backed by rich dudes don't get the same respect. See rich boys can take chances with cheap money. It's just two different worlds.
I don't want to argue with anyone. I know I don't have the greatest attitude. I've just seen too much injustice in the financial world, and when people start up with the family-thing; it just reminds me were in a bubble, with too much cheap money only certain guys have access to.
[+] [-] peckrob|10 years ago|reply
It was a great company to work for. The product was really interesting. I got to learn so many random things - how tires are made, the warning signs of traumatic brain injuries, how the propellant for the Space Shuttle's SRBs was mixed, etc.
But the best part was the family atmosphere of the company. The owner was a business professor full time and this was his side project. We were always small - just a few interns, a few part-time people (mostly students) and just a couple full-time employees. Him and his wife always took an interest in everyone that worked for them. Getting a home-cooked meal and a night of poker once a week was a nice perk for a poor college student.
After my internship, I was hired on part-time, then full-time after I graduated until I left for a different opportunity. But to this day they're still one of the favorite companies I've ever worked for. It was such a positive experience for me and has caused me to continue to seek out companies with that type of atmosphere.
[+] [-] larrys|10 years ago|reply
This is also the reason why in business (the reverse example) it's important (generally and depending on the circumstances) to keep an arms length relationship. If your brother in law is, for example, the contractor doing work and renovating your home, your hands are tied more than if it's someone that you don't have a personal connection to. Weighed against the potential upside of getting a bad job from someone who has no relationship with you at all of course. (Details and the parties involved matter as with anything).
[+] [-] swombat|10 years ago|reply
Probably not a surefire way to achieve this - and certainly not the only one - but I thought I'd share.
[+] [-] nickpsecurity|10 years ago|reply
Not to mention, the few places I've worked like that were the only ones where I looked forward to going to work and gave it that extra percent of effort. Didn't even feel like work. Wonder if that's the experience for everyone else. All employers should at least to attempt to create such an environment as good things just seem to emerge from it.
And as this excellent post show, it can work wonders in startup incubators too.
[+] [-] cballard|10 years ago|reply
This sounds horrid. I don't want to spend Christmas with my boss, and I definitely don't want to have dinner in the office, ever.
"Sorry Grandma, can't make it for Christmas, have to go see my boss instead"?
[+] [-] the_watcher|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] austenallred|10 years ago|reply
My company isn't even particularly successful, but it's incredibly difficult for us to get anyone who writes about us to mention that I'm a co-founder (not the founder, let alone the fact that the community that does most of the important work) and that there's an entire team behind what we're doing (that it's not "my" thing).
The single-man myth is just a lot sexier, even if false. There are great founders, to be sure, but every time you talk to the person who is the "single man" they talk about how the company is successful because of a fantastic team. In fact, a lot of the work of a founder is assembling a great team and making them work well together. I don't think I've ever seen an exception to that - even Jobs, Musk, etc.
In fact, the real moral of the story is that the tech press is almost entirely bullshit, and that is mostly to be avoided.
[+] [-] birken|10 years ago|reply
Basically, don't value yourself based on what the tech press writes about you. If you are the one getting the press: you actually aren't that great; if you aren't getting the press: who cares.
I understand that PG is writing this article because he feels it is unfair he gets written about too much and Jessica not enough, but the real crux of the issue is that the tech press is so stupid it doesn't matter. I mean just look at that article that was written about Jessica...
[+] [-] tptacek|10 years ago|reply
"Because I'm a writer" is a kind of highfalutin' way of saying "because I'm super noisy". :)
[+] [-] skybrian|10 years ago|reply
Similarly for bands or movies. The lead may be male or female, but either way, nobody except the most obsessed fan or people who worked there is going to remember more than a few names. The closing credits give you a more accurate picture of how many people it takes to make a movie, but that's not the story anyone can remember.
The press knows this already. If you're going to interact with them, you need to understand their need to tell a good story, or nobody's going to read the article.
So I think we can't blame the press for this (much). They could tell slightly more complicated stories, but they're still going to be inaccurate, and you won't remember all the names anyway.
If anything, blame how human memory works, and keep in mind that no matter what stories you read, the world isn't really story-shaped.
[+] [-] talsraviv|10 years ago|reply
Any interaction I've had with the tech press from the "written about" side of things (or reading about close friends) has given me less and less faith in what I read about those I don't know.
[+] [-] greghendershott|10 years ago|reply
Most stories are pitched by PR firms (or the other side of the same coin, attempted take-downs). Either way, they're ready-fire-aim -- finding facts to fit a conclusion.
First and foremost they are stories -- written by someone attempting, under deadline, to fit messy, complicated reality into a simple, entertaining narrative to hold your eyeballs.
Think of them as professional fan (or anti-fan) fiction.
Even long-form articles and books that interview many people, while admirable efforts, present a pretty small slice of reality.
[+] [-] cookiecaper|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] salmonet|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SwellJoe|10 years ago|reply
So, it's an interesting phenomenon that even with such a preponderance of evidence, the story that gets told and re-told mostly leaves her out. Our industry has so many internalized prejudices that are invisible unless and until you're looking for them, it can seem perfectly normal for the story to be about a lone man building an empire with a few supporting characters. If the story were framed as building a "family", rather than a business empire, would Jessica's role be more prominent in the telling? I think one could tell it either way, but the tech industry doesn't have language for that, even though I think some of the best companies were as much a family as an empire (early HP, for example).
Gender roles are weird, is what I'm trying to say, and the tech industry is more rigid than many.
[+] [-] angelbob|10 years ago|reply
For instance, the vigorous, long-lasting and constantly denied spamming that AirBnB did off CraigsList with fake names, or some of the early Reddit fake accounts and general puffing-up (which was, to be fair, less bad.)
Maybe business tactics are explicitly not part of what PG and Jessica consider "good character"? It seems increasingly clear that they mean something different by it than I do.
[+] [-] ggchappell|10 years ago|reply
> The existence of people like Jessica is not just something the mainstream media needs to learn to acknowledge, but something feminists need to learn to acknowledge as well. There are successful women who don't like to fight. Which means if the public conversation about women consists of fighting, their voices will be silenced.
> There's a sort of Gresham's Law of conversations. If a conversation reaches a certain level of incivility, the more thoughtful people start to leave.
I imagine that this idea applies to many situations. Replace "feminists" and "[successful] women" with something else.
[+] [-] iandanforth|10 years ago|reply
Any chance you could write up what it means to have social radar? Right now you might as well substitute the word "magic." What is it that you see that other people don't? Do you score especially highly on reading micro-expressions (http://www.paulekman.com/micro-expressions/)? Is this a familial trait? What is your subjective experience when talking to a 'faker?' Have you ever tried to track you first impressions against later behaviors?
I'm super curious about what seems to be a real life superpower!
[+] [-] wpietri|10 years ago|reply
He even asks the question, "If Jessica was so important to YC, why don't more people realize it?" His answer: he's vocal and she doesn't seek attention. Those may be true, but that's not enough to answer the question. As the NYT just wrote, even famous female economists get slighted like this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/12/upshot/even-famous-female-...
[+] [-] mosquito242|10 years ago|reply
>[3] The existence of people like Jessica is not just something the mainstream media needs to learn to acknowledge, but something feminists need to learn to acknowledge as well. There are successful women who don't like to fight. Which means if the public conversation about women consists of fighting, their voices will be silenced.
[+] [-] hebdo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zodiac|10 years ago|reply
> Those may be true, but that's not enough to answer the question.
I think the "he's vocal and she's not" answer is a perfectly good answer to the question "why do people tend to ignore Jessica?", since it does seem to be the main reason. If the question had been "why do people tend to ignore women?" then maybe that NYT article might be relevant.
[+] [-] pitchups|10 years ago|reply
"The overall atmosphere was shockingly different from a VC's office on Sand Hill Road, in a way that was entirely for the better."
The rest of the essay is filled with words like family, mom, character, culture, authenticity, good(ness), social radar etc. Words you would hardly ever associate with a successful business - let alone a big time, successful VC firm on Sand Hill Road or anywhere else. It sounds like a crazy way to run a company based on such fuzzy concepts. But remarkably, these soft, fuzzy concepts appear to be a key part of YC's huge success - and not some cold, calculated decision making. In a way this bears out one of PG's other theories - that hugely successful startups usually start out with ideas that look really bad or crazy. And in YC's case, the most successful startup to come out of YC may be regarded as YC itself!
Edit: Would like to add a key part of their approach seems to have been to throw out the old, tried and true approach, think from first principles and build the company and culture in a way that they felt comfortable with - and not how it was "supposed to be done".
[+] [-] mbrock|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brownbat|10 years ago|reply
Generalized, this explains why a lot of the really cool, thoughtful, and kind people I know seem to fly under the radar.
And it suggests that moderating a discussion forum means constantly pushing uphill.
[+] [-] jolhoeft|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattmaroon|10 years ago|reply
Those of us in YC knew she wasn't just PG's girlfriend.
[+] [-] jessaustin|10 years ago|reply
It's my impression (primarily from lurking) that the more nuanced, observant conversation tends to take place in less publicized fora, which while not exactly closed are at least so little publicized that they are not "public". Sometimes this is termed a "safe space", sometimes the essential characteristics are arranged without calling it that. Anyway the conversations are very much "here's my impression; it's different than yours but we can agree on at least these things" and "I'm sorry but that is just so far out of bounds that we'll have to part ways and not try to work this out". There's a conversation, but not a debate.
Maybe some would lament the "filter bubble" aspect of such an arrangement, because after all everyone should prefer to debate each point to death, but in fact not everyone does prefer that. (Of course, I do, but I'm slowly learning not to assume everyone else is like me.) It's tempting to put this all on "the feminists", but that is selling ourselves short. We can all listen without speaking, long enough to realize that feminism is not monolithic and that many feminists are aware of women like Livingston. The ignorance of the media and the Twitterati is a property of them, not of all of feminism. (Of course much of feminism is, for want of a better word, "masculine" in the sense of wanting to dialogue each point until we have a party line for everyone to toe, but much of feminism is not that.)
[+] [-] dtf|10 years ago|reply
http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/the-social-radar-what-i-...
(I posted this partly due to the predictable reaction to PG's use of the word mom.)
[+] [-] sparkzilla|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zubspace|10 years ago|reply
Is it something you can learn, is it experience, x-ray vision you either have or have not? Are women better suited for this job?
What clues are you looking for while talking to founders?
Is there something like a 'perfect' character or does she make a list of positive and negative traits?
Are some traits more important than others?
[+] [-] neilk|10 years ago|reply
The way in for me was English literature. Since the modern novel, writing in English focuses on revealing character through what someone does or says. Why do they choose this word and not another? By their actions, what can you learn about what's going on in their head?
Turns out that works pretty well in real life too.
A trivial example: I had a supervisor who I would say had problems with role-reversing. While ostensibly the boss, this person really wanted other people to notice what a difficult time they were having. Again I figured this out just through word choice. Some people, in the boss role, express their vision as "we need to do this"; with this boss it was more like "nobody is supporting me, so you all need to step up". Instead of performing confidence, they performed their personal discomfort, which is a cry for others to show that they care.
I think most people would realize that this is annoying, but look a little deeper, to see the need that's behind that. This is someone who habitually fears abandonment. (Maybe that's even why they took the boss role.)
So, all it took was a tiny comment every now and then from me, to allay their fears, and our relationship dramatically shifted for the better.
Now, this kind of personal attention can be just kindness. You can use it to give people around you the motivation they need to succeed. But in this case, the neediness was sort of a bottomless pit, so it made me seriously question ever working with this person again.
Most people are broadcasting all kinds of things about themselves, almost painfully strongly. It's just that for the most part, nobody is picking up on it. Developers in particular usually don't want to pick up on it.
[+] [-] hebdo|10 years ago|reply
You could literally ask the same questions about Mozart or Einstein. Let me try that: what's their secret? Can you learn it? Is it experience, something you either have or have not? Are men better suited for the job? What clues are you looking for while analyzing a theory? Is there something like a 'perfect' symphony, or did he make a list of positive and negative tone patterns? Are some chords more important than others?
[+] [-] 20years|10 years ago|reply
I think her traits are what make her good at this. She doesn't like attention and is more of an introvert. These traits probably make her very good at listening and a great observer of people.
Most introverts I know are very good at judging people because they don't want the attention on themselves.
[+] [-] cookiecaper|10 years ago|reply
Yes, practically all of the core traits PG describes are typical feminine traits. This is a nice piece because it explains how critically important the feminine touch is, and how easy it is to ignore that because most females don't care much about their personal fame, they mostly care about helping people and being useful.
While PG has described the utility these traits have in running a "family" of founders, they're also extremely valuable in running an actual family. PG has really written an ode to womanhood in general, and whilst reading it, I think most of us will relate as we identify similar things in our wives and mothers.
This is not to detract from Jessica Livingston's specific ability to apply these to the world of VC, which undoubtedly takes a lot of skill and knowledge, but I think it's important that we recognize the value from these types of contributions is accessible and often regularly enjoyed by those of us who are lucky enough to have such stereotypically selfless women in our lives.
[+] [-] nickpsecurity|10 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10578474
[+] [-] velik_m|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yason|10 years ago|reply
Everyone, including you, do get different feelings from different people. Maybe there's that uncle you're just not that comfortable with to begin with, or your neighbour who always lightens you up somehow. But the problem is that focusing on thoughts and modelling your impression by thinking masks these feelings off. Thus, most people don't realize how their feelings change when they move from place to place and from person to person. The feelings can be seen in your body language but in the worst case you're completely oblivious to them yourself. Typically you just grow a blurred sense of anxiety or ease, much like a moving average of what you've felt that day.
Now imagine you do get a slight grasp of all that, and begin to practice it. Maybe you can find a way to "feel" different people, maybe you observe how your feeling changes when stepping into an elevator with different people each time. Maybe you find some other way to sift through people and try to get a feeling from each one. There are infinite number of ways to practices and they are all equally hard.
Sensing can be really hard because, today, everyone is always going, talking, making noise, and acting busy. It's impossible to deal with a lot and try to get a feel of a person at the same time. I think something similar was described in the article: you need to be out of the focus, you have to have some space around you to make this connection with your feelings. However, for some reason, your body tends to like breathing. Focusing on breathing tends to tone down the active parts of brain and emphasize your sensibility to your feelings going through your body. Maybe that is the reason martial arts emphasize breathing a lot. So, it might be that you find yourself breathing slowly and steadily in the elevator, maybe gazing out to the wall during the ride, and just practice sensing what the feeling is each time, with different people.
The more you practice, the better you get. Usually, as with practice, there are turning points where you just suddenly "get it", or at least you will get a glimpse of it if nothing else. Maybe at some point you begin to associate these feelings with an idea, or rather, an intuition. This is where you learn to put meaning in the feelings. A lot of times these feelings tend to be unexplainable. You don't know how, but your answer is "no". Or "yes". Or whatever you were seeking to know. In fact, the surefire sign that the feeling produces a genuine intuition in you is that you can't make yourself explain it. You're still practicing but now you need to practice trust. You get readings, some of which are noise from your mind and some are signals, from your body and based on genuine feelings, and you need to learn to trust your judgement on which one you heard.
Becoming more sensible is not a game. You can't game it: what you need to do is surrender. Also note that it is absolutely not a one-way street. By changing how you perceive your surroundings and the people out there also changes you. You will not be the same person who is asking about this and who eventually gets the answer. It's also nothing mystical nor magical, it's just something humans can do but very rarely choose to do by a conscious choice.
Foot note: I've been a very sensitive person since I was kid. So has my wife. It seems all so normal here now. Many a years back, it was truly comforting to realize that there are others like me. I've chosen to increase my sensitivity during the early adulthood by relying more on it. What you use will get bigger, I guess it's like what a muscle would do. It's also not a general trait or objective capability: it's very personal. What and how I feel the world is completely different from how Jessica Livingstone feels the world. Or my wife. Or anyone else. But the truths I feel myself are only applicable in my own life, so that is fine.
[+] [-] rdl|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matrix|10 years ago|reply
That essay is also comforting for me on a personal level because like Jessica, I'm uneasy with attention, public speaking, etc and that's a tough thing to struggle with when you're a startup founder, where a big part of your job is to be the affable, extroverted face of the company. The thought of doing a YC or similar interview makes me sweat, even though I know what I'm building is awesome, cool and valuable. If ever Jessica is giving lessons on how to get over that, sign me up please!
[+] [-] flinty|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] achow|10 years ago|reply
I wonder what chances these people would have if they were to apply to YC now: Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey etc.