The details are stunning. Nearly 20% of responders reported sexual coercion or quid-pro-quo.
Given that there are responses which declined to report anyone, the actual number is obviously higher. This is happening at the top startup accelerator in the world, where there is likely to be more scrutiny than elsewhere. (The problem is likely worse in other places.)
> The details are stunning. Nearly 20% of responders reported sexual coercion or quid-pro-quo.
Doesn't surprise me. A couple years ago my co-founder and I were at a startup event, and an investor came up to another founder next to us and made a comment like, "Oh, you're way too hot to be a startup founder, what are you doing here?"
It's a tricky problem to really make sense of though just because investors are so diverse. You've got things like:
- People who got an MBA and for whom investing is their actual career.
- Founders who exited their own startup and now it's their hobby or second career.
- People who made a couple million dollars as doctors or lawyers and are now taking it up as a hobby in their 50s.
- People who made tens or hundreds of millions of dollars from crypto or whatever in their early 20s and have now lost all touch with reality.
- People who quietly manage family offices who occasionally add a startup to their portfolio.
Not that it necessarily matters from the founder's perspective. But it's just a very different problem than addressing sexual harassment in tech companies, because you have a mix of people doing it as a career and people doing it for completely different reasons.
You're using 'reported' in two different contexts, and drawing an odd conclusion as a result
From your comment:
> Nearly 20% of responders reported sexual coercion or quid-pro-quo
From the survey:
>> 88 YC female founders completed the survey
>> 19 founders experienced one or more inappropriate incidents by angels or VCs:
Yes, 19/88 of founders surveyed stated they had been harassed to YC as part of the survey.
From your comment:
> Given that there are responses which declined to report anyone
The reporting here is between the founder and authorities, other founders, other VCs, in context of the incident and not the survey.
From the survey:
>> When founders did report, their main reason was to protect others: “I wanted to make sure that other founders funded by this VC would NOT be in contact with this person, so I shared.”
I'm not assuming any malice on your part, just a misreading of the survey results.
I'd prefer to see a bit more of a break up at the low-end of the scale.
> "18 experienced unwanted sexual overtures or sexual badgering"
Badgering is beyond the pale, "unwanted sexual overtures" are unwelcome but I don't see how they are ever going away; if men don't make a first sexual overture there aren't going to be a lot of men who end up having sex. Some of those overtures are going to be unwanted, but the men basically have to try to find out.
Things like Tinder where you can filter for "interested only" are pretty much a new phenomenon and havn't really had time to influence the culture of anyone aged over 30.
Anyway, I'd like to know how persistent these "unwanted sexual overture" is before it is reported in the survey as harassment. Minor point in a larger picture.
Indeed. What I find shocking is how many people still delude themselves that this stuff isn't ubiquitous across the industry. 20% experienced sexual coercion. Think about how many more experience "just" sexual harassment, misogyny, mistreatment, etc. How many instances of being mistreated does it take to affect your career growth? How many instances does it take to impact your perception of the industry as a whole and your desire to stay working in it? To what degree you keep a list of safe and unsafe places to work, safe and unsafe opportunities for you, and how much that curtails your growth potential? How many stories from other coworkers about worse abuses (like sexual coercion) does it take to erode any belief in the goodness of your industry whatsoever and make you feel like you are walking around with a target on your back just waiting until it happens to you? This is why the industry finds retention and promotion of women so difficult, because it treats them horribly and like all rational people they have a tendency to leave situations that are harmful to them. It doesn't take a huge number of bad actors for these things to affect lots (or even most) women, but it does require organizations (HR, management, etc.) consistently looking the other way and failing to take action, it does require the majority of guys just bumbling around thinking these problems are super rare instead of universal.
> Given that there are responses which declined to report anyone, the actual number is obviously higher.
I don't think you can assume that. I think it's very likely that the number is higher, but it's also possible that it's lower - that women who have experienced harassment are more likely to complete a survey on the topic than women who have not.
The scale at which this happens and yet I feel like I've never seen it is pretty shocking to me. To be clear I'm not denying it, it's just amazing to me that this behavior is that frequent or common and presumably because I'm a guy, i'm not exposed to it.
Doesn't surprise me at all. The company I work for had a similar survey internally and over 20% of the respondents indicated some level of harassment or coercion (fewer than 20% reported coercion or quid-pro-quo). This is a company that works hard at not having that sort of thing, being inclusive and diverse, etc. and has a reputation in the community as being one of the better places to work as far as gender and racial diversity is concerned.
> Given that there are responses which declined to report anyone, the actual number is obviously higher.
I don't see any specifics on the number reported vs the number that experienced harassment, just the number of respondents who experienced it. Where is that in the article?
This is one of the real values of #metoo. A lot of people just don't know how incredibly common this sort of thing is. Catcalling, harassment, sexual demands for career advancement, rape. It is all really really widespread and it is very likely that almost every adult woman you know has experience some form of sexual degradation.
I'm curious why only survey female founders? It seems like an odd data damaging move which is based on an inherent assumption which is ironically now not backed by data. And it would have been easy to just send the same survey out to some of the male founders while you where at it.
Not even taking men into account seems to passively push the rather sexist mantra that men should just "suck it up" and not actually be taken serious in cases or sexual coercion and quid-pro-quo situations.
I'm not trying to argue that woman are not disproportional represented in these case, however why not just include everyone? You state Callisto is a "non-profit dedicated to building tech to combat sexual assault and harassment." if that is the case and it's not just for assault and harassment against woman, then why self-limit the scope of your survey?
And if the answer is "we would have just found no-one had any issues anyway" then I restate the question, why not just send it out to everyone and show this disproportion with data instead of just making it an assumption?
Hey there - Anjana (CTO of Callisto) here. You're absolutely right - this problem is not just unique to women, and male founders experience this too (we know that reporting rates are extremely low among men because of the stigma involved.) In fact, our current product for college students (Callisto Campus) is actively used by survivors of all genders. Given that VC-funded founder community is predominantly male, there might be even more male founder-survivors than female.
For the survey, we started with a small list of female founders that we thought we could get a high response rate from. We definitely are interested in doing surveys of all genders.
Callisto Expansion for Founders is launching on November 15th and it is for founders of all genders, not just for women.
I think that misunderstands the purpose of non-rigorous surveys like this one, which after all only included the "125 [out] of the 384 female founders who have participated in YC", because that's who had signed up for the mailing list they used. It's a rough estimate, and probably a lowball one given that their survey mechanism excludes any respondents who chose not to maintain ties with YC for one reason or another.
The purpose of this survey is to jump up and down while waving its arms in the air and yelling "WE HAVE A PROBLEM"!
We have a problem.
We don't know the exact size and scope of the problem, but at a glance it looks like it's probably bad. I would love to see reliable data about precisely how bad, including among many other things gender cross-tabs. But that data doesn't exist because nobody's gone to the substantial effort to properly collect and publish it. Maybe, if we're lucky, this report will help to create the political will to bring some of that data into existence.
It absolutely blows my mind that your response to this information is that not enough people are thinking of men.
>why not just send it out to everyone and show this disproportion with data instead of just making it an assumption?
Because all projects and studies have to have a scope or they would all use infinite resources. I'm sure there's an absolute plethora of studies that have already established the hugely disproportionate amount of sexual harassment that is by men against women.
"Later this fall, they are launching Callisto for founders. Callisto detects serial perpetrators of sexual coercion and assault, and connects survivors to each other and their options for taking action to protect their community.
Founders will be able to use Callisto to securely store the identities of perpetrators of sexual coercion and assault. These identities will be encrypted in a way that not even the Callisto team can view. If multiple founders name the same perpetrator, they will be referred to an attorney who can then decrypt the founder’s contact info and reach out to provide them with free advice on their options for coming forward, including the option to share information with other victims of the same perpetrator."
-------------------
Collusion between witnesses can derail a court case. The best way to prevent charges of collusion is to limit communication between witnesses. This system absolutely should put an attorney in touch with the founders to build a case, but it should not put them in touch with each other. At least, not until after pressing legal charges is ruled out.
I would like to know what percentage of VCs/angels are responsible for the reported incidents. If most founders are pitching to 10 VCs (which does not seem like an unrealistic number), it would be possible for even a single bad actor to be responsible for these statistics.
I doubt it is a single bad actor, but I bet its highly asymmetric, since most offenders are likely serial offenders.
This is seriously great work. Thanks to all involved for making it happen. My one quibble is, why limit this to only female founders? Male founders can also experience sexual harassment and coercion from authority figures. I am speaking from personal experience.
Although the specific form of harassment may be sexual, fundamentally it isn't about sex. It's about abuse of power.
To be clear, I am 100% behind all efforts to reduce harassment in all forms, and I am aware that the % of female founders who have experienced harassment is higher than males. But I guarantee that the male % is greater than 0, and it would be constructive to have these perspectives included in future work.
I asked this question below and apparently it warranted massive downvotes:
Is there any data on how many of the angels and VC's have a background engineering, math, sciences vs. law, business and others?
It seems to be that correlation requires more than just, he's a guy, he get's more. She's a women she gets sexually harassed, she get's less. In one of the US offices I worked in I kept getting a lot of shit from some colleagues and a middle manage who's wife was one of the first employees and highly influentual. A year after I left, an ex colleague tells me that a good friend of that lady, also a lady, that didn't like me told everyone I talked shit about her breasts. Germany, half a year in, turns out the girls in the company are talking about my cute ass.
Is the difference that they did it behind my back, besides proactively? Can power dynamics really be boiled down to a plain men vs. women? Nothing about demographics, social context, history etc.?
Are we saying that Elizabeth Holmes is treated the same as some no name immigrant female founder? Or a random no name immigrant male founder even?
There's no implied causation here ("correlation")... It's straightforward: The women reported experiencing sexual harassment. Does it make it any better if the sexual harassment happened because they're female and a mathematician?
I'm not tracking exactly what your point is here. You ask things like "Can power dynamics be boiled down to men vs women?" And "Are we saying that Elizabeth Holmes is treated the same as some no name immigrant founder?" and the pretty obvious answer to those in no but I don't immediately see anyone here arguing against that so I'm not sure exactly what your objecting to.
You're right in that racism and sexism also exist alongside classism, nepotism, cronyism, religious and cultural bigotry, "place-ism," favoritism toward people who attended certain schools, and so on.
They're all problems. Racism and sexism are bad but the others should get more scrutiny as well. I know that classism and "place-ism" (favoritism or discrimination based on region of origin) are fairly big things in the US.
Did anyone survey female founders who consciously leveraged their sexuality to their benefit? I’m a gay man in the VC world and this happens to me regularly.
My other related question; why did they survey only females? It seems like a report of combined and gender separated statistics would have also served the same purpose. If (as I suspect, but we have no numbers to back it up) females are disproportionately targeted by VCs, wouldn't this have made a stronger case than surveying only women?
(1) There are VCs that are female friendly from the get go, rather than as an afterthought, for instance http://www.karmijnkapitaal.nl/
(2) What is also interesting to research is what the difference is in capital raised for what %age of equity vs teams consisting of all-males.
(3) The study started off with a self-selected group, which might affect the results either way, it would be good to repeat it across a larger number of subjects chosen at random.
Here is a study of 150,000 women in college.
https://www.aau.edu/key-issues/aau-climate-survey-sexual-ass...
The percentage reporting sexual assault is the close to the same. There is a 160 page addendum which attempts to address 3.) as one point of a lot of points.
This seems like a bullshit solution imo. From the perspective of females, the solution to an industry having problems is not to create some safe haven. It's to fix the industry. From the perspective of males who aren't bad actors, a 'female friendly' silo creates inverse selection. We want a level playing field for all parties, not a safe haven.
(1) sounds like a good idea from an outside perspective, but it fails in practice. I can't speak for women, but I see a lot of LGBTQ+ spaces full of people I want nothing to do with. Just because people share marginalizations doesn't mean they're going to get along or want to go into business together.
It's important to make all spaces welcoming so people aren't boxed into spaces that subdue their potential by forcing them to work with people they don't mesh with just to be in an industry that suits their interests and talents.
We once went to a meeting with a VC (in San Francisco), and at the end he told us the story about why he didn't become a priest. Because when he was in an all-boys school, they always had one afternoon off per week. And they would go to the milkshake place and (and I'm quoting here) "everytime the girl working there turned around to stick the cups into the milkshake machine, her little butt would wiggle". He made this this butt grabbing motion with his hands.
And the way he told the story was exteremly unsettling, you could see his horniness through his words and the way he moved. Almost as if he was talking about a juicy steak he ate.
That story was 100% unrelated to our business or any other topic we were discussing. The worst part is, all 3 of us laughed. Only a minute after I realized that I should have said something.
The point of my story is that in that moment, I was almost in a shock-like state and didn't't know what to say. I was taken by surprise. My co-founder said that she felt super uncomfortable, and was happy that she wasn't in this room with him alone.
Not sure where I can report this, as Callisto seems for schools only?
As a survivor I can say sexual assault is terrible. Before we make any conclusion on the numbers, 88/384=22.9% of the female founders responded and 32.5% were given the chance to participate. Is the sample representative of the whole? How were the 32.5% of female founders that were given a chance to respond selected? If this is a representative sample then this is a shockingly high percentage of unwanted sexual contact.
Also, I wonder if we can get a bit more detail on what situations these happened in and what exactly happened so that we can discuss other reasonable measures we can all participate in.
Good stuff. One concern with Callisto though: What stops a serial perpetrator from reporting himself (using an alias) to be able to identify anyone else who has reported him?
This sounds like a high-tech, low-effectiveness solution. A lawyer reaches out and discusses their options? That’s easy. 1) take some kind of legal action, get outgunned by wealthy VC, blacklisted by VC community as a litigious founder, tank your startup with distractions. Or 2) keep quiet.
The real solution if YC wants to use their top-of-food-chain position is to name, shame, ban these investors from YC invites, and - most importantly - target their LPs. No need for a tech platform. I make no judgement as to whether that is appropriate or something YC wants to undertake.
I'd be curious to know what YC is doing about these VCs - obviously telling them to go fuck themselves w/r/t demo day and other program access is a start, but what else? This is where YC has a platform to be a part of the solution and name names.
I wonder if it's intentional that they named the system Callisto. In mythology, Callisto was raped (in Ovid's account, violently); she became pregnant and, in punishment for being raped, was either killed or transformed into an animal, at which point her own son did not recognize her and attempted to kill her. Or, in another account, her father cut her son into pieces to revenge himself on the rapist. It's all rather confused.
My point is that none of these stories seem like the kind of treatment I would like to promise to sexual assault victims. It makes me question the founders' motivations; it's a bit like naming a Messianic Jewish club "The Final Solution", except that of course 100% of the people who might consider joining a Messianic Jewish club already know what that phrase connotes.
Great initiative, one suggestion though for Callisto and YC, it may help to publish the names of people who have access to the reports filed on Callisto.
One of the main ways that organizations (schools, churches, etc) defend against abuse is with a simple rule: authority figures are not allowed 1:1 private communication or contact with someone under their power, and members are encouraged to always stay in the presence of a trusted companion during all activities. This greatly reduces the possibility of getting into an ambiguous situation where abuse can happen without a 3rd-party witness, by making the absense of a witness its own violation.
This isn't 100% practical in the business world, but could be quite helpful, and valuable in its own right to avoid single-points of information failure in the business.
With modern technology, recording conversations (with the knowledge and consent of both parties) can be a practical alternative when humans are not available to accompany.
[+] [-] runako|7 years ago|reply
Given that there are responses which declined to report anyone, the actual number is obviously higher. This is happening at the top startup accelerator in the world, where there is likely to be more scrutiny than elsewhere. (The problem is likely worse in other places.)
Kudos on publishing this research, great work.
[+] [-] Alex3917|7 years ago|reply
Doesn't surprise me. A couple years ago my co-founder and I were at a startup event, and an investor came up to another founder next to us and made a comment like, "Oh, you're way too hot to be a startup founder, what are you doing here?"
It's a tricky problem to really make sense of though just because investors are so diverse. You've got things like:
- People who got an MBA and for whom investing is their actual career.
- Founders who exited their own startup and now it's their hobby or second career.
- People who made a couple million dollars as doctors or lawyers and are now taking it up as a hobby in their 50s.
- People who made tens or hundreds of millions of dollars from crypto or whatever in their early 20s and have now lost all touch with reality.
- People who quietly manage family offices who occasionally add a startup to their portfolio.
Not that it necessarily matters from the founder's perspective. But it's just a very different problem than addressing sexual harassment in tech companies, because you have a mix of people doing it as a career and people doing it for completely different reasons.
[+] [-] nailer|7 years ago|reply
From your comment:
> Nearly 20% of responders reported sexual coercion or quid-pro-quo
From the survey:
>> 88 YC female founders completed the survey
>> 19 founders experienced one or more inappropriate incidents by angels or VCs:
Yes, 19/88 of founders surveyed stated they had been harassed to YC as part of the survey.
From your comment:
> Given that there are responses which declined to report anyone
The reporting here is between the founder and authorities, other founders, other VCs, in context of the incident and not the survey.
From the survey:
>> When founders did report, their main reason was to protect others: “I wanted to make sure that other founders funded by this VC would NOT be in contact with this person, so I shared.”
I'm not assuming any malice on your part, just a misreading of the survey results.
[+] [-] roenxi|7 years ago|reply
> "18 experienced unwanted sexual overtures or sexual badgering"
Badgering is beyond the pale, "unwanted sexual overtures" are unwelcome but I don't see how they are ever going away; if men don't make a first sexual overture there aren't going to be a lot of men who end up having sex. Some of those overtures are going to be unwanted, but the men basically have to try to find out.
Things like Tinder where you can filter for "interested only" are pretty much a new phenomenon and havn't really had time to influence the culture of anyone aged over 30.
Anyway, I'd like to know how persistent these "unwanted sexual overture" is before it is reported in the survey as harassment. Minor point in a larger picture.
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LyndsySimon|7 years ago|reply
I don't think you can assume that. I think it's very likely that the number is higher, but it's also possible that it's lower - that women who have experienced harassment are more likely to complete a survey on the topic than women who have not.
[+] [-] duxup|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sidlls|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nrdgrl|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] castlecrasher2|7 years ago|reply
I don't see any specifics on the number reported vs the number that experienced harassment, just the number of respondents who experienced it. Where is that in the article?
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] UncleMeat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jVinc|7 years ago|reply
Not even taking men into account seems to passively push the rather sexist mantra that men should just "suck it up" and not actually be taken serious in cases or sexual coercion and quid-pro-quo situations.
I'm not trying to argue that woman are not disproportional represented in these case, however why not just include everyone? You state Callisto is a "non-profit dedicated to building tech to combat sexual assault and harassment." if that is the case and it's not just for assault and harassment against woman, then why self-limit the scope of your survey?
And if the answer is "we would have just found no-one had any issues anyway" then I restate the question, why not just send it out to everyone and show this disproportion with data instead of just making it an assumption?
[+] [-] anjanarajan|7 years ago|reply
For the survey, we started with a small list of female founders that we thought we could get a high response rate from. We definitely are interested in doing surveys of all genders.
Callisto Expansion for Founders is launching on November 15th and it is for founders of all genders, not just for women.
[+] [-] vec|7 years ago|reply
The purpose of this survey is to jump up and down while waving its arms in the air and yelling "WE HAVE A PROBLEM"!
We have a problem.
We don't know the exact size and scope of the problem, but at a glance it looks like it's probably bad. I would love to see reliable data about precisely how bad, including among many other things gender cross-tabs. But that data doesn't exist because nobody's gone to the substantial effort to properly collect and publish it. Maybe, if we're lucky, this report will help to create the political will to bring some of that data into existence.
[+] [-] ClassyJacket|7 years ago|reply
>why not just send it out to everyone and show this disproportion with data instead of just making it an assumption?
Because all projects and studies have to have a scope or they would all use infinite resources. I'm sure there's an absolute plethora of studies that have already established the hugely disproportionate amount of sexual harassment that is by men against women.
[+] [-] jsmeaton|7 years ago|reply
I’m sure if men within YC experience this kind of behaviour they can use the same reporting tools on bookface.
[+] [-] beloch|7 years ago|reply
Founders will be able to use Callisto to securely store the identities of perpetrators of sexual coercion and assault. These identities will be encrypted in a way that not even the Callisto team can view. If multiple founders name the same perpetrator, they will be referred to an attorney who can then decrypt the founder’s contact info and reach out to provide them with free advice on their options for coming forward, including the option to share information with other victims of the same perpetrator."
-------------------
Collusion between witnesses can derail a court case. The best way to prevent charges of collusion is to limit communication between witnesses. This system absolutely should put an attorney in touch with the founders to build a case, but it should not put them in touch with each other. At least, not until after pressing legal charges is ruled out.
[+] [-] emtel|7 years ago|reply
I doubt it is a single bad actor, but I bet its highly asymmetric, since most offenders are likely serial offenders.
[+] [-] mindgam3|7 years ago|reply
Although the specific form of harassment may be sexual, fundamentally it isn't about sex. It's about abuse of power.
To be clear, I am 100% behind all efforts to reduce harassment in all forms, and I am aware that the % of female founders who have experienced harassment is higher than males. But I guarantee that the male % is greater than 0, and it would be constructive to have these perspectives included in future work.
[+] [-] rjzzleep|7 years ago|reply
Is there any data on how many of the angels and VC's have a background engineering, math, sciences vs. law, business and others?
It seems to be that correlation requires more than just, he's a guy, he get's more. She's a women she gets sexually harassed, she get's less. In one of the US offices I worked in I kept getting a lot of shit from some colleagues and a middle manage who's wife was one of the first employees and highly influentual. A year after I left, an ex colleague tells me that a good friend of that lady, also a lady, that didn't like me told everyone I talked shit about her breasts. Germany, half a year in, turns out the girls in the company are talking about my cute ass.
Is the difference that they did it behind my back, besides proactively? Can power dynamics really be boiled down to a plain men vs. women? Nothing about demographics, social context, history etc.?
Are we saying that Elizabeth Holmes is treated the same as some no name immigrant female founder? Or a random no name immigrant male founder even?
[+] [-] gk1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tdb7893|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] api|7 years ago|reply
They're all problems. Racism and sexism are bad but the others should get more scrutiny as well. I know that classism and "place-ism" (favoritism or discrimination based on region of origin) are fairly big things in the US.
[+] [-] NoblePublius|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ionforce|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drawnwren|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hypatiadotca|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|7 years ago|reply
(1) There are VCs that are female friendly from the get go, rather than as an afterthought, for instance http://www.karmijnkapitaal.nl/
(2) What is also interesting to research is what the difference is in capital raised for what %age of equity vs teams consisting of all-males.
(3) The study started off with a self-selected group, which might affect the results either way, it would be good to repeat it across a larger number of subjects chosen at random.
[+] [-] stevenwoo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drawnwren|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unstuckdev|7 years ago|reply
It's important to make all spaces welcoming so people aren't boxed into spaces that subdue their potential by forcing them to work with people they don't mesh with just to be in an industry that suits their interests and talents.
[+] [-] atomical|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shafyy|7 years ago|reply
I'm a male, my co-founder is a female.
We once went to a meeting with a VC (in San Francisco), and at the end he told us the story about why he didn't become a priest. Because when he was in an all-boys school, they always had one afternoon off per week. And they would go to the milkshake place and (and I'm quoting here) "everytime the girl working there turned around to stick the cups into the milkshake machine, her little butt would wiggle". He made this this butt grabbing motion with his hands.
And the way he told the story was exteremly unsettling, you could see his horniness through his words and the way he moved. Almost as if he was talking about a juicy steak he ate.
That story was 100% unrelated to our business or any other topic we were discussing. The worst part is, all 3 of us laughed. Only a minute after I realized that I should have said something.
The point of my story is that in that moment, I was almost in a shock-like state and didn't't know what to say. I was taken by surprise. My co-founder said that she felt super uncomfortable, and was happy that she wasn't in this room with him alone.
Not sure where I can report this, as Callisto seems for schools only?
[+] [-] asabjorn|7 years ago|reply
Also, I wonder if we can get a bit more detail on what situations these happened in and what exactly happened so that we can discuss other reasonable measures we can all participate in.
[+] [-] ummonk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rajacombinator|7 years ago|reply
The real solution if YC wants to use their top-of-food-chain position is to name, shame, ban these investors from YC invites, and - most importantly - target their LPs. No need for a tech platform. I make no judgement as to whether that is appropriate or something YC wants to undertake.
[+] [-] exogeny|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kragen|7 years ago|reply
My point is that none of these stories seem like the kind of treatment I would like to promise to sexual assault victims. It makes me question the founders' motivations; it's a bit like naming a Messianic Jewish club "The Final Solution", except that of course 100% of the people who might consider joining a Messianic Jewish club already know what that phrase connotes.
[+] [-] hal9000xp|7 years ago|reply
If I’m attracted to someone and I want to date. How you can ask to go out without risk of being accused of sexual harassment?
This is not sarcastic question. This is especially important if you as a male is not very good at reading subtle social cues.
P.S. I really don't see why it got downvoted. There is no hidden message here.
[+] [-] cm2012|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seshagiric|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sonnyblarney|7 years ago|reply
I always thought that investors might be looking for a date or something ... not quite professional ... but 'quid pro quo' ... my god man. Greasy.
[+] [-] gowld|7 years ago|reply
This isn't 100% practical in the business world, but could be quite helpful, and valuable in its own right to avoid single-points of information failure in the business.
With modern technology, recording conversations (with the knowledge and consent of both parties) can be a practical alternative when humans are not available to accompany.
[+] [-] User23|7 years ago|reply