Interview: Y Combinator Founder Jessica Livingston

[okeumeni]

Being a hacker and dad of girls, I have to admit I am always very excited and proud of women achievement in the tech world.

I still think there are not enough ladies hackers out there. I thank you Jessica for your work, this should inspire more girls to become hackers.

[jlees]

Wouldn't have pegged Jessica as a typical hacker or really an inspiration to get girls coding in that sense of the term, but any woman working in tech happy to share her story gets an automatic thumbs up regardless of terminology.

[daniel-cussen]

Finally the mainstream looks up to a woman in tech that actually seems to deserve it. I.e. not Carly Fiorina.

[vaksel]

Upvoted for the personal attack, since Fiorina deserves it

[jodrellblank]

(Downvoted for the personal attack, not disagreement with the first bit)

[xfnid]

JL was PG's girlfriend, which is how she got involved in this stuff. So she interviewed some founders.

Then she did organizing for start-up school and administrative duties for YC.

Not sure what you mean about "deserving". Sure, having organizational skills is useful, but not exceptional.

Not a knock at all on JL, but becoming CEO of HP was certainly a lot harder and more exceptional, even if Fiorina was exceptionally bad at actually being CEO.

Still waiting for a tech equivalent of the Go-Go's.

[apsec112]

Why is it that any article about any female in computing, regardless of who they're working for or what they're working on, will always mention at some point the high male:female ratio in most technical fields? What is it about this topic that makes people want to come back to it over and over and over, no matter how many discussions they've had on it previously? Eg., even though this article's title is completely generic, the very first thought I had upon looking at it was "this will talk at some point about the dearth of women in programming or startups or something-or-other", and lo, my prophecy was fulfilled.

[mattyb]

The interview was conducted by The Next Women, which has a "focus on startups and growing businesses, led, founded or invested in by women."

http://thenextwomen.com/about/

[stanleydrew]

I don't understand why an article wouldn't mention it. A lot of articles are written because the subject stands out in some way, and to not address that seems remiss to me.

[edw519]

"Comically unbusinesslike behavior struck me as actually critical to the success of a startup."

What an interesting quote. I think I know what she's talking about, but I'm not sure.

If there's a difference between commonly accepted behavior and the behavior of successful startup founders, then which is really more "businesslike"?

[staunch]

There's no question that plenty of very successful people have not behaved in the way that most people consider to be "professional". The problem is that people either don't realize that or have a vested interest in ignoring that fact.

I think it all comes down to people wanting to be like the "business" people they see on TV. The persona of the rigid professional suit-wearing business person is attractive to a lot of people.

Edit: The insidious part is that they scorn you if you don't play along!

[gcheong]

And which is more comical?

[alphazero]

And following the link trails we find:

Paul Graham (Viaweb) On raising money: “The advice I would give is to avoid it. I would say spend as little as you can because every dollar of the investors’ money you get will be taken out of your ass…”

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/03/founders_at_wor.html#ixz...

Is that "Y"?