Another weird attribute of her theory about setting the bar and paying premiums for talent is that her engineering team, according to LinkedIn, is in India --- which is a radically different market for software talent than SFBA. In particular, the gender distribution of CS grads and programmers in India is very different from what it is here.
One possible interpretation --- and there are probably equally credible others --- is that this founder found it difficult to compete in the (overheated) SFBA market for talent, irrespective of gender.
I used the following advanced sleuthing techniques (don't share outside HN):
1. I went to LinkedIn
2. I searched for "Silverlabs"
3. I found the page for their company
4. I clicked on the link labeled "14 employees and former employees have LinkedIn profiles"
5. I observed that all the engineering profiles were in Hyderabad.
I'm being a little snarky but also it's good to know how superficial this "research" was so it's not at all unlikely that I'm totally wrong about this.
One possible interpretation --- and there are probably equally credible others --- is that this founder found it difficult to compete in the (overheated) SFBA market for talent, irrespective of gender.