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The personal opinions of individuals are pretty irrelevant when discussing systemic issues, so I don't see that as very productive to focus on. In either direction, actually; personally well-meaning people can nonetheless be complicit in systemic racism/sexism/etc., and personally bigoted people might not be.

I do think YC is probably more open to women as founders than the VC norm, but it's the overall statistics that convince me of that more than some attempt to discern what its principals personally think about things. That was the most interesting part of this post as well, talking about what YC is actually doing.




Systems are made of (or by) people. Systematic biases are not curses handed down by gods, they originate from somewhere within organizations.

It is therefore relevant to consider the individuals involved when we are talking about systematic biases of the system which is composed of them. You cannot talk about the biases of YC without talking about the biases of the people who comprise YC. It would be like talking about the structural integrity of a building while trying to never consider the physical properties of the building materials.

(Of course, even if we strike off this entire thread of conversation as irrelevant, that does not make the comment I was responding to any less problematic.)




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