I perfectly understand intolerance towards sexual harassment but I wonder what qualifies as "inappropriate romantic behavior" in this context. You can not ask a founder "on a date"? What's if is the other way around?
EDIT: of course this is coming from a nobody. I'm just curious.
Correct: if your interactions with a founder are cabined by professional settings --- demo days, funding pitches, going for coffee to talk about their company --- romantic overtures are inappropriate. Similarly: if you're in process, at any stage, with a company, overtures to their founders are inappropriate.
It's important to understand WHY this is so: if you're an investor you are in a position of power over a founder. It is not possible in such a situation to make a romantic overture that is not tainted by the possibility that you are looking for a quid-pro-quo even if in fact you are not.
In addition to quid pro quo, making romantic overtures in professional settings sets up a barrier for women that doesn't exist for men. Men can go to coffee with a potential investor and know walking in the door that they're there to get a hearing about their business. But every woman that walks through that door has to fight off the concern that the meeting isn't about their company, but instead about their own personal availability.
Even if 90% of the time that concern is unfounded, the mental effort you spend dealing with that exerts drag and hurts your performance. One of the things investors are grading you on is confidence!
It sounds like your saying, "Why isn't there a VC firm that states outright you might be sexually harassed to receive funding"
How are you possibly surprised that isn't a thing...? Of course it's not and never could or should be. You're comment is being down-voted because it's pretty ridiculous; the extremely low possibility(non-existant) coupled with the offensive nature of the concept as a whole makes it mind-boggling that someone would even consider it worth pondering in the first place.
I speak I think for many people on HN when I say that at least on this thread, in this context, in this discussion, in these circumstances, this idea should be dismissed out of hand.
Let's stipulate you just want to have an interesting intellectual conversation. Can we have it some other time?
I understand where you're coming from, and that's fine.
As for context, I disagree--I think this is a perfectly fine time for it--OP was saying, in effect, "Folks, we're about to do Demo Day, don't be scumbags and/or harass our founders; there's a price to that."
My comment was in response to a (completely valid and correct!) complaint about the tainting of business relationships for investing with romantic/sexual nonsense. I asked a question that several people interpreted as crass, which is unfortunate. I later refined and elaborated on the topic, showing it could be taken quite seriously and evaluated beyond just being thought of as some lowbrow joke.
The troubling thing to me about this all is the out-of-hand rejection of the idea without further argument than "This idea makes us really uncomfortable, and we summarily refuse to evaluate it".
It's a sign of intellectual laziness, of prejudice, and perhaps most unfortunately, mob mentality on a forum I generally respect.
If we want to fix a lot of these issues we have as an industry, we can't shy away from ideas we find odious or comfortable: we must engage them on their own ground and show them to be folly.
"I imagine such a thing would be amazingly toxic and hopefully collapse into a vortex of bad."
That's exactly right. Your idea is nothing more than a thin veneer over a brothel. And that's exactly the reason it merits no further discussion. (Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with brothels, but that's not what HN is about.)
No, this 'intellectual conversation' should never happen. The people involved in any sort of conversation of this type(as I am sure many have happened in the past) will only dull their sympathy for people who do have to struggle/contend with this happening to them. It's morally disgusting and I could care less about your definition of 'morality'.
The idea that scholarly discussions should ever be disregarded as insensitive is, in my opinion, pure absurdity.
I don't disagree that this isn't the right time for it (though I don't fault angersock for that), nor do I disagree that it might dull the sympathies of some - regardless, I completely reject that as a valid reason for avoiding an exchange of ideas driven by intellect.
The exchanging of ideas is the definition of conversation itself, it is not particular to 'scholarly discussions'. That alone completely negates your point.
However, I understand what you are trying to say. You are worried that the dismissal of conversation is a bad attitude towards progress. That is true. BUT that is not what is happening here. The premise was already set for what this conversation would be about. You should think of my rhetoric as a part of the conversation itself. Just because I weighed in as "going further accomplishes nothing", does not make that a a wrong conclusion. You could try to prove why THAT conclusion is wrong (but only in relationship to the conversation itself) instead of generalizing what I am doing as somehow "stopping all scholarly discussions".
>Stopping any scholarly discussion is, in my opinion, pure absurdity.
And yet you hypocritically just put an end to a conversation that would be about: "Whether or not stopping points for scholarly discussions can be useful".
How can you not even see how unfruitful your conclusions are?
Because I don't have any desire to prolong a conversation with someone who feels like a possibly poor choice of words on my part renders my entire argument useless.
Choosing to opt out of a discussion is not the same as attempting to prevent others from having one.
Having a discussion with someone whose principle argument is that the discussion shouldn't be had seems like folly to me. Call it unfruitful if you like, but I wasn't attempting to start an argument as much as do my duty and explain the downvote.
We could go on and talk about the hypocrisy of how your attempts to extend the conversation are being made in order to bolster your argument against having one in the first place, but truly, I was not, nor am not trying to be condescending, as much as expressing my outright rejection for the idea that there is ever grounds for preventing an intellectual discussion on the grounds that someone might not like it.
The original conversation is not the one being extended. And who chose to take a leap away from the original conversation? You did. Your entire comment: invalid.
Disagreed. Any form of discrimination or ignorance should be challenged with more dialogue instead of less. Take whatever abhorrent ideological position you can think of and I will tell you that we should discuss it publicly, challenge it publicly, and destroy it intellectually in a public forum.
This has the advantages of:
* the person who held these thoughts outs themselves as a bigot as opposed to being a toxic agent
* a corpus of knowledge how to dispel/combat such positions is formed
* people who may be in the beginning stages of harboring such ideas are either discouraged due to strong public pushback or are helped to realize how wrong that position is
steveklabnik posted a good link for PG's take on downvotes--do we have a similar reference for flagging? I recall a couple of polls on it, but beyond that, nothing comes to mind.
Maybe it was hard to see with all the grey text, but I couldn't find a specific line where you supported the idea, but rather, you just wanted to discuss and dissect the merits of such an idea through breaking it down to promote discussion and to specifically call out pitfalls in taking things to an absurd degree. Shame people here have problems separating discussion and refutation of toxic ideas from the active support for toxic ideas.
Downvotes because you're wondering why there isn't a VC fund/group "explicitly" set up to invest money in companies/individuals in exchange for some sort of sexual favors or for tolerating whatever behaviour you would throw at them.
It may just be an idea that you're not explicitly advocating, but it's an idea that's too close to what professionals here and the industry as a whole are trying to distance themselves from.
I think the downvotes are not born of disagreement (you're not really taking much of a stance here to agree or disagree with) so much as because this comment seems needlessly lowbrow and serves no clear purpose but to fantasize about a world in which even more ugly things exist.
Phone number for a business conversation? Of course.
This isn't difficult. I know techies have a reputation for being socially awkward but if you're suggesting that asking for someone's phone number in a business context could be mistaken for asking in a romantic context then you're wrong. It's very, very easy to define intention.
Any kind of romantic behavior is probably inappropriate, due to the power/incentive imbalance. A founder is trying to get money, an investor has money, and romantic overtures are really difficult to separate from the "getting money" problem.
I sort-of agree with you and sort-of don't. I think there are situations where there isn't a power imbalance.
For example a lot of VC firms won't invest in two companies in the same space. This ensures that they themselves don't have to pick which of their two portfolio companies is a winner in terms of advice, contacts, hiring help, etc. This is "baked in" to VC in a very, very obvious, no-exceptions kind of way.
So let's suppose that Anna is a founder at BoxFlix. And let's suppose that Gary is a VC with ABCD Partners. ABCD led Netflix's series A round (and since it's fictional, Netflix hasn't gone public yet). Gary is at demo day and couldn't possibly ever even HOPE to invest in BoxFlix no matter how compelling Anna and her team and company are; he's already in the Netflix deal. Further let's suppose that Gary primarily deals on the clean energy side of things, meaning that most of his personal/professional (they're often intermixed) contacts won't do Anna any good.
So could Gary ask Anna out on a date without it being inappropriate?
Let's suppose for the sake of argument that he tells Anna all this prior to his asking her out on a date such that she knows Gary and ABCD Partners will never invest in her company. In this case I think it's at the very least in a grey area and quite possibly not inappropriate at all.
Now if Gary conveniently doesn't mention that he or his company could never invest with BoxFlix, it could be argued that he's trying to bait & switch on Anna and that's a real problem.
Or if Gary led the investment in Netflix and sits on the board and remains highly involved in the company that could be inappropriate too, at least for Gary. Anna might not mind, but ABCD Partners surely would.
Disclaimer: I made all this stuff up. I live in Houston, not California and I don't really know anyone out there. If this seems too much like anything that's happened in real life I apologize and I'm happy to change the made-up names of Anna, Gary or ABCD Partners. It's all just to illustrate a point, not to make anyone feel bad.
EDIT: I wrote all this out because the original line is "Y Combinator has a zero tolerance policy for inappropriate sexual or romantic behavior from investors toward founders."
In that I read the word "inappropriate". If it was a strictly zero-tolerance policy (like schools have for guns, fake or real or toy or hand-formed-into-a-gun) then the word "inappropriate" wouldn't need to be there. By definition ALL romantic/sexual advances would be inappropriate.
So that leads me to believe that the folks at YC think it is possible for a VC and a founder to interact in a way that might end up romantic and that it's OK.
The other possibility is that they mean "no VC we invite can ever ask a founder out" but worded it poorly. I'd like to think that the folks at YC are smarter than that so I discount it as a possibility but there's still some chance that's what happened.
In either case, it's inappropriate. Professionally, it creates a major conflict of interest. Personally, it create a power dynamic where the founder may be indebted to the founder and facilitate unethical interaction.
The other responses are excellent, but I'll add my two cents. There is good reason to interpret this language broadly. Its really shitty when someone you assumed was interested in you as a potential investment (or as a coworker or mentor or contact or just an ally in office politics), turns out to just be interested in getting into your pants. Hitting on someone at demo day is just the tip of the iceberg. This goes all the way down to asking out someone on your team. This shit is just toxic up and down.
I think in this context, investor <--> founder is analagous to boss <--> employee, so I guess you'd have to take similar steps to manage it i.e. recuse yourself from investment decisions regarding that company.
I guess it would be equally awkward. In such a case, the people involved should at least wait until there is no more professional connection between them.
Furthermore, from a business standpoint, it's understandable that YCombinator doesn't want this kind of thing. It seems very dangerous for the company, without any advantage.
Still inappropriate after demo day. Investors are a tight knit group and retaliatory action is always a concern. The recent two exposes from two female founders both pointed to investors' power/influence as coercive factors, even if no specific deal is on the table.
It's maybe unfortunate it has to be this way, but investors should not hit on founders, full stop.
For those who didn't see this when it was making its way around, these are the two articles that have come up recently:
> When she asked why, he told her. “I don’t like the way women think,” he said. “They haven’t mastered linear thinking.” To prove his point, he explained that his wife could never prioritize her to-do lists properly. And then, as if he was trying to compliment her, he told Tucker she was different. “You’re more male,” he said.
This sounds like something a cartoon villain would say, but there's research that shows that the way men relate to their wives colors how they view women in their workplace. If you're a woman and your boss doesn't respect his wife's intellect, then it's going to be that much harder to make him respect your's.
I dunno where I'm going with this, but, if I were a manager and wanted to date a subordinate, I imagine I could quit, get a another job, and then ask the person out.[1] Is this route not available to an investor? Are they in the position of "permanent boss" to a founder?
This is a good plug for my general advice: make sure your employees have enough time to date outside of work.
[1] I never did this or was in a position to do this. And, speaking from general life experience, I would want someone to shake my shoulders vigorously and tell me "get over it, find someone else, there are plenty of fish in the sea," but people can't always see obvious things like this if/when they fall for someone.
Yeah, this is why I described it as "maybe unfortunate". I do believe there are roles where you will end up being "permanent boss" to a group of people, and short of losing all of your money/influence there's no way out.
A burden of being incredibly wealthy and influential, I suppose.
Since there are some founders who go through YC more than once, that's not good enough.
There are 6 billion people on this planet. It's not that hard to figure out as a YC investor: if it's a YC founder, they're no longer part of that pool. Period. I'm amazed at the amount of "but what if ..." discussion here
But yeah, it's all a bit crazy.