That's an edge that can reap rich rewards. It's also an edge that most often goes to those who fit Silicon Valley's typical demographic for entrepreneurs: Young white males. Few of the industry's incubators keep track of the racial and gender breakdown of the founders they choose to back.
Take Y Combinator, for example. Based in Mountain View, Calif., it offers a bit of launch funding, typically a few thousand dollars, in exchange for a small equity stake. But Y Combinator's real value is its network: Participants get legal aid, guidance and advice from well-connected industry veterans. The program's reputation is so strong that three of the industry's most influential investors -- Yuri Milner, Ron Conway and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz -- offer every participant a no-questions-asked $150,000 investment.
Y Combinator has funded around 300 startups in its six-year existence. How many were run by women, or by minority entrepreneurs? Y Combinator has no idea.
"At the end of the day, as a startup investor, I only care about a great team and product," says Alexis Ohanian, Y Combinator's East Coast representative. "You could be from Mars, though the immigration hassle would be tricky."
Another Y Combinator representative told CNNMoney: "We've never collected any stats about people's race or ethnicity. It's not a big factor when we're judging applications."
That approach resonates with many in Silicon Valley. The tech industry likes to view itself as a pure meritocracy, where the only thing that matters is the quality of a visionary's idea and the depth of their technical skills.
But critics point out that subtle -- and sometimes not so subtle -- biases come into play. Legendary investor John Doerr made a telling, offhand remark a few years ago at a venture capital conference. He observed that the "world's greatest entrepreneurs" are almost all "white, male, nerds who've dropped out of Harvard or Stanford."
"When I see that pattern coming in -- which was true of Google -- it was very easy to decide to invest," he added.
Investor Mitch Kapor, who co-founded the Lotus Development Corp. 30 years ago and now runs his own technology investment firm, says the idea of a tech meritocracy is "an aspirational statement," not a factual one.
"Not everybody gets the same breaks; not everybody gets the same opportunities," he said in an interview this summer with Soledad O'Brien for CNN's Black in America documentary The New Promised Land: Silicon Valley. "The part that is meritocratic is great, and there's a big part of it that isn't. And so, please, let's not fool ourselves and pretend otherwise in some self-congratulatory kind of way."
No comments:
Post a Comment