6 ms·

Why are there so few black tech entrepreneurs?

37 points by SJSque 6y ago

Ancapistani 6y ago
While bias in hiring is certainly an issue, I don’t believe that its the primary factor. Most of this disparity is due to differences in opportunity. Blacks in the US are less likely to have the resources at their disposal to enter our field. They are less likely to have two parents at home, to be able to afford college on their own, to have the familial financial and emotional support system necessary to have the required risk tolerance to attempt their own venture, and most of all - less likely to have escaped the pressures of devoting all of their energy to financial survival in the first place. Assuming the above statement is true, the only way to solve that problem is the address the root causes: stable families, educational opportunities, easier access to decent wages, and lower housing costs.
- umvi 6y ago
  > the only way to solve that problem is the address the root causes: stable families, educational opportunities, easier access to decent wages, and lower housing costs. That first one seems much more difficult than the others. How do you go from pervasive single-parent households to consistent two parent households? You can't simply throw money at the problem and expect the next generation to bootstrap itself into stable marriages. A lot of these single parent families start in middle/high school. And you can't just say "teach it in school" either, because truancy is rampant among black impoverished youth. So even if you have the best school in the world, it does no good if the kids aren't attending.
  - shakezula 6y ago
    It can't be addressed directly, it's a latent expression of the problem. Address all the other things and you'll see increased stability in the average family.
  - jknz 6y ago
    Truancy: the action of staying away from school without good reason; absenteeism. (Had to google it! Thanks for a new word) Truancy can be dealt with by providing food to the kid at the end of the school day, food meant to be brought home. There are of course arguments against this, e.g., school are not meant for this. Well, schools are not meant to operate with absent students and whatever can fix should be considered.
    - whammywon 6y ago
      Some schools do provide food for students' evening meals. I don't have a statistic to provide, but my wife's school is one of them. It's also worth noting that her school is the low socioeconomic school district in our town (out of 3 total).
    - burfog 6y ago
      Perform a trick to get a food reward? It sounds like training dolphins. I don't even know if that is a good sign or a bad sign, but... wow.
      - adwn 6y ago
        Sure, you can turn up your nose at this "trick", shrug with resignation, and tell yourself "Well, nothing we can do about it!" Or you can get off your high horse, try something new, and see whether it solves this problem.
  - Ancapistani 6y ago
    > How do you go from pervasive single-parent households to consistent two parent households? I can’t. I’m a white dude and completely outside that experience, to the point that I would have to drive more than an hour to get somewhere it’s happening. I believe cultural is by and large a result, not a root cause. As a society we must identify the causes of the negative culture, work to change those things, wait, and modify our approach based on observation as time goes on. In terms of concrete ideas I would say: 1: judicial reforms. All else being equal, Blacks receive longer sentences than Whites. Stop that, through any means necessary. For the immediate future, the President and state governors should look for Black offenders in particular that are serving time and grant clemency and pardons as appropriate. 2: legislative reforms. Crimes that are predominately committed by Blacks have harsher prescribed punishments. Cocaine possession versus crack cocaine possession is a great example of this. Mandatory minimums should be significantly reduced or eliminated. We should consider some means of reducing the latitude that judges have for determining sentencing. 3. social support. This doesn’t have to mean the government spending tax dollars - it could, and that could be effective, but I’m sure you can infer from my username that that’s not what I want to happen. The biggest thing here would likely be the people who “made it” staying involved in their local communities. A child who grows up seeing all of the adults around them either struggling to survive in a dead-end job, incarcerated, or actively involved in criminal activity and apparently better off for it has the deck stacked against them. I live in a poor, rural area. I take every opportunity I get to show kids what I do, how I got here, and what it would take for them to take a similar path. AFAIK, that’s simply not happening in most poor Black communities.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- threatofrain 6y ago
  What's sad is that all these kinds of investments would take two decades to see fruit, but in tech years that's forever.
- athms 6y ago
  >Blacks in the US are less likely to have the resources at their disposal to enter our field. What is "our" field? Food service? Car repair? Carpet cleaning? >to be able to afford college on their own No college is needed to be an entrepreneur.
  - Twixes 6y ago
    I imagine grandparent meant the broad field of software. Where you do need at least somewhat performant hardware and an environment to focus in to enter it. To be an entrepreneur, you do need connections and a cushion (like savings or family with means to support you) though.
founderofcolour 6y ago
Posting anonymous for obvious reasons. I'm not black, but I am a minority. The racism in tech is so obvious, my eyes bleed sometimes. At my workplace, they will consistently take an average white worker (no special degrees, no special schools) and promote them over and over until they are multiple levels higher than others. Its all BLM woo haa on slack but what really matters is promotions, raises, projects, opportunities, and nothing shows up there. Pretty soon, you have a 24 or 25yo director of VP presiding over a PoC (some of whom are black) who has two or more decades of experience and who is obviously doing all the real work. The entire c-suite has a single person of color. The board has none. Then, you hear people grumbling in management meetings that some of the "diversity hires" are not motivated. Think -- why would they be motivated given what goes on? Addendum: Not saying this doesnt happen outside of tech, but I know it happens in tech because I see it company after company, and especially at my current venture-backed employer. So consider that when you hear empty talk about tech being a meritocracy. Now granted, tech does have good numbers of Asians, but I think that is sheer funnel input volume driving that.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Who are some 25yr old directors and VPs? Not counting "CTO" of a 10 person startup where the title is obviously bogus.
  - founderofcolour 6y ago
    If you have linked-in premium, do a search of "Director" and "VP" and try to back out age by year of undergraduate graduation and you'll find plenty in tech. Good point about small companies. In my case, we're a tad about 100 employees. This would be a great great great investigative journalist piece that is data-driven for someone who wants to earn the ire of tech decision makers. That will not be me. In my company of 100, we have 4! Once is 27 now, but was promoted at 25.
- Ancapistani 6y ago
  Out of curiosity - the 25-year-old white VP seems very specific, so I assume it’s based on a personal experience. When were you able to enter the field, compared to them? Do they have more experience at an earlier age? To be clear, I am in no way arguing or trying to minimize your experiences. I’m looking for holes in my own view of the problem, which I stated in a top-level comment. Based on that I would expect that the VP probably had a lot of starting advantages over you. That doesn’t make it right, but it may highlight effective strategies for changing the dynamic for your children.
mytailorisrich 6y ago
For whatever reasons, it seems to me that relatively few black people study for engineering and science degrees. At least that's my feeling in Europe. Then it's simply a trickle down effect, like for women in tech: Few choose this path so even fewer end up being tech entrepreneurs or at Google/Facebook, etc (since the article mentions the workforce of these companies). So, once again, education from primary/secondary school is key and needs a long term investment. After that, all these talks about "increasing diversity" in tech by 'tweaking' hiring practices or what not is just PR fluff or virtue signalling because this tries to fix a consequence while ignoring the cause. Silicon Valley's giants should instead reach out to help on education if they wanted to do actual good long term.
- charlesu 6y ago
  There are many, many non-technical founders. Most jobs at Google and Facebook are not in engineering. A lack of blacks in computer science might explain why the engineering department has only two black employees but how do we explain the sales team?
  - Gibbon1 6y ago
    Thought. Old school. If you needed another team member HR and the Boss would hire one. And you'd have to work with them. If the company thought they weren't hiring enough women and blacks they'd just hire some women and blacks. New way, we only hire from the top schools and programs. And we allow members of the team to act as gate keepers over vague things like 'cultural fit'. Over time your team becomes composed entirely of upper class whites and a few model minorities.
    - burfog 6y ago
      This is interesting: "upper class whites and a few model minorities" Discrimination against the lower class is invisible within the white population. It just goes undetected. It is never reported to the government. Group photos doesn't raise suspicion. If race and class are correlated, then one type of discrimination can be misdetected as the other.
brainless 6y ago
I didn't think about it before but just thinking now - I know more Indian origin tech founders in the US than Black tech founders in the US. I find that a bit surprising suddenly. I'm an Indian who has never been to the US so I can not imagine the ground reality. But it's odd when I think of this. And I follow a good chunk of tech stuff online from various founders.
- Ancapistani 6y ago
  There are ~1.4 billion people in India. The subset of those who are able to afford to immigrate to the US is a small fraction of that - a fraction that by definition has either the financial means to do so or extreme motivation and persistence. In light of that, it’s not at all surprising to me that people of Indian descent in America are disproportionately successful.
  - brainless 6y ago
    There are 1.4 billion people now. Indians have been doing some wonderful things in the US for a couple decades now. Which means even previous generation expats were probably having more chance at success than Black Americans? I am happy with where Indians are but I'm just trying to understand, in the light of recent situations, how deeply Black Americans feel they don't have any chance at success within their own country.
    - Ancapistani 6y ago
      Even going as far back as when India was a British possession, the Indians who were able to immigrate was still the best-suited for success. In fact, I’d expect that the disparity was greater then that now - the caste system was even more strictly enforced, and it took more resources to move halfway around the world in 1960 than it does in 2020.
- mytailorisrich 6y ago
  I don't know if it's a general cultural trait, but my feeling is that Indians in Western countries tend to invest massively in education and point their children towards 'practical subjects: tech, medicine, law, business. I think that they are over-represented in all these subjects compared to their demographic weight in the general population. On top of that, there is a significant migration of Indian engineers to the US/UK/etc.
Mc91 6y ago
Tech entrepreneurs come out of IT. In the US, when I was a teenager, blacks kids who were into computers were doing the same things the other people going to computer clubs and whatnot did. Some knew more than a lot of the white kids. As people graduated high school, went to college, got internships and jobs, somewhere along that route a lot of them fell off. Also, I worked at some places with a lower manager that just seemed to have it in for the staff black IT person for no discernible reason, making life more difficult for them etc.
- founderofcolour 6y ago
  Also consider that having an arrest record (or worse) (which I think we can finally agree happens to black people -- being arrested for no reason) precludes you from many jobs
  - Ancapistani 6y ago
    I feel like I’m going out on a limb here, but I’ve made it a personal goal to try to reconcile the language used in political conversations as best I can. > being arrested for no reason I think a lot of people in the US would disagree with this statement. It’s (typically) not precisely true, but the idea I believe you’re expressing absolutely is. Blacks (and other minorities) in the US are policed more aggressively than Whites. This is a fact, and I don’t know anyone who would disagree with it. I suspect it’s very uncommon for them to be arrested for no reason, though. Rather, they are investigated for little to no reason, and for crimes that are rarely or never enforced for others. A White guy driving down the road with a joint in his ash tray is less likely to get pulled over. He’s less likely to be asked to allow a search of his vehicle. The cop is less likely to be looking for contraband. If it’s found, it’s more likely that the cop will either completely overlook it or decline to charge him with possession. If charged, it’s less likely he’ll be convicted. If convicted, he’ll likely get a lighter sentence. By saying “for no reason”, we emotionally charge the debate and give people with opposing views a straw man to attack. Worse, I’ve found that people who are simply ignorant of the issues or who haven’t examined their own views at all to latch on to this and never even consider the reality of the situation. Instead, it’s easier for them to think “this person has an agenda, and they’re wrong because this is technically false”.
danhak 6y ago
Generational wealth. Ask yourself why there are so few entrepreneurs—of any race—who can take big risks without a family safety net to fall back on. Now realize that slavery was only two generations ago, Jim Crow / legal segregation ended with this generation, and mass incarceration and systemic racism are ongoing.
- umvi 6y ago
  And not just generational material wealth, but generational intellectual wealth as well. What % of black people have parents they can go to ask complex financial questions about investing, mortgages, loans, retirement, etc. vs white people? Or even just basic cooking/diet/physical health questions? People vastly underestimate the value of intellectual wealth passed from successful, educated parents to their offspring.
  - strikelaserclaw 6y ago
    agreed, cultural and intellectual wealth is far more valuable than material wealth. Take the Jewish people for example, the reason they can go from one place to the other with no material wealth and still come out on top is probably due to their inherited cultural/intellectual wealth.
- anemoiac 6y ago
  It seems to me that (non-black) Americans commonly overestimate the amount of time that’s passed since the end of slavery - there are still living children of slaves! [1] 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/07/27/slave-son-racism-george-floyd/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/07/27/slave-son-...
morceauxdebois 6y ago
Gee, why aren't a predominantly economically unfortunate demographic majorly present in an area requiring capital or higher education?
- bsanr2 6y ago
  *economically sabotaged
  - charlesu 6y ago
    I don't know why you're being down voted. Blacks were purposefully if not explicitly excluded from many economic programs for decades, from the Homestead Act to the GI Bill. Several of their towns and communities we're destroyed, like Greenwood Tulsa. That sounds like sabotage.
    - bsanr2 6y ago
      It's a sore subject, particularly on HN, because it calls into question the meritocracy Americans want to believe they epitomize. Suffice it to say that, while the examples you relate were significant and infamous, such sabotage also manifests insidiously in smaller ways.
- tootahe45 6y ago
  By tech i assume we mean IT, which requires very little capital to start a business or learn about. And student loans have no accessability requirements in the US.
sillpunt 6y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve
dumbfoundded 6y ago
This article seems to solely focus on venture-backed startups. It would be interesting to understand how the venture world does in terms of inclusivity versus more traditional entrepreneurship like starting a restaurant or other small local business. According to surveys from US Census data in 2017 (1), it seems pretty similar. This points to not VCs as the source of the problem but more to the general racism that exists. Starting a business in any sense is perhaps the largest financial risk any individual can take. Being able to afford that risk is a huge privilege accessible to only a few. I'm glad there's a focus on creating more opportunities for minorities in the VC but ultimately this reflective of the structural racism that seeps through every part of American society. (1) https://blackdemographics.com/economics/black-owned-businesses/ https://blackdemographics.com/economics/black-owned-business...
umvi 6y ago
Like mentioned in the article, only 13% of Americans are black[0]. Secondly, nearly 30% of that 13% are living in poverty[1]. So really you only have ~8% of Americans who are both black and not in poverty. From there it gets whittled down further for cultural reasons. You could similarly ask "where are there so few white rappers?" or "why are there so few male nurses?" and find cultural reasons and pressures involved for that. [0] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219 [1] http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/index.html%3Fp=4193.html http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/index.html%3Fp=4193.htm...
- Ancapistani 6y ago
  “Cultural reasons” is often a “dog whistle” term. I don’t believe that’s the case here, and am responding in that spirit. Why does “Black culture” in the US differ from “White culture”? I believe it’s because their experiences differ. Blacks in the US are disproportionately poor, urban, and from unstable home environments. While I don’t have facts to back this up, I expect that if we compared groups segmented by these factors we would find the racial/ethnic disparities to be much less pronounced. That difference could be reasonably attributed to culture. What shaped those cultures? That’s the important piece of information, and the root cause here. Looking back over American history, I’m aware of no point in which Whites and Blacks had even roughly equivalent conditions as a whole. At best, I would expect that the Black experience today is somewhere close to first-generation Irish or Italian immigrants in during their initial surges. Perhaps a closer fit would be Chinese immigrants during the railroad boom of westward expansion. It took generations for those groups to be fully integrated into our society. I fully expect it to take generations to solve this problem. There’s much to do that can speed it up - like ensuring legislation does not discriminate either explicitly or implicitly - but it’s going to take time. Changing hiring practices alone will not solve this.
  - krapp 6y ago
    >Why does “Black culture” in the US differ from “White culture”? One factor - white Americans have historically identified not as "white" primarily, but by country of origin - Italian, German, British, etc. "White" as a culture tends to be used as a reference in contrast with and in comparison to "black" culture or people. Whereas African slaves and their descendants were deprived of the opportunity to identify with their culture and countries of origin, so they had to build a cultural identity around the only common attribute and heritage they were afforded - their race.
bberenberg 6y ago
This Planet Money episode investigate the issue in an interesting analysis: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/12/876097416/patent-racism https://www.npr.org/2020/06/12/876097416/patent-racism
cvhashim 6y ago
Why is this flagged?
- burfog 6y ago
  It won't generate a reasonable intellectual discussion. Some of the most common opinions on the matter are unspeakable in polite society. Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham has this to say on that trouble: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html You can't have an honest discussion when not everybody can speak their mind.
  - krapp 6y ago
    >You can't have an honest discussion when not everybody can speak their mind. Yes, you certainly can. Looking through the thread I see a lot of what appears to me to be honest discussion, and I would also consider it of reasonable intellectual level. Those common "unspeakable" opinions you allude to tend to drag the quality of discussions down, rather than lift them up. But if it helps, everyone is aware of those opinions, it's just that most people just don't find them interesting or worth discussing.
renewiltord 6y ago
Interesting note that with sufficient discrimination, even non-discriminating agents will have the discrimination propagate to them. If I know that a black woman is going to have a hard time raising loans, hiring, finding a business partner and a white guy is going to have an easy time doing all that, even a non-discriminating VC will just go for the latter. After all, you're just blindly chasing outcomes. And there's no edge to be had by choosing someone who is holistically less likely to succeed because the environment doesn't favour them.
ksk 6y ago
Isn't there just an infinite series of questions that you can ask? How come there are so few paraplegic entrepreneurs? How come there are so few Eskimo entrepreneurs? I don't think that equality of opportunity will necessarily lead to homogeneity and equal representation in every single field of commerce. People are all wired differently with different inclinations/desires/ambitions/goals/skills.
- charlesu 6y ago
  Unless races are all wired differently, I think it's safe to assume that there should probably be equal representation in every single field. Is that your argument?
  - ksk 6y ago
    >Unless races are all wired differently, I think it's safe to assume that there should probably be equal representation in every single field. Is that your argument? Maybe I used the term wired a bit loosely, we're all the same DNA to be sure, but we are shaped by our environment, biology, wealth, upbringing, culture and so many other factors. I don't think how given a multitude of factors you can achieve equal representation unless you also have equal representation along the other axes. (Edit: Also, humans are not robots. There is still the element of free-will here. It may well be that Eskimos have no interest in entrepreneurship. :))

37 points by SJSque 6y ago

While bias in hiring is certainly an issue, I don’t believe that its the primary factor. Most of this disparity is due to differences in opportunity. Blacks in the US are less likely to have the resources at their disposal to enter our field. They are less likely to have two parents at home, to be able to afford college on their own, to have the familial financial and emotional support system necessary to have the required risk tolerance to attempt their own venture, and most of all - less likely to have escaped the pressures of devoting all of their energy to financial survival in the first place. Assuming the above statement is true, the only way to solve that problem is the address the root causes: stable families, educational opportunities, easier access to decent wages, and lower housing costs.

umvi 6y ago
> the only way to solve that problem is the address the root causes: stable families, educational opportunities, easier access to decent wages, and lower housing costs. That first one seems much more difficult than the others. How do you go from pervasive single-parent households to consistent two parent households? You can't simply throw money at the problem and expect the next generation to bootstrap itself into stable marriages. A lot of these single parent families start in middle/high school. And you can't just say "teach it in school" either, because truancy is rampant among black impoverished youth. So even if you have the best school in the world, it does no good if the kids aren't attending.
- shakezula 6y ago
  It can't be addressed directly, it's a latent expression of the problem. Address all the other things and you'll see increased stability in the average family.
- jknz 6y ago
  Truancy: the action of staying away from school without good reason; absenteeism. (Had to google it! Thanks for a new word) Truancy can be dealt with by providing food to the kid at the end of the school day, food meant to be brought home. There are of course arguments against this, e.g., school are not meant for this. Well, schools are not meant to operate with absent students and whatever can fix should be considered.
  - whammywon 6y ago
    Some schools do provide food for students' evening meals. I don't have a statistic to provide, but my wife's school is one of them. It's also worth noting that her school is the low socioeconomic school district in our town (out of 3 total).
  - burfog 6y ago
    Perform a trick to get a food reward? It sounds like training dolphins. I don't even know if that is a good sign or a bad sign, but... wow.
    - adwn 6y ago
      Sure, you can turn up your nose at this "trick", shrug with resignation, and tell yourself "Well, nothing we can do about it!" Or you can get off your high horse, try something new, and see whether it solves this problem.
- Ancapistani 6y ago
  > How do you go from pervasive single-parent households to consistent two parent households? I can’t. I’m a white dude and completely outside that experience, to the point that I would have to drive more than an hour to get somewhere it’s happening. I believe cultural is by and large a result, not a root cause. As a society we must identify the causes of the negative culture, work to change those things, wait, and modify our approach based on observation as time goes on. In terms of concrete ideas I would say: 1: judicial reforms. All else being equal, Blacks receive longer sentences than Whites. Stop that, through any means necessary. For the immediate future, the President and state governors should look for Black offenders in particular that are serving time and grant clemency and pardons as appropriate. 2: legislative reforms. Crimes that are predominately committed by Blacks have harsher prescribed punishments. Cocaine possession versus crack cocaine possession is a great example of this. Mandatory minimums should be significantly reduced or eliminated. We should consider some means of reducing the latitude that judges have for determining sentencing. 3. social support. This doesn’t have to mean the government spending tax dollars - it could, and that could be effective, but I’m sure you can infer from my username that that’s not what I want to happen. The biggest thing here would likely be the people who “made it” staying involved in their local communities. A child who grows up seeing all of the adults around them either struggling to survive in a dead-end job, incarcerated, or actively involved in criminal activity and apparently better off for it has the deck stacked against them. I live in a poor, rural area. I take every opportunity I get to show kids what I do, how I got here, and what it would take for them to take a similar path. AFAIK, that’s simply not happening in most poor Black communities.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
threatofrain 6y ago
What's sad is that all these kinds of investments would take two decades to see fruit, but in tech years that's forever.
athms 6y ago
>Blacks in the US are less likely to have the resources at their disposal to enter our field. What is "our" field? Food service? Car repair? Carpet cleaning? >to be able to afford college on their own No college is needed to be an entrepreneur.
- Twixes 6y ago
  I imagine grandparent meant the broad field of software. Where you do need at least somewhat performant hardware and an environment to focus in to enter it. To be an entrepreneur, you do need connections and a cushion (like savings or family with means to support you) though.

founderofcolour 6y ago

Posting anonymous for obvious reasons. I'm not black, but I am a minority. The racism in tech is so obvious, my eyes bleed sometimes. At my workplace, they will consistently take an average white worker (no special degrees, no special schools) and promote them over and over until they are multiple levels higher than others. Its all BLM woo haa on slack but what really matters is promotions, raises, projects, opportunities, and nothing shows up there. Pretty soon, you have a 24 or 25yo director of VP presiding over a PoC (some of whom are black) who has two or more decades of experience and who is obviously doing all the real work. The entire c-suite has a single person of color. The board has none. Then, you hear people grumbling in management meetings that some of the "diversity hires" are not motivated. Think -- why would they be motivated given what goes on? Addendum: Not saying this doesnt happen outside of tech, but I know it happens in tech because I see it company after company, and especially at my current venture-backed employer. So consider that when you hear empty talk about tech being a meritocracy. Now granted, tech does have good numbers of Asians, but I think that is sheer funnel input volume driving that.

srtjstjsj 6y ago
Who are some 25yr old directors and VPs? Not counting "CTO" of a 10 person startup where the title is obviously bogus.
- founderofcolour 6y ago
  If you have linked-in premium, do a search of "Director" and "VP" and try to back out age by year of undergraduate graduation and you'll find plenty in tech. Good point about small companies. In my case, we're a tad about 100 employees. This would be a great great great investigative journalist piece that is data-driven for someone who wants to earn the ire of tech decision makers. That will not be me. In my company of 100, we have 4! Once is 27 now, but was promoted at 25.
Ancapistani 6y ago
Out of curiosity - the 25-year-old white VP seems very specific, so I assume it’s based on a personal experience. When were you able to enter the field, compared to them? Do they have more experience at an earlier age? To be clear, I am in no way arguing or trying to minimize your experiences. I’m looking for holes in my own view of the problem, which I stated in a top-level comment. Based on that I would expect that the VP probably had a lot of starting advantages over you. That doesn’t make it right, but it may highlight effective strategies for changing the dynamic for your children.

mytailorisrich 6y ago

For whatever reasons, it seems to me that relatively few black people study for engineering and science degrees. At least that's my feeling in Europe. Then it's simply a trickle down effect, like for women in tech: Few choose this path so even fewer end up being tech entrepreneurs or at Google/Facebook, etc (since the article mentions the workforce of these companies). So, once again, education from primary/secondary school is key and needs a long term investment. After that, all these talks about "increasing diversity" in tech by 'tweaking' hiring practices or what not is just PR fluff or virtue signalling because this tries to fix a consequence while ignoring the cause. Silicon Valley's giants should instead reach out to help on education if they wanted to do actual good long term.

charlesu 6y ago
There are many, many non-technical founders. Most jobs at Google and Facebook are not in engineering. A lack of blacks in computer science might explain why the engineering department has only two black employees but how do we explain the sales team?
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  Thought. Old school. If you needed another team member HR and the Boss would hire one. And you'd have to work with them. If the company thought they weren't hiring enough women and blacks they'd just hire some women and blacks. New way, we only hire from the top schools and programs. And we allow members of the team to act as gate keepers over vague things like 'cultural fit'. Over time your team becomes composed entirely of upper class whites and a few model minorities.
  - burfog 6y ago
    This is interesting: "upper class whites and a few model minorities" Discrimination against the lower class is invisible within the white population. It just goes undetected. It is never reported to the government. Group photos doesn't raise suspicion. If race and class are correlated, then one type of discrimination can be misdetected as the other.

brainless 6y ago

I didn't think about it before but just thinking now - I know more Indian origin tech founders in the US than Black tech founders in the US. I find that a bit surprising suddenly. I'm an Indian who has never been to the US so I can not imagine the ground reality. But it's odd when I think of this. And I follow a good chunk of tech stuff online from various founders.

Ancapistani 6y ago
There are ~1.4 billion people in India. The subset of those who are able to afford to immigrate to the US is a small fraction of that - a fraction that by definition has either the financial means to do so or extreme motivation and persistence. In light of that, it’s not at all surprising to me that people of Indian descent in America are disproportionately successful.
- brainless 6y ago
  There are 1.4 billion people now. Indians have been doing some wonderful things in the US for a couple decades now. Which means even previous generation expats were probably having more chance at success than Black Americans? I am happy with where Indians are but I'm just trying to understand, in the light of recent situations, how deeply Black Americans feel they don't have any chance at success within their own country.
  - Ancapistani 6y ago
    Even going as far back as when India was a British possession, the Indians who were able to immigrate was still the best-suited for success. In fact, I’d expect that the disparity was greater then that now - the caste system was even more strictly enforced, and it took more resources to move halfway around the world in 1960 than it does in 2020.
mytailorisrich 6y ago
I don't know if it's a general cultural trait, but my feeling is that Indians in Western countries tend to invest massively in education and point their children towards 'practical subjects: tech, medicine, law, business. I think that they are over-represented in all these subjects compared to their demographic weight in the general population. On top of that, there is a significant migration of Indian engineers to the US/UK/etc.

Mc91 6y ago

Tech entrepreneurs come out of IT. In the US, when I was a teenager, blacks kids who were into computers were doing the same things the other people going to computer clubs and whatnot did. Some knew more than a lot of the white kids. As people graduated high school, went to college, got internships and jobs, somewhere along that route a lot of them fell off. Also, I worked at some places with a lower manager that just seemed to have it in for the staff black IT person for no discernible reason, making life more difficult for them etc.

founderofcolour 6y ago
Also consider that having an arrest record (or worse) (which I think we can finally agree happens to black people -- being arrested for no reason) precludes you from many jobs
- Ancapistani 6y ago
  I feel like I’m going out on a limb here, but I’ve made it a personal goal to try to reconcile the language used in political conversations as best I can. > being arrested for no reason I think a lot of people in the US would disagree with this statement. It’s (typically) not precisely true, but the idea I believe you’re expressing absolutely is. Blacks (and other minorities) in the US are policed more aggressively than Whites. This is a fact, and I don’t know anyone who would disagree with it. I suspect it’s very uncommon for them to be arrested for no reason, though. Rather, they are investigated for little to no reason, and for crimes that are rarely or never enforced for others. A White guy driving down the road with a joint in his ash tray is less likely to get pulled over. He’s less likely to be asked to allow a search of his vehicle. The cop is less likely to be looking for contraband. If it’s found, it’s more likely that the cop will either completely overlook it or decline to charge him with possession. If charged, it’s less likely he’ll be convicted. If convicted, he’ll likely get a lighter sentence. By saying “for no reason”, we emotionally charge the debate and give people with opposing views a straw man to attack. Worse, I’ve found that people who are simply ignorant of the issues or who haven’t examined their own views at all to latch on to this and never even consider the reality of the situation. Instead, it’s easier for them to think “this person has an agenda, and they’re wrong because this is technically false”.

danhak 6y ago

Generational wealth. Ask yourself why there are so few entrepreneurs—of any race—who can take big risks without a family safety net to fall back on. Now realize that slavery was only two generations ago, Jim Crow / legal segregation ended with this generation, and mass incarceration and systemic racism are ongoing.

umvi 6y ago
And not just generational material wealth, but generational intellectual wealth as well. What % of black people have parents they can go to ask complex financial questions about investing, mortgages, loans, retirement, etc. vs white people? Or even just basic cooking/diet/physical health questions? People vastly underestimate the value of intellectual wealth passed from successful, educated parents to their offspring.
- strikelaserclaw 6y ago
  agreed, cultural and intellectual wealth is far more valuable than material wealth. Take the Jewish people for example, the reason they can go from one place to the other with no material wealth and still come out on top is probably due to their inherited cultural/intellectual wealth.
anemoiac 6y ago
It seems to me that (non-black) Americans commonly overestimate the amount of time that’s passed since the end of slavery - there are still living children of slaves! [1] 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/07/27/slave-son-racism-george-floyd/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/07/27/slave-son-...

morceauxdebois 6y ago

Gee, why aren't a predominantly economically unfortunate demographic majorly present in an area requiring capital or higher education?

bsanr2 6y ago
*economically sabotaged
- charlesu 6y ago
  I don't know why you're being down voted. Blacks were purposefully if not explicitly excluded from many economic programs for decades, from the Homestead Act to the GI Bill. Several of their towns and communities we're destroyed, like Greenwood Tulsa. That sounds like sabotage.
  - bsanr2 6y ago
    It's a sore subject, particularly on HN, because it calls into question the meritocracy Americans want to believe they epitomize. Suffice it to say that, while the examples you relate were significant and infamous, such sabotage also manifests insidiously in smaller ways.
tootahe45 6y ago
By tech i assume we mean IT, which requires very little capital to start a business or learn about. And student loans have no accessability requirements in the US.

sillpunt 6y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve

dumbfoundded 6y ago

This article seems to solely focus on venture-backed startups. It would be interesting to understand how the venture world does in terms of inclusivity versus more traditional entrepreneurship like starting a restaurant or other small local business. According to surveys from US Census data in 2017 (1), it seems pretty similar. This points to not VCs as the source of the problem but more to the general racism that exists. Starting a business in any sense is perhaps the largest financial risk any individual can take. Being able to afford that risk is a huge privilege accessible to only a few. I'm glad there's a focus on creating more opportunities for minorities in the VC but ultimately this reflective of the structural racism that seeps through every part of American society. (1) https://blackdemographics.com/economics/black-owned-businesses/ https://blackdemographics.com/economics/black-owned-business...

umvi 6y ago

Like mentioned in the article, only 13% of Americans are black[0]. Secondly, nearly 30% of that 13% are living in poverty[1]. So really you only have ~8% of Americans who are both black and not in poverty. From there it gets whittled down further for cultural reasons. You could similarly ask "where are there so few white rappers?" or "why are there so few male nurses?" and find cultural reasons and pressures involved for that. [0] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219 [1] http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/index.html%3Fp=4193.html http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/index.html%3Fp=4193.htm...

Ancapistani 6y ago
“Cultural reasons” is often a “dog whistle” term. I don’t believe that’s the case here, and am responding in that spirit. Why does “Black culture” in the US differ from “White culture”? I believe it’s because their experiences differ. Blacks in the US are disproportionately poor, urban, and from unstable home environments. While I don’t have facts to back this up, I expect that if we compared groups segmented by these factors we would find the racial/ethnic disparities to be much less pronounced. That difference could be reasonably attributed to culture. What shaped those cultures? That’s the important piece of information, and the root cause here. Looking back over American history, I’m aware of no point in which Whites and Blacks had even roughly equivalent conditions as a whole. At best, I would expect that the Black experience today is somewhere close to first-generation Irish or Italian immigrants in during their initial surges. Perhaps a closer fit would be Chinese immigrants during the railroad boom of westward expansion. It took generations for those groups to be fully integrated into our society. I fully expect it to take generations to solve this problem. There’s much to do that can speed it up - like ensuring legislation does not discriminate either explicitly or implicitly - but it’s going to take time. Changing hiring practices alone will not solve this.
- krapp 6y ago
  >Why does “Black culture” in the US differ from “White culture”? One factor - white Americans have historically identified not as "white" primarily, but by country of origin - Italian, German, British, etc. "White" as a culture tends to be used as a reference in contrast with and in comparison to "black" culture or people. Whereas African slaves and their descendants were deprived of the opportunity to identify with their culture and countries of origin, so they had to build a cultural identity around the only common attribute and heritage they were afforded - their race.

bberenberg 6y ago

This Planet Money episode investigate the issue in an interesting analysis: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/12/876097416/patent-racism https://www.npr.org/2020/06/12/876097416/patent-racism

cvhashim 6y ago

Why is this flagged?

burfog 6y ago
It won't generate a reasonable intellectual discussion. Some of the most common opinions on the matter are unspeakable in polite society. Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham has this to say on that trouble: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html You can't have an honest discussion when not everybody can speak their mind.
- krapp 6y ago
  >You can't have an honest discussion when not everybody can speak their mind. Yes, you certainly can. Looking through the thread I see a lot of what appears to me to be honest discussion, and I would also consider it of reasonable intellectual level. Those common "unspeakable" opinions you allude to tend to drag the quality of discussions down, rather than lift them up. But if it helps, everyone is aware of those opinions, it's just that most people just don't find them interesting or worth discussing.

renewiltord 6y ago

Interesting note that with sufficient discrimination, even non-discriminating agents will have the discrimination propagate to them. If I know that a black woman is going to have a hard time raising loans, hiring, finding a business partner and a white guy is going to have an easy time doing all that, even a non-discriminating VC will just go for the latter. After all, you're just blindly chasing outcomes. And there's no edge to be had by choosing someone who is holistically less likely to succeed because the environment doesn't favour them.

ksk 6y ago

Isn't there just an infinite series of questions that you can ask? How come there are so few paraplegic entrepreneurs? How come there are so few Eskimo entrepreneurs? I don't think that equality of opportunity will necessarily lead to homogeneity and equal representation in every single field of commerce. People are all wired differently with different inclinations/desires/ambitions/goals/skills.

charlesu 6y ago
Unless races are all wired differently, I think it's safe to assume that there should probably be equal representation in every single field. Is that your argument?
- ksk 6y ago
  >Unless races are all wired differently, I think it's safe to assume that there should probably be equal representation in every single field. Is that your argument? Maybe I used the term wired a bit loosely, we're all the same DNA to be sure, but we are shaped by our environment, biology, wealth, upbringing, culture and so many other factors. I don't think how given a multitude of factors you can achieve equal representation unless you also have equal representation along the other axes. (Edit: Also, humans are not robots. There is still the element of free-will here. It may well be that Eskimos have no interest in entrepreneurship. :))