> No one understands female founders better than Jessica. But it's unlikely anyone will ever hear her speak candidly about the topic. She ventured a toe in that water a while ago, and the reaction was so violent that she decided "never again."
I wonder how much wisdom has been lost bc of this effect.
I feel like society needs to create a much larger incentive for thoughtful people to share their wisdom. Today, you stand to gain status & wealth, but a lot of thoughtful people like Jessica don't care about that.
I think the only solution is to somehow protect them from the disincentive (backlash from the internet mob), but I don't know how.
For the curious, I think this is what pg is referring to: https://valleywag.gawker.com/paul-graham-says-women-havent-b... (so glad that “news site” is dead BTW). He made some Summers-like foray on female founder’s abilities, I remember it was a big deal at the time, now I don’t know if many people remember it (note to self about any moral battle du jour that seem so important). I have no data to back this up but always thought that this brouhaha was a big reason pg moved on from YC, not that he was ousted or anything, but didn’t want to deal with this crowd. Jessica Livingstone got embroiled, too.
Wow. Now I really don't understand the cult-like reverence for PG on here. That he begins his post about Livingstone by referring to her as the "mom" of YC corroborates the Gawker piece in my mind.
I’m not familiar with this incident, and if it was truly violent then I agree that it’s tragic and likely to result in a loss of valuable voices.
But all too often people express opinions publicly, then receive criticism of those opinions publicly, and conclude “wow, these days you can’t even express opinions any more.” This is especially common with wealthy and/or powerful people who are not accustomed to receiving criticism from the public.
"""Not surprisingly, the juiciest targets for this sort of willful misinterpretation are organizations and people who are successful. They have power, and power makes them both interesting and envied; I teach founders they all have to be prepared for this as their startups grow.
In my blog post, "Subtle Mid-Stage Startup Pitfalls" I said:
You can't prevent yourself from being a target. It's an automatic
consequence of being successful. So the best you can do is react
in the right way when people attack you. To some extent you have
to resign yourself to letting people lie about you.
The problem with this is, the most successful people in an industry tend to have some of the most valuable insights about it. So you lose a lot when they are silenced. And also, if they keep those insights to themselves, it makes the powerful more powerful. It means useful information remains amongst insiders, like me, for example."""
Thanks for sharing, below is a quote from the same post.
> Thirteen years later, that's my default plan. There’s just too much downside for me to get distracted with others’ opinions of my opinions. [1] It's not that I'm afraid of expressing my opinions. I just think, "Why bother?"
Is it really true that she's not afraid though? It's a perfectly natural reaction to be afraid of the internet mob shouting you down -- the first time I went through this, I was extremely distraught.
The reason I ask is bc we should be honest about the problem, so that we can solve it.
Perhaps the solution is to teach the good people around us how to have thicker skin, so they don't have as strong of an emotional reaction to internet backlash. But, detaching yourself from ego is actually a really hard skill to teach & learn. It almost seems like a hopeless endeavor when you're talking about creative people who are already very busy.
> Which is fine. The wisdom isn't lost, its just not as widely available.
It's not fine though. Our political and economic spheres have been run by the swine for too long, and the planet's back is breaking. The second order effects of only giving the brash and thick-hided a voice in society are everywhere, causing permanent harms.
Let's start making space for the wise and sensitive types, and make pearls abundant.
You seem to be implying that this is a recent phenomenon of some kind though and I don't think it is. Just something to keep in mind! Not intended in the spirit of a damning critique or reason not to try.
I wonder how much wisdom has been lost bc people don't ask follow-up questions to statements like this?
Questions like "What did she actually say?" and "What was the reaction?"
Luckily both have been answered in the comments and it's a bit more clear that not everything someone feels is worth sharing is automatically "wisdom".
While we're on the topic, she's also the author of this wonderful book of founder interviews, which is illuminating even 15ish years after publication.
Also worth mentioning her new podcast (along with Carolynn Levy), The Social Radars, which is sort of a podcast version of Founders At Work: https://www.thesocialradars.com/
Seconding that, it's easily my favorite business/entrepreneurship book. It's very helpful for getting in the mindset if you're trying to figure out how to start a company, but it's also just really interesting and entertaining in its own right.
Funny note: I went to jail for 10 years. One of only about three sites (out of thousands I had accounts on) that I could log into when I was released was delicious. Sadly 99% of my bookmarks now pointed to dead wood.
Weirdly, one was Facebook. The reason for all the other failures was that almost every site had either changed their password requirements and reset everyone's passwords when I was locked up (and so far in the past for me that I had missed the boat and now was terminally locked out), or they had introduced some sort of multi-factor authentication, and again I had missed the boat on the change-over and re-authentication and could no longer get in.
Frustratingly the worst ones were the biggest accounts, e.g. Google, because most of these companies were now boasting that they had rid themselves completely of human support and that if you could no longer access your account then you should simply create a new one. Years or decades of stored data be damned.
I'm guessing those sites probably ruined their reputation by selling out their users, refusing to listen to them and belittling their genuine concerns about UX and API access.
Even though this is old, I'm glad it's here again. Jessica deserves so much credit for the success of YC but she's far too humble to make a big deal of it herself. It's important for the rest of us to call this out once in a while.
Thank you Jessica for everything you've done and do.
"Jessica deserves so much credit for the success of YC but she's far too humble to make a big deal of it herself."
It seems to me that one reason for her success is that's she's able to exist in the limelight. Give her a higher profile and I'm not sure that the her approach as described in PG's post would work as well.
I'm not convinced that everyone wants much attention - I know that I don't.
This was like the golden age of individuals furthering the zeitgeist of entrepreneurial discovery. A glowing recommendation from a luminary was like finding a missing piece of the puzzle.
One of the things she's best at is judging people. She's one of those rare individuals with x-ray vision for character. She can see through any kind of faker almost immediately. Her nickname within YC was the Social Radar, and this special power of hers was critical in making YC what it is
A manager at a past job also had a similar "x-ray vision".
During interviews, she would always sit in with another interviewer and never ask any questions of the candidates. She would just observe.
Over 5 years of working with her, every single person she said we should hire turned out great. Every person she said was no good, turned out to not be great.
This was particularly fascinating to watch when she was the lone dissenter either way. e.g. there were times where 7 out of 8 interviewers said "pass", she said "hire" and she was always right.
The first time I read pg's essay about Jessica, it immediately reminded me of my old manager.
It also reminds me of a story from, I believe, Malcolm Gladwell's Blink about the tennis coach who knew before a tennis player served if they would double fault.
Some people have either a natural gift or their brains have picked up a set of weights for their internal neural network that make them fantastic at this kind of thing.
I am extremely skeptical of someone who claims this ability in themselves or others. What this tells me is that someone is misjudging a lot of circumstances very confidently. You just can't understand people on a snap judgment, there are too many outliers.
Imagine if we applied this kind of thinking in courts. We would convict a lot of innocent people. We wouldn't feel that we need to wait for all the facts and evidence to come in, because our radar for people is so good. We don't do it that way, because it's nonsense.
I feel like anyone who fits the categorization (so called INFP/F types[0]) are unlikely to the ones to tell you.
That's why people who claim to have this ability almost never do. Its not in the nature of someone who can to really talk about it this way.
I'd also argue that courts are definitely not the place to have this. There's good reasons why this is likely to fail in a stressful setting (convicting someone of a crime or reviewing evidence) vs a situation of neutrality. Once you start mixing in other factors I imagine this gets blurry real fast. Its all very context dependent.
To tack on further, courts by structure also have a burden of proof aspect to limit / remove the human element as much as possible (in theory anyway) and that is very important.
You're probably on to something. I frequently get impressions like, good Lord, can't you tell this person is schmoozing? Or that they're trying to hide their agitation? Same with people prone to black and white thinking. And it comes after just a minute or two. And it's often right. (Though I constantly doubt myself and possible confirmation bias.) I wouldn't say it's preternatural but better than most people, apparently. I almost never vocalize these impressions. Because the reasons why are inexplicable, and few have any reason to trust my gut instinct over any other person's.
Why is Myers Briggs being referenced when it has zero substance to back it up? I thought it was common knowledge that pop psychology stuff was garbage, at least amongst this website’s readers.
Not quite zero substance, the four dimensions are reasonable close to some of the five leading components of personality.
The problem is that each letter comes from splitting a normal distribution in half right at the middle where maximum likelihood is. So most people won't be very strongly attached to most of their letters.
That "common knowledge" is wrong. Myers briggs is not great for scientific studies since it splits people into 16 buckets instead of sliding scales (like the Big 5, which is used in research). But MB is an incredible mental toolkit to have.
100% right. My wife is an INFP and in 16 years of being together, she has not been wrong about someone once, even when I vehemently disagreed with her at the time. But she would never say she's good at reading people to a stranger lol.
"I felt the gut-feeling that the guy sucked, so I didn't give him a job, told my connections he sucks, and lo and behold he didn't succeed, so I was right."
There's another variant of this that occurs after hiring. You don't trust them to take on a big project, so you give it to somebody else. At review time, you dock them for not having any big projects. Clearly a bottom performer.
Yeah, this always seems like a truism. If you give people opportunities, they will tend to succeed. If you deny people opportunities, they won’t. So anybody in the position of giving or denying opportunities to people will tend to be “right” most of the time.
Good point. So when we try and evaluate a person's "social radar", we should probably limit ourselves to cases where they are the minority dissenter and the person they dislike is given the opportunity, since it gives us the most controlled scenario in which we can evaluate their hypothesis.
What this manager did isn't practically different from what all interviewers do, except the particular manager wasn't the specific target of the usual manipulations[0] candidates will do to seem better. The manager is likely to have a better understanding of how the candidate bullshits (or if they do) when they're not the target of the bullshit.
[0] Used as a descriptor; e.g. "manipulating" someone to decide they should see a doctor for their toe infection isn't bad.
> except the particular manager wasn't the specific target of the usual manipulations[0] candidates will do to seem better.
There's merit to this argument.
Consider people who get scammed or catfished -- it's obvious to an outside observer. You're less likely to fool yourself when you have no skin in the game.
And I'm saying a 100% hit rate is not possible. Your ability to determine an accurate numerical hit rate is also very difficult to impossible.
If we treat this kind of thing as an oracle rather than admit that it's a flawed heuristic, even a good heuristic being ultimately flawed, I think that's pretty dangerous. One has to be extremely humble at the task of evaluating people, because it's difficult and error-prone.
You bring up a good point in that false negatives could never be tracked.
E.g. if the manager in this story said "no" and that person wasn't hired, how would you know she was correct?
I will say that there was a non-zero number of "she said 'no', person was hired anyway and it turned out to not be good". As sister/cousin threads have pointed out: this might be a self fulfilling prophecy.
Meh. You're underestimating how simple people are and how easy it is to read intonation and general presence of a person. Combined with questions that apply pressure it is very easy to read a person because the very basics of a human being are inherently simple.
You just can't understand people on a snap judgment, there are too many outliers.
Not so long ago, I would have certainly agreed with you until I met this one girl.
So we started dating and, a couple months in, sometimes, as a joke, I use to say to her: "the first time I saw you, blablabla beautiful blablabla a star in the sky blablabla". I did that not only once but many many times. And every time, every time, she would have the exact same answer. She would say: "the first time I saw you, I thought 'oh bof'" (meaning she thought I was mediocre). So you know, I thought she only plays hard to get, like women do. That didnt bother me. Time passes and I kept going with my "the first time I saw you .."s. Kind of know she liked it anyway. And she kept on having the same answer.
At one point I thought something was strange. She kept on having those exact same words again and again. 'Oh bof'. Again and again. I could sense she was actually trying to tell me something entirely else.
Until I realised what she was saying. When I did realised what she was saying, I was shocked.
The first time I saw her... what I really thought was... 'Oh bof'. This is literally word for word what I thought the first time I saw her. I thought in my head: 'Oh bof'. But not only the words matched perfectly, the ton as well.
I pass on the details but let me tell you that girl knew exactly my state of mind even when I was in the next room.
Thats the time I learnt some people can tell exactly what you think just by looking at you. This is frightening. They can because they started observing people at a very young age. They love to observe people. Exactly like it is said in that pg's post: they observe.
> Have you never heard of someone being a good judge of character?
I’ve heard of people claiming to be a good judge of character, or claiming other people are, usually without evidence and as an excuse for actions which involve disregarding objective indicia of character as it relates to the decision at hand, and very often as an excuse specifically for making decisions that seem to amount to disregarding objective criteria to favor their own and/or a generally-socially-favored race, ethnicity, subculture, etc.
Not to be argumentative, but how did someone get hired if 7 out of 8 interviewers said "pass"? What's the point of having 7 interviewers if only one of them gets to decide?
Definitely agree with your point that some people have a gift for this kind of thing, so just genuinely curious how the 7 of 8 thing worked.
At a company I worked at in the past we had a "champions" rule:
1. First, only select few interviewers with a great track-record could be a "champion".
2. If this interviewer was going against the rest of the interview panel, they could choose to be that interviewee's "champion". This means they are essentially saying "I have such a strong conviction that this person will do well that I'll put my professional reputation on the line for them." E.g. this person agreed to be that person's mentor when they started, and if things went south they would carry the burden of additional mentorship or finding the least problematic way to fire that person.
I've read before -- though right now I can't think of the source -- that if a group of interviewers are weakly against a candidate but one is strongly for them, you should trust the instincts of the person who's "strongly for." When hiring, I'd probably have that than a room of people who are weakly for a candidate on the basis that you'd rather have a person who's great at one thing than someone who's okay at everything.
Are there any books on this topic that anyone would recommend? As a manager, this is where I struggled the most - naturally i am someone who strives to be a consensus builder, but it's hard to know when to put your thumb on the scale vs not.
You might take lots of peoples opinions into account but that doesn’t mean you should do so by majority vote. Some of those people may have been more confident than others. And it could make sense to allow for more variance in hiring (eg for hiring interns, or at an investment bank or big law firm where many new hires are sent out after a year so the cost of a bad hire isn’t so high)
This happened after the manager already demonstrated a track record of 100% for picking candidates that turned out to be good. This happened in situations were the "hire" count was the majority.
I do also agree with you that "only one person gets to decide" is a bad idea in general (and is usually a red flag for someone trying to be a dictator).
Depends on why they "pass" - it might be "They're solid, but not a good fit for my specific team". Assuming each interviewer is focused on their specific group and the skills they actually use and need day-to-day.
Different groups requiring different skillsets certainly isn't unusual.
Or, 7/8 people were "weak no", they heard her argument, then changed their minds to "weak yes."
The whole point of a committee is to reach consensus. I've flipped my beliefs on many candidates before after hearing what other interviewers think. I think most of us understand that interviews aren't exactly the best way to judge a candidate - at least I think that way. So I'm pretty open to forming consensus when I'm "weak" and they are "strong" in opinion (especially if I respect their judgement).
> During interviews, she would always sit in with another interviewer and never ask any questions of the candidates. She would just observe.
I'd honestly be a little unnerved by this as an interviewee. I've seen interview shadowing before for people first starting to interview (and in the past have both shadowed and been shadowed), but having someone watch me like that not to learn how to interview but to just focus on monitoring me would feel very different. I definitely have an above average amount of social anxiety though, and one of the biggest things that induces it for me is not getting feedback about whether I'm communicating clearly, so maybe this is specific to me and not generally how people would react,
My guess is that this kind of people will add a few remarks here and there, look at the persons doing one question, look at you while you answers, look at the other person doing the question, smile, look at you while you answers, make a small nod, ... Not stare at you with the eyes open like a cartoon character.
The YC interviews at the time were with 4 to 6 partners. So given 10 minutes an interview, it's natural that not everyone asks questions. Jessica almost never said a thing, but would be quite attentive. So it wouldn't be unnerving that there was someone that didn't get to ask questions in the interview.
I mean it is all fine. There are other more suitable candidates for them and other more suitable jobs for you. Else we would be totally fungible which I am sure employees wouldn't want (though employers may).
> e.g. there were times where 7 out of 8 interviewers said "pass", she said "hire" and she was always right.
Just noting: that situation around that assessment can affect the outcome.
For example, hired person appreciates the opportunity/faith extended to them, or otherwise picks up on the need to rise to the occasion.
Or a manager or other staff sees/treats the person differently because of the circumstances (e.g., gives the hire more guidance because they think the hire will need it, wants the hire to succeed because a founder has blessed them, or just sees the person more favorably because they trust the opinion of someone else).
"Jessica is the reason we hired you - she says you'll be great here and when she says that she's always right" technically says "we weren't going to hire you", but also "we all believe in you".
I mean yes, but not everyone succeeds despite best efforts, and a good social radar might imply detecting whether they Will rise to the occasion or not
This sounds sorta like one of my observations about someone I worked with: she'd go into an enterprise prospect/relationship meeting, and come out with better insights than the other people from our team. And the insights rang true.
(And it was unfortunate that she wasn't listened to more, because a higher-ranking person would more often miss cues about customer thinking, or would come out of a meeting seeming to feel a gist biased more towards what they wanted it to be.)
For that skill/quality and others, I later tried to recruit her as a startup CEO.
Not necessary a counter example but with all the Reddit drama right now, I would like to know her opinion on Steve Huffman and if he is fulfilling expectations.
> It also reminds me of a story from, I believe, Malcolm Gladwell's Blink about the tennis coach who knew before a tennis player served if they would double fault.
I believe it was from watching the serve, but not seeing where the ball went. As someone who has played tennis for many years (but not remotely professionally), it always seemed to me that the coach could simply be reading the player's expression. When you're serving, you can typically tell based on how the contact felt, and the sound it made, whether your serve was going in. It wouldn't be surprising if that could be 'read' from your face.
Basically anyone who can do this kind of thing falls into INFP or INFJ in Myers-Briggs. They're just incredible at reading people. Based on the article I'd be shocked if Jessica wasn't an INFP.
False. First, one person’s Myers-Briggs score can drift over time. Any of those letters can flip; being an “empath” is learnable. Second, people like Jessica and other evaluators do a lot (both reported and unreported) to set and move the goalposts that define success.
What this article and discussion shows is less of a “some people are magic” phenomenon and more of a “a lot of evaluators and leaders have huge blindspots” phenomenon. Most all panels bias towards false negatives; there’s a lot of support for having too narrow a perspective on any given candidate.
There's a lot of sources out there on this topic, but Psychology Junkie is way better than I would have expected from the name. Two articles that mention these traits:
I've tested as INFP and INTJ. I'm not going to deny the Introvert theory part. The rest of it, I don't know how seriously to take it. I haven't studied the academic literature, and the occasional pop-psych writing about it bears some similarities to astrology writing (e.g., appeal to being special, being deep, having powers, navel-gazing, etc.).
If you're not sure about the tests, you can use this quick framework in this comment to help you find your letters.
Extraverted (E) vs Introverted (I)
“E” generally means gaining energy from other people, while “I” means people drain your batteries. This one is not always immediately obvious for people. In general "E"s talk more when with groups of people and "I"s think more. Even though I spend a lot of time at home with my wife, I'm an E - I get energy from social interactions.
Sensing (S) vs Intuiting (N)
This is about how you process new information. S people see what's actually in front of them - they think and talk more in specifics. In general, S types are better at detail oriented work.
N types intuit things, so they sometimes aren't great at focusing at what's in front of them, but are great at coming up with ideas and next steps based on what they see.
Feeling (F) vs Thinking (T)
Everyone feels and everyone thinks. A good way to judge this is people's reactions to situations. Feelers react with empathy first, thinkers react with problem solving first.
Very basic example: Your friend comes in with their arm bleeding. Is your very first reaction?
"Oh no! What happened?" - Feeler
"You should go to the hospital!" or "Let me get something to wrap that", etc etc.
In general feelers are more likely to feel empathy for someone, even if they they think they are dead wrong or disagree with them.
Judging (J) vs Perceiving (P)
This is about how you make decisions. And it has nothing to do with the dictionary definitions of judging and perceiving.
Some defining traits of Js:
Achieving the goal is more important than the process.
You are comfortable making decisions with limited information.
For Ps:
Being true to your moral system is more important than achieving the goal.
You prefer to collect more information before making decisions.
The side effect of these two things means Js tend to have steadier lives with more commitment, while Ps tend to have a broader range of experiences and a bigger variety of life experiences.
---
Lastly, the temperaments:
ExxJ - Organizes people
IxxJ - Keeps systems running, also good at absorbing and teaching information.
ExxP - Collectors of experiences, achievements, pleasures, etc.
IxxP - Being true to your convictions
---
Now, people who study function stacks are going to shit on this comment, saying the letters don't mean anything, its all about functions like Extraverted Thinking, etc. But I find these letter rules make a great shortcut for 97% of people.
> Sensing (S) vs Intuiting (N). This is about how you process new information. S people see what's actually in front of them - they think and talk more in specifics. In general, S types are better at detail oriented work.
What about someone who is strong intuitive, but starting the next moment they're very detail-oriented, and also the person you'd most trust for meticulous coding that had to work?
> But I find these letter rules make a great shortcut for 97% of people.
Do we want to try to hire people who have qualities that would spanning these headshrinker buckets? If so, maybe we're dealing a lot with that missing "3%", so trying to pigeon-hole people would frequently be counterproductive?
It's like being right or left handed. And you wouldn't want to box against George Foreman even if he uses his off hand.
Intuitors just start with the big picture as their basic instinct, then fill in the details. Sensors start with detail and build up to the big picture.
Is that closer to the actual cognitive mechanics, or closer to a myth that's nevertheless useful for classifying people?
For example, in some empirical behavior research, person A seemed to have better snap decisions but poor at follow-though, and person B seemed to be asking about details... Has that nailed some key innate difference in how A and B actually think, or merely -- for purposes of, say, assigning military conscripts to jobs, or a huge corporate hiring machine that can't care beyond commodities -- at least it's a classification?
Maybe it's better than chance at predicting exhibited behavior (absent training), and we don't know that it reflects the actual cognitive mechanics?
Chris Voss talks about this in his book "Never Split the Difference".
He advocates for teams of people handling a negotiation with the most experienced negotiator just observing.
The reason: it's incredibly difficult to be process, crafting and delivering responses in real time. If your primary goal is to observe the other side, that should be your sole focus. It's also incredibly valuable to have that observation hence why you should negotiate in teams (or at least pairs).
This is honestly infuriating. Why wouldn't you realize that all of the characteristics of Jessica are why women are pushed out of the start-up world from the very first day they start? Why wouldn't you realize from this experience that women are the ones providing all the reasons and ideas for why a startup might be successful, but then are swept under the rug as a wife/family member/outside consultant/etc?
sed 's/women/everybody who does not come across as an extroverted, eloquent, assertive, attractive white(-ish) male (of the correct age, social class, educational background, etc.)/g'
Humans are, sadly, extremely good at twisting things to allocate most of the power, wealth, opportunities, rights, and credit to a small subset of the population - which they either are a member of, or closely identify with. It's not merely a sexism thing.
It sounds to me like you are admitting that women often provide the crucial ideas and then are dis-credited. What direction would any work take without the initial idea? Lol. Even when a female has the idea and does all the work (ah-hem), a man will come along, steal the idea, claim it as his own, and suddenly be the one with a multi-million dollar seed deal or Nobel Prize or whatever. That is the reality that I have seen over and over.
You have a selective vision of the world if that is your conclusion. Plenty of examples of the opposite, I can’t convince you with just one example, so you’ll have to take a friendlier look at men, and once you find the pattern where men aren’t recognized for a particular deed, you’ll find it everywhere and in as great quantity as women.
Concerning Marie Curie, maybe if we could agree on another example than one 120 years ago, that would revive the proof. As far as I’m concerned, every time someone cites Marie Curie, it rather confirms that we haven’t been doing that for the last 120 years, otherwise you’d cite a contemporary example. But the problem of contemporary examples, is that we’re here to analyze them, and they don’t generally hold the scrutinity. I don’t know for Marie Curie, I wasn’t there.
You should downvote your own comment so that the comments which promote her work and career are above yours.
The article mentions specifically in the note about backlash and vitriol that feminists need to give room for someone like her to 'exist' in the public eye.
There is also the important fact that this was written by her husband and founding partner.
> The qualities of the founders are the best predictor of how a startup will do. And startups are in turn the most important source of growth in mature economies.
Ah yes, "growth" in our economy is all because of a select few of super special amazing people. It seems obvious to me this is a post facto rationalization.
Posting this here because (as pointed out by pg's recent tweet about Wikipedia) many people don't realize just how important a role Jessica Livingston has played "behind the scenes".
I think anyone who's read enough of Paul's and knows a bit of YC's backstory would understand that Jessica was the human between all the nerds making things stick together.
Thanks for posting this. I always wondered why Jessica wasn't a bigger part of the YC story that so many people told.
This line stood out to me in particular: _It's not just because she's shy that she hates attention, but because it throws off the Social Radar. She can't be herself. You can't watch people when everyone is watching you._
No matter what you get acknowledged for I think it's so important to always be yourself but to know what makes you strong is so challenging.
I understand the optics involved with the Wikipedia situation.
But an automated script (AnomieBot) tagged that article because it met or rather didn’t meet certain guidelines. It’s a stub article and lacked certain citations.
Why not just flesh the article out?
The “Notability” tag on Wikipedia has a different meaning than “notability” in the dictionary.
Either way, it seems like someone already removed the tag manually with the justification “clearly notable” and uploaded a better photo.
But even though a valid reason wasn’t listed, it appears that valid reasons did exist. “Valid” based on guidelines not personal opinion. The anon user still could have done this based on personal opinion and/or ill intentions.
Editors often upload bad photos, even if better alternatives exist in the public domain or are fair use.
But the thing that grates me more than anything is Wikipedia uses elderly photos of famous figures that were at the peak of their careers in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. The appearance of these public figures changes, and sometimes the changes are so dramatic that I have to question if these are the same person.
Wikipedia should have multiple photos in the top info box, but if not, they should focus on photos of subjects when they were in their peak of public activity.
There are far worse examples, and a lot of them. I'm having trouble finding them on the spot, though.
Edit: Another super weird case of this is articles on famous child actors that didn't go on to act later in life, but their photo is of them in their 40's or substantially after their heyday. There's so much of that. They're easy examples to find:
Wiki has a guideline to use recent photos for living figures, and will use more hey-day pictures after the person passes. Compare the pictures for William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. I think this is a good balance - it acknowledges people change, and sets your expectations should you see the person on the news or something, and then later they're reflected as they were best known.
Note that most of your good examples are deceased and most of your bad ones are living.
I learned this when Elizabeth II passed, and her photo was updated very quickly to a much older portrait.
They're still alive (most of them anyway)! Imagine looking up your own Wikipedia page and they've got a photo of you from 40 years ago. That'd be rude! It's like pretending they're already dead just because they're not in the spotlight anymore.
In addition, for all the child actors except Lloyd, we don't have any free photos of them as children (and that childhood photo of Lloyd isn't very good – the one in the article is the only one we have).
Do you have unencumbered photos for those? The last time I added a portrait photo I had to ensure license was good and I needed a model release as well. If you provide the unencumbered photos, I will attempt to contact them or their publicists for a model release if required. It will likely take months for me, though, since this isn't a top priority.
But if you get me the photos, I'll take care of the rest. We can't make it the infobox because they're still living, but we can add the photo to show what they were like at the time, which is notable since that's what they're famous as.
There was a comment here earlier explaining how many modest/humble/non-confrontational/etc qualities portrayed as reflections of good character in this article by PG come from a place of privilege. I think it’s gone now, does anybody have a copy of it / is the author around? It was probably unnecessarily mean but it was insightful for me and made me reflect. Would appreciate any help finding it, thanks
I wonder what her Social Radar picks up off cryptocurrency-adjacent individuals. Because she's seen their pitches to YC. And that Social Radar of hers should get a good read on crypto bros. And so the question is how many of them are grifters and con artists trying to cash in on the next Bitcoin, and how many of them are true believers of the ideals being spouted. And how many of them are, actually, honestly, good people.
Because they're there, but they seem few and far between.
I don't follow the YC applicant space that closely. Is every rejection posted publicly? Cryptocurrencies do have some true believers, but there are also some of those that aren't. Hence by sheer statistics, we'd be safe to assume they exist in the YC applicant pool.
I don't doubt Jessica is good at reading people, but I found out during hiring people is that it is the easiest/cheapest skill to hire. I am honestly curious about why pg skipped the most frequently asked question: Would Jessica be close to this level of successful if she was not his wife?
Also I would be very curious to know about female founders that Jessica selected. According to [1], companies with at least 1 female founder has <10% of valuation compared to YC companies with all male founders[2]. Just on casual looking all female founder companies is <2% compared to all male founder companies, which is below average for VCs.
Combined Valuation (all companies): $600B
Combined Valuation (Companies with women founders): $45B
Still unbalanced, but closer to 15:1 as opposed to 49:1.
That's also a comparisons that is totally useless without the base rate. If half the companies had female founders, it might be valid to say "why are the companies with women raising at a lower rate" but I'd be willing to bet that the application pool is heavily skewed male, and thus that the accepted pools are also heavily skewed male. It wouldn't shock me if that skew were on the order of 50:1. It also wouldn't shock me if it were trending in a more balanced direction; that would lead to a fundraising bias towards older companies that have raised more money over time and are more likely to have only men as founders.
I said 10% valuation for companies with at least 1 female founder compared to no female founder. And in that list, I could see something like 5:1 for company with at least female founder to company with all female founder. That is how I arrived with all female:all male ratio of 2% if we ignore mixed gender founder companies.
Also I am not arguing whether female founders experience discrimination or not, I am just arguing YC's female ratio is not significantly higher than other VC's which pg hints at due to Jessica.
Careful, this seems to be falling for the prosecutor's fallacy where the probabilities aren't normalized to account for base rates of the hypothesis occuring. So in this case, the percent of successful valuations that have a female founders will likely be extremely low simply because the gender ratio is disproportionaly male, and being successful is extremely rare.
For example, let's say probability of being successful is due to random chance, and effects both genders equally. Then ratio of successful women to successful men would just reflect the ratio of women to men. Now imagine if the actual valuation of successful companies is exponentially weighted, so that the top 1 or 2 companies make up the bulk of the total valuation. Again, these two companies are more likely to be founded by men given the base gender rate, and now the percent of valuation attributed to men would completely dominate the valuation percent.
To get the real effectiveness of female founders, we need to account for the low probability of success and low probability of being female.
The first equation gets the number of founders who are female and successful, and then divide that by the number of female founders in total, and the second one does the same for males. That should give you a apples to apples comparison.
Note: p($_i) represents a sequence of valuation probabilities subdivided to reflect low valuation, moderate valuation etc. I think this should account for the exponential distribution of valuation, but someone correct me if I'm wrong.
I commented the same thing in another thread. I am not arguing the base rate or whether female founders experience discrimination, I am just arguing YC's female ratio is definitely not higher than other VC's which pg hints at due to Jessica. In fact I think other VCs have something in the range of 20% IIRC(would not mind to be corrected though).
Okay fair enough, but why look at female founders in terms total valuation percent, then? I think my point about the distortion from the (likely) exponential distribution of total valuation still stands, although in this case with regards to comparison between VCs.
Isn't it straightforward to just look at percent of female founders?
Can’t read this without thinking about the founders I know who started (and are still running) a successful unicorn. When they were founding this unicorn, they applied to YC and were rejected. Why, I’ll never know, but they’re both fairly immigranty and the cynical side of me wonders if the “social radar” didn’t like that about them. There’s a thin line between social radar and unconscious bias.
Words like "social" and "culture" and a ton of other now-taboo hiring ideas throughout this writeup. I wonder how much YC has changed over the last few years with regards to how it uses nebulous hiring practices like "someone's gut feeling" to reject or accept candidates. I also wonder what YCs diversity numbers look like.
Its' start: """
I recently heard one of the more interesting insights about Silicon Valley I'd heard in a while. It explained something I’d wondered about for years.
But I can't tell you what it was.
There's too much downside in sharing any opinion that could easily be misinterpreted online. Even facts are dangerous to share if they don’t align with what people want to believe.
There's a lot of concern about "fake news" lately. That is a real problem, but there's also the opposite problem: true things that aren't being said.
Some of the most useful things I've learned about startups over the years are also things I'd never share publicly. Not because the ideas are necessarily controversial in their own right, but because anyone could twist them to seem controversial if they were sufficiently motivated to. And when that happens I immediately regret having said anything. It's a massive distraction. I have two young kids, and I have hundreds of startups to keep track of. I don't have time to fight with people who are trying to misunderstand me.
"""
I wish pg the best but I think everyone should know how much legal liability these kind of public writings creates. A person I know closely had 25 year marriage in CA and he always believed in love and lifelong relationship. But as their kids went to college, wife's priorities changed. She started affair, started helping out her partner financially etc. Husband discovered all these accidently from her phone. After many discussions, they decided to file for divorce. She apparently claimed in court that she owned majority of his company even though she didn't played much of the part. The guy had started the company even before marriage by his own money. She produced bunch of emails among friend where he appreciated her for help. That was the end of it.
It's easy to swept away in "love" and all that but the reality is that 50% of marriages in Western world ends in divorce. Always remember that people change over time.
That oft-cited statistic about divorce is misleading. Most marriages end in divorce, but most people who get married don't get divorced. It's that if you get divorced once, you're more likely to get divorced again; serial-divorcees produce a disproportionate number of marriages.
From everything I can read, I think Jessica contributed as much as pg but I have no direct knowledge in their world and it's not my business to speculate there.
On the other hand, it would be hard to argue that Lucas, Bezos or Gates wives had same contributions in Lucas Films, Amazon and Microsoft. When I look at their cases, I feel they cashed out with massive windfall taking advantage of broken laws.
Another case in point: Musk's wife went to court for Tesla's ownership during their divorce but Tesla board had made some provision to avoid this. If Musk had written public letters like above during good days of their relationship, he will toast in the court. I am not saying Musk must deny legitimate ownership of other co-founder but someone just claiming ownership because of marriage laws without putting in blood and sweat of actual founder is just wrong.
Everyone not cynical about marriage only realize their mistake after they get put in 50% bucket of divorces couples. No one who is getting married think they will the one who end up in divorce. It's always that other couple :).
I can only imagine this is related to PG‘s recent tweet about how the Wikipedia article on Jessica has “questionable notability” warning due to sexist nonsense.
Anybody in the world can put a notability tag on an article in Wikipedia. The notability tag is properly read as a "this article needs more sources and more claims of notability" call for help, not a "get this article off the site" argument.
Livingston will have no trouble maintaining a Wikipedia article; she's had profiles written about her in mainstream sources.
A big chunk of complaints about Wikipedia notability come from people who don't quite grok the dynamic of how biographical articles like these get added to WP. Usually, someone writes a stub article with few sources and no clear statement of what the person is notable for. Those are bad articles! They actually need the notability tag! That's how they turn into better articles!
Anyone who's seen an article covering a topic of personal interest removed due to "lack of notability" would be forgiven for assuming the bar is "important to an arbitrary few editors", because that is the bar.
From the examples I've encountered over the years, once an article is deemed irrelevant, it is deleted permanently with little to no opportunity for recovery (unless some event makes the subject suddenly more noteworthy). The reality is the most active Wikipedia editors make great contributions to the world's knowledge, but aren't exactly the most representative sample of humanity.
The typical Wikipedia complainant simply is a talker, not a doer. I have started Wikipedia pages, edited controversial ones (including the Derek Chauvin page), and fixed things very straightforwardly. I would have fixed this one, but someone was faster than me.
Most people cannot do things. They simply cannot. There's always a reason they can produce: "Oh it'll just get deleted", "oh I don't want to get into a fight", "oh the editors will delete me". You can see this because they cannot provide situations where this happens because they cannot try. They will Google to show "there is some evidence this is happening" and produce some newspaper article where the reporter has not tried it either.
But the reality of the thing is that they cannot do it. The faculty it takes to see a problem and make it not a problem is not available to them. Presumably, at work they are told what to do and they just do it - execution agents incapable of autonomous operation.
Of course pg cannot modify his wife's page. But I see it a lot.
I always found it a mix of amusing and annoying that my complaints about Wikipedia are usually self-defeating: "This article is bad! They should have ... okay, I should ... nevermind."
thanks for the link back to this, was a great story. i think women in general are more like this and as the article states, tend to never get enough credit for the things they achieve.
Because she's seen all their pitches to YC. And that Social Radar of hers should get a good read on crypto bros, and so the question is how many of them are grifters and con artists trying to cash in on the next Bitcoin, and how many of them are true believers of the ideals being spouted. And how many of them are, actually, honestly, good people.
Let’s not ignore the sexism here, because what you’ve written is pretty a blatant example. Besides that, the fact that you seem to have unironically written something like this:
> Things like walking home alone in the dark and other activities with low probability of danger they just are more reactive to it for various reasons.
makes me feel that you are either completely ignorant of women’s issues or minimizing them, neither of which helps your case.
You clearly don’t know the history of YC or haven’t been involved in a startup. Paul and Jessica started YC together. Saying she is like Bill Gates’ wife is ludicrous. Maybe “Paul Allen” would be less wrong.
I wonder how much wisdom has been lost bc of this effect.
I feel like society needs to create a much larger incentive for thoughtful people to share their wisdom. Today, you stand to gain status & wealth, but a lot of thoughtful people like Jessica don't care about that.
I think the only solution is to somehow protect them from the disincentive (backlash from the internet mob), but I don't know how.