This post would be a lot more persuasive with the pitch deck, or some growth numbers, or something indicating the app is in fact on a success track and is the type of app that is potentially VC scale.

I found no mentions on reddit. On google there is a single review on Capterra, no other results.

The Canadian ios app has no reviews, can’t check US on my phone. The Google play version has 88 reviews, but all but 3-4 of them are from Jan 26-Feb 2, with only one since, in May.

So some evidence of traction, product market fit, growth, or the general idea behind the app (pitch deck) would help with the argument.

The author does highlight an issue of how to get funded if you don’t have an existing network though. Network based introductions seems to be the norm for VC from what I’ve heard. And to be clear, there may be racism involved: my point is it’s hard to tell without knowing more about the app’s and whether it seems plausibly a fit for VC. Once an app has been around for a year you need more evidence of traction.

Edit: I should mention that if the app is indeed somewhere between “can be bootstrapped” and “needs VC investment” then there are are new options like Tinyseed aimed at this middle ground of company. Another commented pointed out that a competing app has 1-10 employees, which is not VC scale.

I'm so glad she wrote this, and that she named names!

As a female founder (not black though), we went through a similarly congnitively dissonant process. A-List investors who would publicly talk about supporting female founders would behave the worst (esp. female investors, Hi Aileen!), investors whose entire brand was around supporting ethical startups (or insert any similar alternative movement) would be the least interested in that aspect (Hi Spero Ventures!) All of that, along with a healthy dose of rudeness.

In our experience, those at the very very top of the totem pole gave us the fairest chance, and those below them, were the very worst. In the end, it was hard no to feel that an investor's Twitter persona was a sham, in the end they would invest only in the hottest SAAS startup by an ex-Googler.

FWIW, I know my experience was not alone. There are tons of now well-funded female founders who will echo this sentiment. I just wish there was a way to have a public list of those who walk the talk and those who just tweet the walk..

EDIT: Adding something from thread below to focus more on solutions, and providing perspective on why what is happening is not enough.

>...What is frustrating about these investors (and YC) is that it all is very surface level. I'm sure they believe they are doing the right thing but all of their assumptions, ideas, pipelines, and teams, all are informed by those biases. And there isn't enough being done to deconstruct that. For example, what does it mean to say 'too early' to an under-represented founder? who is the comparison to? How many of your last X investments or team members came from Stanford or ex-FAANG?

> Let's put in place processes, time allocations, smaller programs. And let's put all of this in place first for those raising their first rounds - the angel or the mythical pre-seed.

The author of this article cites as evidence of racism higher response to her husband's solicitations of VCs than her own. However, comparing their resumés, its pretty easy to see that this is unlikely to be attributable to racism. Husband has founded multiple start-ups that were acquired, is technical, and worked at Google and YouTube. Meanwhile, the author has personal trainer and gym owner as experience.

The nature of VC being what it is, it's extremely difficult to prove racism at the level of proof that most HN readers seem to need. 99.99% of all startup ideas are bad, 99.99% of all apps are terrible, so how can we know if she was rejected for being black, or for just being another supplicant denied by the VC gods?

The email thing is the strongest evidence she provides, but obviously, a doubting mind can find other reasons that her husbands email would get responses but hers wouldn't.

We do know, however, that African Americans are greatly under represented in tech, in startups and in VC. There are many interlocking reasons for this, and its not unreasonable to expect that racism, whether conscious or unconscious, is one of them. (Why should tech, uniquely in American society, be immune from racism?). Because there are so many interlocking reasons, it's easy for each individual link in the chain of tech to deflect blame to the other links (business can blame the pipeline, colleges can blame the high schools, high schools can blame the financial structures etc etc etc).

So, is it reasonable to expect individual VCs to make a stand against racism instead of doing what comes naturally to them? (trying desperately to make money). Not really!

However, I do think it's reasonable to expect, that VC's who make big pronouncements about what their firm is going to do to combat racism should be expected to follow through with it! And guess what, given all the interlocking problems that prevent black people from founding companies, VC's probably aren't going to be able to follow through on that mission by relying on business as usual of warm intros only, five minute pitch reviews, blow off emails.

Just level with us. We are all adults. Just say, I'm not actually that interested in explicitly helping black founders, I just want to keep trying to make money the way I've been doing it. Conversely, if you do give juicy quotes to the press, then be prepared to walk the walk.

I think the argument here is suffering as the business is questionable, though I wholeheartedly agree that pointing a founder to a blog post and pretending that counts as mentorship is bullshit.

> none of the VCs I contacted even tried downloading my app (I use Intercom daily to see all the new users trying our app). They dismissed its worth without even giving it a shot.

Fair, but I just had a look at the app store - this had two reviews since late January (when about ninety-five 5* reviews were posted over a few days), and neither were positive.

Additionally, a cursory search for personal trainer apps will turn up dozens of well-rated alternatives. Putting myself in the mind of a VC, I would be hard-pressed to invest or advise the founder of such a company.

Would love to learn more about why the VCs wouldn’t respond to her emails, though - seems like another failure to meet the commitment.

It seems like the author could search and replace “racism” with “sexism” and put out an otherwise similar article based on her experience having to use her husband’s LinkedIn rolodex to reach these people.

I think it’s shameful that VCs make empty promises to support black founders - but it’s also not surprising. Most of the people paying lip service to racial equity now didn’t give a shit six weeks ago before it was fashionable to do so. But empty promises are par for the course as they’ve been for decades. My experience living in Minneapolis where George Floyd was murdered is that the same people suddenly promising to fix the problem are the ones who created it.

VCs only want to make money. The author raised insufficient evidence that she was a victim of racism. If any unfair discrimination occurred it’s more likely sexism. But the simplest explanation is also the most likely: the VCs just weren’t interested in her pitch.

I'm on easy mode (white and male), but I had no network and no prestigious previous employers or schools to point to when starting on my company a few years ago. There were many points when I felt like raising money would be impossible, but I eventually did so. In case it might help someone who's feeling hopeless and has it much harder than I did due to their background, here are a few things I've learned about how the game is played:

- Talking to investors is a waste of time in the beginning. It's much better to focus on getting into an accelerator first.

- Never talk to one investor at a time. That gives them all the leverage. It's better to schedule many meetings with many different investors all in a one or two week period.

- Timing is everything. Don't talk to investors before you're ready to even if they say it's "just a casual coffee". They are looking for reasons to rule you out. Try to only talk to investors at inflection points where a graph of some important metric is going steeply up and to the right.

- Move on quickly. Unless an investor is obviously enthusiastic by the end of the first pitch, they are highly, highly unlikely to invest. Don't waste time answering their questions or getting their "feedback" or giving them additional meetings if they seem skeptical. Just move on to the next one.

- Don't ask for introductions from investors who turned you down. These are actually anti-endorsements that significantly decrease your chances with the investors you get introduced to this way.

Seems like the most compelling evidence of racially-disparate treatment is that she got no responses when reaching out via her own email address, but received some responses when reaching out via her husband's (he is an Asian-American man with a recognizably Asian name). Assuming the emails sent were identical, this would be pretty solid evidence of bias.

One potential confounding issue is that her husband is a former Google engineer, and she doesn't mention having any similar experience. It wouldn't be surprising if a VC's vetting process involved checking linkedin to see what experience the person had, and giving points to former FAANG engineers (note: I am not in this category).

Regardless, it's still pretty lousy that VCs that claim to want to help certain types of founders don't even respond to inbound inquiries.

She asks why her husband gets more of a response (a sign of the racism she is facing).

- Her linkedin doesn't show what her major was as an undergrad.

- After 4 years of working she was a powerlifting coach.

- Then boom, in 2017/2018 she is an owner of two gyms and in 2019 she is trying to get benchmark to invest in her app.

Her Husband:

Google Engineer

Masters in CS from Berkeley / Undergrad in CS

Started companies and managed employees.

15 years experience - 40 apps developed. Top 10 apps

Multiple successful exists (to zynga then another one to google).

Talking about being successful as a gym owner etc she says folks can assume its because black folks were helped out.

"They assume it’s because they’re somehow lucky or exceptional or that they gained success because of help from white people. This—of course—isn’t true, but it’s an idea that continues to spread, sending the message that Black professionals require help from white people to build their careers."

"We need to put an end to the lie that Black people are still in need of white folks’ help,” she continues. “What we need is the freedom to live, work, and act without white people and white institutions disproportionately targeting us and stopping us from building the success we are already capable of building on our own."

So it's a bit of a confusing set of messages.

If there is VC racism, doesn't that also mean there is a market opportunity for VC money to focus exclusively on African American tech startups. Even if there aren't many, there appears to be zero competition selecting investments.

The author is rightfully frustrated. But instead of focussing on lack of interest in their app, maybe there's a bigger opportunity here.

> Black women are the most educated group when you look at the number of associate and bachelor’s degrees earned within each demographic.

Can anyone confirm this? When I follow the links, I get to this source:

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=72

That bar chart doesn't say anything to me about inter-demographic data. It looks confined to each demographic; i.e. women earn more degrees than men within each demographic, but that doesn't say anything about Black women vs. White men vs. Hispanic men vs. White women

Sequoia is primarily a Series A investor, without seeing the deck and traction/usage/retention/revenue metrics, it's really hard to make definitive conclusions at least with regards to that one example.

In the context of wrong stage/check size, Alfred's response was reasonable.

The part about Nguyen was frustrating. It's hard to imagine a more honest hypocrisy than explicitly saying, on the record, that one will be forthcoming and helpful towards the marginalized, and ending up being just as dismissive and unengaged as everybody else.

It's an app for personal trainers to help them organize their business. Not a big niche, and there are other apps in that space.[1] That one is from Fitii, which has software for trainers, customers, and gyms, talking to each other. Crunchbase shows Fitii as being from Melbourne, AU, with "1-10 employees". In that situation, VC funding seems unlikely.

[1] https://www.mypthub.net/

It is amazing to me if that the entire conversation on the thread is about her credibility, and not at all towards the systems that lead to blogposts such as these. It isn't one interaction, or one round or one app, these are system issues!

I think it is more interesting to discuss how all of the investor assumptions, ideas, pipelines, and teams, all are informed. And there isn't enough being done to deconstruct that. For example, what does it mean to say 'too early' to an under-represented founder? who is the comparison to? How many of your last X investments or team members came from Stanford or ex-FAANG?

Maybe YC can take the lead here? @mwseibel?

Even if her business idea was bad, or her app didn't have traction, or her LI profile was not impressive enough, she deserved, at the very least, the following:

  * Access to VCs, she had to use her husband's email to get access.
  * Some constructive and personalized feedback. This does not have to be very detailed, a couple of no-BS sentences will do the trick.

I'm not sure why this article is so controversial. Whether her app deserved funding or not wasn't what the main point of the article was. No one is saying they are obligated to fund a startup because a person is black.

If VCs want to claim to put effort into supporting black founders, then they should follow through on that with their actions. They had committed to meeting and helping black founders. Ignoring emails and generic responses is in no way helping. They could have still said no and been more accommodating as they claimed they would do.

VCs' duty is to act in the interests of their limited partners, so they have to make investments that they think will generate the highest returns, within the fund's investment mandate.

It may make sense for the activists to apply pressure on the limited partners (many of these being institutions with some social / public angle, such as pension funds, university endowments or sovereign and municipal funds) to demand higher diversity of founders from the venture funds they invest in.

Some large-scale investors have a history of adopting a social or environmental based elements in their investment strategy (for example, Norway's SWF divesting from coal and oil companies) - probably similar moves (but aimed at equal opportunities for all backgrounds) can be demanded from major US based asset management institutions - I don't see why, just to take an example, Harvard's board of trustees can't agree to that - even if that change is not directly aimed at generating the highest return on investment, it may be the right move from the longer term societal development perspective and for the university's brand value.

I don't know how to flag this thread to the mods, but--hey mods, can we lock these comments? It's disheartening to see threads on women/minorities in tech on Hacker News get strong, negative reactions from the community like some of what's written here. I would hope the forum can hold itself to higher standards than what I'm reading here.

Why is it that African-Americans (not including Black Africans in this) tend to seek acceptance into White institutions and power structures, instead of building parallel ones? For instance, TiE[1] (The Indus Entrepreneurs) was specifically set up to fund Indian founders. At the time, there was pervasive bias (not that it doesn't exist today) against Indians as being good enough only as rank-and-file engineers, but not as founders or leaders [2]. TiE was instrumental in funding some of the earliest Indian founders many of whom are successful VCs today. They effectively forced the White VC power structure to sit up and take notice. Today, there is a flourishing ecosystem of Indian VCs and founders.

On a related note, as an Indian, I'm envious of what China is doing today - they realized pretty early that the Western world order would never have a place for China as equals. Hence, they began to develop viable alternatives to Western technology and institutions. Those efforts are beginning to bear fruit today. The borderline insanity and paranoia that the West has developed [3] about China is justification enough for those efforts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiE(https://en.wikipedia.org/w... [2] [https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archiv... [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...

I’ve seen this with a firm I advise; I get far better responses to outbound fundraising than the founder, who has a distinctively African name.

This is the problem with all of these "diversity" pushes --- people have started feeling they should be "helped" and even funded.

Top VCs reject thousands of pitches every year, you are one. Black or white does not matter, deal with it.

Venture Capital started out as high-risk, high-reward high technology investments. Genentech, LSI, Teradyne, BTU International, and Apple. As Sam Altman, Thiel et al, and others have noted, VC lost its way since the late 80s and started focusing on widgets and "blitzkrieg" capital. The point of differentiation shifted from proprietary semiconductor or recombinant DNA technology to the ability to deploy large amounts of capital at scale, quickly.

What has mattered has also shifted. Uber's ride hailing solution was a revolution, of sorts, but it was an incrementalist one. The breakthrough that led to the production of synthetic insulin was a transformative one. Uber isn't a sustainable business. Genentech is still alive and kicking.

The personality types that are chosen for to create a business where the only metric of "innovation" is growth and genentech are different. In one, Steve Woz is a viable co-founder. In the other, he simply isn't, and is filtered out actively and implicitly.

There is discrimination in Venture Capital, that much is clear. But this issue makes it far worse. As it creates an ineffable bar that is vague and entirely defined in the VC's head. It is easier to answer the question if someone is a genius. Because genius is genius no matter the gender identity or race. A scientific or technological breakthrough is a breakthrough. No matter the origin. But the ability to "blitzkrieg" a business? Who knows.

When the only metric for success is rapid growth, and the only way for rapid growth to be predicted is for it to happen, it creates a murky set of rubrics and metrics where the number of bad companies by white/asian, cis-male founders who went to Stanford outnumber the number of great ones by people who don't qualify for those checkmarks.

The new system delivers sub-par returns and it is obvious that an alternative is needed. Despite great work being done by people like 1517 fund, Sam Altman's new firm, YC, Founder's Fund, Lux Capital etc, the industry isn't actively seeking out people with potential breakthroughs. It is creating artificial barriers to their success. Personally, the most significant sign that something is wrong with the ecosystem is that a potential breakthrough in phenotypic screening of pharmaceutical molecules wasn't sought out https://www.daphnia-labs.com , but the "Uber for X" by Template Stanford Founder Y will be.

It is also apparent that an alternate financing system is needed for companies that aren't technologically innovative, such as Nerissa's but aren't quite small businesses either. Companies that do fall under the "high-growth potential" label, while lacking the other qualities.

The blurring between VC, traditional PE, and small business banking have led to sub-par outcomes for all involved.

VCs shouldn’t be the gatekeepers to capital. The game is rigged. Who gets funding is decided by arbitrary metrics, inherent biases, and already established networks. Personally I’m planning on bootstrapping my own business and don’t plan on asking a VC for a hand.

Capitalists only pretending to care about an issue to improve their image while continuing to only optimize purely for profit instead of taking additional risk to do the right thing? Shocking. /s

Please upvote this! We need to expose them and work on alternatives that are inclusive to everyone. VC elites era is going to be over soon, borderless capital is unstoppable.

The fact that she writes this tells my that not funding her was the right choice.

Does she offer any actual evidence that she was rejected due to racism? She just seems to assume it.

Most of the comments are trying to disprove the racism that this black female founder is facing. Microsoft has put out a great unconscious bias course that this mostly cismale dominated forum can benefit from. https://www.mslearning.microsoft.com/course/72169/launch

Why downvote this comment?

Wow. This post was marked dead within a minute of it being posted. I "vouched" for it, though given my pariah status on HN for calling out SV on social issues (such as racism), I'm surprised my "vouch" had any affect.

I have a lot more to say but HN doesn't really welcome my point of view, so...

My experience in trying to raise capital is pretty similar to the author's, and I'm a white guy. However, I don't think that detracts from her point.

If the system were more meritocratic, the demographics of people being funded would more closely match the demographics of the world. But it's actually a game of personal connections, theater, and psychological manipulation that has little relation to competence in most business domains.

I think VC (and financial) culture in general is totally broken and far from meritocratic, unless you feel that getting good at the wealthy-capitalist-image-of-success-signaling metagame is a measure of some kind of merit.

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An insidious effect of racism is that one can explain any negative interaction through that lens if one is inclined. Based on her post, I don't actually see racism, I see someone with a stronger background and more bona fides being more successful at pitching than someone with less of those things. In most other situations, HN commenters would be saying something like 'anecdotes are not data'. I think it's hard to draw large scale conclusions of a 'different reality' from this.