[beardedman]

> Diversity continues to be an issue in SaaS. Only 11% of founding teams include a non-male and 21% include a non-white founder

I find this line absolutely infuriating. And I'm disappointed it's right at the start. Must there always be an issue when the data doesn't suit a worldview? Why compromise a survey 's integrity with your own bias?

It costs virtually $0 these days to start a SaaS company, regardless of gender, ethnicity or religious creed. Look at the emerging African & Indian markets to see absolutely remarkable people hustling & making things happen with having very very little.

[dang]

Please don't rush from the first detail that infuriates you to the HN thread to post about it. That's the opposite of intellectual curiosity, the guiding value of this site. Curiosity looks around to see what's new; fury rushes to react to something old. It also breaks the site guidelines because (a) it will probably start a flamewar, and (b) such discussions are basically always the same. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Instead, wait until the first infuriated rush subsides, and then reflect on what a thoughtful post might say, and how it might contribute to curious conversation. If you can't think of anything like that, it's the better part of valor not to post. This is the reflexive/reflective distinction: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

[codegeek]

I think it has more to do with socio-economic background than your race/gender/ethnicity etc by default. You used the example of Indian markets. If you look at who the founders are, most of them are middle-upper middle class where they don't have to worry about basic needs on a daily basis. Again, I am sure you can find the rags to riches story anecdotally but running a business myself (non white male founder), I can tell you that socio-economic status helps tremendously. Yes, you can still start a SAAS business regardless due to lower barrier to entry but you are only thinking about servers/software type of cost and not the opportunity cost that most lower middle class to poor people have to give up on.

It almost always comes down to your socio-economic status and I am in the "big risk taker" group. When I started my business, I could totally risk not working for a year or two without it causing significant damage to my family's socio-economic status/needs. Yes, my income went down significantly and it was still a risk but a heavily calculated one. Even if the business failed, I would be able to get back to the corporate life easily since I had put in 10+ years of experience by that time and had financial stability to do this.

[tarsinge]

Racial statistics also only make sense in the US where skin color is associated with usually only one culture/origin, and while it's understandable in this specific context be aware than in other countries this is plain racism (and also illegal in some like France) because of the complexity and multi culturally and background that exist between a similar skin color.

Now sure there are socio-economics realities correlated but in that case instead of using skin color as a proxy (which again only works in the US) the correct thing to do is to use directly the variables of that socio-economics background, like education, income level, parent's wealth, ...

[cambalache]

Why are you downvoted? Americans are right when they say people from outside do not understand certain things about Americans (like the second amendment or why car culture is so prevalent) but many don't apply that standard to themselves. In many countries race is not a big deal.

[beardedman]

You have many countries with racial stats. I also referred to the gender "issue" - not only race.

[tarsinge]

I don't think gender has the same statistics relevance issue, because the distribution is more uniform across the socioeconomic spectrum.

Edit: to clarify, I am not debating wether or not the gender and racial "issue" should be highlighted in the survey, just that the racial stats as they are are not statistically relevant to draw conclusions (at least in non US countries).

[Alex3917]

> It costs virtually $0 these days to start a SaaS company

The average cost of raising a kid in a middle class family is around 250K. What percentage of micro SaaS founders do you think had less than double or triple that (inflation adjusted) spent on them between when they were born and when they founded their companies?

If founding a SaaS company is free, it's only in the same sense that gas for a Tesla doesn't cost anything. Being one person who has the liberal arts / social science background to understand people, and can also code, and can also design, and can also do marketing, requires many hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of education -- even if it's just sitting around in the library for a few years instead of working.

There are definitely people who are wildly successful without that kind of background, but I don't think they're representative of the typical people building micro SaaS companies. Keep in mind you're really only able to learn to code if you're able to read English at a proficient level, which only ~13% of Americans are able to do.

[csa]

> Keep in mind you're really only able to learn to code if you're able to read English at a proficient level, which only ~13% of Americans are able to do.

Proficiency is measured on a scale — it is not binary.

What specific level of proficiency are you referring to, and what is your source for saying that this is the minimum level needed to learn to code. I will go out on a limb and say that your 13% is folks who can read at a 12th grade level (or thereabouts). Note that in the literature, this does not refer to the reading level of an average 12th grader, rather the level that curriculum developers aim to have 12 graders read at.

Also, what level of coding are your referring to?

I will just say straight up that I can teach and have taught kids who have little or no knowledge of English how to code (e.g., with Scratch), so I think you may need to make your assumptions a bit more transparent.

[Alex3917]

Source: https://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF

> Also, what level of coding are your referring to?

Just being a working developer. For which the main skill is just being able to read and understand the documentation for new languages, frameworks, libraries, etc.

[csa]

Thank you for the source.

That said, I don’t think proficiency as defined in that source is an ideal proxy for “can be a developer”, especially given the that “developer” can refer to a wide range of tasks.

Some comments:

1. To pass a FAANG algo interview, yes, the proficient level is needed.

2. To do the bulk of coding and bug fixing that many (most?) developers do, I think that there are a lot of high intermediates (my sub-categorization of intermediate) can do the work and actually are employed as developers. I’ve seen enough janky code in code bases and submitted as “updates” or “fixes” for me to believe that this is widely true.

3. To be a productive creator, I also think the proficient level is necessary. That said, I have seen a bunch of janky creations with questionable efficiency/productivity that lead me to believe again that proficiency is an ideal rather than a necessity.

Literacy is a tricky subject, so I encourage you to exercise caution before throwing around ideas like only the proficient 13% of the population can be developers. There are so many qualifications that need to be made before that statement is plausibly true that it is not worth making, imo.

Let me add that I agree with your overall statement that most successful founders come from relatively privileged backgrounds. There are many reasons for this, literacy being one.

[beardedman]

The US (surprisingly) is not the only country where people start businesses. ;)

Look at emerging markets & look at tech being applied to them by folks that have far far less than 250k.

> If founding a SaaS company is free

VIRTUALLY free is what I said. And yes it is - you have resource like CodeAcademy & a VPS cost less than $5 these days.

[friendlybus]

13% of America is literate enough to code??

[ivanhoe]

It costs zero if you're a student living with parents who feed you and provide for you. If you have to pay the bills while working on the project then it costs the money you'll need to survive those 6+ months, or it costs you your free time and social life and sleep if you're moonlighting. Depending on your gender, ethnicity or religious creed (and immigration and parental status) it might be significantly harder for you to pull it.

[beardedman]

> It costs zero if you're a student living with parents who feed you and provide for you.

False. Hence me mentioning those other markets where the economic climate is must worse than the US - yet you have people making it work. Kenya/Nigeria fantastic examples.

[ivanhoe]

In Kenya also just some people manage to do it. I'd bet there's no many single parents among them, just like there's no them in US. Or people having to do multiple part-time shitty jobs to pay the bills. Or people that have to take care of their parents or siblings. It's highly dependable on your social and financial situation if you'll be able to run a business, any business including SaaS.

[thulecitizen]

> Must there always be an issue when the data doesn't suit a worldview? Why compromise a survey 's integrity with your own bias?

Hello. Might I remind you of the Global North's historic and continued plundering of the Global South (developing countries)?

Or should we forget about all of that?

> It costs virtually $0 these days to start a SaaS company

Yes, if you have a big cultural inheritance (which was itself plundered and stolen and appropriated from other countries). Oh yes, and you need a big trust fund and upper class parents, or at the least a pedagogical mentor who stimulates you, nourishes your curiosity.

By saying this you are showing me the holy ground you are standing on. There are many hands who touch your life every day: feeding you, making your clothes, your electronics, etc. Check out the True Cost (2015): https://youtu.be/OaGp5_Sfbss?t=32, or 'Steve Jobs: The Man In The Machine': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhWKxtsYrJE

Two key areas one can focus on: 1) imperial intellectual property machine - the work of Ruth Okediji is revealing with this: http://www.commonlii.org/sg/journals/SGJlIntCompLaw/2003/14....

and 2) Corporatist/institutionalized plundering since the colonial era: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/britain-stole-45-t...

Please would you consider these and try to understand their implications on today's reality?

[dang]

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. It just makes the thread even worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[thulecitizen]

Dear dang, please could you unflag my comment?

I am up for a debate, and I am happy to be shown other perspectives. Yet flagging my comment seems to be the easiest way to scrub something you don't like, while avoiding constructive debate. It seems to me that you are labeling my writing as starting an 'ideological flamewar', when I would argue I back up my arguments with leading research/references.

I just replied to another comment below, with more links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22153575

When I googled ‘flamewar’, wikipedia defines it as:

"a flame war is a series of flame posts or messages in a thread that are considered derogatory in nature or are completely off-topic"

I am making connections that I think are worthwhile. They might seem overly critical and negative to those who are not familiar with the arguments. Do you want to limit connections you don’t make yourself, and discard them as ‘off-topic’ because you aren’t familiar with the research?

That sounds a bit like cherry-picking to me.

I don’t understand how constructive critique like this can be flagged, and my comment muted/hidden. Are we not all humans typing away at our keyboards here? Is your perspective really the ‘right’ or only useful perspective?

The only reason I can think of for you and others to flag my comment is if my comments are getting in the way of you or others in Silicon Valley from charging your rents? Is it that you see some truth in what I share that you might not be comfortable with?

[dang]

I'm sorry, but it's a classic generic ideological tangent to take a thread about SaaS into "the Global North's historic and continued plundering of the Global South". If we allow that, every thread will eventually turn into a generic ideological flamewar. That's how the internet works by default, and one must make a conscious effort to prevent that if one wants to prevent it, which we do. Comments like yours lead precisely to comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22153317, and worse, so please don't do that here.

If you're sincerely worried about the moderation favoring one ideology over another, you're welcome to look through the many past occasions where I've posted moderation comments about this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... We don't keep any counts, but you'll find plenty of examples of every side getting the same sort of moderation reply when commenters take a thread in this sort of direction.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[hecatoncheires]

So you give the example of Britain plundering India. Explain to me why Indians in America are the most successful ethnic group in the country then, at almost twice the median income of white people?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...

By your logic of white "holy ground" whites should obviously be at the top of the list, no? Instead Indians and East Asians are.

[bergstromm466]

What is there to explain? I am not challenging the intelligence of one ethnicity over another, that seems to be your argument here.

My argument is that we tell countries in the Global South to use strategy B (free competition) to try to become ‘successful’ like us, when actually we ourselves used strategy A (infant industry protection and export subsidies) [1].

In other words, we give them advice we ourselves didn’t follow, and then blame them for not having ‘caught up’ and become ‘developed’.

The delivery mechanisms for rich cultural inheritances, and use of the best time-saving strategies, are increasingly made artificially scarce through a combination of (1) the money system, and (2) through the IP system (the Aaron Swartz Doc. is great on this). Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley because of the US Intellectual Property regime.

To understand this deeper, I'd implore you to check out the work of Guy Standing [2]:

"…today, a tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created. ‘Rentiers’ of all kinds are in unparalleled ascendancy and the neo-liberal state is only too keen to oblige their greed.

Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions."

The reviewer of Chang’s book then goes on to write:

"Rather than a “free market,” the neoliberal global economy praised as “free trade” by policy wonks is actually “a global framework of institutions and regulations that enable elites to maximise their rental income.”

Standing says 31% of Western corporate profits today, as opposed to 17% in 1999, are in industries where profits are rents on artificial scarcities like patents, copyrights and trademarks enforced under the neoliberal treaty regime established in the ’90s. To take one example, Apple — thanks to patents, copyrights and trademarks — runs a 40% gross profit on the iPhone. Two-thirds of drug research is funded by taxpayers, while patents add $140 billion to the annual price of drugs in the United States. And Standing makes short work of the propaganda myth in favor of so-called “intellectual property”; rather than being a reward for innovation, the main actual purpose of patents is to prevent others from innovating. This is especially egregious, considering that most of the new technologies and products under patent were developed with heavy taxpayer R&D subsidies, and then enclosed for private profit.

Alongside rents on the artificial scarcity of ideas, the state provides enormous rents to the propertied classes through the enclosure of land and natural resource commons, dating back to the enclosure of peasant land in early modern Europe, the engrossment of land (both vacant and native-occupied) in settler societies like America and Australia, the hacienda system in Latin America, the nullification of peasant land rights by colonial powers in Asia and Africa, and the looting of oil and mineral resources. Property claims to all these forms of looted land and resources have persisted in the hands of Western capital under neocolonialism, and one of the main functions of the state is to enforce such titles — in the name of “defending private property rights” — against attempts at reclamation by their rightful owners.”

[1] Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective by Ha-Joon Chang (2002)

[2] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...