[Gradient-Ascent]

I have just scraped the comment section of the recent "Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch" announcement:

- Aditya and Karan (Warrant)

- Anta and Karthik (Inai)

- Nishant and Pranav (Nino Foods)

- Jan and Anahi (Perfekto)

- Bruno and Guilherme (Jestor)

- Antonio, Felipe, Joaquin and Francois (Chipax)

- Ali and Omair (Abhi)

As with every place "you need to fit in": Do you fit in here?

I have the feeling that YC have "their favs": Kind of: Young, global and more and more very "boring"/normal business. They rather replace existing businesses with something better, than to innovate/disrupt. It works for them now, since they are such a household brand.

[dang]

A few things.

- it's misleading to cherry-pick a single post. The analysis for all 400+ Launch HNs would look entirely different (https://news.ycombinator.com/launches).

- the type of startups you mention (extending an existing business to a large market) are more likely to be in an aggregate thread than a standalone Launch HN [1], so you've effectively assumed your conclusion.

- you presumably know nothing about the ages of those founders, so bringing them up in a post alleging age discrimination (or more precisely, not alleging age discrimination) and misleadingly adding the word "young" is... dubious.

- you list the founders' names but nothing about their startups. Why? Obviously because they have international origins. Following that with "do you fit in here" strikes me as a veiled slur.

- it's also pretty silly. Why shouldn't YC fund great startups regardless of where they come from? You'll find YC doing exactly that in every category: national background as well as all the others (race, gender, class, and yes, age).

[1] That's because, for this batch, we've been trying to give every YC startup who wants to launch on HN a chance to do so. That requires a huge number of editorial decisions because there are so many more startups than front page slots. I make the editorial decisions based not on the quality of the startup or their market (let alone irrelevant attributes of founders), but on how interesting the HN thread is likely to be to the community here. Mostly that has to do with avoiding repetition (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). In other words, the considerations are completely unrelated to everything you're implying. I explained all this when announcing the aggregate launch threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27877280.

[sillysaurusx]

> In other words, the considerations are completely unrelated to everything you're implying.

Discrimination and bias are often unconscious, rather than an explicit decision.

Suppose that YC was biased against X, and that therefore the startup pool you can select from contains mostly ~X. You could select for interesting, substantive startups in Meet The Batch threads, and it would still reveal the absence of X.

I'll be honest: I'm terrified of speaking with you lately, but I'm posting this because it's worth risking myself if it helps change someone's mind about bias. So, for whatever it's worth, there's my attempt.

[dang]

I deleted that sentence because it made my post too long, but since you've quoted it, I'll put it back. I was talking there about the editorial decision surrounding HN launches. That's not related to YC's funding decisions.

It's not clear to me what your point is, unless it was simply to mention unconscious bias. Saying that you or anyone would somehow be risking yourself by posting to HN is also a little obscure.

[sillysaurusx]

It's a risk any time I speak to you, because a large part of my life is HN, and speaking to you risks another penalty. I didn't mean it as an accusation, it just seems to be the mechanics of me-speaking-to-you.

I also apologize for quoting a sentence that you cut. That happened to me earlier, and it's always frustrating, even if it was unintentional.

My point was, your comment seems to be mistaken in a revealing way. If it were true that YC was biased, then your editorial decisions wouldn't be able to influence anything in relation to the bias. The bias would already have an impact on the startup pool that you can select from.

In other words, your decisions about HN's "Meet the Batch" threads seem unrelated to the question of YC's alleged age discrimination. But you felt that your decisions were related, since you were saying "We don't select for age" in regards to the Meet The Batch threads.

Bias is something that you can't force someone to care about. I'm hoping that it may be a lightbulb moment for you, as it once was for me. It's never any fun to be a part of an organization accused of some form of bias, but asking yourself "Could it be true?" is a mental exercise that personally I found helpful.

That said, you were correct that this commenter posted those startups without knowing the ages of the founders. It could be possible that those startups have older founders. But no one seems to be quite sure. It's lame of them to make an insinuation like that without knowing the ages of the founders – burden of proof – but it's also worth considering whether it's true, even if it was a lame accusation.

Anyway. I didn't say any of this to put you on the defensive. That'd be the opposite way to change your mind. Just think it over a moment, is all I ask.

EDIT: After re-reading this chain, perhaps I'm off the mark here (a common theme). From my perspective, it sounded like someone was saying "Well, it might be true; these startups do seem pretty young and trendy..." and then you were listing reasons why that was mistaken.

It sounded like you didn't necessarily care about whether YC is age discriminatory. My goal here was to convince you it may be worth caring about it.

If you already do care about that, then never mind. My mistake. I see now that your point about editorial decisions was an expansion of a different train of thought.

One last point to give a moment of pause: If you list N random politicians, most of them will probably be pretty old, because politics is biased against youth. If you list N random YC companies, will the ages of their founders tend to skew younger or older (relative to the proportion of those age groups that apply)? That might be one way to investigate the claim.