[michaelochurch]

I wonder if some of us are turning tech startups into the high school we never had.

Insightful.

I'd take this comparison further. The depiction of high school in the media is that the popular kids ("jocks") bully the nerds. In reality, the jocks and the popular kids and the bullies are mostly disjoint sets. Jocks work too hard at their athletic pursuits to also work their way into the popular crowd. Popular kids aren't really interested in bullying the people at the bottom; they'd rather not associate with them at all. They're indifferent.

It's usually mid-range kids trying to become popular who are the worst bullies. It rarely actually works that way for them, but that doesn't prevent them from doing it.

In the VC-funded startup world, the VCs are the popular kids. They don't intentionally bully women or older programmers or non-conformists or non-Kool-Aid-drinkers. They just don't care. The bullies are the ex-nerds, promoted into startup middle management, who think they're going to be going to be skiing with Peter Thiel in a year (but, in the mean time, they have to beat "the team" into making this deadline). Of course, they're almost always wrong. The popular kids in the VC-funded world tacitly accept the cruelty and cultural failure, but they're not the ones actually doing it.

[didgeoridoo]

This definitely matches my high school experience. The "jocks" were basically the nerds of the physical realm. There was a distinct male/female difference, though.

On male side, the jocks were respected by the popular kids (because the girls loved them), and feared by the bullies (because of their physical size).

On the female side, however, the jocks ended up creating their own little isolated world, much like the female nerds. Now that I think of it, this may have been because female athleticism doesn't bestow the same social standing — men don't prize female strength & size, and female bullies don't operate by physical strength (they're much more... psychological).

Fortunately, there isn't this same gender dynamic in the real world. Right?

[spiritplumber]

One interesting thing is that physical ability has nothing to do with it unless it's associated with a popular sport.

In HS, I made a bit of money doing construction on the weekend (it beat waiting tables) for a year -- needlessly to say I bulked up a lot. Still couldn't play soccer worth a damn, though, and this was in Italy so soccer is a huge deal.

I went from "kid who it is safe to bully" to "kid who beat the shit out of three older kids in full view of half the school after they keyed his scooter", but it didn't make me any more popular. It did get idiots to leave me alone, though.

The principal was pretty awesome about the whole thing -- he saw the whole thing go down, had everyone involved get into his office, yelled at the other three kids for provoking me, and after sending them home and telling me to come in, actually congratulated me on my victory. Only got a disciplinary note in that trimester's report card for this, no suspension or anything.

[jiggy2011]

I think that Jocks get a free pass into the popular set, so they don't have to work their way in. In fact a person's measure of popularity might be defined by their proximity to the Jocks. It might work the same way for VCs.