This. Although there is no age limit on YC applications, there appears to be a natural bias towards younger candidates. Women, however, tend to move into being an entrepreneur later in life, when they have more experience.
Blind applications would make me more comfortable to consider applying.
A lot of this has to do with impostor syndrome which is why the idea of a blind applications would, in my opinion, help many other talented founders think of applying.
Thanks for your comment on empathy. That is something that makes me feel really welcome to comment here.
This raises a good point, but informal inferences about age, ethnicity, and sex can be made from other parts of the application. Statistics on the discrimination of Ivy league schools show that (east) Asian face a stacked deck in college applications at "selective" schools[0]. Its plausible that much of this is inferred from ethnic names. To the extent it impacts the short-lists for interviews (ie, before candidates are seen in person), it's obviously detrimental.
Which brings up another point: it would be interesting to see a YC batch where the colleges/universities' names were redacted from the screening process.[1] Again, I don;t think this will ever happen...but as a thought experiment I would likely be of equal interest in terms of "opening" access. At some stage, business is as much about trading favours as it is about measuring "competence". There are some good game-theoretic reasons for this (ie, establishing trust in sequential repeated games), but there is more to the story than that.[2]
[1] Even if this was replaced by a sort of rating system, eg. that placed X schools into N buckets. This could be done so that the information was recorded but never made visible (say by online application). And the data could still be verified later prior as part of due-dilligence/ affadavit to avoid a problem with gaming the system.
The last time I was hiring, I wished I could easily review resumes without seeing the names, email addresses, physical addresses, school names, or even telephone numbers as I felt that I was bringing in my arbitrary bias.
Telephone numbers? I found that I identified a lot more with area code 206 than 425 or 253, just as I identify a lot more with an @gmail.com address than @hotmail.com or @aol.com.
I would like to think that I could do both. I really want to believe that the playing field is level no matter if your first name is Paul or Venkatesh or Bambi or LaTonya, but I don't have absolute trust in that. The "screen" is a tool in helping with that.
It wouldn't be hiding biases, it would be making them inconsequential. That's pretty much the best you can hope for, once you admit the possibility that there's no such state as bias-free.
- who graduated from WSU (the rival of my alma matter)
- who has a 253 area code (my least favorite suburb)
- who uses Papyrus for headings (my least favorite font)
- with the email address belieber69@aol.com (triple yuck)
I would want to get that person in for an interview and explicitly check the subtle biases of me and other people who are making hiring decisions.
True story: when I was in college I had a classmate in my database class who was so good-looking it kind of hurt to look at her. I never once explicitly thought that she was a dumb blonde, but I was surprised when I found out that she was just brilliant. Similarly, I worked on a group project with a few prototypical "frat boys" with their Abercrombie sweaters and backwards baseball caps, and found myself surprised that they were smart as hell, too.
I just want to give people an honest chance to be brilliant and not have their resumes passed over for bullshit reasons, even subconsciously.
> "Statistics on the discrimination of Ivy league schools show that (east) Asian face a stacked deck in college applications at "selective" schools[0]. Its plausible that much of this is inferred from ethnic names."
I wonder how a surname like "Lang" would fair. It is either Germanic of Asian, though it seems to be primarily Germanic in practice but seems strongly Asian to people who are not familiar with it[0]. If there is discrimination keyed off of "Asian-ish sounding" names then it might be apparent when looking at these sorts of names.
[0] I know a germanic "Lang". Apparently he gets asked how his family got that name a lot.
Your comments on school history etc are completely valid in the context of inference.
I'd like to think that we could genuinely make a fairly well balanced system for meritocratic selection. Yes, it's a lot of work and there is always room for error however I'd like to think that ultimately the STEM industry favours these kinds of methods and they could be improved on so we'd see some kind of futuristic system that we saw in the Starship Troopers narrative (as a crazy example that in the movie at least, no-one complained about). Maybe we just need a ton more data to be able to make better predictions. But I also think that face-to-face interviews are ultimately needed as others have mentioned: cultural fit is important to a degree as well.
On that note it reminds me of the Declara article I read (about the founder Ramona Pierson), where data is working to pair relevant people.
Can I ask you to go one deeper there? Do you think age is more critical here than sex? Would you rather be a 25 year old female applying or a 38 year old male?
I'd rather have been me, 10 years ago (i.e. 25yr female) applying to an accelerator. Looking back however, that me needed an incredible amount of guidance regardless of talent and I'd think it's a million times easier to get productive work out of a me-now. In that sense I don't need an accelerator like YC at this point, more guidance and mentorship on how to get past the post-startup phase. And that's perfect for a 38 year-old anyone.
There is no age limit for going to college either, but I have seen many people feel reluctant to begin/return to college later in life, for many reasons - they think they won't fit in with other students and hence will miss out on shared experiences, they think it's "too late" to get any use out of the degree by the time they finish, they think other people will think they are slow/stupid for being in college at their age, they think that colleges might not want to admit older people, they aren't sure if they can afford to support their family while being in college (not a concern for the traditional student), etc. I think that most of these fears are unfounded, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. One way to reassure them is often to give them specific examples of 'x went back to college to be a doctor when he was 33, and has had a long and successful career since then that totally let him pay off his student loans even though they were so huge!' or 'z did a degree in Mathematics in her 40s, and she said sure nobody invited her to keggers, but she was able to find partners for her group projects easily'. Are any of the older previous alumni open to being known as 'the guy who did YC in his 30s', or to being contacted by prospective entrants, to provide similar success stories?
I agree that people fear to do something if they think they might fail or have that the something might have a bias against them.
However, I would argue YCom graduates are people who do a thing even if THEY ARE TERRIFIED.
Being afraid of failure is not a justification for not trying, it is in fact a thing any healthy person has.
The successful among us are the ones who operate even though they are afraid of failure. Otherwise only the people that were born with a perfect hand dealt to them would ever succeed.
That mindset could justify any arbitrary barrier to y combinator, but I don't see pg instituting a mandatory cliff dive as part of the application even though startup founders need to be able to show courage and deal with unexpected and crazy obstacles.
That's true!
However, another quote that I thought was relevant to this same way of thinking: (this was just posted today on HN, and I thought, exactly!)
“Fear is the greatest obstacle to learning. But fear is your best friend. Fear is like fire. If you learn to control it, you let it work for you. If you don’t learn to control it, it’ll destroy you and everything around you.
“You think you know the difference between a hero and a coward, Mike? Well, there is no difference between a hero and a coward in what they feel. It’s what they do that makes them different. The hero and the coward feel exactly the same, but you have to have the discipline to do what a hero does and to keep yourself from doing what the coward does.”
When I read this, it exactly encapsulated what I was trying to say. You are allowed to fear everything, but if you let fear control you or decide what you will or will not do you will not become great. You may even regret bitterly not taking the jump off the cliff.
Well, you might. But I think you're either having a different discussion to 'is it a good thing for arbitrary barriers exist to entering YC?', or else you're conflating heroism and entrepreneurship in a way I find a little overblown.
What kind of pressure are you feeling about applying to funds now?