
I got shipped to California to date tech guys - jmduke
http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/05/shipped-to-california.html
======
jack-r-abbit
I'm not rich or single so I am really not the target market here. But
something about this feels really gross. I can't figure out how this was
allowed. I've lost all sense of what is and isn't acceptable these days. It
seems to change daily. It feels like not too long ago a couple guys lost their
job for making a joke about dongles and forking. I fail to see how that was
worse than this.

~~~
rayiner
> But something about this feels really gross. I can't figure out how this was
> allowed. I've lost all sense of what is and isn't acceptable these days.

My slow path to conservatism.

~~~
mikeash
Solve the problem by making the list of acceptable behavior so small that you
can remember it?

~~~
MarkPNeyer
maybe he means this

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle)

~~~
mikeash
I thought you were joking (and maybe you are) but now that I think about it,
that's a really good life philosophy. Tolerate behavior in others beyond what
you would engage in yourself.

Of course, this works better for social conventions like "call me by my last
name" or "pay for your date's dinner" than for stuff like "don't be gay",
which is sadly what's more associated with conservatism in this country.

~~~
pessimizer
That's how I try to operate. Everybody should get a break but me. There's a
word for giving yourself a break for bad behavior: rationalization.

------
blendergasket
This is not without precedent:

February 3 [1849]: The Raleigh Register runs an advertisement for women to go
to the Gold Rush and get a rich husband, titled "A Chance FOR A LADY." Other
efforts to encourage women to go to California include Mrs. Eliza Farnham of
New York's attempt to organize a ship of intelligent women over the age of 25
to sail to San Francisco to meet miners. Editors in the east praised her
efforts, but the plan failed.

[http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/goldrush/timeline/](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/goldrush/timeline/)

There was one that succeeded that I read about but I don't remember the
details and don't have the time to look it up. It was either in The Barbary
Coast or Rebecca Solnit's book about Muybridge.

------
ufmace
On a weirdness scale of 1 to 10, I think it sounds like this idea is hitting a
solid 6 or so. Possibly some extra points for the glorified prostitution model
of "Pay a ton to fly NYC girls, selected for their desire to spend 5 days out
of town meeting rich men, to SF to meet super-rich tech founders"

~~~
protomyth
Sadly, this is just the next link in a long line of similar attempts every
time there is a boom where the guys per girl ratio gets above 1. Read some
articles about the oil boom in North Dakota, although they don't fly them in
from NYC.

~~~
sliverstorm
Ratios close to 1 are tolerated, the real problem is when that ratio
approaches numbers like 2:1 (~66% male).

It's hard to have a happy town when a third of your population will wind up
alone.

~~~
protomyth
I seem to remember as countries get near 2:1 you get wars.

------
jquery
SF is nothing like this. The article is poorly written--little more than we-
did-this-then-we-did-that. The author is painfully lacking in self-awareness
or humility. The only insight to be gained from the article is about the
author, a caricature of severe narcissism played out through speed dating the
few men in San Francisco bored and desperate enough to participate. I think
this paints a worse picture of New York than it does of San Francisco.

~~~
jacquesm
No, it just paints a picture of that individual, or those individuals that
partook in this particular venture.

It says absolutely nothing about New York or San Francisco or any appreciable
fraction of their residents.

------
habosa
I'm moving to SF in August, but reading articles like this makes me want to
stay put. I know YC is just an incubator in the end, but I really wish they'd
advise their companies against sleazy stunts like this.

I feel like all of these ridiculous startups are forgetting: just because you
CAN do something, doesn't mean you SHOULD.

~~~
whalesalad
Why is this a sleazy stunt? What about this story is sleazy? A bunch of girls
flew to SF to go out, socialize, and have a good time. Sounds like everyone
involved had fun.

~~~
smsm42
They are having fun wrong! (C) Sheldon Cooper

------
aaronbrethorst
I honestly can't tell if this is satire or not.

~~~
jdp23
"Any publicity is good publicity."

------
jacquesm
Some investors are getting quite desperate to get 'ring-side-seats' (pun
intended) to the YC classes:

"I meet an angel investor who admits he gave to the Crowdtilt to butter up CEO
Lauren Kay so she’d accept his money. “With these Y Combinator companies,
sometimes so many people want to invest that they end up turning down money,”
he explained. He’d given money to the Dating Ring to secure the chance to give
even more money to the Dating Ring. He wouldn’t tell me how much he invested,
but did mention a desire to buy an airplane."

And how about this:

"Today’s daytime activity is a picnic in the park. I find Lisa and tell her
it’s time to do as the San Franciscans have done since before the dawn of
personal computing: get high. She goes to Dolores Park to seek weed from
strangers, while I return to the hotel and initiate a texting phone tree.
Twenty minutes later, as a white guy with dreadlocks is dumping vegan brownies
onto the bed, there is a knock on the door and the Nightline film crew is
standing there with a camera and a giant light. “Just a minute!” I shout
through a crack in the door. When the dealer exits, I wonder if Nightline
thinks I boned him."

------
tlrobinson
I guess "I volunteered to travel to California to date tech guys" isn't quite
as catchy.

------
irremediable
Ugh, this sounds so cringeworthy. Something about the commodification of those
women, even if it was done willingly.

~~~
lnanek2
It sounded fun, honestly. Props to her for getting her own medicine too.
That's the one thing I always cringe at - when an SF date off craigslist,
often an out of town person passing through like a stewardess, wants a hookup
like that. I don't keep any on me, so it's always a pain in the ass catering
to that need.

------
sciguy77
"'We’re doing shots! This will be great B-roll!' I scream into Lisa’s boob."

Reading this article made me very uncomfortable.

------
larrys
I see nothing wrong with this at all. In fact I have suggested to men that
they will have an easier time dating and finding love in NYC and to women that
they will have an easier time dating and finding love in SF or the Bay Area.
Because of the ratios of men to women and vice versa. What's wrong with that
exactly?

When I was dating myself years ago I had a trivially easy time getting really
good looking women (that I would never meet locally) by driving a bit to NYC.
I remember thinking "I need to move here even if this relationship (the women
that I met doing this) breaks up".

The name for this is a "target rich environment". It's as much about supply
and demand as it is about other issues.

------
alttag
I'll admit, I wasn't initially sure this was relevant to HN, but this is a
participant (customer?) perspective of a YCombinator startup.

~~~
trhway
it is also seems to be in line with the core business idea of the other
startups frequenting HN - Uber, AirBNB, etc... - identifying and putting to
use/brokering access to underutilized resources.

Though it is really an open question whether the underutilized resource like
male techies of SV can be efficiently made into business inventory desirable
by the potential customers. The article doesn't sound optimistic here.

~~~
jack-r-abbit
> _underutilized resource like male techies of SV_

To me it felt more like the underutilized resource was the hot women in NYC.
But that would be too degrading to the women. So they couldn't possibly take
that angle.

------
was_hellbanned
I have no problem with the ethics of any part of this, but this sounds like a
great way to grab a bunch of self-selecting people with significant
combinations of personality defects, poor interpersonal skills, and overly-
high estimation of their own worth. No personal judgment of them here, I
recognize such defects in myself, I'm just saying why the whole thing feels
'wrong'.

~~~
x1798DE
This is exactly my thought. It's the same thing with meeting someone on The
Bachelor or something. I don't care if you want to date 25 people and winnow
them down in a rose ceremony, or if you want to televise your rushed
courtship, but I'm very nearly 100% sure that I would never want to date
anyone willing to participate in that particular spectacle. Same thing here -
I don't care if you want to marry someone for their money or their body if
that's what you're into. I'm pretty damn sure I want no part in it.

------
antonapa
Mailorder brides concept made hip. This moral grey zone is very blackish.

------
parennoob
This program is going to fail, for the reason outlined in a couple of
sentences, that are possibly the most important sentences in this entire
article.

"...which is a blessing, since gossiping about dates is more fun than actually
going on them."

"We’re doing shots! This will be great B-roll!" I scream...

Arranged matches are fine and have been working out fairly well for hundreds
of years. But when one of the parties is more interested in making some sort
of production out of the experience than in finding an actual relationship,
the program is going to fall flat. They would do much better getting female
participants on a volunteer basis, preferably not from a large metropolis, who
are more interested in finding a relationship than in making a "B-roll".

~~~
xarball
>> who are more interested in finding a relationship than in making a
"B-roll".

^^ THIS. There must be some pretty lonely guys out there. I can only hope the
more genuine ones learned their lesson after it ended.

Best example: The poor fellow who left early to work for Yahoo at 8:00 am. He
may have only understood the ethics that he had bought into after it ended.

Women who try and make anything off this crap are selfish to the point of
degrading those around them. They're really horrible people to be around, let
alone to sleep with -- because they're too self-absorbed with the money and
free ride to factor in the precedent they're setting for the kind of
interaction that's socially acceptable around potential mates.

DO WE REALLY want a society where people who work hard, are forced to compete
financially to have an attractive mate fly in, do B-rolls, get high, and to
demonstrate what a cold and mechanical interaction they actually want?

Women: How would you like it if this was the kind of world you had to live in
to find affection from a man? Pay $1,000 to have him come in and show you that
your money, work, and desire for affection is just as worthless as anyone
else's.

Because THAT is what your actions convey.

I think I'm with my grandparents on this one: These women need to learn to
treat others exactly how they expect to be treated. Otherwise nobody can be
their friend, foe, or lover.

Because when we start pretending that relationships and affection can be
bought -- we won't be buying real affection.

------
throwaway_0529
And YC wonders why it has an image problem among female founders.

Sam, what is this.

------
sergiotapia
I see nothing wrong with this. It's cringe-worthy, but not wrong morally, or
legally.

More power to the women who wanted to give it a shot.

------
Jun8
OK, keeping an open mind, this sounds like a good idea for a startup: (i) try
to solve an important problem that has bugged people for millennia and (ii) do
so by exploiting inefficiencies of the system (different gender ratios in
different geographical locations). The basic idea is nothing new, of course
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail-
order_bride](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail-order_bride)).

Still, makes you think, why didn't it work out?

My simple explanation is that the organizers went for the dumb _Big Bang
Theory_ thing: brainacs paired with dashing beauties. I would hypothesize that
if you were to select _random_ 20 young women from NYC and paired them up with
random men from SF (random within reason, of course) you would have had much
less problems.

~~~
trhway
>(i) try to solve an important problem that has bugged people for millennia

1\. it has bugged almost everybody else for uncountable millennia before
people :) So if it were a problem, the evolution would have already solved it.
Which brings us to the next point :

2\. it isn't a problem really, it is the solution that evolution came up with
to make sure that blobs of organic matter move their a&&es, tails, tentacles,
...

------
cracell
Seems like encouraging more females to go into tech jobs and making training
for them more available like RailsBridge's workshops would be a far better use
of money and time.

If you want to simply stay on the dating side of things you could make a site
designed for remote dates through web cam chats, cooperative games (anything
from web based mini-games to co-op on Call of Duty depending on the interests
of the players), IMing and texting. You don't need to be in the same physical
place to get to know someone, thinking you do seems very backwards for a
startup.

What's the plan here if two people do click? The service isn't going to pay
for them to fly over for every date. It's the same situation as meeting
someone online except that the initial date is face to face.

~~~
smsm42
Better for what? I'm not sure how training women to work in tech and helping
people from remote to date each other is related. Unless "women in tech" are
viewed as a commodity that "we need more of" and these are considered as
alternative ways for getting more of that commodity - which _would be_ kind of
disgusting point of view to me. But if we ignore such point of view, I do not
see any relation between the two and why they should be viewed as alternative
ways of spending money instead of complimentary ways.

>>> You don't need to be in the same physical place to get to know someone,
thinking you do seems very backwards for a startup.

Depends on your definition of "know", I guess. Ultimately, there are things
between men and women that don't work well over chats ;)

------
blizkreeg
I'd love to see their YC application. I'm curious (in a genuine way) to
understand what got them into YC.

------
bobbles
Why would they break opening links in new tabs? Whyyyyyyyy?

------
FiloSottile
> She goes to Dolores Park to seek weed from strangers, while I return to the
> hotel and initiate a texting phone tree. Twenty minutes later, as a white
> guy with dreadlocks is dumping vegan brownies onto the bed [...]

I'm not judging morally, even if stating that it's a good way "to evaluate
men" makes me uncomfortable.

Still, is it legal to write down this in the US?

EDIT: rephrase

~~~
mpyne
It's not illegal to write that you use weed.

But it could be used as evidence against you if the prosecutor were to get
charges filed against you that you used weed.

Surely the prosecutors will be filing these charges any minute now, since the
USA is now officially a police state.

------
Dewie
Why are there so many bachelorettes in NYC?

EDIT: I don't know what people have against an honest (though perhaps naive?)
question.

~~~
tpeng
Interestingly, this only appears to be true in Manhattan. In New York City,
single men aged 20-34 outnumber single women. And according to this site,
single men aged 20-34 outnumber single women 20-34 in almost every city in the
US: [http://jonathansoma.com/singles/](http://jonathansoma.com/singles/)

I have several hypotheses for Manhattan, but my best guess is that a major
contributing factor is that the average age of marriage (and proportion of
never-marrieds) is higher in Manhattan than outside.
[http://nypost.com/2010/01/05/all-the-single-people-in-
manhat...](http://nypost.com/2010/01/05/all-the-single-people-in-manhattan/)

------
a3voices
Is this a precursor to the first prostitution ring startup?

~~~
sp_
Such a startup already exists obviously: [http://www.thelocal.de/20140417/new-
app-helps-johns-find-pro...](http://www.thelocal.de/20140417/new-app-helps-
johns-find-prostitutes)

------
dueprocess
If dating had to be like this, I'd become a monk in Tibet.

------
brokentone
Neither the idea nor this article seem to be helping to encourage girls in
technology.

~~~
torbit
I don't believe that was point of the article based on the first paragraph "An
online start-up (tech) was crowdfunding a shipment of single women from New
York to San Francisco".

