
YC is compiling a blacklist of venture capitalists accused of harassing women - sandmansandine
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/this-influential-silicon-valley-firm-is-compiling-a-blacklist-of-venture-capitalists-who-harass-women/2017/07/14/1dfc7164-6661-11e7-8eb5-cbccc2e7bfbf_story.html
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adrianratnapala
The most startling thing here is the form headline takes: "X is compiling a
blackist of Y _accused of_ Z".

Notice the word is " _accused_ " and not " _guilty_ ". Now I am not going to
accuse YC of running a star chamber: I assume (without knowing) that they are
fairly responsible with their blacklist. But the principle is still worrying.

Like most institutions, private companies are not able to hold trials and
rigorously tell guilt from innocence, so whenever they set out to police
others they must do so on some lesser evidence.

It is our right to shun others because we suspect them without proof of
something bad. Perhaps it is even our right to gang together and ostracise
such, but society suffers when that is the norm.

~~~
sillysaurus3
I used to feel similarly, but see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14621466](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14621466)
which completely changed my mind.

Empirically, we seem to be too far in the direction of "innocent until proven
guilty." This allows people to prey on others unchecked.

It can swing back too far in the other direction, but a healthy balance is
probably best.

~~~
ams6110
Typical standards for these sorts of things are a presumption of innocence
until shown otherwise, which can be to varying degrees of certainty:
_preponderance of evidence_ (i.e. "more likely true than not"), _clear and
convincing evidence_ ("quite likely true"), or _beyond a reasonable doubt_.

I would hope that at least a _preponderance of evidence_ standard is used,
beyond just the leveling of an accusation. Considering the consequences for
the accused, _clear and convincing_ is probably a better standard.

------
tptacek
YC has, from what I've been told, been doing stuff like this for years. Not
just for harassment, but also for all the other bad-actor stuff VCs do to
startup founders (think: stuff like ruthless term sheet recision).

It's things like this that make it hard for me to be totally down on YC,
despite disquieting things about its culture. It's hard to argue that it
hasn't been an unalloyed good for founders.

~~~
elmar
could you please elaborate on the "disquieting things about its culture" I
never personally found any, maybe I am missing something.

~~~
seppin
perhaps not the best place to discuss

~~~
philipov
or else, on the other hand, the best place to discuss...

------
mattmaroon
Part of me worries that "accused" seems like a very low standard, and part of
me has little idea how to better address the very real problem.

~~~
jdavis703
Don't you "accuse" a restaurant of having subpar food or service when
reviewing on Yelp? When I read restaurant reviews I take certain ones with a
grain of salt, unless I hear the same problems coming up in multiple different
reviews. These accusations can have a material impact on the restaurant,
similar to the impact it might have on a VC. Hopefully, no person will take
one review as a final judgment on a VC, but if a pattern emerges people should
proceed with caution.

~~~
ams6110
Reviewing a restaurant and accusing someone of sexual harrassment are not even
remotely in the same ballpark of potential for long long-term damage to
someone's reputation, family, career, and future.

~~~
tptacek
This is easy to dispute. A lot of restaurants operate on a razor's edge of
profitability. More restaurants fold every year than VC firms. Restaurants
tend to be operated by middle class people with weaker backup plans than
venture capital firms, which are staffed by investment bankers, most of whom
have Ivy League pedigrees --- in fact, most of whom collect 2/20 on funds
invested no matter how bad the quality of their dealflow gets.

Meanwhile, these same VCs that people on this thread are champing at the bit
to defend routinely create blacklists of founders, which they'll share _with
competitors_ to fuck people over. If they don't like you, they'll take
meetings with you, telling you the whole time that they can't wait to get you
a term sheet, and then take your slide deck and their notes from the meeting
and send them to portfolio companies and other VCs for competitive intel†.

It's a little silly to think we're going to feel sorry for these people in
this situation.

Really, the distinction is that it's important to some people that we all
believe a large fraction of sexual harassment complaints are bogus. It's got
nothing to do with the impact of YC shunning you, and everything to do with
the politics of the issue.

† _Ask me how I know this. But, I mean, you already know how I know this._

------
noahmbarr
I'm very supportive of these efforts to distance startup founders from
investors who are unprofessional and/or abusive -- but:

"She also tweeted that Y Combinator had disinvited an investor who was trying
to replace a female chief executive with a white male"

Should it be the best person for the job, male or female alike?

~~~
tptacek
Here we're inventing a controversy where none necessarily exists; we simply
don't know enough to discuss what's happening here, and so we shouldn't.

~~~
stcredzero
Power corrupts, but it isn't instantaneous and it isn't as if there aren't
good people who can resist that tendency. Y Combinator represents an
aggregation of power, and so it's likely that someone, somewhere will be
tempted to abuse such power. The "lowest cost" and most likely form of this
would be through a false accusation of someone who only has marginal standing.

You can say this for just about any organization which has power. This is why
transparency is often a good check for power. In cases where transparency
isn't practical, then there is the larger granularity of the market. Where
this breaks down is in very acute concentrations of power. The realist view
acknowledges that power is contextual, and that contextual abuses will happen.
Sometimes the world is imperfect and you're going to have to leave for more
peaceful pastures.

Throughout all of the above, you can recognize "the good" in their magnanimity
and their protection of the dignity and rights of individuals -- even
extending this to the accused. I forget who said it, but the true test of
character is not in how someone treats those they need, it's how they treat
those they don't need.

~~~
tptacek
I think it's very reasonable to be concerned about the level of influence YC
has amassed. I'm not super concerned because I had raised funds in the valley
before YC existed and I'm pretty confident that YC is a massive improvement
for founders. But either way: sure, YC is very powerful.

I would just push back on the idea that it's somehow out of bounds for them to
have lists of potential business partners they won't want to work with in the
future. Businesses do this all the time. All YC has done here is actually told
us about one of those lists.

------
finkin1
The general idea of creating lists of people who are bad actors is an
interesting (and controversial) idea.

On one side, there should be a ledger of people doing shitty things, even if
the behavior isn't illegal. Who wants to work with assholes? No one. If
there's a record of people's bad behavior then future founders can save
themselves a lot of suffering by simply knowing to avoid these people.

On the other side, what standards are used to put someone on this list in the
first place? Are multiple offences required? Seems like without a process of
submitting good evidence of people's poor behavior there's a lot of room for
abuse. If this list actually becomes a tool that people rely on to select
their investors I would start to be concerned by the potential abuse of power.

I'm curious how others feel about this idea of putting people on lists.

~~~
rezashirazian
Wouldn't lists like this lead to lawsuits?

~~~
patrickmay
> Wouldn't lists like this lead to lawsuits?

Yes, yes they will:
[http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2017/06/23/maaj...](http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2017/06/23/maajid-
nawaz-is-suing-the-splc-for-calling-him-an-anti-muslim-extremist/)

I don't think Maajid Nawaz is going to win because he'll have to prove real
damages from the SPLC (horribly erroneously, in my opinion) labeling him an
"anti-Muslim extremist". Being put on a blacklist by YC might result in
damages that are easier to prove, though.

~~~
tptacek
YC will have to make a discoverable false statement of actual fact. They're
unlikely to publish a list, and what they do reveal to YC founders is unlikely
to be phrased as simply as SPLC's statements about Nawaz.

I think this is less likely to be legally complicated than you think.
Consider: YC has been doing this for years already.

------
baron816
I hope they're very careful with this. If even a couple of unscrupulous
founders threaten a VC with false accusations in order to secure funding (ie
blackmail), then VCs will stop taking meetings with female founders. Game
theory can be used to make sure this doesn't backfire, so hopefully they
consult a good game theorist.

------
randyrand
Clearly few in the comments are in favor of this, but it's curious _why_.

My supposition is that sexual harassment is too _grey_. It's ill defined. It's
hard to know how to 100% avoid it when flirting with someone. If someone can
define the exact point hitting on someone goes from acceptable flirting to
unacceptable harassment, then we could all rest easy. But without that, it's
incredibly worrying to accidentally do something that ruins your career.

Is there a place for coworkers falling in love or making love in 2017? Maybe
not. Maybe so. But I think it's sort of sad how much we are repressing human
sexuality if not.

~~~
mrkurt
This one is pretty cut and dried. When there's a power disparity between two
people, flirting's not ok.

You can be against investors and bosses making passes at the people who have
to make them happy without wanting to ban workplace romances entirely. Big
companies have been doing this for years.

~~~
throwaway_30761
_This one is pretty cut and dried. When there 's a power disparity between two
people, flirting's not ok._

Well, there's flirting and then there's flirting.

Real-life example, which I observed from the sidelines:

.

Mr. A is a new hire.

Mrs. B is the senior non-management team member.

Someone gets flowers sent to them. Mr. C decides it would be amusing if they
ended up on Mrs. B's desk, with a note saying they're from Mr. A.

An hour or two later when Mr. A realizes he's just being hazed and still has a
job, he decides to take the joke and run with it. This leads to several years
of the most absurd and blatant come-ons you can imagine.

Several years later, Mrs. B is the official team lead and Mr. A is reporting
to her. The blatant flirting and absurd come-ons are still exactly the same as
they've always been.

.

The _only_ concern about whether this is OK, is if some outsider were to see
and take it seriously enough to cause trouble with HR.

------
covercash
There's a Reddit AMA happening right now with a current batch founder and they
said, "There's an... internal investor database with founder grading and info-
passing," so I wonder if that's where the blacklisting is happening.

AMA link for those interested:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/6najyy/im_a_found...](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/6najyy/im_a_founder_in_the_current_y_combinator_batch/)

------
dreta
Not getting into "guilty until proven innocent"; all this is going to
accomplish is attach a huge risk factor to women who are seeking investors
making their life harder than it already is. Hell is paved with good
intentions.

~~~
stcredzero
_Guilty until proven innocent? This is disgusting, it will get abused_

If YC has their head in the right place, then such abuses will be figured out,
and will effectively flag the abusers. If YC doesn't have their head in the
right place, you really didn't want to do business with them in the first
place.

 _Hell is paved with good intentions._

In some ways, the beginning of the 21st century really isn't all that
different from the beginning of the 20th or the 19th!

------
throwaway6497
I am assuming the access to this list will be tightly guarded. So the only way
to protect the women of the valley from these VCs is by having a partner
friend at YC who will look up the list for you and give yay/nay answers?

~~~
tptacek
More likely, since pretty much every VC in the valley needs access to the YC
dealflow, becoming _persona non grata_ with YC will force VC firms to make
personnel changes.

~~~
throwaway6497
This is only way VC firms can be motivated to actively punish the bad actors.
Unless, it hurts their dealflow, they are not incentivized to act. Pledges and
warnings' only go so far.

------
Steeeve
Every incubator maintains a list of who they prefer to work with. This really
should not be news.

------
bsder
Are they going to make it public? This is pretty much a deal breaker if they
don't.

People deserve the opportunity to defend themselves.

------
djohnston
this is not going to end well.

~~~
thinkingemote
I expect this thread to be flagged down quite soon. Many such threads are if
they are lacking substance and/or attractive to flame.

~~~
djohnston
i didn't mean the thread, i meant the blacklist.

~~~
anigbrowl
I disagree, for reasons that are equally obscure.

------
danieltillett
Well this is not going to encourage VCs to want to work with women founders.
Even if you never harass anyone why take the risk of ending up on the banned
list.

~~~
s73ver
No, you don't. With that level of paranoia, you could say that you shouldn't
drive anywhere, because you might get into an accident.

~~~
tbrownaw
I've heard of people who refuse to ever be alone with anyone of the opposite
gender. IIRC they were megachurch pastors who had legitimate reason to fear
that even a hint of an accusation would be a career-ending event.

~~~
danieltillett
I think Pence does this - refuses to have private meetings with women because
of the risks.

~~~
Sleeep
No, Mike Pence does it for religious reasons, to avoid the abstract
possibility of sexual temptation and to further the idea of men and women
having separate roles in life. It's a popular practice among evangelicals (and
other conservative religious groups, like fundamentalist Muslims and orthodox
Jews). It's known as the Billy Graham rule. He also doesn't go to events where
alcohol is being served without his wife; she will presumably protect him from
any loose women.

Also, as far as I remember he only mentioned meals, not meetings in general.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Graham_rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Graham_rule)

------
anindha
This secret list might give less incentive for these issues to be publicized.
Having these issues raised publicly helps change overall culture.

------
aburan28
Is this actual a legal maneuver available to YC? This seems risky. Why not
help fund the women's arbitration fees instead?

------
surfmike
Though this is a real problem to solve, what about false accusations? If all
it takes is an accusation (or two) to destroy someone's career then I see a
huge problem with this.

~~~
bArray
I don't see why you've been down-voted, this is a serious concern. This sort
of power can make or break somebody's career. I don't like the idea of
somebody who works with me being able to destroy my career with no or weak
evidence.

At the very least there needs to be consequence for false accusations if the
punishment is so severe (destroying the reputation of a venture capitalist).
The process should also be open to scrutiny once judgment is passed.

I personally don't like the way society is going. If I was a good looking
woman with a warped moral compass, I would consider ganging up with several
other women and blackmailing ourselves a few million dollars. As a venture
capitalist with such a claim against you and no evidence to prove your
innocence, you'll likely lose or be forced to pay up.

------
Overtonwindow
All it takes is an accusation. A very powerful weapon indeed.

------
theEXTORTCIST
from the article "Two other groups are also launching tech start-ups to help
victims share their experiences."

"One group of women has already founded a start-up, BetterBrave, that aims to
be an online hub for female workers who felt they were sexually harassed at
work. SheWorx, composed of female entrepreneurs, is planning an online
database that would enable women and others to report unethical behavior by
investors."

------
nodesocket
How is this any different than discriminating based on hearsay? I.E. what
happens if you get on such a list without any resources to defend yourself?
This experiment has been tried before (Mccarthyism). It did not end well!

This also assumes that the accusing women are being entirely truthful, honest,
and acting in good faith which unfortunately is not always the case.

------
aaron695
So best advice for VCs not to get on the blacklist, don't deal with women.

Best advice for startups, deal with people on the blacklist, less competition.

------
grandalf
Could someone post a link to the article (paywall)

------
dangerboysteve
This should keep the lawyers busy for a while.

~~~
smt88
How so?

This isn't unlike Uber or Yelp ratings, where someone's reputation will affect
their ability to make money. It's not perfect, but it at least provides some
accountability.

~~~
clock_tower
Income will definitely be affected by getting on this list. See above, where
tptacek says:

"More likely, since pretty much every VC in the valley needs access to the YC
dealflow, becoming persona non grata with YC will force VC firms to make
personnel changes."

But still, this will probably be good on balance. False accusations of this
sort will certainly be something to watch out for, but now victims of real
sexual harassment will have recourse.

~~~
smt88
I think you misread my comment. I agree that income will be affected. I agree
it's not perfect and that it needs to be moderated and substantiated.

------
carsongross
Accused?

------
bassman9000
Compiling an easily shareable list. What could go wrong?

------
charlieo88
So basically a list of VC that want to be taken to a strip club to discuss
funding?

Wouldn't a list of VC that behave professionally be better?

