

Interview: Y Combinator Founder Jessica Livingston - drm237
http://thenextwomen.com/2009/05/01/interview-y-combinator-founder-jessica-livingston/

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okeumeni
Being a hacker and dad of girls, I have to admit I am always very excited and
proud of women achievement in the tech world.

I still think there are not enough ladies hackers out there. I thank you
Jessica for your work, this should inspire more girls to become hackers.

~~~
jlees
Wouldn't have pegged Jessica as a typical hacker or really an inspiration to
get girls coding in _that_ sense of the term, but any woman working in tech
happy to share her story gets an automatic thumbs up regardless of
terminology.

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daniel-cussen
Finally the mainstream looks up to a woman in tech that actually seems to
deserve it. I.e. not Carly Fiorina.

~~~
xfnid
JL was PG's girlfriend, which is how she got involved in this stuff. So she
interviewed some founders.

Then she did organizing for start-up school and administrative duties for YC.

Not sure what you mean about "deserving". Sure, having organizational skills
is useful, but not exceptional.

Not a knock at all on JL, but becoming CEO of HP was certainly a lot harder
and more exceptional, even if Fiorina was exceptionally _bad_ at actually
_being_ CEO.

Still waiting for a tech equivalent of the Go-Go's.

~~~
pg
Actually Jessica does a lot more than "administrative duties" for YC. Of the
four YC partners, she is the best judge of people, and that's the main thing
we're judging at this early stage. It would not be too far from the truth to
say that interviews consist of me and Rtm and Trevor asking founders a lot of
questions, and then as soon as they walk out, turning to Jessica and asking
"ok, should we fund them?"

~~~
xfnid
> _Of the four YC partners, she is the best judge of people, and that's the
> main thing we're judging at this early stage._

"Best judge of people" is sufficiently nonspecific to not be a testable claim.

If you mean she is best at judging who would be the most successful if you
fund them, you lack the evidence to make that claim, as you don't know what
would have happened with all the people you _didn't_ fund, which is almost all
of them.

If you mean that the ones that she picked -- but you didn't -- performed
better than the ones you picked -- but she didn't -- it's possible that she is
valuable not because she is so accurate, but that you are so _in_ accurate.

The notion that YC is especially good at choosing successes is not borne out
by your results, or you'd all be a lot richer. And as mentioned, you don't
know which were the ones that "got away" -- founders that went back to school
because they didn't get in, but would have been even larger successes. Reddit
would have been in that group if you hadn't had a last-minute change of heart.

As for the relentless founders, was it really that difficult to recognize that
Sam Altman was one of those people? For the obvious cases, it's apparent to
all four of you; and for the less-obvious cases, you lack the data to know how
many were false negatives. All you know is the false positives; but that's
going to be the most common outcome anyway.

Being ramen profitable working on something you don't especially like is silly
compared to what you COULD be making at jobs in the Bay Area. A website is not
a startup, and most of them lack any major potential, barring irrational
market exuberance.

Considering Yahoo! Paid 6 billion for Broadcast.com and 4 billion for
Geocities shortly after paying 95 million for ViaWeb just shows the most
important skill is finding someone with billions of dollars and talking them
into throwing it away on your unprofitable business.

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apsec112
Why is it that _any_ article about _any_ female in computing, regardless of
who they're working for or what they're working on, will always mention at
some point the high male:female ratio in most technical fields? What is it
about this topic that makes people want to come back to it over and over and
over, no matter how many discussions they've had on it previously? Eg., even
though this article's title is completely generic, the very _first_ thought I
had upon looking at it was "this will talk at some point about the dearth of
women in programming or startups or something-or-other", and lo, my prophecy
was fulfilled.

~~~
mattyb
The interview was conducted by The Next Women, which has a "focus on startups
and growing businesses, led, founded or invested in by women."

<http://thenextwomen.com/about/>

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edw519
"Comically unbusinesslike behavior struck me as actually critical to the
success of a startup."

What an interesting quote. I think I know what she's talking about, but I'm
not sure.

If there's a difference between commonly accepted behavior and the behavior of
successful startup founders, then which is really more "businesslike"?

~~~
staunch
There's no question that plenty of very successful people have not behaved in
the way that most people consider to be "professional". The problem is that
people either don't realize that or have a vested interest in ignoring that
fact.

I think it all comes down to people wanting to be like the "business" people
they see on TV. The persona of the rigid professional suit-wearing business
person is attractive to a lot of people.

 _Edit:_ The insidious part is that they scorn you if you don't play along!

~~~
Alex3917
"I think it all comes down to people wanting to be like the "business" people
they see on TV. The persona of the rigid professional suit-wearing business
person is attractive to a lot of people."

No, it comes down to protecting a brand. If you're doing a startup then it's
ok to show up to meetings blazed, because your job is just to get work done
and if you can still get work done while high then that's fine. But at big
companies your job isn't to get work done, because the most valuable asset of
a big company isn't the work that gets done but rather the brand. How does
this tie into suits? Well, suits are sort of the crescent wrench of attire. If
you are a startup then you only have to dress in a way that pleases the niche
you're serving. But if you are a big business then by definition you are
interacting with people from multiple niches all day long. Everyone is
comfortable dealing with someone wearing a suit, whereas if you wear surfing
clothes to work then that only works if you trying to send a message to a
small niche of surfers.

The vast majority of the YC kids aren't starting out with a personal brand, so
it doesn't matter what they do as long as they get work done. In fact,
screwing around will help them build a brand as long as they are only dealing
with people within their community, because unique culture is a purple cow
that helps you stand out. Luckily most of the YC companies make products where
even when they get more marketshare they won't have to act much differently
because of quirks related to the high-leverage of software, but most big
companies eventually do adopt a different culture as the ways they create
value as businesses becomes more nuanced.

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alphazero
And following the link trails we find:

Paul Graham (Viaweb) On raising money: “The advice I would give is to avoid
it. I would say spend as little as you can because every dollar of the
investors’ money you get will be taken out of your ass…”

[http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/03/founders_at_wor.html#ixz...](http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/03/founders_at_wor.html#ixzz0EIDlAjVU&Bhttp://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/03/founders_at_wor.html#ixzz0EIDSEfh2&B)

Is that "Y"?

