
Leap Spins out of YC - cbcowans
https://blog.ycombinator.com/leap-spins-out-of-yc/
======
cbcowans
Hi! Leap is spinning out of YC today as an independent company called Elpha.
I'm the CEO and Co-Founder of Elpha and am here to answer questions. Thanks!!

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ForrestN
Congratulations! Do you have a policy regarding non-binary or genderqueer
people? And are there any steps you're planning to take to keep your community
free of TERF transphobia? I'm curious about building a gender-based community
in 2019.

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ForrestN
Woah! Even after so long on HN, I'm surprised by multiple downvotes for even a
_question_ that merely implies an interest in inclusivity for non-cis people.

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sctb
There is little that can be gleaned from voting, especially early on. It's
just plain noisy and you don't know what someone is objecting to.

> _Please don 't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good,
> and it makes boring reading._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

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ForrestN
Agree to disagree in this case, wherein I believe two or more people's
gestures do communicate something real regardless of the eventual balancing
out. Thanks for the reminder.

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telesilla
This looks wonderful but it requires a LinkedIn profile - I'm not on any
social media so it means, I don't get to join?

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kl2931
You can definitely join - you can put in your website, or anything other link
that we can verify your identity. Let us know if you run into any trouble
hi@elpha.com

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androidgirl
Was just wondering this! That is great news and thank you for posting this
here.

Maybe it can get mentioned in the FAQ too?

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kl2931
Sure, that's a great idea. We will fix it in our sign-up form as well.

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Cenk
Congrats on your relaunch! The new landing page is fantastic. I love the
"Remind me" function for upcoming AMAs.

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cbcowans
Thank you so much! Glad you like it :)

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briantmaurer
As not-a-female, what can we do to learn from this community?

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kl2931
You can read our AMAs with industry experts, and we have more public content
coming soon.

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mharroun
Its always good to see more communities like this spin up. I am actually the
CTO of [https://fairygodboss.com](https://fairygodboss.com) a company that is
also a community, content resource, and job search platform but targeted at
all professional women. I am a guy (the founders are female) but join this
company because I saw the lack of women in this space...especially in the
leadership/management level and wanted to help in this mission. If you're ever
interested in speaking with me or one of our founders we always try to keep in
close contact with those in this space.

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GoRudy
What kind of community / forum software is being used?

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kl2931
Elpha is built on Rails and is using React on the frontend.

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Alex3917
The literary typeface for a UGC site is a bold design choice. On its own it
suggests static content and lack of community, but then that's balanced by all
the social flair on the AMA cards so I think it works. But very tricky to pull
off. :-)

It's interesting in general that the design language for signaling "for women"
(and "exclusive") is so incongruous with the design language of UGC.

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kl2931
Hi, designer/cofounder of Elpha here. Thank you for the comment! It is tricky
to design a UGC site for women, and we aim for friendliness/neutral than
feminine. Glad you like Chiswick!

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Alex3917
Yeah I think neutral has gotten a lot easier to pull off in the last five
years just because of all the design resources put out by Google, Apple, and
MS. Even though I don't like Material as a strict design language, just the
fact that it's clearly explained and all the resources behind it are free is a
much better starting point than being more limited to reverse engineering
existing sites and picking up their biases along the way.

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kl2931
Can't agree more! There are only 3 of us, and we have so much to do, resources
like material design really help us speed up the design & dev process.

