

'The Female Factor' And Other Proven Tricks To Get Into Y Combinator - miguelrey
http://www.forbes.com/sites/meghancasserly/2012/10/02/the-female-factor-and-other-proven-tricks-to-get-into-y-combinator/

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geebee
Interesting article. However, I'm a little surprised that an article about
women at ycombinator didn't include Paul Graham's own rumination on the
issue...

<http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html>

"This is one reason Y Combinator has a rule against investing in startups with
only one founder. Practically every successful company has at least two. And
because startup founders work under great pressure, it's critical they be
friends.

I didn't realize it till I was writing this, but that may help explain why
there are so few female startup founders. I read on the Internet (so it must
be true) that only 1.7% of VC-backed startups are founded by women. The
percentage of female hackers is small, but not that small. So why the
discrepancy?

When you realize that successful startups tend to have multiple founders who
were already friends, a possible explanation emerges. People's best friends
are likely to be of the same sex, and if one group is a minority in some
population, pairs of them will be a minority squared."

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annableker
When I applied, I didn't even think about the fact that I'm female. This
article has me super-excited.

I'm surprised it's so low. My guess is that:

1) As geebee said, groups of coding girlfriends are rare (I'm the only one of
my girlfriends who's into tech stuff)

2) Women don't like peacocking as much as men, so they suppress a lot of great
ideas

3) If women have babies in their twenties, that becomes their first priority

Otherwise, I'm psyched to be a female applicant at this moment of opportunity.

