Just looking for some inspiration. It's that simple. I don't think 'THE MAN' is trying to hold me down. If I had that mentality I would have never made it this far.
Both are black founders - but there's so much more on Mixergy that you should check out. Andrew Warner is pretty awesome at that stuff.
I particularly liked Ephren's interview, I've been listening to Mixergy for a number of months now and he is still a stand-out for me.
EDIT I just remembered that Peter Gruber tells a great story about Magic Johnson pitching him on a chain of movie theaters.
http://mixergy.com/peter-guber-interview/
I need to do a better job of finding even more black founders for Mixergy. If anyone wants to help me connect with successful, please email me: http://mixergy.com/contact
I must be an idiot, because I still don't understand it.
So I'm an old fat ugly-looking guy. According to you, I should be looking for other folks like me who made it? This will somehow be inspirational?
And what good, exactly, does finding another person who _looks_ like me going to accomplish? What the hell difference does it make?
Have you ever visited or not visited a web site because of the way the person who created it looks? Ever purchased or not purchased an app because of the religion or heritage of the developer?
YC, if they have any sense in their heads, should care about traction, scalability, and success potential. None of that is based on attributes like this. If it is, I've never heard of it. (And it makes no sense)
Now perhaps you can make a case that things like this play a role with finding investors, but AFAIK YC has made it clear -that not every entrant has to have a beauty pageant investor track.
Here's a question I could get behind: Let's say I want to find funding. What sorts of things that I can control -- looks, haircut, attitude, etc -- make the biggest superficial difference to investors?
I'd like to hear a lot more about that. Wonder if anybody has any data?
I thought his question was perfectly legitimate and interesting. I look for people like me who've succeeded for inspiration and ideas.
The black experience in the United States is likely quite different than the white one. Ever watched a Tyler Perry movie? His films have grossed over $400 Million and go largely unseen by whites. It's because the black experience in the USA is so different. The people who live it, identify with it.
I'm sure it really was a fair question based on interest. Not any sort of accusation.
Yes, it's a fair question, as I tried to explain. Hell I upvoted your reply.
My point was that the answer to the question has no usefulness that I can determine. You can either explain it or not, but please don't assign emotions and attitudes to me that I am not having.
There are a lot of people with various experiences that share some commonality. Ever attend a Jewish wedding? Spend some time in a mosque? Been to Mardi Gras? Had perogies?
Unless you are saying that the "black experience" is somehow different from the "Puerto Rican experience" or the "Eastern European experience" then all of these issues are on the table and should be treated equally.
I don't think you're saying that, so please stop picking on me. I was simply saying that the question had no value that I could determine. These things might (unfairly) be success criteria for a cocktail party, but never a startup. I'd love to be proven wrong. How many ways can I say "Stop looking to people outside yourself and to attributes you can't control and instead go make something happen?" before it sinks in? And what's so controversial about saying that?
>So I'm an old fat ugly-looking guy. According to you, I should be looking for other folks like me who made it? This will somehow be inspirational?
Is this question really rhetorical?
I would say look at all of the discussions here and elsewhere about older Entrepreneurs being under represented and the myriad reasons why. I think that if the only successful role models were under 25, many others would find that quite discouraging.... whether they would let that dissuade them is another question.
I see your point. But apologies if this sounds insensitive as I am not American and I am not privy to the social complexities that exists. What I think is that as budding entrepreneurs all trying to figure out some method from this madness, I think we ought to celebrate the success of everyone and anyone who has made it. Black, white, blue, green whatever. Singling out someone because of skin colour I feel almost contravenes the spirit of YC and hacker news. We are all here because of ideals and passion, beliefs and doggedness. I think I speak for most people when I say the community at HN is by and large colour blind.
What makes Michael Seibel special is not because he is Black but because he has succeeded at least on some level where many have tried and failed. So your last sentence "...was just wondering if anyone that looks like ME has EVER made it." is really coming from a wrong angle IMO.
Maybe there's an economic barrier to that realization? Adults who realize the power of programming were likely children with access to a computer growing up.
In Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" he tells the story of Bill Gates and Bill Joy - two prolific programmers. The key similarity between them was their unfettered access to a computer growing up.
Perhaps donating your old computer to inner-city and after school programs would help a kid realize that. Wishing won't do anything, but if you've got computers "lying around" that you were going to get rid of, there are programs that distribute them to people who could use them.
Not many black programming role models. Sad to say but many black youth still see sports and entertainment and the only way to achieve a high level of success in America. My primary goal in life is to try to change that perception by becoming a successful programmer.
I'm not sure about this... do you really believe that programmers need role models for success?
We have people that we idolize but its not because of common-place programming ability or merely their job but because of what they've achieved----Bill Gates with Microsoft, Linus Torvalds with Linux, etc.
Programmers seem to usually be self-described 'geeks' and thus like programming for its own sake.
Don't need specifically black role models but it would help. Just proof positive that being a programmer can be interesting and lucrative. Coming from a social anthropology background and having experienced it in grade school myself, there is an issue of "talking and acting white." Programming falls directly under that umbrella unfortunately.
Is it complete BS, absolutely. But at the core of it, we're talking about people delineating groups based on sameness and otherness which is a practice as old as there have been social structures.
It helps kids to identify with a mentor whose shoes they can envision being in directly. More important than "looking like" though is feeling a sense of kinship that comes from similar background. I'm a firm believer that we should focus on the level of privilege not color. There are all types of people coming from a disadvantaged background that need help, how do we make programming/startups attainable and "sexy?" Silicon Valley's got that down but NYC is still a "banking city"
> Don't need specifically black role models but it would help.
That is exactly what the OP is asking for.
To tell about my experience, I did not grow up with "black programming" models. Even to date, I can't think of a single black man over 50 who is a programmer that I know personally or professionally.
I got into programming for the same reasons I assume many other HNers did: computer were readily available for my use, and I enjoyed the logic exercise. Once I found something I was good it, it was irrelevant if other people thought it was 'cool'.
Luckily though, I grew up black in a black nation so accusations of being 'white' was the furthest thing from most peoples minds. You weren't 'white', you were just 'uncool'. I think that's a significant difference because one is an attack on your identity, and the other merely on your social credentials.
You may not need a "strong role model" that you idolize and learn everything about and consciously structure your life after, but a "weak role model" that demonstrates that yes, it's an option, can be helpful. I'm not sure I've really read a lot of stories about "role models" in the strong sense but I've heard a lot of people over the years make comments about the weak case.
Many programmers may be self-described geeks, but they must have been exposed to computers and programming at some point in their life. I think his point is that such an opportunity doesn't exist for most black youth.
Yes, but the discussion right now is do blacks need black programming models in order to become interested in programming?
If merely access to computers and exposure to programming is necessary, then its obvious why we don't have too many black programmers today. In the 80s and previously, computers were expensive and it was unlikely that someone from a lower socioeconomic bracket would have easy access to them.
As a black technical founder, I'm with you 100%. But the hard part is getting the word out. It won't be enough for us to become successful programmers / founders / entrepreneurs. We can't expect kids to find out about our accomplishments on Tech Crunch and Hacker News.
We have to reach out to them. We need to show them the possibilites available to them in our field. We need to show them how much freedom you can have, and how lucrative software development can be.
And most of all, we need to show them how much fun building software can be. I'm not the only one who loves this stuff, right?
But it still comes down to getting the word out. What's the best way to do it? I don't know, but it's on my agenda to find out once I've achieved some form of success.
Agreed, this is something that might be good to address through something like http://www.nfte.com which has a large group of entrepreneurial young minorities who are all sharp but looking for help/mentorship.
They focus mostly on the basic tenets of entrepreneurship but I would love to see more minority programmers coming out of underprivileged schools and situations.
I'm sure there's a lack of women or blind people or people who can't speak or write English. The thing overly-PC types don't want to address is that certain fields attract certain types. Geeky males in tech, women and gay men in fashion, etc. The lack of population matching demographics isn't proof of racism.
That said, I'd argue that unless you grew up with computers and were interested in programming them early in life you probably aren't the startup type. Your income level affects this, obviously if you can't get your hands on a computer then you're not going to be able to do much. As a geek I never had any "role models" or other things that set me on my path. Nor did my parents encourage tech. Nor did my friends. I was, and in many ways, still am something of a lone geek amongst non-geeks. I believe "role models" to be a meaningless cop-out.
>That said, I'd argue that unless you grew up with computers and were interested in programming them early in life you probably aren't the startup type.
"That said, I'd argue that unless you grew up with money and were interested in trading early in life you probably aren't the wall-street type."
"That said, I'd argue that unless you grew up with movies and were interested in acting early in life you probably aren't the hollywood type."
Can we put aside this drivel? People can learn after they're 10 years old.
My point isn't that they can't do x or y if not by age z, but that if we see an income-based disparity on whether someone studies CS or starts a startup, it probably has a lot to do with being in an income bracket where your parents could afford to give you your own PC and the time to play with it. Not to mention being able to get into a decent CS program.
Perhaps this isn't much of an issue today where PCs are commodities, but if you grew up in the 1980s, like I did, then it probably was an issue. An Apple //e or a //c in the mid eighties was around $1500. That's over $3000 in today's money. Having parents with disposable income matters.
The Facebook and Twitter apps are actually web services that require a username/password and their apps are merely extensions of their website. Does his app have a standalone service that would justify a username/password? Or would it be equivalent to forcing me to register to play a game like Plant vs Zombies, which has no functionality that would justify password protecting it.
TFA: "Read It Later is a simple account-based service. Read It Later does not collect ‘personal’ information, you just need a username and password to create an account. The account allows you to sync your reading list between your iPhone, iPad, computers, and browsers."
people are motivated by the "reward" their efforts may reap them. For some people this "reward" is money or power, for others it may be acceptance from peers or loved ones,
for the plumber it was the ability to take care of his family.
I would find out who is really pulling the strings. Could the founder's lawyers or maybe the investor be asking that all parties involved sign an NDA? Are the founders merely advising themselves? You may want to think about having a meeting with everyone(founders, lawyers, investors) and find out where the contingencies are. The people in control may not even know your situation.
Why are we assuming that all nerds are smart? My high school had several "dumb" nerds (Napoleon Dynamite-ish). Nerds are people who are socially inept. Add intelligence to a nerd and all you have is an intelligent nerd, he has not moved up the social ladder at all. The real question should be "Why are smart black kids with no social skills unpopular?" but that wouldn’t be much of a question, would it? They’re unpopular because they have no social skills, being smart has nothing to do with it. Since the author states that blacks put so much emphasis on their social status, it makes perfect sense that anyone not exhibiting socially acceptable behaviors would be deemed unpopular. You could easily have said:
Why are black kids who wear tight clothes unpopular?
Why are black kids who listen to heavy metal unpopular?
Why are black male virgins unpopular?
If you do unpopular stuff then you will not be popular. Interesting article, but way off base. Oh, and if you are wondering, I’m BLACK.
In hindsight you're classifying these individuals as Geeks, Nerds, Dorks, but to an average high schooler these terms are synonymous unless you actually belonged to one of these groups and felt the need to create a hierarchy :)
What would be the reason for "throwing" them an equity stake? Many people believe this makes a person more dedicated to the company, which is absolutely false.
Equity should be given to individuals who are critical to the success of your company, individuals who are indispensable. Too many companies give equity to individuals who can be replaced once the company becomes self-sustaining. Equity shouldn't be given to "good" coders just because they contributed in the beginning. Equity should be saved for the "great/exceptional" coders that you may attract as your business grows.
The empirical evidence suggests startups don't work that way. All the most successful startups had great techical people from the beginning. If you don't have good technical people at the start, you never reach the point where you attract them.
I don't dispute that. What if you have great technical people in the beginning who happen to have no equity stake? A talented developer is a talented developer (regardless of how they are compensated)...equity doesn't make them any better, does it?
If they're de facto cofounders and they have no equity, then either you're cheating them (and they don't know they should have equity) or they don't have much faith in the project (and prefer salary to equity).
What if you have great technical people in the beginning who happen to have no equity stake?
They leave as soon as something better comes along. Giving them equity [with vesting] prevents that from happening. If the person is okay with just a salary, he'll go work at Microsoft or Google and additionally collect the "intangible" benefit of job security.
I was in this position in my last startup (they offered me a fat salary instead of equity), and it's a terrible position to be in, both for the employee and for the startup. Here's why (bear with me on this, there's a lot of setup):
Economists like to divide all spending into two categories: consumption and investment. Consumption is spending for things you'd like to have now, that'll give you an immediate benefit. Investment is spending for tomorrow, in the hopes that you will gain more benefits later.
Technology organizations face the same tradeoff, but with time rather than money. Developers can work on features that immediately benefit users and pad the bottom line (consumption). Or they can work on refactoring, infrastructure and tools that will make it easier to add features in the future (investment). There's always a tradeoff. If you spend too much time on investment, you're customers will wonder why you haven't done anything for them recently and stop giving you money. If you spend too much time on consumption, you'll wonder why it suddenly starts taking 10 times as long to implement each feature, why the system is grinding to a halt, and why your developers have no clue what's causing your latest dozen bugs.
In my experience, the best developers spend 80-90% of their time on investment and 10-20% on consumption. They'll apparently do nothing for 3 months and then crank out an app in a week (for an extreme example, check out PG's On Lisp: he writes a whole book on building up tools, and then in the very last chapter, he's like "Oh, by the way, here's a Prolog interpreter. In 50 lines. Done"). The worst programmers reverse that - they'll spend 80-90% of their time implementing your feature requests and only 10-20% cleaning things up, moving common code into functions, etc.
So here's your problem: under U.S. law, all "investment" that an employee creates is owned by their employer. Meanwhile, their salary is dependent upon how good you think they are, which depends upon how much they've done to improve the bottom line. In other words, they have every incentive to "consume" (push out quick features for the boss) and no incentive to "invest" (clean up code, setup infrastructure, build tools). The only way to rectify this is to make them part of the company's capital structure, so that they are effectively part-owners of the code they build.
You might think that you know better and can compensate people based on how well they actually do, but in practice it's virtually impossible. Ask yourself: how would you feel if your development team did nothing for 3 months. Because that's what it'll look like if they're doing their jobs properly. You say that you've got a terrific programmer who's working for no equity, but you're seeing him at his best. It's easy to crank out impressive stuff on a small green-field project; it's much harder to keep it working as the project grows. The choices he makes now will determine the future development of your software, even if you fire him and get someone else later.
Don't do this to your startup. If you're a tech company, spend your equity getting a top-notch tech person, then give him the discretion he needs to do things right. Otherwise (assuming you've gotten all the marketing/PR/idea stuff right), I can predict the path your startup will take. You'll get lots of buzz and lots of users, and they'll love you for cranking out features quickly. You'll dominate the market. Then, about 1-2 years in, you'll hit a brick wall, and every feature you add will result in lots of mysterious bugs. Fixing these will result in dozens of new bugs, and you won't be able to add any new features at all. Competitors will arise and start catching up to you. You'll fire your tech team, thinking that they must be incompetent. You'll start a rewrite-from-scratch project, which you'll abandon when your investors come calling. Then you go out of business.
I've gone through it once and probably would've gone through it a second time had I not just left my last employer. It's not pretty.
You don't think a founding coder is indispensable to your company? Are you saying that if this person decided, one week from launch, to quit, it wouldn't matter? If so, why have them on the team at all?
Web applications are a lot easier to develop. I think too many people are still applying methodologies that applied to more "traditional" forms of software development. If I have a good JavaScript hacker bail on me a week before launch, I don't think it would be extremely difficult to find another good JavaScript hacker.
This is just my perspective, but if you're hiring and treating programmers like temps, don't expect any works of beauty. They're going to push out what they need to push out, probably very hackishly (because what do they care?), and then bail with check in-hand and let the next guy deal with the mess.
That's not such a big deal with JS, but it's a very big deal when your backend is in the toilet. You may as well flush.
You're right about "development" part, especially for the initial feature set. I do consulting, and I estimate efforts for initial development vs maintainance as 5% : 95%. If you aim at millions of users, probably it should be 1% : 99%. It might be easy to find or replace somebody who does that first 5% or 1%. It will be difficult to find somebody who has commitment to hang on for the rest of 95% to 99%.
you are talking like a MBA and a manager. As per your learnings people are machine so you can easily replace one malfunctioning part by another.
I am not involved in any startup but like to do my job with creative energy and scripted quite a few time saver solutions for my group. Until now all my manager were thoughtful enough to allow me but this new guy thinks that he can replace any person with any person without looking at the unique attributes of each of the person. He wants me to do the work others can do without looking at what i can do and others cannot...
I am sorry but you are sounding like my manager so get a job in big company. Startup make you respect your talent and looks like you do not want to do that...
Coders may be dime a dozen but believe me true developers/hackers are not...
If you are paying someone to work an 8 hour day, no problem just paying the programmer.
But if you want someone to work a practically unlimited number of hours as is most often the case then you are going to either need to pay the person to work two 8 hour shifts, hire additional programers, or give the programmer some equity in the business.
The only way I see this as possible is if you sit down with a "front end" graphics guy and create every page. Then have the programmer put the code behind it.
But beware the code that is written it will be hard for another programmer to pick up on. Everyone writes code differently and it is just suprising in one language how many different ways there is to create a solution.
There are too many other factors that come into play when it comes to selecting a good co-founder/equity holder. Things such as vision, rapport, dedication, etc. Equity/options are too compensate someone that you want in your company when you don't have the financing to pay them what they are worth.
