For black CEOs in Silicon Valley, humiliation is a part of doing business

I usually choose to believe in &quot;the honest mistake&quot;. It happens, two people walk in, one of them is the CEO, you assume it is the one on the right. And then when you realize it is a mistake, you apologize. We are only human.<p>But when it happens over and over and over, you can&#x27;t help but feel frustrated. You realize that people natural instinct is to think you are the subordinate. One second your are on stage at Techcrunch (I was in 2017), where you have clearly introduced yourself. You get off-stage, they greet your colleague and ask him the questions as if he was on stage.<p>I was often in the interview room waiting for my interviewer, only to have him show up, and tell me I must be in the wrong room. A simple &quot;Hey are you XYZ?&quot; could have avoided this frustration.<p>I&#x27;ve written an article about my experience working as a black developer, I&#x27;ll post it here in the near future. You wouldn&#x27;t believe how lonely it is. In my team of 150 people, we were two black people.

For everyone arguing &quot;honest mistake&quot; or &quot;just chance&quot;, think about the person at the receiving end. For the person making that mistake, it could be their first, but for the person at the receiving end it could be the hundredth, and that too, not without consequences. The first 3-4 times I got &quot;randomly selected&quot; for additional screening at the airport, I was like whatever. But years later after my probably 100th &quot;random selection&quot;, I am mostly just upset. Watching traveler after traveler go around you, staring at you, while you&#x27;re being subjected to additional search, your baggage laid out open in front of everyone, while being asked questions like &quot;have you recently been in contact with any chemicals?&quot; and so on. It is humiliating. And this is just one aspect of their life. Imagine having to face &quot;honest mistakes&quot; everyday in all kinds of different aspects of your life.

Some of the most successful blacks in tech had to &#x27;hide&#x27; their blackness to achieve success. Robert Smith, the wealthiest black man in America, specifically didn&#x27;t put up a photo on his investment firm&#x27;s site to avoid any possibility of bias (now that he&#x27;s a multi-billionaire who&#x27;s &quot;made it&quot;, this is no longer a concern).<p>Calendly, who&#x27;s CEO is black, and is one of the top performing black led tech startups curiously doesn&#x27;t have an about us page (and though I don&#x27;t know the exact reason, I can only suspect why).<p>A very good friend of mine, a black woman in finance, had to have drinks with and entertain obnoxiously racist jokes from a potential white client to close the deal.<p>Black folks don&#x27;t get the presumption of competence. You&#x27;re assumed to be mediocre (or worse) until you can prove yourself exceptional.

I used to work for a regional ILEC and everyone in the company was required to do regular ridealongs with the installers to get a better understanding of the customer base and their needs.<p>Me (a white guy) would frequently do ridealongs with some of our black installers and I would see this kind of treatment from customers regularly. I wasn&#x27;t dressed like I was doing install work (business casual) and was clearly younger and would tell the customer in advance that I worked in X department and was just learning from the installer.<p>People would talk to me like the installer wasn&#x27;t there. It really didn&#x27;t matter what demographic either, it was pretty universal. Except for one older lady. She didn&#x27;t even want me in her house if I wasn&#x27;t there to physically work on her service. I liked her.

There was a presentation from the Black Diversity group in my company where they described an incident where they gathered for an ERG meeting. They were a collection of engineers, managers, legal, etc from across the company. The front desk security, who also was black, assumed they were cafeteria staff and directed them to the cafeteria without even asking. It was eye opening how deeply unconscious bias occurs.<p>My Asian friends say that especially Asian women have problems being taken as authority figures as well. My friend was a senior manager at an accounting firm and went to visit a client with a fresh grad who was a tall white male. The client instantly greeted the fresh grad first and assumed he was the manager and she was the subordinate.

I thought this was a great article. One of the most interesting things to me was how the embarrassment&#x2F;defensiveness of the white people involved was one of the biggest blocks to the black CEOs in their advancement, e.g. the VCs who &quot;just wanted to get the hell out of there&quot; after mistaking a white subordinate for the CEO.<p>I&#x27;ve recently been reading&#x2F;watching some videos and writings by Robin Diangelo on systemic racism - here&#x27;s a great starting point: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=h7mzj0cVL0Q" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=h7mzj0cVL0Q</a>. She also wrote the book &quot;White Fragility&quot;.<p>Thinking about that, I&#x27;m just wondering how different it would be if one of those people who mistook the employee for the CEO instead turned to the CEO and said &quot;I&#x27;m sorry, please excuse me for the instance of racism I just perpetrated against you, I promise it won&#x27;t happen again.&quot; I realize how outlandish that may sound writing that out, but I&#x27;d propose that the fact that it <i>does</i> sound outlandish is the main problem. Everyone in the US was raised in an environment that inculcated certain racial ideas, subconsciously or not. We can&#x27;t address them if we&#x27;re so embarrassed by their existence as to pretend they don&#x27;t exist.

I will say that being an older techie has also had its share of humiliation.<p>It&#x27;s just assumed that I have no idea what &quot;all the kids are into,&quot; these days. I guess they think that I&#x27;m being &quot;Lenny Wosniak.&quot;<p>I grew up in Africa. I was quite used to black people running things, from a very early age.

This entire story reminded me a lot of the story of the inventor of the gas mask[1] who had to hire a white actor to play as the inventor during presentations<p>Scary things don’t change and little progress has been made.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.biography.com&#x2F;.amp&#x2F;inventor&#x2F;garrett-morgan" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.biography.com&#x2F;.amp&#x2F;inventor&#x2F;garrett-morgan</a>

It seems like people from other ethnicities&#x2F;countries have done well in Silicon Valley, e.g. India, China, Iran. Notably, CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Uber and others are brown-skinned.<p>Would they have done even better without the racism? Or what accounts for the difference?

This is an interesting and in-depth article that was inappropriately flagged. I&#x27;ve turned off the flags.<p>I understand the impulse to flag follow-up stories [1], especially on the hottest controversies of the moment, which always produce a flood of articles, most of which aren&#x27;t very good. Curiosity and repetition don&#x27;t go together [2]. But it&#x27;s important to recognize the articles that are higher than median quality and not simply flag an entire category mechanically. Curiosity isn&#x27;t mechanical either.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=true&amp;query=by%3Adang%20follow-up&amp;sort=byDate&amp;type=comment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=true&amp;que...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;query=by%3Adang%20curiosity%20repetition&amp;sort=byDate&amp;type=comment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;qu...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;query=by%3Adang%20%22significant%20new%20information%22&amp;sort=byDate&amp;type=comment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;qu...</a>

I joined a growing team in South Africa as the only black in ~40; and a foreigner to boot. When I left 3 years later we were only 2 out of 120. In the years that I was there, I probably participated in about 100+ interviews. In that whole time, I never got a single black South African interviewee. Not even for an internship! To be clear, I had phone screens with folks from Egypt, Pakistan, UK, Nigeria etc. I think the black community in South Africa is in a wedge.<p>My 2 cents: Systemic issues probably cause them to rarely progress to white collar jobs. The kids in the education system don&#x27;t see any benefit in progressing to higher education because, they don&#x27;t know anyone in their family&#x2F;neighborhood who made it. Compound it with schools that have gangs in them [1] and an easy choice appears. 1. Slog through education with probably no chance of a good job (from a young person&#x27;s view point) or 2. Join this gang, make money, drive fast cars and belong.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=u6eb6fNVfmo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=u6eb6fNVfmo</a>

My boss did this to a client once. He was not amused and soon thereafter became a former client.

It&#x27;s always fascinating to me how the most liberal and progressive areas of our society are the ones who exhibit the most functional racism.<p>This is the manifestation of the bigotry of low expectations that is so engrained in Silicon Valley. When you live your life grouping people of a certain skin color into a protected class that you the hero white person need to save, you automatically assume that every person you see of that class is of diminished status.

As a non-American non-SV resident, every time I visit there I feel like I&#x27;ve stepped into the &#x27;60s. <i>All</i> the developers and managers are white or asian, and <i>all</i> the janitors, cooks, security guards, bus drivers, etc. are black or hispanic. Silly Valley talks the talk, very loudly, but they don&#x27;t walk the walk.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.vn&#x2F;nFx3E" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.vn&#x2F;nFx3E</a>

Is it possible that when put in unfamiliar situations, people will by default direct themselves toward others who are most like themselves?<p>A hypothetical: Reverse all the races in the VC&#x2F;CEO situation. Who would the black VC assume was the CEO?<p>Repeat the experiment with whichever combination of race&#x2F;sex you like.

I believe, and often comment, that there&#x27;s a different culture between Silicon Valley and SF, though they are often conflated in the press.<p>Regrettably, this is an area where both regions are equally terrible.

Where I live, it&#x27;s not that uncommon to found a tech company and step down as the &quot;nominal&quot; CEO a few months later to put in place a white guy—the right shade of white—who fits the expectations of customers and partners. The original founder may still be the one making executive decisions, but he&#x2F;she is not the public face anymore.

I was once working at a startup in the south bay area, where &quot;white developer&quot; was not one of the people who was able to do what we wanted, as an engineer, for a startup which had a tech foundation. This was a big problem for most companies.<p>The thing is, this group had really terrible problems in the first place.<p>Most startups are very different from the valley because of the nature of technical talent. But the people who come from the valley are pretty good at what they do.<p>The problem is the lack of culture.<p>In most companies there are only a few minorities:<p>* There are enough great tech people that want to start their own companies.<p>* Some have to get a job as a software developer, because there&#x27;s a strong market saturation of smart people right in the first place.<p>* There are few places a tech founder can get to start a startup.

Couple of years ago me and few other guys (highly qualified and paid SAP engineers all) have been sitting in beer garden in Dusseldorf. The waiter had been friendly and asks:<p>- Where are you guys from? - From Poland - Oh, you have came here to purchase some old cars, right?

Whoa! I didn’t realize Leland Stanford was racist. And blatantly so. Makes you wonder if the university should be renamed.

Here&#x27;s a recent Twitter thread by Timothy Jones <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;timbeejones&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;timbeejones&#x2F;</a> which seems relevant: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;timbeejones&#x2F;status&#x2F;1268665921364770816" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;timbeejones&#x2F;status&#x2F;1268665921364770816</a> . I can&#x27;t vouch for it as I have zero experience of SV or being black, let alone the specifics here, but the author seems to be someone worth hearing on the subject.<p>Someone always complains about reading Twitter threads, so here&#x27;s a thread unroll <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;threadreaderapp.com&#x2F;thread&#x2F;1268665921364770816.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;threadreaderapp.com&#x2F;thread&#x2F;1268665921364770816.html</a> while I have also cut and pasted it here (again, this is Timothy Jones not me):<p>&gt; I’m glad there’s now a vibrant discussion about black tech entrepreneurs and VC. Now might be a good time to discuss an elephant in the room: the systematic pushing aside of Black founders to make way for a White CEO who is “bankable”. Happens more often than not. I’ve seen this happen in two tech bull mkts; I hope those who have newfound interest in Black founders don’t repeat this same mistake<p>Here&#x27;s the way it goes: Black Founder has an idea they&#x27;re passionate about; could be demographically anchored, or just a great idea and they&#x27;re Black. By some <i>Miracle</i> they raise a seed. They go off, build product, get some revenue even...<p>Now it&#x27;s Series A time. Again, by some <i>Miracle</i> they raise a VC Series A. They&#x27;re now part of the rate 1% of VC backed founders who are black. They add to their board 1-2 VC&#x27;s from the usual suspects. They start to build a team...<p>Here&#x27;s where the move is made. Somewhere between A and going for a B, the VC&#x27;s on the board call the founder for a &quot;chat&quot;. They &quot;strongly suggest&quot; that the founder get some &quot;help&quot; in order to get the company to the next stage. And they know just the guy...<p>&#x27;Cause it&#x27;s always a guy. I call him &quot;Business Biff&quot;. He looks like he&#x27;s stepped out of central casting for &quot;White Dude CEO&quot;. The Board VC&#x27;s explain that Biff can &quot;help&quot; raise the next round, and &quot;you two should really work together&quot;.<p>Black Founder says: &quot;Ok, cool. Will reach out to Biff on a few things if I need him&quot;. VC&#x27;s give the puzzled, RCA Dog-watching-TV-Look. &quot;You know, we think Biff should really come on board the company to help you out &quot;. &quot;As What?&quot; asks the Black Founder. &quot;I already have a head of Sales&#x2F;Finance&#x2F;Marketing&#x2F;etc&quot;...&quot;Well, we were thinking Biff should become CEO, and you become Chairman&quot; &quot;Sayyyyy whaaaa?&quot; says Black Founder. &quot;Am I being fired?&quot;. &quot;Oh, No!&quot; say the VC&#x27;s. &quot;We want you to stay and guide the strategy, Biff will be responsible for the day to day, and putting together the fundraise&quot;<p>Not going to go into the details but here&#x27;s essentially what happens:.<p>1. VC&#x27;s realize that having a Black CEO creates financing RISK for the next round.<p>2. Best way to reduce the risk is to bring in a CEO who &quot;pattern matches&quot;<p>3. The problem is they still need the Founder. They still need the Founder for (a) mkt knowledge (b) passion so he&#x2F;she doesn&#x27;t get fired. But the bump to Chairman is designed to &quot;keep them working, but not in control&quot;. It&#x27;s straight out of the unopened letter in &quot;Invisible Man&quot;.<p>There&#x27;s a lot more here, but I&#x27;m raising the point now so that people realize that downstream of funding, there are still a ton of practices which need reforming. The kicker: The VC&#x27;s decided to bring Biff in when they did the A. In fact, the seed investors may have suggested it, and backchanneled it to the A rounders. The bottom line is that even the investors realized blackness as a &quot;risk&quot; that needs to be managed down&#x2F;out.

Serious question: is it legal for someone not to correct an incorrect assumption? Let&#x27;s say a black CEO invites his white friend to a pitch meeting as a wingman, VC says &quot;oh great to meet you Will&quot; assuming the white man is the CEO. And no one ever corrects him. In this way, perhaps the company would be able to access funds not normally provided to black folks. The white man would probably need to be an executive of some sort (CFO maybe) and both would need to sign whatever paperwork, and only then would it become apparent to the VC who&#x27;s who.<p>It&#x27;s ridiculous that I even need to ask this question, and doing this literally just steps aside the racism problem rather than addressing it, so it might cause more harm than good, but until racism is solved (possibly a multi generational shift) something like this might help some people out.<p>I feel like this should be the plot of a short film; where the black man is revealed to be the CEO and the viewer is challenged to rethink their assumptions. If I had an ounce of creativity I&#x27;d totally make it if it doesn&#x27;t already exist.

Stylistic question. I noticed Black and White capitalized in this article. Is that an emerging convention?

This is somewhat tangential to the article, but I&#x27;ve written about this previously. I think a big first step would be to stop talking about race for different skin colours.<p>I&#x27;m always surprised that &quot;race&quot; is so commonly adopted in conversations even by campaigners against racism, as a European I always cringe. The term implies a genetic difference where there isn&#x27;t any and thus contributes to systematic racism&#x2F;discrimination IMO, words do matter.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”<p><pre><code> - Buckminster Fuller.</code></pre>

I am not convinced about the argument the authors try to make about Silicon Valley, and VCs&#x27;. I also see cherry-picking of data to make the point (&quot;...0.4% of people who received venture capital were Black...&quot;), okay so how many Black people applied? How many other races? How many white? Etc. We cannot form the full picture since other critical variables have been ommitted without providing cross-references to the study. That reduces credibility of the article.<p>As for where should a VC invest, I think it is his&#x2F;her decision alone, and nobody else has any say that. Including the article&#x27;s author.

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;nFx3E" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;nFx3E</a>

Non-paywall link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mercurynews.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;16&#x2F;for-black-ceos-in-silicon-valley-humiliation-is-a-part-of-doing-business&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mercurynews.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;16&#x2F;for-black-ceos-in-sil...</a><p>(Published by Bloomberg news so no copyright issues)

&gt; the simple phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ is seen as a political dog whistle, rather than a desperate cry to bring attention to a dire situation that many people choose not to see.”<p>A little off-topic, but I notice a lot of the &quot;All Lives Matter&quot; people are mistaking the term &quot;Black Lives Matter&quot; as valuing black lives over others. I wonder if &quot;Black Lives Matter Too&quot; would convey its message better.

this article title is so racist. stop normalizing it and represent the success stories.<p>the whole, &quot;X is so marginalized and victimized,&quot; narrative represents negative stereotypes and reinforce a victimhood identity that only disempowers X, and reinforces to the dominant ethnic groups&#x27; superiority narrative<p>few would believe that such psyop propaganda is part of systemic racism, lured instead by the virtue signaling and fake &quot;solidarity&quot; parroting such victimization narratives would seem to yield. but it is.<p>you&#x27;ll resist the idea I propose by saying, highlighting how bad everything is, is doing something about it, while pretending there&#x27;s no problem is part of the problem.<p>viewing another way you&#x27;ll see that editorializing to consistently represent a problem is a problem.<p>but such psyop propaganda is so embedded in the politically corrected social discourse programming that few will be able to escape<p>you&#x27;ll most likely dismiss this idea by pretending this idea is just apologizing for racism.<p>it will be very hard for you to see beyond that but you should try, it&#x27;s worth it.

I would have never even guessed Hayes is black. He looks Middle Eastern to me. He doesn&#x27;t look like a CEO in these pictures: a constantly worried facial expression sends the wrong message IMO. Givens does project calm confidence, and therefore looks like a boss. I think his experience is more illustrative of the problem here.

In this thread hacker news proves the article right. Head desk.

I think these titles just discourage black&#x2F;female&#x2F;diverse founders.<p>Reads like: don&#x27;t even try, it&#x27;s not your game

I didn’t understand the first bit, why did they think people confused the black man with his white colleague, and how could that possibly be “racist”?

This is the sort of issues that some kind of &quot;unconscious bias&quot; training should help you overcome. It is really frustrating for the victim but those who are perpetuating are not racists or evil. It is a social mental conditioning that they will overcome if they realize how much damage they are doing.<p>My wife joined an ecomm company recently. Since entire joining was remote, it was little hard for her to get onboarded with the team and her manager would assign her documentation and testing issues. Few weeks later when she told her manager that she would like to write some real code he was surprised. Because of her gender he had thought she was a tester.

How is it racist to assume that in a country of mostly white people, the CEO would be white? That isn&#x27;t racist. Unless you consciously thought the black person in the room was less competent just because they were black, it isn&#x27;t racism.<p>If I was in India, and walked into a company meeting with a diverse set of people, I would assume the Indian looking person is the CEO. If I was in Japan, I would assume the Japanese looking person was the CEO.<p>This isn&#x27;t racism. This is the human brain using pattern recognition to evaluate a situation and infer information as best it can under the circumstances.

So I get there are not a lot of black CEOs. Unsure what this means or the cause. As a board member I want the smartest and most talented person to run my business with low risk. Quantify that. Also, I&#x27;m confused when I hear that only 7% of tech jobs are black people, but 70% of basketball and football teams are black. Yet regardless 10% of population is black. Scientifically speaking... Given facts on IQ, we are probably most racist against Asian CEOs in US as they have the highest IQs on avg (106), followed by Jewish people, then Caucasian (97). This group is supposedly enlightened and factual - so...

By my back-of-the-napkin math, white America owes black America about 10 trillion dollars in stolen wealth.<p>The are roughly 50 million black Americans out of a population of 330M. Americans own roughly $100T in wealth. So black Americans should own about 50 &#x2F; 330 * 100T or $15T. But they currently only own about $5.5T.<p>We could start by allocating some our our Federal tax dollars to making black Americans whole.<p>Sources:<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brookings.edu&#x2F;blog&#x2F;up-front&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;25&#x2F;six-facts-about-wealth-in-the-united-states&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brookings.edu&#x2F;blog&#x2F;up-front&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;25&#x2F;six-facts...</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brookings.edu&#x2F;blog&#x2F;up-front&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;27&#x2F;examining-the-black-white-wealth-gap&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brookings.edu&#x2F;blog&#x2F;up-front&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;27&#x2F;examining...</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2019&#x2F;08&#x2F;14&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;racial-wealth-gap.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2019&#x2F;08&#x2F;14&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;raci...</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;united-states&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;06&#x2F;the-black-white-wealth-gap-is-unchanged-after-half-a-century" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;united-states&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;06&#x2F;the-black...</a><p>Edit: downvotes but no replies.