YC is compiling a blacklist of venture capitalists accused of harassing women

The most startling thing here is the form headline takes: &quot;X is compiling a blackist of Y <i>accused of</i> Z&quot;.<p>Notice the word is &quot;<i>accused</i>&quot; and not &quot;<i>guilty</i>&quot;. Now I am not going to accuse YC of running a star chamber: I assume (without knowing) that they are fairly responsible with their blacklist. But the principle is still worrying.<p>Like most institutions, private companies are not able to hold trials and rigorously tell guilt from innocence, so whenever they set out to police others they must do so on some lesser evidence.<p>It is our right to shun others because we suspect them without proof of something bad. Perhaps it is even our right to gang together and ostracise such, but society suffers when that is the norm.

YC has, from what I&#x27;ve been told, been doing stuff like this for years. Not just for harassment, but also for all the other bad-actor stuff VCs do to startup founders (think: stuff like ruthless term sheet recision).<p>It&#x27;s things like this that make it hard for me to be totally down on YC, despite disquieting things about its culture. It&#x27;s hard to argue that it hasn&#x27;t been an unalloyed good for founders.

Part of me worries that &quot;accused&quot; seems like a very low standard, and part of me has little idea how to better address the very real problem.

I&#x27;m very supportive of these efforts to distance startup founders from investors who are unprofessional and&#x2F;or abusive -- but:<p>&quot;She also tweeted that Y Combinator had disinvited an investor who was trying to replace a female chief executive with a white male&quot;<p>Should it be the best person for the job, male or female alike?

The general idea of creating lists of people who are bad actors is an interesting (and controversial) idea.<p>On one side, there should be a ledger of people doing shitty things, even if the behavior isn&#x27;t illegal. Who wants to work with assholes? No one. If there&#x27;s a record of people&#x27;s bad behavior then future founders can save themselves a lot of suffering by simply knowing to avoid these people.<p>On the other side, what standards are used to put someone on this list in the first place? Are multiple offences required? Seems like without a process of submitting good evidence of people&#x27;s poor behavior there&#x27;s a lot of room for abuse. If this list actually becomes a tool that people rely on to select their investors I would start to be concerned by the potential abuse of power.<p>I&#x27;m curious how others feel about this idea of putting people on lists.

I hope they&#x27;re very careful with this. If even a couple of unscrupulous founders threaten a VC with false accusations in order to secure funding (ie blackmail), then VCs will stop taking meetings with female founders. Game theory can be used to make sure this doesn&#x27;t backfire, so hopefully they consult a good game theorist.

Clearly few in the comments are in favor of this, but it&#x27;s curious <i>why</i>.<p>My supposition is that sexual harassment is too <i>grey</i>. It&#x27;s ill defined. It&#x27;s hard to know how to 100% avoid it when flirting with someone. If someone can define the exact point hitting on someone goes from acceptable flirting to unacceptable harassment, then we could all rest easy. But without that, it&#x27;s incredibly worrying to accidentally do something that ruins your career.<p>Is there a place for coworkers falling in love or making love in 2017? Maybe not. Maybe so. But I think it&#x27;s sort of sad how much we are repressing human sexuality if not.

There&#x27;s a Reddit AMA happening right now with a current batch founder and they said, &quot;There&#x27;s an... internal investor database with founder grading and info-passing,&quot; so I wonder if that&#x27;s where the blacklisting is happening.<p>AMA link for those interested: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;startups&#x2F;comments&#x2F;6najyy&#x2F;im_a_founder_in_the_current_y_combinator_batch&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;startups&#x2F;comments&#x2F;6najyy&#x2F;im_a_found...</a>

Not getting into &quot;guilty until proven innocent&quot;; all this is going to accomplish is attach a huge risk factor to women who are seeking investors making their life harder than it already is. Hell is paved with good intentions.

I am assuming the access to this list will be tightly guarded. So the only way to protect the women of the valley from these VCs is by having a partner friend at YC who will look up the list for you and give yay&#x2F;nay answers?

Every incubator maintains a list of who they prefer to work with. This really should not be news.

Are they going to make it public? This is pretty much a deal breaker if they don&#x27;t.<p>People deserve the opportunity to defend themselves.

this is not going to end well.

Well this is not going to encourage VCs to want to work with women founders. Even if you never harass anyone why take the risk of ending up on the banned list.

This secret list might give less incentive for these issues to be publicized. Having these issues raised publicly helps change overall culture.

Is this actual a legal maneuver available to YC? This seems risky. Why not help fund the women&#x27;s arbitration fees instead?

Though this is a real problem to solve, what about false accusations? If all it takes is an accusation (or two) to destroy someone&#x27;s career then I see a huge problem with this.

All it takes is an accusation. A very powerful weapon indeed.

from the article &quot;Two other groups are also launching tech start-ups to help victims share their experiences.&quot;<p>&quot;One group of women has already founded a start-up, BetterBrave, that aims to be an online hub for female workers who felt they were sexually harassed at work. SheWorx, composed of female entrepreneurs, is planning an online database that would enable women and others to report unethical behavior by investors.&quot;

How is this any different than discriminating based on hearsay? I.E. what happens if you get on such a list without any resources to defend yourself? This experiment has been tried before (Mccarthyism). It did not end well!<p>This also assumes that the accusing women are being entirely truthful, honest, and acting in good faith which unfortunately is not always the case.

So best advice for VCs not to get on the blacklist, don&#x27;t deal with women.<p>Best advice for startups, deal with people on the blacklist, less competition.

Could someone post a link to the article (paywall)

This should keep the lawyers busy for a while.

Accused?

Compiling an easily shareable list. What could go wrong?

So basically a list of VC that want to be taken to a strip club to discuss funding?<p>Wouldn&#x27;t a list of VC that behave professionally be better?