Startup America needs to look more like America

As if founders have to be selected or hired by others. Founding means hiring yourself. Founders have to be ready for a protracted struggle against the status quo, not special adoption by it.<p>I had to laugh when the Founder Institute's admission of Lecole Cole was mentioned as taking some kind of educated chance. Lecole had a proven track record before that experience and didn't need any special treatment. But he absolutely took advantage of every legitimate opportunity that came his way.<p>"Disruption is fine as long as it's caused by white, male, Ivy-league hipsters in skinny jeans." - as if people sit down and examine new things in light of who made them. Customers want value. If a feature will save them $5 a month, they'll trade with martians if they have to.<p>Those that don't like disruption are the established market players. I'm pretty sure they don't decide to yield their markets because the disruptor looks like them.<p>One only needs to meet people that have made it to the US that have struggled to achieve elsewhere to get the sense of how much opportunity there actually is here. And those who sit on their hands waiting for the light to turn green are going to have a long wait.

I'm not even sure what most of the important people in tech look like, outside of the big-names that get their pictures put on websites.<p>I like it that way in many aspects, because it provides a clear disassociation with physical externalities and allows a clarity on their ideas, unclouded by whatever biases I have. It's one reason I prefer all-text chat to avatar chats.

There are a disproportionate number of women and minorities in leading or supporting roles within venture investment sized start-ups. Historically, companies owned by women and minorities have received less than 5% of total venture capital investments over the past 40 years and minorities have only accounted for 3.7% of entrepreneurs in venture scale start-ups.

Its simply not true that children won't believe they can do something if they don't see someone who looks like them doing it.<p>If it were the case, there'd be all sorts of adopted kids completely incapable of doing things.<p>It is true that if people do not see a certain behavior or do not see that it is successful, they are less likely to adopt the behavior themselves. But even then, children create and experiment with behaviors all the time. Unless, of course, they are actively discouraged from doing so.<p>We don't simply repeat what we see. We are capable of assessing the way people act around us and judging whether or not behavior works.<p>But if children are surrounded by people not practicing successful behaviors and also are actively discouraged from experimenting, its a lot less likely they will be successful at whatever they choose to do.

I would like to see a survey on how many people actually WANT to be founders based on race/sex compared to the percentage of the population that ARE. This article assumes that every profession needs to match the distribution of the overall population