I've seen a co-founder get pregnant and have a baby while running a successful start-up.
I think people take an unnecessarily negative view of pregnancy and child rearing. Sure you can enumerate distractions (such as sleepless nights). But how about enumerating positives: for example, what if having a baby made a founder, man or woman, happier and more fulfilled? That would have a positive effect on the start-up.
The question you are asking is "what will make Founder A more productive". You are hypothesizing that a baby will (I find this unlikely, but it's irrelevant).
That's not the question the investor was asking. He was asking whether to invest in Founder A or Founder B. Suppose A gets their happiness from a baby - this makes them happier and more fulfilled in their remaining 50-60 hours/week. Founder B gets their happiness from marketing - this makes them happier and more fulfilled in their remaining 50-60 hours, plus they spend 20 extra hours on marketing.
All else held equal, B is a better investment than A, even if A+baby is a better investment than A sans baby.
You're making an incredible assumption that marketing offers the same level of happiness as parenting. You might say it's just a hypothetical, but it's a totally unsupported one that offers zero insight on the question.
The questions is not merely one of "happiness" either. Parenting also involves maturity and well-roundedness. Much like other extracurricular interests and accomplishments which are considered great positives in say college admissions, despite how they might take 20 hours away from studying each week.
As an investor I care about productivity, not happiness. If you want to run a trading strategy on the theory that parents are better founders, be my guest. Complaining that this investor ran a different strategy is silly.
Running that strategy may or may not make him wrong.
Saying "actually, if I'd known I wouldn't've funded you", when (a) he already had (b) she was already committed to parenthood provided no useful information whatsoever to her ... except for the information that one of her investors was capable of engaging in pointless criticism based on couterfactuals and that as such her estimate of his capacity to maintain relationships with other people should likely be revised downwards.
Because, realistically, non-actionable after-the-fact criticism is a WOFTAM and risks damaging the relationship to no gain.
Elsewhere in the thread I agreed with this point. The profit-maximizing action for the investor to take would have been to hide his feelings of disappointment from the founder, and quietly alter his process and raise the bar for women or try to assess the likelihood of them becoming pregnant.
He screwed up and spoke honestly for a moment. That makes him human, not an asshole.
Given it's already happened, he should either be focusing on the specific negative consequences on her engagement with the startup ... or if there aren't any such, recalibrating to not be disappointed. Continuing to hold the estimate related to a guess when you're about to get actual data seems ... suboptimal, at best.
Also, I specifically said that the "estimate of his capacity to maintain relationships with other people should likely be revised downwards" which was intentionally rather more nuanced than "asshole"/"not an asshole".
You completely missed the point about it being about more than happiness. If you want to run a college admissions program on the theory that significant extracurricular accomplishments offer no value, are mere happiness-generating distractions and that maximum study time is the sole key to academic fitness, be my guest.
It would in fact be silly for a school to run such a program, if only because the data on achievement so strongly opposes it. Same for entrepreneurship and parenting; the median founder age is 40 and older age correlates with success[1]. No doubt many of these older, more successful founders are parents.
Of course we're not talking merely about study time or even parenting, but an attitude and complex of poorly reasoned arguments calculated to keep women disadvantaged. This is beyond silliness; it is chauvinism masquerading as (pseudo) intellectualism.
You should read up on why colleges ask about extracurriculars and leadership:
Neither strategy worked [to keep the Jews out]. Finally, Lowell—and his counterparts at Yale and Princeton—realized that if a definition of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of student, the solution was to change the definition of merit...
...Lowell told his admissions officers to elicit information about the “character” of candidates...provide a photograph...personal essays, demonstrating their aptitude for leadership, and list their extracurricular activities.
But yes, I'm sure you are right - expecting founders to focus solely on their startup is "calculated to keep women disadvantaged". I'm sure that if a man wanted to, I dunno, do a startup without quitting his day job, investors would be totally fine with that.
"But what did Hunter achieve with that best-students model?... As graduates... they weren’t nearly as distinguished as they were expected to be... The researchers spend a great deal of time trying to figure out why Hunter graduates are so disappointing, and end up sounding very much like Wilbur Bender. Being a smart child isn’t a terribly good predictor of success in later life, they conclude. 'Non-intellective' factors—like motivation and social skills—probably matter more... [Harvard] wanted superstars, and Bender and his colleagues recognized that if this is your goal a best-students model isn’t enough."
I'm confused as to the point you are trying to make.
You cited an explicitly anti-semitic policy as a model of what investors should be doing, while implying that anyone who disagreed was somehow trying to keep women disadvantaged. Huh?
You then cite a study showing that drive and determination matter in addition to academics. No one disputes this. That's why a woman founder demonstrating a lack of determination (i.e., choosing to divide her focus) was a disappointment to the investor, who was stupidly honest for a moment before deciding to hide his real feelings.
Certain specific seemingly non-academic factors also promote life success. That doesn't mean that any random hobby does. An investor isn't an asshole simply because he doesn't think that pregnancy is on the list of non-academic factors that do promote investment success.
Did no such thing. You cited it, incorrectly characterizing it as "why colleges ask about extracurriculars and leadership."
You misread your source, and are wholesale missing the bigger point that success is often about more than maximizing hours in the office/library.
You actually remind me of that right-wing group that Tim Cook just smacked down in the latest Apple shareholder meeting. Poor politically-motivated reasoning masquerading as shareholder interest.
Parents do tend to be better workers. They have commitments to keep that are personally important to them. They have people they care about counting on them. They tend to be more reliable, more committed, etc. Young, single and childless may give you the time and energy to do more but it doesn't necessarily give you the impetus to do so.
Actually, there seems to be no correlation between working hard and becoming the next Airbnb. Working hard is necessary the same way intelligence is necessary: past a certain threshold, other things matter more. And if a metric has no correlation with mega-success, then investing based on that metric is a mistake.
(If working harder was correlated with mega success, then the winners would be easy to pick out: invest in anyone whose team spends all their time on the startup. But many startups do that yet still fail, so it must be true that those extra 20 hours per week shouldn't factor into any any investor's decision making process, counterintuitively.)
Your first and second sentences contradict each other - if hard work is necessary up to a certain threshold, then hard work is correlated with success.
If working harder was correlated with mega success, then the winners would be easy to pick out
The fact that a predictor is correlated with outcomes does not mean it is the sole predictor.
I don't really think the childish language helps. There's a culture of "you are an asshole because I say you're an asshole and if you disagree you're an asshole because my views are universally accepted truths" that dampens grown-up discourse.
Evidently, from the fact this thread exists:
- The concept that people should not disclose life changing circumstances to investors is not universally accepted.
- Nor does wishing to be informed of material facts affecting an investment mean one hates women.
Well it's not just pure sexism that would make an investors or co-founders nervous about a pregnancy. If I was starting a venture with capital for 10 months of runway, and my co-founder told me that they (or their spouse) was 3 months pregnant - well I would be happy for them personally, but I definitely would be concerned about our venture. I think anybody in their right mind would be concerned because you know they will have to take at least some time off for the birth - then who knows how they will feel about working after that. Maybe they'll be driven, maybe they'll decide they need to stay home with their new child. It's pretty tough to say, nobody knows for sure how they will feel. It's not something you really want to be dealing with while getting a company off the ground.
That's no excuse for the rude, sexist comments made in the article, though.
If they're happy and fulfilled from having a child, they'd seek less fulfillment from their start-up.
Hell, they might take an early out in hopes for stability to provide for the new child. That could mean thousands, millions, or billions (if you have a chat app with more than 3 users).
I don't think many people would argue that it's impossible for a co-founder to have and raise a child while building or running a start-up. But I also don't think many would argue that it would on average have a net positive outcome on the start-up.
I think people take an unnecessarily negative view of pregnancy and child rearing. Sure you can enumerate distractions (such as sleepless nights). But how about enumerating positives: for example, what if having a baby made a founder, man or woman, happier and more fulfilled? That would have a positive effect on the start-up.