Ask YC: Are there any black or latino founded startups?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=104919

by wumi • 18 years ago

14 102 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Came across a great post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=104728

Although I think the more we focus on race, the worst we are (i.e. instead of referring to Dungy as a coach who won the superbowl, he's the "first black head coach" to win a superbowl), I'm going to break my own rule for the purpose of discussion:

How many founders in web/mobile/desktop applications have been Black or Latino in the last decade or so?

(Or even Y C applicants for that matter)

bmaier2• 18 years ago

You said it yourself... why does this even matter? Brains are all the same color (well for the most part anyway).

curi37• 18 years ago

I think it matters because it's a sign of a problem in black and latino cultures, if they create startups at a much lower rate.

axod5• 18 years ago

Is that necessarily a problem? There are more black basketball players than white. Does that mean there is a problem in white cultures?

People do what they want to do, and what they're good at.

Kaizyn• 18 years ago

Blacks and Latinos percentage wise make up a smaller portion of the US population. What you need to find out is if blacks and latinos who each make up about 13% of the US population are starting up significantly fewer than 13% of the web startups.

mnemonicsloth• 18 years ago

You've got to be kidding me.

It matters because there's more to living a life free of prejudice than just thinking you're too smart to be susceptible to it.

bmaier2• 18 years ago

Thanks for the down mod... I wasn't saying I thought I and other entrepreneurs are too smart to be susceptible to it. I was getting at the idea that it shouldn't be used as a crutch.

merrick333• 18 years ago

It's interesting that there are 7 points here, yet only one comment so far. I am Mexican, I run my own startup without any outside funding and my ethnicity has not been an issue, the value our startup adds is all that matters in our success or failure.

daniel-cussen• 18 years ago

The guys who did Mercado Libre (like eBay, but for Latin America) were Hispanic. They did very well, to my knowledge.

hhm2• 18 years ago

Yes. The people who started Mercado Libre are from Argentina, and ML is in Nasdaq ("MELI"), so sure it's successful.

wumi4• 18 years ago

the reason I started this thread was after reading the article about NASCAR and the lack of minorities, I was sorta wondering:

Is there a high-barrier to entry that is restricting blacks or latinos from founding startups? (real or imagined) -- the same thing we see in high end sports such as NASCAR, hockey, or lacrosse that take lots of cash to participate in.

merrick333• 18 years ago

The question posed in the original thread is much different than the one you pose now. No matter what ethnic background you come from you have to ignore the stats and act as if.

Now that you clarified the intention of your initial question, it seems you want to know if the percentage of founders of startups correlates with each ethnicities percentage of population.

While I don't know the ethnic breakdown of tech startups founders, I know that disparities do exist and they vary by culture, social economic strata and in this case by geographic location.

Until recently, the stats for U.S. broadband adoption showed that income and ethnicity were strong indicators.

After I finished up my economics degree at UCLA I took a few sociology courses. I recall that in the first half of the 20th century Asian immigrants had a higher percentage of entrepreneurship relatively because of the lack of employment opportunities and discrimination. In the second half of the 20th century that percentage declined.

While it's interesting to study the plight of some ethnic groups, it's much more interesting to study how public policy can improve the situation.

The wonderful thing for everyone is that the access to information is a great equalizer, and that our parents socio-economic level is less of a predictor of our future than it was when our parents were kids.

kobs• 18 years ago

Hopefully in the next year or two :-]. If you want to dig even further, there aren't many of us in CS departments either. (I'm aware that not every potential startup-type studies CS)

(I'm making a generalization based on my school's CS population. I'm assuming it's similar at other institutions.)

manvsmachine• 18 years ago

I'd suggest that a large part of the reason is the issue of prestige. In America, intelligent black people will tend to choose high prestige, low-risk career paths more often than not. A lot of it is about the uncertainty of failure; In black communities, a lot is expected of the really smart kids. They're seen as not just representing themselves, but also their communities and, to an extent, their race. It sucks, but it's the truth. So a lot of them choose to be doctors, lawyers, etc, because you're viewed differently by society. If we ever get to the point that being a software engineer is viewed in the same light as the aforementioned occupations, I'm sure there would be a sizable increase.

aswanson• 18 years ago

Heh, I used to think that being an engineer was prestigious.

pius• 18 years ago

I'm black and I run a technology startup. It's really shocking how many conferences in the Web 2.0 space are incredibly, well, white. Moving forward, I'm going to attend more conferences and workshops, if only to do my little part to make sure that questions like the one posed in this Ask YC title become ridiculous. Speaking of which, I'm going to SXSW Film and Interactive and the Cannes Film Festival, so anyone who'd like to meet up should let me know if they're going!

wumi4• 18 years ago

shoot me an email david.adeyalo at gmail

webwright• 18 years ago

Out of curiosity, why don't you care about Asian founded startups? Or south-Asian (Indian, Pakastani, etc)? Or Middle-Eastern?

To answer your actual question, I have met exactly one (am currently a YC founder and was VERY active in the Seattle startup scene, FWIW).

wumi4• 18 years ago

I was going for the uncommon social groups, and East Asian, and South Asian founded is definitely not an uncommon breeding ground for startups.

As far as middle-eastern, sure, throw them in there, but it was more reference to minority groups in the US -- Black and Latino are pretty prevalent as fars % of US population, and it does not correlate with startups

gscott• 18 years ago

The Internet is color blind. If anyone has a chance to make it it would be on the Internet.

I was watching the "Big Idea" with Donnie Deutsch some months ago and a 10 year old had a great eBay business and relationships with wholesellers. His age was not a limiting factor because he did everything online.

paul• 18 years ago

http://www.ooyala.com/management

hhm2• 18 years ago

If there are any? There are plenty of them...

I'm from Argentina, and here, as in many other latin countries, there are a real lot of local tech startups. Some important companies which started like startups here are Mercado Libre (MELI in Nasdaq), Core Technologies, and Wanako Games (a company in Chile, by Argentinians, recently sold to Vivendi for US$ 10 million).

Actually there are lots of incubators for entrepreneurs here, and there are local VCs, and there are many people working on Web 2.0 and general tech stuff. Recently, there was a local Barcamp here in Buenos Aires too.

There are many, many local startups here, and of course we are all latino here. So I'm not sure the question makes a lot of sense...

merrick333• 18 years ago

hhm please contact me at:

uclawins at gmail dot com

-Merrick

pchristensen• 18 years ago

Reg Braithwaite is a developer at startup Mobile Commons (weblog.raganwald.com www.mcommons.com)

Hank Williams is working on an unannounced startup (http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/ ).

They're from Toronto and NYC. Maybe it's a coincidence of demographics - many startups and most of startup culture are in Silicon Valley, most people there are white or Asian.

Ask YC: Are there any black or latino founded startups?

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