What to say when someone is being an asshole

http://www.karenx.com/blog/what-to-say-when-someone-is-being-an-asshole/

by karenxcheng • 12 years ago

90 135 12 years ago

mrkurt• 12 years ago

This is a good thing to do when you think someone is being an asshole. It gives them a chance to recognize if they are, and you a chance to recognize if they're not.

re_todd• 12 years ago

Great point. In the past, I've often been too willing to take offense and taken things the wrong way. Then when I get home, I realize they didn't mean it the way I initially thought they did, and it was too late to take back my negative response.

pelario• 12 years ago

The point is to calmly verify if the person was aware that he is behaving as an asshole.

If he was not, not only the communication improves; you also make the guy a favor.

makomk• 12 years ago

The only downside is that, if he was doing it deliberately, it's going to make him even more unbearable to deal with.

chomp• 12 years ago

But having a child is a -huge- commitment- I don't think I'd be able to have one, and run a business at the same time. Sleepless nights devoted to the baby, medical concerns, etc. all of those are large factors that weigh on the effectiveness of a leader.

I do agree that most of this stuff is ingrained behavior that most people know is wrong, asking for a clarification usually can snap them out of it.

eli12• 12 years ago

I can't believe this needs saying, but discriminating against mothers is wrong (and likely illegal!) no matter how hard you might imagine it would be to be one.

argumentum17• 12 years ago

It's certainly not illegal to decline an investment opportunity because a founder is pregnant or just had a child. No one can force you to invest in something if you don't want to.

It may be stupid to turn down a great founder for this reason, it may be ass-holish, but it's not illegal.

baddox17• 12 years ago

The gender is irrelevant. The same would go for an expecting father. I don't think it is wrong for investors to discriminate on the basis of the priorities and time commitments of founders. On the contrary, I think such discrimination is crucial.

wavefunction2• 12 years ago

Run a business or start a business? People have been doing this exact thing for thousands of years, so maybe you're selling yourself short or you don't have what it takes.

abalone8• 12 years ago

"Medical concerns, etc."? What do you mean?

As for sleepless nights (mostly just for a couple months after birth), name a founder that doesn't have sleepless nights.

DavidSJ• 12 years ago

I gather the huge commitment you're referring to goes way beyond the pregnancy itself and extends to the actual parenting. In which case, why discriminate against moms but not dads? Why can a male founder have a kid but not a female one?

lmm• 12 years ago

Because statistically a mother is likely to spend much more of their time on childcare than a father. And since you're not allowed to ask questions about their intentions, the statistics are all you can go on.

brador2• 12 years ago

Question is, does pregnancy affect viability of an investment?

In my opinion, yes. Sleepless nights, days off taking the child to medical appointments. This isn't magic and you can't wish these things away. It's hard to run a startup, it's even harder when you're not sleeping well. Just my opinion.

Edit - I covered post-pregnancy here, which also applies to fathers, my bad. The women only part would be the hormones and lack of sleep from around t-6 months.

eli12• 12 years ago

What do you mean?

maxharris2• 12 years ago

You shouldn't use this phrase as a way to shut down arguments you don't agree with, without any attempt at explaining yourself further. He gave several reasons in his explanation, and you're not challenging any specific aspect of his response. Try again with a detailed query or argument, not an ad hominem.

PhasmaFelis3• 12 years ago

You're doing it wrong.

yummyfajitas9• 12 years ago

But it is useless for the vc to say so. It might harm the relationship (and possibly his reputation), but will gain him nothing.

The profit maximizing way for him to move forward is to quietly take the possibility of pregnancy into account with future investments.

eli12• 12 years ago

Not to belabor the point, but the reason saying these things can harm a reputation is that they are bad things to say. They suggest poor character. I go out of my way to avoid people I believe to be sexist or racist.

Not saying offensive things loudly is a good start, but if you want to maximize being a decent human being you should also not discriminate against women quietly -- or at all.

abalone8• 12 years ago

Guess fathers can't be founders then.

gizmo686• 12 years ago

No, it means that being a father (negatively) influences your ability to be a successful founder. Like any other barrier, this can be overcome.

To get to the question I think you are trying to raise, it does seem like gender has a non-zero effect on this influence. Even ignoring the fact that, for likely cultural reasons, mothers tend to spend more time with their children, being pregnant itself presents something of a (short term) barrier. Again, it should be quiet possible to overcome this barrier, but not by pretending it does not exist.

Undoubtedly, one could make a case that being a parent is actually a benefit towards being a successful founder.

simcop2387• 12 years ago

In that same vein I've known many a new father has very similar difficulties that would likely be a factor in worrying about the investment. I think it's largely a cultural issue that men don't usually take the same amount of leave (either at the same time or later to help deal with the new born). That said if I was investing and the founder was alone and planning on starting a family soon would probably turn me off unless they had a co-founder that I felt could take over during that time.

vacri• 12 years ago

days off taking the child to medical appointments

Isn't this post-pregnancy? Isn't the father in the same boat here?

taspeotis• 12 years ago

What to say when someone is being sexist^

If someone's being a dick to piss you off saying these magic words might inflame the situation.

Best to keep them to examples of sexism.

jgrahamc• 12 years ago

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.

yummyfajitas9• 12 years ago

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.

sillysaurus3• 12 years ago

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.)

abalone8• 12 years ago

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.

aaronbrethorst• 12 years ago

false dichotomy unless you're being, in the words of the author, an "asshole."

skndr• 12 years ago

Founders aren't fungible.

trentmb• 12 years ago

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).

Whatever, we're both speaking out of our asses.

jakejake• 12 years ago

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.

baddox17• 12 years ago

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.

bifrost• 12 years ago

As someone who's recently had a child, and who's been through several startups; I think this is excellent.

I've made the offhand comparason of having a child to working for a variety of 1990's startups, I'm an ops guy and craptastic perl code made my sleep schedule less than ideal. I optimized and my life got easier.

The training from that made dealing with the wakeups a lot easier, and my wife and I worked out a schedule.

Working for a startup, like having a baby, requires good partners. If you don't have a good partner(s), life becomes significantly more complicated and I am not sure I'd recommend it.

Ask me about my ops strategy, stuff I design generally can do 99.999 uptime.

cgriswald• 12 years ago

This is a very useful and adult tool for dealing with these types of situations, but the child in me will always want a witty retort, usually in the form of a quote from The Princess Bride.

wavefunction2• 12 years ago

Don't finance people (at least Wall Street) pride themselves on being big swinging dicks? I'd give them a chance in private to fix things, then I'd put them on public blast. By that I mean go to their partners or whatever.

I don't know, I'm just a simple country programmer, your big city ways frighten and confuse me!

millstone• 12 years ago

Was the first investor an asshole for thinking what he did, or for voicing that thought?

If it was for voicing the thought, is there a more delicate way he should have phrased it? Or should he have just kept his mouth shut, denying her useful (if insensitive) feedback?

eli12• 12 years ago

There is no delicate or acceptable way of providing blatantly sexist feedback.

peteforde4• 12 years ago

I think it's amazing that people would debate whether to fund a company led by a hard-working mother when nobody questions the logic of funding a company run by someone who worships a malevolent invisible sky wizard.

Warren Buffett figured out that hiring women was all-win long before most. Kudos to him.

argumentum17• 12 years ago

Why do you say no one would question that logic? If a founder ended his pitch claiming that his startup would succeed because he prayed all the time, I'm pretty sure questions would be in order (along with a polite decline).

peteforde4• 12 years ago

Fair point; I don't think we disagree.

Essentially I was trying to make the point that as a non-religious individual, it's always wild to me how people can find the time to ponder whether a woman would have the audacity to start a family while building a company, but nobody questions a founder that worships a paranormal creator entity. Lots of people do both, yet somehow it's becoming a mother that is considered crazy.

And, I was trying to say it without being an asshole myself.

eli12• 12 years ago

The founder in the original story did not end her pitch by claiming her business was likely to succeed because she intended to become a mother.

eaurouge• 12 years ago

Do you think people should question the logic of religious investors investing in companies run by atheist founders?

And what does this have to do with the posted topic?

Edit:

I'm finding it hard reconciling what you said below [0] with what you said above.

0. Yep - I am not a big Dawkins fan. He does a lot of damage to the image of non-religious people, because he's such a jerk to the people he disagrees with.

peteforde4• 12 years ago

It's late and I should probably not try to make coherent statements concerning politics and religion after 4am.

I've had intelligent religious folks suggest to me that they are shocked I'm not a jerk, because so many of the prominent atheists in popular culture are jerks. Dawkins is a primary offender: he has a hard time answering any question without sounding smug and superior.

This is a problem for me because I believe that he's mostly correct in his assertions.

However: people don't remember what you say, they remember how they felt after you said it.

baddox17• 12 years ago

Ah right. The guy in the article was making an insensitive comment towards the wrong group of people. We shouldn't be insensitive towards women, we should be insensitive towards religious people.

hartie• 12 years ago

"I think it's amazing that people would debate whether to fund a company led by a hard-working mother when nobody questions the logic of funding a company run by someone who worships a malevolent invisible sky wizard."

Yet here you are. Debating.

k-mcgrady• 12 years ago

> "I think it's amazing that people would debate whether to fund a company led by a hard-working mother when nobody questions the logic of funding a company run by someone who worships a malevolent invisible sky wizard."

How is that comparison at all valid?

Being a mother is obviously going to take up a lot of your time and energy. Startups require a lot of time and energy. Doing both is difficult (although not impossible). Belief in a god is something most people do for an hour on the weekend. It's unlikely to impact the startup at all.

abalone8• 12 years ago

I'm a founder with a young child. It's awesome. You can't do it alone obviously but with a partner and a support system it's totally doable. Even the sleepless night thing is mostly contained to the first couple months.

"What do you mean" is a nice easy response. I like it. It's not going to stop all assholes but it will filter out the ones are are ashamed of themselves, which is probably a lot. What it won't stop is the ones with pernicious superficial rationalizations for excluding women.. the "short people shouldn't be firefighters" crowd.

rib3ye• 12 years ago

She knows what they mean...

gcb0• 12 years ago

the only difference is that male founders can try to hide their "pregnancy". an investor would shun both a male if he knew a baby was on the way.

of course not saying said investor is right, but that is probably what happen. not really a sexist thing though.

DanBC• 12 years ago

I'm always surprised in threads like these that people express ideas that leave them open to legal action in the future.

I hope those people have rigorous documentation for hiring people and that reasons for rejection are kept on record.

angelortega• 12 years ago

tl;dr

Stop being an asshole.

lazyjones• 12 years ago

Perfect example of a dumb investor who thinks he has a better idea of how to run the company than the founders themselves. I'm quite certain that bad influences of such investors have broken more startups' backs than pregnancies.

Founders, please choose your investors well.

Mz2• 12 years ago

I am not a fan of the framing here. This is not about someone "being an asshole." This is about someone opening mouth and inserting foot. Okay, so when men unthinkingly default to stupid assumptions and phrasing, it can seriously hurt women. The fact that women get hurt doesn't mean the harm was intentional, malicious, etc.

What the investor said was probably just the uncomfortable truth coming out. IIRC, Paul Graham has made remarks not terribly unlike that. A lot of investors are leery of investing a woman of child-bearing age. Is that "unfair" to women? Perhaps. But I don't think saying it after the fact is "being an asshole." He did invest in her company. Now she needs to preform, baby or no baby.

This piece is not about "people being assholes." It is about men opening mouth and inserting foot, probably fairly innocently in both cases cited. A lot of remarks of that ilk are not intended as hostile. I think the phrase "what do you mean?" is probably a good one to use in such situations but I really think this article with this ugly title rooted in ugly assumptions does women more harm than good.

What to say when someone is being an asshole

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