Study: Attractive men fare best in gaining venture capital

http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/study-says-attractive-men-fare-best-in-gaining-venture-capital

by rbanffy • 11 years ago

56 35 11 years ago

newsoffice.mit.edu

d357r0y3r• 11 years ago

New study: Attractive people fare best in getting what they want

d0m• 11 years ago

Attractive "anything" fare best in gaining "everything".

NhanH2• 11 years ago

I remember reading that attractive women is discriminated against in certain situation, fundraising being one of those (men will probably do better in fundraising). Although in aggregate of everything in life, I wouldn't be surprised if they (attractive women) still fare better than ugly "anything".

TazeTSchnitzel2• 11 years ago

So in the stuff that doesn't matter, attractive women do better, but in the big picture, they do worse?

So uh, they do worse, then.

donw2• 11 years ago

As I am generally interested in reading raw data about issues like this, care to provide a source?

jz10• 11 years ago

except for medical care apparently

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150213-the-downsides-of-be...

adubashi• 11 years ago

"What's the most important factor in making partner at McKinsey? A good hairline."

brookside• 11 years ago

Balding is the most depressing thing. Wish I had started taking Finasteride years ago when I decided the risks weren't worth it.

chatmasta• 11 years ago

Just shave it off. Bald heads have actually been shown to be a positive status indicator, probably because it takes serious confidence to pre-emptively shave off all your hair. Besides, I've always thought bald heads look way better than a head with patches of hair on it.

enzoferrizi• 11 years ago

Balding is the most depressing thing.

Being a young man who's balding might seem depressing, but I can certainly think of something far more depressing. Propecia's labeling was recently updated to say that erectile dysfunction may be permanent, even if you stop taking the drug.

meow_mix• 11 years ago

Study: Another Thing You'd Think To Be Correct Is Correct

TazeTSchnitzel2• 11 years ago

Another success for "merit"ocracy.

raspasov• 11 years ago

"Attractiv"ocracy

ForHackernews• 11 years ago

Hooray for rational and efficient markets!

letstryagain• 11 years ago

We knew this already.

apsec112• 11 years ago

I have zero trouble believing that VCs are biased, but this is a terrible terrible study.

First, their study collected literally zero data about venture capitalists. Their first experiment looked at "pitch competitions", where people give speeches and/or submit business plans to a set of judges, and the judges pick a winner. This is distinct from events like Demo Day because there is no follow-up or due diligence: choices are made solely based on the speech/written plan. For obvious reasons, these "competitions" usually don't involve serious money. Picking three at random from Google, the first prizes were $1,000, $3,000, and "a meeting with Andreesen Horowitz", plus a bunch of discounts from Rackspace and so on.

The second and third experiments were even sillier. They literally recruited a bunch of random people on Mechanical Turk, asked them to watch a pitch video, and then asked them to judge which company they thought was more likely to succeed.

And even if you did a study showing that VCs invested in men more often, that wouldn't mean VCs are biased: you have to control for a bunch of other factors too. If, eg. startup employees preferred to work for companies run by attractive men, a perfectly unbiased VC would invest in attractive men more often, just because their companies were objectively doing better.

Here's a link to the original paper: http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/Brooks%20Huan...

roymurdock• 11 years ago

I'm not sure if there's any quicker and more effective way to draw a metric ton of scrutiny and skepticism on a study than to have the two words "mechanical turk" somewhere in your paper. Classic.

woah• 11 years ago

How is it worse than recruiting random undergrads?

dylanjermiah3• 11 years ago

Even in this discussion thread people value the headline more than they value the legitmacy of the study or the truth.

orthoganol• 11 years ago

Maybe attractive people (that is, clean cut, white attractive people) are more likely to come from upper middle class backgrounds, which means they already have substantial money supporting them their entire lives, so they not only fit in better, but are in much better positions to be starting companies & pitching VCs.

sportanova• 11 years ago

Time to start a fund that only invests in ugly people. "ButterFace Ventures' investment thesis entails value generation through arbitraging network effects across the lower end of the visual anthropomorphic spectrum"

vasilipupkin• 11 years ago

I am fundraising for a new VC fund called FUBU. For ugly by ugly.

calbear81• 11 years ago

Doomed to fail from an evolutionary standpoint.

001sky• 11 years ago

Ha. That's only because nobody (rationaly) wants to negotiate with a beautiful woman.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/relationships/11707591/Why-me...

xacaxulu• 11 years ago

Now we should also test the 'blondes have more fun' hypothesis :-D

moridinamael• 11 years ago

Water wet, more at eleven

dilipd• 11 years ago

If getting VC funding is considered partly as a sales job, then Bill Porter's story may be interesting. Consistency in 'top selling' requires qualities like determination & efforts. Natural born 'attractive people' generally are not inclined to put in that extra effort just because they, in their lives so far, probably didn't need to.

Wiki: Bill Porter born with cerebral palsy, was unable to gain employment, but refused to go on disability. Porter eventually convinced Watkins Incorporated to give him a door-to-door salesman job, selling its products on a seven-mile route in the Portland area. He eventually became the top seller for the company.

reagency• 11 years ago

Porter also likely benefited from emotionally manipulating his clients to buy stuff out of a sense of charity. That works on the general public face to face, but not other parts of industry.

Study: Attractive men fare best in gaining venture capital

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