Absolutely feels that way... but it may also be VITAL.
The first (really only) goal of a company is to not die. I call this the SHL rule - as it was recommended several times to SHL that he kill off Gumroad.
Who can kill a company varies over time. Initially, that is likely 100% the founders. Either giving up, feuding or running out of money. Then investors/debtors have the power to kill a company off. Finally, and every company should be so lucky to reach this level, acquirers/bankers/Government can kill off a company. Making sure you don't die - and knowing who has the power to kill you off - should be prioritised at (almost) any cost.
As an example, I once had a client who spent $X0K a month on AdWords for one keyword exact matched. It generated almost no revenue. The main investor would Google this one word, and if the site did not rank 1st both paid and organic, he'd threaten to pull all future funding. The company was loss making at that time, so that would have killed it off. I moved that one keyword into it's own AdGroup, called it "Investor Relations", never talked about it again, and years later the company was sold for $X0,000,000.
I have been able to do just a handful of freelance-gigs outside of my desired field but between bad experiences (payment was 6 months late once) and life kicking me while I'm down, I've just been seeking some stability.
This never gets enough visibility among freelancers / contractors / consultants - it can be really hard to get paid and for smaller amounts of money it often would take too much in legal fees to actually get paid.
This is an important one, as is a clause in your contract that will force them to pay legal fees in the event you have to sue to get them to pay.
>Don’t work until payment is made?
I'm a fan of arrangements where clients pay something up front, then receive work, then pay the rest. No client in their right mind is going to pay the whole amount up front and frankly nor should they. But, if they pay 50% up front, you do work, and then they decide to stiff you for the final payment, you'd better have a good lawyer and a tight contract.
You can't exactly not work until payment is made, simply because the field is too crowded. So in the starting of a project, you desperately go to a bidding war against the competition where you either compromise on your time or your money or something else of yours. Whether you get paid or not becomes a backseat priority. Offering a discount for early payment is one sort of those things, and let's be honest, most clients value the optionality of not paying at all over paying a discount. Charging an interest on late payments needs to be explicitly mentioned during the bidding process, and that will draw the client away in an already crowded field.
In my experience, a lot of corporate entities have bad rules like "30 days to review patches before they go live", or "no patches not reviewed by team X" that slow down changes. These sorts of caveats are both hard to change, and even harder to circumvent, because big companies make change difficult as they usually have more to lose than to gain.
If you look at the article, it matches this idea:
> ... Mr. Smith referred to an “individual” in Equifax’s technology department who had failed to heed security warnings and did not ensure the implementation of software fixes that would have prevented the breach.
I doubt one individual is responsible for every patch in the organisation, and I reckon that Equifax likely has many individuals each responsible for different systems, all of whom have to deal with a central security department before they can, well, patch their system. I further bet the internal politics are off the chart, and the security team is a "no, you can't do that" department who makes things worse.
I put money on there being plenty of "individuals" who are each responsible for patching different systems at Equifax, and while this particular breach was in system X, A-W might, at another time, have been the epicentre of a breach for similar reasons related to internal processes that make moving fast nigh on impossible.
Now, while that's no excuse, I think the fault is likely not the individual who missed the patch, but the interaction between departments with different goals (political and practical) combined with an internal structure that makes changes glacially slow, and this sort of breach inevitable.
> – The numbers of hours worked by low-wage workers fell by 3.5 million hours per quarter. This was reflected both in thousands of job losses and reductions in hours worked by those who retained their jobs.
>
> – The losses were so dramatic that this increase “reduced income paid to low-wage employees of single-location Seattle businesses by roughly $120 million on an annual basis.” On average, low-wage workers lost $125 per month. The minimum wage has always been a lousy income transfer program, but at this level you’d come out ahead just setting a hundred million dollars a year on fire. And that’s before we get into who kept vs lost their jobs.
When laws with one goal achieve the exact opposite, we need to rethink the laws. Unfortunately, pyrrhic victories are rather common in politics.
Is any of this supported by evidence that "a big chunk of the economy (will be) powered by gigs"? I doubt it is true, and I believe your conclusion is likely off, even though I agree with (what I think are) your implied goals. Let me explain why.
> I wish the new tech entrepreneurs would find a better way to fix the low skill problem rather than find a way to reduce services/costs to the bone.
I doubt these low skill workers are the gig economy workers. Many people on AirBnB are doing fairly well, as no one wants to stay in the Ghetto, and the places with high take up are relatively well off places (London, NYC, SF). Ditto Uber, which requires a car under a certain age - is it 5 years? - not the sort of bombs truly poor people have.
> Just who are minimum-wage workers, anyway? ... people at or below the federal minimum are:
> Disproportionately young: 50.4% are ages 16 to 24; 24% are teenagers (ages 16 to 19).
> Mostly (77%) white; nearly half are white women.
> Largely part-time workers (64% of the total).
The problem isn't that minimum wage is unlivable - it is that some people can't get a job. Increasing minimum wage doesn't help people who can't get a job at all.
Similarly, the gig economy isn't reducing the cost of services for people who currently do it. Rather, it is an extra source for people who already make OK money. There aren't a lot of poor people living in the Haidt, or NYC, two places where I have taken AirBnB places, and there aren't a lot of people looking to rent a room in Gary, Indiana. Or Nairobi. Or Soweto.
That's the real issue - not the cost reductions in rich areas, but finding a way to engage people who don't have a way in to the economy at all. I'd say this is not even a low skilled issue, I'd almost say it os a no skilled, combined with a no history (as in no work history) workers' problem. The gig economy isn't really affecting these people, as it seems more likely to me to be a way to prop up middle class people and make their lives slightly better, rather than a way-in for these almost-no-skilled workers.
Just as an increase in minimum wage isn't the panacea to poverty alleviation, if it does much of anything at all, so addressing the gig economy, when so many of the means of making money have rather high barriers to entry, isn't going to fix much.
I have no answers BTW, I just think the suppliers to the gig economy aren't the group - poor, low skilled people - that is the common perception, and this mis-alignment of who we need to help and HOW we help them is sending people in the wrong direction.
The massive-growth-model of startups dictates "YOY, double revenue on a 50% cost increase. Rinse and repeat until profitable". As long as the funding holds out, this model is mathematically sound.
Uber is well on track for this from the (admitted dodgy) numbers I have seen - those being summarized here http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/14/technology/uber-financials/i.... Uber is (again, rumoured) to have doubled revenue in 2016, with a reported $6.5B net revenue, and a loss of $2.8B for ~$9.3B in costs. Double and 50% those numbers, and you get $13B, and about $12.2B, or ~$1B in profit.
Agree, but it's also not purely linear predicted growth. There are sunk costs to assist greater than linear growth. Uber without drivers surely has to be a killer business. Radio controlled by GPS "ai" "driverless" taxi with near zero customer service. Throw in electric vehicles, again cost is rapidly approaching near zero. Throw in bulk purchasing, 247 service, almost zero fuel costs and you've upended logistics. It's worth a punt to see if it can happen. One mans opinion, your mileage may vary, objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear.
Not "an", as in singular measure, no. But what about several? Is there a single metric for "heathy"? Someone can be OK in almost all ways but have a broken leg. Are they "healthy" by a single metric? What about diabetes that is managed? Can you think of any field in life where there is a singular metric for performance? If not, why does the non-existence of a singular metric in tech invalidate the idea?
And what about in reverse? What if, rather than finding the "best", we merely have a metric/s that weed out the worst? If I remove the bottom 15% effectively, and replace them with average performers, then the net gain is massive, especially as each extra bug introduced is a massive time sink for any team, and poor developers are a massive cause of that.
That's pretty rare! Almost all great teams have great players - and the teams that don't, usually have chronically underrated players, e.g. the Pistons with Ben Wallace - one of the greatest defenders ever.
HOWEVER, I will say that, rather than a great team, strategic / tactical innovation can cover for flaws. The Sydney Swans pioneered "flooding" and made a grand final with a sub-standard team. Next season though, the league caught up and the Swans did poorly. It wasn't the team or the players that got there, rather it was a tactical innovation, and that is usually short lived.
In similar ways, a coding change - new library, microservices etc can all be short term gains. Ultimately, though, when everyone starts using those tactics, what you want is the best people, fullstop.
That's pretty rare! Almost all great teams have great players
You're disagreeing with something I never said.
Imagine you're a baseball GM. You decide to build a winning roster by taking an unlimited amount of money, and then identifying the statistically best left fielder, the statistically best center fielder, the statistically best right fielder, and so on through all the field positions. You also identify the five statistically best starting pitchers, etc., and sign all of them.
There are franchises which try this "just sign a bunch of superstars, they have to win because they're so good" approach, and the track record of that approach is very, very mixed. But "just sign a bunch of superstars" is basically how tech companies claim they try to hire.
These articles also sell it without a solution. "It isn't X, it is Y. I have no idea how to fix Y, or a single policy idea to suggest, but, yeh, definitely Y."
> This is the official study that was commissioned several years ago by the city of Seattle to study the impacts of raising the minimum wage, in a move that I applauded at the time as an honest and transparent attempt towards self-examination of a bold policy.
> The losses were so dramatic that this increase "reduced income paid to low-wage employees of single-location Seattle businesses by roughly $120 million on an annual basis." On average, low-wage workers lost $125 per month.
So the official government study found this to be an horrific law for the poor. So we'll accept this, roll it back and move on yeh? Of course not!
> This paper not only makes numerous valuable contributions to the economics literature, but should give serious pause to minimum wage advocates. Of course, that's not what's happening, to the extent that the mayor of Seattle commissioned another study, by an advocacy group at Berkeley whose previous work on the minimum wage is so consistently one-sided that you can set your watch by it, that unsurprisingly finds no effect. They deliberately timed its release for several days before this paper came out, and I find that whole affair abhorrent. Seattle politicians are so unwilling to accept reality that they'll undermine their own researchers and waste taxpayer dollars on what is barely a cut above propoganda (sic).
Now, here's a policy aimed directly at the poor, that we are researching well, and the findings are being thrown out because, well why if not because "my feelings". Maybe it is because the political climate won;t accept the decision, but how is that better than climate deniers on the right? It seems to me both sides of politics are deniers of inconvenient truths.
So I am done with articles that aim to explain, raise awareness, shine a light on etc. I want tangible, actionable policy with a measurement framework in place that we as a society both believe and accept. If society tries a UBI, and it proves bad for society for what ever pre-decided reason, we should ditch it. Policy -> measurement -> keep or drop -> repeat. That's what I want.
> I expect less VCs to take meetings with women, sadly.
Why? There's a really simple procedure that can solve these problems:
Don't hit on, feel-up, or try to have sex with people you're in a professional business relationship with. That goes double for people you hold power over (managers to employees, VCs to Founders, etc).
If you're really truly worried about false accusations then here's another fix you can have for free: record your meetings, texts, emails, and calls with founders and/or don't meet alone.
I expect smart VCs that are interested in making money (as opposed to lording it over others or using their position to get sex) will continue to take lots of meetings with women.
> If you're really truly worried about false accusations then here's another fix you can have for free: record your meetings, texts, emails, and calls with founders and/or don't meet alone.
It's not so easy. Bullshit accusations leaking on Twitter will be halfway to destroying your career before you even dig up the original recordings, and I doubt anyone will want to listen to your case anyway (if anything, they'll comb over your recordings with a tootbrush to prove you were guilty of this, and a bunch of other things). I too expect VCs to be less willing to expose themselves to such danger.
Do you know what amazes me about comments like yours? You don't have to agree with a course of action to accept the reality that certain things will happen.
> I expect smart VCs that are interested in making money ... will continue to take lots of meetings with women.
OK, so ON NET what do you expect to happen? Lets say I agree and the smart ones take the meetings, what about the dumb ones? Or the average ones? What is the net result of all those different levels of VCs? Less or more meetings for women?
Again, "You don't have to agree with a course of action to accept the reality that certain things will happen".
> "If you're really truly worried about false accusations then here's another fix you can have for free: record your meetings, texts, emails, and calls with founders and/or don't meet alone."
Well, there are two problems with that.
1 - It puts the burden of proof on the accused. I.E. it totally throws out of the window what has become a de facto human right and an universally established legal one in every democracy: "Innocent until proven guilty", into a: "Guilty until you can shows us some footage that proves you are not guilty" (which let's face it, it's basically impossible if the accuser is lying on purpose and knows how to do things).
2 - In America I think you are free to record other people interacting with you or in your office/home (perhaps some American can clarify this), but in many other countries, specially in most of EU, that's a crime. You can't go around recording people unless they are of public interest and in a public situation or they expressly consent to it.
It may or may not be legal to record conversations in the U.S. depending on the state, and depending on whether or not other people consent to being recorded. California has 2-party consent law when it comes to recording conversations. In other words, it's a crime to record a conversation with another person and not tell them: https://www.google.com/search?q=california+conversaion+recor....
(Law enforcement is exempt from this restriction, of course).
As has been pointed out, no one is suggesting non-consensual recording. Starting a meeting with, "do you mind if I record this?" is hardly alien.
As for burden of proof, I don't see it. It's like saying that asking people to lock their houses is a burden, when thieves are the criminals.
If you are a VC having a meeting with a founder, arrange for for more than 2 people to be there, such as a co-VC, a co-founder, a secretary, or whoever. Are business meetings with 3 people suddenly a human rights violation?
The burden argument seems really disingenuous given the context. This is a business meeting, not picking dinner with your friends, and the process is full of negotiation, records, and witnesses. Would anyone protest writing down terms or having a secretary at the meeting to avoid the chance of a contractual dispute later?
> "As for burden of proof, I don't see it. It's like saying that asking people to lock their houses is a burden, when thieves are the criminals."
This is surely the poorest analogy I've ever read in my all life, comparing a burglar trying to enter your house with someone falsely accusing you of something.
What about the burden of proof you don't see if you go casually dressed to shop in some fancy shop and they falsely accuse you of trying to shoplift and you - oh bummer - didn't record everything?
You also don't see any burden of proof on you if you go to some corrupt country and the police falsely stops you for speeding and you didn't record your all trip after the moment you got there (though luck, if you didn't record everything is because you surely did something wrong)? You don't see that burden of proof on you, right?
> I expect less VCs to take meetings with women, sadly.
Why? There's a really simple procedure that can solve these problems:
Don't hit on, feel-up, or try to have sex with people you're in a professional business relationship with. That goes double for people you hold power over (managers to employees, VCs to Founders, etc).
If you're really truly worried about false accusations then here's another fix you can have for free: record your meetings, texts, emails, and calls with founders and/or don't meet alone.
The previous comment didn't allude to illegal recording of conversations without consent. The suggestion was to ensure there was a record of all interactions.
If I'm a VC and I've scheduled a meeting at my office it is as simple as letting the party I'm meeting with know that I had planned on recording for my archives.
Nothing unusual or sketchy about the request, especially in a business setting.
Because VCs are all populated by serial harassers who now realize they can't get away with this crap?
Or are you saying these will be seen as false accusations and thus it'll scare off VCs who aren't run by mysogynist pieces of sh-t?
Because I'm not sure what the alternative is. If a VC is not in the habit of harassing women, they have nothing to fear. In fact, it'll give them an opportunity to court talented entrepreneurs driven away from the immoral part of the VC spectrum.
Everyone has plenty to fear. Any sexual harassment/rape accusations (no matter how untrue) are incredibly damaging, it's very biased towards the accuser.
The people who actually do this shit are scumbags, but there's plenty who will take advantage of this when things don't go their way, and reputation damage is worse than physical for a lot of people.
Sure, if you completely ignore the cultural context.
Rape and sexual assault (of women) is seen as one of the worst possible crimes[0] a man can commit in most Western societies[1]. These crimes are so heinous that even accusations are enough to destroy someone's career and social status, even if the accusations are dropped or proven false.
This is further complicated by these crimes generally being very difficult to prove without recorded evidence and eyewitnesses, creating a dilemma of either treating the accusation as fact (foregoing "innocent until proven guilty") or risking that a criminal can avoid consequences and may go on to repeat his crime. The media often favors the former, people close to the accused often prefer the latter, although even a disproven allegation can sow permanent doubt.
There aren't many crimes a VC could be falsely accused of that have the possibility of such dire consequences and such a low burden of proof.
[0]: The only crime I can think of that society treats as worse than sexual abuse of women is sexual abuse of children.
[1]: This isn't about the relative severity of legal punishments, or in any way a judgement on what crime is "less bad" than another, just how people (and the media) generally react to people being charged with these crimes.
Since the current president celebrates his past assaults on women with no consequences, and threatens his accusers, again with no consequences, and Cosby was recently freed, your thesis that mere accusations damage prominent men rings hollow. The exact opposite is true.
It is so damaging for the women involved (career, socially, and withstanding the barrage of slander, misogyny and distrust that they always seem to face) that it is very hard to step up and simply tell the truth, and you are part of the problem here, with your needless insinuations about false accusations and talk of a low burden of proof.
The cultural context is pretty much the exact opposite. The cultural context is that men with power tend to get away with sexual harassment of subordinates for years before anyone gets caught. Only when there is a mountain of evidence and a small army of accusers does the world actually believe them.
For all of the VCs described in this story - this was a pattern, corroborated by independent sources, and with details in writing. There is in fact a very high burden of proof before anyone even gets blasted in the mainstream media, let alone fired.
I think the distinction that can be made is that allegations of sexual abuse of women are less damaging in some cases than others. That the people in question were able to "get away with it" says more about how their character is generally perceived from the onset than about society in general.
It's true that society is ridiculously "tolerant" of gross misconduct of some people more than others but there are enough examples of lives being ruined by false allegations to validate my original point.
As a sibling comment pointed out, Trump was elected despite his "locker room talk" and multiple women alleging sexual abuse (plus the actual chauvinism he has displayed on numerous occasions). However I would wager that similar allegations would be far more damaging if leveled against someone like Sanders.
There's also the effect that successive allegations sometimes even reduce the credibility of the allegations because of suspected bandwagoning ("Oh, she just wants some of that attention to make herself interesting").
Humans are fickle and irrational, especially when in a group. Individuals tend to be treated differently but this tends to be more about social status than gender itself.
Donglegate wasn't about false accusations, though. It was about a woman publicly shaming two other attendees for what she considered inappropriate jokes in a public setting and then being caught in the blowback when other people were unhappy with how she handled the situation.
Her accusations were factual, although there was discussion about whether they were valid.
Also, the people who agree that her accusations were valid, are also likely the people who think that their behavior was indicative of them being serial harassers.
>The people getting in trouble right now are not the borderline cases of someone saying an awkward comment here or there.
>Also, the people who agree that her accusations were valid, are also likely the people who think that their behavior was indicative of them being serial harassers.
Which is completely unreasonable. Do you remember what she complained about them saying? Dongles and forking repos? They were discussing among themselves, it wasn't targeted at anyone, and any reasonable person wouldn't believe it was sexist.
And IMO the majority of people on the internet were supportive of the guy who got fired, and also thought it was bullshit.
The woman who started the whole drama received way worse retaliation from the Internet mob (which was partially deserved) and got fired as well, so it was tit for tat at least, although that of course doesn't fix the damages.
Are you suggesting the false sexual harassment / rape accusations never happen? I think there are some athletes from Duke who were subject to character assassination and would entirely disagree with you.
It is a significant number. For example in Hardvard campus 20% of the allegations were determined to be false[0]; but this is a controversial subject and the numbers all over the place[1] from state to state and even more from country to country but overall most quote numbers that are not an insignificant number.
You are placing normative (meaning "you should do") moral judgements on a descriptive (meaning "this will happen") moral statement.
My prediction isn't what SHOULD happen, but what I think WILL happen. My personal opinion on what is morally right? As I'm not a VC, utterly unimportant and redundant.
I think you're right. It's "unlawful" but handled civilly.
While looking up the relevant law, I looked through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of sex and various other things, and discovered that there is an explicit exception written in to the law for members of the Communist Party. So you can totally discriminate against any commies who might try to work for you. Not really relevant here, but so weird I just had to share.
Jeez, the Cold War was a strange time. The exception seems especially weird since political party affiliation wasn't a protected class in the law to begin with. I guess that meant you legally could say, "We only hire non-Communists, regardless of sex/race/religion/...; and white Communist Jain men of Estonian origin."
I wonder if it was just a "safeguard" against members of CPUSA claiming their membership was a religious affiliation.
It sounds like it was an amendment introduced by a confused lawmaker who wanted to make sure the law wouldn't stop companies from firing Communists. The amendment was then accepted on the basis that it didn't make any difference (since as you note party affiliation isn't protected in the first place), so it wouldn't do any harm to include it.
Unfortunately I suspect you're right, at least in the shortish term. The culture in general does seem to be making progress in (fits and starts) this area, but it's gonna take a while.
this response would be as short lived as it is short sighted -- not taking into account that eventually.soon their bias would be measurable and again turn into ethical and PR nightmares for VC's that dont find a way to manage their male problem
Any VC whose reaction to this is "oh I guess I should avoid taking meetings with women because I just can't know what goof will cause me to get sued" is probably already making some women uncomfortable.
If you cannot understand how _stupidly easy_ it is to have a completely non-sexual, non-harassing conversation with a member of the opposite sex, you most definitely should read up on some stuff. I mean this in the most non-snarky way possible.
Wouldn't it be nice if half the population weren't completely turned off by the idea of talking to anyone in tech?
Sales at my company is female dominated, I'm in building next door so I run into them all the time, I just treat them as any other member of staff, politely but otherwise as an amorphous blob.
I don't socialise with work mates outside of work events either, lines get crossed when you do in a alcohol orientated culture like mine.
It's worked fine for me for 19 years employed.
Had one female former colleague assume I was gay because I never hit on her (and she was attractive).
Nope, just not interested in bollocking up a good work environment, it was interesting to watch the dynamic though.
My simple rules for work.
Treat everyone equally, small stuff matters, I went out for coffee and went and asked the cleaner if he wanted one, he looked surprised.
Don't gossip ever, just don't. Leave the conversation if someone else starts.
Be on time, meet deadlines, let boss know as soon as you know you won't.
Be professional, you might know a customer for years but they are still Mr Smith until they say 'call me Bob'.
When a boss makes what you think is a poor decision (business reasons, moral reasons etc) get it in writing.
Always send a recap email after meetings, misunderstandings cost less the earlier you catch them (much like bugs).
Great list. Its interesting how good ideas for how to conduct yourself in a business environment will naturally exclude creepy and/or harassing behavior AND will also leave far less room and opportunity for false accusations to take root.
Its not foolproof by any stretch, but it's excellent risk management on multiple fronts.
I've been working since I was 18 and in 19 years I've seen a lot, experience is learning from your own mistakes, wisdom is learning from other peoples.
It's really not that difficult to maintain a professional attitude, it's a skill like any other it's just the modern workplace isn't always conducive to it, frankly I'd prefer a more formal workplace than informal all things been equal.
The risk is that some go-getter will use a harassment thread as leverage over you. No matter how saintly are you, in the current culture nobody is going to believe you if you're a man accused of harassment - so why open yourself up for the possibility?
Maybe the best way to phrase this is "If there is mutual attraction." Plenty of people marry their co workers. And there are plenty of non creepy/harassing ways to figure out if someone else is interested.
That's a bit of a different scenario, though. The statement I objected to is sexist in at least one of these two ways: 1) it presumes that women appreciate these advances from men in positions of power simply because they're attractive (i.e. that harrassment is "forgiven by default" if it's done by an attractive guy) or, 2) women are vacuous and easily charmed by attractive men to the point where they don't recognize sexual harassment for what it is.
It probably isn't sexist to say that people appreciate advances from someone who is extremely attractive, as long as both are available and looking.
The problem is that it's inappropriate to express interest if you're in a position of power over someone, whether you're a man or a woman. I think you were saying that, but point #1 lacks that context.
(Assuming no supervisory relationship or other power imbalance,)
Make an introduction. Make your mild/budding interest in them clear enough. Ask them to do something that's clearly not work with you.
"Hey, want to get coffee sometime this weekend?"
You'll find out if there's preliminary interest or not. If they're interested but busy, they'll figure out how to make that distinction clear. If "sorry; I'm busy" is the entire answer, just assume they're not interested. You get one "free" chance here; make it fairly clear that you're interested; don't invite them out for a "team dinner" and then arrange for the rest of the team to not show up or other chicanery.
Unfortunately, it's not quite that easy. Sometimes it's not clear that you're asking them on a date. Ex. I've asked a professional associate out for drinks. I thought it was a date, she didn't, and she was offended when I tried to flirt a little. (I stopped once I realized she wasn't interested, but it could have been offensive.)
Personally, I've stopped ever pursuing anyone who works in the same industry due to the potential for weird dynamics, but it's sometimes not as cut-and-dry as people make it sound. Like the example with Chris Sacca, is flirting with someone at a conference a form of sexual harassment?
That chicanery happens when the man is insecure and thinks a woman won't go out with him unless it's a team dinner. If there's a magic potion to turn an insecure man to become more secure without the man doing stupid things and screwing up asking out women, you'd make trillions.
I'm not saying what sokoloff said is wrong (or doesn't work) but I'd not invite a woman (or a person) to coffee before getting a physical approval. This physical approval (eye contact + smile) is usually a certain indicator of interest. I'm talking about same level co-worker.
I'd not go with a co-worker that I have power on (like being the direct manager, or the VC). I can see many ways where the relationship can go awfully wrong.
There should be no one on one meetings for any plausible business venture. Both sides needs to have multiple players to protect all interest and keep discussions to the subject at hand.
I would suggest than anyone who does get into such meetings simply demand the presence of multiple persons. This isn't a buddy lending money to another.
Scenario with a female founder: "Listen, I want to meet you but as we have an at least one woman present policy for any meetings with female founders, adn all the female partners are booked for the next week, I'm afraid I can't meet you".
Vs with a male: "Hells yes I'd love to catch up for coffee, I love your idea. Unfortunately, it will just be me as everyone else is busy".
> One example was the Americans With Disabilities Act, and we told the story of a Los Angeles orthopedic surgeon named Andrew Brooks. When a deaf patient came to him for a consultation, he realized that the A.D.A. required him to hire a sign-language interpreter for each visit if that’s what the patient wanted. The interpreter would cost $120 an hour, with a two-hour minimum, and Brooks wouldn’t be reimbursed by the insurance company:
> That would mean laying out $240 to conduct an exam for which the woman’s insurance company would pay him $58 — a loss of more than $180 even before accounting for taxes and overhead.
Absolutely feels that way... but it may also be VITAL.
The first (really only) goal of a company is to not die. I call this the SHL rule - as it was recommended several times to SHL that he kill off Gumroad.
Who can kill a company varies over time. Initially, that is likely 100% the founders. Either giving up, feuding or running out of money. Then investors/debtors have the power to kill a company off. Finally, and every company should be so lucky to reach this level, acquirers/bankers/Government can kill off a company. Making sure you don't die - and knowing who has the power to kill you off - should be prioritised at (almost) any cost.
As an example, I once had a client who spent $X0K a month on AdWords for one keyword exact matched. It generated almost no revenue. The main investor would Google this one word, and if the site did not rank 1st both paid and organic, he'd threaten to pull all future funding. The company was loss making at that time, so that would have killed it off. I moved that one keyword into it's own AdGroup, called it "Investor Relations", never talked about it again, and years later the company was sold for $X0,000,000.