Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

I have no idea. Possibly not.

The issue is this: Would a man have gotten a $10 billion valuation based on hot air and zero results for years and years? Or would someone have called him on his shit a lot earlier?

She was literally sleeping with and living with a much older male investor* while publicly claiming to be celibate in her twenties due to her extreme devotion to her career and business. I always figured that was bullshit and she was probably sleeping with someone and "I'm celibate" was probably a cover story.

And no one went looking for that because of fear of being called sexist, I guess. I hesitated to give that opinion on HN for fear of back lash.

But as a woman with six year of college and yadda, when I meet accomplished men in positions to open doors for me, a lot of them find me attractive and this actively closes doors in my face. I'm not willing to sleep with a man to open doors, not because I have some kind of moral objection to that but because I don't believe it actually works.

It didn't actually work for Elizabeth Holmes. Sleeping with an investor did not, in fact, help her succeed in the world of business. It merely helped her cover up fraud while her problems grew larger until it resulted in both criminal and civil suits and her name is mud. She will never really recover from this debacle.

So I don't think sleeping with men to open doors works. I think sleeping with rich and powerful men would get me sex and maybe would let me be a "kept woman" but it wouldn't get me taken seriously as a business woman and it wouldn't teach me how business is done and it wouldn't have some men giving me meaty, constructive feedback.

* Edit: To be crystal clear here, I mean someone who invested in Theranos, I don't mean "Someone whose job title was investor." This was a clear conflict of interest.

> But as a woman with six year of college and yadda, when I meet accomplished men in positions to open doors for me, a lot of them find me attractive and this actively closes doors in my face. I'm not willing to sleep with a man to open doors, not because I have some kind of moral objection to that but because I don't believe it actually works.

I thought this was interesting. Do you mean "it closes doors because they are only prepared to help you if you sleep with them"? Or "it closes doors because they're scared to help you in case you misinterpret it"?

It closes doors because there is no good way for them to proceed. We essentially have no good answers for how to get involved with a woman both professionally and romantically in some ethical, above board fashion.

So men who are attracted to me are damned if they do, damned if they don't.

And I can't trust their motives. Are they helping me because they think I'm smart and talented and a good fit for a project? Or are they helping me hoping it leads to sex?

In practice, they usually don't make any effort to help me professionally anyway. Once they decide I'm attractive, in their minds the relationship is strictly personal and not professional. Period.

My experience has been men consistently decide early whether this is a platonic/professional relationship or a potential romantic interest. If I'm a potential romantic interest, I'm basically dead to them professionally.

They also tend to only think about how this impacts their career, not mine.

When I had a corporate job, one senior programmer in the IT department asked me for a date. In five years working there, he was the only person I met who knew what GIS was without me having to explain it. (I have a certificate in GIS.)

He interpreted that as "We have things in common and she's hot." He did not wonder if I might be an asset to the IT department. He did not wonder if I wanted a job in the IT department.

I did, in fact, want a job in the IT department. Being asked out by him did nothing to hurt his career. He was doing nothing wrong.

I'm sure he stopped to consider that. I'm sure he stopped to check that asking me out was not a fire-able offense.

He likely did not wonder how it impacted my career at the company. It made it vastly less likely I would ever get a job in his department.

This was true whether I said "yes" or "no." Simply being asked for a date, regardless of how that went personally, made it vastly less likely I would ever get into the IT department.

I left the company a few weeks later. I likely would have left anyway and had been planning to do so for some time, but him asking me for a date was something of a final nail in the coffin, killing all hope that I had a shot at a real future at the company.

I didn't. That simply was a non starter.

So it made it easier to pull the trigger on plans to leave.

Also interesting. Why this?

>This was true whether I said "yes" or "no." Simply being asked for a date, regardless of how that went personally, made it vastly less likely I would ever get into the IT department.

Speaking from outside the tech bubble, that sounds nuts - I mean the situation, not your interpretation of it. How can being asked on a date mean you can't work in the asker's department?

I didn't say I couldn't. I said it made it vastly less likely.

It was a big company. You could date and marry coworkers but you couldn't date someone in your chain of command.

I didn't know the internal structure of the IT department, but if he was high enough in the chain of command, there would be many positions below him. I had an entry level job. Transferring from an entry level job in a different department would have meant I would be getting an entry level job in IT.

I was having trouble figuring out how to get a different job in the company as is. I was having trouble finding the kind of info I wanted that was pertinent to me and having trouble understanding the internal job listings.

Adding the possibility that someone had just asked me out who was high enough in the department I wanted to get into that many of the jobs that might interest me would make him my boss made it overwhelmingly difficult to try to navigate the process of transferring into IT.

As I said, I already had plans to leave for unrelated reasons. Had I stayed, maybe I would have eventually drawn different conclusions and found a path forward.

But based on the info I had, my emotional reaction was "Welp, I can stop fretting about whether or not I'm doing the right thing by leaving. I'm basically going nowhere fast at this company."

> The issue is this: Would a man have gotten a $10 billion valuation based on hot air and zero results for years and years?

Adam Neumann?

Thank you for that, though it doesn't look to be nearly on par with the level of sheer hot air that Theranos proved to be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Neumann

It's true. There was no fundamental lie at the heart of WeWork. It was just bog standard over-exuberance of markets and west coast woo-woo BS.