PG: "A lot of people outside the startup world seem to assume that investors have the same sort of naive bias ordinary people do when deciding who to invite to join a club—that they simply fund the people most like them. That is not true."
John Doerr, famous investor: "That correlates more with any other success factor that I’ve seen in the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. If you look at Bezos, or Andreessen, David Filo, the founders of Google, they all seem to be white, male, nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they absolutely have no social life. So when I see that pattern coming in -- which was true of Google -- it was very easy to decide to invest."
I feel PG wants to do the right thing but is a little handicapped by his reluctance to believe that there could be something structurally wrong with Silicon Valley and/or the functioning of markets w.r.t. male white privilege. This leads to unfortunate gaffes along an otherwise positive trajectory.
I think you misinterpreted that. PG said funding decisions aren't made based on similarity to the people making the funding decision.
John Doerr is saying that sometimes one of factors in making a funding decision is similarity to other massively successful founders, not the people making the funding decisions. PG has been pretty open about the fact that pattern matching to other successful founders is very common.
The other massively successful founders are also incredibly similar to the people making the funding decisions, though - in fact, quite often they are the people making those decisions.
Do you really think that interpretation would improve PG's position? That pattern matching based on gender and race is "very common"? Are you implying that is ok so long as it's the race/gender of other founders?
Thankfully PG does not actually take as extreme a position as Doerr. He merely downplays the existence of it in the VC community.
PG: "A lot of people outside the startup world seem to assume that investors have the same sort of naive bias ordinary people do when deciding who to invite to join a club—that they simply fund the people most like them. That is not true."
John Doerr, famous investor: "That correlates more with any other success factor that I’ve seen in the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. If you look at Bezos, or Andreessen, David Filo, the founders of Google, they all seem to be white, male, nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they absolutely have no social life. So when I see that pattern coming in -- which was true of Google -- it was very easy to decide to invest."
I feel PG wants to do the right thing but is a little handicapped by his reluctance to believe that there could be something structurally wrong with Silicon Valley and/or the functioning of markets w.r.t. male white privilege. This leads to unfortunate gaffes along an otherwise positive trajectory.