It's interesting to me today how so many people view "business" as some sort of monolithic political entity, just like teacher's unions or the NRA.
So if a politician is upset about the economy (and who isn't?) he meets with "business leaders", much the same way if he were upset about proposed rifle regulations he might meet with the NRA, or just like if one country doesn't like the way another is acting they meet with the leader of that country. Likewise, if a CNN reporter is upset (or smells a story) about minorities in the startup scene, she ambushes a leader of the startup community with questions about racism.
It shows a complete lack of understanding the thing you are talking about. While you might make a case for institutionalized racism when it comes to funding, there's no way in hell an internet user is going to know the race, gender, religion, nationality, or sexual preference of anybody who runs a webapp. Traction on the net is for the most part stereotype-free. Plus from what I hear funding doesn't have the impact on startups that it had say five years ago. The dynamics have changed. You'd have to be an idiot not to fund a startup that had traction because of the race of the founders, and if you're not using team and traction as primary metrics, good luck with your VC business.
The entrepreneurial world is not a centralized, monolithic thing that somehow you can talk or meet with any small number of people and understand and/or control. It's a very poor mental model to use and promote.
I just find it weird that somehow reporters, or even politicians, expect there to be a person they could go to in order to talk about the pantheon of entrepreneurship. It doesn't work that way by definition. It's not like there's a startup club where they hand out all these freebies and you're not invited. To slant the coverage that way, even unintentionally and subtly, is really whacked. It implies that economic problems are simply dependent on meeting the leaders of various groups and gaining consensus -- that economics is really just politics by another name. I understand why politicians do this -- they have a faulty mental model of everybody being in some sort of political group to be negotiated with -- but reporters need to up their game. This kind of reporting screws over the viewer big time.
So if a politician is upset about the economy (and who isn't?) he meets with "business leaders", much the same way if he were upset about proposed rifle regulations he might meet with the NRA, or just like if one country doesn't like the way another is acting they meet with the leader of that country. Likewise, if a CNN reporter is upset (or smells a story) about minorities in the startup scene, she ambushes a leader of the startup community with questions about racism.
It shows a complete lack of understanding the thing you are talking about. While you might make a case for institutionalized racism when it comes to funding, there's no way in hell an internet user is going to know the race, gender, religion, nationality, or sexual preference of anybody who runs a webapp. Traction on the net is for the most part stereotype-free. Plus from what I hear funding doesn't have the impact on startups that it had say five years ago. The dynamics have changed. You'd have to be an idiot not to fund a startup that had traction because of the race of the founders, and if you're not using team and traction as primary metrics, good luck with your VC business.
The entrepreneurial world is not a centralized, monolithic thing that somehow you can talk or meet with any small number of people and understand and/or control. It's a very poor mental model to use and promote.
I just find it weird that somehow reporters, or even politicians, expect there to be a person they could go to in order to talk about the pantheon of entrepreneurship. It doesn't work that way by definition. It's not like there's a startup club where they hand out all these freebies and you're not invited. To slant the coverage that way, even unintentionally and subtly, is really whacked. It implies that economic problems are simply dependent on meeting the leaders of various groups and gaining consensus -- that economics is really just politics by another name. I understand why politicians do this -- they have a faulty mental model of everybody being in some sort of political group to be negotiated with -- but reporters need to up their game. This kind of reporting screws over the viewer big time.