Women Owned Micro Enterprises

I was fascinated with the story behind YC because I am a woman in a man's world trying to figure out how to make adequate money as a business person. 

I'm also medically handicapped. I know for a fact that's a big factor in my frustrations, but wherever you go, there you are. As a sample of one, I can't clone myself and run this game twice, once with my medical condition and once without it or once as a woman and once as a man.

So I look for examples of success and there aren't very many that I can find at all, and fewer still where I can gather enough details to be useful to me for finding a path forward.

Mackenzie Scott has been described as being actively involved in Amazon in the early days, but then she officially became the little wifey and when she and Jeff Bezos divorced, she was given billions of dollars worth of stock stripped of voting rights. She is not officially a co-founder of Amazon and at best plays the traditional "power behind the throne" roll some wives play.

I'm divorced. I don't have a husband to play front man for me while I secretly am involved in important decisions via discussions over dinner.

Bill Gates married a woman who worked at Microsoft thereby effectively ending her career. She gets to nominally be a big wig involved in charitable foundations and the like, but she basically married well and became a big fat nobody as a business person, so much so I have trouble remembering her name and I'm not going to bother to look it up and hopefully that omission will help make my point.

Only 19 percent of S&P 500 companies have female CEOs and in 2022 just 4.6 percent of Fortune 500 companies had female CEOs.

Everything I've read indicates women frequently get power by inheritance from daddy or the late husband and if they co-found a successful concern from the ground up, their partners are likely to primarily be male relatives, such as sons or brothers.

Men frequently also co-found companies with male relatives. The insurance giant Aflac was founded by three brothers. 

There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but that's not meaningfully an option for me personally. I've tried working with my sons on projects and they went nowhere. I'm divorced. I moved away from home a long time ago.

Men also somewhat frequently found companies with college buddies, especially if they went to certain colleges that are known business incubators basically. I can't think of a single company where I heard some gal got together with college buddies of any gender and founded a company together.

Men start garage bands with high school buddies and sometimes go on to big music careers. I can't think of a single woman artist with a similar story.

One clothing company was founded by a guy in a band who ultimately quit the band to focus on the clothing company. The clothing company was looking like the better bet financially and he made a choice to invest more time in that.

As far as I could tell from the PR cover story initially put forth by YC, it was founded by a woman and three random men and didn't just turn into a fight over who gets the girl.

Reality: It was founded by an experienced businessman and his serious girlfriend whom he later married and had kids with. That's not that weird. Women sometimes work with a boyfriend and marry him after the company is solid or work with a husband.

What is weird is Paul Graham positioned the company publicly like it was four equal partners, one of whom happened to be female. He had a successful company under his belt. He knew something about PR.

It was mostly him and his girlfriend probably initially working from home to a large degree and she was essentially his business muse. They were dating and she was job hunting and they would talk about her work in finance and he probably got tired of listening to her get strung along and chose to give her the business opportunity other probably male gatekeepers weren't giving her.

So the company was designed around her strengths. He saw something in her skill set that was a good match for a venture capital firm and the only thing she lacked was business experience and business acumen, which he had. Between the two, they had the makings of a venture capital firm.

She would walk people in and make small talk and introduce applicants to her three male business partners who appeared to be the backbone of the company, though in reality two of them primarily participated in these interviews and most of the rest of the work was done by Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston.

During the interview, while her three male partners asked questions, she stood there and watched and didn't ask questions. Most applicants probably thought she was a secretary or receptionist or administrative assistant.

And then at the end, Paul Graham would turn to her after all three male partners gave their opinions and ask her opinion and she got final say, often to the shock of the applicants.

I don't know how it worked out in the long term, but in the early days, Paul Graham arranged things where there were few opportunities for any man to sexually harass her, did so without telling people "She's my girlfriend (so keep your hands to yourself)." and visibly signaled on a routine basis she had final say in whom they funded. So you best say ma'am and respect her going forward if you have any sense.

Women are still largely raised to be moms and wives. In our heteronormative world, men are expected to initiate romantic relationships and I cannot begin to express how weirdly a lot of men react if I speak to them first.

Female owned micro enterprises and female solopreneurs likely spend an excess of time and energy fending off male romantic attention and time wasters acting like "we're FWENDS!" And no one knows how to tell them how to avoid that while still putting themselves out there enough to attract business.

Rest assured, your defensive positioning of only having a Facebook page is doing you no favors in that regard. It amounts to announcing "I'm not really a professional. I'm playing at this. And I'm scared of engaging the public."