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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday July 05 2017, @06:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the into-the-light dept.

Their stories came out slowly, even hesitantly, at first. Then in a rush.

One female entrepreneur recounted how she had been propositioned by a Silicon Valley venture capitalist while seeking a job with him, which she did not land after rebuffing him. Another showed the increasingly suggestive messages she had received from a start-up investor. And one chief executive described how she had faced numerous sexist comments from an investor while raising money for her online community website.

What happened afterward was often just as disturbing, the women told The New York Times. Many times, the investor's firms and colleagues ignored or played down what had happened when the situations were brought to their attention. Saying anything, the women were warned, might lead to ostracism.

Now some of these female entrepreneurs have decided to take that risk. More than two dozen women in the technology start-up industry spoke to The Times in recent days about being sexually harassed. Ten of them named the investors involved, often providing corroborating messages and emails, and pointed to high-profile venture capitalists such as Chris Sacca of Lowercase Capital and Dave McClure of 500 Startups, who did not dispute the accounts.

The disclosures came after the tech news site The Information reported that female entrepreneurs had been preyed upon by a venture capitalist, Justin Caldbeck of Binary Capital. The new accounts underscore how sexual harassment in the tech start-up ecosystem goes beyond one firm and is pervasive and ingrained. Now their speaking out suggests a cultural shift in Silicon Valley, where such predatory behavior had often been murmured about but rarely exposed.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 05 2017, @06:14PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 05 2017, @06:14PM (#535314)

    While there are Vulture Capitalists who had their start in tech, most of the aforementioned ones are frat boy and trust fund types, not techies who graduated into VC from actually starting/running/IPOing tech firms then moving on to being venture capitalists or angel investors.

    Furthermore, most of these guys qualify as the 'SORT OF SHIT WRONG WITH THE AMERICAN ECONOMY' in general, rather than limited to a specific business sector. The real solution, long since passed as a result of the internet/globalization, would have been to regulate the size of corporations/investment banking firms so that cabals could not overcome compromise the free market economy and keep people from voting with their feet and/or wallets to punish socially unacceptable behavior like that in the marketplace.

    But since we don't have a free economy, or even an equal opportunity ecosystem, we have to deal with shit like this, even as the economy for the middle and lower class slowly implodes.