I've know of you Aditya, but after reading this article I feel like I know you. You have ao wonderfully articulated the feelings or someone who's spent a lifetime on their keyboards and only wants to spend a lifetime more. Thank you for writing with such profound clarity about something so close to who I am.
A person who hyper-maxes along the intelligence dimension will always eventually lose to computers, just as a person who hyper-maxes along the physical dimension will always eventually lose to machines.
Some wisdom paired with a little spark of curiosity goes a long way.
Funny you say that, but the SPC website is still looking for candidates who have won Olympic gold medals. Oh, and that’s totally fine—I mean, who doesn’t want to trust a great person? But did I mention that women still get minimal attention despite having cool websites, great side projects, and a genuine love for building things? I bet they’d still lose to male candidates, even if they had the same Olympic gold medal. LOL
The fact that a person from a non-dominant group rises to lead a system controlled by the dominant group does not necessarily justify that system for the non-dominant group — sometimes quite the opposite occurs. SPC lists 13 investors on their page; she is the only woman. I admire her being a first in many respects, but that doesn’t make my point wrong. Having a Black partner doesn’t make someone immune to racism. A person of color can work for ICE and still be complicit in expelling others who look just like them.
I don’t see a meaningful difference in the rate at which women are accepted into SPC compared to other programs — and this isn’t specific to SPC. The same pattern holds across incubators and the VC world broadly.
I used to attribute the lack of female founders to a pipeline problem — not enough women, or a capability gap produced by structural disadvantages like unequal access to education.
But that explanation no longer holds. Since Title IX opened higher education to women in 1972, the gender gap in degrees closed within a single decade. Today, women represent 58% of all undergraduates — a 350%+ increase in female enrollment. They don’t just match men in education; they’ve surpassed them.
The pipeline is full. The disparity in the startup world is not a capability problem or an intelligence problem. Women are being systematically screened out — by bias, by network gatekeeping, by criteria that were never designed with them in mind
beautifully put, Aditya. i am a writer/author and for the past few years, i've seen the erosion of human writing and a flood of AI text - including in myself. but i deeply believe that the more we collectively, as a human race, walk away from writing/coding/painting/making music to let AI take care of it, the more that we as individuals will run toward good art to appreciate its place in our lives.
Excellent article. I like your frankness and openness. To morph into something bigger and embrace adaptability in the age of AI, is a crucial mindset to have. Thanks for sharing.
I liked what you wrote in the end of the article about the shifting times bringing us closer to our human self, and how each person's adaptability trait will be the new metric to decide who's more valuable in the industry and who's not.
Code being a commodity now has also given rise to the generalists of the world. SME's and people with deep expertise in something were always sought after and the most "hireable." Where generalists who were never the best at one thing, but decent at many things, embodied that restlessness you mentioned, constantly. I believe they now have an upper-hand and can be empowered to do more because of their native agility/seeing patterns across the spectrum. I fear SME's and deep expertise are becoming commoditized; engineers and coding languages is just one of the first examples here.
I've know of you Aditya, but after reading this article I feel like I know you. You have ao wonderfully articulated the feelings or someone who's spent a lifetime on their keyboards and only wants to spend a lifetime more. Thank you for writing with such profound clarity about something so close to who I am.
A person who hyper-maxes along the intelligence dimension will always eventually lose to computers, just as a person who hyper-maxes along the physical dimension will always eventually lose to machines.
Some wisdom paired with a little spark of curiosity goes a long way.
Funny you say that, but the SPC website is still looking for candidates who have won Olympic gold medals. Oh, and that’s totally fine—I mean, who doesn’t want to trust a great person? But did I mention that women still get minimal attention despite having cool websites, great side projects, and a genuine love for building things? I bet they’d still lose to male candidates, even if they had the same Olympic gold medal. LOL
Our founder is a woman!
The fact that a person from a non-dominant group rises to lead a system controlled by the dominant group does not necessarily justify that system for the non-dominant group — sometimes quite the opposite occurs. SPC lists 13 investors on their page; she is the only woman. I admire her being a first in many respects, but that doesn’t make my point wrong. Having a Black partner doesn’t make someone immune to racism. A person of color can work for ICE and still be complicit in expelling others who look just like them.
I don’t see a meaningful difference in the rate at which women are accepted into SPC compared to other programs — and this isn’t specific to SPC. The same pattern holds across incubators and the VC world broadly.
I used to attribute the lack of female founders to a pipeline problem — not enough women, or a capability gap produced by structural disadvantages like unequal access to education.
But that explanation no longer holds. Since Title IX opened higher education to women in 1972, the gender gap in degrees closed within a single decade. Today, women represent 58% of all undergraduates — a 350%+ increase in female enrollment. They don’t just match men in education; they’ve surpassed them.
The pipeline is full. The disparity in the startup world is not a capability problem or an intelligence problem. Women are being systematically screened out — by bias, by network gatekeeping, by criteria that were never designed with them in mind
beautifully put, Aditya. i am a writer/author and for the past few years, i've seen the erosion of human writing and a flood of AI text - including in myself. but i deeply believe that the more we collectively, as a human race, walk away from writing/coding/painting/making music to let AI take care of it, the more that we as individuals will run toward good art to appreciate its place in our lives.
Excellent article. I like your frankness and openness. To morph into something bigger and embrace adaptability in the age of AI, is a crucial mindset to have. Thanks for sharing.
I liked what you wrote in the end of the article about the shifting times bringing us closer to our human self, and how each person's adaptability trait will be the new metric to decide who's more valuable in the industry and who's not.
Well written. Thanks for sharing your genuine feelings.
Code being a commodity now has also given rise to the generalists of the world. SME's and people with deep expertise in something were always sought after and the most "hireable." Where generalists who were never the best at one thing, but decent at many things, embodied that restlessness you mentioned, constantly. I believe they now have an upper-hand and can be empowered to do more because of their native agility/seeing patterns across the spectrum. I fear SME's and deep expertise are becoming commoditized; engineers and coding languages is just one of the first examples here.