by
Ellen Pao
My former boss—one of the idolized leaders in the field, and in many other respects considered one of the good guys—once gave a speech to the National Venture Capital Association in which he described his ideal tech founders as “white, male, nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford—and they absolutely have no social life.”
sadly this is a real John Doerr quote. From Business Insider:
Doerr was giving a keynote with Moritz at a National Venture Capital Association meeting in 2008, when he described being in an Amazon warehouse and seeing programming language books next to titles like "The Joy of Sex."
"These were male nerds trying to get help from an online service," Doerr said.
"That correlates more with any other success factor that I've seen in the world's greatest entrepreneurs. If you look at [Amazon founder Jeff] Bezos, or [Netscape founder Marc] Andreessen, [Yahoo co-founder] 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," he said.