The months ticked by. I hired more people, built more features, and grew the business. My peers were all white men: other YC founders building consumer-­tech startups within a few blocks of ours. I took advice from some of them. I made friends with some of them. I dated some of them.

My social life, or what little there was of it, was constructed mostly of other startup founders and early employees focusing on building their startups. We rarely discussed anything other than issues we were having with our product. A group of us would often gather in Daly City for dim sum on Sundays, where most of our socializing took place outside, waiting for a Chinese hostess to call our number— that is, until someone in our group figured out that she could hire a TaskRabbit to go early and stand in line for us. We’d arrive with a few minutes to spare, walking past crowds of white men with their Asian girlfriends congregated in front of the restaurant and straight to our table, where everyone but me looked at menus.