Suggested a somewhat more informative title. :)

The article itself has its heart in the right place, but–for me anyways–kinda misses the boat. I apologize for the Usenet-style quoting that follows, but it’s how I organized my critique on this.

First, it uses a bunch of allusions to gender conflict that ring hollow:

Consider the metaphors: “seed” funding, “up and to the right” trajectories, “acceleration,” “exit.”

So, I pretty sure that the seed in seed funding is more of the “plant a little money, watch the company grow” than “ah skeet skeet goddamn (goddamn)”–at least in the midwest. “trajectories” describes the path of an object through a state space, in this context the state space of size/revenues/costs/actions, and that is fairly gender-neutral. “acceleration” is meant to describe the change in velocity of a business through its trajectory, a bit hackneyed metaphor to be sure but not one alluding to cismale sexuality under even the most tortured readings.

They then immediately show their devotion to ignoring metrics and proceed to equate a 90% failure rate (startups) with the 99.999…% failure rate of a spermatozoon (takes between 200M-500M for one to succeed). This is cringe-inducing for those who are biased towards current numeronormative trends in thinking.

At various other points, the authors continually bring back in the importance of women, and it detracts from their main point: that the startup ecosystem would be better off if we instead focused on “quality over quantity”, and were not merely slaves to our various metrics. The gender rhetoric, while playing very well I’m sure in their native Portland, simply is orthogonal to their otherwise interesting thesis.

Even there, though, they didn’t convince me that they had developed their idea fully (even with the lowered expectations one usually brings to a Medium post).

This she attributes partly to the failure of language to communicate the value of “slipperier things,” things that “cannot be named or described.”

Second the article makes some allusions to some very interesting and deep questions, and then fails to treat them with the seriousness they deserve. The above quote and context for example kinda hints at a rather deep philosophical question: can something which cannot be described (and the implication there is that it cannot be measured) actually exist (the implication there being that it can change the world and should be cared about)? To be concrete about this: that same question is isomorphic to “Do you believe in a higher power/powers”?

The interesting thing to do here would be to unpack the philosophical bias we has (as Westerners, presumably) in favor of the strictly observable and describable world, to show alternative philosophies, and to conjecture how the ecosystem would manifest differently were those philosophies used as a seed instead. That’s not what the article does, though.

But we don’t need more players playing the same old game. We need new rules for winning. … build a more equitable and inclusive system.

Third, in places the flowery writing seems to contradict itself. Do the authors want more people participating, or do they want new rules? As written it appears that they don’t want more people but do want to be more inclusive, and that either suggests either that a) they’re sloppy writers or b) that they are seeking to remove the existing non-inclusive members (read: traditional majority) and replace them with more diverse folks.

They complain of the use of such industry buzzwords (and I hate those as much as they do!) like “disrupt” and “crushing” and “owning”, but fail to see their own use of similarly threadbare ones like “visionary”, “equitable”, “non-traditional”, and “impact”.

It just isn’t very clear writing in places.

~

I could go on with this, but the basic questions I think the article raises are very much worth discussion:

• Is there too much emphasis on analytics driving decisiosn?
• Is there too much emphasis on growth?
• What would an ecosystem that doesn’t focus on those things look like?

Unfortunately, despite their clearly-articulated desire to celebrate the “mundane”, they fail to ask the basic questions that also present themselves:

• What is the economic incentive for changing the current strategy?
• What success does a business have if it ignores numerical indicators of its own performance?
• How does a business succeed in a free market where the other competitors do not subscribe to such a friendly philosophy?

It’s an okay read, but really I don’t think it has made much headway in the topic it wishes to discuss.