I’m sick of that bullshit about not being able to find women in tech: part 2

Yesterday, I wrote about Cindy Gallop’s talk on finding diverse talent

The Rest of the Story …

There were two additional points in her presentation I want to address, but first …

You can take a  look at our latest prototype under development, Aztech, here and play it in Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Play it for a few minutes and come back here for the rest of the story.

Did you find yourself saying,

“Yes, but your group of minority/ female developers and artists did not have good enough graphics/ CSS that perfectly centered video/ all of the Spanish language translations done ..”

The fact is, I gave  you the link to a prototype for a reason. It emphasizes two of the truest points Cindy Gallop makes in her presentation.

We hire men based on their potential but we hire women based on their demonstrated ability to do the work.

Did I mention that the link you reviewed was a prototype? Yes, I did. Ever since we started 7 Generation Games, our start-up arm that is distributing our educational games, we have heard the same refrain from investors.

• We don’t think this idea will work. Come back when you have a prototype
• We don’t think you can make a commercial game for that price. Come back when you have a completed game.
• We don’t think schools will use these games. Come back when you have 1,000 users.
• We don’t think these games will work. Come back when you have data.
• We don’t think there is a market for games that need to be installed on the desktop. Come back when you have a version in the cloud.
• We don’t think there is a market for web-based games. Come back when you have an iPad version.

Are we seeing a pattern here? I’m actually not whining. Well, not whining any more than usual. We’re still here while most of those companies that received funding two or three years ago when we were just starting have since disappeared.

We’ve received over $600,000 in federal grants, we’ve had two successful crowd-funding campaigns.

We were part of the Boom Startup Ed Tech Accelerator. We just closed our first angel investor round, late in 2015, where we raised $240,000. My point is that we did that MUCH later in the game than I think we would have if we were co-founded by a couple of white or Asian males from Stanford. We don’t look the part of a start-up team.

Funny, I believe my experience as a non-male, non-Japanese competing in judo back in those pre-Title IX days has been great preparation for co-founding a startup. I had 14 years of experience as a competitor with people denying me funding because I wasn’t good enough, didn’t do things right, didn’t run with the right group to get coaching to succeed. Then, I was the first American to win the world judo championships and this weekend I’m getting inducted into the International Sports Hall of Fame.

I actually appreciate the haters and the doubters as they do point out areas we can improve our products and we are continually working on that. We have come very far with relatively little funding for making games and we will go much farther yet.

I’m not sure how much more we have to demonstrate before we attract the attention of

<sarcasm> those accelerators and investors who are looking so-o hard for women-owned startups </sarcasm>

If you’re interested in our desktop games, check out the demos here,

or

buy a couple here

If you are interested in games that run on the web, those are in beta and will be done in a few months. Email info@7generationgames.com if you’d like more information on those.

What you should NOT do is tell me how you are trying so hard to find women in tech to support because I am seriously, seriously tired of hearing that bullshit.

Check back tomorrow for what you really shouldn’t say about women in tech if you don’t want me to slap you.