![]() ![]() The guys with the bow-legged swagger, wearing boots and a shin guard were always picked first. ![]() My first memory of Pattern Matching was while playing football (the real one) as a kid. It is how human beings recognise things and make vital decisions quickly, with little data. In psychology it is known as pattern recognition, which is natural and critical for survival. Since how one “looks” is one of the obvious patterns one can observe in a human, it is believed that pattern matching disproportionally affects “people of colour” (why do we use this term?). Though eventually clarified by Paul Graham, that attributed quote articulately captures the spirit of Pattern Matching. “I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg” Paul Graham (According to The New York Times) Venture Capitalists, taking superficial patterns of successful founders (young white boys who have dropped out of Stanford or Harvard) and using them to determine future investment decisions. Pattern matching is a colloquial terminology in the tech industry that refers to the propensity for established players in tech e.g. And as with previous conversation cycles, one key player in the diversity deficient tech world is wriggling away unscathed, yet again. The tech industry has not been exempted.Īs with previous cycles, it has cast blame towards the typical suspects: Big Tech and Venture Capital. No thanks to the brutal execution of George Floyd and more importantly, thanks to the persistence of protesters, the conversation about institutional racism in various parts of American life is back to the fore and has been sustained. Abeg (please), share it as you wish me luck holding these very powerful people to account. It is a big request to ask anyone, including journalists, to give a dissenting voice an audience, so I have decided to self-publish again, but this time around, I hope the primary intended audience gets to see it and the conversation happens. Sadly, but unsurprisingly and understandably, I’ve had no takers. Since I completed this post over two weeks ago, I’ve hawked it as an Op-Ed to ALL main street US (Tech) media – 22 of them. This time around, I wanted to do something different with regard to distribution. However, my self-published posts have never really got the audience it was targeted at, which is, the Silicon Valley Main Street. I have been writing about Diversity in Tech for over a decade now – a long time. Clockwise from top left: Lessin of The Information, Swisher of Recode (Vox), Panzarino of TechCrunch, Shontell of Business Insider and Pierce of Protocol are Editors-in-Chief of the most influential tech publications in the world. ![]()
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