Jeremy Lin is the speak of the NBA. Sportswriters everywhere are busy cranking out column inches on what men and women have known as the ultimateCinderella story: The emergence of an Asian-American Harvard graduate, seemingly from nowhere, as a single of the NBA’s largest stars.
On February 3, Jeremy Lin was the Knicks’ third-string point guard. Less than two weeks later,
Sports Illustrated announced that they would put him on the cover of the February 20 issue with the caption, “Against All Odds.”
However 1 group wasn’t surprised by Lin’s accomplishment. A new breed of basketball statheads (the hoop equivalent of the SABRmetricians popularized in “Moneyball“) had predicted Lin’s achievement from the begin.
Prior to the 2010 draft (where all 30 NBA teams passed on Lin) their analysis ranked Lin #10 out of all players, and #1 amongst undrafted players. This evaluation is purely statistical the models don’t consider height, vertical leap, foot speed, and maybe most importantly, skin color. They merely appear at statistical contributions made throughout basketball games.
Statistical evaluation continued to rate Lin very on his rookie season. He developed .157 wins per 48 minutes played, or a lot more than 50% far better than the average player, who produces .100 wins per 48 minutes played. (Incidentally, Carmelo Anthony made .140 wins per 48 minutes played that season).
He also shone in the NBA’s Developmental League (a minor league of basketball), exactly where he made at a .211 clip.
In other words, when you looked at pure production, Lin was a leading prospect. His rise only appears unlikely when you take into account non-basketball factors, like his race or educational institution.
Trendy sports blog Deadspin tweaked the madness greatest, titling a February 7 weblog post, “Asian Harvard Grad Somehow Succeeding In New York.”
It’s a funny one particular-liner, but it underscores a more serious issue.
Lin’s high school coach noted that his star player wasn’t recruited by any colleges, in spite of top underdog Palo Alto High to the California state title. He also noted that the following year, a number of scouts came to games to watch an additional of his players who wasn’t as very good, but was African-American.
Stereotyping has legitimate purposes. If you knew that Harvard University had developed twice as numerous presidents (8) as NBA players (four), you would be right to guess that any generic Harvard basketball player would be unlikely to make the NBA.But stereotyping only tends to make sense in the absence of much better information.
In the case of Jeremy Lin, publicly obtainable statistics proclaimed his value, but scouts preferred believing in stereotypes to trusting in data.
Sadly, this sort of bigotry isn’t limited to the world of sports. Even right here in Silicon Valley, where we like to feel of ourselves as a meritocracy, we practice a especially pernicious form of stereotyping on a daily basis.
Investors really like to speak about “pattern matching.” A typical expression is, “I’ve seen this movie ahead of.” There’s a reason why entrepreneurs continually pitch themselves as “the AirBnB of ice skating” or “the iPhone of Valentine’s Day cards” (hmmm, that really doesn’t sound so negative….).
This made sense in the absence of far better information. When investors had to make choices based on a PowerPoint deck and some rough prototypes, falling back on stereotypes was a very good method. Indeed, I like to describe the default investing strategy of Silicon Valley as “invest in charismatic 20something Pc Science graduates from Stanford, MIT, and CMU (with Berkeley, UIUC, and Harvard as fallbacks), as extended as they’re male and either Caucasian or Asian.”
In nowadays’s world, with the capacity to judge entrepreneurs based on a vast quantity of publicly readily available data, ranging from social media to GitHub, with the ability to launch MVPs and create tangible engagement and conversion statistics without raising cash from investors, we now have the much better information we want to make stereotyping AKA “pattern matching” AKA bigotry obsolete.
But old habits die difficult. Just in the last handful of months, we saw a CNN unique on black entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Regardless of whether or not you feel that CNN utilized ambush tactics to aid stir up controversy, the reality is that African-Americans make up only 1% of venture-backed entrepreneurs nationwide. And just last month, Whitney Hess conducted an analysis of leading venture capital firms that showed that the most gender-balanced firm was Kleiner Perkins at 23% female, although the majority of those firms had zero female investors.
Discussing such topics tends to make people in Silicon Valley uncomfortable. Couple of of us like to think of ourselves as racist or sexist. Yet I know of a lot of entrepreneurs who really feel that they are overlooked due to the fact of their skin color, gender, age or simply because they didn’t go to the proper schools.
Jeremy Lin has been known as the Asian Tim Tebow (or is it that Tim Tebow is the white Jeremy Lin?) we require to extend the lessons of Jeremy Lin beyond sports to the startup planet. Choices need to have to be based on performance on the field of play, not race, gender, age, or education.
And for those who are the very first to recognize “pattern matching” for what it is, the rewards can be wonderful. How several of those other 29 NBA teams could use Jeremy Lin on their team right now?
Chris Yeh is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and angel investor based in Silicon Valley. He also blogs at Adventures in Capitalism, where the above story also appears. The story is reprinted here with permission.
Filed below: VentureBeat 
