I agree with 'harryh that you were being dismissive, but also like 'harryh I don't think that's a big deal. It's just a message board.

Rather than take the time to write a coherent response, I'm just going to hose the room down with bullets:

* If a tech company was heard to be rejecting candidates for not liking sports --- for instance, if well-qualified applicants were turned away for not knowing which teams were in the American League Central --- nerds would be on their lawn with pitchforks and torches.

* There are plenty of "classes" of that aren't protected. For instance, your political affiliation is fair game under the law. Discriminating based on personal politics seems reasonable to approximately zero of us.

* Age discrimination is both not regulated in the class of companies occupied by most startups and rampant across the industry.

* Lots of non-protected behaviors are in reality proxies for protected behaviors; in particular, "culture fit" is an extremely common proxy method to filter out older works and mothers.

* In the post we're talking about, the post linked in this thread, and even in Paul Graham's essays, there's a theme of startups having the privilege to ignore antidiscrimination laws early on. It does us no good to pretend that everyone's on the same page about protected employment classes when the most widely cited writings in the field say that the ability not to hire women who might have children† is a benefit of starting a company.

* Environments where team members can't fit in if they don't drink, don't work noon-9:00PM, don't listen to the same music, don't play foosball, or don't each lunch with the team are common in startuplandia, but aren't intrinsic to the concept of a startup. You say you know people who were happier when they left these kinds of companies. But people are also happier when they leave companies where they're harassed. Surely that's not a justification for harassment!

* You say you picked up emotional language in the post, and thus (we infer) engaged with the content differently. You should be aware that studies show that people --- men and women alike --- engage with women differently than they do men.† In particular, the ability to write a blog post and have it not be read as "emotional" is at least in part a male privilege. Try rereading the post, but this time, instead of coming to an early conclusion that it's emotional, tell yourself "this is a radically different perspective on startup culture than I have; what can I learn from it?"

I'm an arrogant guy, but I'm not arrogant enough to assume everyone is on board with this (yet): it is immoral to reject candidates for reasons other than predicted ability to produce for the team, and it is immoral to rationalize non-performance rejections by inventing grounds to predict poor performance (like "culture fit"). In most circumstances, I think it's probably immoral to run companies in a manner that would prevent qualified parents of small children from contributing. There are real culture fit issues, but the air has been so thoroughly poisoned by startup misbehavior that we're probably going to have to invent a new term to describe them.

† Can you spot the problem with this logic?

†† Here's a recent study pertaining to the sciences: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109*