There is nothing to be sorry about, you should expect public speaker to be able to convey their message or at least compensate it with sheer brilliance.
Same here. Circuits class, Chinese prof with accent. Also he sort of muttered, making a bad problem even worse. If you are in a position of giving information or instructions to others then you are responsible for clarity of communication. An obtrusive accent can hinder that.
What PG talks about is also why Linus acquired a North American accent since moving to the United States. His accent used to be strongly Finnish (Swedish?) but now he speaks American English like a native.
I had a C professor with a thick Russian accent. Apparently he had been talked to by the dean after several student complained in semesters prior to my taking the class, and after each class he sent out written notes of the important aspects of his lecture. He was a great teacher with a wonderful grasp of the English language when he wrote it down, but his accent was atrocious when he got excited during the lecture. I'm glad he was able to work around that, I learned a lot from him.
Pronunciation is absolutely a part of spoken language. You could probably make a decent argument that somebody who can't pronounce the spoken word in such a way that other people understand them doesn't completely know the language.
The range of accents between native speakers of English even in the US is large now. Sixty and seventy years ago before radio and TV had had time to do their work, the range was even larger.
>The range of accents between native speakers of English even in the US is large now.
Sure, if I plot all the accents in the United States on a graph there's probably a lot of divergence. I would think that the accents that impede understanding are outliers though. (At least among native speakers.)
I can say, from experience, that native Texans and Australians can have difficulties understanding each other.
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fChqXqvvmg8 for an example that I enjoy of a song, in English by native English speakers, than many English speaking people have trouble understanding. After you've seen the words written down, native English speakers usually can then understand. But if English is a second or third language, then good luck!
>I can say, from experience, that native Texans and Australians can have difficulties understanding each other.
(On a pedantic note, I did specifically say US accents.)
I have to wonder if this is purely caused by pronunciation or other aspects of dialect. After all, the stereotypical Australian 'accent' (Ex. "Shrimp on the barbie") is usually accompanied by more than just a change in pronunciation. Obviously the international case is different than the local one. It's probably more accurate to say that somebody who has trouble getting people who speak a dialect of English to understand them doesn't know the dialect.
>See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fChqXqvvmg8 for an example that I enjoy of a song, in English by native English speakers, than many English speaking people have trouble understanding.
Music is something of a special case. If it weren't, there wouldn't be so many lyrics sites out there to help people who have trouble understanding.
Some dialects are more understandable than others. I miss the Canadian accent that I grew up with. That one is very easy for people all over the world to understand.
As for the song, even if you heard it recited, you'd have trouble understanding it. It is in a strong Scots dialect.
I've found myself unable to understand a native-born American English speaker within 75 miles of where I was born and raised.
Inner-city ghetto dialect can be very difficult to understand.
Among educated classes, you'd generally have to get into professional jargon to have similar difficulties (ask a set of biologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars to discuss "starting a culture", for one example).
I don't know about that. I don't know you from heck but I am prepared to bet that my depth of knowledge of the English tongue is as good as yours ( Presumably you are one of those 'native speakers'). English was the first language I learnt. However, the people around me that spoke it were all non-native speakers. This means that most of the way I picked up words came from books. Again, I was never a child obsessed with phonetics so my pronunciation of things is weird.
Why not just narrow it down to communication barriers? It has really nothing specifically to do with accents. Two people with the same heavy accents may perfectly understand the other - or maybe not at all. That still comes down to issue with communication. How about making the statement that 3 year olds are terrible CEOs - they're terrible at conveying a story, and I'm not even sure they're speaking English when they make sounds!
I agree, I was about to post this same sentiment. There are people who speak perfectly good English but they are simply bad at communicating, the net effect is the same, they are unable to lead because people cannot understand their ideas.
Spoken language is an strong indicator of education and class. I'm guessing that native english speakers with poor communication were hardly ever accepted to YC, while non-native english speakers with good educations were. That would explain pg's data, at any rate.
"Communication skills is an strong indicator of education and class." is probably what you meant to say - though I'd disagree, and say it's more experienced based. You last sentence suggests that the non-native English speakers were accepted only because they had good educations, though again I'd imagine that someone could have a strong accent - and still be highly educated.
> "Communication skills is an strong indicator of
> education and class." is probably what you meant to
> say...
No, actually, I said exactly what I meant to say: The accent you speak with is a social (class) marker. I refer you to Oscar Wilde's Pygmalion [1] for a humorous introduction to the concept. Those with "low class" accents are often presumed to be uneducated, whether they're brilliant or not.
> You last sentence suggests that the non-native
> English speakers were accepted only because they had
> good educations, though again I'd imagine that someone
> could have a strong accent - and still be highly
> educated.
Not quite... I'm suggesting that despite their strong accent (and their difficulty in making themselves understood), their other credentials, education included, gained them acceptance to YC, whereas the native speakers with "low class" accents weren't accepted in the first place. Hence the data makes it look like this is about strong foreign accents when in fact it's just about poor english communication skills. (The non-native speakers may be William bloody [2] Shakespeare in their native language.) Again, this is just my hypothesis about why pg's data looks like it does. Feel free to make up your own.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_(play)
[2] For the humourless pedants: This is a joke. I know
that Shakespeare's middle name was't "bloody."
What? Listening comprehension is absolutely measurable. Take the same passage, have subjects in different groups listen to it as read by various speakers, and test them on how much of the content (and its implications) they understood. Of course there is an extreme where the passage isn't understandable at all. But what we're talking about is the point where the words are comprehensible, but the mental effort to decode them is quite high. That effort pushes out the higher-level thoughts that would otherwise be going along with the surface-level listening. So listeners will know what was said, but have thought and abstracted less about it.
This kind of thing is commonly done in linguistics research when trying to, for example, differentiate dialects.
You should not forget, that the result depends heavily also on the listener. Probably the hardest to understand English I have ever heard has been spoken by two native Englishmen who I met last year at a hostel in Spain. Similarly in my opinion the most clear English is spoken in Germany and the Nordic countries. It's just a matter of what you are used to.
Oddly enough this is a re-hash of the same types of arguments used for why engineers could never be CEO's and run startups. They didn't speak the language of business, weren't good communicators. "Go hire a 6'3" white sales guy CEO if you are really serious about this startup and raising money from VC's"
I picked up on the language of business in order to get my business going. It isn't rocket science. What you want is someone who can connect with people. Culture is a part of that but business tends to be sufficiently at arms length that cultural barriers are not fatal.
What is necessary is being understood, having a common mutually intelligible language and enough connection that things can get done. If your engineer is living in a world of machines or bits, or software, that individual cannot be an effective CEO in that mindset but language is much harder.
I am learning Bahasa Indonesia. Last time I tried to tell someone "I only speak a little Bahasa Indonesia" it ended up coming out more along the lines of "I speak a little Bahasa Indonesia" which I must have said really well because I couldn't follow a thing after that......
You fail the analogy-off. He's not talking about stares-at-feet aspies who can't say hello to save their lives. He's talking about neurotypicals who don't see their own lingual deficiencies and how it impacts how they are viewed, understood, and accepted by others.
There's nothing more draining than being a listener trying to constantly adjust to understanding somebody who isn't quite able to communicate what they want to say.
No it's not. A typical engineer is not a good CEO. Like Knuth said, "a good scientist/engineer is one who get to the bottom of things". A CEO is someone who gets on top of things. That is not to say there doesn't exist someone who can do both, probably better in one than the other. Bill Gates / Larry Page / Larry Ellison, etc. are (or used to be) good engineers, but they are also good businessmen and able to to communicate the language of business.
A CEO not only communicates with his engineers / manager / executive team, but also with external customers. There are also different classes of customers: enterprise, consumers; each would need a different sales pitch. A CEO who is not able to connect with people is not going to be a good CEO. And by connecting, you probably need to make references to sports, music, fashion trends or whatever that is the demographics you are selling to are interested in.
A CEO who is "foreign" to US culture / language will have a hard time running a company in US. Now if you are as charismatic/iconic as Arnold Schawazenegger then you might get by. But even Arnold worked hard on his English and he is clearly picking up some American accent :)
Disclaimer: I am a recent immigrant and have a strong accent.
Never explain yourself to people who misunderstand you on the internet. They'll just use it as an excuse to misunderstand you again, which is worse because not only are you a terrible monster who said those terrible things, but now you've had the unmitigated gall to defend those terrible things.
It's a universal truth of saying things in public. No matter how clearly you say things, somebody will take it the wrong way. The only approach that doesn't make things worse is to simply ignore those people.
What if - on a rare occasion - you did say something that was misunderstood by a lot of people who trust your judgement? Would you be ignorant at that time too?
Yes. For an example of why, observe the situation we're discussing.
If you read the original piece, it's perfectly clear what was meant, and there's absolutely no room for anybody to misunderstand it. Still lots of people did. And they were quickly corrected in the previous thread.
And if you read this very thread, you'll see people responding to his even more carefully written clarification who still hold their initial misunderstanding and are writing angry replies as though their mistaken reading of the piece was what the author had actually said.
Seriously. There's no fixing those people. The only winning move is not to play.
Seriously. There's no fixing those people. The only winning move is not to play.
Agreed. Going on record to defend yourself without provocation (he doesn't specifically refer to someone asking him for an official response) generally means there is something deeper at hand here. PG did respond originally to provocation and should have kept it to that.[0]
This is akin to when someone goes out of there way to explain why things "aren't their fault". If it wasn't your fault, you state the case and be done with it. People at fault generally go beyond their means to make sure people think they aren't at fault.
If I could interject a brief modification— People who feel that they're at fault go beyond their means to defend themselves. And there isn't necessarily a correlation between someone who feels guilty and someone who is guilty.
It should be obvious to anyone who has participated in a karma based discussion board like reddit or HN.
First, all the karma goes to the first explanation. Everyone understands it when the idea is explained. Replies to a naysayer usually get 1/10th of the original reward because new information isn't usually provided with the updates.
Next, there are many people who can only interact with ideas by contradicting them. Without putting a value judgement on that behavior, it isn't worth continuing a public discussion with them to enlighten them, unless they make you realize something you're missing.
Finally, controversy competes with truth, understanding, and imagination in the human brain. By replying to someone creating controversy, all the positive effects of your idea are diluted, and all people take away is the fact that there was a controversy surrounding what you said.
Anyway, these are my experiences. I'm open to the possibility that there is a way to reply to controversial disagreement, but unless it's a private message, I'm not aware of it right now.
> If you read the original piece, it's perfectly clear what was meant, and there's absolutely no room for anybody to misunderstand it.
I'll give you an anecdotal example: myself. I did misunderstood him first, and the explanation makes sense. I don't need more "fix". pg won me over this issue. So, are you sure that it was a bad move?
He acknowledges this. Then explains: he did the interview and made the statement to help founders, and this clarification will help founders. I'm all for not engaging in this type of situation, but I admire his reasons for responding.
..."accents so strong that people can't understand" is the key here. An obvious truth well known to everyone frightens people sometimes. He does not tell, he uses that as a standalone parameter in screening applications. In addition to 'accent', lack of communication skills is a problem even for natives.
That said, instead of 'accent', I would use there 'problems in communication skills', which implies native speakers too. Otherwise a lot of people don't understand PG correctly.
This would have eliminated the backlash. However, I like that PG seems to live by what he wrote about in "What you can't say" and strives for perfect accuracy in his observations. While problems in communication might be the root cause (I'm almost sure they are, why is it surprising that if you can't communicate you'll do worse? Change "accents" to "can't speak English - the language of the country they are in" and no one would argue), PG was perfectly accurate in describing his observations in the data. Isn't it better to be open about this, along with him noticing his selection bias? Being aware of biases is better than ignoring them.
...You are right, it's always better to be open. He does not speak a diplomatic political language, he states the knowledge he acquired through thousands of interviews and other experiences. That way, he would share how race, religion, gender are affecting success too. But I suspect that would result in an even bigger backlash.
I disagree. Simply phrasing it as a suggestion to fix problem communication skills is too general to really be helpful. Most people who speak English who are terrible communicators don't realize it so they won't think it applies to them. Meanwhile, foreign founders with strong accents won't understand that it is really them he is speaking to.
I think it is much more helpful to tell somebody plain as day: if you are bad at X you aren't likely to be successful until you fix it. These are facts. Ignore them if you choose but that doesn't change that they are supported by very strong evidence from somebody with loads of experience.
I do agree with the previous comment that he shouldn't have responded, though. It's a losing argument because those who are choosing to misinterpret a statement that is pretty much crystal clear are doing so because of inherent biases. You won't convince those people to consider logic so it doesn't pay to expend time and reputation having a public discussion with them. The people who agree will say so or say nothing and choose to take the advice and act accordingly.
Scott Adams has a nice dismissal: I agree with your analysis of your hallucination.
(and, to defend the pg, he says he would have let it all just go away, but it's a really important point and he doesn't want the meaning co-opted by people with any agenda other than helping people grow companies better.)
I'm not entirely sure I'd be quoting the wisdom of a guy who sets up sockpuppets to agree with himself of discussion forums, since it would appear he has a hard time with delusions himself.
A distinct lack of response by pg on this issue would not have sent an effective message. I think that the audience that reads these misunderstandings is large enough, and of a wide enough spread of interest/knowledge in the issue, that most would not interpret this lack of response as an attempt not to step down into muddy water.
Seems like pg made a good choice to me. I don't think that people will focus on attacking him in similar ways in the future- his self defense was clear and reasonable, and it doesn't really appear that he is defending a sort of terrible racist agenda at all. It also seems that his publicly stated opinions are reasonable enough, in general, that future attackers would be dissuaded from attacking him by the sheer fact that most attacks on pg's opinions/statements would be hard to back up when pressed.
> Never explain yourself to people who misunderstand you on the internet. They'll just use it as an excuse to misunderstand you again, which is worse because not only are you a terrible monster who said those terrible things, but now you've had the unmitigated gall to defend those terrible things.
This has been the exact opposite of my experience. Usually when I approach people directly and in a forthright manner and try and correct and clarify (and of course, apologize if my position offends and offer to listen to a counter-argument) then people seem to positively adjust their opinion of me.
I can't help but feel like your advice smacks of elitism. When I read your post I get a subtext of, "Everyone else is dumb if they don't get what I'm saying. At best, that is! Usually they're trying to shoot me down! I don't negotiate with terrorists."
I'm not sure how I could wake up every morning if I felt that way.
Well, recent events suggest that unfortunately there is a grain of truth to that assessment.
A lot of the noise in blogs and twitter has been along the lines of "PG is an evil monster who hates women and foreigners and people of color and doesn't ever want to invest in their companies". None of which he said or implied, but that doesn't seem to have stopped the attacks.
> "PG is an evil monster who hates women and foreigners and people of color and doesn't ever want to invest in their companies".
There are long-standing complaints with the structure and the predatory nature of YCombinator. It is very unusual and complaints center around how HN is essentially a very high-pressure situation designed to try and sell kids on the value of PG & YComb as investors on very small funding events.
Personally, I don't think this article really justifies the behavior that has been consistently (if not as high-profile) that PG has had. His reported castigation and refusal to see people who have Indian accents is troublesome. It's very difficult to take his claims seriously when he affects fake russian accents while proclaiming his innocence.
There's no question that YC has benefited greatly from PG's "propaganda" - and vice-versa. (That is, the success and growth of YC has given PG a lot more tangible stuff to write about, as opposed to 'thought experiments'.)
I'm far from an insider so I can't speak to whether a person or team should go for YC funding or not. Or whether the system is biased against people with Indian accents (your comment is the first I've heard of that, actually).
Clearly, a team with potential success ahead of them ought to consider their options carefully and see whether applying to YC is right for them. And, if they get in, whether doing the program is the most valuable use of their next few months. A founding team needs to look beyond the hype and headlines and determine what the best deal is - but that's hardly YC's fault if they present themselves in the best possible light.
> Clearly, a team with potential success ahead of them ought to consider their options carefully and see whether applying to YC is right for them.
It seems like this step is precisely what the YCombinator process is meant to complicate. The entire structure is designed to make it feel like a competition for PG's attention. By structuring it this way, it makes it much more likely that the people who "win the competition" will say yes to YComb.
And YComb moves fast! People tell me there isn't a lot of time to think. Implicit in YComb's structure is the statement, "There are a dozen people in line behind you that will take your place." It's all very American Idol.
It seems like this step is precisely what the YCombinator process is meant to complicate. The entire structure is designed to make it feel like a competition for PG's attention. By structuring it this way, it makes it much more likely that the people who "win the competition" will say yes to YComb.
I suspect that vibe emerges from the scaling aspect of things - if a regular VC firm invests in N deals a year and YC does 10N [], then there is no need to 'create' a competition for the attention of PG and the other principals. It will just emerge out of the large number of portfolio companies. (And this is not unique to YC, but may be exaggerated - VC firms are notoriously busy for the same reason.)
And YComb moves fast! People tell me there isn't a lot of time to think. Implicit in YComb's structure is the statement, "There are a dozen people in line behind you that will take your place." It's all very American Idol.*
Again, this sounds like a scaling issue. If you're investing in fewer companies, you can spend more time hand holding with the teams of each one. HUman attention is the thing that doesn't scale, so it makes sense that it is the thing in short supply.
It sounds to me like teams need to precompute their responses to lots of possible situations. And get as much information about the downside of participating as possible, beyond the headlines and the hype. But this is the kind of suggestion that I'd give anybody considering YC (or a job, or the military, or a college, or a grad school, or a training program).
[*] I don't know if these numbers are accurate, but the point is that YC is well known to do many more, smaller deals than VC firms.
> Again, this sounds like a scaling issue. If you're investing in fewer companies, you can spend more time hand holding with the teams of each one. HUman attention is the thing that doesn't scale, so it makes sense that it is the thing in short supply.
Isn't human coaching the primary asset that YComb offers though? It's certainly not money, HN seed rounds are not exceptionally large, and they aren't unusually early.
There are long-standing complaints with the structure and the predatory nature of YCombinator.
It seems like a "good deed never goes unpunished"-type situation. YC partners are both independently wealthy and brilliant. They could choose to do anything they wanted with their time, or nothing at all, and they'd still be fine. Instead, they chose to dedicate themselves to coaching people and sharing their expertise to teach people to build companies. Men, women, foreigners, everybody. The selection process for getting into YC is the most open you'd ever find anywhere. The paperwork is open-source for heaven's sakes! Could you suggest a couple of things they could do to make the process less "predatory"?
> Instead, they chose to dedicate themselves to coaching people and sharing their expertise to teach people to build companies.
You know, most of the good venture capital firms and angels who enter in on seed rounds do this.
> Instead, they chose to dedicate themselves to coaching people and sharing their expertise to teach people to build companies. Men, women, foreigners, everybody.
I'd love to know the ratio of male founders who apply to the number that get funded vs. the ratio of female ones. Did PG publish this data?
> Could you suggest a couple of things they could do to make the process less "predatory"?
Not structure it like American Idol, for starters. With the possible exception of pre-everyone-goes-on-summer-vactation, most agencies don't structure their funding around some kind of audition structure. They make appointments and develop leads as they see fit, trying to talk to companies when they're actually read to do funding.
Of course, many venture firms out there are sleazy and lots of people are working on ideas that won't interest the top tier firms. But personally I've always felt like everything about the YComb process was design to fool young Stanford undergrads into taking what, honestly, is a kinda mediocre funding deal unless YComb is basically the biggest value-add ever.
> I can't help but feel like your advice smacks of elitism. When I read your post I get a subtext of, "Everyone else is dumb if they don't get what I'm saying. At best, that is! Usually they're trying to shoot me down! I don't negotiate with terrorists."
I don't think it was meant to be elitist. I believe it was directed towards those who are going to find a problem with anything you say, regardless of what you say.
The Internet is filled with every type of person with many different motivations. Many of those people have a different motivation than "understanding" you. They are people that get social currency from signaling that they are anti-racist, they are people that monetize outrage, they are people for who arguing is a bloodsport, they are self-avowed trolls. Why bother? The people who make the attempt to understand you will treat what you say charitably, they are self-selecting. The rest you can ignore.
I am elitist against people who judge ideas on the scale of which one is most politically correct.
I don't understand how they get anything done in life without giving their brain room to think. For example, a founder having trouble raising funds could consider Paul Graham's advice on accents and see if it applies to him, but not if he censors his own mind to avoid it.
That is not what's at play here. There is a systemic problem in Silicon Valley and San Francisco in startup culture. Berating founders for their accent publicly (as has been reported) is an excellent example of the problem.
That is not polite, cordial conversation between equals. That is not the behavior of two equals talking business. It's not acceptable behavior in a civilized venue. This is not because it's "politically correct," but rather because of the profound implications of antagonizing someone for what they are and where they were born.
Pg is the equal of very few of the people with whom he does business. He has more money, power, knowledge and experience than almost anyone he deals with on a regular basis. YC applicants are not equals, they are supplicants. His equals are VCs, super angels and C-suite executives from big software companies. People who are not equals can have mutually beneficial relationships, but treating rhetoric about people being equal in dignity or legal rights with an accurate description of the world is a mistake.
> People who are not equals can have mutually beneficial relationships, but treating rhetoric about people being equal in dignity or legal rights with an accurate description of the world is a mistake.
Except that PG's continued fortune is dependent upon the success of these "supplicants" approaching his business for money. And if he does his job well, the winners will become his equals. So... yeah. Unwise to play the "I am better because economics!" card.
Certainly, PG is not the equal of most of these people in engineering ability. He's so far out of the game that it'd take him 1-3 years just to update his vocabulary.
PG is in the business of giving business advice and teaching startups how to grow and prosper in the world as it exists. He has stated that he writes publicly in order to scale the process of giving advice. By putting it online, it is precisely where founders who most need the advice are most likely to find it.
It makes you upset that PG is giving this advice. But if it is true advice, then founders will be better off for hearing it, regardless of your feelings.
It is easier for founders to modify their behavior than it is to teach all the VCs of the valley to understand lots of accents, so PG's advice passes the sanity check even though we may wish the contrary were true.
> PG is in the business of giving business advice and teaching startups how to grow and prosper in the world as it exists.
Quite untrue. PG is in the business of giving very small seed rounds to mostly small, low-effort consumer plays in the web and mobile space. He does fund things that do not meet these criterion, but they are in a notable minority.
His writing and website and other aspects are part of his overall plan to engage with the tech community. This is the added value (beyond cash, of which everyone's int he same) he proposes to add as an investor. Have you ever done YComb or gotten seed/A-round funding before? You know how this works, right.
> But if it is true advice, then founders will be better off for hearing it, regardless of your feelings.
It is clearly true that PG will be less likely to fund you if you were not born in the parts of the world he is familiar with, consequently speaking the language and dialects that he is comfortable with. His arguments that only western-sounding people succeed in the world of tech business is absurd (and poorly sourced).
> It is easier for founders to modify their behavior than it is to teach all the VCs of the valley to understand lots of accents, so PG's advice passes the sanity check even though we may wish the contrary were true.
Yeah dude, I just made walked into the doors of basically every top tier VC in the Valley, sat down, gave a presentation, then left. I heard people prepping for presentations with thick accents in nearly every office. I'm pretty sure it is "okay" to be not born in the US.
Especially since it's entirely possible to, you know, employ someone to help you with this part if your English skills aren't up where you need them to be.
So I am not only upset that PG is mockingly affecting accents to tell people what not to do, but I'm upset that these are his criterion. I'm a bit upset because this diminishes the slowly tarnishing image I have of my former Lisp idol, and because the Valley has a systemic problem with women and certain ethnicities.
This is another example of that coming into play, and I'm mad because the engineering part of my head demands I try and fix it if it bothers me. But I can think of no solutions that don't involve putting people who say things like this in a shock collar. So now I am more upset because my irrational and pervasive desire to fix things is thwarted by brute feasibility.
That's a little bit paranoid. Sure, there are some people out there who just don't like you and will bend whatever you say against you. But sometimes, people may be rightfully calling you out on your assumptions. If you're not open to any criticism on what you say or how you say it, you will never get any better at expressing yourself.
When I respond to people who are being unreasonably critical of things I've written, I'm usually not just responding to them for their sake, I'm responding so that everyone else who's following the conversation can look at both sides and decide for themselves who's being reasonable. Over time, being earnest about responding to criticism, even unwarranted criticism, has gained me respect in my social circle. Of course, one has to decide how their time is best spent, but on the whole, I think it's a bit thick headed to always take the "yeah, I said it, so f' off" approach.
Yes, this is the operative point. There may always be some who wilfully and loudly misinterpret you for their own reasons, but the majority will be reading along silently, trying to decide who's most credible. Those are the people you're really speaking to.
Well, perhaps he ironically didn't make himself as clear as he could have. (Which happens in off-the-cuff interviews.) And that may demonstrate his point about communication.
And it is an unpleasant point. People "get their asses kicked by the world" (as he put it) for the way they speak or irrelevant aspects of their appearance. Says something about this world.
(I know when I mention certain viewpoints which maybe aren't commonly voiced or liked by the audience, some willfully misunderstand me, and it's my job to clarify.)
Anyone who accuses PG/YC of being xenophobic is laughable. It's especially laughable coming from the press -- they've been at YC offices many times, and the sheer number of founders with accents is staggering. YC even got involved in the political process to make getting founder visas easier!
I have a really strong Russian accent that (hopefully) doesn't border too much on being not understandable, and I've never felt discriminated against at YC or elsewhere in SV, not for a millisecond. This is corroborated by dozens upon dozens of founders whose accents are even stronger than mine.
If you want to do business in a country and raise millions of dollars from people, you have to be understandable. If someone made this claim in France, or Germany, or Japan, nobody would even blink. The very fact that PG is getting criticized for it is almost indicative of how meritocratic Silicon Valley (and YC in particular) is.
... or just indicative of a very delicate and typically American rule: thou shall not speak ill of ethnic communities you don't belong to. It's a very civilized norm (which I also follow), and I'm sure it helps keeping together the most multi-ethnic cities in the world, but occasionally it gets in the way of honest discourse.
That politeness extends to omitting the very real fact that listening to a foreign accent is somewhat tiring - it's like running error-correction that consumes extra processing power ;-)
(Not a native English speaker, but I noticed that with accents from other non-native speakers ...)
No kidding. I had a couple professors in college with accents truly as thick as molasses. I would leave every lecture mentally drained, and during the lecture my brain would run anywhere from 1-3 sentences behind realtime as it struggled to comprehend what had been said. It took me weeks to get used to "wahriable" (variable).
Yes, for me listening to some west coast US accent is extremely tiring and even plain painful. I started playing some Google videos about topics I'm interested in and stopped after two sentences.
Just to add some relativism to this highly relative topic. I'm French by the way, and enjoy British, German, Indian, black American, Chinese accents, for example.
I wouldn't say that was typically American by any means. I would say that hyper political correctness is a reaction by a subset of the population to the overt ethnic discrimination of much American dialogue, policy, and action.
A quarter of the country belongs to an evangelical church. Those people discriminate against anyone that isn't Christian, because that's what being evangelical means. A third of black males born today will go to prison. There is a war on anybody that is vaguely middle eastern, even at home. The Jews controlling Hollywood and Wall Street are reviled. It goes on and on and on.
I read that extra politeness as fake, and indicative of phobic behaviour. If you treat black people as equals, then you don't see anything bad about describing someone as black. Instead, for politeness you have to say "individual of color". Newspeak that tells a lot about the society as a whole.
Anyone who accuses anyone of being X-phobic is laughable. Rational people ought to be able to debate - sparring through facts, hypotheses, and argument - without walking on eggshells. Dispassionate debate is a far better mechanism to find truth than name-calling.
If you're right, then why do you have to resort to attacking the motivations of the other speaker to win? Correct opinions ought to be able to walk on their own without relying on such crutches.
If you're right, then why do you have to resort to attacking the motivations of the other speaker to win?
Because in this case I happen to actually know the motivations of both parties. PG's motivation is to help founders. The press's motivation is to drive traffic.
I'm criticizing the people claiming that PG is xenophobic. I'm on your side on this one. I hate argument by insult - it shrinks the range of acceptable thought, thereby enstupidating the public mind.
It's straight out of the 1984 playbook. Language becomes vaguer and mushier, less communicative. We can no longer tell founders that "thick foreign accents will hurt your startup", instead we must say "have good communication skills", which is a far less useful statement. It is like the substitution of "ungood" for "bad" and "plusgood" for anything more extreme than "good".
Why should we talk to each other anymore, when a tiny handbook can contain all the thoughts we are allowed to express?
Dispassionate debate is a good way to find the truth, but does seem a bit odd to debate whether somebody is xenophobic when you can just go talk to them and see what they are like.
Debating theories and facts or interpretation of facts makes alot of sense for things like science experiments , it seems a bit like indirection when talking about what a certain person is like.
You can just go find out what that person is like, instead of relying on hearsay.
Regarding Slava, I wouldn't say that he is doing the name calling.
Accusing somebody of being xenophobic is much closer to name calling, I find that even the act of accusing to be pretty weak, why not just make a statement as opposed to an accusation.
I agree with Slava's statement, if anyone would make the statement that YC/PG is xenophobic after having met them I would say that is pretty laughable.
I don't need to debate this, it's merely my opinion based on factual experience.
(also, opinions don't need to be correct, they are just opinions. Facts on the other hand can be incorrect or correct)
If you think otherwise without meeting YC/PG, then you are making an opinion without any experience.
(a situation you can correct)
As an aside, you don't even need to walk on eggshells around PG.
You can just ask him if he is a xenophobe, he will answer no.
The word xenophobic isn't name calling when it accurately labels an emotional response, namely the fear of strangers. America is xenophobic with respect to Muslims, for example, especially so since Islamist terrorist actions instilled that fear.
In this case, I would say yes PG is xenophobic when it comes to people with strong foreign accents, because he's afraid based on his experience that they'll lower the value of the companies he's investing in.
You've taken all the meaning out of the word. Founders with thick accents should also be afraid that their speaking abilities or lack thereof will lower the value of the companies that they are founding. Would that make them... "xenophobic"... about themselves?
I was actually trying to clarify the meaning of the word to take the pejorative bite out of it. A fear of strangers makes sense in some contexts.
Of course foreigners cannot be xenophobic about themselves, they aren't foreigners to themselves. Agreed that if you have a strong accent it makes sense to worry about it; this is the pressure that drives assimilation.
i still remember one of your rehearsal presentations for demo day,
it was something along the lines of
"this graph is bad"
"this graph is good"
i even thought you were playing up your accent for added comedic value.
(for context, he was showing a performance graph of rethinkDB vs. mySQL, and the graphs were practically inverted. rethinkDB was performing so much better it was comical how much throughput it was doing)
* The only approach that doesn't make things worse is to simply ignore those people. *
I appreciate your overall sentiment, but I respectfully disagree with this point. I think founders need to consider whether or not their critics matter. In other words, will a critic's derogatory statements affect your business and reputation?
For example, if PG were to ignore a New York Times reporter, there's a big risk that the reporter could have created an even more negative story that had a lot of traction because of the newspaper's cachet. Was talking to the reporter a perfect solution in this case? No, I don't think so.
But having been a reporter and worked with journalists as a public relations professional, I've seen clients achieve much better outcomes by making themselves available for comment. It gives the clients an opportunity to shape how others perceive them, particularly in times of crisis.
Actually, if you look at what PG and YC are trying to achieve, this is a great strategy. What an efficient way to filter out people who focus on soundbites and refuse to think more deeply and clearly about what the author is trying to say.
I couldn't have put this better myself, it's exactly the first thing I thought once I came on HN and saw this essay. It's just more fuel for the fire, which is a good thing when that's what you want. PG never struck me as a shock jock so I was quite surprised.
Within the US there are various accents and sometimes people from one area have a little trouble understanding people from another area. If a strong foreign accent is a big roadblock to start ups then it's understandable, said and done. Now with this follow up I have to revisit the whole thing to see why it is the biggest challenge. Since we're all into solving problems why not have a hot blonde take care of all the public interaction if it's that big of a deal (that's what I would do)?
The crazy thing is I used to have a boss who was native to India until late childhood, and (so the story went) had taught himself English, largely by watching American TV. The guy now has zero accent. So I was somewhat skeptical. But maybe some people as part of their personality just pick up on pronunciation faster than others?
And some people don't even try. I'm fascinated when I listen to someone who speaks English with excellent syntax and vocabulary, but with consistently poor pronunciation. Sometimes it comes off as a mark of pride, like "I'll deign to speak to you, but I'm not going to put forth the effort to sound like you."
You can learn syntax and vocabulary quite easily by reading and writting in a language. Pronunciation is much harder to learn, often requiring relocating yourself.
This happens because English as Second Language teachers are often non-native speakers and speak with an accent themselves. They are able to teach grammar or vocabulary but they cannot teach pronunciation. Often non-native speakers are only exposed to a native speaking environment as grown-ups. By that time your brain is already stuck in its ways and it is frustratingly tough to learn new vowels and consonants.
As a non-native speaker myself I can often hear myself pronouncing English poorly yet I find it excruciatingly difficult to pronounce some vowels the way I intend to pronounce them, even though I have been living in a native-speaking environment for a long time. Similarly, my native English-speaking (American) wife finds it very difficult to pronounce some vowels and consonants of my own native language. It took her fairly long to learn how to pronounce my name correctly. (Ironically, now that we're married it is her name as well.)
All I am saying is that I would not attribute this to pride or laziness. Pronunciation is a genuinely difficult thing to learn as an adult.
Thanks for that perspective. I certainly didn't mean that all ESL speakers exhibit wanton mispronunciation. Perhaps none do. In fact, your eloquent rebuttal has left me sympathizing with even Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I think the reason people got slightly sniffy about it was the use of the word 'foreign' in a negative context, which, whether or not it is intended, will be interpreted by some as xenophobic. Had it been stated as '...having unintelligible accents...' it would probably have passed without note.
This is one of the few cases where this is worth repeating: correlation is not causation.
PG is definitely one of the foremost researchers in the realm of entrepreneurial success factors, but it is important to step back for a moment when analyzing such things as verbal accents and "Zuckerberg likeness" correlating with failure and success, respectively.
Just as Noam Chomsky criticized Peter Norvig because of his focus on statistical methods versus fundamental models, I would suggest that inferring success based on statistical observation without an underlying model can become a confusing and unrewarding process.
Statistics is a tool to test fundamental models, not a model to explain phenomena all in itself. As such, I would guess that founder success is more likely based upon mundane traits such as intrinsic motivation, intellect, experience, access to capital and key personnel, and most importantly, luck. We see this time and time again in superstars such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, John Carmack, Bill Gates, etc.
Extremely smart people are more prone to analyzing every tiny variable, which sometimes causes them to give additional weight to trivial factors in a complex equation.
PG offered a clear underlying model in this essay. His model is that a) founders need to sell well to succeed and that b) it's hard to sell well if you can't be easily understood. You have a "guess" that mundane traits are more important for success. He has a theory and data that support his theory.
That's fine just as long as what he did wasn't the following:
see some small number of founders with a fairly strong accent, say < 30 or < 50 or < 60, then observe that those startups happened to do poorly and then extrapolate a theory from those observations to explain what is happening. I am not necessarily disagreeing with his thesis, but in statistical data analysis you have to be very careful about drawing conclusions from small samples when the underlying distribution is non-normal, with fat tails
This is an epidemiological observation, and those rarely indicate a particular mechanism. Even with giant populations and teams of scientists we have only tentative and shifting theories for why, for example, Americans are fatter than Europeans.
Controlled studies of startup founders are not practical.
But pg has a pretty good idea of the 'why' of this observed phenomena so there is your underlying model: it is fundamentally important for CEOs to be able to communicate clearly and effectively with stakeholders.
Your 'correlation is not causation' mantra seems misplaced unless you can argue that effective communication is not fundamentally important.
There are "things you can't say".[1] You can be right, and your message can be harmless but the way you communicate it comes so close to a cultural taboo button that it requires too much extra effort not to be misunderstood. You just probably shouldn't go there. It will cause misunderstanding. Its kind of like having a thick "cultural accent".
For example, I used to, but do not now, ever use the word "niggle". Its just too much work.
A friend of mine got hung up by a vendor because the friend said they were being ``asinine''. (No, it wasn't because they offended at being called stupid, but rather they thought it was a naughty, posterior related word...) Good times.
One of the things that hastened Larry Summers departure from Harvard is the general public's sudden inability to comprehend the difference between average and standard deviation in reference to male/female intelligence.
> One of the things that hastened Larry Summers departure from Harvard is the general public's sudden inability to comprehend the difference between average and standard deviation ...
Yes, but I would have said chronic and acute inability. What Summers offered in that unfortunate address was a perfectly reasonable explanation (concisely, same mean value but differing standard deviations), one that has a certain amount of circumstantial evidence and that in no way disparages women's intelligence or abilities, but all that followed from it resulted from innumeracy, not common sense.
I don't see how this is a discussion. His point is completely valid, and holds true for many things.
If you were to become a public speaker/motivational speaker in Canada, then not being able to be understood in either English or French would affect your career.
It seems to me like everybody is caught up in the semantics of whether pointing this out is politically correct or not. I personally think it doesn't matter, and if you're truly committed on creating a startup in the US, you'll have to just persevere regardless of the opinions, as this is just a remark on data.
So the message is, 'It helps if people can understand you'.
Um. Ok. ...and I appreciate that PG wanted to make this clear as the press loves to make a story where there isn't one. But do we really need to vote this up like crazy to guarentee it is the top story for the next 48 hours? Are there really that many people here who will benefit from this lesson?
The reason for voting this up isn't so people know that it's good to communicate well. The reason for voting this up is to correct a misperception with what was said. Corrections rarely ever get the publicity that they deserve.
The right way to have communicated would have been "Oh shit, I didn't mean it that way, sorry guys. I understand how that may have come across poorly." instead of "What me racist unpossible!"
Yes - it's the type of thing you have to jump on quickly before the negative PR spirals. And unfortunately, corrections and clarifications rarely get the hype that original articles or misquotes get in the first place.
"I'm not sure why. It could be that there are a bunch of subtle things entrepreneurs have to communicate and can't if you have a strong accent. Or, it could be that anyone with half a brain would realize you're going to be more successful if you speak idiomatic English, so they must just be clueless if they haven't gotten rid of their strong accent."
He is talking about strong accents as a superficial data point. You would have to make shit up to infer anything beyond that.
I actually think his second suggestion (a lack of a critical kind of sensibility) is the deeper and more meaningful one.
I agree to some extent. I'd love to have heard how he approaches the sensitive subject of telling someone he can't understand them because they're speaking with an incredibly thick accent or considerably stilted english. I know many people I work with or interview that I would love to convey this to, but I can't think of a way to say it that wouldn't either run afoul of their feelings or Human Resources.
No, the message is, if you have such a strong accent that people don't understand you, working on your language skills is not only a good idea, but it may even be a cause why you are not successful.
I recall working in a lab with a lot of foreign grad students from different backgrounds (under a professor with a bit of an accent). There were definitely times the accents interacted in interesting ways, where some would understand completely and others would have no clue what was said (even after several repetitions) until someone else said it.
I think the problem really arose because he said foreign accent. So if it was someone American with an incredibly thick and hard-to-understand accent that would be fine? It wouldn't, if what he really cares about is comprehension.
> I'd thought of just letting this controversy blow over.
A common PG tactic, this (see also the "HN mods wilfully ruin submission titles" storm). But probably not a great one to emulate: time and again here we've seen startups badly burnt by the "fuck up in public and don't say or post anything hoping it will blow over" stance.
Even if it does blow over, you've damaged your image. People might treat you the same, but they'll long remember that time you ran away and hid when people expected better of you.
> I think the problem really arose because he said foreign accent. So if it was someone American with an incredibly thick and hard-to-understand accent that would be fine?
How many native-born US citizens with regional accents this strong are in a position to start a technology startup? I grew up in the Bible Belt and I find this inconceivable.
>American with an incredibly thick and hard-to-understand accent
Is there an example of this that can be pointed out? A nearly unintelligible American accent held by someone working in technology who is trying their best to be understood?
It's exceedingly easy to find an example in people who are speaking English as a 2nd, 3rd, or 4th language, and isn't a reflection of their worth as a person, but a sign that they may have a problem in the English speaking startup world.
A sole person in the country would do as an example, right? And I'll bet with 300 million there's at least one tech-inclined American with English as the first language that has trouble being understood.
Likewise, if foreignness isn't really the issue, disabilities will surely also count? Are there disabled people in tech who have a hard time speaking English? Would Stephen Hawking pass as a Founder for PG?
Most educated Americans with any type of accent can usually alternate between standard dialect and their regional accent. Politicians especially are good at this. Kevin Spacey nails this in "House of Cards", but there are examples of Obama, Bush, and Clinton doing this as well.
A thick southern accent is far easier for Americans to understand than a thick foreign accent. I've never heard a native English speaker that I had a hard time understanding.
I occasionally have—some Newfoundlanders, people from certain parts of the UK, and so on. There's a whole lot of variation in the English-speaking world, and the line between dialect and accent isn't well-defined. There's even an island off the coast of Virginia (I think) where people speak 18th-century English!
I don't know what island you're referring to, but there are a lot of claims out there like this - a lot of people claiming they speak the "Queen's English". Every claim I've heard, much like Eskimos and snow, turns out to be a myth:
The "18th century" thing stuck in my mind from some media piece, and now that you mention it, does sound rather obviously like a myth. But the place exists—I think it was probably Tangier Island [1], and the accent there is indeed archaic:
Some of that sounds like a Monty Python sketch! It's definitely an example of one native English speaker (me) finding another (them) hard to understand.
I also second the commenter who brought up the Glaswegian accent. I love how it sounds but damned if I can make out half of what they're saying.
I would say that depends on the southern accent in question. I (native english, mid-east coast) have never had trouble with Texan accents at all, no matter how strong, but have had a lot of difficulty with rural accents from people in South Carolina. A few weeks ago I was down there visiting and tried to buy some shrimp from a native South Carolinian. I had to resort to hand-gestures; he seemed to have as much difficulty understanding me as I did him.
My wife's family comes from the coastal islands off South Carolina.
They speak English, but I just could not understand anything the locals said. The dialect/culture is called Gullah: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullah
A couple of years back, I met my friend's grandma down in the bayou on the border between Texas and Louisiana. I had absolutely no clue what that woman was saying to me. I had to look at my friend for a translation every time she spoke. He assured me that she was speaking English.
Listen to some "native English speakers" in Glasgow - I understood them reasonably well after a week, but when I arrived the cab driver might as well have spoken chinese, I had to write things on paper to get where I wanted...
I am Indian, but a native English speaker. When I went to Northern Ireland, I took a long cab drive to meet a customer. For the first 15 minutes of that drive, the driver and I were trying to calibrate accents. I certainly couldn't understand a word he said. After a while, things magically started making sense.
Plenty of Singaporeans or Indians are, in fact, native speakers with accent and dialect differences that can stymie other English speakers. I've had people complain New Zealanders speak too quickly for foreigners to understand (as well as our flattened vowels). And get back to me after watching Taggert.
(The most incomprehensible language I've ever heard from a native speaker personally wasn't Glasgwegian, but rather two 60+ folks demonstrating Black Country English.)
Could be an effective strategy or could be a technique employed by people with a low threshold or tolerance for adversity (as hard as that is to believe) or experience higher than normal levels of frustration when people don't agree with them.
You sometimes see this in people that normally are tops at something and where things come easy to them (vs. "normals"). So they are not used to having to put in much effort to defend themselves and the practice of having to do so feels foreign and distonic to them.
If you've ever attended a top school you see this in some of the students there. The ones who skated through high school and were tops find it hard to operate where they actually have to work very hard and study so much (because of the competition). The ones who struggled and had to work hard to get in take the "b's" in stride and continue working hard and aren't as bothered by setbacks. Because it's always been like that.
A generalization, based strictly on my observation.
PG rarely engages in long back and forth's with comments on HN. He makes comments but I don't normally see much of him replying to a reply. I remember recently where he actually told people it was time to "get back to work" just like a parent would tell you that you are being silly and to grow up.
To an England-born person now making his home in Northern California (PG), some extreme American accents would also be "foreign". Indeed, in idiomatic English, "foreign" doesn't necessarily mean "from another country" but can also mean "from another place/region" or even just "strange and unfamiliar".
(I'd bet a sensitive-enough analysis would show that even North American accents "foreign" to northern California have a very slight disadvantage in the bay area startup community. The tiniest of things can send signals of mutual-understanding and shared-goals, fairly or not.)
Focusing on the "non-United-States" sense of "foreign", in order to take offense here, is thus yet another example of why a shared, subtle, native-like understanding of the nuances of language is so important.
Appreciating the whole range of senses of "foreign" makes it easy to interpret the PG quote sympathetically, as being about practical comprehension. Focusing on just the primary sense of 'foreign', as if the word only meant "other-country-origin", leads to time wasted on misunderstandings and taking-offense.
I think most Americans would regard different regions of the US "not foreign" and British or Australian accents as "foreign". This is entirely justified. Those of us who grew up in areas with nonstandard American accents grow up with enough American media to know what Americans are "supposed to" sound like. While there is still some regional variation, there is no place I know of in the US where it's socially acceptable for an educated person to speak in a way that educated Americans from other regions would have any trouble understanding them. In fact, it's quite the opposite; the strongest American accents tend to mark you as a member of one of the lower classes.
As a result most of us either eliminate our accent as much as possible or learn how to switch as needed (as philwelch below pointed out). The bar to get past the prejudices of other educated Americans is so high that we get past the point of comprehensibility by default.
Someone from another country doesn't have the same influences. An adult from an outside English-speaking country may not be able to sound American simply because they've never tried. That's not going to be the case for someone who grew up here, even for an unusual value of "here".
People who are focusing on the "non-United-States" sense of "foreign" are reading the statement as it was meant.
Here's a startup idea: help people speak English well. I live in France, my kids don't speak English at all. I send them to the "American School of Paris" on weekends for a so-called "immersion program" where most kids are French. Results are a little disappointing, and the thing is quite expensive. Yet the waiting list to get in is immense, people are willing to fight to get in.
I'd pay a very high price for an app or a program that young kids would love / do willingly, that would result in them becoming fluent in English.
Watching TV shows in English (with English subtitles) is a great idea, but I'm not so sure about The Simpsons. I speak English fairly well and I still have some trouble understanding the Simpsons (Homer especially). There are other shows that are much easier to understand and better suited for beginners.
For example, I would consider Breaking Bad much more suitable for beginners in English (most characters speak very clear), but it might not be an appropriate show for kids.
“Milao is a unique virtual environment that offers language learners on-demand opportunities to interact in a target language through text-based conversations that closely mimic real life situations. [They] have created an Artificially Intelligent Native Speaker, that will allow learners to develop and improve their communicative skills in the language they are trying to learn anywhere and anytime.”
(I know one of the team members; this was copied off their LinkedIn profile.)
We are building a real life language service marketplace. We are Italians, with strong accents. Sometimes I am under the impression that our non being native may be a competitive advantage, mostly in terms of broader perspective over language learning. I would test if positive correlation between strong accent and lower rates of achievement may primarily have something to do with trust, more than to the ability to get understood. Telling your story as a foreigner speaker is a relatively easy task. Convincing somebody you deserve credibility, even though you talk like a native 10 years old, is a whole different pair of shoes.
Okay, but this seems to make the same mistake as the French education system, who talks about foreign "languages" in general.
But most non-English-speaking people don't want to learn "languageS" as if those were all equivalent and there was some general quality to be gained by speaking different tongues. They want to learn English, as the only international language.
I want my kids to speak English not because they'll have a better mind if they do, like I try to have them learn music, but because not speaking English in today's world is like missing an eye (or more probably both).
As for why English-speaking people want to learn a foreign language, I have no idea, but I suspect their motivations are wholly different. It's interesting to speak Spanish, it's mind-opening to learn Chinese, but it's not vital.
So what I'm looking for is a "system" aimed at young / very young kids, specialized in teaching English (and only English).
To succeed it needs to be playful, maybe addictive, not require one to already know how to read -- and in general not look or sound like anything "school-y".
Somebody (was it John Holt?) said "if we taught kids how to speak, they would never learn". Yet that's exactly what we're doing with foreign languages.
I'm guessing you speak french inside the home? Have you thought about switching that over the english? That would probably be really good immersion for them.
How can they allow you to sign up with an email address and then require connecting G+ before allowing me to join a class? Much better to just require G+ as the login (or at least tell me up front). This conversion flow is irritating.
I tried http://verbling.com quite a few times, it seems a great idea and use of technology. Maybe Verbling's founders, would make a deal for all YC applicants. For example, X hours of free 1-to-1 accent crash course with the appropriate tutor. Or, Y hours of free courses for foreign YC founders as part of the offering.
My younger brother speaks amazingly good English, and I actually think he picked it up playing Counterstrike (or some similar game where you can communicate with the other players with a mic and earphones).
1. having accent is ok as far as you can make others understand your point in english ...
2. bad english (i mean really bad) will be turn-off anyway with or without accent .... so it is not accent but its all about english as a language i guess ...
I've seen people with english and no bad accent but still having trouble in making other people understand :) and they are either Dumb OR they're P.hd holders (not generalizing though)...
People go to Pitch Nights just to work on the quality of their communication.
The reason is, if you have ever waded through a large round of pitches - you understand that it only takes a couple hard to understand sentences before you lose interest.
This doesn't just apply to foreign accents, it applies to volume, pace, etc.
Stephen Hawking and Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston (aka "Mumbles") are examples of people who have experienced difficulty making themselves understood (either through medical conditions or strong accents), yet are leaders in their respective domains. In entrepreneurship, one example that springs to mind is Charles Pfizer, who started a successful chemical company a year after arriving in the United States from Germany in the 1840s. I assume he spoke with a heavy accent which may have been difficult for some employees and customers to understand, yet his company flourished.
Let's not equate "poor English" with "likely to fail at X". There are other factors, ranging from domain knowledge to soft skills, that come into play as well.
I don't think Mayor Menino is hard to understand for native Bostonians: he speaks with their accent. If anything, it's probably helped him in what has traditionally very xenophobic city.
Hawking was famous in physics circles before he could no speak.
People underestimate the level of skill required to speak a language well enough so that it is not a chore for a native speaker to listen.
The chairman of the English Department of my local community college (College of Marin in California) told me that it takes an immigrant an average of 7 years to get good enough at speaking English for native speakers to actually want to listen to them talk.
I am an immigrant and have lots of immigrant friends with various lengths of being at in the U.S. I can confirm that it takes 7 years to speak English well enough so people really want to socialize with you.
Look, I respect PG as much as the next person so this is not a slight against him since I feel HN far too often comes to his defence as if protecting their newborn. Having said that ...
I don't understand how a man of his stature and someone in his position can allow himself to make those statements about accents (or anything that sounds remotely xenophobic). I say that because even his blog post says the following:
"A startup founder is always selling. Not just literally to customers, but to current and potential employees, partners, investors, and the press as well ... there is little room for misunderstanding."
That statement doesn't just hold for startups but for anyone in business. His initial statements left plenty of room for misunderstanding. Furthermore, I would also find it very difficult to believe that his inclination towards avoiding "excessive" accents does not also subconsciously lead him to have a slight bias against founders with a "slight" accent. That's how biases work - the threshold for when your brain decides to evoke that bias is not black-and-white.
Read the rest of the comments in this discussion on HN and you should quite easily be able to see how he can allow himself to make this kind of statement. There's a huge amount of people willing to portray anyone who interpreted his statement differently from how he said it should be interpreted as malevolent, as part of "the looking-for-reasons-to-be-offended patrol", of only caring because it's in their "business model to generate politically correct controversies".
I have read a fair amount of this thread and I still stand by what I said. Furthermore, for obvious reasons, I don't believe HN is an objective place to discuss the merits of PG's statements past & present.
Oh, HN's definitely not even close to objective when discussing the merits of PG's statements, but in a way that's beside the point. So long as HN comments represent the subjective viewpoints of the kinds of people that can affect PG - startup founders and employees, venture capitalists, etc - they're a good demonstration of why PG will have no problems making these kinds of statements. I suspect HN is probably a good representation of their viewpoints, at least on this topic.
He's getting some slight blowback from the press, but sadly they have a short attention span.
Much respect to Paul here. I've been impressed with his willingness to engage the press in rebuttals and elaborations (and in a polite, clear way). I've made it a personal rule not to be quoted in anything controversial just because, even if the reporter is well-meaning, the editor may not be. I suspect Paul is even more aware of this and so his willingness to communicate is a sign of how important he believes his message is.
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[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 376 ms ] threadmy parents are foreigners - it's not that i'm not used to it.
sorry folks, but it's true.
Even speaking from your heart should not save you: http://glavtube.ru/video/844D72986KRX/%D0%92%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%... (sorry for the lame video hosting because YouTube decided to region-restrict this speach just, you know, because)
What PG talks about is also why Linus acquired a North American accent since moving to the United States. His accent used to be strongly Finnish (Swedish?) but now he speaks American English like a native.
Sure, if I plot all the accents in the United States on a graph there's probably a lot of divergence. I would think that the accents that impede understanding are outliers though. (At least among native speakers.)
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fChqXqvvmg8 for an example that I enjoy of a song, in English by native English speakers, than many English speaking people have trouble understanding. After you've seen the words written down, native English speakers usually can then understand. But if English is a second or third language, then good luck!
(On a pedantic note, I did specifically say US accents.)
I have to wonder if this is purely caused by pronunciation or other aspects of dialect. After all, the stereotypical Australian 'accent' (Ex. "Shrimp on the barbie") is usually accompanied by more than just a change in pronunciation. Obviously the international case is different than the local one. It's probably more accurate to say that somebody who has trouble getting people who speak a dialect of English to understand them doesn't know the dialect.
>See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fChqXqvvmg8 for an example that I enjoy of a song, in English by native English speakers, than many English speaking people have trouble understanding.
Music is something of a special case. If it weren't, there wouldn't be so many lyrics sites out there to help people who have trouble understanding.
As for the song, even if you heard it recited, you'd have trouble understanding it. It is in a strong Scots dialect.
Inner-city ghetto dialect can be very difficult to understand.
Among educated classes, you'd generally have to get into professional jargon to have similar difficulties (ask a set of biologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars to discuss "starting a culture", for one example).
- Six watch.
- What, so much?
- For whom how.
...
- MGIMO finish?
- Asks!
This kind of thing is commonly done in linguistics research when trying to, for example, differentiate dialects.
Is this the proper definition of irony?
What is necessary is being understood, having a common mutually intelligible language and enough connection that things can get done. If your engineer is living in a world of machines or bits, or software, that individual cannot be an effective CEO in that mindset but language is much harder.
I am learning Bahasa Indonesia. Last time I tried to tell someone "I only speak a little Bahasa Indonesia" it ended up coming out more along the lines of "I speak a little Bahasa Indonesia" which I must have said really well because I couldn't follow a thing after that......
You fail the analogy-off. He's not talking about stares-at-feet aspies who can't say hello to save their lives. He's talking about neurotypicals who don't see their own lingual deficiencies and how it impacts how they are viewed, understood, and accepted by others.
There's nothing more draining than being a listener trying to constantly adjust to understanding somebody who isn't quite able to communicate what they want to say.
A CEO not only communicates with his engineers / manager / executive team, but also with external customers. There are also different classes of customers: enterprise, consumers; each would need a different sales pitch. A CEO who is not able to connect with people is not going to be a good CEO. And by connecting, you probably need to make references to sports, music, fashion trends or whatever that is the demographics you are selling to are interested in.
A CEO who is "foreign" to US culture / language will have a hard time running a company in US. Now if you are as charismatic/iconic as Arnold Schawazenegger then you might get by. But even Arnold worked hard on his English and he is clearly picking up some American accent :)
Disclaimer: I am a recent immigrant and have a strong accent.
It's a universal truth of saying things in public. No matter how clearly you say things, somebody will take it the wrong way. The only approach that doesn't make things worse is to simply ignore those people.
If you read the original piece, it's perfectly clear what was meant, and there's absolutely no room for anybody to misunderstand it. Still lots of people did. And they were quickly corrected in the previous thread.
And if you read this very thread, you'll see people responding to his even more carefully written clarification who still hold their initial misunderstanding and are writing angry replies as though their mistaken reading of the piece was what the author had actually said.
Seriously. There's no fixing those people. The only winning move is not to play.
Agreed. Going on record to defend yourself without provocation (he doesn't specifically refer to someone asking him for an official response) generally means there is something deeper at hand here. PG did respond originally to provocation and should have kept it to that.[0]
This is akin to when someone goes out of there way to explain why things "aren't their fault". If it wasn't your fault, you state the case and be done with it. People at fault generally go beyond their means to make sure people think they aren't at fault.
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6279276
It should be obvious to anyone who has participated in a karma based discussion board like reddit or HN.
First, all the karma goes to the first explanation. Everyone understands it when the idea is explained. Replies to a naysayer usually get 1/10th of the original reward because new information isn't usually provided with the updates.
Next, there are many people who can only interact with ideas by contradicting them. Without putting a value judgement on that behavior, it isn't worth continuing a public discussion with them to enlighten them, unless they make you realize something you're missing.
Finally, controversy competes with truth, understanding, and imagination in the human brain. By replying to someone creating controversy, all the positive effects of your idea are diluted, and all people take away is the fact that there was a controversy surrounding what you said.
Anyway, these are my experiences. I'm open to the possibility that there is a way to reply to controversial disagreement, but unless it's a private message, I'm not aware of it right now.
I'll give you an anecdotal example: myself. I did misunderstood him first, and the explanation makes sense. I don't need more "fix". pg won me over this issue. So, are you sure that it was a bad move?
That said, instead of 'accent', I would use there 'problems in communication skills', which implies native speakers too. Otherwise a lot of people don't understand PG correctly.
I think it is much more helpful to tell somebody plain as day: if you are bad at X you aren't likely to be successful until you fix it. These are facts. Ignore them if you choose but that doesn't change that they are supported by very strong evidence from somebody with loads of experience.
I do agree with the previous comment that he shouldn't have responded, though. It's a losing argument because those who are choosing to misinterpret a statement that is pretty much crystal clear are doing so because of inherent biases. You won't convince those people to consider logic so it doesn't pay to expend time and reputation having a public discussion with them. The people who agree will say so or say nothing and choose to take the advice and act accordingly.
(and, to defend the pg, he says he would have let it all just go away, but it's a really important point and he doesn't want the meaning co-opted by people with any agenda other than helping people grow companies better.)
Seems like pg made a good choice to me. I don't think that people will focus on attacking him in similar ways in the future- his self defense was clear and reasonable, and it doesn't really appear that he is defending a sort of terrible racist agenda at all. It also seems that his publicly stated opinions are reasonable enough, in general, that future attackers would be dissuaded from attacking him by the sheer fact that most attacks on pg's opinions/statements would be hard to back up when pressed.
This has been the exact opposite of my experience. Usually when I approach people directly and in a forthright manner and try and correct and clarify (and of course, apologize if my position offends and offer to listen to a counter-argument) then people seem to positively adjust their opinion of me.
I can't help but feel like your advice smacks of elitism. When I read your post I get a subtext of, "Everyone else is dumb if they don't get what I'm saying. At best, that is! Usually they're trying to shoot me down! I don't negotiate with terrorists."
I'm not sure how I could wake up every morning if I felt that way.
A lot of the noise in blogs and twitter has been along the lines of "PG is an evil monster who hates women and foreigners and people of color and doesn't ever want to invest in their companies". None of which he said or implied, but that doesn't seem to have stopped the attacks.
Hence, this recent article.
There are long-standing complaints with the structure and the predatory nature of YCombinator. It is very unusual and complaints center around how HN is essentially a very high-pressure situation designed to try and sell kids on the value of PG & YComb as investors on very small funding events.
Personally, I don't think this article really justifies the behavior that has been consistently (if not as high-profile) that PG has had. His reported castigation and refusal to see people who have Indian accents is troublesome. It's very difficult to take his claims seriously when he affects fake russian accents while proclaiming his innocence.
I'm far from an insider so I can't speak to whether a person or team should go for YC funding or not. Or whether the system is biased against people with Indian accents (your comment is the first I've heard of that, actually).
Clearly, a team with potential success ahead of them ought to consider their options carefully and see whether applying to YC is right for them. And, if they get in, whether doing the program is the most valuable use of their next few months. A founding team needs to look beyond the hype and headlines and determine what the best deal is - but that's hardly YC's fault if they present themselves in the best possible light.
It seems like this step is precisely what the YCombinator process is meant to complicate. The entire structure is designed to make it feel like a competition for PG's attention. By structuring it this way, it makes it much more likely that the people who "win the competition" will say yes to YComb.
And YComb moves fast! People tell me there isn't a lot of time to think. Implicit in YComb's structure is the statement, "There are a dozen people in line behind you that will take your place." It's all very American Idol.
I suspect that vibe emerges from the scaling aspect of things - if a regular VC firm invests in N deals a year and YC does 10N [], then there is no need to 'create' a competition for the attention of PG and the other principals. It will just emerge out of the large number of portfolio companies. (And this is not unique to YC, but may be exaggerated - VC firms are notoriously busy for the same reason.)
And YComb moves fast! People tell me there isn't a lot of time to think. Implicit in YComb's structure is the statement, "There are a dozen people in line behind you that will take your place." It's all very American Idol.*
Again, this sounds like a scaling issue. If you're investing in fewer companies, you can spend more time hand holding with the teams of each one. HUman attention is the thing that doesn't scale, so it makes sense that it is the thing in short supply.
It sounds to me like teams need to precompute their responses to lots of possible situations. And get as much information about the downside of participating as possible, beyond the headlines and the hype. But this is the kind of suggestion that I'd give anybody considering YC (or a job, or the military, or a college, or a grad school, or a training program).
[*] I don't know if these numbers are accurate, but the point is that YC is well known to do many more, smaller deals than VC firms.
Isn't human coaching the primary asset that YComb offers though? It's certainly not money, HN seed rounds are not exceptionally large, and they aren't unusually early.
It seems like a "good deed never goes unpunished"-type situation. YC partners are both independently wealthy and brilliant. They could choose to do anything they wanted with their time, or nothing at all, and they'd still be fine. Instead, they chose to dedicate themselves to coaching people and sharing their expertise to teach people to build companies. Men, women, foreigners, everybody. The selection process for getting into YC is the most open you'd ever find anywhere. The paperwork is open-source for heaven's sakes! Could you suggest a couple of things they could do to make the process less "predatory"?
You know, most of the good venture capital firms and angels who enter in on seed rounds do this.
> Instead, they chose to dedicate themselves to coaching people and sharing their expertise to teach people to build companies. Men, women, foreigners, everybody.
I'd love to know the ratio of male founders who apply to the number that get funded vs. the ratio of female ones. Did PG publish this data?
> Could you suggest a couple of things they could do to make the process less "predatory"?
Not structure it like American Idol, for starters. With the possible exception of pre-everyone-goes-on-summer-vactation, most agencies don't structure their funding around some kind of audition structure. They make appointments and develop leads as they see fit, trying to talk to companies when they're actually read to do funding.
Of course, many venture firms out there are sleazy and lots of people are working on ideas that won't interest the top tier firms. But personally I've always felt like everything about the YComb process was design to fool young Stanford undergrads into taking what, honestly, is a kinda mediocre funding deal unless YComb is basically the biggest value-add ever.
I don't think it was meant to be elitist. I believe it was directed towards those who are going to find a problem with anything you say, regardless of what you say.
Elitism is an overloaded word, but your sentiment here seems good.
I don't understand how they get anything done in life without giving their brain room to think. For example, a founder having trouble raising funds could consider Paul Graham's advice on accents and see if it applies to him, but not if he censors his own mind to avoid it.
Do you really think this discussion is about political correctness?
> I don't understand how they get anything done in life without giving their brain room to think.
Then think on this. There are many models to building a startup. Most of them don't involve the YCombinator style.
That is not polite, cordial conversation between equals. That is not the behavior of two equals talking business. It's not acceptable behavior in a civilized venue. This is not because it's "politically correct," but rather because of the profound implications of antagonizing someone for what they are and where they were born.
Except that PG's continued fortune is dependent upon the success of these "supplicants" approaching his business for money. And if he does his job well, the winners will become his equals. So... yeah. Unwise to play the "I am better because economics!" card.
Certainly, PG is not the equal of most of these people in engineering ability. He's so far out of the game that it'd take him 1-3 years just to update his vocabulary.
It makes you upset that PG is giving this advice. But if it is true advice, then founders will be better off for hearing it, regardless of your feelings.
It is easier for founders to modify their behavior than it is to teach all the VCs of the valley to understand lots of accents, so PG's advice passes the sanity check even though we may wish the contrary were true.
Quite untrue. PG is in the business of giving very small seed rounds to mostly small, low-effort consumer plays in the web and mobile space. He does fund things that do not meet these criterion, but they are in a notable minority.
His writing and website and other aspects are part of his overall plan to engage with the tech community. This is the added value (beyond cash, of which everyone's int he same) he proposes to add as an investor. Have you ever done YComb or gotten seed/A-round funding before? You know how this works, right.
> But if it is true advice, then founders will be better off for hearing it, regardless of your feelings.
It is clearly true that PG will be less likely to fund you if you were not born in the parts of the world he is familiar with, consequently speaking the language and dialects that he is comfortable with. His arguments that only western-sounding people succeed in the world of tech business is absurd (and poorly sourced).
> It is easier for founders to modify their behavior than it is to teach all the VCs of the valley to understand lots of accents, so PG's advice passes the sanity check even though we may wish the contrary were true.
Yeah dude, I just made walked into the doors of basically every top tier VC in the Valley, sat down, gave a presentation, then left. I heard people prepping for presentations with thick accents in nearly every office. I'm pretty sure it is "okay" to be not born in the US.
Especially since it's entirely possible to, you know, employ someone to help you with this part if your English skills aren't up where you need them to be.
So I am not only upset that PG is mockingly affecting accents to tell people what not to do, but I'm upset that these are his criterion. I'm a bit upset because this diminishes the slowly tarnishing image I have of my former Lisp idol, and because the Valley has a systemic problem with women and certain ethnicities.
This is another example of that coming into play, and I'm mad because the engineering part of my head demands I try and fix it if it bothers me. But I can think of no solutions that don't involve putting people who say things like this in a shock collar. So now I am more upset because my irrational and pervasive desire to fix things is thwarted by brute feasibility.
When I respond to people who are being unreasonably critical of things I've written, I'm usually not just responding to them for their sake, I'm responding so that everyone else who's following the conversation can look at both sides and decide for themselves who's being reasonable. Over time, being earnest about responding to criticism, even unwarranted criticism, has gained me respect in my social circle. Of course, one has to decide how their time is best spent, but on the whole, I think it's a bit thick headed to always take the "yeah, I said it, so f' off" approach.
And it is an unpleasant point. People "get their asses kicked by the world" (as he put it) for the way they speak or irrelevant aspects of their appearance. Says something about this world.
(I know when I mention certain viewpoints which maybe aren't commonly voiced or liked by the audience, some willfully misunderstand me, and it's my job to clarify.)
I have a really strong Russian accent that (hopefully) doesn't border too much on being not understandable, and I've never felt discriminated against at YC or elsewhere in SV, not for a millisecond. This is corroborated by dozens upon dozens of founders whose accents are even stronger than mine.
If you want to do business in a country and raise millions of dollars from people, you have to be understandable. If someone made this claim in France, or Germany, or Japan, nobody would even blink. The very fact that PG is getting criticized for it is almost indicative of how meritocratic Silicon Valley (and YC in particular) is.
(Not a native English speaker, but I noticed that with accents from other non-native speakers ...)
(Not complaining, just agreeing)
Indian (dot, not feather), right?
Just to add some relativism to this highly relative topic. I'm French by the way, and enjoy British, German, Indian, black American, Chinese accents, for example.
A quarter of the country belongs to an evangelical church. Those people discriminate against anyone that isn't Christian, because that's what being evangelical means. A third of black males born today will go to prison. There is a war on anybody that is vaguely middle eastern, even at home. The Jews controlling Hollywood and Wall Street are reviled. It goes on and on and on.
https://www.google.com/search?q=jews+wall+street
If you're right, then why do you have to resort to attacking the motivations of the other speaker to win? Correct opinions ought to be able to walk on their own without relying on such crutches.
Because in this case I happen to actually know the motivations of both parties. PG's motivation is to help founders. The press's motivation is to drive traffic.
It's straight out of the 1984 playbook. Language becomes vaguer and mushier, less communicative. We can no longer tell founders that "thick foreign accents will hurt your startup", instead we must say "have good communication skills", which is a far less useful statement. It is like the substitution of "ungood" for "bad" and "plusgood" for anything more extreme than "good".
Why should we talk to each other anymore, when a tiny handbook can contain all the thoughts we are allowed to express?
Debating theories and facts or interpretation of facts makes alot of sense for things like science experiments , it seems a bit like indirection when talking about what a certain person is like.
You can just go find out what that person is like, instead of relying on hearsay.
Regarding Slava, I wouldn't say that he is doing the name calling. Accusing somebody of being xenophobic is much closer to name calling, I find that even the act of accusing to be pretty weak, why not just make a statement as opposed to an accusation.
I agree with Slava's statement, if anyone would make the statement that YC/PG is xenophobic after having met them I would say that is pretty laughable. I don't need to debate this, it's merely my opinion based on factual experience. (also, opinions don't need to be correct, they are just opinions. Facts on the other hand can be incorrect or correct)
If you think otherwise without meeting YC/PG, then you are making an opinion without any experience. (a situation you can correct)
As an aside, you don't even need to walk on eggshells around PG. You can just ask him if he is a xenophobe, he will answer no.
In this case, I would say yes PG is xenophobic when it comes to people with strong foreign accents, because he's afraid based on his experience that they'll lower the value of the companies he's investing in.
Of course foreigners cannot be xenophobic about themselves, they aren't foreigners to themselves. Agreed that if you have a strong accent it makes sense to worry about it; this is the pressure that drives assimilation.
i still remember one of your rehearsal presentations for demo day,
it was something along the lines of
"this graph is bad"
"this graph is good"
i even thought you were playing up your accent for added comedic value.
(for context, he was showing a performance graph of rethinkDB vs. mySQL, and the graphs were practically inverted. rethinkDB was performing so much better it was comical how much throughput it was doing)
Hehe, I wasn't playing it up since I don't have to! :)
If anything, you just need to project your voice better and speak louder. :)
I appreciate your overall sentiment, but I respectfully disagree with this point. I think founders need to consider whether or not their critics matter. In other words, will a critic's derogatory statements affect your business and reputation?
For example, if PG were to ignore a New York Times reporter, there's a big risk that the reporter could have created an even more negative story that had a lot of traction because of the newspaper's cachet. Was talking to the reporter a perfect solution in this case? No, I don't think so.
But having been a reporter and worked with journalists as a public relations professional, I've seen clients achieve much better outcomes by making themselves available for comment. It gives the clients an opportunity to shape how others perceive them, particularly in times of crisis.
also related: http://paulgraham.com/say.html
Within the US there are various accents and sometimes people from one area have a little trouble understanding people from another area. If a strong foreign accent is a big roadblock to start ups then it's understandable, said and done. Now with this follow up I have to revisit the whole thing to see why it is the biggest challenge. Since we're all into solving problems why not have a hot blonde take care of all the public interaction if it's that big of a deal (that's what I would do)?
As a non-native speaker myself I can often hear myself pronouncing English poorly yet I find it excruciatingly difficult to pronounce some vowels the way I intend to pronounce them, even though I have been living in a native-speaking environment for a long time. Similarly, my native English-speaking (American) wife finds it very difficult to pronounce some vowels and consonants of my own native language. It took her fairly long to learn how to pronounce my name correctly. (Ironically, now that we're married it is her name as well.)
All I am saying is that I would not attribute this to pride or laziness. Pronunciation is a genuinely difficult thing to learn as an adult.
Especially in the U.S., I find, especially when it comes to actors.
PG is definitely one of the foremost researchers in the realm of entrepreneurial success factors, but it is important to step back for a moment when analyzing such things as verbal accents and "Zuckerberg likeness" correlating with failure and success, respectively.
Just as Noam Chomsky criticized Peter Norvig because of his focus on statistical methods versus fundamental models, I would suggest that inferring success based on statistical observation without an underlying model can become a confusing and unrewarding process.
Statistics is a tool to test fundamental models, not a model to explain phenomena all in itself. As such, I would guess that founder success is more likely based upon mundane traits such as intrinsic motivation, intellect, experience, access to capital and key personnel, and most importantly, luck. We see this time and time again in superstars such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, John Carmack, Bill Gates, etc.
Extremely smart people are more prone to analyzing every tiny variable, which sometimes causes them to give additional weight to trivial factors in a complex equation.
see some small number of founders with a fairly strong accent, say < 30 or < 50 or < 60, then observe that those startups happened to do poorly and then extrapolate a theory from those observations to explain what is happening. I am not necessarily disagreeing with his thesis, but in statistical data analysis you have to be very careful about drawing conclusions from small samples when the underlying distribution is non-normal, with fat tails
Controlled studies of startup founders are not practical.
Your 'correlation is not causation' mantra seems misplaced unless you can argue that effective communication is not fundamentally important.
For example, I used to, but do not now, ever use the word "niggle". Its just too much work.
[1]http://paulgraham.com/say.html
http://media.swarthmore.edu/bulletin/?p=145
Yes, but I would have said chronic and acute inability. What Summers offered in that unfortunate address was a perfectly reasonable explanation (concisely, same mean value but differing standard deviations), one that has a certain amount of circumstantial evidence and that in no way disparages women's intelligence or abilities, but all that followed from it resulted from innumeracy, not common sense.
If you were to become a public speaker/motivational speaker in Canada, then not being able to be understood in either English or French would affect your career.
It seems to me like everybody is caught up in the semantics of whether pointing this out is politically correct or not. I personally think it doesn't matter, and if you're truly committed on creating a startup in the US, you'll have to just persevere regardless of the opinions, as this is just a remark on data.
Um. Ok. ...and I appreciate that PG wanted to make this clear as the press loves to make a story where there isn't one. But do we really need to vote this up like crazy to guarentee it is the top story for the next 48 hours? Are there really that many people here who will benefit from this lesson?
"I'm not sure why. It could be that there are a bunch of subtle things entrepreneurs have to communicate and can't if you have a strong accent. Or, it could be that anyone with half a brain would realize you're going to be more successful if you speak idiomatic English, so they must just be clueless if they haven't gotten rid of their strong accent."
He is talking about strong accents as a superficial data point. You would have to make shit up to infer anything beyond that.
I actually think his second suggestion (a lack of a critical kind of sensibility) is the deeper and more meaningful one.
* Eat food daily.
* Take a shower.
* Continue breathing.
I don't know, if PG took on Lisp Machines Inc. that might have been a problem with Greenblatt.
>A startup founder is alway selling.
(edit: has been fixed)
> I'd thought of just letting this controversy blow over.
A common PG tactic, this (see also the "HN mods wilfully ruin submission titles" storm). But probably not a great one to emulate: time and again here we've seen startups badly burnt by the "fuck up in public and don't say or post anything hoping it will blow over" stance.
Even if it does blow over, you've damaged your image. People might treat you the same, but they'll long remember that time you ran away and hid when people expected better of you.
How many native-born US citizens with regional accents this strong are in a position to start a technology startup? I grew up in the Bible Belt and I find this inconceivable.
Is there an example of this that can be pointed out? A nearly unintelligible American accent held by someone working in technology who is trying their best to be understood?
It's exceedingly easy to find an example in people who are speaking English as a 2nd, 3rd, or 4th language, and isn't a reflection of their worth as a person, but a sign that they may have a problem in the English speaking startup world.
Likewise, if foreignness isn't really the issue, disabilities will surely also count? Are there disabled people in tech who have a hard time speaking English? Would Stephen Hawking pass as a Founder for PG?
Clinton: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6175843
Obama: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=30-lYueJivk&feature=player_embe...
http://mobile.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/...
http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/04/10/176234171/lea...
http://streaming.ohio.edu/cas/lingCALL/ling270/myth9.pdf
The "18th century" thing stuck in my mind from some media piece, and now that you mention it, does sound rather obviously like a myth. But the place exists—I think it was probably Tangier Island [1], and the accent there is indeed archaic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E#t=0m33s
Some of that sounds like a Monty Python sketch! It's definitely an example of one native English speaker (me) finding another (them) hard to understand.
I also second the commenter who brought up the Glaswegian accent. I love how it sounds but damned if I can make out half of what they're saying.
Maybe you're just gifted with dialects :)
[1] http://goo.gl/maps/Brbtr
How well do they integrate with modern English speakers when they leave the island?
They speak English, but I just could not understand anything the locals said. The dialect/culture is called Gullah: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullah
EDIT: Here are some native English speakers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1TJnDG61_Y Can you understand them? I sure can't! :)
(The most incomprehensible language I've ever heard from a native speaker personally wasn't Glasgwegian, but rather two 60+ folks demonstrating Black Country English.)
Could be an effective strategy or could be a technique employed by people with a low threshold or tolerance for adversity (as hard as that is to believe) or experience higher than normal levels of frustration when people don't agree with them.
You sometimes see this in people that normally are tops at something and where things come easy to them (vs. "normals"). So they are not used to having to put in much effort to defend themselves and the practice of having to do so feels foreign and distonic to them.
If you've ever attended a top school you see this in some of the students there. The ones who skated through high school and were tops find it hard to operate where they actually have to work very hard and study so much (because of the competition). The ones who struggled and had to work hard to get in take the "b's" in stride and continue working hard and aren't as bothered by setbacks. Because it's always been like that.
A generalization, based strictly on my observation.
PG rarely engages in long back and forth's with comments on HN. He makes comments but I don't normally see much of him replying to a reply. I remember recently where he actually told people it was time to "get back to work" just like a parent would tell you that you are being silly and to grow up.
(I'd bet a sensitive-enough analysis would show that even North American accents "foreign" to northern California have a very slight disadvantage in the bay area startup community. The tiniest of things can send signals of mutual-understanding and shared-goals, fairly or not.)
Focusing on the "non-United-States" sense of "foreign", in order to take offense here, is thus yet another example of why a shared, subtle, native-like understanding of the nuances of language is so important.
Appreciating the whole range of senses of "foreign" makes it easy to interpret the PG quote sympathetically, as being about practical comprehension. Focusing on just the primary sense of 'foreign', as if the word only meant "other-country-origin", leads to time wasted on misunderstandings and taking-offense.
As a result most of us either eliminate our accent as much as possible or learn how to switch as needed (as philwelch below pointed out). The bar to get past the prejudices of other educated Americans is so high that we get past the point of comprehensibility by default.
Someone from another country doesn't have the same influences. An adult from an outside English-speaking country may not be able to sound American simply because they've never tried. That's not going to be the case for someone who grew up here, even for an unusual value of "here".
People who are focusing on the "non-United-States" sense of "foreign" are reading the statement as it was meant.
I'd pay a very high price for an app or a program that young kids would love / do willingly, that would result in them becoming fluent in English.
For example, I would consider Breaking Bad much more suitable for beginners in English (most characters speak very clear), but it might not be an appropriate show for kids.
“Milao is a unique virtual environment that offers language learners on-demand opportunities to interact in a target language through text-based conversations that closely mimic real life situations. [They] have created an Artificially Intelligent Native Speaker, that will allow learners to develop and improve their communicative skills in the language they are trying to learn anywhere and anytime.”
(I know one of the team members; this was copied off their LinkedIn profile.)
There is a massive disconnect in English ability of the European countries that dub media on tv and the ones that use subtitles.
But most non-English-speaking people don't want to learn "languageS" as if those were all equivalent and there was some general quality to be gained by speaking different tongues. They want to learn English, as the only international language.
I want my kids to speak English not because they'll have a better mind if they do, like I try to have them learn music, but because not speaking English in today's world is like missing an eye (or more probably both).
As for why English-speaking people want to learn a foreign language, I have no idea, but I suspect their motivations are wholly different. It's interesting to speak Spanish, it's mind-opening to learn Chinese, but it's not vital.
So what I'm looking for is a "system" aimed at young / very young kids, specialized in teaching English (and only English).
To succeed it needs to be playful, maybe addictive, not require one to already know how to read -- and in general not look or sound like anything "school-y".
Somebody (was it John Holt?) said "if we taught kids how to speak, they would never learn". Yet that's exactly what we're doing with foreign languages.
1. having accent is ok as far as you can make others understand your point in english ... 2. bad english (i mean really bad) will be turn-off anyway with or without accent .... so it is not accent but its all about english as a language i guess ...
I've seen people with english and no bad accent but still having trouble in making other people understand :) and they are either Dumb OR they're P.hd holders (not generalizing though)...
The reason is, if you have ever waded through a large round of pitches - you understand that it only takes a couple hard to understand sentences before you lose interest.
This doesn't just apply to foreign accents, it applies to volume, pace, etc.
Let's not equate "poor English" with "likely to fail at X". There are other factors, ranging from domain knowledge to soft skills, that come into play as well.
Hawking was famous in physics circles before he could no speak.
The chairman of the English Department of my local community college (College of Marin in California) told me that it takes an immigrant an average of 7 years to get good enough at speaking English for native speakers to actually want to listen to them talk.
I don't understand how a man of his stature and someone in his position can allow himself to make those statements about accents (or anything that sounds remotely xenophobic). I say that because even his blog post says the following:
"A startup founder is always selling. Not just literally to customers, but to current and potential employees, partners, investors, and the press as well ... there is little room for misunderstanding."
That statement doesn't just hold for startups but for anyone in business. His initial statements left plenty of room for misunderstanding. Furthermore, I would also find it very difficult to believe that his inclination towards avoiding "excessive" accents does not also subconsciously lead him to have a slight bias against founders with a "slight" accent. That's how biases work - the threshold for when your brain decides to evoke that bias is not black-and-white.
He's getting some slight blowback from the press, but sadly they have a short attention span.