As a founder you need to interact with customers, vendors, employees and investors. If those groups have trouble understanding your speech, then how could you not have a problem?
Really, this is not a debatable point among sensible people. The only part that is debatable is which accents are strong enough to pose a major problem.
Unfortunately most people don't seem to logically process what was said before deciding to argue. They just pattern match. If the pattern looks like something they argue with, then they argue. So people pattern match on his argument, see the word "accent", and argue on the basis of his comment being thinly veiled xenophobia. Which could not be farther from the truth!
As european (and italian), I can confirm most of what Antirez said.
Moreover, founding a startup (or running a business, or working as an account, or working as a diplomat) is undoubtly much more difficult when you have to work with people speaking a foreing language.
The truth is that not just "accents", but also slang, technical lingo and even local humour come into play when you have to decode whether the person you are speaking with is really angry, sarcastic or she is just joking.
Things get even worse when you can't see those you are speaking with.
I don't think PG claims that strong accents are a barrier to creating successful startups in Silicon Valley, they just add up yet another hurdle that founders (and employees alike) must overcome to make that startup successful.
Therefore, such hurdles, must be accounted for.
One of my favourite bits of (UK) english that I regularly find myself having to explain to people is the difference between "bollocks", meaning that something awful has occurred and "the bollocks", meaning that something is amazing.
From my limited point of view, I have noticed that some speakers with strong accents seem to be oblivious to the fact that they are hard to understand. They speak grammatically correct sentences and they sit on that knowledge seemingly thinking it's enough, that it's me who's stupid for not understanding what they said. The problem in those cases is that through their confidence, they try to speak too fast for their ability to clearly pronounce words and their syllables, which results in a long stream of garble to my ear.
English is my second language, French being my native tongue, and I do have an accent myself, but I try to speak individual words and syllables clearly. I still have an accent, maybe 'strong' but I'm pretty sure everybody can understand clearly the words I speak, or at least most of the time.
My wife is also learning English as a second language, Vietnamese being her mother tongue. Recently she's been improving a lot in her classes and begun to be overconfident in her ability to speak, trying to use contractions everywhere. Consequently, she's been having a harder time to communicate with others. My recommendation to her was to slow down and pay attention to say every word clearly before jumping into more artistic manipulations of the language. Surely it was frustrating to her, feeling she was moving back to a more primitive use of english. But she's also been improving her ability to be understood by other speakers.
In Silicon Valley there are so many people from all over the USA, and from other countries, that this type of bigotry is less important. I can't promise it will entirely not be an issue, but I doubt it would be a big deal.
In fairness, speaking as someone from Georgia, you run into a lot of this within the south. I've lived here my entire life, and generally speak with a fairly neutral, midwestern accent, and I'd say that it's extremely common within the roughly 35 and under demographic around here.
Not commenting on whether it's fair or not, but because there is such a stigma around southern accent = stupid, many southerners, especially younger ones, make a concerted effort not to pick up the accent. Generally, the younger and better educated a southerner is, the less likely they are to sound like a southerner. That's not because the accent makes someone stupid, but because there is an awareness that it has that perception, so people avoid it.
And, I mean, I'll still fall into it in less formal settings or when I'm cranking up the charm, but in a business environment it gets switched off.
If you work at a large Silicon Valley company, there's always that one meeting where someone at the table, while obviously smart, speaks such an incomprehensible version of English, that whenever suggestions from their end are vocalized, everyone looks at one another with silent "did you get that?", nods politely and then moves on.
As for people who are standing behind PG’s statement, just look outside your window. The US has had a number of immigrants who came to this country and did not speak a single word of English. Yes, they did not speak English forget about a strong accent – who built successful businesses. I think that is great. Somehow lack of the right accent didn't prevent them from interacting with customers/vendors etc. Also, most businesses are international and you can’t expect to master the local accent and idioms everywhere. Does Tim Cook have Chinese accent, or German accent? Last I checked the iPhone is selling quite well in China and Germany. The idea that you need the right accent and master the local idioms to do business makes no sense today where your major customers are half a world away. You partner and figure things out. Having the right accent is not the top or even important in that list. PG is a great guy but he slipped big time this one time.
He is looking at it from his point of view of what running a startup and startup culture encompasses, that is: an environment rife with competition built on extreme uncertainty that can be transcended with the appropriate communicative abilities to fool investors, founders, employees to believe in what you're doing. In that context, it would seem that having an accent that hinders others' ability to understand you is a huge disadvantage.
I do not know about the beginnings of Intel, but Apple in the startup stage had a founding team whose native tongue was English. Steve Jobs was fluent in English and could deliver these great orations about his stupidly crazy ideas to his friends and investors who also spoke English. You can't say that didn't help him. Having a thick accent that prevented him from communicating clearly would've had a multiplicative effect on the unwillingness of others to even listen to his ideas.
PG never just stopped at "people with accents can't succeed or be successful in business." And it's incredibly disingenuous of you and others to continue to label him as anti-accent when he has repeatedly stated the context and details of his position.
Sorry, but even the weak interpretation of his statement actually raises more questions. For starters, how did YC end up funding them in the first place if they had such a strong accents that hinders understanding? Given YC accepts 1 in 25 (or 50) of applicants in a short time frame (going by a short video) what exactly did YC see in the founders. Or did the founders suddenly develop unacceptable accents in the three months at YC. Also, what did the YC team do when they found out about these guys’ accent problem? Did they ask them to partner with someone else? Did the founders refuse to partner etc. If so, is that an accent problem or a pig-headedness issue?
In fact, when it comes to startups, that is exactly what he is saying, and your dismissal of it by saying that it's not a surprising top red flag tells me that you are consciously trying to make this more racy than it actually is.
If you read his real initial position in the New York Times [0], you'll find: "“You can sound like you’re from Russia,” he said, in the voice of an evil Soviet henchman. “It’s just fine, as long as everyone can understand you.”" Again, the issue is communicating to reach an understanding. If you cannot convey thoughts, ideas, facts relevant to the core of your startup/idea, then you are at a disadvantage. Plain and simple.
I come from a community of Egyptians with incredibly thick, hard-to-understand accents, my father being one of them. I have difficulty talking about very complicated subjects with him because neither of us can clearly articulate our thoughts in the other's language, and so we never fully get a grasp on each other's opinions or the positions we hold. We both know the other isn't stupid; there's just a language barrier that's preventing effective dialogue.
Now take an investor who is deciding whether to risk his/her money on a startup. If an investor cannot come to a clear understanding of what it is you do or effectively bounce thoughts back-and-forth to assess you and your company, then they are not able to minimize their risk as much as they can, in an already incredibly risky endeavor. I'll also say again that had PG discovered that there was a correlation between risk of failure and stammering CEOs, he would've mentioned it.
Anyway, I'd like to think that instead of sparking an entire racist investing trend, that PG's advice has motivated a considerable number of foreign entrepreneurs to improve their English-speaking capabilities -- a skill that will certainly help them in every part of their lives (if they hope to plan to move to America to pursue a startup).
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/magazine/y-combinator-sili...
Long-distance communication and migration is becoming more common: native English speakers (especially in North America) are getting more chances to hear and become familiar with the speech of people who do not have English as their first language. (Without familiarity, it's easy to assume that flawed grammar and pronunciation means either flawed thinking or risky cultural differences.) So I'd surmise that the heavily-accented currently have their best opportunities ever to thrive in North American capital/recruiting/selling markets – and earlier generations of investors would have offered even harsher assessments about the impact of strong accents.
One of the points I was making with the My Fair Lady-themed joke in another thread (the SayAfter.me accent training offer) was that this is an eternal issue.
Look at her, a prisoner of the gutters; condemned by every syllable she utters…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhninL_G3Fg
That film came out in 1964 (winning Best Picture), based on a 1956 stage musical, based on a 1913 play (Pygmalion). The same ideas about accent and career-success go back further, and easily translate to many other languages and cultures.
Of course, an uneducated native (or disadvantaged local group dialect) accent is a different thing than a non-native accent. A non-native accent is more likely to indicate someone with the education and drive to dare operating in a non-native language environment. But, it takes a bit of familiarity to internalize that understanding, and stronger accents still signal a risk of slower and more error-prone communication.
When someone honestly points out that the strongest accents have been problematic, based on significant observational experience, they haven't "slipped", they've done the listeners a favor by sharing a perceived truth. Even if for some reason their observation is in error (and here I doubt it), by sharing the lesson they're helping, not hurting, the process of describing and understanding the world.
This is a self fulfilling prophesy. Like a 'black swan'. If PG meant to criticise (or point out) that poor communication skills are unproductive, his comment would be banal. He chose this as a cute, cock-tail party line. It was just a poor decision on his part. Its not too dis-similar to another famous SV/C who admitted 'he knows no black people'. OK, great. No we have two prominent people in the Valley who use the rule of thumb: no blacks, no funny-sounding people. Quite embarrassing, really.[0,1]
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[0] 'I don't know a single black entrepreneur' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS93R1YnK-U
[1] http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/nationalorigin.cfm
National Origin Discrimination & Work Situations
The law forbids discrimination when it comes to any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff, training, fringe benefits, and any other term or condition of employment.
National origin discrimination involves treating people (applicants or employees) unfavorably because they are from a particular country or part of the world, because of ethnicity or accent
___________________
Note that investing is not hiring; there is no employer-employee legal relationship. BUT, <Entreprenuers> need to be careful as they do in fact hire employees. So this is pretty ??? advice to entrepreneurs unless it comes pro-bono legal advice.
In any case, we are talking about Silicon Valley here. Not society in general. What made it special is this ability to assimilate talent from all over the world. As has been pointed out by others, people with strong accents are all over the valley running businesses successfully. BTW, significant observational experience from pg is about 100 companies in an economy that has several million businesses. So, yeah not exactly significant if you ask me.
Until then, on the empirical issue – what has actually been a predictive indicator during the YC programs – real experience, not theory and hope, matters.
If pg's ancestors emigrated from England, that is not in fact a judgement on it. The UK has exported a great many people to every corner of the globe, and received them in kind, because it is a very globally engaged collection of islands. By your twisted logic this must make it just about the worst country in the world.
I'm from Quebec, we speak French there. When you come to do business here, you'll talk to investors and politicians in English and you'll be just fine. People know that foreigners coming to invest/expand their business speak English. If you speak French too, great! Then when you start selling your product, that product will have to be translated. But you as a business woman/man coming to Quebec and dealing with people, you'll be just fine speaking English.
Now if I go in the Bay Area and start expecting people to do business in French with me, I doubt anybody will bother listening to me.
It's right up there with the allegation that "the French don't even have a word for entrepreneurship".
(Of course, only the 1st phrase is true, but they're both funny.)
The founders of both firms speak American english well and raised bunches of money in America, so language and accents were not a concern for them with regards to fundraising. Indeed, America is the best market in the world for raising speculative venture capital, so being comfortable with American English is a useful skill to have for entrepreneurs.
Those are real communication problems recognized by professionals for decades if not centuries, and happens all over the world.
However accents are strictly a cultural and socioeconomical difference: someone coming from a very remote country is of course going to have a considerably different accent, and in countries like england the difference between classes has created some very different accents all over the country.
In the old days in england having a posh accent was a good way of working your way up the social ladder because being the best steam-engine engineer mattered little if you sounded like an illiterate irish. Same in the usa where even president Clinton got some bs from east coast journalists for his southern accent.
Did I say at any point that bad accents mean you are dumb and unintelligible? no, because that's not true. What it does is make you a target of xenophobia because it makes it very clear that you are "not from around here"
When that happens it doesn't matters if you are as eloquent as the best orators in history because if your public already has a demeaning attitude towards you they are not going to care one bit about what you have to say, after all you are just one dumb foreigner! hearing you is a waste of everybody's time!
pg could have gone for speech impediments instead which are a problem no matter where or what language you speak, and of course if english is your second language those problems are just going to compound. But pg went for the accents and the accents alone, as if the number of white american dudebro founders out there saying your instead of you're all the time were perfect.
Then again maybe when they are speaking pg is actually paying attention to what they say.
Not to worry! If you are as eloquent as the best orators in history, you'll do great in Silicon Valley!
If you're starting a company, your communication skills are possibly equally as important as your technical skills -- there are simply so many difficult tasks that you will need really great communication to accomplish.
Not just convincing investors, but also your customers, possible suppliers and/or potential partners, your employees and potential hires... Communication is huge.
If your targets here are NOT English-speaking, then your communication in English is not what matters -- you had damn well better be very fluent in the languages those people speak. This also applies to a native English-speaker trying to break into foreign markets.
Unfortunately, there are all kinds of nasty psychological tricks that can harm you if you even look foreign (I'm thinking of a study where students were given one of two photos of an instructor but the same audio file, and some of the ones shown a Chinese-looking instructor had trouble with her accent, but the ones shown a blond instructor didn't.
Then if you do have a strongly non-local accent... people who grew up in fairly urban areas may have no trouble understanding you, but others may be lost with an accent that's even moderately different from their own. I remember spending a hour on the phone debugging with an IBM DB2 tech based in India, and his accent didn't seem terribly strong to me, but the (upstate-NY born & bred) woman sitting next to me was extremely quiet on the call... I found out afterwards that she'd hardly understood a word he'd said.
It's totally legit to talk about the bias (and I tend to agree pg should make some effort not to make the irrational part worse...), but it's also valid to tell founders that working on their accent can make a huge difference in their success.
He's only saying that speaking English at a high level of fluency is a requirement for his investments in an English-speaking program that he runs. Fluency means you understand others and others understand you. How many of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies have thick foreign accents?
It depends what country you're in.
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/1515825.stm)
> A head chef who was sacked for speaking Welsh at work has been awarded more than £10,000 in compensation.
> The award for racial discrimination and unfair dismissal comes five years after Gwilym Williams was sacked from a hotel near Caernarfon after refusing to speak English to Welsh-speaking colleagues.
His bosses didn't speak Welsh.
If he was Russian or Chinese and nobody could understand him in either English or Welsh, I don't think it would legally be discrimination to fire him (nor morally).
The story that's been told is that his English speaking bosses wanted him to speak English in the kitchen. He refused, speaking Welsh to the Welsh speakers and English to the English speakers.
They sacked him, claiming it had nothing to do with the language.
A tribunal found that it was about his use of language.
> If he was Russian or Chinese and nobody could understand him in either English or Welsh, I don't think it would legally be discrimination to fire him (nor morally).
I'd be interested to know what would have happened if it had been a language other than Welsh.
If there were a bunch of people who spoke Russian fluently, and he spoke Russian to them and English to the English speakers.
So in multilingual jurisdictions there can be strong employment protections around speaking one's choice of national language. In this case the article says there was the Welsh Language Act of 1993, which presumably says that citizens of Wales are free to conduct all of their business in English or Welsh and shall not be discriminated against in any professional or government capacity for speaking either language as they please.
It's about workplace expectations that derive from the local culture. The hypothetical comparison that comes to mind would be if California adopted Spanish as a second language or something.
The warm and fuzzy thought police department (WTFPD) would like to have a little chat with you. You see, we have taken down bigger game than you, and we could easily have you stuffed and mounted on our mantle.
Instead of saying what you believe to be true, the WTFPD recommends that you say what we wish were true. Here at the WTFPD, our belief is that wishing hard enough for something will make it true.
Sure, some founders might be hurt along the way while your advice is temporarily false during the small period when we are waiting for our wishes to have effect. But it is far better for a foreign founder's company to die than suffer the chance that he might be made uncomfortable by the suggestion that adapting his accent to the norms of the local market might help his startup.
You see, the worst crime in the world according to the WTFPD is making people feel uncomfortable. That's why we're warm and fuzzy ;)
Do I need to spell this out to you? Shape up Paul. Our sanctimony is powerful enough to destroy any reputation. Struggle too hard and we can make you a "racist". News reports about you will forever read "Paul Graham, the investor who stirred controversy by saying that foreign accents are bad for startups, ate breakfast today". Don't make us do it Paul.
The next time you are tempted to open your mouth to speak your mind based on your experience investing in over 500 startups, stop and consider that maybe we know better. You may have built a firm that revolutionized how investing is done, but we feel deeply. So who is really the expert here?
The world needs more sensitivity Paul, not the cancer of your nasty hatey hate speech. But we will give you a chance to redeem yourself. Beg for our forgiveness, say what you're supposed to say from now on, and join us in making the world a warmer, fuzzier place.
giggle and hugs
-The Warm and Fuzzy Thought Police Department
Once name-calling starts, we are playing the grade school game of seeing who can invent the worst insult. No thanks.
It's a brand new account that's posting deeply hypocritical crap, and the only "real" identity tied to it is a new and spammy twitter account.
Let's not pretend he's here for a conversation when every single available signal indicates that he's full of shit.
So you repeatably referring to those you disagree with as the thought police is different in what ways?
And your handle is that of a roman politician an odd one to chose when your saying real world politics doesn't matter.
"Dear Paul,
It's not what you are, it's what you did. At least, I hope.
I suspect this is all coming out of a desire to emphasize that communication is important when you're starting a company. It's never just about solving technical problems. Well, sure, that's true. But as Nitasha has covered rather thoroughly, your "empirical evidence" isn't some blind sample - it's a walking demonstration of confirmation bias.
The larger problem is something you've explained yourself, in your essay on "Investor Herd Dynamics". Another name for this essay might have been, "Venture Capital is a Cargo Cult". In that essay, you lay out several reasons why an investment becomes more attractive when other people are already investing in it. And here's the crux of your argument:
'But frankly the most important reason investors like you more when you've started to raise money is that they're bad at judging startups. Judging startups is hard even for the best investors. The mediocre ones might as well be flipping coins. So when mediocre investors see that lots of other people want to invest in you, they assume there must be a reason.'
Do I need to spell this out? Your bias is a cancer on your industry, because it becomes part of the voodoo nonsense that less astute investors use to pick their horses. Your decisions may seem rational to you — but if you talk about how you don't like to back people with strong accents, it becomes less likely that other people will back them as well. You can be better than this.
Look deeper."