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It's not our top criterion. It's just one that I'm willing to talk about publicly, because there's no way to fake it. We're not against funding people from ou

• c0mpute 13y ago
  According to this article, 14% of the top 500 CEOs are non-native to the company's homeland. http://money.cnn.com/gallery/leadership/2013/07/08/global-500-non-native-ceos.fortune/index.html http://money.cnn.com/gallery/leadership/2013/07/08/global-50... Even empirically your dataset consists of startups that target USA markets mostly and hence this conclusion. I am guessing CEOs are good and can come from anywhere, its perhaps "sales" that really needs the idiomatic speak.
  • sliverstorm 13y ago
    That statistic is meaningless. As pg said explicitly, the problem is not being foreign. The problem is having an accent so thick no one understands you when you speak.
    • c0mpute 13y ago
      I don't think I disagree with what you have mentioned and pg has concluded. My point was, it is possible to find a dataset where the audience actually doesn't need to stop the speaker because they can tune in to the way english is spoken. I see this happen all the time here at startups in Bangalore. Of course if the audience is YC and the investors, it goes without saying what the language requirement is. Indira Nooyi (Pepsico, CEO and one amongst that cnn list) articulates it perfectly in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8PC5U55AUU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8PC5U55AUU
      • sliverstorm 13y ago
        it is possible to find a dataset where the audience actually doesn't need to stop the speaker because they can tune in to the way english is spoken. Of course. But again, what does that really tell us? To be effective, you need to be able to communicate with a large variety of people, not just a carefully-chosen subset of people. As Indira acknowledges, it is your own responsibility to ensure this- not your listeners. I've met people in America with accents almost this unintelligible: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5XyecKONu8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5XyecKONu8 (although typically their mother tongue was of Asian lineage so the sound was different)
• NicoJuicy 13y ago
  Do you keep any startup analytics?
• spitfire 13y ago
  Sort of like your university calculus professor then? I remember students changing seminars just to avoid a certain not so easily understood prof. I have zero doubt that it affected peoples grades. They couldn't clearly understand what was being said, and were less likely to ask for clarification if they knew communication would be a chore.
  • soneca 13y ago
    This happens all over the world?? In my university (USP at São Paulo, Brazil) there were several foreign - normally Russian - physics and calculus teachers with terrible accents - some were still learning portuguese.
    • beambot 13y ago
      In my undergrad EE, we had an elderly german prof who pronounced "quiescent" as "christian." Awesome professor, but half the class didn't take the initiative to understand (1) the meaning of the word or (2) it's true pronunciation. Could you imagine communicating with these people in industry?! It would've been maddening. </anecdote>
      • jamiequint 13y ago
        My Electronic Circuits professor pronounced 'threshold' as 's-ratio'. I didn't actually discover until after the semester in another class that there was something called a 'voltage threshold'.
        • Natsu 13y ago
          I had a professor turn pivot into something close to pervert (pee-vert, to be precise). It was... distracting. But I do understand how hard it is. I don't even know how long I confused the pronunciation of cheveux (hair) and chevaux (horses) and I used to butcher the pronunciation of l'eau (water; it sounds like 'low' not 'loo').
      • lightcatcher 13y ago
• znt 13y ago
  If I had read this reply 3 years ago, I would have called you "racist". But after spending time with engineers from different countries, I believe having an understandable English accent is not a nice thing to have, but rather a professional responsibility. I have personally witnessed people losing their jobs/contracts because of this issue, and although I enjoyed their friendship, I wasn't really sorry for losing a teammate. Because trying to solve a technical issue while your mate uses a very broken accent is very very mind numbing and frustrating at its best. Interestingly, my wife was also having trouble with pronunciation of certain English words as she was learning the language, and I did not want her to have the same fate when (or if) she got a job. So I created a very simple app for her to practise her pronunciation. Later on I turned it into a webapp when her classmates also wanted to try it. If you are interested you can check it out at: http://www.sayafter.me http://www.sayafter.me
  • olivier1664 13y ago
    Too bad we need to create an account (in clear HTTP) to try it.
    • antsar 13y ago
      So, use a unique password and/or a throwaway email?
  • iandanforth 13y ago
    Your video uses phrases which are not standard English. The phrase 'a spaghetti' is not used. 'A plate of spaghetti' might be used in that context. Additionally the phrase "Would you please bring some water" would only be used if you have just asked "What should I bring to the game?" or something like that. In the context displayed 'ordering food' you would most likely say "Could you bring me a glass of water?" or "Could you please bring us some water?" I fully support your effort and think this is a great tool.
    • HeyLaughingBoy 13y ago
      This being HN, I immediately thought he should run it by some speech therapists and see what the market would be for such a tool.
• hnriot 13y ago
  Having now gone publicly on record with this, I wonder what kind of lawsuits this might lead to down the road. I could imagine that any company pg sits on the board of would now have their lawyers scratching their heads how they are going to minimize their risk.
  • 1123581321 13y ago
    I can help you with both. This will lead to no lawsuits. The legal counsel at any company of which PG is a director will not have to worry. In the remote chance someone believes this is an issue, PG would only need to abstain from a matter involving a person with a foreign accent. Again, this will never have to happen, but it is an easily solved matter.
  • tptacek 13y ago
    Not that I want to supply more oxygen to this deeply silly thread, but is it even possible to sue an investor for discrimination? Would not the premise of such a suit be that there are cases when an investor can be compelled to make an investment of some sort? That sounds crazy.
    • statictype 13y ago
      It does sound crazy. But is it much different from an employer bing forced to hire a certain sort of employee?
      • tptacek 13y ago
        Yes, it is much different than that.
        • temphn 13y ago
          What is the difference in your view? Very interested to hear this. The sums involved in this case ($20000) are less than those involved in most employment scenarios.
• nashequilibrium 13y ago
  It's a good thing you not a football manager, imagine Lionel Messi, Ronaldo,Zinnedine Zidane or Ronaldhino coming to your team. These are some of the best footballers in the world, all speak different languages but can walk on a field in England and beat an offside trap, request a pin point pass through top rated defenders at a speed of 100mph. Most people just don't want to take the time to try and understand someone because the expectation is that you are in America and you must speak english. In football, you can't go an complain that you don't understand your teammate, you getting paid $200 000 a week, so shut up and make it happen. Park Ji Sung and Patrice Evra became best friends yet one spoke korean and the other french, teammates would laugh commenting on how they don't know how they communicate. The issue is that they were both willing to learn to understand each other, having mutual respect for each others culture but bottom line no football player can use language as an excuse. My first language is English, so i was amused when moving to LA, an asian girl from UCLA was at one of the teller windows and i guess that she could not fully understand this girl so she just bravely says to here coworkers that "this asian girl is so dumb, how did she get into UCLA, she can't even fill out a deposit slip". The amazing thing is that she felt so natural saying it as she knew other americans will not mind what she said, even though she is a teller and the young girl is attending a top U.S College. I would also like to add that many football coaches take jobs where they cannot speak the home language fluently but are still successful. I feel that Europeans are more accepting of foreign accents than Americans and i have worked in Europe and stay in the U.S.
  • rhizome 13y ago
    Is there an aspect of association football that depends on language like a CEO in an English-speaking industry does? My impression is that the majority of success-oriented communication in soccer is nonverbal.
    • sunir 13y ago
      Perhaps? Since football is entertainment, it involves building a public image to draw crowds and sell merchandise. This BBC video talks about how Beckham's accent has become more posh over time. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22183566 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22183566
• abalone 13y ago
  "That correlates more with any other success factor that I've seen in the world's greatest entrepreneurs. If you look at Bezos, or Andreessen, David Filo, the founders of Google, they all seem to be white, male, nerds who've dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they absolutely have no social life. So when I see that pattern coming in -- which was true of Google -- it was very easy to decide to invest." -- John Doerr Anytime race is involved you've got to be careful before playing the "strong correlation" card. Granted this is about accents, which an be trained. But it's a little unsettling to me how nakedly pg relies on correlation of a racial/cultural signal, without so much as a comment on how obviously racist and sexist Doerr's perspective is.
  • anovikov 13y ago
    pg is not a politician who must appeal to all to be successful, so why do you wonder? he just thinks of the things that work. I run an outsourcing shop, and if i clearly knew that black gays are 2x productive for the same rate i'd quickly turn worst racist/sexist guy you seen.
    • abalone 13y ago
      Only politicians should be concerned with racial equality? Wow.
      • webdevsometimes 13y ago
        Only politicians have to pretend that everyone is 100% equal in every way, because they can't afford to offend anyone. pg, on the other hand, doesn't need to worry about that as much because what matters is whether the startup is successful or not. If there is a pattern indicating that a certain group of people are particularly bad at running a business, why should he take the higher risk associated with investing in them?
        • abalone 13y ago
          Because correlation != causation, and applying "pattern recognition" to race and gender is racist and sexist.
• sunir 13y ago
  Thanks for replying. I guess I should explain further why it is disappointing to me. Accent is intrinsic to a person's sense of self, akin to their religion or ethnicity (truly). Asking people to change their sense of self for you is a lot. Imagine I said I couldn't relate to a business person because they were just too, say, Chinese and so I suggest they take lessons to act more Canadian to fit my liking. Yikes. Then imagine I said that in an nationally syndicated magazine as a role model to young foreign-sounding entrepreneurs. Double yikes. After criticizing you, I guess owe you a different perspective. The real question I suggest in a business context is "were my expectations met?" Did they clearly explain their idea? Build rapport? Answer my questions? Direct the conversation? Organize a plan? It doesn't matter how foreign they sounded if I got what I wanted. Accents aren't really important. They vary wildly even in the United States. Is Steve Ballmer's heavy New England accent germane to his leadership's successes and failures? Or did Ross Perot's Texas accent matter when building EDS? Or Scott Thompson's Boston accent matter when turning around PayPal? Conversely, it's easy to find successful tech CEOs with "strong foreign accents" such as Sridhar Vembu (ZOHO) or Rashmi Sinha (Slideshare) or Mikkel Svane (Zendesk) or Tobias Luetke (Shopify). On the other hand, of course clarity does matter. Consider Todd Bradley who was passed over for German-accented Leo Apotheker as CEO because (reportedly) he mumbled during presentations (despite running a $41B division of HP)? cf. http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/05/08/500-hp-apotheker/ http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/05/08/500-hp-apotheker/ That's different. You can still be clearly understood with a strong foreign accent. cf. Gandhi. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yMcNubXqc4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yMcNubXqc4
  • ludston 13y ago
    > Accent is intrinsic to a person's sense of self This is a bit of a truism don't you think? > You can still be clearly understood with a strong foreign accent. cf. Gandhi. I hesitate to argue on behalf of someone as esteemed as pg, but surely he is using foreign accent to describe the cause of their communication deficiency, rather than painting persons with foreign accents as deficient.
    • sunir 13y ago
      Ok, let me pull the quote and be more direct about my reaction. "One quality that's a really bad indication is a CEO with a strong foreign accent. 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. I just know it's a strong pattern we've seen." As I read it, unfortunately, there's nothing in this published interview that says a foreign-accented person failed to communicate or needed to repeat themselves to be understood. It just says a "strong" foreign accent, with not clear definition of the subjective meaning of "strong". Then, it goes astray, saying "subtle cues" could be what leads the person to business failure; presumably subtle cues that would be obvious to a native speaker. Further, not being idiomatic (i.e. not a native speaker). Thus, the conclusion is the deficiency is the foreignness, not a functional problem like elocution. So, then I think it's pretty cutting to say people are "clueless if they haven't gotten rid of their strong accent" (emphasis mine). Since the strong accent is the foreignness, this read to me as saying Americanize which means change your identity. I contend this is not the best way to make the point. Also, the wrong track since as we have discussed above to death the real problem is the elocution, leadership and business skills, not the foreignness per se. However, do you think I read the interview (as published) incorrectly? I'm thinking about a cold reader, like a 21-year old woman in Tennessee who moved here with her parents when she was 12 from Sri Lanka thinking of the next big thing.
• weland 13y ago
  This reminds me of a fun thing that happened to my colleagues a few years ago (weeks prior to me joining them). They were working on a router pimped with some home automation features (Z-Wave/ZigBee interfacing & co.); the baseboard that the HW provider was offering had 2 Ethernet ports, but they wanted four. They informed them they don't have a four-port version, so they asked if a custom one can be made, extending the current design. The answer (in a strong Chinese accent)? "Noooo we can't do extended custom design hitishu". They were baffled. Sure, they understood the "can't do extended custom design part", but the last word was entirely foreign to them. They tried to dig deeper, but all they got was "if we extend cable network we have hitishu". The talks continued, in order to explore some alternatives; while the business guys did their talking, one of my colleagues figured what this hitishu gizmo was by accident; a few days later, he accidentally touched one of the chips on the board and burnt his fingers. The problem was that the processor they were using was already fairly loaded and, due to the design of the case, couldn't be properly ventilated. They feared that pushing it even harder could get it to heat up even more, which would have lead to heat issues.
  • delinka 13y ago
    I have a Southern American® accent. I work with Indians of various English fluency. I make an effort to reword and repeat certain phrases that I know would cause trouble for a non-native speaker. I don't have any immediate examples because this habit has become second-nature when speaking with others who have heavy accents. Think of it as an attempt at automatic forward error correction. When I run across someone doing what you're talking about, I just wish they'd repeat the phrase another way: "...hitishu; it get too hot." Problem solved.
• tinkerdol 13y ago
  >But 564 startups is enough to see patterns This is an interesting point. Beyond happening to notice patterns yourself, have you tried running machine learning algorithms on your data to try to find other characteristics?
• vasilipupkin 13y ago
  PG: I wonder how well you account for the fact that even though you have 564 data points, you end up having much fewer data points for each type of subsample - and since startup data is by definition highly non-linear and non-normally distributed, you could end up reaching sweeping conclusions from way too few data points