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"He is brilliant and hilariously funny." How is being hilariously funny an advantage in terms of working for YC?
Is this a case of playing to your personal weakness, or is it playing to your personal blind spot? In either case, how long until you say, "This is important, but I'm not good at it. I have to bring someone in to do it while teaching me." My impression is a good salesperson quickly pays for themselves.
I'm curious to learn more about this. I'm certainly not accusing YC/PG of being racist in the least, but although I don't have an accent, I feel like I know numerously brilliantly smart people with heavy accents, many of whom happen to be Indian-born Stanford students or Google employees. I think we all know that "brilliantly smart" doesn't necessarily correlate with "great CEO", but it has to suck that something like your own accent puts you at a huge disadvantage applying to YC.
"One quality that's a really bad indication is a CEO with a strong foreign accent...they must just be clueless if they haven't gotten rid of their strong accent." I'm curious to learn more about this. I'm certainly not accusing YC/PG of being racist in the least, but although I don't have an accent, I feel like I know numerously brilliantly smart people with heavy accents, many of whom happen to be Indian-born Stanfo…
"He is brilliant and hilariously funny." How is being hilariously funny an advantage in terms of working for YC?
That's actually a very interesting question. I've noticed for a while that the people who are best at giving advice to startups tend to be funny. It's not a job where it would be good to be the humorless variety of smart. I think the reason is not that being funny is important per se, but that being funny and having good ideas about startups are so similar that it's impossible to find one without the other.
That's a very interesting topic, and is something I wonder about too. Historically speaking, the amount of capital required to start an internet company these days is amazingly low. Will this last? Maybe in the future, to even get started, people will need more horsepower in terms of servers, or storage, or something like that, and this low-capital period will be seen as an anomaly. Or maybe the trend will continue and spread to other fields. Are there others that are ripe for a similar transformation, where it gets super easy to start something new?
Also, I like this quote/thinking:
> The way you'll get big ideas in, say, health care is by starting out with small ideas. If you try to do some big thing, you don't just need it to be big; you need it to be good. And it's really hard to do big and good simultaneously. So, what that means is you can either do something small and good and then gradually make it bigger, or do something big and bad and gradually make it better. And you know what? Empirically, starting big just does not work.
"He is brilliant and hilariously funny." How is being hilariously funny an advantage in terms of working for YC?
A person who can't laugh at himself and the absurdity of the world and situations that tend to happen when you are creating a startup ... he won't last long as an entrepreneur.
That reminds me of an incident earlier in my career when a recruiter ranked candidates on their 'communication skills', which really was a proxy for whether they were an immigrant or not, in order to try to avoid discrimination laws.
http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2007/07/23/immigrant-quebecoi...
Besides, it's failing to communicate clearly and be understood that makes a bad leader, regardless of the behavioural cause (foreign accent, mumbling, random trains of thought).
"We were the kind of start-up started by nerds who were really good at programing and really, really bad at sales and business. Now I would know exactly what to tell my previous self, which is that I should be spending all my time selling." Is this a case of playing to your personal weakness, or is it playing to your personal blind spot? In either case, how long until you say, "This is important, but I'm not good at…
The total drag happens when a salesperson is brought on too soon. When the product is not aligned with the market (pre-product/market fit), there is little a good salesperson can do. In this situation, everyone gets frustrated as success does not happen and costs increase.
Post-product/market fit, a good salesperson can certainly accelerate growth. The use of the word "accelerate" here is deliberate as the founder(s) should be the ones to spark growth.
Initial sales should always be made by the founders for several reasons: 1. Your initial idea is likely misaligned with the market. The only way to figure this out is to be listen directly to customer's rejections and stall tactics. 2. Customer's will initially be positive (before you ask for money or ask them to do something), and watching this change from positive/supportive to neutral/negative forces a good reality check. 3. The founder(s) bring the most excitement to the sales process. You need to be the spark for interest/excitement about the solution. Salespeople will then feed off of your excitement.
"One quality that's a really bad indication is a CEO with a strong foreign accent...they must just be clueless if they haven't gotten rid of their strong accent." I'm curious to learn more about this. I'm certainly not accusing YC/PG of being racist in the least, but although I don't have an accent, I feel like I know numerously brilliantly smart people with heavy accents, many of whom happen to be Indian-born Stanfo…
But on the other hand, this shows a way of doing business that SV still suffers from: they are too west centered. These companies build things to US market and, sometimes, Europe. South America usually follow-up as we (i am brazilian) are very connected to US culture. But even we have our thriving copycat companies. But if you take Russia and China into account, then they often have juggernauts versions of SV companies (not regular copycats, but dominant companies) that the original ones just can't easily beat when they try.
I don't think there is causality here, just guessing that they are both reflects of a particular trace of SV companies: US is the Total Adressable Market. So, if you don't completely fit with the US culture, you will likely fail as a startup CEO in SV (for pragmatic reasons, not any "racist" bias or anything like that). At the same time, these companies usually take a little too long time to expand internationally.
This a diferentiation that 500startups have that, in my opinion, will pay large benefits to them eventually.