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Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

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Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#61

Post by glibgil »

NhanH wrote: post #55
sunir wrote: post #18

I'm really disappointed that this was Paul's top of mind criterion for rejection, "One quality that's a really bad indication is a CEO with a strong foreign accent." 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.freshbook…

Can anyone here share their experience on how they get rid of their accent? As a non-native speaker, there are some phonemes that are just straight up unrecognisable for me : "h" - "x", "war" - "wall", "word" - "world" to name a few. I recognized the problem about a year ago and has been trying to figure it out since then, albeit without much success.

Pick an accent in English that sounds very extreme to you. Learn to speak that accent. For example, if you live in California learn to speak the difficult words as if you are from Texas or Georgia. Don't aspire to say "there" but go for "thar" instead. Example "can you hand me that book over thar?" Your goal should be to make people think, "this guy speaks good English. When he moved here he probably refined his English in Texas or somewhere in the South."

Once you have learned to mimic one accent you can quickly master another.

Source: I did this myself in Brazil when learning Portuguese. The words that were hard to pronounce I would say like I was from Rio. It was easier to mimic the accent from Rio because it was different from what I was hearing every day. If I were actually in Rio I would have probably found it easier to mimic a Paulistano accent.

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#62

Post by c0mpute »

sliverstorm wrote: post #54
c0mpute wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-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.

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.

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

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#63

Post by sliverstorm »

c0mpute wrote: post #62
sliverstorm wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 Nooy…

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 (although typically their mother tongue was of Asian lineage so the sound was different)

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#64

Post by logicallee »

ngoel36 wrote: post #13

"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…

I know a good accent-reduction service (among other language services) via skype, hit me up by email and I'll hook you up. It's definitely something you can improve!

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#65

Post by logicallee »

sunir wrote: post #18

I'm really disappointed that this was Paul's top of mind criterion for rejection, "One quality that's a really bad indication is a CEO with a strong foreign accent." 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.freshbook…

You can work on your accent. I know a good coach who can help reduce your accent, send me a message and I'll put you in touch. He works via skype.

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#66

Post by olivier1664 »

znt wrote: post #45
pg wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 outside the US, and we fund a lot of them. But 564 startups is enough to see patterns, and the empirical evidence about very strong accents is striking. And I am talking about failure to communicate here. I don't mean strong accents in the sense that it's clear th…

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…

Too bad we need to create an account (in clear HTTP) to try it.

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#67

Post by graeme »

Something interesting: a lot of people thought Airbnb was terrible, including YC and Fred Wilson.

I was 23 when Airbnb was founded. I had had many happy experiences with Couchsurfing.

For me, and many Couchsurfers, the idea of an upscale, paid couchsurfing was trivially obvious. None of us built it, but I assumed someone would.

I'm not sure what the lesson is.

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#68

Post by sunir »

capkutay wrote: post #41
sunir wrote: post #18

I'm really disappointed that this was Paul's top of mind criterion for rejection, "One quality that's a really bad indication is a CEO with a strong foreign accent." 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.freshbook…

'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." There are a handful of successful immigrant CEO's in tech along with other industries (CEO of coca cola is just one example). One of the things they all have in common is excellent com…

Totally. That's why I was so surprised the recruiter's only dimension to evaluate communication skills was a candidate's accent. I assumed it would include presentation, negotiation, project management, etc. skills which would be relevant.

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#70

Post by NhanH »

glibgil wrote: post #61
NhanH wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can anyone here share their experience on how they get rid of their accent? As a non-native speaker, there are some phonemes that are just straight up unrecognisable for me : "h" - "x", "war" - "wall", "word" - "world" to name a few. I recognized the problem about a year ago and has been trying to figure it out since then, albeit without much success.

Pick an accent in English that sounds very extreme to you. Learn to speak that accent. For example, if you live in California learn to speak the difficult words as if you are from Texas or Georgia. Don't aspire to say "there" but go for "thar" instead. Example "can you hand me that book over thar?" Your goal should be to make people think, "this guy speaks good English. When he moved here he probably refined his Engl…

Thanks for the answer, it's an interesting method! The main problem (I think) would be that self-study material tends to be heavily skewed toward either West Coast or East Coast accent, and I don't think I have seen anything on Southern accent.

I actually have been thinking about something similar for a while too. In my case, I thought that British accent would be easier for me to mimic. I haven't actually tried that out yet and now seems to be a good time to do so. Would British accent be a good goal? Out of curiosity, has there ever been a case of someone having a "too thick" British accent that would make it hard for American to understand?

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