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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

#81

Post by jonnathanson »

rustynails77 wrote: post #43
larrys wrote: post #3

" If a place has really good food, it can be in an obscure location, charge a lot, and have really bad service, and it will still be popular. If it has bad food, boy, it better do something really special to get anybody in there." The "special" can be "location". Food on the NJ Turnpike (or similar) is an example of a captive market where quality of food is not the key ingredient but landing the contract and being me…

Just to be clear, this rule doesn't work for McDonalds - as it's an established brand. Their food is awful, but the place tends to be clean and tidy - with a toilet. Interestingly, where I live, Burger Kings tend to be filthy and poorly maintained, with slightly better tasting food. They are also popular - so cleanliness doesn't seem to be a major contributor.

McDonalds' food is awful by what standard, precisely? From a health standpoint, sure. From the standpoint of a foodie, yes. From the standpoint of pretty much anyone who is accustomed to nicer food, in nicer circumstances, sure.

But McDonalds isn't competing on the dimension of "quality" as other restaurants might define that term. McDonalds is competing on scale and consistency. A Big Mac [1] in Jakarta tastes identical to a Big Mac in Cleveland. A pack of fries in Moscow tastes identical to a pack of fries in Istanbul. If you walk into a McDonalds in any part of the world, barring a few local specialties on the menu, you know exactly what you're going to get, and exactly when you're going to get it. That's pretty damned remarkable.

McDonalds runs a marketing and logistics company, not a restaurant chain.

[1] Insert Pulp Fiction reference here.

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#82

Post by jcampbell1 »

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.

I work in the foreign language education business, and so am naturally curious when I meet someone who speaks English without accent, but should have an accent. I have met 7 people that speak with no accent, but should have one, e.g. moved to the US from Taiwan at age 21, but is now 31 and speaks with no accent. They all told a similar story. They listened to the same piece of audio content thousands of times. For one it was an episode of Friends, for another guy it was a Bill Clinton speech.

If you want to make progress, I suggest finding a piece of content 15-30 minutes long, and listening and repeating everyday for a year. Once you have memorized the content word-for-word, then you will be able to stop hearing meaning, and actually hear the sounds.

You could also spend time with a book which explains differences like the 'th' difference in 'thin' and 'then'. I assure you that book will not help you. Many native english speakers don't distinguish between 'pin' and 'pen' but no one confuses 'thin' and 'then'. Trying to learn a bunch of rules will not work. You have to learn to hear the difference, and the only way to learn to hear the difference is to listen to the same thing over and over.

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#83

Post by antsar »

olivier1664 wrote: post #66
znt wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, use a unique password and/or a throwaway email?

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#84

Post by gfodor »

pcunite wrote: post #6

With hands in pocket he has not been captured mid motion. He is therefore purposefully guarding entrance into the "Y". The blue exit door is for anyone who cannot answer his questions three.

"What have you made?" "Who wants it?" "How do you know?"

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#85

Post by nashequilibrium »

pg wrote: post #30
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…

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…

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.

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#86

Post by abalone »

pg wrote: post #30
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…

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…

"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.

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#87

Post by rhizome »

nashequilibrium wrote: post #85
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…

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 someon…

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.

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#88

Post by sunir »

pg wrote: post #30
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…

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…

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/

That's different. You can still be clearly understood with a strong foreign accent. cf. Gandhi. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yMcNubXqc4

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#90

Post by Natsu »

jamiequint wrote: post #71
beambot wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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'.

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').

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