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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

#91

Post by sunir »

rhizome wrote: post #87
nashequilibrium wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#92

Post by nashequilibrium »

rhizome wrote: post #87
nashequilibrium wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"My impression is that the majority of success-oriented communication in soccer is nonverbal."

No, if payers wore mic's you would hear it is very verbal as well, just lip read sometimes or in preseason watch a warmup game since the crowd is small you can hear all the calls, "wazza backdoor" etc, is mainly between one to three words, but you use everything you have. Then half-time, the strategy sessions are all talk. I forgot to mention when the coach can't speak english or any other home lanhuage but still is successful.

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#93

Post by Natsu »

NhanH wrote: post #70
glibgil wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I find that I have to learn how the phoneme is actually said (where is the tongue, etc.) and then practice it a lot with recording(s) of native speakers (i.e. a recorded TV show) to compare with. Once you can make the right sound, practice it until you can say it easily.

If you have friendly native speakers, you may be able to get them to exaggerate the sound. E.G. the difference between thin and then is that the 'th' in then gets voiced (your throat vibrates) and the vowel is different. 'World' has an extra syllable (wur - ul - d) vs. 'word' (wur - d). I'm less sure about your issues with the others, save that certain sounds probably don't exist in your native language.

And those you just have to study & practice. I know how hard it is, though, having learned such sounds as 'ng', the 'eu' vowel in 'feu' (French - fire), glottal stops (yes, those exists in the English word bookcase, but...), the Japanese 'R'-group sounds (they're not 'R's or 'L's as we know them).

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#94

Post by ludston »

sunir wrote: post #88
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…

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. T…

> 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.

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#95

Post by Natsu »

NhanH wrote: post #57
larrys wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"they must just be clueless if they haven't gotten rid of their strong accent" Specifically "clueless". I agree with that but I also think it's an attitude as well in some people. I think even if it was explained to them they might not think that it would benefit them. In that case they are not clueless they are simply rigid in their thinking, right? As the saying goes "when in rome do as the romans do" Along those l…

I've actually asked some American (one of them being my boss) on whether I should be using an American name to make it easier for everyone at work. I received two "It's weird" answers, and haven't asked the third person yet. Considering that my name is relative short (the first 4 letter of my username, Americans tend to remember the "h" and "a"'s position swapped though), would you consider it a difficult name to rem…

Nhan? I'm assuming that sounds like 'non', so it's probably easier to use your real name. I do know some people who abbreviate their names, though, if there's a workable abbreviation (e.g. Siddahrta / Sid).

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#96

Post by lightcatcher »

beambot wrote: post #49
soneca wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I recently had a math prof with a bit of an accent and also fairly bad handwriting. He always used the variables "u" and something that sounded like "wee", where "wee" was drawn kind of like a backwards uppercase "N" where the right hand tail didn't go all the way down to the baseline.

I realized about 5 weeks into the class that "wee" was actually just "v". :( I've had other profs with heavy accents before (that other people said they couldn't understand but I did alright with), but this prof just completely lost me on some words.

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#97

Post by patio11 »

unono wrote: post #58
arbuge wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Does anyone know what has been PG's ROI on his investments is, for all we know it could be below industry standard. Hell no. Just do the math: http://ycombinator.com/nums.html The total value of YC companies is more like $12B today. That makes their average 6% stake worth around $700m or so. Around 600 companies total, at around $20k each - a total investment of just $12m or so by my calculations. $12m to $700m in…

If that's true, then that's astounding. Why isn't some huge wall street fund swooping in to this? Do people not know. The White House should be calling in PG for advice.

That's a good question. The main reason is that the hypothetical Huge Wall Street Firm doesn't see a way to reproduce the project at scale. They don't have pg et al, and while YC is applying mass-production techniques to startups, by the standards of markets where APIs exist to conduct transactions they're still in the early industrial revolution.

If pg was just a decision engine for Startup#fund(amount), a vaguely specified API which could put hundreds of millions of dollars to work on any given day and which didn't require artisanal mentorship and connection-making of the fledgling startups, you would expect somebody from Wall Street to already have said "We can offer you an arbitrarily high amount of money to do that for us."

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#98

Post by NhanH »

Natsu wrote: post #95
NhanH wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've actually asked some American (one of them being my boss) on whether I should be using an American name to make it easier for everyone at work. I received two "It's weird" answers, and haven't asked the third person yet. Considering that my name is relative short (the first 4 letter of my username, Americans tend to remember the "h" and "a"'s position swapped though), would you consider it a difficult name to rem…

Nhan? I'm assuming that sounds like 'non', so it's probably easier to use your real name. I do know some people who abbreviate their names, though, if there's a workable abbreviation (e.g. Siddahrta / Sid).

Take a look here: http://www.forvo.com/word/nh%C3%A2n/#vi

The "h" is not a silent sound, and I think pronouncing as "non" is part of the reason why American tends to mix up "Nhan" and "Nahn".

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#99

Post by tptacek »

hnriot wrote: post #51
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…

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.

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.

Re: Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

#100

Post by statictype »

tptacek wrote: post #99
hnriot wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

It does sound crazy. But is it much different from an employer bing forced to hire a certain sort of employee?
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