101–110 of 175 posts
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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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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.
"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.
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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.
Coming at it from the teaching side there is definitely a high correlation between lack of foreign accent and good teaching skills. In school I used to help assign graduate TAs into math sections. We would go through and rate all the graduate students by teaching skill and then use that to divide up teaching and grading assignments. The data showed unambiguously that TAs who lost their accent were much better teacher…
This fits well with my experience.
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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 s…
All YC investments are public and some investor could go through and build PG's model using videotapes of all those founders. Collect all this data, put a few data scientists on it, and build a virtual PG.
The connections don't matter if you're a huge fund, you can buy your way to a meeting with Presidents, silicon valley types are puny in comparison.
This is a golden opportunity for oil tycoons (tesla and google are going to be demolishing them in the next few years with electric self-driving cars, they better get in the tech game, and so far PG has been most reliable at it).
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.
What I am wondering about is: would Einstein be a good start-up founder?
History says no. He was never able to build a great business with the fashionable blouses he designed. He never was able to scale his refrigerator company beyond the customer discovery phase and sold the patent to Electrolux... Google these if you think I am joking.
My imaginary scenario is more like this: let's assume that there is something like the relativity theory of programming, i.e. in order to build programs of a certain size and complexity you HAVE to use the relativity theory, otherwise you'll fail. Now, could Einstein have built a software company that takes advantage of this?
"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…
"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…
You were hopefully thinking about refugee immigrants when you said this?
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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 on…
I have an actor friend, who is well-respected professionally. I once discussed how he approaches the new play that he is working on. He said that at first he just rote-learns the play, so that he can keep all of it in his head.Only after that he starts to analyze and think about the role, deeper themes and emotional flows in the play.
I also used a somewhat similar tactic to get better at public presentations. I studied and watched two presentations over and over, making notes about structure, pausing between words, content of the slides, etc. It really helped and I managed to create a presentation that people liked a lot and I was asked to give presentations afterwards in several events.
"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 talked about this on another thread, but by strong accent I mean so strong that people have a hard time understanding you. It's not a problem if founders have accents as strong as, say, the Collison brothers'.