

Paul Graham on CEOs with ‘Strong’ Foreign Accents - jeremybencken
http://www.siliconbeat.com/2013/08/27/quoted-y-combinators-paul-graham-on-ceos-with-strong-foreign-accents/

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GuiA
PG has clarified what he meant in HN comments for the original article:

 _" I am talking about failure to communicate here. I don't mean strong
accents in the sense that it's clear that someone comes from another country.
I'm talking about accents so strong that you have to interrupt the
conversation to ask what they just said."_

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6279918](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6279918)

~~~
vasilipupkin
This makes a lot of sense to me. Originally, I thought PG was confusing
correlation with causation and projecting from a relatively small number of
data points. But I agree, if the accent is so strong that it's hard to
understand, that person will have a more difficult time being an effective CEO

~~~
jacquesm
> that person will have a more difficult time being an effective CEO

In an English speaking community. But in their own country they'd be fine.
This is about _YC applicants_. That really needs to be included in the quote,
she moved the leading question to the part below it, which gives an entirely
different impression than if that were the introduction.

~~~
vasilipupkin
Yes, of course. I meant in the U.S.

------
martythemaniak
"Other prominent Silicon Valley people with accents — we’re not sure what
Graham considers “strong” — include Vinod Khosla, Sun Microsystems co-founder
and now a venture capitalist, Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen, Tesla’s Elon Musk, and
a guy named Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google."

No, none of those people have strong accents. When pg says "strong" he really
does mean it - so strong that you cannot actually understand what the person
is saying. Has anyone ever been tripped up by Brin or Musk's accents?

As CEO, one of your main responsibilities is to be the chief communicator -
with employees, investors, press, customers, etc. If you want to be a good
verbal communicator, being understood is very important.

------
jacquesm
Hm. That's not the nicest quote to be out there (it's missing quite a bit of
important context too). Paul you should really either retract that or nuance
it but as it sits this reads pretty bad, _even if it might be true_.

But I doubt it is true, accents have nothing to do with people's brains, they
have everything to do with what your first language was and for how long that
language was your only language. If you were born in Bulgaria, Hungary or a
hundred other places and your first exposure to English in bulk and attempts
to speak it started at the age of 10 or later you'll have a fairly strong
accent no matter what. It's just how your throat cavity, voice box and lips
will be muscled. If you tried to speak Finnish you'd likely have a very strong
accent.

But that doesn't mean you're not 100% in the head or unable to communicate
clearly, for instance, you could write, or you could communicate in your
mother tongue. That YC finds itself in the English speaking community and
tends to address an English speaking audience with its start-ups and prefers
to communicate in English does not mean that those are the only ways of doing
things.

Maybe people would have to work a little harder at understanding you but I
think that it would need more than this quote and some of the original context
to establish that such a thing is an indicator of not being able to run a
business, or even that your experience to date is relevant anywhere outside of
the start-up community.

This quote will be used against you, it will be spun to read you're xenophobic
or worse. Do something about it before it gets legs.

~~~
boards2x
Must agree. It's a stupid comment and it's embarrassing to see how PG fanboys
here are walking on eggshells trying to force some sense into what seems to be
the unavailing of a xenophobe. Look at early days Hollywood. It was founded,
literally, by foreigners with thick accents. What a lame and nauseating
comment.

~~~
theorique
Would you invest in a CEO whom you had to interrupt every 10-15 seconds
because you literally _could not understand what he was saying_? Since the CEO
is the one responsible for communicating with VCs, investors, big customers,
potential acquirers, this is a serious concern.

PG has already clarified that he's not talking about someone saying "zee"
instead of "the". And YC has funded many non-native English speaking teams
before.

------
BobbyH
All the famous entrepreneurs mentioned in this story have very light accents.
I found YouTube videos with these entrepreneurs speaking, and none of them
have "accents so strong that you have to interrupt the conversation to ask
what they just said.":

* Vinod Khosla, Sun Microsystems co-founder and now a venture capitalis: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxYVOMj6F2U&t=1m2s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxYVOMj6F2U&t=1m2s)

* Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TShENN3VVX8&t=0m29s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TShENN3VVX8&t=0m29s)

* Tesla’s Elon Musk: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDwzmJpI4io&t=2m33s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDwzmJpI4io&t=2m33s)

* Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vv0NKieCoI&t=5m59s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vv0NKieCoI&t=5m59s)

------
rtpg
There are a lot of studies out there that show that people only "hear" the
sounds that they heard as a child. So someone who grew up in the countryside
in Japan is going to have a hard time speaking English "properly" even with
gargantuan effort.

Anyone here who's spent a decent amount of time abroad probably knows what I'm
talking about. When someone asks you how to say something in English, and you
say it, and they repeat it but it just sounds _off_ , and they're incapable of
producing the same sounds as you. It seems like the simplest of exercises but
it hits the core of the issue.

For any Americans, trying to learn something like Thai (or other tonal
languages) can be extremely difficult because of the tonal information. I am
pretty incapable of producing anything sounding correct in Thai no matter how
many times my friends try to make me say it.

You also have probably heard French people speak English. There's not much
else to say about that. Almost all the accent is derived from differences in
the sounds between the two languages.

Saying that it "just" requires effort is underestimating the amount of time it
can take to rewrite the way you speak. People living years in foreign
countries can still end up speaking with strong (yes, even near
incomprehensible) accents, and I've run into a good amount of them.

There's a big perception penalty when you're not "in sync" with the language
you're speaking in, which is where you get the "people talk slowly to you and
assume you're not very smart" effect. So character judgements on language
ability is a bit much.

There's an easy solution though: just hire somebody who can speak well.
They're harder to find in some areas, but it's a pretty high priority. Just
don't hate on the CEO if he can do his job.

------
Jemaclus
I was rather surprised when he said that. Not that strong foreign accents tend
to fail, but more that he would actually say such an un-politically correct
thing.

One thing entrepreneurs have to do is sell. Not just products, but ideas,
visions, and strategies. They have to be able to convert industry talk into
laymen's terms. They need to be able to convince someone who doesn't know
anything about X that Y is the way to go.

While a strong foreign accent isn't necessarily the bottleneck, it is probably
highly correlated with with a weaker grasp on the English language --
particularly idiomatic English, as PG pointed out. If I ask you to ELI5 your
business, generally the best way to go about that is to use an analogy, but if
your grasp of idiomatic English doesn't allow you to construct an elegant
analogy, then you're going to miss out on a great opportunity to explain your
product/idea/vision to me.

To be fair to non-English speaking entrepreneurs, this isn't specifically a
language problem. There are people who speak perfectly good idiomatic English
that can't speak in layman's terms. A good example of this is a Calculus
professor at a college. They're so good at calculus and higher-level math that
explaining simple algebra is often very difficult. "What do you mean you don't
understand that y = 2x + 5 draws a graph that looks like this?!? It's easy!"
But for someone who doesn't understand slope and algebra, it's NOT intuitive.
There are tons of people who have this problem.

Having said that, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a higher correlation of
poor communication skills to strong foreign accents.

~~~
jacquesm
It's perfectly possible to run a business entirely in French, Dutch, German,
Finnish, Swedish, Japanese, Chinese and so on. Not all businesses are
international, not all business address an English speaking audience or
employees etc.

~~~
sp332
But are any of them asking YC for funding?

------
jlgreco
If we are going with the stated reasoning, I'd probably drop the "foreign"
part. Midwest/Californian/New England/Texan are all mutually comprehensible
but there are some deep-south accents (I am thinking particularly of rural
South Carolina) that can cause the exact same sort of communication friction.

Also, I doubt a strong English accent would cause much trouble, despite being
both strong and foreign.

------
sp332
_We learned a bunch of tells as time went on. We videotape all of our
interviews, and before each round of interviews, we look at the game tapes
from the last round. By then, we know something about how these start-ups
turned out, either good or bad. Sometimes, you look at that video and say, "We
would have been fooled by these guys again." But sometimes, we can see: "Aha!
They're doing X."_

That's not predjudice, that's... post-judice? Andy Grove, Elon Musk, and
Sergey Brin are exceptions in many ways, so they're not really good
indicators.

~~~
theorique
Additionally, Andy Grove, Elon Musk, and Sergey Brin speak very clear,
understandable, and yes, accented English.

What PG actually said is that speakers with accents so thick that the YC team
had to interrupt frequently to ask them to repeat themselves, tended not to be
successful.

I think the problem was that PG used the term "accent" rather than
"communication problem" or "could not understand what they were saying".

It's about the communication, not the fact that English is not their native
language.

------
jongraehl
I ran into the idea that people are biased against thick accents in '59
seconds':

    
    
       "If the gloves don’t fit, you must acquit." Rhyme is actually persuasive. 
       (In general things that are easier to understand/remember are more persuasive; 
        people distrust the same words said in a thick foreign accent, for that reason).
    

[http://graehl.org/2011/02/02/59-seconds-is-a-good-self-
help-...](http://graehl.org/2011/02/02/59-seconds-is-a-good-self-help-book/)

------
jessedhillon
Sort of amazing that someone (edit: someone of such stature) would utter
something like this without, apparently, pausing to reflect whether their own
subtle biases might be steering them into a comfortable observation. Then
again, PG _may actually have_ reflected deeply on the matter and still come to
this conclusion, but the reasoning given strikes me as post-hoc.

Is the sample of successful YC companies (or all companies) even large enough
to begin making generalizations? There's what, around a thousand? In that
sample size there must be tremendous variety across any axis, not just English
speaking ability.

~~~
sp332
Well he does qualify the idea with "it could be..." and follows it up with "I
just know it's a strong pattern we've seen."

