Paul Graham on CEOs with ‘Strong’ Foreign Accents

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

"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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.