Bring Me Your Accents. Immigration Fuels Innovation
bothsidesofthetable.com
bothsidesofthetable.com
I do not doubt that there may be correlation between people who have performed poorly in YC and "very strong accents", it does not mean causation. Such a statement from someone whom people hang to his every-word should not be put out without clarification.
The defense of "accents so strong you cannot understand" holds no water. It was an after thought. What about people that are dumb and cannot speak at all? Nothing could have stopped him from saying "people who do not communicate well make bad CEOs. As an example, thick accents, stammering, unclear minds can be the cause.
Instead of clarifying the context which I assume to be "With a strong accent you will find it to raise money on demo day which is very important" or expanding it, Paul Graham goes "Don't say things people want to misunderstand"
It is insulting at best. Heaping the blame/responsibility of understanding on the readier/listener. How ironic considering the topic.
I hope his position does not lead to default bias in YC companies. "He has a strong accent, I cannot ask him to be my co founder". Or "His strong accent means he will be a bad CEO so why employ him at all"
This tread will soon disappear. But I will end with a Martin Luther King quote from the I have a dream speech 5o years ago yesterday. "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter"
pg is an investor. From the point of view of angel investing, causation is not important. Correlation is enough. If some trait historically shows the company will be half as likely to succeed, why should an investor put money in that company, causation be damned?
e.g Thee cliche white male that attended an Ivy League school was successful. therefore, to be safe I go that way all the time. This then goes ahead and pollutes your data-set because it would be built on that bias.
Now, I am not saying that those that patten match are bad, but they should at the very least try not to make their 'findings' influence other people who might have the chance to to start a new data set without bias.
Does it make it more difficult to get a foot in the door if you're female, Ecuadorian and went to a community college, despite being a phenomenal programmer with a great idea? Yes, it does make it more difficult, but that's not their problem. They are choosing where to invest their money, and using math to do so should be encouraged.
If they don't have a spreadsheet in front of them, then at the very least they should understand that prestige is prestige for a reason.
Does that make it impossible to succeed without those qualifiers? No, but it's not unfair that it's more difficult to do so without them. You can't play a fair game all the way through. Sooner or later something's going to happen that's not in your favor.
"Discrimination is rational" and "discrimination is bad" are not mutually exclusive.
If you value diversity, equality, etc, then you have to actively monitor your own discriminatory tendencies and lead with respect, compassion, love instead of rationality and pattern matching.
And it does not matter that you are the next Jobs, because the moment the investors hear you greeting them with a foreign or exotic accent they are not paying any attention about what you have to say, at all.
What would you do? would you still support pg? even if that keeps you from ever being able to raise any funding?
See? I can play at that game too. The problem is, doing that doesn't get anywhere, because I'm still convinced of my point, and you're still convinced of yours, and there's no dialectic to compromise our ideas.
Again, being snarky like this leads nowhere. If you're going to give a solid rebuttal, good! If you're not, then you're not achieving anything.
Treat everyone equally. Understand that humans are wired to recognize patterns, and are naturally discriminatory. Fight that urge.
If that is right then PG has missed the obvious in his own data, since several high-quality YC startups have CEOs who speak American English with moderate accents. One of them is on the front page of Hacker News right now, in fact. So I don't think your claim is either likely or, given that you've offered zero evidence, fair.
Amusingly, you condemn his clarification immediately after condemning him for not offering one.
>I do not doubt that there may be correlation between people who have performed poorly in YC and "very strong accents", it does not mean causation.
It doesn't matter what the cause is, he's an investor, not a doctor. The cause is irrelevant. If there's correlation, that's enough to say no. Being an investor is a game where you find what's wrong before you try to find what's right. You don't approach deal-flow with "How can I make this work?" but "What does this person have to offer me?"
>The defense of "accents so strong you cannot understand" holds no water.
Nor should it be a defense; it's a solid fact. How many CEOs do you see in the United States who can't be understood very well when they're speaking?
>Nothing could have stopped him from saying "people who do not communicate well make bad CEOs.
You're right, nothing stopped him. Then again, he doesn't have any responsibility to people on a message board who will critique him without any experience of internal operations of Y Combinator. "Nothing stopped him" is a good enough reason for anything. It's invalid because it's not a logical rebuttal, it's just a tautology.
>Heaping the blame/responsibility of understanding on the readier/listener. How ironic considering the topic.
I'm a bit confused by this part. I think Paul Graham's entire point is that the responsibility of understanding is on the speaker...hence why strong accents aren't desirable in a CEO.
>I hope his position does not lead to default bias in YC companies. "He has a strong accent, I cannot ask him to be my co founder". Or "His strong accent means he will be a bad CEO so why employ him at all"
I don't care if it becomes a default bias. Do you know why? Because it isn't a bias in the sense of discrimination. If the statistics bears out that it's not a quality correlated with success, then you don't want it. This isn't unicorns and candy rainbows. This is capitalist investment. There isn't room for everyone to succeed. That doesn't mean we're being ethnocentric.
In fact, if the math bears it out, I honestly hope YC companies do take this on as a qualifier. If it's valid, it doesn't matter if it hurts your feelings. They're not being racist.
>This tread will soon disappear. But I will end with a Martin Luther King quote from the I have a dream speech 5o years ago yesterday. "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter"
You're taking this entirely the wrong way. This has nothing to do with unfair discrimination. It's entirely about the logistics of public speaking and communication in a company that has everything going against it. A quote from MLK has nothing to do with any of this.
Perhaps I am taking this too personal.
People always refuse (till tomorrow) to reply my emails when I put 'Nigeria(n) in it. Why? Because they had until that time, never received a legitimate email from Nigeria. As a result, all Nigerians became blacklisted.
I am not talking assumption here, I am talking about those who I ended up visiting and becoming friends with, who opened up to tell me their thinking when they first got my email.
Paul Graham is within his right to patten match all he wants. I personally believe it is at the least "not too proper" to opine your pattern matching as scientific (even mildly) ESPECIALLY when you have the power he has. If you must it has to have the proper context.
I am sure before Eminem, Dr DRE had stats that matched a particular pattern. I am glad he did not announce it to the world as an 'aha'.
With great power comes great responsibility.
I can see a reasonable case for you to say PG should add more clarification to his words when he's in an interview, but I also think PG has already done this. In at least two other places, Graham has publicly clarified what he meant by his comment about foreign accents. Perhaps if he had yet to do that and people were making a big fuss over his words, then I'd agree. But I think he's already done the due diligence.
"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 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."
and
"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'."
All other things being equal, there is a lot of difference between what an eloquent speaker can achieve and what a heavily accented speaker can achieve in the role of CEO.
This has nothing to do with preconceived bias. This has to do with Paul Graham's examination, over the course of funding over 500 different startups and his experience in that entire domain as a whole, that foreign accents are not desirable. The data is there; your bias prevents you from seeing it because you're misinterpreting it as discriminatory.
As far as I know this all started with a valleywag article a couple days ago, that somehow turned (paraphrased) "Something we've noticed after funding 500+ startups is that people with difficult-to-understand accents have trouble raising money and recruiting cofounders/employees" into "Paul Graham is a racist xenophobe who hates immigrants, pregnant women, and probably non-white people too."
Foreign founders are SOL, no company is going to hire he who will disrupt them out of the market, and those who get in are doomed to menial positions with no change of getting ahead in the company.
The real losers will be local engineers who will be priced out of the market, downwards I mean.
There is nothing preventing people with heavy accents taking a technical co-founder role.
Anecdotal evidence: my father the technical co-founder of a products company has a rather heavy accent while his US born co-founder was the CEO. It worked out decently for them and very well for the company itself: company has been bought for the 2nd time, that is VCs sold it to a conglomerate.
I did have a foreign accent but thankfully not so thick to make it non-understandable. I received a similar feedback from PG before the demo day and I worked on it.
As an entrepreneur, you can do two things - either take it as an insult and leave it or as constructive feedback and work on it. In fact, I setup an office hour with Garry to just work on this.
For eg: in India, the word programmer is pronounced as prograamar (the stress is at the end) vs pro-grammar in US. And similarly, path is pronounced as "paath" as opposed to "p-a-th" (stress on 'a') here. These are definitely minor things that you have to tune (and I'm sure PG was referring to a much more thicker accent people had) which will make it easy for people to follow what you are saying.
If you didn't work on this, the investor would miss what you had said and then after a couple of seconds would realize.. "oh. you said programmer, okay", the train of thought is lost, you continue with the slides and it repeats again. And that's not okay.
After you have identified a product-market fit in your startup, I have realized everything is about convincing, every damn thing. -- convincing the guy to join your company -- convincing the customer to buy your product -- convincing a new investor to make a bet on your company -- negotiating/convincing for compensation and pay package -- convincing someone to continue to stay in your company and so on..
It's almost like I can prefix a huge percentage of my work with the word "convincing" and it would all make sense. When that's the case, it's better to ensure at least your statements are eloquent and of high clarity that doesn't require repetition (unless of course the person wasn't listening). You are just going to improve the odds and that's what a startup is all about - do things that increase the odds of success.
It's a constructive feedback that I believe entrepreneurs should work on for their own good. It's not equivalent to sounding like an american but if you have a foreign accent (which you will if you aren't born here), please work on it to ensure what you say comes off clearly. That's it.
And YC clearly has no bias based on accent. I know tons of immigrant founders who are part of YC. In fact, 3 of my classmates (all from India) are a part of YC.
So, can people recommend any good online courses / institutes where I can improve my accent to bring it more in line with the standard American one?
Seriously though, thanks. Will check it out.
I like this course (I bought the pdf+mp3 version):
http://tarlespeech.com/accent-services/accent-products/stand...
http://tarlespeech.com/accent-services/accent-products/stand...
She also has some very helpful free videos:
http://tarlespeech.com/accent-services/minute-of-speech/
It's very important to record and listen to yourself. It'll become clear very quickly what you need to improve.
When people bring up the fact that it drives down wages and residents lose as a result - why don't they also mention that residents win by getting a cheaper product or a service?
When people bring up the welfare question and the fact that foreigners might take advantage of it, why don't they think of a simple solution: not providing it?!
The US was built on the hard work of immigrants. People seem to forget this.
There are countless justifications for it, but none that you're going to want to hear.
This whole notion that the people in the US are just too stupid and too lazy and too whatever to be able to create jobs is absurd. It takes more than one person to create, fund, build, and grow a company. Stop assigning the job-creation to the “immigrant founder”. There were more people involved in the process.
Nobody asks you to invite immigrants to your backyard. Let them live in their enclaves and don't show up there if you think it's not safe. It doesn't mean both communities can't benefit each other. But what makes you think that somehow you have more right to all the land that doesn't directly belong to you than some guy from a different country? Why do we even have these arbitrary borders? Why is it considered moral to deny people an opportunity to travel and settle down where they like?
The US was built by the descendants of Europeans who nearly wiped out the existing native population. How did immigration work out for the Native Americans and their descendants?
So, comparing colonists and indians to the current immigration problems is simply unfounded.
That's besides the point. The point is that this is a fluff piece upvoted by people with white guilt in order to alleviate that guilt. :D
The main reason why racism (or other discriminations like sexism) is bad, is because the disadvantaged person cannot change it.
Accent can be changed, culture differences can be learnt, connections can be made.
The world is not a fair place, but as long as individuals have ways to improve their situation, it is fair enough.
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/gborjas/publications/journal/J...
I'm not an expert by any means, but it didn't take much to find an article that supports this idea:
--cut--
We find that the increased supply of non-EU low skilled immigrants pushed native workers to pursue more complex occupations. This reallocation happened mainly through movement across firms. Immigration increased mobility of natives across firms and across municipalities but it did not increase their probability of unemployment. We also observe a significant shift in the native labor force towards complex service industries in locations receiving more immigrants. Those mechanisms protected individual wages from immigrants competition and enhanced their wage outcomes. While the highly educated experienced wage gains already in the short-run, the gains of the less educated built up over time as they moved towards jobs that were complementary to those held by the non-EU immigrants.
--cut--
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/08/29/immigration_a...
That is so brave.
Now these new untouchables will be rejected from many other accelerators who do nothing but copy whatever YC does in the vain hope that they too can land the next dropbox and airbnb, and rejected because they talk "funny"
At the same time expect to see a lot of teams made mostly of either foreign and domestic engineers who aren't "that good" when it comes to public speaking being indirectly coerced into accepting a dumb white bro as CEO just to get past the initial selection process of any accelerator.