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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

Never explain yourself to people who misunderstand you on the internet. They'll just use it as an excuse to misunderstand you again, which is worse because not only are you a terrible monster who said those terrible things, but now you've had the unmitigated gall to defend those terrible things.

It's a universal truth of saying things in public. No matter how clearly you say things, somebody will take it the wrong way. The only approach that doesn't make things worse is to simply ignore those people.

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Anyone who accuses PG/YC of being xenophobic is laughable. It's especially laughable coming from the press -- they've been at YC offices many times, and the sheer number of founders with accents is staggering. YC even got involved in the political process to make getting founder visas easier!

I have a really strong Russian accent that (hopefully) doesn't border too much on being not understandable, and I've never felt discriminated against at YC or elsewhere in SV, not for a millisecond. This is corroborated by dozens upon dozens of founders whose accents are even stronger than mine.

If you want to do business in a country and raise millions of dollars from people, you have to be understandable. If someone made this claim in France, or Germany, or Japan, nobody would even blink. The very fact that PG is getting criticized for it is almost indicative of how meritocratic Silicon Valley (and YC in particular) is.

... or just indicative of a very delicate and typically American rule: thou shall not speak ill of ethnic communities you don't belong to. It's a very civilized norm (which I also follow), and I'm sure it helps keeping together the most multi-ethnic cities in the world, but occasionally it gets in the way of honest discourse.

You've been hoisted with your own petard.

That politeness extends to omitting the very real fact that listening to a foreign accent is somewhat tiring - it's like running error-correction that consumes extra processing power ;-)

(Not a native English speaker, but I noticed that with accents from other non-native speakers ...)

No kidding. I had a couple professors in college with accents truly as thick as molasses. I would leave every lecture mentally drained, and during the lecture my brain would run anywhere from 1-3 sentences behind realtime as it struggled to comprehend what had been said. It took me weeks to get used to "wahriable" (variable).

(Not complaining, just agreeing)

> "wahriable"

Indian (dot, not feather), right?

Yes, for me listening to some west coast US accent is extremely tiring and even plain painful. I started playing some Google videos about topics I'm interested in and stopped after two sentences.

Just to add some relativism to this highly relative topic. I'm French by the way, and enjoy British, German, Indian, black American, Chinese accents, for example.

I wouldn't say that was typically American by any means. I would say that hyper political correctness is a reaction by a subset of the population to the overt ethnic discrimination of much American dialogue, policy, and action.

A quarter of the country belongs to an evangelical church. Those people discriminate against anyone that isn't Christian, because that's what being evangelical means. A third of black males born today will go to prison. There is a war on anybody that is vaguely middle eastern, even at home. The Jews controlling Hollywood and Wall Street are reviled. It goes on and on and on.

What's all that about Hollywood and Wall Street?

https://www.google.com/search?q=jews+hollywood

https://www.google.com/search?q=jews+wall+street

I read that extra politeness as fake, and indicative of phobic behaviour. If you treat black people as equals, then you don't see anything bad about describing someone as black. Instead, for politeness you have to say "individual of color". Newspeak that tells a lot about the society as a whole.

I don't love the term, but people of color is broader than black. It's a replacement for "visible minority".

Anyone who accuses anyone of being X-phobic is laughable. Rational people ought to be able to debate - sparring through facts, hypotheses, and argument - without walking on eggshells. Dispassionate debate is a far better mechanism to find truth than name-calling.

If you're right, then why do you have to resort to attacking the motivations of the other speaker to win? Correct opinions ought to be able to walk on their own without relying on such crutches.

If you're right, then why do you have to resort to attacking the motivations of the other speaker to win?

Because in this case I happen to actually know the motivations of both parties. PG's motivation is to help founders. The press's motivation is to drive traffic.

I'm criticizing the people claiming that PG is xenophobic. I'm on your side on this one. I hate argument by insult - it shrinks the range of acceptable thought, thereby enstupidating the public mind.

It's straight out of the 1984 playbook. Language becomes vaguer and mushier, less communicative. We can no longer tell founders that "thick foreign accents will hurt your startup", instead we must say "have good communication skills", which is a far less useful statement. It is like the substitution of "ungood" for "bad" and "plusgood" for anything more extreme than "good".

Why should we talk to each other anymore, when a tiny handbook can contain all the thoughts we are allowed to express?

I think you overreact. He made a great point.

Ah, I see.

Dispassionate debate is a good way to find the truth, but does seem a bit odd to debate whether somebody is xenophobic when you can just go talk to them and see what they are like.

Debating theories and facts or interpretation of facts makes alot of sense for things like science experiments , it seems a bit like indirection when talking about what a certain person is like.

You can just go find out what that person is like, instead of relying on hearsay.

Regarding Slava, I wouldn't say that he is doing the name calling. Accusing somebody of being xenophobic is much closer to name calling, I find that even the act of accusing to be pretty weak, why not just make a statement as opposed to an accusation.

I agree with Slava's statement, if anyone would make the statement that YC/PG is xenophobic after having met them I would say that is pretty laughable. I don't need to debate this, it's merely my opinion based on factual experience. (also, opinions don't need to be correct, they are just opinions. Facts on the other hand can be incorrect or correct)

If you think otherwise without meeting YC/PG, then you are making an opinion without any experience. (a situation you can correct)

As an aside, you don't even need to walk on eggshells around PG. You can just ask him if he is a xenophobe, he will answer no.

The word xenophobic isn't name calling when it accurately labels an emotional response, namely the fear of strangers. America is xenophobic with respect to Muslims, for example, especially so since Islamist terrorist actions instilled that fear.

In this case, I would say yes PG is xenophobic when it comes to people with strong foreign accents, because he's afraid based on his experience that they'll lower the value of the companies he's investing in.

You've taken all the meaning out of the word. Founders with thick accents should also be afraid that their speaking abilities or lack thereof will lower the value of the companies that they are founding. Would that make them... "xenophobic"... about themselves?

I was actually trying to clarify the meaning of the word to take the pejorative bite out of it. A fear of strangers makes sense in some contexts.

Of course foreigners cannot be xenophobic about themselves, they aren't foreigners to themselves. Agreed that if you have a strong accent it makes sense to worry about it; this is the pressure that drives assimilation.

you've got a perfectly understandable accent,

i still remember one of your rehearsal presentations for demo day,

it was something along the lines of

"this graph is bad"

"this graph is good"

i even thought you were playing up your accent for added comedic value.

(for context, he was showing a performance graph of rethinkDB vs. mySQL, and the graphs were practically inverted. rethinkDB was performing so much better it was comical how much throughput it was doing)

i even thought you were playing up your accent for added comedic value.

Hehe, I wasn't playing it up since I don't have to! :)

Your accent is moderately strong, but as long as the room isn't noisy, I haven't had any trouble understanding you.

If anything, you just need to project your voice better and speak louder. :)

> Never explain yourself to people who misunderstand you on the internet. They'll just use it as an excuse to misunderstand you again, which is worse because not only are you a terrible monster who said those terrible things, but now you've had the unmitigated gall to defend those terrible things.

This has been the exact opposite of my experience. Usually when I approach people directly and in a forthright manner and try and correct and clarify (and of course, apologize if my position offends and offer to listen to a counter-argument) then people seem to positively adjust their opinion of me.

I can't help but feel like your advice smacks of elitism. When I read your post I get a subtext of, "Everyone else is dumb if they don't get what I'm saying. At best, that is! Usually they're trying to shoot me down! I don't negotiate with terrorists."

I'm not sure how I could wake up every morning if I felt that way.

Well, recent events suggest that unfortunately there is a grain of truth to that assessment.

A lot of the noise in blogs and twitter has been along the lines of "PG is an evil monster who hates women and foreigners and people of color and doesn't ever want to invest in their companies". None of which he said or implied, but that doesn't seem to have stopped the attacks.

Hence, this recent article.

> "PG is an evil monster who hates women and foreigners and people of color and doesn't ever want to invest in their companies".

There are long-standing complaints with the structure and the predatory nature of YCombinator. It is very unusual and complaints center around how HN is essentially a very high-pressure situation designed to try and sell kids on the value of PG & YComb as investors on very small funding events.

Personally, I don't think this article really justifies the behavior that has been consistently (if not as high-profile) that PG has had. His reported castigation and refusal to see people who have Indian accents is troublesome. It's very difficult to take his claims seriously when he affects fake russian accents while proclaiming his innocence.

There's no question that YC has benefited greatly from PG's "propaganda" - and vice-versa. (That is, the success and growth of YC has given PG a lot more tangible stuff to write about, as opposed to 'thought experiments'.)

I'm far from an insider so I can't speak to whether a person or team should go for YC funding or not. Or whether the system is biased against people with Indian accents (your comment is the first I've heard of that, actually).

Clearly, a team with potential success ahead of them ought to consider their options carefully and see whether applying to YC is right for them. And, if they get in, whether doing the program is the most valuable use of their next few months. A founding team needs to look beyond the hype and headlines and determine what the best deal is - but that's hardly YC's fault if they present themselves in the best possible light.

> Clearly, a team with potential success ahead of them ought to consider their options carefully and see whether applying to YC is right for them.

It seems like this step is precisely what the YCombinator process is meant to complicate. The entire structure is designed to make it feel like a competition for PG's attention. By structuring it this way, it makes it much more likely that the people who "win the competition" will say yes to YComb.

And YComb moves fast! People tell me there isn't a lot of time to think. Implicit in YComb's structure is the statement, "There are a dozen people in line behind you that will take your place." It's all very American Idol.

I suspect that vibe emerges from the scaling aspect of things - if a regular VC firm invests in N deals a year and YC does 10N [], then there is no need to 'create' a competition for the attention of PG and the other principals. It will just emerge out of the large number of portfolio companies. (And this is not unique to YC, but may be exaggerated - VC firms are notoriously busy for the same reason.)

Again, this sounds like a scaling issue. If you're investing in fewer companies, you can spend more time hand holding with the teams of each one. HUman attention is the thing that doesn't scale, so it makes sense that it is the thing in short supply.

It sounds to me like teams need to precompute their responses to lots of possible situations. And get as much information about the downside of participating as possible, beyond the headlines and the hype. But this is the kind of suggestion that I'd give anybody considering YC (or a job, or the military, or a college, or a grad school, or a training program).

[*] I don't know if these numbers are accurate, but the point is that YC is well known to do many more, smaller deals than VC firms.

> Again, this sounds like a scaling issue. If you're investing in fewer companies, you can spend more time hand holding with the teams of each one. HUman attention is the thing that doesn't scale, so it makes sense that it is the thing in short supply.

Isn't human coaching the primary asset that YComb offers though? It's certainly not money, HN seed rounds are not exceptionally large, and they aren't unusually early.

There are long-standing complaints with the structure and the predatory nature of YCombinator.

It seems like a "good deed never goes unpunished"-type situation. YC partners are both independently wealthy and brilliant. They could choose to do anything they wanted with their time, or nothing at all, and they'd still be fine. Instead, they chose to dedicate themselves to coaching people and sharing their expertise to teach people to build companies. Men, women, foreigners, everybody. The selection process for getting into YC is the most open you'd ever find anywhere. The paperwork is open-source for heaven's sakes! Could you suggest a couple of things they could do to make the process less "predatory"?

> Instead, they chose to dedicate themselves to coaching people and sharing their expertise to teach people to build companies.

You know, most of the good venture capital firms and angels who enter in on seed rounds do this.

> Instead, they chose to dedicate themselves to coaching people and sharing their expertise to teach people to build companies. Men, women, foreigners, everybody.

I'd love to know the ratio of male founders who apply to the number that get funded vs. the ratio of female ones. Did PG publish this data?

> Could you suggest a couple of things they could do to make the process less "predatory"?

Not structure it like American Idol, for starters. With the possible exception of pre-everyone-goes-on-summer-vactation, most agencies don't structure their funding around some kind of audition structure. They make appointments and develop leads as they see fit, trying to talk to companies when they're actually read to do funding.

Of course, many venture firms out there are sleazy and lots of people are working on ideas that won't interest the top tier firms. But personally I've always felt like everything about the YComb process was design to fool young Stanford undergrads into taking what, honestly, is a kinda mediocre funding deal unless YComb is basically the biggest value-add ever.

> I can't help but feel like your advice smacks of elitism. When I read your post I get a subtext of, "Everyone else is dumb if they don't get what I'm saying. At best, that is! Usually they're trying to shoot me down! I don't negotiate with terrorists."

I don't think it was meant to be elitist. I believe it was directed towards those who are going to find a problem with anything you say, regardless of what you say.

These people will do this either way. Why even include them in your assessments?

s/elitism/defensiveness/g

Elitism is an overloaded word, but your sentiment here seems good.

I chose it intentionally. "Defensiveness" is not what I meant.

The Internet is filled with every type of person with many different motivations. Many of those people have a different motivation than "understanding" you. They are people that get social currency from signaling that they are anti-racist, they are people that monetize outrage, they are people for who arguing is a bloodsport, they are self-avowed trolls. Why bother? The people who make the attempt to understand you will treat what you say charitably, they are self-selecting. The rest you can ignore.

I am elitist against people who judge ideas on the scale of which one is most politically correct.

I don't understand how they get anything done in life without giving their brain room to think. For example, a founder having trouble raising funds could consider Paul Graham's advice on accents and see if it applies to him, but not if he censors his own mind to avoid it.

> I am elitist against people who judge ideas on the scale of which one is most politically correct.

Do you really think this discussion is about political correctness?

> I don't understand how they get anything done in life without giving their brain room to think.

Then think on this. There are many models to building a startup. Most of them don't involve the YCombinator style.

if it's not about political correctness, then we need a new word for signaling one's own righteousness by being quick to take offense

That is not what's at play here. There is a systemic problem in Silicon Valley and San Francisco in startup culture. Berating founders for their accent publicly (as has been reported) is an excellent example of the problem.

That is not polite, cordial conversation between equals. That is not the behavior of two equals talking business. It's not acceptable behavior in a civilized venue. This is not because it's "politically correct," but rather because of the profound implications of antagonizing someone for what they are and where they were born.

Pg is the equal of very few of the people with whom he does business. He has more money, power, knowledge and experience than almost anyone he deals with on a regular basis. YC applicants are not equals, they are supplicants. His equals are VCs, super angels and C-suite executives from big software companies. People who are not equals can have mutually beneficial relationships, but treating rhetoric about people being equal in dignity or legal rights with an accurate description of the world is a mistake.

> People who are not equals can have mutually beneficial relationships, but treating rhetoric about people being equal in dignity or legal rights with an accurate description of the world is a mistake.

Except that PG's continued fortune is dependent upon the success of these "supplicants" approaching his business for money. And if he does his job well, the winners will become his equals. So... yeah. Unwise to play the "I am better because economics!" card.

Certainly, PG is not the equal of most of these people in engineering ability. He's so far out of the game that it'd take him 1-3 years just to update his vocabulary.

PG is in the business of giving business advice and teaching startups how to grow and prosper in the world as it exists. He has stated that he writes publicly in order to scale the process of giving advice. By putting it online, it is precisely where founders who most need the advice are most likely to find it.

It makes you upset that PG is giving this advice. But if it is true advice, then founders will be better off for hearing it, regardless of your feelings.

It is easier for founders to modify their behavior than it is to teach all the VCs of the valley to understand lots of accents, so PG's advice passes the sanity check even though we may wish the contrary were true.

> PG is in the business of giving business advice and teaching startups how to grow and prosper in the world as it exists.

Quite untrue. PG is in the business of giving very small seed rounds to mostly small, low-effort consumer plays in the web and mobile space. He does fund things that do not meet these criterion, but they are in a notable minority.

His writing and website and other aspects are part of his overall plan to engage with the tech community. This is the added value (beyond cash, of which everyone's int he same) he proposes to add as an investor. Have you ever done YComb or gotten seed/A-round funding before? You know how this works, right.

> But if it is true advice, then founders will be better off for hearing it, regardless of your feelings.

It is clearly true that PG will be less likely to fund you if you were not born in the parts of the world he is familiar with, consequently speaking the language and dialects that he is comfortable with. His arguments that only western-sounding people succeed in the world of tech business is absurd (and poorly sourced).

> It is easier for founders to modify their behavior than it is to teach all the VCs of the valley to understand lots of accents, so PG's advice passes the sanity check even though we may wish the contrary were true.

Yeah dude, I just made walked into the doors of basically every top tier VC in the Valley, sat down, gave a presentation, then left. I heard people prepping for presentations with thick accents in nearly every office. I'm pretty sure it is "okay" to be not born in the US.

Especially since it's entirely possible to, you know, employ someone to help you with this part if your English skills aren't up where you need them to be.

So I am not only upset that PG is mockingly affecting accents to tell people what not to do, but I'm upset that these are his criterion. I'm a bit upset because this diminishes the slowly tarnishing image I have of my former Lisp idol, and because the Valley has a systemic problem with women and certain ethnicities.

This is another example of that coming into play, and I'm mad because the engineering part of my head demands I try and fix it if it bothers me. But I can think of no solutions that don't involve putting people who say things like this in a shock collar. So now I am more upset because my irrational and pervasive desire to fix things is thwarted by brute feasibility.

That's a little bit paranoid. Sure, there are some people out there who just don't like you and will bend whatever you say against you. But sometimes, people may be rightfully calling you out on your assumptions. If you're not open to any criticism on what you say or how you say it, you will never get any better at expressing yourself.

When I respond to people who are being unreasonably critical of things I've written, I'm usually not just responding to them for their sake, I'm responding so that everyone else who's following the conversation can look at both sides and decide for themselves who's being reasonable. Over time, being earnest about responding to criticism, even unwarranted criticism, has gained me respect in my social circle. Of course, one has to decide how their time is best spent, but on the whole, I think it's a bit thick headed to always take the "yeah, I said it, so f' off" approach.

Yes, this is the operative point. There may always be some who wilfully and loudly misinterpret you for their own reasons, but the majority will be reading along silently, trying to decide who's most credible. Those are the people you're really speaking to.

* The only approach that doesn't make things worse is to simply ignore those people. *

I appreciate your overall sentiment, but I respectfully disagree with this point. I think founders need to consider whether or not their critics matter. In other words, will a critic's derogatory statements affect your business and reputation?

For example, if PG were to ignore a New York Times reporter, there's a big risk that the reporter could have created an even more negative story that had a lot of traction because of the newspaper's cachet. Was talking to the reporter a perfect solution in this case? No, I don't think so.

But having been a reporter and worked with journalists as a public relations professional, I've seen clients achieve much better outcomes by making themselves available for comment. It gives the clients an opportunity to shape how others perceive them, particularly in times of crisis.

A distinct lack of response by pg on this issue would not have sent an effective message. I think that the audience that reads these misunderstandings is large enough, and of a wide enough spread of interest/knowledge in the issue, that most would not interpret this lack of response as an attempt not to step down into muddy water.

Seems like pg made a good choice to me. I don't think that people will focus on attacking him in similar ways in the future- his self defense was clear and reasonable, and it doesn't really appear that he is defending a sort of terrible racist agenda at all. It also seems that his publicly stated opinions are reasonable enough, in general, that future attackers would be dissuaded from attacking him by the sheer fact that most attacks on pg's opinions/statements would be hard to back up when pressed.

He acknowledges this. Then explains: he did the interview and made the statement to help founders, and this clarification will help founders. I'm all for not engaging in this type of situation, but I admire his reasons for responding.

..."accents so strong that people can't understand" is the key here. An obvious truth well known to everyone frightens people sometimes. He does not tell, he uses that as a standalone parameter in screening applications. In addition to 'accent', lack of communication skills is a problem even for natives.

That said, instead of 'accent', I would use there 'problems in communication skills', which implies native speakers too. Otherwise a lot of people don't understand PG correctly.

This would have eliminated the backlash. However, I like that PG seems to live by what he wrote about in "What you can't say" and strives for perfect accuracy in his observations. While problems in communication might be the root cause (I'm almost sure they are, why is it surprising that if you can't communicate you'll do worse? Change "accents" to "can't speak English - the language of the country they are in" and no one would argue), PG was perfectly accurate in describing his observations in the data. Isn't it better to be open about this, along with him noticing his selection bias? Being aware of biases is better than ignoring them.

...You are right, it's always better to be open. He does not speak a diplomatic political language, he states the knowledge he acquired through thousands of interviews and other experiences. That way, he would share how race, religion, gender are affecting success too. But I suspect that would result in an even bigger backlash.

I disagree. Simply phrasing it as a suggestion to fix problem communication skills is too general to really be helpful. Most people who speak English who are terrible communicators don't realize it so they won't think it applies to them. Meanwhile, foreign founders with strong accents won't understand that it is really them he is speaking to.

I think it is much more helpful to tell somebody plain as day: if you are bad at X you aren't likely to be successful until you fix it. These are facts. Ignore them if you choose but that doesn't change that they are supported by very strong evidence from somebody with loads of experience.

I do agree with the previous comment that he shouldn't have responded, though. It's a losing argument because those who are choosing to misinterpret a statement that is pretty much crystal clear are doing so because of inherent biases. You won't convince those people to consider logic so it doesn't pay to expend time and reputation having a public discussion with them. The people who agree will say so or say nothing and choose to take the advice and act accordingly.

Scott Adams has a nice dismissal: I agree with your analysis of your hallucination.

(and, to defend the pg, he says he would have let it all just go away, but it's a really important point and he doesn't want the meaning co-opted by people with any agenda other than helping people grow companies better.)

He has another, similar one that I like: "I respectfully decline the invitation to join your hallucination."

I'm not entirely sure I'd be quoting the wisdom of a guy who sets up sockpuppets to agree with himself of discussion forums, since it would appear he has a hard time with delusions himself.

Ooooh. Are you one of the unhinged people who taunt him for his thought experiments?

Are you one of these "people" who are actually Scott Adams?

Actually, if you look at what PG and YC are trying to achieve, this is a great strategy. What an efficient way to filter out people who focus on soundbites and refuse to think more deeply and clearly about what the author is trying to say.

also related: http://paulgraham.com/say.html

What if - on a rare occasion - you did say something that was misunderstood by a lot of people who trust your judgement? Would you be ignorant at that time too?

Yes. For an example of why, observe the situation we're discussing.

If you read the original piece, it's perfectly clear what was meant, and there's absolutely no room for anybody to misunderstand it. Still lots of people did. And they were quickly corrected in the previous thread.

And if you read this very thread, you'll see people responding to his even more carefully written clarification who still hold their initial misunderstanding and are writing angry replies as though their mistaken reading of the piece was what the author had actually said.

Seriously. There's no fixing those people. The only winning move is not to play.

Seriously. There's no fixing those people. The only winning move is not to play.

Agreed. Going on record to defend yourself without provocation (he doesn't specifically refer to someone asking him for an official response) generally means there is something deeper at hand here. PG did respond originally to provocation and should have kept it to that.[0]

This is akin to when someone goes out of there way to explain why things "aren't their fault". If it wasn't your fault, you state the case and be done with it. People at fault generally go beyond their means to make sure people think they aren't at fault.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6279276

If I could interject a brief modification— People who feel that they're at fault go beyond their means to defend themselves. And there isn't necessarily a correlation between someone who feels guilty and someone who is guilty.

I'm with you here, 100%.

It should be obvious to anyone who has participated in a karma based discussion board like reddit or HN.

First, all the karma goes to the first explanation. Everyone understands it when the idea is explained. Replies to a naysayer usually get 1/10th of the original reward because new information isn't usually provided with the updates.

Next, there are many people who can only interact with ideas by contradicting them. Without putting a value judgement on that behavior, it isn't worth continuing a public discussion with them to enlighten them, unless they make you realize something you're missing.

Finally, controversy competes with truth, understanding, and imagination in the human brain. By replying to someone creating controversy, all the positive effects of your idea are diluted, and all people take away is the fact that there was a controversy surrounding what you said.

Anyway, these are my experiences. I'm open to the possibility that there is a way to reply to controversial disagreement, but unless it's a private message, I'm not aware of it right now.

> If you read the original piece, it's perfectly clear what was meant, and there's absolutely no room for anybody to misunderstand it.

I'll give you an anecdotal example: myself. I did misunderstood him first, and the explanation makes sense. I don't need more "fix". pg won me over this issue. So, are you sure that it was a bad move?

Well, perhaps he ironically didn't make himself as clear as he could have. (Which happens in off-the-cuff interviews.) And that may demonstrate his point about communication.

And it is an unpleasant point. People "get their asses kicked by the world" (as he put it) for the way they speak or irrelevant aspects of their appearance. Says something about this world.

(I know when I mention certain viewpoints which maybe aren't commonly voiced or liked by the audience, some willfully misunderstand me, and it's my job to clarify.)

Well, if the accent makes one hard to understand, it's no longer irrelevant.

I couldn't have put this better myself, it's exactly the first thing I thought once I came on HN and saw this essay. It's just more fuel for the fire, which is a good thing when that's what you want. PG never struck me as a shock jock so I was quite surprised.

Within the US there are various accents and sometimes people from one area have a little trouble understanding people from another area. If a strong foreign accent is a big roadblock to start ups then it's understandable, said and done. Now with this follow up I have to revisit the whole thing to see why it is the biggest challenge. Since we're all into solving problems why not have a hot blonde take care of all the public interaction if it's that big of a deal (that's what I would do)?

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