Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

http://www.inc.com/magazine/201309/issie-lapowsky/how-paul-graham-became-successful.html

by shakes • 13 years ago

250 172 13 years ago

pg4• 13 years ago

That's a very Kate Courteau picture incidentally. She's our architect, and is the reason YC looks so distinctive. It's hard to get simple right, but she does.

thetrumanshow• 13 years ago

I would love to have a high-res version of that.

If you're in a Q/A mood, I'm curious: When you start to see one of the YC batch companies struggling... what does an intervention look like?

brianjesse2• 13 years ago

I love the way she used a super wide shot to pull in so many graphic elements - beautifully done, Kate Courteau.

brianjesse2• 13 years ago

oh I see now that she didn't take the actual picture but Jason Madara did that -

hnriot2• 13 years ago

I don't see anything very distinctive. Aside from the usual colorful doors == sf startup, the place (from that photograph) looks just like any other startup space (except darker, but that's likely because it would have made taking that photo difficult if the background were bright)

larrys5• 13 years ago

" If a place has really good food, it can be in an obscure location, charge a lot, and have really bad service, and it will still be popular. If it has bad food, boy, it better do something really special to get anybody in there."

The "special" can be "location". Food on the NJ Turnpike (or similar) is an example of a captive market where quality of food is not the key ingredient but landing the contract and being merely acceptable can still be very profitable.

Likewise being in Times Square, if you can afford the rent, can be profitable because you are not worried about repeat business but simply grabbing the tourists that will only be a customer one time.

LogicX• 13 years ago

I see the times square trend in Myrtle Beach, in a slightly different way: poorly run (which includes bad food) restaurants can be open only seasonal, get sufficient 'incidental' business to survive and then shut down during the off season due to low property costs. I suspect eventually property valuations will make it too attractive to sell out to more profitable business, whether thats due to being better run or all-year.

rustynails77• 13 years ago

Just to be clear, this rule doesn't work for McDonalds - as it's an established brand. Their food is awful, but the place tends to be clean and tidy - with a toilet. Interestingly, where I live, Burger Kings tend to be filthy and poorly maintained, with slightly better tasting food. They are also popular - so cleanliness doesn't seem to be a major contributor.

jonnathanson2• 13 years ago

McDonalds' food is awful by what standard, precisely? From a health standpoint, sure. From the standpoint of a foodie, yes. From the standpoint of pretty much anyone who is accustomed to nicer food, in nicer circumstances, sure.

But McDonalds isn't competing on the dimension of "quality" as other restaurants might define that term. McDonalds is competing on scale and consistency. A Big Mac [1] in Jakarta tastes identical to a Big Mac in Cleveland. A pack of fries in Moscow tastes identical to a pack of fries in Istanbul. If you walk into a McDonalds in any part of the world, barring a few local specialties on the menu, you know exactly what you're going to get, and exactly when you're going to get it. That's pretty damned remarkable.

McDonalds runs a marketing and logistics company, not a restaurant chain.

[1] Insert Pulp Fiction reference here.

larrys5• 13 years ago

"He is brilliant and hilariously funny."

How is being hilariously funny an advantage in terms of working for YC?

asolove• 13 years ago

Presumably being likable is important when you're trying to make business deals. Plus, if you are doing well and earning more money that is necessary, you can probably afford to optimize for other things, like enjoying the people you work with.

pg4• 13 years ago

That's actually a very interesting question. I've noticed for a while that the people who are best at giving advice to startups tend to be funny. It's not a job where it would be good to be the humorless variety of smart. I think the reason is not that being funny is important per se, but that being funny and having good ideas about startups are so similar that it's impossible to find one without the other.

larrys5• 13 years ago

Would add that humor to me is linked to being liked which is important in getting people to do what you want them to do or listen to you..

And being liked is related to at least two things [1]. One is having lots of people who want to be around you which can be an advantage (you can get people to help you and do things for you it's like being the "pretty" girl).

Of course it can also be a big distraction (you are funny and people want to spend time with you so you are less inclined to stay in side and study or hack at something).

In terms of someone listening to you humor is like an anesthetic that puts people at ease and makes them more inclined to at least hear you out (that is if they don't take you as being a complete goofball). And perhaps the mental state that a good joke puts them in makes it less likely that they will be defensive and opens them up. (An example is my wife who I can never get mad at because she is always following up with humor to anything that goes wrong.)

I could also stretch and add that being funny provides social proof since the group as a whole likes or appears to like the funny person giving advice.

[1] Strictly my observations over time.

davidw3• 13 years ago

One component in humor is taking an idea out of context. This is in some ways related to "lateral thinking" where you try and brainstorm by randomly changing marketing bits (price, place, promotion, product) to come up with a new way of seeing things. I think some people with a creative/entrepreneurial mindset automate this process in their heads. So you could see humor as a similar creative process to that of some innovators: being able to see the world in a slightly different/skewed way. In one case, it makes you laugh because of the incongruity, in another, it may help you see ideas for businesses where others do not see them.

the_economist• 13 years ago

Although one could imagine a humorless person spending 20 years of his life building startups and thus becoming a useful advisor, despite not being particularly funny. Another possibility is that the humorless type aren't as interested in offering to help.

mathattack3• 13 years ago

Could it be that people from startups won't listen to someone that takes themselves too seriously? A "Very Important Person" in a "Very Nice Suit" won't resonate with an engineer in flip-flops. But someone who experienced hypergrowth, and can laugh at their own mistakes.... Well that's someone worth listening to.

theorique2• 13 years ago

Humor is correlated with mental resilience. Laughter diffuses stress and improves mental well being. Additionally, being funny is associated with mental quickness and thinking on your feet.

A person who can't laugh at himself and the absurdity of the world and situations that tend to happen when you are creating a startup ... he won't last long as an entrepreneur.

Macsenour• 13 years ago

I think a good sense of humor is an advantage at every company. I'm a Scum Master, been at it 7 years, and I shudder to think what my experience would be like if I didn't have a sense of humor. (Some say over active, but let's not quibble)

arbuge2• 13 years ago

It's an advantage at working at any non-menial job anywhere. If you're competent as well as a pleasant person to work with, you'll go far in most fields.

pcunite• 13 years ago

With hands in pocket he has not been captured mid motion. He is therefore purposefully guarding entrance into the "Y". The blue exit door is for anyone who cannot answer his questions three.

gfodor• 13 years ago

"What have you made?" "Who wants it?" "How do you know?"

mathattack3• 13 years ago

"We were the kind of start-up started by nerds who were really good at programing and really, really bad at sales and business. Now I would know exactly what to tell my previous self, which is that I should be spending all my time selling."

Is this a case of playing to your personal weakness, or is it playing to your personal blind spot? In either case, how long until you say, "This is important, but I'm not good at it. I have to bring someone in to do it while teaching me." My impression is a good salesperson quickly pays for themselves.

akbar501• 13 years ago

In my experience, a good salesperson is either a total drag or big boost.

The total drag happens when a salesperson is brought on too soon. When the product is not aligned with the market (pre-product/market fit), there is little a good salesperson can do. In this situation, everyone gets frustrated as success does not happen and costs increase.

Post-product/market fit, a good salesperson can certainly accelerate growth. The use of the word "accelerate" here is deliberate as the founder(s) should be the ones to spark growth.

Initial sales should always be made by the founders for several reasons: 1. Your initial idea is likely misaligned with the market. The only way to figure this out is to be listen directly to customer's rejections and stall tactics. 2. Customer's will initially be positive (before you ask for money or ask them to do something), and watching this change from positive/supportive to neutral/negative forces a good reality check. 3. The founder(s) bring the most excitement to the sales process. You need to be the spark for interest/excitement about the solution. Salespeople will then feed off of your excitement.

mathattack3• 13 years ago

Fair enough - you don't need them too soon. But in this instance, the starting point is the founder deciding (in hindsight) that spending all of their time in Sales would be good.

ngoel36• 13 years ago

"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 Stanford students or Google employees. I think we all know that "brilliantly smart" doesn't necessarily correlate with "great CEO", but it has to suck that something like your own accent puts you at a huge disadvantage applying to YC.

infoseckid3• 13 years ago

Me too! I would have thought there could be so many things in the number 1 spot ... and then this :)

davidw3• 13 years ago

Err... if you read the article, he says "one quality", not "the number one". Also, it's worth considering that this is something that has jumped at them only after a number of batches of YC, not something that they started out with, so it is, in some way, based on actual data. They probably already filter out people based on any number of more important criteria.

soneca2• 13 years ago

I think the difficulties of communication, specially during incubation time and demo day, justify this qualifying as a bad indication. A great deal of YC value lies in the office hours and everyone has some bias to listen what they want to listen on a feedback session and to create excuses as "they didn't quite get my idea, that is why they are pointing these errors". When mentors actually don't understand them and vice-versa, this may totally nullify a feedback session. Networking on Demo Day (and subsequently fundraising meetings) also is seriously jeopardized. How to look formidable when you can't even sound "right".

But on the other hand, this shows a way of doing business that SV still suffers from: they are too west centered. These companies build things to US market and, sometimes, Europe. South America usually follow-up as we (i am brazilian) are very connected to US culture. But even we have our thriving copycat companies. But if you take Russia and China into account, then they often have juggernauts versions of SV companies (not regular copycats, but dominant companies) that the original ones just can't easily beat when they try.

I don't think there is causality here, just guessing that they are both reflects of a particular trace of SV companies: US is the Total Adressable Market. So, if you don't completely fit with the US culture, you will likely fail as a startup CEO in SV (for pragmatic reasons, not any "racist" bias or anything like that). At the same time, these companies usually take a little too long time to expand internationally.

This a diferentiation that 500startups have that, in my opinion, will pay large benefits to them eventually.

pg4• 13 years ago

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'.

jmtame2• 13 years ago

It's not that bad that Patrick has the accent, but he talks really fast. I struggled to listen to his talk at Hacker School. I have talked to him solo in person and understood him fairly well; maybe it was just the auditorium.

dirtyaura3• 13 years ago

Is it just accent or that people make too many grammatical mistakes? Or to put it another way, if you had to choose between two: clear pronunciation with a lot of grammatical mistakes vs a strong accent but flawless grammar. Which one is harder to understand for a native speaker?

larrys5• 13 years ago

"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 lines I am surprised at the number of people who are foreign born who don't change their names to something more Americanized.

Back when people came to this country at the turn of the century I believe the immigration people would give people americanized versions of their names so they wouldn't experience as much rejection or racisim. Maybe it was for other reasons as well.

Now you can look at it as wrong that people jump to conclusions or you can simply do what is practical and attempt to lessen the disadvantage that you are in if someone perceives you in the wrong way. If I am a member of a religious group and I know that people that I am selling to are biased against that religious group I see it as practical not to wear any symbol of that religious group. It's a business decision.

I'm not saying that someone needs to totally hide the fact that they are Indian, Chinese, or whatever. I'm simply saying you can make the name a little easier for people in America (where you live) to remember it. That's in a sense basic marketing.

Lastly, I've been approached by people trying to sell me with really difficult names to remember. I am less likely to connect them with others simply because their name is so hard to remember.

opminion• 13 years ago

The reason might be not cluelessness, bad attitude, rigid thinking or bad marketing, but the hidden costs of your suggestions. Many migrants tend to spend an inordinate amount of time, during the first months, thinking about how they might be perceived, often playing pointless guessing games. For example: having two different names is an additional source of confusion, and a constant reminder of "otherness". These costs have to be balanced against the perceived benefits. Sometimes they are worth it, often times not.

Focusing on improving communication skills is different because the cost is time, effort and perhaps money, but there are no negative side effects.

NhanH4• 13 years ago

I've actually asked some American (one of them being my boss) on whether I should be using an American name to make it easier for everyone at work.

I received two "It's weird" answers, and haven't asked the third person yet.

Considering that my name is relative short (the first 4 letter of my username, Americans tend to remember the "h" and "a"'s position swapped though), would you consider it a difficult name to remember or not?

capex2• 13 years ago

I believe the immigration people would give people americanized versions of their names so they wouldn't experience as much rejection or racism. (edited for spelling).

You were hopefully thinking about refugee immigrants when you said this?

logicallee2• 13 years ago

I know a good accent-reduction service (among other language services) via skype, hit me up by email and I'll hook you up. It's definitely something you can improve!

davidw3• 13 years ago

There is a secular trend going on, in which launching a start-up is a more common thing to do. It used to be there were two things you could do after college: go to grad school or get a job. Soon, I think there will be three things: go to grad school, get a job, or start your own company. I suspect this will be one of these economic transformations on the scale of the industrial revolution.

That's a very interesting topic, and is something I wonder about too. Historically speaking, the amount of capital required to start an internet company these days is amazingly low. Will this last? Maybe in the future, to even get started, people will need more horsepower in terms of servers, or storage, or something like that, and this low-capital period will be seen as an anomaly. Or maybe the trend will continue and spread to other fields. Are there others that are ripe for a similar transformation, where it gets super easy to start something new?

Also, I like this quote/thinking:

The way you'll get big ideas in, say, health care is by starting out with small ideas. If you try to do some big thing, you don't just need it to be big; you need it to be good. And it's really hard to do big and good simultaneously. So, what that means is you can either do something small and good and then gradually make it bigger, or do something big and bad and gradually make it better. And you know what? Empirically, starting big just does not work.

sunir5• 13 years ago

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.freshbooks.com/blog/2007/07/23/immigrant-quebecoi...

Besides, it's failing to communicate clearly and be understood that makes a bad leader, regardless of the behavioural cause (foreign accent, mumbling, random trains of thought).

auganov• 13 years ago

Having a strong accent can make it much harder to communicate. I don't know if statistically true, but from my experience most of people with bad accents tend to use the language less effectively too. If you're in tech you probably use English everyday if not all the time. With that amount of immersion it's just kind of hard not to be at least mediocre.

Also there's this immense sense of quality about people that speak a foreign language super well.

I think pg meant strong foreign accent combined with usage that just doesn't feel native. Which I feel is strongly correlated.

pg4• 13 years ago

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.

c0mpute3• 13 years ago

According to this article, 14% of the top 500 CEOs are non-native to the company's homeland.

http://money.cnn.com/gallery/leadership/2013/07/08/global-50...

Even empirically your dataset consists of startups that target USA markets mostly and hence this conclusion. I am guessing CEOs are good and can come from anywhere, its perhaps "sales" that really needs the idiomatic speak.

NicoJuicy• 13 years ago

Do you keep any startup analytics?

spitfire2• 13 years ago

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.

znt3• 13 years ago

If I had read this reply 3 years ago, I would have called you "racist". But after spending time with engineers from different countries, I believe having an understandable English accent is not a nice thing to have, but rather a professional responsibility.

I have personally witnessed people losing their jobs/contracts because of this issue, and although I enjoyed their friendship, I wasn't really sorry for losing a teammate. Because trying to solve a technical issue while your mate uses a very broken accent is very very mind numbing and frustrating at its best.

Interestingly, my wife was also having trouble with pronunciation of certain English words as she was learning the language, and I did not want her to have the same fate when (or if) she got a job.

So I created a very simple app for her to practise her pronunciation. Later on I turned it into a webapp when her classmates also wanted to try it. If you are interested you can check it out at: http://www.sayafter.me

hnriot2• 13 years ago

Having now gone publicly on record with this, I wonder what kind of lawsuits this might lead to down the road. I could imagine that any company pg sits on the board of would now have their lawyers scratching their heads how they are going to minimize their risk.

nashequilibrium2• 13 years ago

It's a good thing you not a football manager, imagine Lionel Messi, Ronaldo,Zinnedine Zidane or Ronaldhino coming to your team. These are some of the best footballers in the world, all speak different languages but can walk on a field in England and beat an offside trap, request a pin point pass through top rated defenders at a speed of 100mph. Most people just don't want to take the time to try and understand someone because the expectation is that you are in America and you must speak english.

In football, you can't go an complain that you don't understand your teammate, you getting paid $200 000 a week, so shut up and make it happen. Park Ji Sung and Patrice Evra became best friends yet one spoke korean and the other french, teammates would laugh commenting on how they don't know how they communicate. The issue is that they were both willing to learn to understand each other, having mutual respect for each others culture but bottom line no football player can use language as an excuse.

My first language is English, so i was amused when moving to LA, an asian girl from UCLA was at one of the teller windows and i guess that she could not fully understand this girl so she just bravely says to here coworkers that "this asian girl is so dumb, how did she get into UCLA, she can't even fill out a deposit slip". The amazing thing is that she felt so natural saying it as she knew other americans will not mind what she said, even though she is a teller and the young girl is attending a top U.S College.

I would also like to add that many football coaches take jobs where they cannot speak the home language fluently but are still successful. I feel that Europeans are more accepting of foreign accents than Americans and i have worked in Europe and stay in the U.S.

abalone3• 13 years ago

"That correlates more with any other success factor that I've seen in the world's greatest entrepreneurs. If you look at Bezos, or Andreessen, David Filo, the founders of Google, they all seem to be white, male, nerds who've dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they absolutely have no social life. So when I see that pattern coming in -- which was true of Google -- it was very easy to decide to invest." -- John Doerr

Anytime race is involved you've got to be careful before playing the "strong correlation" card.

Granted this is about accents, which an be trained. But it's a little unsettling to me how nakedly pg relies on correlation of a racial/cultural signal, without so much as a comment on how obviously racist and sexist Doerr's perspective is.

sunir5• 13 years ago

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.

Then imagine I said that in an nationally syndicated magazine as a role model to young foreign-sounding entrepreneurs. Double yikes.

After criticizing you, I guess owe you a different perspective. The real question I suggest in a business context is "were my expectations met?" Did they clearly explain their idea? Build rapport? Answer my questions? Direct the conversation? Organize a plan? It doesn't matter how foreign they sounded if I got what I wanted.

Accents aren't really important. They vary wildly even in the United States. Is Steve Ballmer's heavy New England accent germane to his leadership's successes and failures? Or did Ross Perot's Texas accent matter when building EDS? Or Scott Thompson's Boston accent matter when turning around PayPal?

Conversely, it's easy to find successful tech CEOs with "strong foreign accents" such as Sridhar Vembu (ZOHO) or Rashmi Sinha (Slideshare) or Mikkel Svane (Zendesk) or Tobias Luetke (Shopify).

On the other hand, of course clarity does matter. Consider Todd Bradley who was passed over for German-accented Leo Apotheker as CEO because (reportedly) he mumbled during presentations (despite running a $41B division of HP)? cf. http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/05/08/500-hp-apotheker/

That's different. You can still be clearly understood with a strong foreign accent. cf. Gandhi. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yMcNubXqc4

weland• 13 years ago

This reminds me of a fun thing that happened to my colleagues a few years ago (weeks prior to me joining them). They were working on a router pimped with some home automation features (Z-Wave/ZigBee interfacing & co.); the baseboard that the HW provider was offering had 2 Ethernet ports, but they wanted four. They informed them they don't have a four-port version, so they asked if a custom one can be made, extending the current design.

The answer (in a strong Chinese accent)? "Noooo we can't do extended custom design hitishu".

They were baffled. Sure, they understood the "can't do extended custom design part", but the last word was entirely foreign to them. They tried to dig deeper, but all they got was "if we extend cable network we have hitishu".

The talks continued, in order to explore some alternatives; while the business guys did their talking, one of my colleagues figured what this hitishu gizmo was by accident; a few days later, he accidentally touched one of the chips on the board and burnt his fingers. The problem was that the processor they were using was already fairly loaded and, due to the design of the case, couldn't be properly ventilated. They feared that pushing it even harder could get it to heat up even more, which would have lead to heat issues.

tinkerdol• 13 years ago

But 564 startups is enough to see patterns

This is an interesting point. Beyond happening to notice patterns yourself, have you tried running machine learning algorithms on your data to try to find other characteristics?

vasilipupkin• 13 years ago

PG: I wonder how well you account for the fact that even though you have 564 data points, you end up having much fewer data points for each type of subsample - and since startup data is by definition highly non-linear and non-normally distributed, you could end up reaching sweeping conclusions from way too few data points

arn• 13 years ago

There's a bit of conflation between cause and effect here.

Seems he was just saying that those with strong accents were less successful in previous rounds. That certainly could be due to prejudice in society at large, but it still would be a valid predictor.

tlogan• 13 years ago

I have strong foreign accent and I can tell you: it is much harder to be a CEO with heavy accent than not.

Look this way... The job of a CEO is to hire and sell. And having heavy accent is a big disadvantage when doing these two things. So if you have strong foreign accent you should be aware of that and try to "hack it" and somehow use it in your advantage.

capkutay• 13 years ago

'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."

There are a handful of successful immigrant CEO's in tech along with other industries (CEO of coca cola is just one example). One of the things they all have in common is excellent communication skills in english...so you can't necessarily write off that metric as an anti-immigrant filter.

This may be my opinion, but I don't know any tech companies that wouldn't hire someone just because they're from a different country other than for visa reasons.

sunir5• 13 years ago

Totally. That's why I was so surprised the recruiter's only dimension to evaluate communication skills was a candidate's accent. I assumed it would include presentation, negotiation, project management, etc. skills which would be relevant.

NhanH4• 13 years ago

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.

glibgil2• 13 years ago

Pick an accent in English that sounds very extreme to you. Learn to speak that accent. For example, if you live in California learn to speak the difficult words as if you are from Texas or Georgia. Don't aspire to say "there" but go for "thar" instead. Example "can you hand me that book over thar?" Your goal should be to make people think, "this guy speaks good English. When he moved here he probably refined his English in Texas or somewhere in the South."

Once you have learned to mimic one accent you can quickly master another.

Source: I did this myself in Brazil when learning Portuguese. The words that were hard to pronounce I would say like I was from Rio. It was easier to mimic the accent from Rio because it was different from what I was hearing every day. If I were actually in Rio I would have probably found it easier to mimic a Paulistano accent.

jcampbell1• 13 years ago

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 one it was an episode of Friends, for another guy it was a Bill Clinton speech.

If you want to make progress, I suggest finding a piece of content 15-30 minutes long, and listening and repeating everyday for a year. Once you have memorized the content word-for-word, then you will be able to stop hearing meaning, and actually hear the sounds.

You could also spend time with a book which explains differences like the 'th' difference in 'thin' and 'then'. I assure you that book will not help you. Many native english speakers don't distinguish between 'pin' and 'pen' but no one confuses 'thin' and 'then'. Trying to learn a bunch of rules will not work. You have to learn to hear the difference, and the only way to learn to hear the difference is to listen to the same thing over and over.

capex2• 13 years ago

Listen to Khan Academy videos (if you consider Sal's pronunciations as good as any American's).

jacques_chester• 13 years ago

When I was learning to speak French, I struggled until my sister said "speak in a French accent".

I know, it seems trite. But the point is: think of someone who speaks your native language. Copy their thick accent into the language you are learning.

So when I began to use ze outrrrageous Franch acc-sont, my actual French-speaking improved.

querulous• 13 years ago

there are a few phonemes that are hard for me to discriminate but i've found asking friends who can discriminate to describe the physical arrangement of their lips/tongue for each of the sounds helps. i still can't discriminate between the sounds of certain phonemes but i can discriminate between how they feel when i vocalize them

logicallee2• 13 years ago

You can work on your accent. I know a good coach who can help reduce your accent, send me a message and I'll put you in touch. He works via skype.

JVIDEL2• 13 years ago

I totally get your point, I just got a bunch of BS from a washed-up speech coach (who ironically is also foreign and with a noticeable accent) because of my accent.

I think the problem is the attitude: when I speak in my language with english speakers who are just learning it I go the extra mile to understand their broken accent and mispronunciation and not be too upfront when correcting them.

On the other hand when I see foreign founders with a thick accent pitching something I can sometimes see some faces in the public changing from a neutral "let's see what this guy is working on" to a decidedly negative "oh not another [insert term here]]".

Is there bias? yes there is, I could tell all english speakers trying to speak spanish "shut up your accent is horrible!" but I refrain from doing so out of cordiality. Maybe its a cultural thing, because over here that cordiality rarely exists.

bfe• 13 years ago

"Nobody knows what they're capable of until they try it. Maybe half a percent of people have the brains and sheer determination to do this kind of thing. Start-ups are hard but doable, in the way that running a five-minute mile is hard but doable."

Worth remembering.

unono3• 13 years ago

Does anyone know what has been PG's ROI on his investments is, for all we know it could be below industry standard.

Also, by PG's own words he only invests in the relentlessly resourceful. What do they need PG and later round VC's for? I always get the feeling with PG that something hidden is at play, he's a really really clever guy. There's a sucker getting played when he's around. (For example, Zuckerburg is not as smart as PG keeps enthusing, there's a lot smarter guys than him, so I think he's got some sell YC companies to Facebook flow going on. Another, Andrew Mason is just a terrible business guy - why is PG linking with him - probably experience at knowing how to keep investors from realizing what's actually happening).

arbuge2• 13 years ago

> Does anyone know what has been PG's ROI on his investments is, for all we know it could be below industry standard.

Hell no. Just do the math:

http://ycombinator.com/nums.html

The total value of YC companies is more like $12B today. That makes their average 6% stake worth around $700m or so. Around 600 companies total, at around $20k each - a total investment of just $12m or so by my calculations.

$12m to $700m in <10 years is about as good as it gets in investing.

unono3• 13 years ago

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.

noblethrasher• 13 years ago

I thought their 6% stake typically got diluted to much less.

swah• 13 years ago

In the tradition of Dijkstra...

auggierose2• 13 years ago

What I am wondering about is: would Einstein be a good start-up founder?

mbyrne• 13 years ago

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.

auggierose2• 13 years ago

I found the patents for the blouses / refrigerators, but it seems to me that this was more of a hobby of his, not a serious startup endeavour.

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?

sitkack2• 13 years ago

It is amazing how much value and change in the world has occurred because of ycombinator companies, direct and follow on effects. And all of this for the paltry sum of 1.7 billion (ish) dollars.

The 1,467 Billion we've spent on the war(s) so far could have made ~850 ish entire ycombinators, on the order of 450k startups. As well as exhausting the entire io and ly domain name spaces.

pkfrank• 13 years ago

It's important to note that YC skims from the top, taking the creme de la creme. Applying 1000x the money would not yield 1000x the return, as there's a finite number of the "good founders" PG notes.

2arrs2ells• 13 years ago

The limiting factor on YC is not cash.

sitkack2• 13 years ago

With the kind of money I present, one can farm and not just spear fish.

graeme2• 13 years ago

Something interesting: a lot of people thought Airbnb was terrible, including YC and Fred Wilson.

I was 23 when Airbnb was founded. I had had many happy experiences with Couchsurfing.

For me, and many Couchsurfers, the idea of an upscale, paid couchsurfing was trivially obvious. None of us built it, but I assumed someone would.

I'm not sure what the lesson is.

twog• 13 years ago

The lesson learned is to build things you love but others don't yet understand. Thats the key to emerging markets

graeme2• 13 years ago

I guess what I found interesting is that this was something MILLIONS loved and yet it was a very specific demographic so the wider world missed the potential.

Heck, most people, if you pitch them on Airbnb today, will say: "That would never work". Half the people I know outside the tech niche haven't heard of it.

So something can be quite large, well proven, yet seem like a lousy idea if you have a set of blinders on.

jgalt212• 13 years ago

Is anyone else digging the Tevas with long sleeves look being sported by PG?

6thSigma• 13 years ago

Has there ever been a bubble in low liquidity assets like startup equity? I would think high liquidity is a huge piece of a bubble.

tduquette1• 13 years ago

I hope that Paul doesn't consider a Boston accent to be "a strong foreign accent."

snoonan2• 13 years ago

I do! I was born and raised here. I dropped it in high school and am happy I did. America doesn't tolerate regional accent diversity like they did in the past. People listen more if you speak Generican.

ballard2• 13 years ago

I cackled to myself 4.6x.

Honesty is the sniper of the mind.

Thanks 'pg.

checker6592• 13 years ago

So, one of the purposes of the application video is to judge a person's accent? Is that fair?

snoonan2• 13 years ago

What would fairness have to do with the success of a startup? Put two founders on stage at a conference and the audience won't be fair either. Extend that to other events, web video, TV appearances and other audio/video media. He's not in a position to change other people's prejudice with his investments.

checker6592• 13 years ago

By "Is that fair", I meant: Is that fair to say? As in, is that what it means (?).

infoseckid3• 13 years ago

Funny --- next time when YC rejects a company with foreign founders, you should ask them "Was it the idea or the accent?" :D Hilarious ...

photorized• 13 years ago

Everybody got excited about the foreign accent thing, but my favorite quote was actually "it's easier to be an investor than it is to start a company". So very true. I just launched an incubator, and I've been telling VCs to drop the attitude.

Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

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