Bring Me Your Accents. Immigration Fuels Innovation

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2013/08/29/bring-me-your-accents-immigration-fuels-innovation/?utm_source=t.co&utm_content=awesm-publisher&awesm=bothsid.es_cFK&utm_campaign=&utm_medium=bothsid.es-twitter

by antr • 13 years ago

74 64 13 years ago

bothsidesofthetable.com

skylan_q3• 13 years ago

Immigration also increases the size of the labor pool, driving down wages.

SuperChihuahua• 13 years ago

But the demand increases, driving up wages. Immigrants are also consuming...

icebraining• 13 years ago

George Borjas (Professor of Economics specialized in immigration issues at Harvard) estimates it's less than 4% for a 10% immigrant-induced increase in the number of workers in a particular skill group, at the US national level.

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/gborjas/publications/journal/J...

tokenadult• 13 years ago

It's empirically false that high rates of immigration lead to lower real wages. International comparisons show that it is actually the other way around. The "lump of labor fallacy" is still very persuasive to people who have never studied economics, but people who have traveled around the world notice examples like Hong Kong (high immigration, high wages for region) and reflect that new people in a place leads to more innovation and more demand in the local economy.

skylan_q3• 13 years ago

I've studied plenty of economics and have been around the world and back. Bringing in more labor increases the supply of it and there's also the added effect of immigrants willing to work for less than the local population. To deny this is to deny supply & demand and data.

jh73• 13 years ago

There is nothing in the article that suggests that accents lead to innovation. I'm not fully aware of the PG controversy but maybe he's privileged to some data that we aren't. Stating stats shouldn't be rebutted with fluff pieces.

skylan_q3• 13 years ago

There is nothing in the article that suggests that accents lead to innovation.

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

parennoob2• 13 years ago

I guess this might be a good place to ask -- are there any good places people can recommend for accent training? I can write English pretty decently (in fact, probably better than most of the American people I have seen - but I guess Dunning-Kruger might be involved.) But I still retain the accent of my native country, which somewhat hampers me in the US (specially if PG thinks people like that are clueless.)

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?

roadg33k• 13 years ago

https://www.udemy.com/american-accent-training-for-it-profes...

parennoob2• 13 years ago

Ugh. First think I clicked on there told me to prounounce it "Ennerprise" and "innegrade" :)

Seriously though, thanks. Will check it out.

auctiontheory2• 13 years ago

In SF, I really like my voice coach, Eugene O'Reilly: eugeneor@att.net. (I have no financial connection with him other than as a satisfied customer.) I believe he also does online accent preparation. His website is horrid - don't judge him by that.

kroger• 13 years ago

Rachel's English has a lot of free videos with focus on phonetics:

http://www.rachelsenglish.com

I like this course (I bought the pdf+mp3 version):

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.

snitko4• 13 years ago

Slightly offtopic: The whole idea of the immigration restrictions is ridiculous. There is not a single justification for it. Unless of course you believe that somehow your people deserve better than everyone else.

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.

corresation• 13 years ago

"The whole idea of the immigration restrictions is ridiculous. There is not a single justification for it."

There are countless justifications for it, but none that you're going to want to hear.

powertower• 13 years ago

And when people bring up the x-fold increased violent crime rates, and no-go zones, and enclaves, all statistical facts - you say the victims must just be getting their privileges checked, or they're causing it themselves by breaking the social contract.

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.

snitko4• 13 years ago

Would you say that immigrants from certain countries are by nature more violent? If you don't believe that, then there must be something else involved. Maybe, it's that they have incentives to become criminals, because they are being denied legal opportunities to work. Maybe, it's because the police is not interested in protecting anyone, but rather is interested in catching illegal aliens for the sake of it and applying violence to them.

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?

kops• 13 years ago

sure...how about you throw a party at your home and a thousand people show up and want in? Unrestricted anything leads to chaos and trouble.

snitko4• 13 years ago

But you don't invite them to your house. What makes you believe that somehow you have more right to land that doesn't directly belong to you than another human being from Earth? America is a big country with plenty of land where many more people could live not bothering each other.

ahamilton• 13 years ago

The US was built on the hard work of immigrants.

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?

walshemj• 13 years ago

Who then set up a political system where WASP land owners had more political power than the later RC immigrants from Europe Italians Irish and so on.

snitko4• 13 years ago

The reason the native population was wiped out was primarily because of the diseases brought by Europeans, not because Europeans were particularly brutal. In fact, Indians were as brutal to the colonists as colonists were to Indians. The first colonists themselves died in large numbers, mostly due to hunger and malaria. Also, Indians were technologically behind Europeans. Modern western countries, to which immigration is desirable, are more technologically advanced and we certainly don't have a problem with immunity to diseases - at least you can't call it an equally serious problem.

So, comparing colonists and indians to the current immigration problems is simply unfounded.

devilsadvocate8• 13 years ago

What right do you have to keep me out of your house? If every people that built a society and culture to generate wealth were compelled to take in all comers, there would be none left.

defen2• 13 years ago

This whole "controversy" is so stupid. It consists of people taking pg's words out of context and assigning the maximally stupid interpretation to them. I mean, are there any examples of successful U.S. based founders who have accents that are so heavy that you struggle to understand what they are saying? I'm genuinely curious.

nanijoe• 13 years ago

What part of what he said was taken out of context? Up until a few years ago, there were no examples of successful black Quarterbacks in the NFL.. IF everyone just looked at that "fact", there would still be none. Data can be used to justify anything you like, as long as you are already sufficiently biased.

dylangs10308• 13 years ago

Bad example. There is nothing intrinsically different between a black QB and a white one, all other things being equal.

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.

defen2• 13 years ago

Warren Moon, Randall Cunningham...anyway, there were "no successful black quarterbacks" because the pipeline of such players simply did not exist, for reasons outside the NFL's control. It's not like you had guys who were ready and able to play the position who just couldn't get jobs. The claim being made here is that you have talented people who would be able to succeed, if only Paul Graham would stop being a racist and give them money.

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."

the_watcher3• 13 years ago

PG is a huge supporter of the Founder Visa, but he hates immigrants? Come on everyone, dig a bit deeper. Luckily, PG has written an entire essay on this sort of topic[1], and how "taboos" are generally seen poorly by history. I'm sure the taboo biasing towards extreme political correctness and willfully ignoring things that can improve outcomes for people because they don't fit in some idyllic worldview will suffer the same fate.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

dud19833• 13 years ago

And yet he supports FWD, a stealth superpac whose only mission is to get as many cheap temp. engineers as possible in the country.

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.

sireat• 13 years ago

I am completely puzzled too by this controversy. I did not see pg saying that people with heavy accents could not be funded. He just said that CEO has to be a good communicator and not having a heavy accent (compare late 1960s Schwarzenegger to one in 2000s to see how one can improve) is part of the deal.

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.

dylangs10308• 13 years ago

So, he's not criticizing Paul Graham for making the statement (and admits he understands Graham isn't anti-immigrant or anti-foreigner), but is instead criticizing him for not taking responsibility for how his words might be taken out of context by everyone else? Is that it?

OoTheNigerian3• 13 years ago

I will state my position unlike those afraid to speak so they can have deal-flow or perhaps enter YC.

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"

sliverstorm2• 13 years ago

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.

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?

OoTheNigerian3• 13 years ago

You sir, have just described pattern matching.

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.

gruseom• 13 years ago

The defense of "accents so strong you cannot understand" holds no water. It was an after thought.

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.

dylangs10308• 13 years ago

I think people are blowing this out of proportion.

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.

OoTheNigerian3• 13 years ago

There is no need going back and forth and I do not want to be remembered as the person being antagonistic towards PG. So I will end with this comment.

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.

newnewnew• 13 years ago

Agreed. Your warm squishy egalitarian philosophy has nothing to do with what it takes to build software or launch a startup. Unforgiving reality is the rock upon which ideology founders

fsck--off• 13 years ago

In the HN thread discussing the article [1], pg said:

"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'."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6278293

subsystem• 13 years ago

That only addresses the first part of the answer which I assume isn't the controversial one.

rvivek• 13 years ago

I am an immigrant founder (from India) and part of the YC summer batch of 2011. I think PG's statement has definitely been taken out of context and blown out of proportions.

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.

the_watcher3• 13 years ago

This controversy is so manufactured it is painful. PG is one of the biggest proponents of the Founder Visa, but he hates immigrants? People really need to stop reading Valleywag (or at least taking it seriously)

kenster07• 13 years ago

These discussions are always rife with political undertones and ethical hazards.

analyst74• 13 years ago

Linking this to racism is absurd.

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.

cruise02• 13 years ago

I’m with MLK.

That is so brave.

dud19833• 13 years ago

The racism of pg is subtle, but still racism, not so much from him but from his acolytes and zealots who even now in this thread can be seen taking his word as gospel and demote anyone who fits their interpretation of pg's words as an untouchable

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.

Bring Me Your Accents. Immigration Fuels Innovation

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