[Jemaclus]

I was rather surprised when he said that. Not that strong foreign accents tend to fail, but more that he would actually say such an un-politically correct thing.

One thing entrepreneurs have to do is sell. Not just products, but ideas, visions, and strategies. They have to be able to convert industry talk into laymen's terms. They need to be able to convince someone who doesn't know anything about X that Y is the way to go.

While a strong foreign accent isn't necessarily the bottleneck, it is probably highly correlated with with a weaker grasp on the English language -- particularly idiomatic English, as PG pointed out. If I ask you to ELI5 your business, generally the best way to go about that is to use an analogy, but if your grasp of idiomatic English doesn't allow you to construct an elegant analogy, then you're going to miss out on a great opportunity to explain your product/idea/vision to me.

To be fair to non-English speaking entrepreneurs, this isn't specifically a language problem. There are people who speak perfectly good idiomatic English that can't speak in layman's terms. A good example of this is a Calculus professor at a college. They're so good at calculus and higher-level math that explaining simple algebra is often very difficult. "What do you mean you don't understand that y = 2x + 5 draws a graph that looks like this?!? It's easy!" But for someone who doesn't understand slope and algebra, it's NOT intuitive. There are tons of people who have this problem.

Having said that, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a higher correlation of poor communication skills to strong foreign accents.

[jacquesm]

It's perfectly possible to run a business entirely in French, Dutch, German, Finnish, Swedish, Japanese, Chinese and so on. Not all businesses are international, not all business address an English speaking audience or employees etc.

[sp332]

But are any of them asking YC for funding?