| Hm. That's not the nicest quote to be out there (it's missing quite a bit of important context too). Paul you should really either retract that or nuance it but as it sits this reads pretty bad, even if it might be true. But I doubt it is true, accents have nothing to do with people's brains, they have everything to do with what your first language was and for how long that language was your only language. If you were born in Bulgaria, Hungary or a hundred other places and your first exposure to English in bulk and attempts to speak it started at the age of 10 or later you'll have a fairly strong accent no matter what. It's just how your throat cavity, voice box and lips will be muscled. If you tried to speak Finnish you'd likely have a very strong accent. But that doesn't mean you're not 100% in the head or unable to communicate clearly, for instance, you could write, or you could communicate in your mother tongue. That YC finds itself in the English speaking community and tends to address an English speaking audience with its start-ups and prefers to communicate in English does not mean that those are the only ways of doing things. Maybe people would have to work a little harder at understanding you but I think that it would need more than this quote and some of the original context to establish that such a thing is an indicator of not being able to run a business, or even that your experience to date is relevant anywhere outside of the start-up community. This quote will be used against you, it will be spun to read you're xenophobic or worse. Do something about it before it gets legs. |