[ovoxo]

Look, I respect PG as much as the next person so this is not a slight against him since I feel HN far too often comes to his defence as if protecting their newborn. Having said that ...

I don't understand how a man of his stature and someone in his position can allow himself to make those statements about accents (or anything that sounds remotely xenophobic). I say that because even his blog post says the following:

"A startup founder is always selling. Not just literally to customers, but to current and potential employees, partners, investors, and the press as well ... there is little room for misunderstanding."

That statement doesn't just hold for startups but for anyone in business. His initial statements left plenty of room for misunderstanding. Furthermore, I would also find it very difficult to believe that his inclination towards avoiding "excessive" accents does not also subconsciously lead him to have a slight bias against founders with a "slight" accent. That's how biases work - the threshold for when your brain decides to evoke that bias is not black-and-white.

[makomk]

Read the rest of the comments in this discussion on HN and you should quite easily be able to see how he can allow himself to make this kind of statement. There's a huge amount of people willing to portray anyone who interpreted his statement differently from how he said it should be interpreted as malevolent, as part of "the looking-for-reasons-to-be-offended patrol", of only caring because it's in their "business model to generate politically correct controversies".

[ovoxo]

I have read a fair amount of this thread and I still stand by what I said. Furthermore, for obvious reasons, I don't believe HN is an objective place to discuss the merits of PG's statements past & present.

[makomk]

Oh, HN's definitely not even close to objective when discussing the merits of PG's statements, but in a way that's beside the point. So long as HN comments represent the subjective viewpoints of the kinds of people that can affect PG - startup founders and employees, venture capitalists, etc - they're a good demonstration of why PG will have no problems making these kinds of statements. I suspect HN is probably a good representation of their viewpoints, at least on this topic.

He's getting some slight blowback from the press, but sadly they have a short attention span.