[websirnik]

I'm Russian and was running an ed tech company for the last 2 years. Even thought I rate my English skills reasonably high and I've finished one of the top universities in London with the top grade, once we were at the stage when we need to sell our product, I was completely lost. While talking to native people I was kept noticing how bad my accent was and I think because I've been critical to myself, I felt over time even worse about my accent and ability to fluently communicate what I was doing. It's definitely affected our sales numbers and ability to raise capital. Our company was losing credibility in front of the customers eyes, because of inability to keep up with the conversation pace. After hiring native sales and bizdev people our numbers have grown up. I would advice non-native speakers to keep improving there accent and ability to fluently communicate by getting English tutor or personal-dev trainer or by any other means that I would be happy to hear.

[LiweiZ]

I'm a native Mandarin speaker. I think the most important part is to figure out which part of the business is interface-heavy and their priority and allocate the finite resource to the most necessary. As you mentioned, channels with high local customer communication demands. Founders' time is finite. We second language learners all know how difficult it is to improve language skills from the current level. While keeping practice for a long term gain, a thoughtful resource allocation is a good thing to do to face up the short term challenges.