Founder AccentsAugust 2013 Inc recently published an interview in which I said I had noticed a correlation between founders having very strong foreign accents and their companies having they behave badly. Some interpreted this statement as xenophobic, or even racist, as if I had said that having a foreign accent was a problem. But that's not what I said, or what I think. No one in Silicon Valley would think so. Many of the most successful founders here speak with accents. The case I was talking about is when the founders have such strong accents that people can't understand what they are saying. That is, the problem is not the cultural signal sent by accents, but the practical difficulty of getting a startup off the ground when people can't understand you. I had already explained this when I talked about this issue with a New York Times reporter: But after ranking each YC company by its valuation, Graham discovered a more significant correlation. “You have to go very far down the list to find a CEO with a strong foreign accent,” Graham told me. “Alarmingly, way behind, like 100th place.” I asked him ...