In your most recent essay (http://www.paulgraham.com/accents.html), you discuss the correlation between founders having very strong foreign accents and their companies doing badly. The reasoning according to you is not the cultural signal accents send, but the practical difficulty of getting a startup off the ground when people can't understand the founder.

If this is true, then there should be a correlation between founders' verbal communication skills and their companies doing badly even when we exclude those with accents. Have you seen this in Y.C. companies?

I do agree that most people (investors, press, potential employees, partners) don't consciously discriminate against foreigners, but their models of the ideal founder are current successful founders, who are mostly north american fluent-in-english men. Could this be related to the correlation you have seen?