Ok. So when Groupon and Uber are expanding abroad with investor capital, is someone checking if their accent fits with the local population? Their entire international expansion has been funded by external investors not their own capital.
The situation can't be flipped on it's top like that. English is the lingua franca, people can speak it everywhere. This is not a symmetric relationship where you can say that if A -> B then B -> A.
I'm from Quebec, we speak French there. When you come to do business here, you'll talk to investors and politicians in English and you'll be just fine. People know that foreigners coming to invest/expand their business speak English. If you speak French too, great! Then when you start selling your product, that product will have to be translated. But you as a business woman/man coming to Quebec and dealing with people, you'll be just fine speaking English.
Now if I go in the Bay Area and start expecting people to do business in French with me, I doubt anybody will bother listening to me.
I'm sure that when they are striking deals with local politicians, regulators, and partners, they are careful to do so through representatives intelligible to the local populace.
The founders of both firms speak American english well and raised bunches of money in America, so language and accents were not a concern for them with regards to fundraising. Indeed, America is the best market in the world for raising speculative venture capital, so being comfortable with American English is a useful skill to have for entrepreneurs.
I seen plenty of american founders with diction problems, lisp or some other speaking impediment.
Those are real communication problems recognized by professionals for decades if not centuries, and happens all over the world.
However accents are strictly a cultural and socioeconomical difference: someone coming from a very remote country is of course going to have a considerably different accent, and in countries like england the difference between classes has created some very different accents all over the country.
In the old days in england having a posh accent was a good way of working your way up the social ladder because being the best steam-engine engineer mattered little if you sounded like an illiterate irish. Same in the usa where even president Clinton got some bs from east coast journalists for his southern accent.
Did I say at any point that bad accents mean you are dumb and unintelligible? no, because that's not true. What it does is make you a target of xenophobia because it makes it very clear that you are "not from around here"
When that happens it doesn't matters if you are as eloquent as the best orators in history because if your public already has a demeaning attitude towards you they are not going to care one bit about what you have to say, after all you are just one dumb foreigner! hearing you is a waste of everybody's time!
pg could have gone for speech impediments instead which are a problem no matter where or what language you speak, and of course if english is your second language those problems are just going to compound. But pg went for the accents and the accents alone, as if the number of white american dudebro founders out there saying your instead of you're all the time were perfect.
Then again maybe when they are speaking pg is actually paying attention to what they say.
