It is interesting that you bring up examples of these Irish/English plays, to me these are societies that turned static and frozen after the initial dynamism went away and irrelevant affiliations dominated. Around the time my fair lady came out, pg’s family immigrated away from England to the US. Wonder why?
In any case, we are talking about Silicon Valley here. Not society in general. What made it special is this ability to assimilate talent from all over the world. As has been pointed out by others, people with strong accents are all over the valley running businesses successfully. BTW, significant observational experience from pg is about 100 companies in an economy that has several million businesses. So, yeah not exactly significant if you ask me.
When you have observed a similar number of founding teams close up, your impressions will have similar credibility.
Until then, on the empirical issue – what has actually been a predictive indicator during the YC programs – real experience, not theory and hope, matters.
If you think that the UK and Ireland have been frozen in aspic since the 1920s, that suggests that you are very ignorant of the great many things that have happened in those countries, both of which would now be barely recognisable to anyone from the 20s.
If pg's ancestors emigrated from England, that is not in fact a judgement on it. The UK has exported a great many people to every corner of the globe, and received them in kind, because it is a very globally engaged collection of islands. By your twisted logic this must make it just about the worst country in the world.
In any case, we are talking about Silicon Valley here. Not society in general. What made it special is this ability to assimilate talent from all over the world. As has been pointed out by others, people with strong accents are all over the valley running businesses successfully. BTW, significant observational experience from pg is about 100 companies in an economy that has several million businesses. So, yeah not exactly significant if you ask me.