Interviewing at YC is hard – but interviewing at YC when you’re not a native English speaker is harder. Here are a few tricks that worked for us at Wit.ai (W14). 1- Speak slowly, articulate. It’s OK to have a strong accent (I do), but it makes it harder for the partners to understand what you say. They’re sitting in a room, listening to hundreds of pitches in a row for days. They are tired. Help…
This is an English translation of a post written in French by my father Gérard Lebrun . The pages numbers refer to the original text of Grothendieck’s work Récoltes et Semailles (“Crops and Seeds”). I was intrigued by the unusual path of Grothendieck, the recently deceased mathematician genius who, after twenty years of work that garnered him the 1966 Field Medal (the Nobel Prize for…
In 1949 the Communists, led by Mao Ze Dong, defeat the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-Shek. After three thousand years of Empire, followed by 38 years of military dictatorship, Japanese invasion and civil war, China feels the wind of renaissance - I can’t blame them. In these moments, you want to hard reset everything. Mao wants to reinvent writing. (continued from On Chinese Writing: Evolution ) Why…
You can imagine how disappointed I was when I learned this story. I was secretly hoping that the Chinese had invented their writing in order to remember how, during a fatal and romantic night, the great poet Li Bai, somewhat drunk, drowned to his death while trying to embrace the reflection of the moon on the surface of a lake. No. It was invented by bureaucrats for bureaucratic purposes.…
I’ve always been fascinated with Chinese writing. When I started my military service on an air force base in cold North-East France, spending long nights “supervising” the nuclear base security (i.e. watching porn with the officers while the soldiers were patrolling), I decided that I could make better use of all this wasted time and learn something very bizarre. So I chose Chinese and bought a…