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Listen for I versus we
Michael Moritz trained a younger Sequoia partner to listen for the exact word that's said and the timing of that word. People can't help showing themselves in the adjectives they use, and in whether they say I or we when describing something.
Picture a founder presenting: I can sell you this. The listener hears the I and thinks, you can't sell me anything. Sequoia often chooses a founder with no code and nothing but a presentation, so clarity of vision gets paired with the interpersonal traits that come through in the specific words and when they are said.
Moritz did this to Doug Leone all the time, quoting his words back to him exactly as he had said them. It drove Leone nuts, and he built on the basic training and expanded it.
Why do pronouns reveal so much about people?
James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, spent decades analyzing word use by computer, and he described the results in his 2011 book The Secret Life of Pronouns. Small function words such as I, we, and you are produced with little conscious control, so they track a speaker's mood and attention to others. In his work, people lower in status tended to use first-person singular words more often than people higher in status.
How do word choices reveal lying?
In a 2003 study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Matthew Newman, Pennebaker, and colleagues analyzed written and spoken statements from people who were instructed to lie or tell the truth. Liars used fewer first-person singular words, fewer exclusive words such as but and except, and more negative-emotion words. The researchers' computer model classified statements correctly about two-thirds of the time.
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