When Mike Judge described his fictional creation, the HBO show Silicon Valley, with its send-up of startup gurus, coding nerds, and Kid Rock-hosted launch parties, it sounded more like a documentary. “In a way, you just televise (reality),” he told Fast Company . “Then you get credit for satire, when sometimes all you’re doing is putting it on TV.”

As the show demonstrated, Silicon Valley can be a foreign culture even to Americans. To international startups launching in the U.S., some of these same aspects of Silicon Valley culture can be downright alien.

The common practice, for instance, of promoting a startup before it technically exists—when it’s nothing more than a landing page—strikes some international startups as particularly odd. “In Korea, the press only start to pay attention when startup makes much money or generate meaningful result,” explains John Oh, a Korean entrepreneur who is preparing to launch his video startup, Alive, in the U.S. “On the other hand, I witnessed that in the U.S., a new startup succeeds in generating news as long as it is considered innovative.”

Korean culture is not generous about failure.

Part of the hesitancy to broadcast a business before it’s successful, Oh says, is that Silicon Valley’s enthusiasm for failure (there’s even a conference that uses the tagline “fail forward”) is rather unique. Oh tells the story of an American friend who started a company that is still in prototype stage and hasn’t generated any revenue for the last three years. “His service is considered as a failure,” Oh says. “Nevertheless, there is continuous stream of funding, and he is living a good life in Palo Alto with his wife and a kid. He is able to continue ideation and development without struggling. I was so envious about the startup ecosystem in Silicon Valley, which offers opportunities to try again after failure. Korean culture is not generous about failure. Once you fail, you’re very often forced to change your path and pursue something else.”

Jeong-A Kim, who recently worked at a PR agency called fionabae that specializes in bringing Korean startups to the U.S., says that at times this difference between the cultures could make her job tricky. “Their response is pretty much the same: We’re not ready. It’s not my camera-ready moment, so I don’t want the media to know,” she says. “I feel like the American startups are like, ‘We’re looking for funding!’ And the Korean startups are like, ‘No, no, we’re not a real business yet.’”

It’s not just Korean startups that can find this odd. Elliot Tomaeno, the founder of Astrsk PR, works with startups founded outside of the U.S. on their U.S. launches, which he says makes up about 30% of his business. He’s found the Silicon Valley practice of trumpeting your startup ahead of its actual success seems odd to most Europeans, too. “If you fail at something in Europe, it’s not a badge of honor, and try this and try that and you will find success,” he says. “You feel like you’re shaming your family. They don’t want to talk about them being in the U.S. until they find success, which is a hard chicken-and-egg situation.”