欢迎来到 CS183B 课程。我是山姆・奥尔特曼，是 Y Combinator 的总裁。九年前，我还是斯坦福大学的学生，后来辍学去创办了一家公司，在过去的几年里我一直是一名投资者。所以 YC 已经教人们如何创业九年了。其中大部分内容是针对创业公司的，但有 30% 是普遍适用的。所以我们认为可以在这门课上教授这 30% 的内容。即使只有 30%，希望也会很有帮助。Welcome to CS183B. I am Sam Altman, I'm the President of Y Combinator. Nine years ago, I was a Stanford student, and then I dropped out to start a company and then I've been an investor for the last few. So YC, we've been teaching people how to start startups for nine years. Most of it's pretty specific to the startups but thirty percent of it is pretty generally applicable. And so we think we can teach that thirty percent in this class. And even though that's only thirty percent of the way there, hopefully it will still be really helpful.
我们在 YC 已经讲授了很多这方面的内容，但都是不公开的。这是我们教授的很多内容首次公开。我们邀请了一些嘉宾演讲者来做和在 YC 时一样的演讲。我们已经资助了 725 家公司，所以我们非常确定我们给出的很多建议都非常好。我们还不能资助每一家创业公司，但希望能让这些建议广泛可用。We've taught a lot of this class at YC and it's all been off the record. And this is the first time a lot of what we teach is going to be on the record. We've invited some of our guest speakers to come and give the same talks they give at YC. We've now funded 725 companies and so we're pretty sure a lot of this advice we give is pretty good. We can't fund every startup yet, but we can hopefully make this advice very generally available.
我只教授三部分。算上 YC 本身，每一位嘉宾演讲者都参与创建了价值十亿美元以上的公司。所以这些建议不应该只是理论上的，都是有实践经验的人给出的。I'm only teaching three. Counting YC itself, every guest speaker has been involved in the creation of a billion plus dollar company. So the advice shouldn't be that theoretical, it's all been people who have done it.
这堂课中的所有建议都是针对那些以超高速增长为目标并最终建立一家非常大的公司的创业人士的。其中很多在其他情况下并不适用，我想提前提醒大家，如果你试图在很多大公司或非初创公司中做这些事情，是行不通的。但它仍然应该是有趣的，我真的认为初创公司是未来的发展方向，值得去尝试理解它们，但初创公司与普通公司非常不同。所以在今天和周四的课程中，我将试图概述为了使初创公司取得最大成功，你需要在四个方面表现出色。然后在整个课程中，客座演讲者将更详细地深入探讨所有这些方面。All of the advice in this class is geared towards people starting a business where the goal is hyper growth and eventually building a very large company. Much of it doesn't apply in other cases and I want to warn people up front, that if you try to do these things in a lot of big companies or non-startups, it won't work. It should still be interesting, I really think that startups are the way of the future and it's worth trying to understand them, but startups are very different than normal companies. So over the course of today and Thursday, I'm going to try to give an overview of the four areas you need to excel at in order to maximize your success as a startup. And then throughout the course, the guest speakers are going to drill into all of these in more detail.
这四个方面：你需要一个很棒的想法、一款出色的产品、一个优秀的团队和出色的执行。这些方面有些重叠，但为了讲得清楚，我不得不分别谈论它们。 So the four areas: You need a great idea, a great product, a great team, and great execution. These overlap somewhat, but I'm going to have to talk about them somewhat individually to make it make sense.
你可能还是会失败。结果就像是 想法 × 产品 × 执行 × 团队 × 运气，其中运气是 0 到 10000 之间的一个随机数。真的是这么大的范围。但如果你在这四个可控的方面做得很好，你至少有一定的成功机会。You may still fail. The outcome is something like idea x product x execution x team x luck, where luck is a random number between zero and ten thousand. Literally that much. But if you do really well in the four areas you can control, you have a good chance at at least some amount of success.
创业令人兴奋的一点是，这是一个出奇公平的竞争领域。年轻且没有经验，你可以做。年长且经验丰富，你也可以做。我特别喜欢创业的一点是，在其他工作环境中不好的一些事情，比如贫穷和默默无闻，在创业时实际上是巨大的优势。One of the exciting things about startups is that they are a surprisingly even playing field. Young and inexperienced, you can do this. Old and experienced, you can do this, too. And one of the things that I particularly like about startups is that some of the things that are bad in other work situations, like being poor and unknown, are actually huge assets when it comes to starting a startup.
在我们深入探讨如何做之前，我想谈谈为什么你应该创业。我有点犹豫要不要上这门课，因为你永远不应该仅仅为了创业而创业。有很多更容易的致富方法，每个创业的人总是说，总是，他们无法想象这将会有多艰难和痛苦。你应该只有在被某个特定的问题所驱使，并且认为创办一家公司是解决它的最佳方式时，才去创业。Before we jump in on the how, I want to talk about why you should start a startup. I'm somewhat hesitant to be doing this class at all because you should never start a startup just for the sake of doing so. There are much easier ways to become rich and everyone who starts a startup always says, always, that they couldn't have imagined how hard and painful it was going to be. You should only start a startup if you feel compelled by a particular problem and that you think starting a company is the best way to solve it.
具体的热情应该放在首位，创业其次。实际上，我们在 YC 上的所有课程都遵循这一点。所以在今天讲座的后半部分，达斯汀・莫斯科维茨将接手并谈论为什么要创业。这门课受到的关注之多让我们感到惊讶，所以我们想确保在为什么创业上花很多时间。The specific passion should come first, and the startup second. In fact, all of the classes we have at YC follow this. So for the second half of today's lecture, Dustin Moskovitz is going to take over and talk about why to start a startup. We were so surprised at the amount of attention this class got, that we wanted to make sure we spent a lot of time on the why.
四个方面中的第一个：一个好的想法。近年来，流行一种说法，认为想法不重要。实际上，花很多时间思考创业的想法是不酷的。你应该直接开始，把东西扔到墙上，看看哪些能粘住，甚至不要花时间去思考如果成功了它是否有价值。The first of the four areas: a great idea. It's become popular in recent years to say that the idea doesn't matter. In fact, it's uncool to spend a lot of time thinking about the idea for a startup. You're just supposed to start, throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks, and not even spend any time thinking about if it will be valuable if it works.
而且转向应该是很棒的，转向越多越好。所以这也不全错，事情确实会以你无法完全预测的方式发展。而且在没有把产品交到用户手中之前，你能弄明白的东西是有限的。而且出色的执行至少比一个好的想法重要十倍，也难上一百倍。And pivots are supposed to be great, the more pivots the better. So this isn't totally wrong, things do evolve in ways you can't totally predict. And there's a limit to how much you can figure out without actually getting a product in the hands of the users. And great execution is at least ten times as important and a hundred times harder than a great idea.
但钟摆已经摆得太离谱了。一个坏想法仍然是坏的，我们现在所处的这个频繁转向的世界感觉不太理想。朝着一个糟糕的想法出色地执行也不会有任何结果。当然也有例外，但大多数伟大的公司都是从一个好想法开始的，而不是转向。But the pendulum has swung way out of whack. A bad idea is still bad and the pivot-happy world we're in today feels suboptimal. Great execution towards a terrible idea will get you nowhere. There are exceptions, of course, but most great companies start with a great idea, not a pivot.
如果你看看成功的转向，它们几乎总是转向创始人自己想要的东西，而不是一个随机编造的想法。Airbnb 的出现是因为布莱恩・切斯基付不起房租，但他有一些多余的空间。但总的来说，如果你看看转向的记录，它们不会成为大公司。我自己曾经认为想法不太重要，但我现在非常确定那是错误的。If you look at successful pivots, they almost always are a pivot into something the founders themselves wanted, not a random made up idea. Airbnb happened because Brian Chesky couldn't pay his rent, but he had some extra space. In general though if you look at the track record of pivots, they don't become big companies. I myself used to believe ideas didn't matter that much, but I'm very sure that's wrong now.
我们所说的想法的定义非常广泛。它包括市场的规模和增长、公司的增长策略、防御策略等等。当你评估一个想法时，你需要考虑所有这些事情，而不仅仅是产品。如果成功了，你将在这上面工作十年，所以值得花一些真正的前期时间来思考前期价值和业务的可防御性。尽管计划本身没有价值，但规划的过程非常有价值，而这在当今大多数创业公司中是完全缺失的。The definition of the idea, as we talk about it, is very broad. It includes the size and the growth of the market, the growth strategy for the company, the defensibility strategy, and so on. When you're evaluating an idea, you need to think through all these things, not just the product. If it works out, you're going to be working on this for ten years so it's worth some real up front time to think through the up front value and the defensibility of the business. Even though plans themselves are worthless, the exercise of planning is really valuable and totally missing in most startups today.
**长期主义在任何地方都非常罕见，尤其是在创业公司中。**如果你这样做，会有巨大的优势。记住，随着你的进展，想法会扩展并变得更有雄心。你当然不需要在统治世界的道路上把一切都想清楚，但你真的想要一个好的核心开始。你想要一些能够以有趣的方式发展的东西。Long-term thinking is so rare anywhere, but especially in startups. There is a huge advantage if you do it. Remember that the idea will expand and become more ambitious as you go. You certainly don't need to have everything figured out in your path to world domination, but you really want a nice kernel to start with. You want something that can develop in interesting ways.
问自己：长期来讲，什么最重要？能够持续做多久？
在你思考想法的时候，我们看到创始人一直犯错的另一件事是，有一天你需要建立一个难以复制的业务。这是一个好想法的重要部分。As you're thinking through ideas, another thing we see that founders get wrong all the time is that someday you need to build a business that is difficult to replicate. This is an important part of a good idea.
我想再次强调这一点，因为它非常重要：想法应该放在首位，创业应该放在第二位。等到你想出一个你觉得必须探索的想法时再创业。这也是在不同想法之间做出选择的方法。如果你有几个想法，就去做那个你在不刻意思考工作时最常想到的那个。我们一次又一次地从创始人那里听到，他们希望自己能等到想出一个真正热爱的想法。I want to make this point again because it is so important: the idea should come first and the startup should come second. Wait to start a startup until you come up with an idea you feel compelled to explore. This is also the way to choose between ideas. If you have several ideas, work on the one that you think about most often when you're not trying to think about work. What we hear again and again from founders is that they wish they had waited until they came up with an idea they really loved.
另一种看待这个的方式是，最好的公司几乎总是以使命为导向的。除非公司感觉自己有一个重要的使命，否则很难获得大公司所需的那种专注度。而且如果没有一个好的创始想法，通常很难做到这一点。以使命为导向的想法的一个相关优势是，你自己会致力于它。建立一个伟大的创业公司通常需要数年，通常是十年。如果你不热爱和不相信你正在建立的东西，你很可能在某个时候放弃。我不知道有什么方法可以在没有相信使命真的很重要的情况下度过创业的痛苦。很多创始人，尤其是学生，认为他们的创业公司只需要两到三年，然后之后他们会去做他们真正热爱的事情。那几乎从来都不起作用。好的创业公司通常需要十年。Another way of looking at this is that the best companies are almost always mission oriented. It's difficult to get the amount of focus that large companies need unless the company feels like it has an important mission. And it's usually really hard to get that without a great founding idea. A related advantage of mission oriented ideas is that you yourself will be dedicated to them. It takes years and years, usually a decade, to build a great startup. If you don't love and believe in what you're building, you're likely to give up at some point along the way. There's no way I know of to get through the pain of a startup without the belief that the mission really matters. A lot of founders, especially students, believe that their startups will only take two to three years and then after that they'll work on what they're really passionate about. That almost never works. [Good startups usually take ten years.](
以使命为导向的公司的第三个优势是，公司外部的人更愿意帮助你。在一个困难但重要的项目上，你会得到更多的支持，而不是一个衍生的项目。当谈到创业时，创建一个困难的创业公司比创建一个容易的创业公司更容易。这是那些需要人们很长时间才能理解的反直觉的事情之一。使命驱动的重要性怎么强调都不为过，所以我想最后再强调一次：衍生公司，即那些复制现有想法但几乎没有新见解的公司，不会让人兴奋，也不会促使团队努力工作以取得成功。A third advantage of mission oriented companies is that people outside the company are more willing to help you. You'll get more support on a hard, important project, than a derivative one. When it comes to starting a startup, it's easier to found a hard startup than an easy startup. This is one of those counter-intuitive things that takes people a long time to understand. It's difficult to overstate how important being mission driven is, so I want to state it one last time: derivative companies, companies that copy an existing idea with very few new insights, don't excite people and they don't compel the teams to work hard enough to be successful.
保罗・格雷厄姆将在下周谈论如何获得创业想法。这是很多创始人都在努力解决的问题，但我相信通过练习你可以做得更好，而且绝对值得努力做得更好。Paul Graham is going to talk about how to get startup ideas next week. It's something that a lot of founders struggle with, but it's something I believe you can get better at with practice and it's definitely worth trying to get better at.
想出好想法最难的部分是，最好的想法在一开始往往看起来很糟糕。第十三个搜索引擎，而且没有网络门户的所有功能？大多数人认为这毫无意义。搜索已经完成，而且不管怎样，这并不重要。门户才有价值。第十个社交网络，而且只限于没有钱的大学生？也很糟糕。MySpace 已经赢了，谁想要大学生作为客户？或者一种睡在陌生人沙发上的方式。这听起来都很糟糕。The hardest part about coming up with great ideas, is that the best ideas often look terrible at the beginning. The thirteenth search engine, and without all the features of a web portal? Most people thought that was pointless. Search was done, and anyways, it didn't matter that much. Portals were where the value was at. The tenth social network, and limited only to college students with no money? Also terrible. MySpace has won and who wants college students as customers? Or a way to stay on strangers' couches. That just sounds terrible all around.
这些听起来都很糟糕，但结果却很好。如果它们听起来真的很好，就会有太多的人在做。正如彼得・蒂尔将在第五节课中讨论的，你想要一个能变成垄断的想法。但你不能马上得到垄断。你必须找到一个你能垄断的小市场，然后迅速扩张。这就是为什么一些伟大的创业想法在一开始看起来很糟糕。如果你能说，“今天，只有这个小部分的用户会使用我的产品，但我会得到他们所有人，而且在未来，几乎每个人都会使用我的产品。” 这是很好的。These all sounded really bad but they turned out to be good. If they sounded really good, there would be too many people working on them. As Peter Thiel is going to discuss in the fifth class, you want an idea that turns into a monopoly. But you can't get a monopoly right away. You have to find a small market in which you can get a monopoly and then quickly expand. This is why some great startup ideas look really bad at the beginning. It's good if you can say something like, "Today, only this small subset of users are going to use my product, but I'm going to get all of them, and in the future, almost everyone is going to use my product."
这里有一个会经常出现的主题：你需要对自己的信念有信心，并且愿意忽略别人的否定。难的部分是这是一条非常微妙的线。一边是正确的，另一边是疯狂的。但请记住，如果你真的想出了一个好主意，大多数人会认为它很糟糕。你应该为此感到高兴，这意味着他们不会和你竞争。Here is the theme that is going to come up a lot: you need conviction in your own beliefs and a willingness to ignore others' naysaying. The hard part is that this is a very fine line. There's right on one side of it, and crazy on the other. But keep in mind that if you do come up with a great idea, most people are going to think it's bad. You should be happy about that, it means they won't compete with you.
这也是为什么告诉别人你的想法并不真的危险的另一个原因。真正好的想法听起来并不值得被窃取。你想要一个你可以说，“我知道这听起来像个坏主意，但这就是为什么它实际上是个好主意。” 的想法。你想要听起来疯狂，但实际上是正确的。而且你想要一个没有很多其他人在做的想法。而且一开始听起来不大也没关系。This also another reason why it's not really dangerous to tell people your idea. The truly good ideas don't sound like they're worth stealing. You want an idea where you can say, "I know it sounds like a bad idea, but here's specifically why it's actually a great one." You want to sound crazy, but you want to actually be right. And you want an idea that not many other people are working on. And it's okay if it doesn't sound big at first.
创始人，尤其是首次创业者的一个常见错误是，他们认为他们产品的第一个版本 —— 他们想法的第一个版本 —— 需要听起来非常大。但不是这样的。它需要占领一个小的特定市场，然后从那里扩展。这就是大多数伟大的公司的起步方式。不受欢迎但正确，这就是你要追求的。你想要一个听起来像个坏主意，但实际上是个好主意的东西。A common mistake among founders, especially first time founders, is that they think the first version of their product - the first version of their idea - needs to sound really big. But it doesn't. It needs to take over a small specific market and expand from there. That's how most great companies get started. Unpopular but right is what you're going for. You want something that sounds like a bad idea, but is a good idea.****
你也确实想要花时间思考市场将如何演变。你需要一个十年后会庞大的市场。大多数投资者痴迷于当前的市场规模，根本不思考市场将如何演变。You also really want to take the time to think about how the market is going to evolve. You need a market that's going to be big in 10 years. Most investors are obsessed with the market size today, and they don't think at all about how the market is going to evolve.
事实上，我认为这是投资者所犯的最大系统性错误之一。他们思考的是初创公司自身的增长，而非市场的增长。我更关心市场的增长率而非其当前规模，我也关心是否存在市场达到顶峰的原因。你应该思考这一点。我更愿意投资于一个追求小但快速增长的市场的公司，而非大但增长缓慢的市场。In fact, I think this is one of the biggest systemic mistakes that investors make. They think about the growth of the start-up itself, they don't think about the growth of the market. I care much more about the growth rate of the market than its current size, and I also care if there's any reason it's going to top out. You should think about this. I prefer to invest in a company that's going after a small, but rapidly growing market, than a big, but slow-growing market.
**这类市场 —— 这些较小但快速增长的市场 —— 的一大优势在于，客户通常非常渴望解决方案，他们会容忍不完美但快速改进的产品。**作为学生的一大优势 —— 两大优势之一 —— 是你可能比年长的人对哪些市场可能开始快速增长有更好的直觉。学生通常不理解的另一件事，或者需要一段时间才能理解的是，你无法创造一个本不想存在的市场。在一家初创公司中，你基本上可以改变一切，但市场除外，所以你实际上应该做些思考以确定 —— 或者尽可能确定 —— 你所追求的市场将会增长并存在。One of the big advantages of these sorts of markets - these smaller, rapidly growing markets - is that customers are usually pretty desperate for a solution, and they'll put up with an imperfect, but rapidly improving product. A big advantage of being a student - one of the two biggest advantages - is that you probably have better intuition about which markets are likely to start growing rapidly than older people do. Another thing that students usually don't understand, or it takes awhile, [is that] you can not create a market that does not want to exist. You can basically change everything in a start-up but the market, so you should actually do some thinking to be sure - or be as sure as you can be - that the market you're going after is going to grow and be there.
把这个问题用在写作上就是：当你的文章主题是一个很有需求的问题的答案，即使排版不好看、即使有错别字，都会有人观看的。不要看写作只是写作，当你想要通过写作赚钱的时候，写作可能就开始变成一个创业项目，值得长期做、天花板足够高的项目。写作是产品，写作是销售。
有很多不同的方式来谈论正确的市场类型。例如，乘他人之势、踏入上升的电梯或成为一场运动的一部分，但所有这些都只是说你想要一个将快速增长的市场。它今天可能看起来很小，实际上可能也很小，但你知道 —— 而其他人不知道 —— 它将增长得非常快。There are a lot of different ways to talk about the right kind of market. For example, surfing some one else's wave, stepping into an up elevator, or being part of a movement, but all of this is just a way of saying that you want a market that's going to grow really quickly. It may seem small today, it may be small today, but you know - and other people don't - that it's going to grow really fast.
所以思考一下世界上哪里正在发生这种情况。你需要这种顺风来使初创公司成功。So think about where this is happening in the world. You need this sort of tailwind to make a startup successful.
令人兴奋的是，现在可能比以往任何时候都有更多这样的顺风。正如马克・安德森所说，软件正在吞噬世界。它无处不在，有很多很棒的想法。你只需要选择一个，并找到一个你真正关心的。The exciting thing is the there are probably more of these tailwinds now then ever before. As Marc Andreessen says, software is eating the world. Its just everywhere, there are so many great ideas out there. You just have to pick one, and find one that you really care about.
另一个版本，意思相同的是红杉资本的著名问题：为什么是现在？为什么对于这个特定的想法，现在是创办这家特定公司的完美时机？为什么两年前做不到，为什么两年后就太晚了？对于我们参与的最成功的初创公司，他们都对这个问题有很好的想法和答案。如果你没有，你至少应该对此有些怀疑Another version of this, that gets down to the same idea, is Sequoia's famous question: Why now? Why is this the perfect time for this particular idea, and to start this particular company. Why couldn't it be done two years ago, and why will two years in the future be too late? For the most successful startups we've been involved with, they've all had a great idea and a great answer to this question. And if you don't you should be at least somewhat suspicious about it.
一般来说，如果你正在构建自己需要的东西，那是最好的。你会比通过与客户交谈来构建第一个版本理解得更好。如果你自己不需要，而正在构建别人需要的东西，要意识到你处于很大的劣势，要非常接近你的客户。如果可以，尽量在他们的办公室工作，如果不行，每天与他们多次交流。In general, its best if you're building something that you yourself need. You'll understand it much better than if you have to understand it by talking to a customer to build the very first version. If you don't need it yourself, and you're building something someone else needs, realize that you're at a big disadvantage, and get very very close to your customers. Try to work in their office, if you can, and if not, talk to them multiple times a day.
**关于好的创业想法的另一个有点反直觉的事情是，它们几乎总是很容易解释和理解。**如果用一句话以上来解释你在做什么，这几乎总是表明它太复杂了。它应该是用少量词语清晰表达的愿景。而且最好的想法通常在一个重要方面与现有公司非常不同，比如谷歌是一个效果非常好的搜索引擎，没有门户网站的其他东西，或者像 SpaceX 那样全新。任何克隆其他已存在公司的公司，有一些小的或编造的差异点 —— 比如 X，漂亮的设计，或者 Y 针对喜欢红酒的人 —— 通常都会失败。Another somewhat counterintuitive thing about good startup ideas is that they're almost always very easy to explain and very easy to understand. If it takes more then a sentence to explain what you're doing, that's almost always a sign that its too complicated. It should be a clearly articulated vision with a small number of words. And the best ideas are usually very different from existing companies, [either] in one important way, like Google being a search engine that worked just really well, and none of the other stuff of the portals, or totally new, like SpaceX. [Any company that's a clone of something else, that already exists, with some small or made up differentiator—like X, beautiful design, or Y for people that like red wine instead—that usually fails.](
我们总是认为创始是一个艰难的事情，因此对应的创业想法也是一种复杂而神秘的。当别人别人很容易理解的想法的时候，瞬间就会失去兴趣。觉得不够复杂、不够酷，瞬间患上“简单恐惧症”。其次，你要完成的事情应该用一句话能够说清楚。
所以正如我提到的，作为学生的一大好处是你对新技术有很好的视角。学会有好的想法需要一段时间，所以现在就开始努力吧。这是我们一直从人们那里听到的，他们希望自己在学生时代做得更多。So as I mentioned, one of the great things about being a student is that you've got a very good perspective on new technology. And learning to have good ideas takes a while, so start working on that right now. That's one thing we hear from people all the time, that they wish they had done more of as a student.
另一个是结识潜在的联合创始人。你不知道你现在所处的环境对于结识未来可以一起创办公司的人有多好。我们总是告诉大学生，比任何特定的初创公司更重要的是结识潜在的联合创始人。The other is meeting potential cofounders. You have no idea how good of an environment you're in right now, for meeting people you can start a company with down the road. And the one thing that we always tell college students is that more important then any particular startup is getting to know potential cofounders.
所以我想用 50 Cent 的一句话来结束这部分的演讲。这是他被问及维生素水时说的。我就不读了，就在上面，但它是关于思考客户想要什么以及思考市场需求的重要性。大多数人不这样做 —— 大多数学生尤其不这样做。如果你能做到这一件事，如果你能学会首先思考市场，你将比大多数创业的人有很大的优势。这可能是我们在 Y Combinator 的申请中最常看到的错误，就是人们没有首先思考市场，没有首先思考人们想要什么。So I want to finish this section of my talk with a quote from 50 Cent. This is from when he was asked about Vitamin Water. I won't read it, it's up there, but it's about the importance of thinking about what customers want, and thinking about the demands of the market. Most people don't do this—most students especially don't do this. If you can just do this one thing, if you can just learn to think about the market first, you'll have a big leg up on most people starting startups. And this is probably the thing we see wrong with Y Combinator apps most frequently, is that people have not thought about the market first, and what people want first.
交易的中心是别人，是陌生的别人，非常之重要。我要创业！不，而是思考你要为用户解决问题以及带去什么价值。
所以在下一部分，我将谈论打造一款出色的产品。这里，我再次使用一个非常广泛的 “产品” 定义。它包括客户支持、你为解释产品所写的文案、任何与客户对你为他们构建的东西的互动有关的东西。So for the next section, I'm going to talk about building a great product. And here, again, I'm going to use a very broad definition of product. It includes customer support, the copy you write explaining the product, anything involved in your customer's interaction in what you built for them.
我非常喜欢在这里对“产品”的定义。我认为所有的工作都是分为产品和销售，销售也并不是多数人认为的一样。写作是产品、写作是销售、写作也是思考。
要建立一个真正伟大的公司，你首先必须把一个伟大的想法变成一个伟大的产品。这真的很难，但至关重要，幸运的是，这相当有趣。虽然伟大的产品对世界来说总是新的，很难给你关于构建什么的建议，但有足够的共性，我们可以给你很多关于如何构建它的建议。To build a really great company, you first have to turn a great idea into a great product. This is really hard, but its crucially important, and fortunately its pretty fun. Although great products are always new to the world, and its hard to give you advice about what to build, there are enough commonalities that we can give you a lot of advice about how to build it.
**创始人最重要的任务之一是确保公司打造出一款伟大的产品。**在你打造出一款伟大的产品之前，其他都不重要。当真正成功的初创公司创始人讲述他们早期的故事时，几乎总是坐在电脑前致力于他们的产品，或者与客户交流。几乎一直都是这样。他们很少做其他事情，如果你的时间分配有很大不同，你应该非常怀疑。大多数创始人试图解决的其他问题，如筹集资金、获得更多媒体报道、招聘、业务拓展等，当你有一款伟大的产品时，这些都会容易得多。One of the most important tasks for a founder is to make sure that the company builds a great product. Until you build a great product, nothing else matters. When really successful startup founders tell the story of their early days its almost always sitting in front of the computer working on their product, or talking to their customers. That's pretty much all the time. They do very little else, and you should be very skeptical if your time allocation is much different. Most other problems that founders are trying to solve, raising money, getting more press, hiring, business development, et cetera, these are significantly easier when you have a great product.
首先处理好这个真的很重要。第一步是打造出用户喜爱的东西。在 YC，我们告诉创始人致力于他们的产品、与用户交流、锻炼、吃饭和睡觉，很少做其他事情。我刚刚提到的所有其他事情 —— 公关、会议、招聘顾问、建立合作关系 —— 你都应该忽略，只专注于打造产品，并通过与用户交流使其尽可能好。Its really important to take care of that first. Step one is to build something that users love. At YC, we tell founders to work on their product, talk to users, exercise, eat and sleep, and very little else. All the other stuff I just mentioned—PR, conferences, recruiting advisers, doing partnerships—you should ignore all of that, and just build a product and get it as good as possible by talking to your users.
你的工作是打造出用户喜爱的东西。很少有后来超级成功的公司在没有首先做到这一点的情况下能成功。很多表面上不错的初创公司失败了，因为他们只是做出了人们有点喜欢的东西。做出人们想要但只是中等程度想要的东西，是一个很好的失败方式，而且你还不明白为什么会失败。所以这是两个工作。Your job is to build something that users love. Very few companies that go on to be super successful get there without first doing this. A lot of good-on-paper startups fail because they merely make something that people like. Making something that people want, but only a medium amount, is a great way to fail, and not understand why you're failing. So these are the two jobs
对此问题的疏忽会造成，我差点就成功的悲惨事故。
我们在 YC 经常说的是，**打造出一款少数用户热爱的东西，比打造出一款大量用户有点喜欢的东西要好。**当然，最好是打造出一款少数用户热爱的东西，但对于 v1 来说，做到这一点的机会很少，而且通常创业公司也没有这样的机会。所以实际上你最终要在灰色或橙色之间做出选择。你可以做出一款大量用户有点喜欢的东西，或者少数用户非常热爱的东西。这是一条非常重要的建议。打造出一款少数用户热爱的东西。从少数人热爱的东西扩展到很多人热爱的东西，要比从很多人有点喜欢的东西扩展到很多人热爱的东西容易得多。如果你这一点做对了，其他很多事情做错了也没关系。如果你这一点没做对，其他所有事情都做对了，你可能还是会失败。所以当你开始创业时，在产品起作用之前，这是你唯一需要关心的事情。Something that we say at YC a lot is that its better to build something that a small number of users love, then a large number of users like. Of course, it would be best to build something that a small number of users love, but opportunities to do that for v1 are rare, and they're usually not available to startups. So in practice you end up choosing the gray or the orange. You make something that a lot of users like a little bit, or something that a small number of users love a lot. This is a very important piece of advice. Build something that a small number of users love. It is much easier to expand from something that small number of people love, to something that a lot of people love, then from something that a lot of people like to a lot of people love. If you get right, you can get a lot of other things wrong. If you don't get this right, you can get everything else right, and you'll probably still fail. So when you start on the startup, this is the only thing you need to care about until its working.
[观众成员]：您能再讲一下那张幻灯片吗？[Audience member]: Can you go over that slide again?
所以在创业中你有一个选择。最理想的情况是打造出一款很多人真正热爱的产品。但实际上，通常你做不到这一点，因为如果有这样的机会，谷歌或脸书会去做。所以就像你能打造的东西存在曲线下面积的限制。所以你可以打造出一款很多用户有点喜欢的东西，或者少数用户非常热爱的东西。所以就像喜爱的总量是一样的，只是分布的问题。[观众笑声] 而且就像对于创业公司的第一款产品，存在一个关于你能为世界带来多少幸福的守恒定律。So you have a choice in a startup. The best thing of all worlds is to build a product that a lot of people really love. In practice, you can't usually do that, because if there's an opportunity like that, Google or Facebook will do it. So there's like a limit to the area under the curve, of what you can build. So you can build something that a large number of users like a little bit, or a small number of users love a lot. So like the total amount of love is the same, its just a question of how its distributed. [audience laughter] And there's like this law of conservation of how much happiness you can put in the world, with the first product of a startup.
所以创业公司总是在纠结应该选择这两者中的哪一个。它们看起来是平等的，对吧？因为曲线下的面积是一样的。但我们一次又一次地看到，它们不是。而且一旦你有了一些人们热爱的东西，要扩展就容易得多，但是如果你从模棱两可或者微弱的热情开始，并试图扩展，你永远不会达到很多人热爱的程度。所以建议是：找到一小群用户，让他们热爱你正在做的事情。And so startups always struggle, with which of those two they should go. And they seem equal, right? Because the area under the curve is the same. But we've seen this time and again, that they're not. And that it's so much easier to expand, once you've got something that some people love, you can expand that into something that a lot of other people love. But if you start with ambivalence, or weak enthusiasm, and try to expand that, you'll never get up to a lot of people loving it. So the advice is: find a small group of users, and make them love what you're doing
当这起作用时，你知道的一种方式是你会通过口碑获得增长。如果你有了人们喜爱的东西，人们会告诉他们的朋友。这对消费产品和企业产品都适用。当人们真的热爱某样东西时，他们会告诉他们的朋友，你会看到自然增长。One way that you know when this is working, is that you'll get growth by word of mouth. If you get something people love, people will tell their friends about it. This works for consumer product and enterprise products as well. When people really love something, they'll tell their friends about it, and you'll see organic growth.
如果你发现自己在谈论说你没有增长也没关系 —— 因为有一个大的合作即将拯救你或者类似的东西 —— 这几乎总是真正麻烦的迹象。销售和营销真的很重要，我们稍后会有两节课专门讲它们。一款伟大的产品是长期增长黑客的秘诀。在做其他任何事情之前，你应该先把这个做好。推迟打造一款伟大的产品并不会变得更容易。如果你在还没有一款人们真正喜爱的产品之前就试图建立一个增长机器，你几乎肯定会浪费你的时间。成功的公司几乎总是有一款非常好的产品，它通过口碑增长。从长远来看，伟大的产品会获胜。不要担心你的竞争对手筹集了很多资金，或者他们未来可能会做什么。反正他们可能也不是很好。很少有创业公司死于竞争。大多数是因为他们自己没能做出用户喜爱的东西，把时间花在了其他事情上。所以最应该担心的就是这个。If you find yourself talking about how it's okay that you're not growing—because there's a big partnership that's going to come save you or something like that—its almost always a sign of real trouble. Sales and marketing are really important, and we're going to have two classes on them later. A great product is the secret to long term growth hacking. You should get that right before anything else. It doesn't get easier to put off making a great product. If you try to build a growth machine before you have a product that some people really love, you're almost certainly going to waste your time. Breakout companies almost always have a product that's so good, it grows by word of mouth. Over the long run, great product win. Don't worry about your competitors raising a lot of money, or what they might do in the future. They probably aren't very good anyway. Very few startups die from competition. Most die because they themselves fail to make something users love, they spend their time on other things. So worry about this above all else.
最好的竞争就是不去竞争，关注于最重要的事情上——为用户解决问题。静中藏着一个争字。
另一条打造用户喜爱产品的建议是：从简单的东西开始。如果你的产品简单，打造一款出色的产品会容易得多得多。即使你最终的计划超级复杂（希望如此），你几乎总是可以从比你认为最小的问题子集还要小的部分开始，而且打造一款出色的产品很难，所以你要从尽可能小的范围开始。想想那些非常成功的公司，以及它们的起步，想想你真正喜爱的产品。它们通常使用起来极其简单，尤其是开始使用的时候。Facebook 的第一个版本简直简单得可笑。**Google 的第一个版本只是一个有文本框和两个按钮的网页；但它能返回最好的结果，这就是为什么用户喜欢它。**iPhone 比之前出现的任何智能手机都更容易使用，也是用户真正喜爱的第一款。Another piece of advice to make something that users love: start with something simple. Its much much easier to make a great product if you have something simple. Even if your eventual plans are super complex, and hopefully they are, you can almost always start with a smaller subset of the problem then you think is the smallest, and its hard to build a great product, so you want to start with as little surface area as possible. Think about the really successful companies, and what they started with, think about products you really love. They're generally incredibly simple to use, and especially to get started using. The first version of Facebook was almost comically simple. The first version of Google was just a webpage with a textbox and two buttons; but it returned the best results, and that's why users loved it. The iPhone is far simpler to use then any smartphone that ever came before it, and it was the first one users really loved.
有这么一个学科——复杂系统，当一个简单动作重复很多次，这个系统就会变得很复杂。其次，简单并不意味着需求也简单，简单意味着解决了一个棘手的问题且使用非常方便。
简单之所以好的另一个原因是，它迫使你把一件事做得极其出色，而要打造出人们喜爱的东西，你就必须这样做。Another reason that simple's good is because it forces you to do one thing extremely well and you have to do that to make something that people love.
把业务想清楚，把问题和解决方案想清楚。不要为了手段而放弃思考是否值得追求的目标。当你产品功能简单的时候，就会聚焦于产品最重要的功能，就像保温杯一样，保持造型和外观简单，打造最重要的需求——保温。人的精力和时间总是有限的，专注于最重要的事情上。
当你听成功的创始人谈论他们如何看待自己的产品时，“狂热” 这个词会反复出现。创始人会谈到他们对小细节的质量有多狂热。对用于解释产品的文案做到恰到好处有多狂热。对思考客户支持的方式有多狂热。事实上，YC 公司中与成功相关的一个因素是，那些将 Pagerduty 连接到他们的票务系统的创始人，这样即使用户在半夜创始人睡着的时候发邮件，他们也能在一小时内得到回复。公司在早期确实会这样做。当产品糟糕时，他们的创始人会感到身体上的痛苦，他们想醒来并修复它。他们不会推出垃圾产品，如果推出了，他们会非常迅速地修复。要打造出色的产品，肯定需要一定程度的狂热。The word fanatical comes up again and again when you listen to successful founders talk about how they think about their product. Founders talk about being fanatical in how they care about the quality of the small details. Fanatical in getting the copy that they use to explain the product just right. and fanatical in the way that they think about customer support. In fact, one thing that correlates with success among the YC companies is the founders that hook up Pagerduty to their ticketing system, so that even if the user emails in the middle of the night when the founder's asleep, they still get a response within an hour. Companies actually do this in the early days. Their founders feel physical pain when the product sucks and they want to wake up and fix it. They don't ship crap, and if they do, they fix it very very quickly. And it definitely takes some level of fanaticism to build great products.
你需要一些用户来帮助形成反馈循环，但你获取这些用户的方式应该是手动的 —— 你应该亲手去招募他们。在早期不要像通过购买谷歌广告来获取初始用户。你不需要很多，你只需要那些每天都会给你反馈，并最终会喜欢你的产品的用户。所以不要试图通过谷歌关键词广告来获取他们，而是在世界上找到那些会是好用户的少数人。亲手去招募他们。You need some users to help with the feedback cycle, but the way you should get those users is manually—you should go recruit them by hand. Don't do things like buy Google ads in the early days, to get initial users. You don't need very many, you just need ones that will give you feedback everyday, and eventually love your product. So instead of trying to get them on Google Adwords, just the few people, in the world, that would be good users. Recruit them by hand.
本・西尔伯曼（Ben Silbermann）在大家都认为 Pinterest 是个笑话的时候，通过在咖啡店与陌生人聊天来招募 Pinterest 的初始用户。他真的这么做了，他就在帕洛阿尔托（Palo Alto）四处走动，说 “你能用用我的产品吗？” 他还曾经在帕洛阿尔托的苹果商店里跑来跑去，在被抓住并赶出去之前，迅速把所有的浏览器都设置为 Pinterest 的主页（笑声），这样当人们走进来的时候，他们会说 “哦，这是什么？” 这是一个做不可扩展事情的重要例子。如果你还没有读过保罗・格雷厄姆（Paul Graham）关于这个主题的文章，你绝对应该读一读。Ben Silbermann, when everyone thought Pinterest was a joke, recruited the initial Pinterest users by chatting up strangers in coffee shops. He really did, he just walked around Palo Alto and said "Will you please use my product?" He also used to run around the Apple store in Palo Alto, and he would like set all the browsers to the Pinterest homepage real quick, before they caught him and kicked him out, (laughter) and so that when people walked in they were like "Oh, what's this?". This is an important example of doing things that don't scale. If you haven't read Paul Graham's essay on that topic, you definitely should.
所以手动获取用户，并记住目标是让一小群用户喜欢你。非常了解这个群体，与他们非常亲近。倾听他们的意见，你几乎总会发现他们非常愿意给你反馈。即使你是为自己打造产品，也要倾听外部用户的意见，他们会告诉你如何打造一款他们愿意付费的产品。做任何你需要做的事情让他们喜欢你，并让他们知道你在做什么。因为他们也会成为帮助你获取下一批用户的倡导者。So get users manually and remember that the goal is to get a small group of them to love you. Understand that group extremely well, get extremely close to them. Listen to them and you'll almost always find out that they're very willing to give you feedback. Even if you're building the product for yourself, listen to outside users, and they'll tell you how to make a product they'll pay for. Do whatever you need to make them love you, and make them know what you're doing. Because they'll also be the advocates that help you get your next users.
**你要在公司里打造一个引擎，将用户的反馈转化为产品决策。然后再拿给用户看并重复这个过程。**问他们喜欢什么和不喜欢什么，观察他们的使用情况。问他们愿意为什么付费。问他们如果你的公司消失了他们会不会很沮丧。问他们什么会让他们把产品推荐给朋友，**问他们是否已经推荐给任何人了。**You want to build an engine in the company that transforms feedback from users into product decisions. Then get it back in from of the users and repeat. Ask them what the like and don't like, and watch them use it. Ask them what they'd pay for. Ask them if they'd be really bummed if your company went away. Ask them what would make them recommend the product to their friends, and ask them if they'd recommended it to any yet.
你应该让这个反馈循环尽可能紧凑。如果你的产品每周都能提高 10%，效果会很快累积起来。软件初创公司的一个优势就是你可以把反馈循环缩得很短。可以用小时来衡量，而最好的公司通常有最紧凑的反馈循环。你应该尽量在公司的整个生命周期中保持这种状态，在早期尤其重要。You should make this feedback loop as tight as possible. If your product gets 10 percent better every week, that compounds really quickly. One of the advantages of software startups is just how short you can make the feedback loop. It can be measured in hours, and the best companies usually have the tightest feedback loop. You should try to keep this going for all of your company's life, but its really important in the early days.
公开创建、公开学习的好处最大的好处在于，你有机会和用户交流——或直接或间接，这就是自己的迭代速度。
好消息是，所有这些都是可行的。这很难，需要付出很多努力，但没有魔法。计划至少是直截了当的，你最终会得到一款出色的产品。The good news is that all this is doable. Its hard, it takes a lot of effort, but there's no magic. The plan is at least is straightforward, and you will eventually get to a great product.
优秀的创始人不会让任何人阻隔在他们和用户之间。**这些公司的创始人在早期会亲自做销售和客户支持这样的事情。**把这个循环嵌入到公司文化中是至关重要的。事实上，出于某种原因，我们在斯坦福的初创公司中总是看到一个具体的问题，就是学生们试图马上雇佣销售和客户支持人员，而你必须自己做，这是唯一的办法。Great founders don't put anyone between themselves and their users. The founders of these companies do things like sales and customer support themselves in the early days. Its critical to get this loop embedded in the culture. [In fact, a specific problem we always see with Stanford startups, for some reason, is that the students try to hire sales and customer support people right away, and you've got to do this yourself, its the only way.
这个观点自己感受很深，在我工作的公司，所有的公司管培生必须要到客服岗位轮岗几个月，从客服开始，逐渐成为一个合格的产品经理人员。在创业的初期，你必须亲自销售和客服。
在这方面，你真的需要用指标来让自己保持诚实。公司确实会打造出 CEO 决定衡量的任何东西，这是真的。如果你在打造一个互联网服务，忽略像总注册量这样的东西 —— 不要谈论它们，不要让公司里的任何人谈论它们 —— 关注增长和活跃用户、活动水平、用户群组留存率、收入、净推荐值，这些重要的东西。如果它们的方向不对，要残酷地诚实。**初创公司靠增长生存，这是产品出色的指标。**You really need to use metrics to keep yourself honest on this. It really is true that the company will build whatever the CEO decides to measure. If you're building an Internet service, ignore things like total registrations—don't talk about them, don't let anyone in the company talk about them—and look at growth and active users, activity levels, cohort retention, revenue, net promoter scores, these things that matter. And then be brutally honest if they're not going in the right direction. Startups live on growth, its the indicator of a great product.
所以这大概总结了打造一款出色产品的概述。我想再次强调，如果你这一点没做好，我们在这门课上讲的其他任何东西都不重要。在这一点做好之前，你基本上可以忽略课上讲的其他所有内容。从积极的方面来说，这是创建初创公司最有趣的部分之一。So this about wraps up the overview on building a great product. I want to emphasize again, that if you don't get this right, nothing else we talk about in the class will matter. You can basically ignore everything else in the class until this is working well. On the positive side, this is one of the most fun parts of building a startup.
所以我在这里暂停，我们周四再继续讲剩下的部分，现在达斯汀（Dustin）要来讲讲为什么你应该创业。谢谢你的到来，达斯汀。So I'm going to pause here, we'll pick back up with the rest of this on Thursday, and now Dustin is going to talk about why you should start a startup. Thank you for coming, Dustin.
但是，山姆让我谈谈为什么你应该创业。人们有很多常见的原因，我经常听到为什么你可能会创业。了解你的原因是什么很重要，因为其中一些原因只在某些情况下有意义，有些实际上会让你误入歧途。你可能被好莱坞或媒体对创业的浪漫化所误导，所以我想试着阐明其中一些潜在的谬误，这样你们就能做出清晰的决定。然后我会谈谈我最喜欢的真正创业的原因，这与山姆刚刚讲的很多内容都非常相关。但令人惊讶的是，我认为这不是最常见的原因。通常人们有其他这些原因之一，或者，你知道，他们只是为了创业而创业。But yeah, Sam asked me to talk about why you should start a startup. There's a bunch of common reasons that people have, that I hear all the time for why you might start a startup. Its important to know what reason is yours, because some of them only make sense in certain contexts, some of them will actually, like, lead you astray. You may have been mislead by the way that Hollywood or the press likes to romanticize entrepreneurship, so I want to try to illuminate some of those potential fallacies, so you guys can make the decision in a clear way. And then I'll talk about the reason I like best for actually starting a startup, its very related to a lot of what Sam just talked about. But surprisingly, I don't think its the most common reason. Usually people have one of these other reasons, or, you know, they just want to start a company for the sake of starting a company.
你为什么要创业，真的必须认真回答。所有的问题都是被允许的，但，有一些回答和理由做出的创业决定的成功率更加大一点。
所以 4 个常见的原因，列举一下，是因为它很有魅力，你会成为老板，你会有灵活性，尤其是在你的日程安排上，而且你会有机会比加入一家后期公司产生更大的影响和赚更多的钱。So the 4 common reasons, just to enumerate them, are it's glamorous, you'll get to be the boss, you'll have flexibility, especially over your schedule, and you'll have the chance to have bigger impact and make more money then you might by joining a later stage company.
你们可能对这个概念比较熟悉，当我一年前在 Medium 上发表那篇文章时，很多人都读过，我觉得媒体上的故事有点不平衡，创业被相当程度地浪漫化了。电影《社交网络》上映了，它有很多关于创业不好的方面，但主要是描绘了这样一幅画面，有很多派对，你只是从一个精彩的见解跳到另一个精彩的见解，真的让人觉得这是一件很酷的事情。So you guys are probably pretty familiar this concept, when I wrote the Medium post, which a lot of you guys read a year ago, I felt like the story in the press was a little more unbalanced, entrepreneurship got romanticized quite a bit. The movie The Social Network came out, it had a lot of like bad aspects of what it like to be an entrepreneur, but mainly it painted this picture of like, there's a lot of partying and you just kind of move from like one brilliant insight to another brilliant insight, and really made it seem like this really cool thing to do.
我认为现实并非如此有魅力，创业有其丑陋的一面，更重要的是，你实际上花时间做的只是大量的艰苦工作。山姆提到了这一点，但你基本上就是坐在办公桌前，埋头苦干，专注于回复客户支持邮件、做销售、解决棘手的工程问题。所以你要睁大眼睛进入这个领域真的很重要。而且这也非常有压力。这在最近的媒体上是一个热门话题：《经济学人》上周实际上发表了一篇名为 “匿名创业者” 的报道，展示了一位创始人像躲在桌子底下，谈论创始人的抑郁。所以这是非常真实的事情。说实话，如果你创办一家公司，会极其困难。And I think the reality is just not quite so glamorous, there's an ugly side to being an entrepreneur, and more importantly, what you're actually spending your time on is just a lot of hard work. Sam mentioned this, but your basically just sitting at your desk, heads down, focused, answering customer support emails, doing sales, figuring out hard engineering problems. So its really important that you go in with eyes wide open. And then its also quite stressful. This has been a popular topic in the press lately: The Economist actually ran a story just last week called "Entreupeneurs anonymous", and shows a founder like hiding under his desk, talking about founder depression. So this is a very real thing. Let's be real, if you start a company its going to be extremely hard.
为什么这么有压力？有几个原因。一个是你有很多责任。任何职业的人都有对失败的恐惧，这在某种程度上是心理的主要部分。但当你是一名创业者时，你代表自己和所有决定跟随你的人都有对失败的恐惧。所以这真的很有压力。在某些情况下，人们的生计依赖于你，即使不是这样，他们也决定把人生中最美好的时光用来跟随你。所以**你要对他们时间的机会成本负责。**你总是随叫随到，如果有事情发生 —— 也许不是总是在凌晨 3 点，但对于一些初创公司来说是这样的 —— 但如果有重要的事情发生，你就得处理。这就是结局，不管你是不是在度假，不管是不是周末，你都必须时刻保持警惕，在精神上做好准备处理这些事情。这种压力的一个特殊例子是筹款。Why is it so stressful? So a couple reasons. One is you've got a lot of responsibility. People in any career have a fear of failure, its kind of just like a dominant part of the part of the psychology. But when you're an entrepreneur, you have fear of failure on behalf of yourself and all of the people who decided to follow you. So that's really stressful. In some cases people are depending on you for their livelihood, even when that's not true, they've decided to devote the best years of their life to following you. So you're responsible for the opportunity cost of their time. You're always on call, if something comes up—maybe not always at 3 in the morning, but for some startups that's true—but if something important comes up, you're going to deal with it. That's kinda the end of the story, doesn't matter if you're on vacation, doesn't matter if its the weekend, you've got to always be on the ball and be in a place mentally where you're prepared to deal with those things. A sort of special example of this kind of stress is fundraising.
这是《社交网络》中的一个场景。这是我们一边派对一边工作 —— 有人到处喷香槟 ——《社交网络》花了很多时间描绘这些场景。马克不在这个场景里，他们花时间描绘的另一件事是把他描绘成一个大混蛋。So a scene from The Social Network. This is us partying and working at the same time—somebody's spraying champagne everywhere—The Social Network spends a lot of time painting these scenes. Mark's not in the scene, the other thing they spend all their time on is painting him out to be a huge jerk.
这是帕洛阿尔托的一个真实场景，他在这张桌子前花了很多时间，低着头专注工作。马克有时还是有点混蛋，但更像是有趣可爱的那种，而不是反社会、被抛弃的情人那种。所以这只是他表示自己要专注工作、不参与社交的一种方式。This is an actual scene from Palo Alto, he spent a lot of time at this desk, head down and focused. Mark was still kinda a jerk sometimes, but in this more like fun lovable way, and not in a sociopathic, scorned lover way. So this is just him signaling his intention to just be focused and keep working, not be social.
然后是展示顿悟时刻的场景，有点像《美丽心灵》里的场景，他们真的抄袭了那个场景。所以他们喜欢描绘那个场景，然后从一个场景跳到另一个场景，中间穿插着派对。但实际上我们一直在那张桌子前。所以如果你比较这张照片，马克的姿势完全一样，但穿着不同的衣服，所以这肯定是不同的一天。这才是真实的情况。我刚刚讲了这一点；这就是我刚才提到的《经济学人》的文章。
So then there's the scene demonstrating the insight moment, it's kind of like out of A Beautiful Mind, they literally stole that scene. So they like to paint that scene and jump to these moments from other moments, with partying in between. But really we were just at that table the whole time. So if you compare this photo, Mark is in the exact same position but he's wearing different clothes, so this is definitely a different day. That's what it's actually like in person. I just covered this bullet; this is the Economist article I was talking about a second ago.
所以另一种压力是不想要的媒体关注。成为有魅力的一部分是有时你会得到一些积极的媒体关注，登上《时代》杂志的封面并成为年度人物是很不错的。但在《人物》杂志上用你的一张婚纱照做封面可能就没那么好了。这取决于你是谁，我真的很讨厌，但当 Valleywag 分析你的演讲并把你批得体无完肤时，你不想要，绝对不想要。没有人想要。So another form of stress is unwanted media attention. So part of it being glamorous is you get some positive media attention sometimes, it's nice to be on the cover of Time and to be the Person of the Year. It's maybe a little less nice to be on the cover of People with one of your wedding photos. It depends on who you are, I really hate it, but when Valleywag analyzes your lecture and tears you apart, you don't want that, you definitely don't want that. Nobody wants that.
有一件事我几乎从未听人谈论过，那就是你要投入得多得多。所以如果你在一家初创公司，压力很大，事情进展不顺利，你不开心，你可以离开。对于创始人来说，你可以离开，但这非常不酷，而且对你职业生涯的余下部分来说几乎是一个污点。所以如果进展顺利，你真的要投入十年，如果不顺利，可能也要五年左右。所以三年来弄清楚事情不顺利，然后如果你为你的公司找到了一个好的归宿，在收购公司再待两年。如果你在此之前离开，不仅会在经济上伤害自己，还会伤害你所有的员工。所以如果你幸运，有一个糟糕的创业想法，你会很快失败，但大多数时候不是这样的。One thing I almost never hear people talk about is you're much more committed. So if you're at a startup and it's very stressful and things are not going well, you're unhappy, you can just leave. For a founder, you can leave, but it's very uncool and pretty much a black eye for the rest of your career. And so you really are committed for ten years if it's going well and probably more like five years if it's not going well. So three years to figure out it's not going well and then if you find a nice landing for your company, another two years at the acquiring company. If you leave before that, again it's not only going to harm yourself financially but it's going to harm all your employees. So if you're lucky and you have a bad startup idea, you fail quickly, but most of the time it's not like that.
我应该说，我自己的生活中也有很多这样的压力，尤其是在 Facebook 的早期，我变得非常不健康，我不锻炼，我实际上有很多焦虑，几乎每六个月就会把背弄伤，在我二十一、二岁的时候，这相当疯狂。所以如果你真的创办了一家公司，要意识到你将应对这些。你将不得不实际管理这些，这是你的核心职责之一。本・霍洛维茨（Ben Horowitz）喜欢说 CEO 的首要角色是管理自己的心理，这绝对是真的，一定要做好。I should say, I've had a lot of this stress in my own life, especially in the early years of Facebook, I got really unhealthy, I wasn't exercising, I had a lot of anxiety actually threw out my back, like almost every six months, when I was twenty-one or twenty-two, which is pretty crazy. So if you do start a company, be aware that you're going to deal with this. You're going to have to actually manage this, it's one of your core responsibilities. Ben Horowitz likes to say the number one role of a CEO is managing your own psychology, it's absolutely true, make sure you do it.
另一个原因，特别是如果你在其他公司有过其他工作，你会开始形成这样一种说法，比如运营这家公司的人都是白痴，他们做的所有决定，花时间的方式都很愚蠢，我要创办一家公司，我会做得更好。我要制定所有的规则。Another reason, especially if you're had another job at another company, you start to develop this narrative, like the people running this company are idiots, they're making all these decisions and spending all their time in these stupid ways, I'm gonna start a company and I'm going to do it better. I'm going to set all the rules.
听起来不错，很有道理。如果你读过我的媒体文章，你就会知道接下来会发生什么，我给你们一点时间来读一下这段话：Sounds good, makes a lot of sense. If you've read my media post, you'll know what's coming, I'll give you guys a second to read this quote:
人们有这样一种愿景，成为自己创办的公司的 CEO，站在金字塔的顶端。有些人会因此受到激励，但实际情况根本不是这样。People have this vision of being the CEO of a company they started and being on top of the pyramid. Some people are motivated by that, but that’s not at all what it’s like.
实际情况是：其他人都是你的老板 —— 你所有的员工、客户、合作伙伴、用户、媒体都是你的老板。我从来没有像现在这样有这么多老板，需要对这么多人负责。What it’s really like: everyone else is your boss – all of your employees, customers, partners, users, media are your boss. I’ve never had more bosses and needed to account for more people today.
大多数 CEO 的生活就是向其他人汇报，至少我和我认识的大多数 CEO 都是这种感觉。如果你想对人行使权力和权威，那就去参军或者从政。不要成为企业家。The life of most CEOs is reporting to everyone else, at least that’s what it feels like to me and most CEOs I know. If you want to exercise power and authority over people, join the military or go into politics. Don’t be an entrepreneur.
这真的让我产生共鸣。需要指出的一点是，这些决策的现实情况是微妙的。**你认为是白痴的那些人可能不是白痴，他们只是面前有一个非常困难的决定，而且人们从多个方向拉扯他们。**所以作为 CEO，我最常花费时间和精力处理的事情是其他人带给我的问题，其他人创造的其他优先事项，而且通常是以冲突的形式出现。人们想要朝着不同的方向前进，或者客户想要不同的东西。我可能对此有自己的看法，但我在玩的游戏是让谁最不失望，并努力驾驭所有这些困难的情况。This really resonates with me. One thing to point out is that the reality of these decision is nuanced. The people you thought were idiots probably weren't idiots, they just had a really difficult decision in front of them and people pulling them in multiple directions. So the most common thing I have to spend my time on and my energy on as a CEO is dealing with the problems that other people are bringing to me, the other priorities that people create, and it's usually in the form of a conflict. People want to go in different directions or customers want different things. And I might have my own opinions on that, but the game I'm playing is who do I disappoint the least and just trying to navigate all these difficult situations.
即使在日常基础上，我可能在周一进来，对如何改进公司有所有这些宏伟的计划。但如果一个重要的员工威胁要辞职，那就是我的首要任务。那就是我要花费时间的地方。And even on a day to day basis, I might come in on Monday and have all these grand plans for how I'm going to improve the company. But if an important employee is threatening to quit, that's my number one priority. That's what I'm spending my time on.
“你是老板” 的一个子集是你有灵活性，你可以控制自己的日程。这是一个非常有吸引力的想法。所以现实是：A subset of You're the Boss is you have flexibility, you have control over your own schedule. This is a really attractive idea. So here's the reality:
如果你要成为一名企业家，说实话，你实际上会得到一些弹性时间。你可以在一天中的任何 24 小时工作！If you're going to be an entrepreneur, you will actually get some flex time to be honest. You'll be able to work any 24 hours a day you want! -Phil Libin
这也让我深有感触。再次说明其中一些原因，你总是随叫随到。所以也许你并不打算整天工作，但你无法控制是哪些时间。This truly resonates with me as well. Some of the reasons for this again, you're always on call. So maybe you don't intend to work all parts of the day, but you don't control which ones.
你是公司的榜样，这非常重要。所以如果你是一家公司的员工，你可能会有一些好的星期，也可能会有一些不好的星期，有些星期你精力不足，可能想休息几天。但如果你是一名企业家，这就非常糟糕。你的团队会真的根据你的表现来行动。所以如果你放松了，他们也会。You're a role model of the company, and this is super important. So if you're an employee at a company, you might have some good weeks and you might have some bad weeks, some weeks when you're low energy and you might want to take a couple days off. That's really bad if you're an entrepreneur. Your team will really signal off of what you're bringing to the table. So if you take your foot off the gas, so will they.
反正你总是在工作。如果你真的对一个想法充满热情，它会把你拉向它。如果你和优秀的投资者合作，和优秀的合作伙伴合作，他们会非常努力工作，他们也会希望你非常努力工作。You're always working anyways. If you're really passionate about an idea, it's going to pull you towards it. If you're working with great investors, you're working with great partners, they're going to be working really hard, they're going to want you to be working really hard.
有些公司喜欢讲述你可以鱼与熊掌兼得的故事，比如你可以有每周工作 4 天的情况，也许如果你是蒂姆・费里斯（Tim Ferris），你可能每周工作 12 小时。这是一个非常有吸引力的想法，在特定情况下确实有效，那就是如果你实际上想在每个市场都有一个小企业，那么你就是一个小企业主，这有点说不通，但一旦你的团队超过 2 或 3 个人，你真的需要加大力度，全身心投入。Some companies like to tell the story about you can have your cake and eat it too, you can have like 4 days work weeks maybe, if you're Tim Ferris maybe you can have a 12 hours work week. It's a really attractive idea and it does work in a particular instance which is if you wanna actually have a small business to go after in each market then you are a small business entrepreneur, that makes little sense but as soon as you get past like 2 or 3 people you really need to step it up and be full-time committed.
你会赚更多的钱，产生更大的影响You'll make more money and have more impact
这是最重要的一点，也是我听到最多的，尤其是像申请 Asana 的候选人，他们告诉我 “你知道，我真的很想为小得多的公司工作或者自己创业，因为这样我就能在馅饼中分得更大的一块，或者对公司的发展有更大的影响，我会有更多的股权，所以我也会赚更多的钱”。所以让我们来研究一下什么时候这可能是真的。This is the big one, the one I hear the most especially like candidates applying to Asana, they tell me "You know I'd really like to work for much smaller companies or start my own because then I have a much bigger slice of the pie or have much more impact on how that company does and I'll have more equity so I'll make more money as well". So let's examine when this might be true.
我来解释一下这些表格。它们有点复杂，但我们先关注左边的。这些只是在解释 Dropbox 和 Facebook，这是它们目前的估值，以及作为第 100 名员工进入这些公司你可能会赚到多少钱，特别是如果你是一个有经验、相对有经验的工程师，有大约 5 年的行业经验，你很可能会得到大约 10 个基点的报价。如果你几年前加入 Dropbox，你已经锁定的上行空间约为 1000 万美元，而且还有很多增长空间。如果你在 Facebook 成立几年后加入，你已经赚了大约 2 亿美元，这是一个巨大的数字，即使你是第 1000 名员工加入，也就是在 2009 年左右加入，你仍然能赚 2000 万美元，这是一个巨大的数字，这就是当你考虑作为一名企业家你可能会赚多少钱时应该参考的基准。I'll explain these tables. They're a little complex but let's focus on the left first. These are just explaining Dropbox and Facebook, these are their current valuations and this is how much money you might make as employee number 100 coming into these companies especially if you're like an experienced, relatively experienced engineer, you have like 5 years of industry experience, you're pretty likely to have an offer that's around 10 base points. If you joined Dropbox couple years ago the upside you've already locked in is about 10M and there's plenty more growth from there. If you joined Facebook a couple years into its existence you've already made around 200M, this is a huge number and even if you joined Facebook as employee number 1000, so you joined like 2009, you still make $20M, that's a giant number and that's how you should be benchmarking when you're thinking about what you might make as an entrepreneur.
转到右边的表格，这是两个你可能创办的理论公司。“宠物保姆的优步（Uber for Pet Sitting）”，如果你真的很适合这个，你可能有很好的机会建立一个价值 1 亿美元的公司，你在该公司的份额可能在 10% 左右；这当然波动很大，有些创始人拥有的比这更多，有些创始人拥有的少得多，但经过多轮稀释，多轮期权池创建，你很可能最终会在这个位置。如果你拥有的比这更多，我建议你看看山姆关于创始人和员工之间股权分配的文章，你可能应该给出更多。Moving over to the table on the right, these are two theoretical companies you might start. "Uber for Pet Sitting", pretty good idea if you're really well suited to this you might have a really good shot at building a $100M company and your share of that company is likely to be around 10%; that certainly fluctuates a lot, some founders have more than this, some founders have a lot less, but after multiple rounds of dilution, multiple rounds of option pool creation you're pretty likely to end up about here. If you have more than this I'd recommend Sam's post on equity split between founders and employees, you should be probably giving out more.
所以基本上，如果你对建立一个价值 1 亿美元的公司非常有信心，这是一个很大的要求，不用说，对于 2009 年的 Facebook 或 2014 年的 Dropbox，你应该比一个甚至还不存在的初创公司更有信心，那么这是值得做的。如果你有一个价值 1 亿美元的想法，并且你很有信心能够执行它，我会考虑的。So basically if you're extremely confident in building a 100M, which is a big ask, it should go without saying that you should have a lot more confidence on Facebook in 2009 or Dropbox in 2014 that you might for a startup that doesn't even exist yet, then this is worth doing. If you have a $100M idea and you're pretty confident you can execute it I'd consider that.
如果你认为你是建立 “太空旅行的优步（Uber for Space Travel）” 的合适企业家，这是一个非常大的想法，价值 20 亿美元，你实际上会有一个相当不错的回报，你绝对应该去做，这也是 4 年后的价值，而且这个想法可能有潜力，绝对要去追求，如果你的想法是建立这个，你可能现在就不应该在这个课堂上，直接去建立那家公司。If you think you're the right entrepreneur to build "Uber for Space Travel", that's a really huge idea, $2B idea, you're actually gonna have a pretty good return for that, you should definitely do that, this is also the value only after 4 years and this idea probably has legs, definitely go after that, if you're thinking of building that you probably shouldn't even be in this class right now, just go build that company.
那么为什么这是财务回报和影响呢？我真的认为财务回报与我们对世界的影响密切相关，如果你不相信，让我们通过一些具体的例子来讨论，完全不考虑股权。So why is this financial reward and impact? I really think that financial reward is very strongly correlated with the impact we have on the world, if you don't believe that let's talk through some specific examples and not think about the equity at all.
那么为什么加入一家后期公司实际上可能会有很大的影响，你会得到这个力量乘数：他们有现有的大量用户基础，如果是 Facebook 那就是 10 亿用户，如果是 Google 那就是 10 亿用户，他们有现有的基础设施你可以在此基础上构建，对于像 AWS 这样的新创业公司和所有这些很棒的独立服务提供商来说，这也越来越真实，但你通常会得到一些微型专有技术，他们会为你维护，这是一个非常好的起点。而且你可以和一个团队一起工作，这将帮助你把你的想法转化为伟大的东西。So why might joining a late stage company actually might have a lot of impact, you get this force multiplier: they have an existing mass of user base, if it's Facebook it's a billion users, if it's Google it's a billion users, they have existing infrastructures you get to build on, that's also increasingly true for a new startup like AWS and all these awesome independent service providers, but you usually get some micro-proprietary technology and they maintain it for you, it's a pretty great place to start. And you get to work with a team, it'll help you leverage your ideas into something great.
所以几个具体的例子，布雷特・泰勒（Bret Taylor）在大约第 1500 名员工时进入 Google，他发明了 Google Maps，这是你们可能每天都使用的产品，我来这里就用了它，全世界有数亿人在使用。他不需要创办一家公司来做到这一点，他碰巧获得了巨大的财务回报，但关键是再次产生了巨大的影响。So couple specific examples, Bret Taylor came into Google as around employee number 1500 and he invented Google Maps, that's a product you guys probably use everyday, I used it to get here and it's used by hundreds of millions of people around the world. He didn't need to start a company to do that, he happened to get a big financial reward, but the point is yet again massive impact.
我的联合创始人贾斯汀・罗森斯坦（Justin Rosenstein）在布雷特之后不久加入了 Google，他在那里是一名产品经理，作为一个副项目，他最终制作了一个聊天的原型，曾经是一个独立的应用程序，集成在 Gmail 中，就像你在右上角看到的那样，在他做这个之前，你甚至无法想象你可以通过 Ajax 聊天或者在浏览器中聊天，他只是展示了它并给他的团队看，然后实现了它。这可能是你们大多数人几乎每天都使用的产品。My cofounder Justin Rosenstein joined Google a little later after Brett, he was a PM there and just as a side project he ended up prototyping a chat which used to be a stand-alone app, integrated in Gmail like you see in the upper right there and before he did that like you couldn't even think you could chat over Ajax or chat in the browser at all and he just kinda demonstrated it and showed it to his team and made it happen. This is probably a product most of you use almost everyday.
也许更令人印象深刻的是，在那之后不久，贾斯汀离开并成为 Facebook 大约第 250 名员工，他和安德鲁・博斯沃思（Andrew Bosworth）和莉亚・珀尔曼（Leah Pearlman）等人领导了一个黑客马拉松项目，创建了 “赞” 按钮，这是网络上任何地方最受欢迎的元素之一，完全改变了人们使用网络的方式，而且他又一次不需要创办一家公司来做到这一点，如果他尝试了，几乎肯定会失败，因为他真的需要 Facebook 的分发来使其发挥作用。Perhaps even more impressively, shortly after that Justin left and became employee around 250 at Facebook and he led a hackaton project along with people like Andrew Bosworth and Leah Pearlman to create the Like button, this is one of the most popular elements anywhere on the web, totally changed how people use it and then again didn't need to start a company to do it and almost certainly would have failed if he had tried because he really needed the distribution of Facebook to make it work.
所以重要的是要记住你试图创办的公司的背景，以及你实际上能够在哪里实现它。So important to keep in mind the context for what kind of company you're trying to start and like where you will actually be able to make it happen.
以上的内容也像一个“压力测试”，听完以上所有的内容，你是否继续坚定创业的想法？你是否继续要选择创业？是否对自己的创业项目热情满满？
那么最好的原因是什么？So what's the best reason?
山姆已经稍微谈到了这一点，但基本上你不能不做。你对这个想法超级热情，你是做这件事的合适人选，你必须让它发生。那么这是如何分解的呢？Sam already talked about this a little bit, but basically you can't not do it. You're super passionate about this idea, you're the right person to do it, you've gotta make it happen. So how does this break down?
这是一个文字游戏，“你不能不做” 有两种方式。一种是你对它如此热情，以至于你必须去做，而且无论如何你都会去做。这真的很重要，因为你需要这种热情来度过我们之前谈到的作为企业家的所有艰难部分。你还需要它来有效地招聘，候选人能察觉到你是否没有热情，而且有足够多有热情的企业家，所以他们不妨为其中之一工作！所以这是成为企业家的基本要求。你的潜意识也能告诉你什么时候你没有热情，这可能是一个巨大的问题。This is a wordplay, you can't not do it in two ways. One is you're so passionate about it that you have to do it and you're going to do it anyways. This is really important because you'll need that passion to get through all of those hard parts of being an entrepreneur that we talked about earlier. You'll also need it to effectively recruit, candidates can smell when you don't have passion and there are enough entrepreneurs out there that do have passion so they may as well work for one of those! So this is table stakes for being an entrepreneur. Your subconscious can also tell when you don't have passion and that can be a huge problem.
另一种解释方式是世界需要你去做。这验证了这个想法是重要的，它会让世界变得更美好，所以世界需要它。如果这不是世界需要的东西，那就去做世界需要的事情。你的时间真的很宝贵，有很多好的想法，也许不是你自己的，也许是在一家现有的公司，但你不妨致力于一些会好的事情。The other way to interpret this is the world needs you to do it. This is validation that the idea is important, that it's going to make the world better, so the world needs it. If it's not something the world needs, go do something the world needs. Your time is really valuable, there are plenty of good ideas out there, maybe it's not your own, maybe it's at an existing company, but you may as well work on something that's going to be good.
第二种解释这个的方式是世界需要你去做。你在某种程度上实际上非常适合这个问题。如果不是这样，这可能是一个迹象，表明你的时间在其他地方会更好地被利用。但在最好的情况下，如果不是这样，你在竞争中超过了真正适合的团队，这对世界来说是一个次优的结果，感觉不太好。The second way to interpret this is that the world needs you to do it. You're actually well suited for this problem in some way. If this isn't true, it may be a sign that your time is better spent somewhere else. But best case scenario if this isn't true, you outcompete the team for which it is true and it's a suboptimal outcome for the world and that doesn't feel very good.
所以回到我在 Asana 的经历，贾斯汀和我在创办 Asana 之前是不情愿的企业家，我们在 Facebook 工作，我们在解决一个很棒的问题。我们基本上会整天在我们的正常项目上工作，然后在晚上我们会继续在公司内部使用的这个内部任务管理器上工作，只是因为我们对这个想法非常热情，它显然非常有价值，我们别无选择。So drawing this back to my own experience at Asana, Justin and I were reluctant entrepreneurs before we founded Asana, we were working at Facebook and we were working on a great problem. We would basically work all day long on our normal projects and then at night we would keep working on this internal task manager that was used internally at the company and it was just because we were so passionate about the idea, it was so clearly valuable that we couldn't do anything else.
在某个时候，我们不得不进行艰难的对话，好吧，如果我们实际上不创办这家公司意味着什么。我们可以看到它在 Facebook 产生的影响，我们确信它对世界是有价值的。我们也确信没有人会去建立它，这个问题已经存在很长时间了，我们只是不断看到对它的渐进式解决方案，所以我们相信，如果我们不拿出我们认为是最好的解决方案，会有很多价值被浪费。我们无法停止在这上面工作，实际上这个想法在我们心中不断涌现，迫使自己走向世界。我认为这真的是你创办一家公司时应该寻找的感觉，这就是你知道你有正确想法的方式。And at some point we had to have the hard conversation of okay what does it mean if we don't actually start this company. We could see the impact it was having at Facebook, we were convinced it was valuable to the world. We were also convinced no one else was going to build it, the problem had been around a long time and we just kept seeing incremental solutions to it and so we believed if we didn't come out with the solution we thought was best, there would be a lot of value left on the table. We couldn't stop working on it and literally the idea was beating itself out of our chests and forcing itself out into the world. And I think that's really the feeling you should be looking for when you start a company, that's how you know you have the right idea.
我就在这里结束。我会在这里推荐一些书。I'll go ahead and stop there. I'll put some recommended books up here.
你完全可以采用我在《搜索》中讲述的搜索电子版的方法阅读这一些书籍。
这个事情值得长期做吗？
复制放大的想象空间是怎么样的？增长率曲线陡峭吗？ 市场的增长是怎么样？属于我的有多少？ 这是一个长期存在且需要解决的问题吗？ 必须要现在创业吗？为什么不是10年后？为什么不是5年前？
在开始今天的讲座之前，我想回答一些人们通过电子邮件向我提出的关于上一堂课的问题，我们当时没有时间回答。所以，如果您对上一次我们讲的内容有问题，现在我很乐意回答，从您开始。Before I jump into today's lecture, I wanted to answer a few questions people had emailed me about the last lecture that we didn't have time for. So, if you have a question about what we covered last time, I am welcome to answer it now, starting with you.
问：我如何确定一个市场现在以及未来十年都有快速的增长率？Q: How do I identify if a market has a fast growth rate now and also for the next ten years?
答：关于这个问题的好消息是，这是学生所具有的一大优势。在这方面您应该相信自己的直觉。年长的人基本上得猜测年轻人正在使用的技术。但您可以观察自己和朋友正在做的事情，几乎可以肯定您的直觉会比任何比您年长的人都好。所以答案就是相信您的直觉，多思考您正在做的事情，思考您正在使用的东西，您这个年龄段的人正在使用的东西，那几乎肯定就是未来。A: The good news about this is this is one of the big advantages students have. You should just trust your instincts on this. Older people have to basically guess about the technologies young people are using. But you can just watch what you're doing and what your friends are doing and you will almost certainly have better instincts than anybody older than you. And so the answer to this is just trust your instincts, think about what you're doing more, think about what you're using, what you're seeing people your age using, that will almost certainly be the future.
好的，在开始之前，再回答一个关于上一堂课的问题。Okay, one more question on the last lecture before we start.
问：在保持高效并持续高效的同时，如何应对职业倦怠？Q: How do you deal with burnout while still being productive and remaining productive.
答：答案就是这很糟糕，但您还得继续前进。不像学生，您可以摊开双手说，我真的精疲力竭了，这季度我成绩会很差，但经营一家初创公司的困难之一在于这是现实生活，您必须挺过去。典型的建议是去度假，但这对创始人从来都不管用。它在某种程度上是完全消耗性的，很难理解。A: The answer to this is just that it sucks and you keep going. Unlike a student where you can throw up your hands and say you know I'm really burnt out and I'm just going to get bad grades this quarter, one of the hard parts about running a startup is that it's real life and you just have to get through it. The canonical advice is to go on a vacation and that never works for founders. It's sort of all consuming in this way that is very difficult to understand.
所以您要做的就是继续前进。您要依靠他人，这真的很重要，创始人的抑郁是一件严重的事情，您需要有一个支持网络。但克服职业倦怠的方法就是解决挑战，解决出问题的事情，最终您会感觉好起来的。So what you do is you just keep going. You rely on people, it's really important, founder depression is a serious thing and you need to have a support network. But the way through burn out is just to address the challenges, to address the things that are going wrong and you'll eventually feel better.****
在上一堂课中，我们讲了想法和产品，我想强调的是，如果您在这两方面没做好，后面的内容都救不了您。今天，我们要谈论如何招聘以及如何执行。希望您不会解雇您招聘的人。有时会这样。Last lecture, we covered the idea and the product and I want to emphasize that if you don't get those right, none of the rest of this is going to save you. Today, we're going to talk about how to hire and how to execute. Hopefully you don't execute the people you hire. Sometimes.
首先，我想谈谈联合创始人。联合创始人之间的关系是整个公司中最重要的关系之一。每个人都说您必须留意联合创始人之间逐渐产生的紧张关系，并立即解决。这都是真的，当然在 YC 的案例中，初创公司早期夭折的首要原因就是联合创始人之间的冲突。但出于某种原因，很多人对待选择联合创始人的重视程度甚至还不如招聘员工。不要这样做！这是您在初创公司生涯中做出的最重要的决定之一，您需要认真对待。First, I want to talk about cofounders. Cofounder relationships are among the most important in the entire company. Everyone says you have to watch out for tension brewing among cofounders and you have to address is immediately. That's all true and certainly in YC's case, the number one cause of early death for startups is cofounder blowups. But for some reason, a lot of people treat choosing their cofounder with even less importance than hiring. Don't do this! [This is one of the most important decisions you make in the life of your startup and you need to treat it as such.
出于某种原因，学生在这方面真的很糟糕。他们随便挑个人。他们会说，我想创业，您也想创业，那咱们一起创办一家初创公司吧。有这种联合创始人相亲的活动，您会说，嘿，我在找联合创始人，咱们彼此不了解，咱们一起开公司吧。这太疯狂了。您绝不会这样雇佣员工，但人们却愿意以这种方式选择商业伙伴。这真的非常糟糕。选择一个随机的联合创始人，或者选择一个您没有长期交往历史的人，选择一个不是您朋友的人，所以当事情真的变得糟糕时，您没有那种过去的历史来把你们绑在一起，通常会以灾难告终。And for some reason, students are really bad at this. They just pick someone. They're like, I want to start a business and you want to start a business, let's start a startup together. There are these cofounder dating things where you're like, Hey I'm looking for a cofounder, we don't really know each other, let's start a company. And this is like, crazy. You would never hire someone like this and yet people are willing to choose their business partners this way. It's really really bad. And choosing a random random cofounder, or choosing someone you don't have a long history with, choosing someone you're not friends with, so when things are really going wrong, you have this sort of past history to bind you together, usually ends up in disaster.
联合创始人需要一些特点以至于最终必须绑定着走到最后的终点。
我们有一批 YC 公司，在我们面试这些公司到它们启动之间，大约 75 家公司中有 9 家增加了一个新的联合创始人，而这 9 个团队在接下来的一年里都分崩离析了。联合创始人彼此不了解的公司的记录真的很糟糕We had one YC batch in which nine out of about seventy-five companies added on a new cofounder between when we interviewed the companies and when they started, and all nine of those teams fell apart within the next year. The track record for companies where the cofounders don't know each other is really bad.
结识联合创始人的一个好方法是在大学里认识。如果您不在大学并且不认识联合创始人，我认为接下来最好的办法是去一家有趣的公司工作。如果您在 Facebook 或 Google 之类的公司工作，那里几乎和斯坦福一样容易找到联合创始人。没有联合创始人总比有一个糟糕的联合创始人好，但作为一个单独的创始人仍然不好。在我们开始之前，我刚刚看了一下统计数据。对于最顶尖的，我可能漏了一个，因为我数得很快，但我想，**对于 YC 最有价值的前 20 家公司，几乎所有公司都至少有两个创始人。**而且我们可能为十分之一的单独团队提供了资金。A good way to meet a cofounder is to meet in college. If you're not in college and you don't know a cofounder, the next best thing I think is to go work at an interesting company. If you work at Facebook or Google or something like that, it's almost as cofounder rich as Stanford. It's better to have no cofounder than to have a bad cofounder, but it's still bad to be a solo founder. I was just looking at the stats here before we started. For the top, and I may have missed one because I was counting quickly, but I think, for the top twenty most valuable YC companies, almost all of them have at least two founders. And we probably funded a rate of like one out of ten solo teams.
所以，最好是认识的联合创始人，次一点但仍然可以的是单独创始人。随机遇到的联合创始人，然而学生出于某种原因会这样做，真的非常糟糕。So, best of all, cofounder you know, not as good as that, but still okay, solo founder. Random founder you meet, and yet students do this for some reason, really really bad.
所以当您考虑联合创始人以及可能合适的人时，就会有一个您在寻找什么样的人的问题，对吧？在 YC 我们有一个公开的表述，那就是 “不懈地足智多谋”，每个人都听说过。您肯定需要不懈地足智多谋的联合创始人，但在 YC 的启动会上，我们分享了一个更生动的例子。保罗・格雷厄姆（Paul Graham）开始使用这个例子，我一直在沿用。So as you're thinking about cofounders and people that could be good, there's a question of what you're looking for right? At YC we have this public phrase, and it's relentlessly resourceful, and everyone's heard of it. And you definitely need relentlessly resourceful cofounders, but there's a more colorful example that we share at the YC kickoff. Paul Graham started using this and I've kept it going.
所以，您要寻找的联合创始人需要镇定自若、坚强，他们在任何情况下都知道该怎么做。他们行动迅速，果断，有创造力，随时准备应对任何事情，事实证明，在流行文化中有这样一个模型。这听起来很傻，但至少很令人难忘，我们很久以来都跟每一届 YC 的班级讲这个，我认为这对他们有帮助。So, you're looking for cofounders that need to be unflappable, tough, they know what to do in every situation. They act quickly, they're decisive, they're creative, they're ready for anything, and it turns out that there's a model for this in pop culture. And it sounds very dumb, but it's at least very memorable and we've told every class of YC this for a long time and I think it helps them.
这个模型就是詹姆斯・邦德（James Bond）。再说一次，这听起来很疯狂，但至少会留在您的记忆中，您需要一个表现得像詹姆斯・邦德的人，而不仅仅是在某个特定领域的专家。And that model is James Bond. And again, this sounds crazy, but it will at least stick in your memory and you need someone that behaves like James Bond more than you need someone that is an expert in some particular domain.
正如我之前提到的，您真的想了解您的联合创始人一段时间，理想情况下是几年。对于早期员工也是如此，但顺便说一句，在早期员工方面，更多的人做对了这一点，而在联合创始人方面却没有。所以，利用好学校。除了不懈地足智多谋，您还想要一个坚强和冷静的联合创始人。有些明显的特质比如聪明，但每个人都知道您想要聪明的联合创始人，但他们没有足够重视像坚强和冷静这样的特质，特别是如果您觉得自己不是这样，您就需要一个这样的联合创始人。如果您不懂技术，即使这个房间里的大多数人觉得自己懂，您也需要一个懂技术的联合创始人。在初创公司中现在有一种奇怪的现象，流行说，您知道吗，我们不需要技术联合创始人，我们会雇佣人员，我们只是要成为优秀的管理者。As I mentioned earlier, you really want to know your cofounders for awhile, ideally years. This is especially true for early hires as well, but incidentally, more people get this right for early hires than they do for cofounders. So, take advantage of school. In addition to relentlessly resourceful, you want a tough and a calm cofounder. There are obvious things like smart, but everyone knows you want a smart cofounder, they don't prioritize things like tough and calm enough, especially if you feel like you yourself aren't, you need a cofounder who is. If you aren't technical, and even if most of the people in this room feel like they are, you want a technical cofounder. There's this weird thing going on in startups right now where it's become popular to say, You know what, we don't need a technical cofounders, we're gonna hire people, we're just gonna be great managers.
如何吸引这样的联合创始人？查理·芒格给出了一个很好的答案：得到你想要的最好的方法就是让自己配得上你想要的东西。对方也不傻，所有你也只能同时吸引别人，然后愿意成为联合创始人。
根据我们的经验，这效果不太好。软件人员真的应该创办软件公司。媒体人员应该创办媒体公司。在 YC 的经验中，两个或三个联合创始人似乎是完美的。一个，显然不太好，五个，非常糟糕。四个有时行得通，但我认为目标是两个或三个。That doesn't work too well in our experience. Software people should really be starting software companies. Media people should be starting media companies. In the YC experience, two or three cofounders seems to be about perfect. One, obviously not great, five, really bad. Four works sometimes, but two or three I think is the target.
**关于如何招聘的第二部分：尽量不要。**当您创办一家公司时，您会注意到一个奇怪的事情，就是每个人都会问您有多少员工。**这是人们用来判断您的初创公司有多真实、您有多酷的指标。**如果您说您有很多员工，他们会非常钦佩。如果您说您的员工数量少，那您听起来就像个小笑话。但实际上有很多员工是很糟糕的，您应该为您的员工数量少而感到自豪。很多员工最终会导致像高消耗率这样的问题，意味着您每个月都损失很多钱，复杂，决策缓慢，这样的问题不胜枚举，没有一个是好的。The second part of how to hire: try not to. One of the weird things you'll notice as you start a company, is that everyone will ask you how many employees you have. And this is the metric people use to judge how real your startup is and how cool you are. And if you say you have a high number of employees, they're really impressed. And if you say you have a low number of employees, then you sound like this little joke. But actually it sucks to have a lot of employees, and you should be proud of how few employees you have. Lots of employees ends up with things like a high burn rate, meaning you're losing a lot of money every month, complexity, slow decision making, the list goes on and it's nothing good.
社会认同，寻求别人的认同，往往是独立思考的敌人。
- 你应该为更少的员工而骄傲。
**所以您应该为用少量员工就能完成很多事情而感到自豪。**许多最优秀的 YC 公司在第一年员工数量都非常少，有时除了创始人之外没有其他人。他们真的会尽可能长时间地保持小规模。在开始时，您应该只在迫切需要的时候才招聘。之后，您应该学会快速招聘并扩大公司规模，但在早期，目标应该是不招聘。其中一个原因是，早期招聘错误的成本非常高。事实上，我参与的很多公司，在最初的大约三名员工中进行了非常糟糕的早期招聘，就再也没有恢复过来，这直接毁了公司。So you want to be proud of how much you can get done with a small numbers of employees. Many of the best YC companies have had a phenomenally small number of employees for their first year, sometimes none besides the founders. They really try to stay small as long as they possibly can. At the beginning, you should only hire when you desperately need to. Later, you should learn to hire fast and scale up the company, but in the early days the goal should be not to hire. And one of the reasons this is so bad, is that the cost of getting an early hire wrong is really high. In fact, a lot of the companies that I've been very involved with, that have had a very bad early hire in the first three or so employees never recover, it just kills the company.
因为早起创业阶段，你可能还没有证明自己有“前途”，那一些真正厉害的人、有激情的人可能并不愿意来到你的公司。
爱彼迎（Airbnb）花了五个月的时间面试他们的第一位员工。在第一年，他们只雇佣了两个人。在雇佣第一个人之前，他们写下了一份他们希望任何爱彼迎员工都具备的**文化价值观清单。**其中之一就是你必须热爱爱彼迎，如果你不同意这一点，他们就不会雇佣你。Airbnb spent five months interviewing their first employee. And in their first year, they only hired two. Before they hired a single person, they wrote down a list of the culture values that they wanted any Airbnb employee to have. One of those what that you had to bleed Airbnb, and if you didn't agree to that they just wouldn't hire you.
以爱彼迎首席执行官布莱恩・切斯基（Brian Chesky）为例，他曾经问别人，如果他们被诊断出只剩下一年的生命，他们是否会接受这份工作。后来他觉得这有点太疯狂了，我想他把时间放宽到了十年，但据我所知，他仍然会问这个问题。As an example of how intense Brian Chesky is, he's the Airbnb CEO, he used to ask people if they would take the job if they got a medical diagnosis that they have one year left to life. Later he decided that that was a little bit too crazy and I think he relaxed it to ten years, but last I heard, he still asks that question.
这些员工真的很重要，他们将继续定义你的公司，所以你需要那些几乎和你一样相信公司的人。这听起来像是一个疯狂的要求，但他得到了这样一种文化，即在公司面临危机时，非常敬业的人会团结在一起。当公司在早期面临重大危机时，每个人都住在办公室里，每天都在运送产品，直到危机结束。关于爱彼迎的一个显著观察是，如果你与前 40 名左右的员工交谈，他们都觉得自己是公司成立的一部分。These hires really matter, these people are what go on to define your company, and so you need people that believe in it almost as much as you do. And it sounds like a crazy thing to ask, but he's gotten this culture of extremely dedicated people that come together when the company faces a crisis. And when the company faced a big crisis early on, everyone lived in the office, and they shipped product every day until the crisis was over. One of the remarkable observations about Airbnb is that if you talk to any of the first forty or so employees, they all feel like they were a [part of the founding of the company.
但是，通过设置极高的门槛，通过缓慢招聘确保每个人都相信公司的使命，你就可以做到这一点。假设你听从了不要招聘的警告，除非你绝对必须招聘。当你处于招聘模式时，招聘最优秀的人才应该是你的首要任务。就像在产品模式下，这应该是你的首要任务。当你在融资模式下，融资是你的首要任务。But by having an extremely high bar, by hiring slowly ensures that everyone believes in the mission, you can get that. So let's say, you listened to the warning about not hiring unless you absolutely have too. When you're in this hiring mode, it should be your number one priority to get the best people. Just like when you're in product mode that should be your number one priority. And when you're in fundraising mode, fundraising is your number one priority.
创始人总是低估的一件事是招聘的难度。你认为你有这个伟大的想法，每个人都会加入。但事实并非如此。为了得到最优秀的人才，他们有很多好的选择，所以招聘一个人很容易需要一年的时间。这是一个漫长的过程，所以你必须让他们相信你的使命是他们所关注的最重要的事情。这是为什么在考虑其他任何事情之前正确地获得产品非常重要的另一个例子。最优秀的人知道他们应该加入一个快速发展的公司。On thing that founders always underestimate is how hard it is to recruit. You think you have this great idea and everyone's going to join. But that's not how it works. To get the very best people, they have a lot of great options and so it can easily take a year to recruit someone. It's this long process and so you have to convince them that your mission is the most important of anything that they're looking at. This is another case of why it's really important to get the product right before looking at anything else. The best people know that they should join a rocketship.
顺便说一句，如果你要加入一家初创公司，这是我给你的第一条建议，选择一家快速发展的公司。选择一家已经在运作但还没有被所有人意识到的公司，但你知道，因为你在关注，它会变得非常巨大。而且，你通常可以识别这些公司。但是优秀的人知道这一点，所以优秀的人会等待，看看你是否在这条轨迹上，然后再加入。By the way, that's my number one piece of advice if you're going to join a startup, is pick a rocketship. Pick a company that's already working and that not everyone yet realizes that, but you know because you're paying attention, that it's going to be huge. And again, you can usually identify these. But good people know this, and so good people will wait, to see that you're on this trajectory before they join.
今天早上有人在网上问了一个问题，你应该在招聘上花多少时间。答案是零或 25%。你要么根本不招聘，要么这可能是你最大的一块时间。实际上，所有这些管理书籍都说你应该把 50% 的时间花在招聘上，但给出这个建议的人，他们自己很少能花 10% 的时间。25% 仍然是很长的一段时间，但这确实是你进入招聘模式后应该花的时间。One question that people asked online this morning was how much time you should be spending on hiring. The answer is zero or twenty-five percent. You're either not hiring at all or it's probably your single biggest block of time. In practice, all these books on management say you should spend fifty percent of your time hiring, but the people that give that advice, it's rare for them to even spend ten percent themselves. Twenty-five percent is still a huge amount of time, but that's really how much you should be doing once you're in hiring mode.
如果你妥协并雇佣了一个平庸的人，你会一直后悔的。我们喜欢警告创始人这一点，但直到他们第一次犯错，才会真正感受到这一点，但这可能会毒害公司文化。大公司里的平庸之人会带来一些问题，但不会杀死公司。在前五名中，一个平庸的雇佣者往往会杀死一家初创公司。If you compromise and hire someone mediocre you will always regret it. We like to warn founders of this but no one really feels it until they make the mistake the first time, but it can poison the culture. Mediocre people at huge companies will cause some problems, but it won't kill the company. A single mediocre hire within the first five will often in fact kill a startup.
我的一个朋友在会议室里挂了一个牌子，他用这个牌子来面试，他把牌子放在候选人在面试时能看到的位置，上面写着 “平庸的工程师不会造就伟大的公司”。是的，这是真的，这是真的。在大公司里，你可以侥幸逃脱，因为人们只是从裂缝中掉下去，但初创公司的每个人都设定了基调。所以如果你在前五、十次招聘中妥协，可能会杀死公司。你可以想想你雇佣的每一个人：我会把公司的未来押在这个人身上吗？这是一个很高的标准。在公司的某个时候，当你变大时，你会在招聘上妥协。会有一些紧迫的最后期限或类似的事情，你仍然会后悔。但这就是理论和实践的区别，我们稍后会让其他演讲者谈谈当这种情况发生时该怎么办。但在早期，你不能搞砸。A friend of mine has a sign up in the conference room that he uses for interviews and he positions the sign that the candidate is looking at it during the interview and it says that mediocre engineers do not build great companies. Yeah that's true, it’s really true. You can get away with it in a big company because people just sort of fall through the cracks but every person at a startup sets the tone. So if you compromise in the first five, ten hires it might kill the company. And you can think about that for everyone you hire: will I bet the future of this company on this single hire? And that's a tough bar. At some point in the company, when you're bigger, you will compromise on a hire. There will be some pressing deadline or something like that you will still regret. But this is the difference between theory and practice we're going to have later speakers talk about what to do when this happens. But in the early days you just can't screw it up.
候选人的来源。这是学生们经常犯的另一个错误。**到目前为止，最好的招聘来源是你已经认识的人和公司其他员工已经认识的人。**大多数伟大的公司在文本上都是通过个人推荐在前一百名员工甚至更多的员工中建立起来的。大多数创始人都觉得很尴尬，但给他们遇到的任何优秀的人打电话，并要求他们的员工也这样做。但如果你去 Facebook 或 Google 工作，你会注意到他们在你入职的前几周会做的一件事是，人力资源人员会让你坐下，从你认识的每一个聪明人中挑选出能招聘到的人。Sources of candidates. This is another thing that students get wrong a lot. The best source for hiring by far is people that you already know and people that other employees in the company already know. Most great companies in text have been built by personal referrals for the first hundred employees and often many more. Most founders feel awkward but calling anyone good that they've ever met and asking their employees to do the same. But she'll notice if you go to work at Facebook or Google one of the things they do in your first few weeks is an HR person sits you down and beat out of you every smart person you’ve ever met to be able to recruit them.
这些个人推荐真的是招聘的诀窍。另一个建议是看看硅谷之外的地方。在这里招聘工程师竞争非常激烈，但你可能认识世界其他地方的人，他们愿意和你一起工作。These personal referrals really are the trick to hiring. Another tip is to look outside the valley. It is brutally competitive to hire engineers here but you probably know people elsewhere in the world that would like to work with you.
创始人经常问我们的另一个问题是经验有多重要。**简短的回答是，经验对某些角色很重要，对其他角色则不重要。**当你要雇佣一个将管理你组织的很大一部分的人时，经验可能非常重要。对于你在初创公司早期雇佣的大多数人来说，经验可能并不那么重要，你应该选择资质和对自己所做事情的信念。我一生中做过的最好的招聘中，有很多人以前从未做过这件事。所以这真的值得思考，这个角色我是否在乎经验。你会经常发现，尤其是在早期，你并不在乎。Another question that founders ask us a lot about his experience and how much that matters. The short version here is that experience matters for some roles and not for others. When you're hiring someone that is going to run a large part of your organization experience probably matters a lot. For most of the early hires that you make at a startup, experience probably doesn't matter that much and you should go for aptitude and belief in what you’re doing. Most of the best hires that I've made in my entire life have never done that thing before. So it's really worth thinking, is this a role where I care about experience or not. And you'll often find to don’t, especially in the early days.
在招聘时，我会关注三个方面。他们聪明吗？他们能把事情做好吗？我想和他们共度很多时间吗？如果我能得到一个答案，如果我能对这三个方面都说 “是”，我就不会后悔，而且几乎总是能成功。你可以在面试中了解到很多关于这三个方面的事情，但最好的方法是一起工作，所以理想情况下，你应该找一个你过去一起工作过的人，在这种情况下，你可能甚至不需要面试。如果你没有，那么我认为在雇佣他们之前，和他们一起做一两天的项目会更好。你们都会学到很多，他们也会学到很多，而且大多数第一次创业的人都是很差的面试官，但在合作之后，他们非常善于评估别人。There are three things I look for in a hire. Are they smart? Do they get things done? Do I want to spend a lot of time around them? And if I get an answer, if I can say yes to all three of these, I never regret it, it's almost always worked out. You can learn a lot about all three of these things in an interview but the very best way is working together, so ideally someone you've worked together with in the past and in that case you probably don't even need an interview. If you haven't, then I think it's way better to work with someone on a project for a day or two before hiring them. You'll both learn a lot they will too and most first-time founders are very bad interviewers but very good at evaluating someone after they've worked together.
因此，我们在 YC 给出的建议之一是，尝试一起做一个项目，而不是面试。如果你要面试，你可能会，你应该专门询问某人过去从事过的项目。你会学到比脑筋急转弯更多的东西。出于某种原因，年轻的技术联合创始人喜欢问脑筋急转弯，而不是直接问别人做了什么。深入了解人们从事过的项目。并打电话给推荐人。这是第一次创业的人喜欢跳过的另一件事。你想给这些人过去共事过的一些人打电话。当你这样做的时候，你不只是想问，“某某人怎么样”，你真的想深入了解。这个人是你曾经共事过的前 5% 的人吗？他们具体做了什么？你会再次雇用他们吗？你为什么不再试着雇用他们了？你真的必须在这些推荐信上用力。So one of the pieces of advice that we give at YC is try to work on a project together instead of an interview. If you are going to interview, which you probably will, you should ask specifically about projects that someone worked on in the past. You'll learn a lot more than you will with brainteasers. For some reason, young technical cofounders love to ask brainteasers rather than just ask what someone has done. Really dig in to projects people have worked on. And call references. That is another thing that first time founders like to skip. You want to call some people that these people have worked with in the past. And when you do, you don't just want to ask, How was so-and-so, you really want to dig in. Is this person in the top five percent of people you've ever worked with? What specifically did they do? Would you hire them again? Why aren't you trying to hire them again? You really have to press on these reference calls.
我从与 YC 公司的交谈中注意到的另一件事是，良好的沟通技巧往往与成功的招聘相关。我以前没有注意到这一点。我们将更多地讨论为什么沟通在早期创业中如此重要。如果有人很难沟通，如果有人不能清楚地表达自己，就他们能够成功的可能性而言，这是一个真正的问题。此外，**对于早期员工，你希望找到有一定冒险态度的人。**你通常会得到这样的人，否则他们不会对初创公司感兴趣，但现在初创公司更时尚了，你希望人们真的有点喜欢冒险。如果有人在麦肯锡和你的初创公司之间选择，他们在初创公司工作的可能性非常小。Another thing that I have noticed from talking to YC companies is that good communication skills tend to correlate with hires that work out. I used to not pay attention to this. We’re going to talk more about why communication is so important in an early startup. If someone is difficult to talk to, if someone cannot communicate clearly, it's a real problem in terms of their likelihood to work out. Also. for early employees you want someone that has somewhat of a risk-taking attitude. You generally get this, otherwise they wouldn't be interested in a startup, but now that startups are sort of more in fashion, you want people that actually sort of like a little bit of risk. If someone is choosing between joining McKinsey or your startup it's very unlikely they're going to work out at the startup.
这里的沟通能力，我认为不是说所谓的口才好，而是愿意放下自己的ego去坦诚沟通，以及会换位思考的人。当一个人不是成长型人格的时候，他们可能会碍于面子而放弃沟通。
你还需要那些疯狂决心的人，这与有风险容忍态度略有不同。所以你真的应该两者都找。顺便说一句，欢迎大家在有问题的时候打断我。You also want people who are maniacally determined and that is slightly different than having a risk tolerant attitude. So you really should be looking for both. By the way, people are welcome to interrupt me with questions as stuff comes up.
保罗・格雷厄姆（Paul Graham）有一个著名的测试，叫做动物测试。这里的想法是，你应该能够用一种动物来描述任何员工的工作。我觉得这在英语中不太好翻译，但你需要不可阻挡的人。你想要能把事情做好的人。对早期雇佣的员工非常满意的创始人通常会把这些人描述为他们所做的事情中世界上最好的。There is a famous test from Paul Graham called the animal test. The idea here is that you should be able to describe any employee as an animal at what they do. I don't think that translates out of English very well but you need unstoppable people. You want people that are just going to get it done. Founders who usually end up being very happy with their early hires usually end up describing these people as the very best in the world at what they do.
马克・扎克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg）曾经说过，他试图雇佣那些 A. 他在社交上与之相处融洽的人，B. 如果角色互换，他会很乐意向其汇报的人。这给我留下了一个很好的框架。你不必和每个人都是朋友，但你至少应该喜欢和他们一起工作。如果你没有，你至少应该非常尊重他们。但同样，如果你不想花很多时间和别人在一起，你应该相信自己的直觉。Mark Zuckerberg once said that he tries to hire people that A. he'd be comfortable hanging with socially and B. he’d be comfortable reporting to if the roles were reversed. This strikes me as a very good framework. You don't have to be friends with everybody, but you should at least enjoy working with them. And if you don't have that, you should at least deeply respect them. But again, if you don't want to spend a lot of time around people you should trust your instincts about that.
这和找工作道理是一样的，你与老板、同事是否为这样的标准。
在我谈论招聘这个话题的时候，我想谈谈员工股权。创始人总是把这个搞砸。我认为大致估计，你应该把公司的 10% 左右给前 10 名员工。While I'm on this topic of hiring, I want to talk about employee equity. Founders screw this up all the time. I think as a rough estimate, you should aim to give about ten percent of the company to the first ten employees.
无论如何，他们必须在四年内挣到，而且如果他们成功了，他们的贡献将远远超过这个数字。他们将为公司增加的价值远远超过这个数字，如果他们没有，那么他们也不会在公司了。They have to earn it over four years anyway, and if they're successful, they're going to contribute way more than that. They're going to increase the value of the company way more than that, and if they don't then they won't be around anyway.
**出于某种原因，创始人通常对员工的股权非常吝啬，而对投资者的股权却非常慷慨。**我认为这完全颠倒了。我认为这是创始人最常搞砸的事情之一。员工只会随着时间的推移增加更多的价值。投资者通常会开出支票，然后，尽管做出了很多承诺，但通常不会做那么多。**有时他们会做，但你的员工才是多年来真正建设公司的人。**For whatever reason founders are usually very stingy with equity to employees and very generous with equity for investors. I think this is totally backwards. I think this is one of the things founders screw up the most often. Employees will only add more value over time. Investors will usually write the check and then, despite a lot of promises, don't usually do that much. Sometimes they do, but your employees are really the ones that build the company over years and years.
所以我相信要与投资者斗争，减少他们获得的股权数量，然后尽可能慷慨地对待员工。YC 公司中做得好的公司，对早期员工非常慷慨的公司，总体来说，是我们资助的最成功的公司。So I believe in fighting with investors to reduce the amount of equity they get and then being as generous as you possibly can with employees. The YC companies that have done this well, the YC companies that have been super generous with their equity to early employees, in general, are the most successful ones that we've funded.
创始人忘记的一件事是，在雇佣员工后，他们必须留住他们。我在这里不会详细说明，因为我们稍后会有一个关于这个话题的讲座，但我想稍微谈谈，**因为创始人经常犯这个错误。你必须确保你的员工快乐并感到被重视。**这就是股权授予如此重要的原因之一。在加入初创公司的兴奋中，人们不会想太多，但随着他们日复一日、年复一年地进来，如果他们觉得自己受到了不公平的对待，这真的会开始让他们感到厌烦，怨恨也会随之产生。One thing that founders forget is that after they hire employees, they have to retain them. I'm not going to go into full detail here because we're going to have a lecture on this later, but I do want to talk about it a little bit because founders get this wrong so often. You have to make sure your employees are happy and feel valued. This is one of the reasons that equity grants are so important. People in the excitement of joining a startup don't think about it much, but as they come in day after day, year after year, if they feel they have been treated unfairly that will really start to grate on them and resentment will build.
但更重要的是，学习一点管理技能，这是首次担任首席执行官的人通常很糟糕的，会有很大的帮助。今年夏天在 YC 演讲的一位非常成功的演讲者，在早期遇到了困难，他的团队也几次易主。有人问他最大的困难是什么，他说，原来你不应该每天告诉你的员工他们他妈的搞砸了，除非你想让他们都离开，因为他们会的。But more than that, learning just a little bit of management skills, which first-time CEOs are usually terrible at, goes a long way. One of the speakers at YC this summer, who is now extremely successful, struggled early on and had his team turn over a few times. Someone asked him what his biggest struggle was and he said, turns out you shouldn't tell your employees they're fucking up every day unless you want them all to leave because they will.
但作为创始人，这是一种非常自然的本能。你认为你可以把所有事情都做得最好，当人们做得不好的时候，你很容易告诉他们。所以在这里学习一点可以防止这种大规模的团队流失。对于大多数创始人来说，真正赞扬他们的团队也不是自然而然的事情。我也花了一段时间才学会这一点。**你必须让你的团队为所有好的事情获得荣誉，而你要为坏的事情承担责任。**But as a founder, this is a very natural instinct. You think you can do everything the best and it’s easy to tell people when they’re not doing it well. So learning just a little bit here will prevent this massive team churn. It also doesn't come naturally to most founders to really praise their team. It took me a little while to learn this too. You have to let your team take credit for all the good stuff that happens, and you take responsibility for the bad stuff.
你在创业初期，对员工很难给到实际的金钱价值，但总是很容易给到情绪价值，且更加划算。
你不能微观管理。你必须不断地给人们小的责任区域。这些都不是创始人会考虑的事情。我认为作为第一次创业的人，你能做的最好的事情就是意识到你会是一个非常糟糕的管理者，并试图过度补偿这一点。丹・平克（Dan Pink）谈到了激励人们做好工作的三个因素：自主权、精通和目标。当我经营我的公司时，我从来没有想过这一点，但从那以后我就想过了，我认为这实际上是正确的。**我认为值得尝试去思考这个问题。我也花了一段时间才学会像一对一这样的事情，并给出明确的反馈。**You have to not micromanage. You have to continually give people small areas of responsibility. These are not the things that founders think about. I think the best thing you can do as a first-time founder is to be aware that you will be a very bad manager and try to overcompensate for that. Dan Pink talks about these three things that motivate people to do great work: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. I never thought about that when I was running my company but I've thought about since and I think that’s actually right. I think it's worth trying to think about that. It also took me a while to learn to do things like one on one and to give clear feedback.
所有这些事情都是第一次担任首席执行官的人通常不会做的，也许我可以让你避免不做这些事情。All of these things are things first time CEO don't normally do, and maybe I can save you from not doing that.
关于团队部分的最后一部分是关于在不起作用的时候解雇员工。不管我在这里说什么，都不能阻止任何人做错，我说这话的原因是解雇员工是经营公司最糟糕的部分之一。实际上，以我自己的经验来看，我会说这是最糟糕的部分。每一个第一次创业的人都等得太久了，每个人都希望员工会有所转变。但正确的答案是在不起作用的时候迅速解雇。这对公司更好，对员工也更好。但这是如此痛苦和可怕，以至于每个人在第一次都会犯错。The last part on the team section is about firing people when it's not working. No matter what I say here is not going to prevent anyone from doing it wrong and the reason that I say that is that firing people is one of the worst parts of running a company. Actually in my own experience, I'd say it is the very worst part. Every first time founder waits too long, everyone hopes that an employee will turn around. But the right answer is to fire fast when it's not working. It's better for the company, it's also better for the employee. But it's so painful and so awful, that everyone gets it wrong the first few times.
除了解雇工作表现不佳的员工，你还想解雇那些 a）制造办公室政治的人，以及 b）持续消极的人。公司的其他成员总是知道员工在做这样的事情，这是一个巨大的拖累 —— 这对公司是完全有毒的。同样，这是一个在大公司可能行得通的例子，尽管我仍然持怀疑态度，但会扼杀初创公司。所以你需要小心那些如果的人。In addition to firing people who are doing bad at their job, you also wanna fire people who are a) creating office politics, and b) who are persistently negative. The rest of the company is always aware of employees doing things like this, and it's just this huge drag - it's completely toxic to the company. Again, this is an example of something that might work OK in a big company, although I'm still skeptical, but will kill a startup. So that you need to watch out for people that are ifs.
创业本来就是一件高风险的事情，失败率比较高的事情。如若加入一个悲观、对自己悲观、对公司悲观的人，将会非常有害处。因为创业早期心态也很重要，当你看不到反馈的时候，往往只能通过希望来解决。
不要找到悲观的人，他们会用语言暗示你、用消极的行动来“自证”这是不行的。
那么，问题是，你如何在快速解雇员工和让早期员工感到安全之间取得平衡？答案是，当员工不工作时，并不是他们一两次犯错。任何人都会犯一两次错误，或者更多次，你知道你应该非常有爱心，不要把责任归咎于他们，比如，成为一个团队，一起工作。So, the question is, how do you balance firing people fast and making early employees feel secure? The answer is that when an employee's not working, it's not like they screw up once or twice. Anyone will screw up once or twice, or more times than that, and you know you should be like very loving, not take it out on them, like, be a team, work together.
如果有人每次做决定都错了，那你就需要采取行动了，到那时，每个人都会痛苦地意识到这一点。这不是一两次失误的问题，而是每次有人做了什么，你都会自己做相反的决定。你不能替他们做决定，但你可以选择决策者。而且，如果有人做错了所有的事情，就像在几个星期或一个月的时间里一直这样，你会意识到这一点的。If someone is getting every decision wrong, that's when you need to act, and at that point it'll be painfully aware to everyone. It's not a case of a few screw-ups, it's a case where every time someone does something, you would have done the opposite yourself. You don't get to make their decisions but you do get to choose the decision-makers. And, if someone's doing everything wrong, just like a consistent thing over like a period of many weeks or a month, you'll be aware of it.
这是那种在理论上听起来很复杂，但在实践中几乎没有疑问的情况之一。这是有人犯了一两个错误和不断把一切都搞砸，或造成问题，或让每个人都不开心之间的区别，当你第一次看到它时，就会痛苦地明显。This is one of those cases where in theory, it sounds complicated to be sure what you're talking about, and in practice there's almost never any doubt. It's the difference between someone making one or two mistakes and just constantly screwing everything up, or causing problems, or making everyone unhappy, is painfully obvious the first time you see it.
联合创始人应该在什么时候决定股权分配？When should co-founders decide on the equity split?
出于某种原因，我一直不确定为什么会这样，很多创始人，很多联合创始人都喜欢把这个问题拖很长时间。你知道，他们甚至会以某种疯狂的方式签署公司注册文件，以便他们可以等待讨论这个问题。For some reason, I've never really been sure why this is, a lot of founders, a lot of co-founders like to leave this off for a very long time. You know, they'll even sign the incorporation documents in some crazy way so that they can wait to have this discussion.
随着时间的推移，这个讨论并不会变得更容易，你最好在开始合作后尽快解决这个问题。而且应该是接近平等的。**如果你不愿意给你的联合创始人 —— 你知道，比如平等的股权，我认为这应该让你认真考虑你是否想要他们作为联合创始人。**但无论如何，你应该尽量在公司发展得太远之前把这件事敲定。比如，肯定在最初的几周内。This is not a discussion that gets easier with time, you wanna set this ideally very soon after you start working together. And it should be near-equal. If you're not willing to give someone - your co-founder - you know, like an equal share of the equity, I think that should make you think hard about whether or not you want them as a co-founder. But in any case, you should try to have the ink dry on this before the company gets too far along. Like, certainly in the first number of weeks.
那么问题是 —— 我说过经验不足是可以的 —— 你怎么知道随着时间的推移，某人是否会超越一个角色，而不是晋升到一个角色，成为一个严重的问题。真正聪明并能学习新事物的人，随着时间的推移，几乎总能在公司找到一个合适的位置。你可能不得不把他们调到其他地方，而不是他们开始的地方。你知道，你可能会雇佣一个人来领导工程团队，但随着你公司规模的扩大，他无法胜任，你会给他们一个不同的角色。**非常优秀的人几乎总能在公司找到一个好的位置，我很少看到这成为一个问题。**So the question is - I said that inexperience is OK - how do you know if someone's gonna scale past, not scale up to a role, as things go on and later become crippling. People that are really smart and that can learn new things can almost always find a role in the company as time goes on. You may have to move them into something else, something other than where they started. You know, it may be that you hire someone to lead the engineering team that over time can't scale as you get up to 50 people, and you give them a different role. Really good people that can almost find some great place in the company, I have not seen that be a problem too often.
那么问题是，当你和你的联合创始人的关系破裂时会发生什么。我们将在课程的后期讨论机制，但这是创始人搞砸的最重要的事情。也就是说，每个联合创始人，当然包括你自己，都必须有归属期。基本上，你对联合创始人归属期所做的就是预先协商如果其中一人离开会发生什么。所以在硅谷，正常的立场是，假设你把股权分成五五开，需要四年的时间才能全部获得。而且时钟要到一年后才开始计时。所以如果你一年后离开，你可以保留 25% 的股权，如果你两年后离开，你可以保留 50%，以此类推。So the question is what happens when your relationship with your cofounder falls apart. We're gonna have a session on mechanics later on in the course, but here is the most important thing that founders screw up. Which is, every cofounder, you yourself of course, has to have vesting. Basically what you're doing with cofounder vesting is you're pre-negotiating what happens if one of you leaves. And so the normal stance on this in Silicon Valley is that it takes four years, let's say you split the equity fifty-fifty, is that it takes four years to earn all of that. And the clock doesn't start until one year in. So if you leave after one year, you keep twenty-five percent of the equity, and if you leave after two years, fifty, and on and on like that.
如果你不这样做，而且你有很大的分歧，一个创始人很早就带着一半的公司离开了，那么你在股权表上就会有这个沉重的负担，投资者很难为你提供资金或做其他任何事情。所以防止这种情况的第一条建议是在股权上设置归属期。我们现在几乎不会资助一家创始人没有归属期股权的公司，因为情况太糟糕了。联合创始人之间关系中出现的另一个问题，在每个公司都在一定程度上发生过，就是尽早谈论，不要让它搁置在那里溃烂。If you don't do that and if you have a huge fallout and one founder leaves early on with half the company, you have this deadweight on your equity table, and it's very hard to get investors to fund you or to do anything else. So number one piece of advice to prevent that is to have vesting on the equity. We pretty much won't fund a company now where the founders don't have vested equity because it's just that bad. The other thing that comes up in the relationship between the cofounders, which happens to some degree in every company, is talk about it early, don't let it sit there and fester.
如果你必须在雇佣一个次优员工和失去客户给竞争对手之间做出选择，你会怎么做？如果是公司的前五个员工之一，我会失去那些客户。这对公司造成的损害 —— 失去一些客户总比杀死公司好。以后，我可能会有稍微不同的看法，但在一般情况下很难说。If you have to choose between hiring a sub-optimal employee and losing your customers to a competitor, what do you do? If it's going to be one of the first five employees at a company I would lose those customers. The damage that it does to the company- it's better to lose some customers than to kill the company. Later on, I might have a slightly different opinion, but it's really hard to say in the general case.
**我稍后会谈到这个问题。问题是：不在同一地点工作的联合创始人怎么办？答案是，不要这样做。**总的来说，我对远程团队持怀疑态度，但在初创公司的早期，当沟通和速度比其他一切都重要时，出于某种原因，视频会议电话效果并不好。关于这方面的数据是，看看历史上所有成功的 30 家软件公司，试着指出一个联合创始人在不同地点的例子。这真的真的很难。I am going to get to that later. The question is: what about cofounders that aren't working in the same location? The answer is, don't do it. I am skeptical of remote teams in general but in the early days of a startup, when communication and speed outweigh everything else, for some reason video conferencing calls just don't work that well. The data on this is look at say the 30 successful software companies of all time and try to point to a single example where the cofounders were in different locations. It's really really tough.
好了，现在我们要谈谈执行力。对于大多数创始人来说，执行力并不是经营公司最有趣的部分，但却是最关键的部分。许多联合创始人认为他们只是签署了这个美丽的想法，然后他们将登上杂志封面，参加派对。但实际上，更重要的是，成为联合创始人意味着什么，就是签署了这个多年的执行计划，而你不能将其外包。Alright, so now we're going to talk about execution. Execution for most founders is not the most fun part of running the company, but it is the most critical. Many cofounders think they're just signing up to this beautiful idea and then they're going to go be on magazine covers and go to parties. But really what it’s about more than anything else, what being a cofounder really means, is signing up for this years long grind on execution and you can’t outsource this.
**拥有一家执行力强的公司的方法是你自己必须执行力强。初创公司的一切都以创始人为榜样。创始人做的任何事情都会成为文化。**所以，如果你想要一种人们努力工作、注重细节、管理客户、节俭的文化，你必须自己做到。没有其他办法。你不能在去参加会议的时候聘请一个首席运营官来做这些。公司只需要看到你是一个疯狂的执行机器。正如我在第一节课中所说，有好点子的人至少比愿意努力把它们执行好的人多一百倍。**想法本身并没有价值，只有执行得好才能增加和创造价值。**The way to have a company that executes well is you have to execute well yourself. Every thing at a startup gets modeled after the founders. Whatever the founders do becomes the culture. So if you want a culture where people work hard, pay attention to detail, manage the customers, are frugal, you have to do it yourself. There is no other way. You cannot hire a COO to do that while you go off to conferences. The company just needs to see you as this maniacal execution machine. As I said in the first lecture, there’s at least a hundred times more people with great ideas than people who are willing to put in the effort to execute them well. Ideas by themselves are not worth anything, only executing well is what adds and creates value.
执行力的很大一部分只是努力投入，但你可以学到很多关于如何擅长执行力的知识。所以我们将有三节课来讨论这个问题。A big part of execution is just putting in the effort, but there is a lot you can learn about how to be good at it. And so we’re going to have three classes that just talk about this.
首席执行官，人们一直问我首席执行官的工作。可能有五个以上，这里有五个在早期经常出现的。前四个每个人都认为是首席执行官的工作：设定愿景，筹集资金，向你试图招募的人、高管、合作伙伴、媒体、每个人宣传使命，招聘和管理团队。但第五个是设定执行标准，这不是大多数创始人感到兴奋或设想自己做的，但我认为这实际上是首席执行官的关键角色之一，只有首席执行官才能做到。The CEO, people ask me all the time about the jobs of the CEO. There are probably more than five, here are five that come up a lot in the early days. The first four everyone thinks of as CEO jobs: set the vision, raise money, evangelize the mission to people you’re trying to recruit, executives, partners, press, everybody, hire and manage the team. But the fifth one is setting the execution bar and this is not the one that most founders get excited about or envision themselves doing but I think it is actually one of the critical CEO roles and no one but the CEO can do this.
执行被分为两个关键问题。一，你能知道该做什么吗？二，你能做到吗？所以我想谈谈做到这一点的两个部分，假设你已经知道该做什么了。那就是专注和强度。所以专注是至关重要的。**我最喜欢问创始人的问题之一是，他们把时间和金钱花在什么上。这几乎揭示了创始人认为重要的一切。**Execution gets divided into two key questions. One, can you figure out what to do and two, can you get it done. So I want to talk about two parts of getting it done, assuming that you’ve already figured out what to do. And those are focus and intensity. So focus is critical. One of my favorite questions to ask founders about what they’re spending their time and their money on. This reveals almost everything about what founders think is important.
创始人最难的部分之一是，每天都有一百件重要的事情在争夺你的注意力。你必须找出正确的两三个，专注于这些事情，然后忽略、委托或推迟其余的事情。很多创始人认为重要的事情，比如在不同的律师事务所面试很多人、参加会议、招聘顾问等等，其实都不重要。真正重要的事情会随着时间的推移而变化，但这是一条重要的建议。你需要找出最重要的一两件事情，然后就去做。
你每天只能有两三件事情，因为其他事情都会来找你。每天都会有火灾，如果你不擅长设定这两三件事情，你就永远不会擅长完成事情。这对创始人来说真的很难。创始人对开始新事物感到兴奋。
不幸的是，出色执行的诀窍是经常说不。你在百分之九十七的情况下都说不，大多数创始人发现他们必须非常有意识地努力做到这一点。大多数初创公司都没有足够的专注力。他们可能工作非常努力 —— 但他们并没有在正确的事情上努力工作，所以他们仍然会失败。创业的一个伟大而可怕的事情是，你尝试不会得到任何认可。只有当你做出市场想要的东西时，你才会得到分数。所以如果你在错误的事情上努力工作，没有人会在意。
那么，问题是，你如何确定每天的重点是什么。每天都有目标是非常重要的。我认识的大多数优秀创始人都为公司制定了一套总体目标，公司里的每个人都知道。你知道，这可能是在某个日期前发布产品，达到一定的增长率，获得一定的参与率，招聘这些关键职位，这些都是其中的一些，但公司里的每个人都可以每周告诉你我们的关键目标是什么。然后每个人都根据这个目标执行。
创始人真正设定了重点。无论创始人关心什么，无论创始人专注于什么，这都将为整个公司设定目标。最好的创始人会一遍又一遍地重复这些目标，频率远远超过他们认为自己需要的频率。他们把这些目标贴在墙上，在一对一的会议和每周的全体会议上谈论它们。这使公司保持专注。专注的关键之一，也是我说不是朋友的联合创始人很难做到的原因，是没有良好的沟通就无法专注。即使你在一家公司只有四、五个人，一个小小的沟通障碍也足以让人们在做稍微不同的事情。然后你就失去了焦点，公司就会陷入混乱。
我稍后会谈到这一点，但增长和势头是你永远不能忽视的。增长和势头是初创公司的生命线，你必须始终专注于保持这些。你应该始终知道你在指标方面的表现，你应该每周举行一次评审会议，如果你在谈论我们现在不关注增长，我们现在增长不是很好，但我们在做其他事情，我们没有时间线来发布这个，因为我们关注的是其他事情，我们在做品牌重塑，不管怎样，几乎总是一场灾难，你应该非常怀疑。
所以你要设定正确的指标，你要专注于提高这些指标和保持势头。不要让公司被其他事情分散注意力或感到兴奋。一个常见的错误是，公司会为自己的公关感到兴奋。没有结果的公关很容易，而且感觉自己真的很酷。但一年后，你将一无所有，到那时，你就不再酷了，你只会谈论一年前的这些文章，哦，你知道这些斯坦福学生创办了一家新的初创公司，它将成为下一个大事件，而现在你一无所有，这很糟糕。
正如我已经提到的，要在同一个空间。我认为这几乎是不可能的。远程混淆团队真的非常非常困难。它比任何人想象的都要减慢周期时间。
除了专注于执行之外，另一个关键因素是强度。初创公司只有在相当高的强度下才能工作。我的一个朋友说，创业成功的秘诀是极端专注和极端奉献。你可以有一家初创公司和一件其他事情，你可以有一个家庭，但你可能不能有很多其他事情。初创公司不是工作与生活平衡的最佳选择，这就是一个可悲的现实。初创公司有很多优点，但这不是其中之一。初创公司在某种程度上是消耗一切的。你基本上需要愿意比你的竞争对手更努力工作。
好消息是，在正确的事情上多做一点工作会产生巨大的影响。我喜欢举的一个例子是思考消费者网络产品的病毒系数。每个现有用户带来多少新用户。如果是 0.99，公司最终会停滞不前并死亡。如果是 1.01，你将永远处于指数级增长的快乐状态。
所以这是一个具体的例子，说明一点点额外的工作是成功与失败的区别。当我们与成功的创始人交谈时，他们一直都在讲述这样的故事。只是比竞争对手多做一点工作，这就是他们成功的原因。
所以你必须非常专注。这只来自首席执行官，这只来自创始人。初创公司最大的优势之一是执行速度，你必须有这种不懈的运营节奏。Facebook 有一张著名的海报，上面写着 “快速行动，打破常规”。但同时，他们也非常注重质量。这就是为什么这很难。快速行动或专注于质量都很容易，但诀窍是在初创公司中同时做到这两点。你需要有一种文化，让公司对每个人所做的每件事都有很高的标准，但你仍然要快速行动。
苹果、谷歌和 Facebook 都做得非常好。这不是关于产品，而是关于他们所做的一切。他们行动迅速，打破常规，在正确的地方节俭，但在任何地方都注重质量。如果你不想让员工编写糟糕的代码，就不要给他们买糟糕的电脑。你必须设定一个贯穿整个公司的质量标准。与此相关的是，你必须果断。优柔寡断是初创公司的杀手。平庸的创始人花很多时间谈论宏伟的计划，但他们从不做决定。他们在谈论我可以做这件事，或者我可以做那件事，他们在反复思考，从不行动。而你真正需要的是这种行动倾向。
最好的创始人做的事情看似很小，但他们行动非常迅速。但他们能很快把事情做好。每次你和最好的创始人交谈时，他们都有新的事情要做。事实上，这是我们在 YC 学到的预测创始人成功的最好方法之一。如果每次我们和一个团队交谈时，他们都有新的事情要做，那就是我们预测一家公司会成功的最好指标。部分原因是你可以通过增量的方式做大事。如果你一次又一次地击倒小目标，一年后你回首往事，你会发现你已经完成了一件了不起的事情。另一方面，如果你消失一年，然后期望一次性带回一些惊人的东西，这通常不会发生。
所以你必须选择正确大小的项目。即使你正在建造这家疯狂的合成生物学公司，你说我必须离开一年，也没有办法逐步完成，你仍然可以把它分成更小的项目。
所以速度是非常重要的。最好的创始人通常回复电子邮件最快，做出决定最快，他们在所有这些方面都很快。他们有一种不惜一切代价的态度。
他们也经常出现。
他们来开会，他们来公司，他们亲自见我们。我有一个一直对我有效的建议：在边缘情况下上飞机。我在这里讲一个快速的故事。
当我经营自己的公司时，我们发现我们即将失去一笔交易。这是来自这个领域的第一个大客户的一笔关键交易。它将流向这家比我们早成立一年的公司。他们已经把一切都准备好了。我们打电话说 “我们有更好的产品，你必须和我们见面”，他们说 “我们明天就要签合同了。对不起。” 我们开车去机场，上了飞机，第二天早上 6 点就到了他们的办公室。我们就坐在那里，他们叫我们走开，我们就一直坐在那里。最后，一个初级员工决定和我们见面，在那之后，终于有一个高级员工决定和我们见面。他们最终撕毁了与另一家公司的合同，大约一周后我们与他们完成了交易。我敢肯定，如果我们没有上飞机，如果我们没有亲自出现，事情就不会成功。
所以，你就是要展示自己，做这些事情，当人们说在边缘情况下上飞机时，他们实际上是认真的，但他们并不是字面上的意思。但我实际上认为这是一个很好的字面建议。
所以我之前提到过动量和增长。再强调一次：动量和增长是初创公司的生命线。这可能是执行良好的前三名秘诀之一。你希望公司一直获胜。如果你松开油门，事情就会失控，像滚雪球一样向下滑。一个获胜的团队感觉良好，并且不断获胜。一个一段时间没有获胜的团队会失去动力，不断失败。所以要一直保持势头，这是管理初创公司的首要原则。如果我只能告诉创始人如何经营一家公司的一件事，那就是这个。
对于大多数软件初创公司来说，这意味着保持增长。对于硬件初创公司来说，这意味着不要让你的发货日期推迟。这是我们在 YC 期间告诉人们的，他们通常会听，一切都很好。在 YC 结束时会发生的是，他们会被其他事情分心，然后增长会放缓。不知何故，在这种情况发生后，人们开始变得不开心并辞职，一切都分崩离析。很难找到一个增长引擎，因为大多数公司都以新的方式增长，但有一件事是：如果你制造了一个好产品，它就会增长。所以在一开始就把产品做好是以后不失去势头的最好方法。
如果你确实失去了势头，大多数创始人会试图以错误的方式找回它。他们会发表长篇大论，讲述公司的愿景，并试图通过演讲来鼓舞员工的士气。但在一家势头减弱的公司里，员工不想听到这些。你必须在公司获胜时才发表愿景演讲。当你没有获胜时，你只需要通过小的胜利来找回势头。我的一位董事会成员曾经说过，销售能解决初创公司的一切问题。这是真的。所以你要找出你能在哪里获得这些小胜利，然后去做。然后你会惊讶地发现，初创公司的所有其他问题都消失了。
如果你注意到势头减弱，你还会注意到另一件事，那就是每个人都开始对该做什么产生分歧。当公司失去势头时，争吵就会出现。所以我认为一个有效的框架是，当团队中对该做什么存在分歧时，你就问你的用户，然后按照用户告诉你的去做。你必须提醒人们：“嘿，现在事情进展不顺利，我们实际上并不讨厌对方，我们只需要回到正轨，一切都会好起来的。” 如果你只是指出来，如果你只是承认这一点，你会发现事情会变得更好。
再以 Facebook 为例，当 Facebook 在 2008 年增长放缓时，马克成立了一个 “增长小组”。他们致力于一些非常小的事情，以让 Facebook 增长得更快。所有这些事情本身看起来都非常小，但他们让 Facebook 的曲线重新上升。它很快成为那里最有声望的团队。马克说，这是 Facebook 最好的创新之一。据我当时在 Facebook 工作的朋友说，这真的改变了公司的动态。它从每个人都感觉不好，势头消失的状态，回到了一个获胜的状态。
所以保持势头的一个好方法是尽早在公司建立一个运营节奏。在那里，你定期发布产品和推出新功能。在那里，你每周与整个公司一起审查指标。这实际上是你的董事会能为你做的最好的事情之一。董事会很少为企业战略增加价值。但你经常可以利用它们作为迫使公司关注指标和里程碑的工具。
有一件事情经常会破坏势头，而实际上不应该，那就是竞争对手。竞争对手在媒体上制造噪音，我认为这可能比任何其他外部因素更能打击公司的势头。
所以这里有一个好的经验法则：在竞争对手用真正的产品打败你之前，根本不用担心他们。新闻稿比代码更容易写，而代码又比制造一个好产品容易。所以提醒你的公司这一点，这是创始人的角色之一，不要因为媒体上的竞争对手而让公司感到沮丧。
我喜欢亨利・福特的这句话：“令人害怕的竞争对手不是那些一直打扰你的人，而是那些一直在不断改进自己业务的人。”
这些公司几乎从来不会发布很多新闻稿。而且他们会让人感到沮丧。
https://genius.com/Sam-altman-lecture-1-how-to-start-a-startup-annotated#primary-album