Lecture 1: How to Start a Startup,如何启动一家创业公司翻译

Lecture 1: How to Start a Startup

如何启动一家创业公司

第1讲课程视频

讨论地址:http://www.huomen.com/topic-show-id-103.html。

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.

欢迎来到CS183B。我是山姆·奥特曼，我是Y Combinator的总裁。九年前，我还是斯坦福大学的学生，后来辍学创办了一家公司，在过去的几年里我一直是一名投资者。所以YC，我们教人们如何创业已经九年了。大多数都是针对初创企业的，但有30%是非常普遍适用的。所以我们认为我们可以在这节课上教30%。尽管这仅仅是实现的百分之三十，但希望它仍然会非常有用。

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.

我们在YC教过很多这门课，而且都是不公开的。这是我们教的很多东西第一次被记录在案。我们邀请了一些特邀演讲者来做与YC相同的演讲。我们现在已经为725家公司提供了资金，所以我们非常肯定我们给出的很多建议都是非常好的。我们还不能为每一家初创公司提供资金，但我们有希望使这一建议非常普遍。

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.

我只教三个。算上YC本身，每一位演讲嘉宾都参与了一家价值10多亿美元的公司的创建。所以建议不应该那么理论化，都是人干的。

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.

这门课的所有建议都是针对那些创业者的，他们的目标是实现高速增长，最终建立一个非常大的公司。其中大部分不适用于其他情况，我想提前提醒大家，如果你在很多大公司或非初创公司尝试做这些事情，那是行不通的。这应该还是很有趣的，我真的认为创业是未来的发展方向，值得去理解，但创业与普通公司有很大的不同。因此，在今天和周四的课程中，我将试着概述一下你需要擅长的四个方面，以最大限度地提高你作为初创企业的成功率。然后在整个课程中，演讲嘉宾将更详细地探讨所有这些问题。

Ideas, Products, Teams and Execution Part I
创意、产品、团队和执行第一部分

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.
所以这四个方面：你需要一个伟大的想法，一个伟大的产品，一个伟大的团队，和伟大的执行力。这些有点重叠，但我要单独讨论一下，使之有意义。
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.
你可能还是会失败。结果就像创意x产品x执行x团队x运气，运气是一个介于0和10000之间的随机数。真的有那么多。但是如果你在你能控制的四个方面都做得很好，你至少有机会获得一些成功。
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.
创业公司令人兴奋的一点是，他们是一个出人意料的公平竞争环境。年轻又没有经验，你可以这样做。又老又有经验，你也能做到。我特别喜欢创业公司的一点是，在其他工作环境中，有些不好的事情，比如贫穷和不知名，在创业方面，实际上是巨大的资产。

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.
在我们开始讨论如何创业之前，我想谈谈你为什么要创业。我对上这门课有点犹豫，因为你不应该仅仅为了创业而创业。致富的方法要简单得多，每个创业的人都会说，永远，他们无法想象会有多艰难和痛苦。只有当你觉得被某个特定的问题所迫，并且你认为创办一家公司是解决问题的最佳方法时，你才应该创办一家新公司。
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.
具体的激情应该放在第一位，创业应该放在第二位。事实上，我们在YC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讨论为什么要创办一家初创公司。我们对这门课引起的如此多的关注感到惊讶，以至于我们想确定我们花了很多时间在为什么上。
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.
四个方面中的第一个：好主意。近年来流行的说法是这个想法无关紧要。事实上，花很多时间思考创业的想法是不酷的。你只需要开始，往墙上扔东西，看看有什么东西粘在墙上，甚至不用花时间去想如果它有用的话是否有价值。
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.
支点应该很好，支点越多越好。所以这并不是完全错误的，事情确实以你无法完全预测的方式发展。而且，在用户没有真正得到产品的情况下，你能计算出多少是有限制的。伟大的执行力至少比伟大的想法重要十倍，困难一百倍。
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.
但是钟摆已经摆得不正常了。坏主意仍然是坏主意，我们今天所处的快乐世界感觉不太理想。对一个可怕的想法的伟大执行将使你一事无成。当然也有例外，但大多数伟大的公司都是从一个伟大的想法开始的，而不是一个支点。
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.
如果你看看成功的支点，他们几乎总是一个支点到一些创始人自己想要的，而不是一个随机编造的想法。Airbnb的发生是因为Brian Chesky付不起房租，但他有一些额外的空间。总的来说，如果你看看pivots的历史记录，他们不会成为大公司。我自己过去也认为想法没那么重要，但我很确定现在这样做是不对的。
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.
在我们谈论这个概念时，它的定义是非常宽泛的。包括市场规模与成长性、公司成长性战略、防御性战略等。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，你将在这方面工作十年，因此有必要花一些真正的前期时间来思考企业的前期价值和防御能力。尽管计划本身是毫无价值的，但在今天的大多数初创企业中，计划的实施确实是有价值的，而且是完全缺失的。
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.
长期思考在任何地方都很少见，尤其是在初创企业。如果你这么做的话会有很大的优势。记住，这个想法会随着你的前进而扩展，变得更加雄心勃勃。你当然不需要在你统治世界的道路上弄清楚一切，但你真的想要一个好的内核开始。你想要一些能以有趣的方式发展的东西。
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.
当你在思考创意的时候，我们发现创业者总是犯错的另一件事是，有朝一日你需要建立一个难以复制的企业。这是一个好主意的重要组成部分。

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.
我想再次强调这一点，因为这一点非常重要：创意应该放在第一位，初创企业应该放在第二位。等着开始创业，直到你想出一个你觉得有必要去探索的想法。这也是在想法之间进行选择的方法。如果你有几个想法，在你不想工作的时候，就做你最常想到的一个。我们一次又一次地从创始人那里听到的是，他们希望等到他们想出一个自己真正喜欢的想法。
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.
从另一个角度来看，最好的公司几乎总是以使命为导向。除非公司觉得自己有一个重要的使命，否则很难获得大公司所需要的关注度。如果没有一个伟大的创始理念，通常很难做到这一点。以任务为导向的想法的一个相关优势是你自己将致力于它们。建立一个伟大的初创公司需要年复一年，通常是十年。如果你不喜欢和不相信你正在建设的东西，你很可能会在某个时候放弃。据我所知，如果不相信使命真的很重要，就无法度过创业的痛苦。很多创业者，尤其是学生，相信他们的创业只需要2到3年时间，然后他们就会致力于自己真正热爱的事业。这几乎不起作用。好的创业通常需要十年的时间。
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.
使命导向型公司的第三个优势是，公司外的人更愿意帮助你。在一个艰难而重要的项目上，你会得到比衍生项目更多的支持。在创业方面，找一个硬的创业公司比找一个容易的创业公司容易。这是一个反直觉的事情，需要人们很长时间才能理解。很难夸大任务驱动的重要性，所以我想最后再说一次：衍生公司，复制现有想法却很少有新见解的公司，不会让人兴奋，也不会迫使团队努力工作以取得成功。
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.
保罗格雷厄姆下周将讨论如何获得创业点子。这是很多创业者都在努力解决的问题，但我相信，通过实践，你可以做得更好，而且绝对值得努力做得更好。
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.
想出好主意最难的是，好主意一开始往往看起来很糟糕。第十三个搜索引擎，而且没有一个门户网站的所有功能？大多数人认为这毫无意义。搜索完成了，不管怎么说，没那么重要。门户是价值所在。第十个社交网络，只限于没有钱的大学生？也很可怕。MySpace赢了，谁希望大学生成为客户？或者在陌生人的沙发上呆着。听起来很糟糕。
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.”
这些听起来都很糟糕，但结果都是好的。如果他们听起来真的很好，会有太多的人在他们的工作。正如彼得·泰尔（Peter Thiel）将在第五节课上讨论的，你想要一个变成垄断的想法。但你不能马上垄断。你必须找到一个小市场，在那里你可以获得垄断，然后迅速扩张。这就是为什么一些伟大的创业点子一开始看起来很糟糕。如果你可以这样说，那就好了，“今天，只有这一小部分用户会使用我的产品，但我会得到所有的用户，在未来，几乎所有人都会使用我的产品。”
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.
这里有一个主题将会经常出现：你需要对自己的信仰有信心，并且愿意无视别人的反对。难的是这是一条很细的线。一边是，另一边是疯狂。但请记住，如果你真的想出了一个好主意，大多数人都会认为它不好。你应该对此感到高兴，这意味着他们不会和你竞争。

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.
这也是为什么告诉别人你的想法并不危险的另一个原因。真正好的主意听起来不值得偷。你想要一个想法，你可以说，“我知道这听起来是个坏主意，但这是一个明确的为什么它实际上是一个伟大的想法。”你想听起来疯狂，但你想实际上是正确的。你想要一个没有多少人在研究的想法。如果一开始听起来不算大也没关系。
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.
创始人们，尤其是第一次创业的创始人们的一个常见错误是，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。但事实并非如此，它需要接管一个小的特定市场，并从那里扩张。大多数伟大的公司就是这样起步的。不受欢迎但正确才是你的目标。你想要的东西听起来是个坏主意，但却是个好主意。
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.
你还真的想花时间思考一下市场将如何发展。你需要一个10年后会变得很大的市场。现在大多数投资者都被市场规模所困扰，他们根本不考虑市场将如何演变。
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.
事实上，我认为这是投资者犯下的最大系统性错误之一。他们考虑的是初创企业本身的成长，而不是市场的成长。我更关心的是市场的增长率，而不是它目前的规模，我也关心它是否有任何理由会走到顶峰。你应该考虑一下。我更喜欢投资一家追求小而快速增长市场的公司，而不是一个大而缓慢增长的市场。
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.
这类市场的一大优势——这些规模较小、增长迅速的市场——是，客户通常非常迫切地需要一个解决方案，他们会忍受一个不完美但快速改进的产品。作为一名学生的一大优势——两大优势之一——是你可能对哪些市场可能会比老年人开始快速增长有更好的直觉。另一件学生通常不明白的事情，或者需要一段时间，就是你不能创造一个不想存在的市场。你基本上可以改变初创企业的一切，但市场除外，所以你应该做一些思考，以确定——或者尽可能确定——你所追求的市场会增长并存在。
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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.
有很多不同的方式来谈论正确的市场类型。例如，在别人的浪潮中冲浪，踏进电梯，或者成为运动的一部分，但所有这些都只是一种表达你想要一个增长非常迅速的市场的方式。它今天看起来很小，今天可能很小，但你知道-其他人不知道-它会增长得很快。

So think about where this is happening in the world. You need this sort of tailwind to make a startup successful.
想想世界上发生了什么。你需要这样的顺风才能使创业成功。
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.
令人兴奋的是，现在可能比以前有更多这样的顺风。正如马克·安德森所说，软件正在吞噬世界。它无处不在，有那么多伟大的想法。你只要选一个，然后找到一个你真正关心的。
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.
另一个版本的问题是红杉的著名问题：为什么是现在？为什么现在正是这个想法的最佳时机，也正是创办这家公司的最佳时机。为什么不能在两年前完成，为什么两年后会太迟？对于我们参与过的最成功的初创公司来说，他们都有一个很好的想法，对这个问题有一个很好的答案。如果你不这样做，你至少应该对此有所怀疑。
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.
总的来说，如果你在建造你自己需要的东西，那就最好了。如果你必须通过与客户交谈来构建第一个版本，那么你会更好地理解它。如果你自己不需要它，而你正在建造别人需要的东西，要意识到你处于很大的劣势，并与你的客户非常接近。尽量在他们的办公室工作，如果可以的话，如果不行的话，一天和他们多谈几次。
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.
好的创业点子另一个有点违反直觉的地方是，它们几乎总是很容易解释和理解。如果你要用一句话来解释你在做什么，那几乎总是一个太复杂的迹象。它应该是一个清晰的视觉与少量的话。最好的创意通常在一个重要的方面与现有的公司有很大的不同，比如谷歌是一个运行非常好的搜索引擎，而门户网站的其他东西，或者完全是新的，比如SpaceX。任何一家已经存在的复制品公司，都有一些小的或虚构的区别，比如X，漂亮的设计，或者Y，对于喜欢红酒的人来说，通常是失败的。
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.
正如我所提到的，作为一名学生，最伟大的事情之一就是你对新技术有很好的看法。学习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一件事，他们希望自己在学生时代做得更多。
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.
另一个是会见潜在的联合创始人。你不知道你现在的环境有多好，因为你遇到的人可以和你一起创业。我们经常告诉大学生的一件事是，比任何一家初创公司都更重要的是了解潜在的联合创始人。

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.
所以我想引用50美分的话来结束我的演讲。这是他被问到维生素水的时候写的。我不想读，它就在上面，但它是关于思考顾客想要什么的重要性，以及思考市场的需求。大多数人不这样做，尤其是大多数学生不这样做。如果你能做到这一点，如果你能学会先考虑市场，你会对大多数创业者有很大的帮助。这可能是我们最常看到的Y Combinator应用程序的错误之处，就是人们没有首先考虑市场，以及人们首先想要什么。
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.
所以在下一节中，我将讨论如何构建一个优秀的产品。在这里，我将再次使用一个非常广泛的产品定义。它包括客户支持，你写的解释产品的副本，任何涉及到你的客户互动的东西，你为他们做了什么。
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.
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，但它至关重要，幸运的是它相当有趣。虽然伟大的产品对世界来说总是新的，很难给你关于建造什么的建议，但是有足够的共同点，我们可以给你很多关于如何建造它的建议。
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. 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.
对于一个创始人来说，最重要的任务之一就是确保公司生产出一款优秀的产品。在你创造出一个伟大的产品之前，其他一切都无关紧要。当真正成功的创业者讲述他们早期的故事时，他们几乎总是坐在电脑前处理他们的产品，或者与客户交谈。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的不同，你应该非常怀疑。创业者们正在努力解决的大多数其他问题，筹集资金，获得更多的新闻，招聘，业务发展等等，当你有一个伟大的产品时，这些都会变得非常容易。首先处理好这件事真的很重要。第一步是构建用户喜欢的东西。在YC，我们告诉创始人要开发他们的产品，和用户交谈，锻炼身体，吃饭睡觉，其他的很少。我刚才提到的所有其他事情，公关，会议，招聘顾问，合作伙伴关系，你应该忽略所有这些，只是建立一个产品，并得到它尽可能好的与您的用户交谈。
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
你的工作是建立一些用户喜欢的东西。很少有公司不先这么做就成功了。很多纸面上的优秀初创公司之所以失败，是因为他们只是做了一些人们喜欢的东西。做一些人们想要的东西，但只是一个中等的数量，是一个伟大的方式失败，而不明白你为什么失败。所以这是两份工作

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.
我们在YC经常说的一点是，最好是构建一些少数用户喜欢的东西，然后是大量用户喜欢的东西。当然，最好是构建一些少数用户喜欢的东西，但是对于v1来说，这样做的机会很少，而且创业公司通常不具备这种机会。所以在实践中你最终会选择灰色或橙色。你做了一些很多用户喜欢的东西，或者一些少数用户非常喜欢的东西。这是一条非常重要的建议。构建一些少数用户喜欢的东西。从少数人喜欢的东西扩展到很多人喜欢的东西，然后从很多人喜欢的东西扩展到很多人喜欢的东西，要容易得多。如果你做对了，你可能会把很多其他事情弄错。如果你没有把这个做好，你可以把其他事情做好，你可能还是会失败。所以，当你开始创业时，这是你唯一需要关心的事情，直到它工作。
[Audience member]: Can you go over that slide again?
[观众]：你能再看一遍那张幻灯片吗？
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.
所以你可以选择创业。世界上最好的事情就是制造出一个很多人都非常喜欢的产品。在实践中，你通常不能这样做，因为如果有这样的机会，谷歌或Facebook会这样做。所以曲线下的面积是有限制的，你能建什么。所以你可以构建一个大量用户喜欢的东西，或者一小部分用户非常喜欢的东西。所以就像爱的总量是一样的，它只是一个如何分配的问题。[观众笑声]这是一个守恒定律，你能给这个世界带来多少快乐，一个初创公司的第一个产品。
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
所以初创公司总是在挣扎，他们应该选择哪一个。他们看起来是平等的，对吗？因为曲线下的面积是一样的。但我们一次又一次地看到，事实并非如此。一旦你得到了别人喜欢的东西，你就可以把它扩展成很多人喜欢的东西。但如果你一开始就有矛盾心理，或者热情不高，并试图扩大这种情绪，你就永远不会得到很多人的喜爱。所以建议是：找一小群用户，让他们喜欢你正在做的事情
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.
一种方法，你知道当这是工作，是你会得到增长的口碑。如果你得到人们喜欢的东西，人们会告诉他们的朋友。这也适用于消费品和企业产品。当人们真的喜欢某样东西时，他们会把它告诉他们的朋友，你会看到有机的成长。
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.
如果你发现自己在谈论你没有成长是怎么回事，因为有一个大的伙伴关系会来救你或类似的事情，这几乎总是一个真正麻烦的迹象。销售和市场营销是非常重要的，我们稍后会有两节课。伟大的产品是长期增长的秘密。你应该在做其他事情之前把它做好。推迟生产一个好产品并不容易。如果你在拥有一款人们真正喜爱的产品之前就试图制造一台成长机器，那么你几乎肯定会浪费时间。突围公司几乎总是有一个产品，这是如此好，它增长的口碑。从长远来看，伟大的产品赢得。不要担心你的竞争对手筹集了大量资金，或者他们将来会做什么。不管怎样，它们可能不是很好。很少有初创公司死于竞争。大多数人死是因为他们自己没能做出用户喜欢的东西，他们把时间花在其他事情上。所以最重要的是担心这个。

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.
另一条建议是制作用户喜欢的东西：从简单的东西开始。如果你有简单的东西，做一个好的产品就容易多了。即使你最终的计划是超级复杂的，希望是这样，你几乎总是可以从一个较小的问题开始，然后你认为是最小的，它很难建立一个伟大的产品，所以你想从尽可能少的表面积开始。想想那些真正成功的公司，想想他们从什么开始，想想你真正喜欢的产品。它们的使用非常简单，尤其是开始使用的时候。Facebook的第一个版本非常简单。谷歌的第一个版本只是一个带有文本框和两个按钮的网页；但它返回的结果最好，这就是用户喜欢它的原因。iPhone的使用要比之前任何一款智能手机简单得多，它是用户真正喜爱的第一款手机。
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.
简单之所以好的另一个原因是因为它迫使你把一件事做得非常好，你必须这样做才能做出人们喜欢的东西。
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.
当你听到成功的创始人谈论他们如何看待自己的产品时，一次又一次地出现“狂热”这个词。创始人们谈到，他们热衷于关注小细节的质量。热衷于得到他们用来正确解释产品的拷贝。他们对客户支持的看法也很狂热。事实上，与YC公司的成功相关的一件事是创始人将Pagerduty连接到他们的票务系统，这样即使用户在半夜创始人睡着的时候发邮件，他们仍然能在一小时内得到回复。实际上，公司在早期就这样做了。他们的创始人在产品糟糕的时候会感到身体上的疼痛，他们想醒来修复它。他们不会运送垃圾，如果他们这样做了，他们会很快修复它。当然，要制造出好的产品，还需要一定程度的狂热。
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.
你需要一些用户来帮助你完成反馈周期，但是你应该用手工的方式来获得这些用户，你应该手工去招募他们。不要做像在早期购买谷歌广告这样的事情，以获得初始用户。你不需要太多，你只需要那些每天都能给你反馈的，最终会喜欢上你的产品。因此，与其试图让他们在谷歌广告词，只是少数人，在世界上，这将是好的用户。手工招募。
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.
当所有人都认为Pinterest是个笑话时，本•西尔伯曼（bensilbermann）通过在咖啡店和陌生人聊天来招募Pinterest的最初用户。他真的这样做了，他只是在帕洛阿尔托走来走去，说“请你用一下我的产品好吗？”他还经常在帕洛阿尔托的苹果专卖店里跑来跑去，他想在他们抓住他并把他赶出去之前，把所有的浏览器都很快放到Pinterest的主页上，（笑声），所以当人们走进来时，他们会问“哦，这是什么？”。这是一个重要的例子做的事情，不规模。如果你没有读过保罗·格雷厄姆关于这个话题的文章，你肯定应该读。
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.
因此，手动获取用户，记住目标是让一小群用户爱上你。非常好地理解这个群体，非常接近他们。听他们的话，你几乎总会发现他们非常愿意给你反馈。即使你是为自己设计产品，也要倾听外部用户的意见，他们会告诉你如何制作他们愿意付费的产品。做任何你需要的事让他们爱你，让他们知道你在做什么。因为他们也会成为帮助你获得下一个用户的倡导者。

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.
你想在公司里建立一个引擎，将用户的反馈转化为产品决策。然后把它从一个用户那里拿回来，重复一遍。问他们喜欢什么，不喜欢什么，看着他们用。问问他们会付多少钱。问问他们，如果你的公司走了，他们会不会真的很沮丧。问他们是什么让他们向朋友推荐产品，问他们是否向朋友推荐过。
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.
你应该使这个反馈循环尽可能紧密。如果你的产品每周都有10%的改善，那么很快就会复合。软件初创公司的优势之一就是你能在多短的时间内完成反馈循环。它可以用小时来衡量，最好的公司通常有最紧密的反馈循环。你应该在公司的整个生命周期中保持这种状态，但在公司的早期，这一点非常重要。
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.
好消息是这一切都是可行的。这很难，需要很多努力，但没有魔力。这个计划至少是简单明了的，你最终会得到一个伟大的产品。
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.
伟大的创始人不会把任何人夹在自己和用户之间。这些公司的创始人在早期自己做销售和客户支持等工作。将这个循环嵌入到文化中是至关重要的。事实上，我们经常看到的斯坦福创业公司的一个特殊问题是，出于某种原因，学生们试图马上雇佣销售和客户支持人员，而你必须自己去做，这是唯一的办法。
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.
你真的需要用标准来保持你自己的诚实。这是真的，公司将建立任何首席执行官决定衡量。如果你正在建立一个互联网服务，忽略一些事情，比如总注册量，不要谈论他们，不要让公司里的任何人谈论他们，看看增长和活跃用户，活动水平，队列保留率，收入，净推广分数，这些都很重要。如果他们没有朝着正确的方向前进，那就要残酷地诚实。初创企业靠成长为生，成长是伟大产品的标志。

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.
因此，本文总结了构建一个优秀产品的概述。我想再强调一次，如果你没有弄清楚，我们在课堂上讨论的其他事情都无关紧要。你基本上可以忽略课堂上其他的一切，直到这一切顺利进行。从积极的一面来看，这是创业过程中最有趣的部分之一。
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.
所以我要在这里暂停一下，我们将在周四继续讨论剩下的内容，现在达斯汀将讨论为什么你应该创办一家新公司。谢谢你来，达斯汀。

Why To Start A Startup
为什么要创业

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.
但是是的，山姆让我谈谈你为什么要创业。人们有很多共同的理由，我经常听到你为什么要创业。重要的是要知道什么原因是你的，因为其中一些只有在某些情况下才有意义，他们中的一些实际上会，像，引导你误入歧途。你可能被好莱坞或媒体喜欢浪漫化创业的方式误导了，所以我想试着阐明一些潜在的谬误，这样你们就可以清楚地做出决定。然后我会谈谈我最喜欢创业的原因，这跟山姆刚才说的很多事情都很相关。但令人惊讶的是，我不认为这是最常见的原因。通常人们会有其他原因，或者，你知道，他们只是为了创办一家公司而创办一家公司。
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.
所以四个常见的原因，只是列举一下，是它的魅力，你会成为老板，你会有灵活性，特别是在你的时间表，你会有机会有更大的影响，赚更多的钱，然后你可能加入一个后期公司。
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.
所以你们可能很熟悉这个概念，当我写了一年前你们很多人读过的中篇文章时，我觉得报纸上的故事有点不平衡，企业家精神被浪漫化了很多。电影《社交网络》上映时，它有很多不好的方面，关于企业家的感觉，但主要是它描绘了一幅这样的画面，有很多派对，你只是从一个聪明的洞察力到另一个聪明的洞察力，真的让这件事看起来很酷。
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.
我认为现实并不是那么迷人，作为一个企业家有丑陋的一面，更重要的是，你真正花时间做的只是大量的努力。山姆提到了这一点，但你基本上只是坐在办公桌前，低着头，专注地回答客户支持邮件，做销售，解决棘手的工程问题。所以你必须睁大眼睛进去。而且压力也很大。这是最近新闻界的一个热门话题：《经济学人》上周刚刚刊登了一篇名为“创业者匿名”的报道，内容是一位创始人躲在办公桌下，谈论创始人的抑郁。所以这是一件非常真实的事情。说实话，如果你开一家公司，那将是非常困难的。

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.
为什么压力这么大？所以有几个原因。一是你有很多责任。任何职业的人都害怕失败，这就像心理学中占主导地位的一部分。但当你是一个企业家时，你会为自己和所有决定追随你的人担心失败。所以这真的很有压力。在某些情况下，人们依靠你维持生计，即使事实并非如此，他们也决定用一生中最美好的时光来追随你。所以你要为他们时间的机会成本负责。你总是随叫随到，如果有什么事情发生也许不总是在凌晨3点，但对于一些初创公司来说，这是真的，但如果有重要的事情发生，你会处理它。故事就这样结束了，不管你是不是在度假，也不管是不是周末，你必须时刻保持活力，在精神上处于一个你准备好处理这些事情的地方。这种压力的一个特殊例子是筹款。

更多知识请上火门网讨论:huomen.com
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.
社交网络上的一幕。这是我们在聚会和工作的同时，有人在社交网络上到处喷香槟花了很多时间画这些场景。马克不在现场，另一件他们花了全部时间的事就是把他画成一个大混蛋。
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.
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，全神贯注。马克有时还是有点蠢，但更像是一种有趣可爱的方式，而不是一种反社会的、蔑视情人的方式。所以，这只是他在暗示他的意图，就是专注于工作，而不是社交。
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.
接下来的场景展示了洞察力的瞬间，有点像从一个美丽的心灵里，他们真的偷走了那一幕。所以他们喜欢画那个场景，然后从其他时刻跳到这些时刻，中间有派对。但实际上我们一直都在那张桌子旁。所以如果你比较这张照片，马克的位置完全一样，但他穿着不同的衣服，所以今天绝对是不同的一天。这就是现实生活中的感觉。我刚刚谈到了这一点；这是我刚才谈到的经济学人的文章。
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.
因此，另一种形式的压力是不必要的媒体关注。所以，魅力的一部分是你有时会得到一些积极的媒体关注，登上《时代》杂志封面，成为年度人物是件好事。拿着你的一张结婚照登上别人的封面，可能有点不太好。这取决于你是谁，我真的很讨厌，但当瓦莱瓦格分析你的演讲，把你撕成两半，你不想那样，你肯定不想那样。没人想要那样。
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.
有一件事我几乎从未听人提起过，那就是你比我更坚定。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。对于一个创始人来说，你可以离开，但这是非常不酷的，而且在你的职业生涯的剩余时间里几乎是一个黑眼圈。如果进展顺利的话，你真的要承诺十年，如果进展不顺利的话，可能更像是五年。所以，三年后你会发现事情进展不顺利，如果你发现你的公司有一个好的着陆点，那就在收购公司再工作两年。如果你在那之前离开，这不仅会在经济上伤害你自己，还会伤害你所有的员工。所以，如果你运气好，创业想法不好，你很快就会失败，但大多数时候不是这样的。
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.
我应该说，我在自己的生活中经历了很多这样的压力，特别是在Facebook的早期，我变得非常不健康，我没有锻炼，我有很多的焦虑实际上把我的背甩了，就像几乎每六个月，当我21岁或22岁的时候，这是相当疯狂的。所以如果你真的开了一家公司，要意识到你要处理好这个问题。你必须切实处理好这件事，这是你的核心职责之一。本·霍洛维茨喜欢说，首席执行官的首要角色是管理自己的心理，这是绝对正确的，一定要做到。
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.
另一个原因，特别是如果你在另一家公司有另一份工作，你开始发展这种说法，就像经营这家公司的人都是白痴，他们做所有这些决定，把所有的时间都用在这些愚蠢的方式上，我要开一家公司，我要做得更好。我要制定所有的规则。
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:
听起来不错，很有道理。如果你读过我的媒体帖子，你就会知道接下来会发生什么，我会给你们一点时间来读这句话：
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.
人们有这样的愿景：成为自己创办的公司的首席执行官，站在金字塔的顶端。有些人是受此激励的，但事实并非如此。
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.
真正的感觉是：其他人都是你的老板——你的所有员工、客户、合作伙伴、用户、媒体都是你的老板。我从未有过更多的老板，今天需要为更多的人负责。
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.
大多数首席执行官的生活都是向别人汇报，至少对我和我认识的大多数首席执行官来说都是这样。如果你想对人民行使权力和权威，就参军或者从政。不要做企业家。
-Phil Libin
-菲尔利宾
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.
这真的引起了我的共鸣。需要指出的一点是，这些决定的现实是微妙的。你认为是白痴的人可能不是白痴，他们只是有一个非常困难的决定摆在他们面前，人们把他们拉向多个方向。因此，作为一名CEO，我最常花时间和精力的事情就是处理别人给我带来的问题，处理别人制造的其他优先事项，而这通常是以冲突的形式出现的。人们想要往不同的方向走，或者顾客想要不同的东西。我可能对此有自己的看法，但我正在玩的游戏是我最不让谁失望的游戏，我只是在尝试驾驭所有这些困难的局面。
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.
即使是在日常工作中，我也可能会在周一来，为如何改进公司制定所有宏伟的计划。但如果一个重要员工威胁要辞职，那是我的首要任务。这就是我花时间的地方。
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:
你是老板的一部分是你有灵活性，你可以控制自己的日程安排。这真是个吸引人的主意。所以现实是这样的：
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!
如果你想成为一名企业家，老实说，你会得到一些弹性时间。你可以一天24小时工作！
-Phil Libin
-菲尔利宾
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.
这也确实引起了我的共鸣。其中的一些原因，你总是随叫随到。所以也许你不打算一天中的所有时间都工作，但你不能控制哪些时间。

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.
你是公司的榜样，这一点非常重要。所以，如果你是一家公司的员工，你可能会有好的几周，也可能会有不好的几周，也可能是精力不足的几周，你可能想请几天假。如果你是个企业家，那就太糟糕了。你的团队会把你要带到谈判桌上的东西发出信号。所以如果你把脚从油门上移开，他们也会。
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.
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。如果你和伟大的投资者合作，你和伟大的合伙人合作，他们会非常努力，他们会希望你非常努力。
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.
有些公司喜欢讲这样一个故事：你可以吃蛋糕，也可以吃蛋糕，你可以每周工作4天，如果你是Tim Ferris，你可以每周工作12小时。这是一个非常有吸引力的想法，它确实适用于一个特定的例子，如果你真的想在每个市场上有一个小企业去追求，那么你是一个小企业的企业家，这是没有意义的，但一旦你过去像2或3个人，你真的需要加强它，并全心投入。
You’ll make more money and have more impact
你会赚更多的钱，影响更大
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.
这是最大的一个，我听到的最像是申请体位法的应聘者，他们告诉我“你知道我真的很想为小得多的公司工作，或者创办自己的公司，因为那样的话，我就能分得更大的一块蛋糕，或者对公司的经营方式有更大的影响，我会拥有更多的股权，这样我也能赚更多的钱”。所以让我们来看看什么时候这可能是真的。
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.
我来解释这些桌子。它们有点复杂，但让我们先关注左边。这些只是对Dropbox和Facebook的解释，这些是他们目前的估值，这是你作为100号员工进入这些公司可能赚多少钱，特别是如果你是一个经验丰富、经验相对丰富的工程师，你有5年的行业经验，你很可能会得到一份工作10个基点。如果你在几年前加入Dropbox，你已经锁定的收益大约是1000万美元，而且还有更多的增长空间。如果你加入Facebook几年后，你已经赚了大约2亿美元，这是一个巨大的数字，即使你以1000名员工的身份加入Facebook，那么你像2009年一样加入Facebook，你仍然赚了2000万美元，这是一个巨大的数字，当你考虑作为一个企业家你可能赚多少钱时，你应该这样做。
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.
移到右边的桌子上，这是两个理论上的公司，你可能会开始Uber for Pet siting”是个不错的主意，如果你真的很适合这一点，你可能很有可能建立一家价值1亿美元的公司，你在这家公司的份额可能在10%左右；这肯定会有很大的波动，一些创始人拥有的比这多，一些创始人拥有的少很多，但经过多轮稀释后，多轮的期权池创建你很可能会在这里结束。如果你有比这更多的东西，我会推荐萨姆关于创始人和雇员之间股权分割的文章，你可能应该付出更多。
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.
所以基本上，如果你非常有信心建立一个1亿美元的公司，这是一个很大的问题，不用说你应该在2009年或2014年在Facebook或Dropbox上有更多的信心，你可能对一个还不存在的初创公司有信心，那么这是值得做的。如果你有一个价值1亿美元的主意，而且你很有信心能付诸实施，我会考虑的。
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.
如果你认为你是建立“太空旅行优步”的合适企业家，那是一个非常大的想法，20亿美元的想法，你实际上会有一个很好的回报，你绝对应该这样做，这也是4年后的价值，这个想法可能有腿，一定要走之后，如果你想建立一个你现在甚至不应该在这个班上的公司，那就去建立那个公司吧。
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，为什么会有这样的经济回报和影响呢？我真的认为，经济回报与我们对世界的影响密切相关，如果你不相信的话，让我们通过一些具体的例子来讨论，而不是考虑股票。
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.
那么，为什么加入一家后期公司可能会产生很大的影响，你会得到这样一个力量倍增：他们有大量的现有用户群，如果是Facebook的话，有10亿用户，如果是谷歌的话，有10亿用户，他们有现有的基础设施，你可以在上面建立，对于像AWS这样的新公司和所有这些令人敬畏的独立服务提供商来说，这一点也越来越正确，但你通常会得到一些微专有技术，他们会为你维护这些技术，这是一个非常好的起点。如果你和一个团队一起工作，它会帮助你把你的想法转化为伟大的东西。
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.
举几个具体的例子，Bret Taylor以1500名员工的身份进入谷歌，他发明了谷歌地图，这是一个你们可能每天都在使用的产品，我用它来到这里，全世界数亿人都在使用它。他不需要创办一家公司就可以做到这一点，他碰巧得到了一笔丰厚的经济回报，但这一点又是巨大的影响。
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.
我的联合创始人贾斯汀·罗森斯坦（Justin Rosenstein）在布雷特（Brett）之后不久加入了谷歌，他是那里的一名项目经理，作为一个辅助项目，他最终开发了一个聊天软件原型，它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，在他这么做之前，你甚至认为你根本无法通过Ajax聊天或在浏览器中聊天他只是向他的团队展示并实现了这一点。这可能是你们大多数人几乎每天都在使用的产品。
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.
也许更令人印象深刻的是，在贾斯汀离开后不久，他成为了Facebook大约250名员工，他领导了一个hackaton项目，与安德鲁·博斯沃思（Andrew Bosworth）和利亚·珀尔曼（Leah Pearlman）等人一起创建了like按钮，这是网络上最流行的元素之一，完全改变了人们使用它的方式，然后又不需要成立一家公司来做这件事，而且几乎可以肯定的是，如果他尝试过的话，他会失败，因为他真的需要Facebook的发行来让它发挥作用。
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.
所以重要的是要记住你要创办什么样的公司的背景，以及你能在哪里真正做到这一点。
So what’s the best reason?
那么最好的理由是什么？
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?
山姆已经谈了一点，但基本上你不能不谈。你对这个想法非常热情，你是做这个的合适人选，你必须让它实现。那么这是怎么分解的呢？
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.
这是一种文字游戏，你不能用两种方式来做。一是你对它如此热情以至于你必须去做，而且无论如何你都要去做。这一点非常重要，因为你需要那种激情，才能完成我们前面提到的作为一个企业家的所有困难部分。你还需要它来有效地招聘，候选人可以闻到当你没有激情，有足够的企业家有激情，所以他们也可以为其中一个工作！所以这是作为一个企业家的赌注。你的潜意识也可以告诉你什么时候没有激情，这可能是一个巨大的问题。
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.
另一种解释是世界需要你去做。这证明了这个想法很重要，它会让世界变得更好，所以世界需要它。如果这不是世界需要的，那就去做世界需要的事情。你的时间真的很宝贵，有很多好主意，也许不是你自己的，也许是在现有的公司，但你也可以做一些好的事情。
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.
第二种解释是这个世界需要你去做。在某种程度上你很适合这个问题。如果这不是真的，这可能是一个迹象，你的时间是更好地花在其他地方。但最好的情况是，如果这不是真的，你的竞争对手是真的，这是一个次优的结果，对世界来说，感觉不是很好。
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.
回到我在Asana的经历，我和Justin在创建Asana之前都是不情愿的企业家，我们在Facebook工作，我们在解决一个大问题。我们基本上整天都在正常的项目上工作，然后在晚上，我们会继续在公司内部使用的这个内部任务经理上工作，正是因为我们对这个想法如此热情，它显然非常有价值，以至于我们不能做任何其他事情。
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.
在某个时刻，我们不得不进行艰难的对话，好吧，如果我们不真的创办这家公司意味着什么。我们可以看到它对Facebook的影响，我们确信它对世界是有价值的。我们也确信没有其他人会建造它，这个问题已经存在了很长时间，我们只是不断地看到它的增量解决方案，因此我们相信，如果我们不拿出我们认为最好的解决方案，将会有很多价值留在桌面上。我们无法停止对它的研究，从字面上说，这个想法是从我们的胸膛里跳出来，强迫自己进入这个世界。我认为这才是你创业时应该寻找的感觉，这才是你知道自己有正确想法的方式。
I’ll go ahead and stop there. I’ll put some recommended books up here.
我继续往前走，停在那儿。我会把一些推荐的书放在这里。
Thank you.
非常感谢。