Lecture 2: Ideas, Products, Teams and Execution Part II 第二讲：创意、产品、团队与执行第二部分

Lecture 2: Ideas, Products, Teams and Execution Part II

第二讲：创意、产品、团队与执行第二部分

第2讲课程视频

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

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.
在我开始今天的讲座之前，我想回答一些人们给我发来的关于上次讲座的问题，我们没有时间去听。所以，如果你有一个关于我们上次讨论的问题，欢迎我现在回答，从你开始。
Q: How do I identify if a market has a fast growth rate now and also for the next ten years?
Q： 我如何确定一个市场现在和未来十年是否有快速增长？
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.
A： 好消息是这是学生的一大优势。你应该相信你的直觉。老年人必须基本上猜测年轻人使用的技术。但是你可以看着你和你的朋友在做什么，你的直觉肯定比任何比你年长的人都好。所以这个问题的答案就是相信你的直觉，想想你在做什么，想想你在用什么，你看到你这个年龄的人在用什么，这几乎肯定是未来。
Okay, one more question on the last lecture before we start.
好的，在我们开始之前最后一节课还有一个问题。
Q: How do you deal with burnout while still being productive and remaining productive.
Q： 你如何处理工作倦怠，同时仍然是生产力和保持生产力。
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.
A： 这个问题的答案是，它很糟糕，你继续前进。不像一个学生，你可以举手说，你知道我真的筋疲力尽了，我只是会得到坏成绩这个季度，其中一个困难的部分是，经营一家初创公司，这是真实的生活，你只需要通过它。经典的建议是去度假，这对创业者来说是行不通的。这是一种很难理解的消耗。

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.
所以你要做的就是坚持下去。你依赖别人，这真的很重要，创始人抑郁是一件很严重的事情，你需要一个支持网络。但是克服疲劳的方法就是应对挑战，解决出问题的事情，你最终会感觉更好。
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.
上节课，我们讨论了这个想法和产品，我想强调的是，如果你没有把它们做好，剩下的这些都救不了你。今天，我们将讨论如何招聘和执行。希望你不要处决你雇佣的人。有时候。
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.
首先，我想谈谈联合创始人。联合创始人关系是整个公司最重要的关系之一。每个人都说，你必须提防联合创始人之间正在酝酿的紧张局势，你必须立即解决这个问题。这都是事实，当然在YC的例子中，创业公司早逝的头号原因是共同创始人的失败。但出于某种原因，很多人认为选择共同创始人的重要性甚至不如招聘那么重要。别这样！这是你在创业生涯中做出的最重要的决定之一，你需要这样对待它。
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.
出于某种原因，学生们在这方面真的很差。他们只是随便挑个人。他们说，我想创业，你想创业，我们一起创业吧。有一些共同创始人约会的事情，你会说，嘿，我在找一个共同创始人，我们还不太了解对方，我们开个公司吧。这简直太疯狂了。你永远不会雇用这样的人，但人们愿意这样选择他们的商业伙伴。真的很糟糕。而选择一个随机的共同创始人，或者选择一个你没有很长历史的人，选择一个你不是朋友的人，所以当事情真的出了问题，你有这种过去的历史把你绑在一起，通常会以灾难告终。
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.
我们有一个YC批次，其中大约75家公司中有9家在我们采访这些公司到他们开始的这段时间里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。对于那些共同创始人互不了解的公司来说，业绩记录真的很糟糕。
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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.
认识共同创始人的一个好方法是在大学里见面。如果你没有上过大学，又不认识一个共同创始人，我认为下一个最好的办法就是去一家有趣的公司工作。如果你在Facebook、Google或类似的公司工作，它几乎和斯坦福一样富有。没有共同创始人总比有一个不好的共同创始人好，但单独创始人还是不好的。在我们开始之前我只是看看这里的数据。我可能错过了一个，因为我数得很快，但我认为，对于排名前20位最有价值的YC公司来说，几乎所有公司都至少有两位创始人。我们大概资助了十分之一的独奏队。
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，最重要的是，你知道的联合创始人，没有那么好，但还是可以的，独创者。你遇到的随机创始人，但学生们这样做是出于某种原因，真的很糟糕。
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，当你在考虑可能是好的创始人和人时，有一个问题是你在寻找什么，对吗？在YC我们有一个公开的短语，它是无情的足智多谋，每个人都听说过。当然，你也需要足智多谋的联合创始人，但在YC的启动仪式上，我们分享了一个更丰富多彩的例子。保罗·格雷厄姆开始用这个，我一直在用。

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.
所以，你要找的是那些需要镇定自若、强硬的联合创始人，他们知道在任何情况下该怎么做。他们行动迅速，他们果断，他们富有创造力，他们为任何事情做好了准备，而事实证明，流行文化中有一个这样的模式。这听起来很蠢，但至少很难忘，我们已经告诉YC的每一个班级很长时间了，我认为这对他们有帮助。
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.
那个模特是詹姆斯·邦德。再说一次，这听起来很疯狂，但它至少会留在你的记忆中，你需要一个行为像詹姆斯·邦德的人，而不是一个在某个特定领域的专家。
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.
正如我之前提到的，你真的很想认识你的共同创始人一段时间，最好是几年。这一点对早期员工来说尤其如此，但顺便说一句，更多的人在早期员工身上得到了这样的权利，而不是在联合创始人身上。所以，好好利用学校。除了不屈不挠的足智多谋，你还需要一个坚强而冷静的联合创始人。聪明是显而易见的，但每个人都知道你想要一个聪明的联合创始人，他们没有优先考虑像强硬和冷静的事情，特别是如果你觉得你自己不是，你需要一个联合创始人谁是。如果你不是技术型的，即使在座的大多数人都觉得自己是技术型的，你也需要一个技术型的联合创始人。现在在初创公司里有一件奇怪的事情，人们常说，你知道吗，我们不需要技术上的联合创始人，我们会雇人，我们只会成为优秀的管理者。
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.
根据我们的经验，这不太管用。软件人真的应该创办软件公司。媒体人应该创办媒体公司。在YC的经验中，两三个联合创始人似乎是完美的。一个，显然不是很好，五个，非常糟糕。四个有时有效，但我认为两到三个是目标。
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.
第二部分如何雇佣：尽量不要。当你创办一家公司时，你会注意到一件奇怪的事情，那就是每个人都会问你有多少员工。这是人们用来判断你的创业公司有多真实，你有多酷的标准。如果你说你有大量的员工，他们真的印象深刻。如果你说你的雇员人数不多，那你听起来就像个小笑话。但事实上，员工太多太糟糕了，你应该为自己的员工太少而自豪。很多员工最终都会有这样的事情，比如高燃烧率，这意味着你每个月都会损失很多钱，复杂，决策缓慢，名单上还有很多事情，没有什么好结果。
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.
所以你要为你能用一小部分员工完成多少工作而自豪。许多最优秀的YC公司第一年的员工数量少得惊人，有时除了创始人之外，没有其他员工。他们真的尽量保持身材矮小。一开始，你应该只在你非常需要的时候才雇用。以后，你应该学会快速招聘，扩大公司规模，但在早期，目标不应该是招聘。其中一个很糟糕的原因是，提前雇佣员工的成本非常高。事实上，我参与过的很多公司，在最初的三年左右的时间里，他们的早期雇佣情况非常糟糕，员工永远无法恢复，这只会扼杀公司。

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. 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.
Airbnb花了五个月的时间面试了他们的第一位员工。第一年，他们只雇了两个。在他们雇佣一个人之前，他们写下了一份他们希望任何Airbnb员工拥有的文化价值观的清单。如果你不同意，他们就不会雇佣你。作为Airbnb首席执行官的布莱恩·切斯基（Brian Chesky）是一个多么热情的例子，他曾经问人们，如果他们得到医学诊断，他们还有一年的生命，他们是否愿意接受这份工作。后来他觉得这有点太疯狂了，我想他把时间放宽到了十年，但最后我听说，他还是问这个问题。
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.
这些人真的很重要，这些人是你公司的定义，所以你需要的人几乎和你一样相信它。这听起来像是一件疯狂的事情，但他有一种文化，即当公司面临危机时，全心投入的人会走到一起。当公司很早就面临一场大危机时，每个人都住在办公室里，他们每天运送产品，直到危机结束。关于Airbnb的一个显著的观察结果是，如果你和前40名左右的员工中的任何一个交谈，他们都会觉得自己是公司成立的一部分。
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.
但是，通过拥有一个非常高的标准，通过缓慢的招聘确保每个人都相信这个使命，你就能做到。比如说，你听到了关于除非你真的有机会否则不要雇佣的警告。当你处于这种招聘模式时，找最好的人应该是你的第一要务。就像在产品模式中，这应该是你的首要任务。当你处于筹款模式时，筹款是你的首要任务。
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.
创业者总是低估的一点是，招聘有多难。你认为你有这个好主意，每个人都会加入。但事情不是这样的。为了得到最优秀的人才，他们有很多很好的选择，因此很容易需要一年的时间来招聘人才。这是一个漫长的过程，所以你必须说服他们，你的任务是他们所看到的一切中最重要的。这是另一个例子，说明为什么在看其他东西之前先把产品做好是非常重要的。最优秀的人知道他们应该加入火箭队。
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.
顺便说一句，如果你要加入一家初创公司，我的第一条建议就是选择火箭。选择一家已经开始运作的公司，并不是每个人都意识到这一点，但你知道，因为你在关注，它将是巨大的。再说一次，你通常可以识别这些。但是好人知道这一点，所以好人会等着，看你走上这条轨道，然后他们才会加入。
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.
今天早上人们在网上问的一个问题是，你应该在招聘上花多少时间。答案是0或25%。你要么根本不招聘，要么这可能是你最大的一段时间。实际上，所有这些关于管理的书都说你应该把50%的时间花在招聘上，但是那些给出建议的人，他们自己却很少花10%的时间。百分之二十五仍然是一个巨大的时间量，但这确实是多少，你应该做，一旦你在招聘模式。
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.
如果你妥协并雇佣一个平庸的人，你将永远后悔。我们想警告创始人这一点，但在他们第一次犯错之前，没有人真正感受到这一点，但这会毒害文化。大公司里平庸的人会带来一些问题，但不会扼杀公司。在前五个月内，一个平庸的员工往往会扼杀一家初创公司。

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.
我的一个朋友在他面试时使用的会议室里有一个招牌，他在招牌上写着应聘者在面试时正在看这个招牌，上面写着平庸的工程师不会建立伟大的公司。是的，这是真的，这是真的。在一家大公司里，你可以侥幸逃脱，因为人们只是有点落井下石，但创业公司的每个人都会定下基调。因此，如果你在前五个月妥协，十次雇佣可能会毁掉公司。你可以为你雇佣的每个人考虑一下：我会把公司的未来押在这一次雇佣上吗？这是一个很难的标准。在公司的某个时候，当你长大了，你会在雇佣上妥协。会有一些紧迫的最后期限或类似的事情，你仍然会后悔。但这是理论和实践的区别，我们将让后面的演讲者讨论发生这种情况时该怎么办。但在早期你不能把事情搞砸。
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.
候选人的来源。这是另一件学生经常犯错的事情。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。在文本中，大多数伟大的公司都是由第一批100名员工的个人推荐建立的，而且往往还有更多。大多数创始人都会感到尴尬，但他们会称自己见过的人为好人，并要求自己的员工也这么做。但她会注意到，如果你去Facebook或Google工作，他们在你最初的几周里做的一件事就是让一个人力资源部的人坐下来，击败你见过的每一个聪明人，让你能够招聘到他们。
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.
这些个人推荐确实是招聘的诀窍。另一个建议是往山谷外看。在这里雇佣工程师竞争激烈，但你可能认识世界上其他地方愿意与你合作的人。
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.
另一个问题，创始人问了我们很多关于他的经验和有多重要。简而言之，经验对某些角色很重要，而对其他角色则不重要。当你雇佣一个将管理你大部分组织的人时，你的经验可能非常重要。对于大多数你在创业初期雇佣的人来说，经验可能并不重要，你应该追求自己的能力和对所做工作的信念。我一生中雇佣过的大多数最好的人以前都没有做过这样的事。所以真的值得思考，这是不是一个我在乎经验的角色。而且你经常会发现不需要，尤其是在早期。
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.
我在招聘中需要三样东西。他们聪明吗？他们能完成任务吗？我想花很多时间和他们在一起吗？如果我得到一个答案，如果我能对这三个都说“是”，我永远不会后悔，这几乎总是成功的。在面试中，你可以学到很多关于这三件事的知识，但最好的方法是一起工作，所以理想的情况是，你曾经和某人一起工作过，在这种情况下，你甚至不需要面试。如果你没有，那么我认为在雇用某个项目的人之前，最好先和他们合作一两天。你们两个都会学到很多东西，他们也会学到很多，而且大多数第一次创业的人都是非常糟糕的面试官，但他们在一起工作后非常善于评价一个人。

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.
因此，我们在YC的建议之一是，试着一起做一个项目，而不是面试。如果你要去面试，你可能会去面试，你应该特别问一些过去有人做过的项目。你将学到比用脑筋急转弯的人多得多的东西。出于某种原因，年轻的技术联合创始人喜欢问脑筋急转弯的人，而不仅仅是问别人做了什么。深入研究人们所从事的项目。打电话给推荐人。这是第一次创业者喜欢跳过的另一件事。你想打电话给这些人过去共事过的人。当你这么做的时候，你不只是想问，某某怎么样，你真的很想深入研究。这个人是你共事过的人中排名前5%的人吗？他们具体做了什么？你还会再雇他们吗？你为什么不再雇他们？你真的得给这些推荐人打电话。
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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.
我在与YC公司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员工相关。我以前不注意这个。我们将进一步讨论为什么沟通在早期创业中如此重要。如果有人很难交谈，如果有人不能清楚地沟通，这是一个真正的问题，在他们的可能性工作。也。对于早期的员工，你需要一个有点冒险精神的人。你通常会明白，否则他们不会对创业公司感兴趣，但现在创业公司更流行了，你需要的人实际上有点像风险。如果有人在加入麦肯锡还是你的初创公司之间做出选择，他们不大可能在初创公司成功。
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.
你也需要那些有着疯狂决心的人，这与有着风险容忍态度的人略有不同。所以你真的应该两个都找。顺便说一句，当事情发生时，欢迎有人用问题来打断我。
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.
保罗·格雷厄姆有一个著名的试验叫做动物试验。这里的想法是，你应该能够将任何员工描述为他们所做的事情的动物。我不认为英语翻译得很好，但你需要势不可挡的人。你想要的是那些只会完成任务的人。那些通常对自己早期的员工非常满意的创业者通常会把这些人描述成世界上最优秀的人。
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.
马克·扎克伯格曾经说过，他试图雇佣的人是：A.他愿意在社交场合与人相处；B.如果角色颠倒，他愿意向人汇报。我觉得这是一个非常好的框架。你不必和每个人都是朋友，但你至少应该享受和他们一起工作的乐趣。如果你没有，你至少应该深深地尊重他们。但是，如果你不想花很多时间和人在一起，你应该相信你的直觉。
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.
当我谈到招聘这个话题时，我想谈谈员工权益。创始人总是搞砸这件事。我想粗略估计一下，你应该把公司大约10%的股份给前10名员工。

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.
无论如何，他们必须在四年内挣到钱，如果他们成功了，他们将贡献更多。他们会给公司带来更大的价值，如果他们不这样做，那么他们无论如何也不会存在。
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.
无论出于什么原因，创始人通常对员工的股权非常吝啬，对投资者的股权非常慷慨。我觉得这完全是倒退。我认为这是创始人最常搞砸的事情之一。随着时间的推移，员工只会增加更多的价值。投资者通常会开出支票，尽管有很多承诺，但通常不会做那么多。有时候他们会这样做，但你的员工真的是多年来建立公司的人。
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.
因此，我认为应该与投资者进行斗争，减少他们获得的股本，然后尽可能慷慨地对待员工。在这方面做得很好的YC公司，对早期员工非常慷慨的YC公司，总的来说，是我们资助的最成功的公司。
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.
创始人忘记的一件事是，他们雇佣员工后，必须留住他们。我不打算在这里详细讨论，因为我们稍后会有一个关于这个的讲座，但我确实想谈一点，因为创始人经常会犯错。你必须确保你的员工感到快乐和有价值。这也是股权授予如此重要的原因之一。兴奋地加入一家初创公司的人不会想太多，但当他们日复一日，年复一年地加入时，如果他们觉得自己受到了不公平的对待，那真的会开始激怒他们，怨恨也会累积起来。
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.
但更重要的是，仅仅学习一点点管理技能，这对初任CEO来说通常是很糟糕的。今年夏天YC的一位演讲者，现在已经非常成功了，他很早就开始努力了，他的团队翻了几次身。有人问他最大的挣扎是什么，他说，结果你不应该告诉你的员工他们每天都在搞砸，除非你希望他们都离开，因为他们会离开。
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.
但作为创始人，这是一种非常自然的本能。你认为你能把每件事都做到最好，当别人做得不好的时候，你很容易告诉他们。因此，在这里学习一点知识可以防止团队大规模流失。对于大多数创始人来说，真正表扬他们的团队也不是自然而然的事。我也花了一点时间才学会这一点。你必须让你的团队为所有发生的好事负责，而你要为坏事负责。
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.
你不必管得太细。你必须不断地给人们小范围的责任。这些并不是创始人所想的。我认为作为一个第一次创业的人，你能做的最好的事情就是意识到你将是一个非常糟糕的管理者，并试图对此进行过度补偿。丹·平克谈到了激励人们做伟大工作的三件事：自主、精通和目标。我在经营公司的时候从来没有想过这个问题，但从那时起我就开始考虑这个问题，我认为这是对的。我觉得值得一试。我也花了一段时间来学习做一对一的事情，并给出清晰的反馈。

All of these things are things first time CEO don’t normally do, and maybe I can save you from not doing that.
所有这些都是首席执行官第一次通常不会做的事情，也许我可以帮你避免不做这些。
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.
团队部分的最后一部分是在不起作用时解雇员工。不管我在这里说什么都不能阻止任何人做错事，我这么说的原因是解雇员工是经营公司最糟糕的部分之一。实际上根据我自己的经验，我认为这是最糟糕的部分。每次创始人第一次等待的时间太长，大家都希望有一位员工能转危为安。但正确的答案是在不起作用的时候快速开火。这对公司更有利，对员工也更有利。但这是如此痛苦，如此可怕，以至于每个人在开始的几次都错了。
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.
除了解雇工作表现不好的人，你还想解雇那些a）制造办公室政治，b）持续消极的人。公司的其他人总是意识到员工在做这样的事情，这只是一个巨大的阻力——它对公司是完全有害的。再说一次，这是一个在大公司里可能行得通的例子，尽管我仍然怀疑，但会扼杀一家初创公司。所以你要小心那些“如果”的人。
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.
所以，问题是，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，当一个员工不工作时，并不是他们搞砸了一两次。任何人都会搞砸一次或两次，甚至更多次，你知道你应该很有爱心，而不是向他们发泄，就像，成为一个团队，一起工作。
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.
如果有人把每一个决定都搞错了，那就是你需要采取行动的时候，在那一刻，每个人都会痛苦地意识到这一点。这不是一个简单的问题，而是每次有人做某事时，你自己都会做相反的事情。你不能做他们的决定，但你可以选择决策者。而且，如果有人做错了每件事，就像一件持续的事情，比如几个星期或一个月，你会意识到的。
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.
从理论上讲，确定你在说什么听起来很复杂，实际上几乎没有任何疑问。一个人犯一个或两个错误，不断地把事情搞砸，或者制造问题，或者让每个人都不开心，这两者之间的区别在你第一次看到它的时候是显而易见的。
When should co-founders decide on the equity split?
联合创始人应该在什么时候决定股权分割？

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.
出于某种原因，我从来都不知道为什么会这样，很多创始人，很多联合创始人都喜欢把这件事搁置很久。你知道，他们甚至会疯狂地签署公司注册文件，这样他们就可以等着讨论了。
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.
这不是一个随着时间的推移而变得容易的讨论，你想在你们开始合作后很快就把这个理想化。它应该几乎相等。如果你不愿意给某个人——你的联合创始人——你知道的，比如同等份额的股权，我认为这应该让你认真考虑你是否希望他们成为联合创始人。但不管怎样，你应该在公司走得太远之前把墨水弄干。就像，在最初的几周里。
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.
所以问题是-我说过没有经验是可以的-你怎么知道一个人是否会超越过去，而不是成为一个角色，随着事情的发展，后来变得残废。随着时间的推移，那些真正聪明、能学到新东西的人几乎总能在公司里找到一份工作。你可能要把他们转移到别的地方，而不是他们开始的地方。你知道，可能是你雇了一个人来领导工程团队，但随着时间的推移，这个团队无法扩展到50人，你给了他们一个不同的角色。真的很好的人，几乎可以找到一些伟大的地方在公司，我没有看到这是一个问题太多。
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.
所以问题是当你和你的共同创始人的关系破裂时会发生什么。我们将在课程的后面有一节关于力学的课，但最重要的是创始人搞砸了。也就是说，每一个共同创始人，当然是你自己，都必须有归属权。基本上，你所做的共同创始人行权是你预先谈判会发生什么，如果你们中的一个离开。因此，硅谷对此的正常立场是，需要四年的时间，比如说，你将股权平分，需要四年的时间才能挣到所有这些。一年后才开始计时。因此，如果你在一年后离职，你将保留25%的股权，如果你在两年后离职，你将保留50%的股权。
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.
如果你不这样做，如果你有一个巨大的余波，一个创始人提前离开了一半的公司，你的股票表上就有这个无谓的负担，很难让投资者为你提供资金或做任何其他事情。因此，防止这种情况发生的第一条建议是对股权进行归属。我们现在基本上不会为一家创始人没有股权的公司提供资金，因为这太糟糕了。另一件事，在联合创始人之间的关系，这发生在每个公司的某种程度上，是谈论它早，不要让它坐在那里和溃烂。
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.
如果你不得不在雇佣一个次优员工和把客户输给竞争对手之间做出选择，你会怎么做？如果它是一家公司的前五名员工之一，我就会失去这些客户。它对公司造成的损害——失去一些客户总比毁掉公司好。后来，我可能会有一个稍微不同的意见，但在一般情况下真的很难说。

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.
我稍后再谈。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。一般来说，我对远程团队持怀疑态度，但在初创初期，当通信和速度压倒一切时，出于某种原因，视频会议通话效果并不理想。关于这一点的数据是，看看有史以来30家成功的软件公司，并试图指出一个单一的例子，其中共同创始人在不同的地点。真的很难。
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.
好吧，现在我们来谈谈死刑。对大多数创始人来说，执行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，然后他们将去杂志封面和参加聚会。但其实最重要的是，作为一名联合创始人的真正意义在于，签约参与这项长达数年的执行工作，而你不能将其外包。
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.
要想拥有一家执行良好的公司，你必须自己执行良好。创业公司的每一件事都以创始人为榜样。无论创始人做什么，都会成为一种文化。因此，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，你必须自己动手。没有别的办法了。当你去参加会议时，你不能雇一个首席运营官来做这件事。公司只需要把你看成一个疯狂的执行机器。正如我在第一节课上所说的，有伟大想法的人至少比那些愿意努力把想法做好的人多一百倍。想法本身没有任何价值，只有执行得好才能增加和创造价值。
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.
执行的很大一部分只是付出努力，但是你可以学到很多关于如何做好它的知识。所以我们有三节课来讨论这个。
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.
首席执行官，人们总是问我关于首席执行官的工作。可能不止五个，这里有五个在早期出现很多。前四个大家都认为是CEO的工作：设定愿景、筹集资金、向你要招聘的人宣传使命、高管、合伙人、媒体、每个人、雇佣和管理团队。但第五个是设定执行标准，这并不是大多数创始人感到兴奋或想象自己会做的事情，但我认为这实际上是关键的CEO角色之一，除了CEO，没有人能做到这一点。
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.
执行分为两个关键问题。一，你能想出该怎么办；二，你能把它做好。所以我想谈谈两个部分，假设你已经知道该怎么做了。这些就是注意力和强度。所以专注是关键。我最喜欢问创始人的一个问题是，他们把时间和金钱花在了什么上。这几乎揭示了创始人认为重要的一切。
One of the hardest parts about being a founder is that there are a hundred important things competing for your attention every day. And you have to identify the right two or three, work on those, and then ignore, delegate, or defer the rest. And a lot of these things that founders think are important, interviewing a lot at different law firms, going to conferences, recruiting advisers, whatever, they just don’t matter. What really does matter varies with time, but it’s an important piece of advice. You need to figure out what the one or two most important things are, and then just do those.
作为一个创始人，最困难的部分之一就是每天有上百件重要的事情在争夺你的注意力。你必须找出正确的两个或三个，处理这些，然后忽略，委派，或推迟其余的。很多创业者认为重要的事情，在不同的律师事务所面试，参加会议，招聘顾问等等，这些都无关紧要。真正重要的东西随时间而变化，但这是一条重要的建议。你需要弄清楚最重要的一两件事是什么，然后去做。

And you can only have two or three things every day, because everything else will just come at you. There will be fires every day and if you don’t get good at setting what those two or three things are, you’ll never be good at getting stuff done. This is really hard for founders. Founders get excited about starting new things.
你每天只能有两三样东西，因为其他的东西都会向你袭来。每天都会有火灾发生，如果你不善于设置这两件或三件事是什么，你就永远不会擅长把事情做好。这对创始人来说真的很难。创始人对开始新事物感到兴奋。
Unfortunately the trick to great execution is to say no a lot. You’re saying no ninety-seven times out of a hundred, and most founders find they have to make a very conscious effort to do this. Most startups are nowhere near focused enough. They work really hard-maybe-but they don’t work really hard at the right things, so they’ll still fail. One of the great and terrible things about starting a start up is that you get no credit for trying. You only get points when you make something the market wants. So if you work really hard on the wrong things, no one will care.
不幸的是，成功的诀窍是经常说“不”。你百分之九十七次说不，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。大多数初创公司都不够专注。也许他们真的很努力，但是他们没有在正确的事情上真正努力，所以他们仍然会失败。一个伟大的和可怕的事情，开始一个新的是，你没有得到信贷尝试。只有当你做出市场想要的东西时，你才能得到分数。所以如果你真的在错误的事情上努力工作，没有人会在意。
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So then there’s this question of how do you figure out what to focus on each day. Each day it’s really important to have goals. Most good founders I know have a set of small overarching goals for the company that everybody in the company knows. You know it could be something like ship a product by this date, get this certain growth rate, get this engagement rate, hire for these key roles, those are some of them but everyone in the company can tell you each week what are our key goals. And then everybody executes based off of that.
所以接下来的问题是，你怎样才能知道每天要关注什么。每天都有目标是很重要的。我认识的大多数优秀的创始人都有一套公司所有人都知道的小目标。你知道，这可能像是在这个日期之前运送一个产品，获得这个特定的增长率，获得这个参与率，雇佣这些关键角色，这些都是其中的一些，但是公司里的每个人每周都可以告诉你我们的关键目标是什么。然后每个人都以此为基础执行死刑。
The founders really set the focus. Whatever the founders care about, whatever the founders focus on, that’s going to set the goals for the whole company. The best founders repeat these goals over and over, far more often than they think they should need to. They put them up on the walls they talk about them in one on ones and at all-hands meetings each week. And it keeps the company focus. One of the keys to focus, and why I said cofounders that aren’t friends really struggle, is that you can’t be focused without good communication. Even if you have only four or five people at a company, a small communication breakdown is enough for people to be working on slightly different things. And then you lose focus and the company just scrambles.
创始人们真正确定了重点。无论创始人关心什么，关注什么，都会为整个公司设定目标。最优秀的创始人一遍又一遍地重复这些目标，比他们认为需要的次数多得多。他们把它们挂在墙上，在每周的一对一和所有人会议上谈论它们。它让公司保持专注。专注的关键之一，也是为什么我说那些不是真正的朋友的共同创始人会挣扎，就是没有良好的沟通你就不能专注。即使你在一家公司只有四五个人，一次小小的沟通中断也足以让人们从事稍微不同的工作。然后你失去了注意力，公司就开始混乱。
I’m going to talk about this a little bit later, but growth and momentum are something you can never lose focus on. Growth and momentum are what a startup lives on and you always have to focus on maintaining these. You should always know how you’re doing against your metrics, you should have a weekly review meeting every week, and you should be extremely suspicious if you’re ever talking about, we’re not focused on growth right now, we’re not growing that well right now but we’re doing this other thing, we don’t have a timeline for when we are going to ship this because we’re focused on this other thing, we’re doing a re-brand, whatever, almost always a disaster.
我稍后会谈到这个问题，但增长和动力是你永远不能失去的重点。成长和动力是创业者赖以生存的，你必须始终专注于保持这些。你应该知道你是如何根据你的指标做的，你应该每周有一次每周的回顾会议，你应该非常怀疑，如果你曾经谈论过，我们现在没有把重点放在增长上，我们现在没有增长那么好，但我们正在做另一件事，我们没有一个时间表，我们将要做什么运送这个是因为我们专注于另一件事，我们在做品牌再造，不管怎样，几乎总是一场灾难。

So you want to have the right metrics and you want to be focused on growing those metrics and having momentum. Don’t let the company get distracted or excited about other things. A common mistake is that companies get excited by their own PR. It’s really easy to get PR with no results and it actually feels like you’re really cool. But in a year you’ll have nothing, and at that point you won’t be cool anymore, and you’ll just be talking about these articles from a year ago that, Oh you know these Stanford students start a new start up, it’s going to be the next big thing and now you have nothing and that sucks.
因此，你需要有正确的衡量标准，你需要专注于提高这些衡量标准并保持势头。不要让公司为其他事情分心或兴奋。一个常见的错误是，公司会为自己的公关而兴奋。很容易得到没有结果的公关，实际上感觉你真的很酷。但一年后你将一无所有，那时你将不再冷静，你只会谈论这些一年前的文章，哦，你知道这些斯坦福的学生开始了一个新的开始，这将是下一个大的事情，现在你什么都没有，这很糟糕。
As I mentioned already, be in the same space. I think this is pretty much a nonstarter. Remote confounding teams is just really really hard. It slows down the cycle time more than anybody ever thinks it’s going to.
我已经说过了，在同一个地方。我认为这是一个非常不起眼。远程混淆团队真的很难。它比任何人想象的都要慢。
The other piece besides focus for execution is intensity. Startups only work at a fairly intense level. A friend of mine says the secret to start up success is extreme focus and extreme dedication. You can have a startup and one other thing, you can have a family, but you probably can’t have many other things. Startups are not the best choice for work life balance and that’s sort of just the sad reality. There’s a lot of great things about a startup, but this is not one of them. Startups are all-consuming in a way that is generally difficult to explain. You basically need to be willing to outwork your competitors.
除了执行的重点之外，另一个因素是强度。初创公司的工作强度相当高。我的一个朋友说，创业成功的秘诀是全神贯注，全力以赴。你可以有一个创业公司和一个家庭，但你可能不能有很多其他的东西。创业公司并不是平衡工作与生活的最佳选择，这只是一个悲哀的现实。创业公司有很多伟大的东西，但这不是其中之一。初创公司的消费方式通常很难解释。你基本上需要愿意胜过你的竞争对手。
The good news here is that a small amount of extra work on the right thing makes a huge difference. One example that I like to give is thinking about the viral coefficient for a consumer web product. How many new users each existing user brings in. If it’s .99 the company will eventually flatline and die. And if it’s 1.01 you’ll be in this happy place of exponential growth forever.
好消息是，在正确的事情上做少量的额外工作会产生巨大的影响。我想举的一个例子是考虑消费者网络产品的病毒系数。每个现有用户引入多少新用户。如果是0.99，公司最终会停滞不前。如果它是1.01，你将永远处于指数增长的快乐之地。
So this is one concrete example of where a tiny extra bit of work is the difference between success and failure. When we talk to successful founders they tell stories like this all the time. Just outworking their competitors by a little bit was what made them successful.
所以这是一个具体的例子，一点点额外的工作就是成功和失败的区别。当我们与成功的创始人交谈时，他们总是讲这样的故事。仅仅比竞争对手多出一点点就使得他们成功了。

So you have to be really intense. This only comes from the CEO, this only comes from the founders. One of the biggest advantages that start ups have is execution speed and you have to have this relentless operating rhythm. Facebook has this famous poster that says move fast and break things. But at the same time they manage to be obsessed with quality. And this is why it’s hard. It’s easy to move fast or be obsessed with quality, but the trick is to do both at a startup. You need to have a culture where the company has really high standards for everything everyone does, but you still move quickly.
所以你必须非常紧张。这只来自CEO，这只来自创始人。初创企业最大的优势之一是执行速度，你必须有这种无情的运作节奏。Facebook有一张著名的海报，上面写着“快速行动，打破现状”。但与此同时，他们却对质量着迷。这就是为什么很难。快速行动或者沉迷于质量是很容易的，但诀窍是在创业时两者兼顾。你需要有这样一种文化：公司对每个人所做的每件事都有很高的标准，但你仍然行动迅速。
Apple, Google, and Facebook have each done this extremely well. It’s not about the product, it’s about everything they do. They move fast and they break things, they’re frugal in the right places, but they care about quality everywhere. You don’t buy people shitty computers if you don’t want them to write shitty code. You have to set a quality bar that runs through the entire company. Related to this is that you have to be decisive. Indecisiveness is a startup killer. Mediocre founders spend a lot of time talking about grand plans, but they never make a decision. They’re talking about you know I could do this thing, or I could do that other thing, and they’re going back and forth and they never act. And what you actually need is this bias towards action.
苹果、谷歌和Facebook都做得非常好。这不是产品的问题，而是他们所做的一切。他们行动迅速，他们打破东西，他们在正确的地方节俭，但他们关心的质量无处不在。如果你不想让别人写下流的代码，你就不会给他们买下流的电脑。你必须设置一个贯穿整个公司的质量标准。与此相关的是你必须果断。优柔寡断是创业杀手。平庸的创始人会花很多时间谈论宏伟的计划，但他们从不做决定。他们说你知道我可以做这件事，或者我可以做那件事，他们来回走动，从不行动。你真正需要的是对行动的偏见。
The best founders work on things that seem small but they move really quickly. But they get things done really quickly. Every time you talk to the best founders they’ve gotten new things done. In fact, this is the one thing that we learned best predicts a success of founders in YC. If every time we talk to a team they’ve gotten new things done, that’s the best predictor we have that a company will be successful. Part of this is that you can do huge things in incremental pieces. If you keep knocking down small chunks one at a time, in a year you look back and you’ve done this amazing thing. On the other hand, if you disappear for a year and you expect to come back with something amazing all at once, it usually never happens.
最优秀的创业者从事的事情看起来很小，但进展却很快。但他们很快就能完成任务。每次你和最好的创始人交谈，他们都会做些新的事情。事实上，这是我们学到的最能预示YC创始人成功的一件事。如果每次我们和一个团队谈话，他们都完成了新的事情，那就是我们对一个公司成功的最好预测。其中一部分是你可以做大量的事情。如果你一次一个地把小东西敲下来，一年后你会发现你做了一件了不起的事。另一方面，如果你消失了一年，你希望回来的东西惊人的所有一次，它通常永远不会发生。
So you have to pick these right size projects. Even if you’re building this crazy synthetic biology company and you say well I have to go away for a year, there’s no way to do this incrementally, you can still usually break it into smaller projects.
所以你必须选择合适的项目。即使你在建一家疯狂的合成生物公司，你说我得离开一年，也没有办法逐步完成，你通常可以把它分成更小的项目。
So speed is this huge premium. The best founders usually respond to e-mail the most quickly, make decisions most quickly, they’re generally quick in all of these ways. And they had this do what ever it takes attitude.
所以速度是一个巨大的溢价。最好的创始人通常最快回复电子邮件，最快做出决定，他们通常在所有这些方面都很快。他们让他们做任何事情。
They also show up a lot.
他们也经常出现。
They come to meetings, they come in, they meet us in person. One piece of advice that I have that’s always worked for me: they get on planes in marginal situations. I’ll tell a quick story here.
他们来开会，他们进来，他们亲自来见我们。我得到的一条建议一直对我很有用：他们在边缘环境下上飞机。我在这里讲个简单的故事。

When I was running my own company, we found out we were about to lose a deal. It was sort of this critical deal from the first big customer in the space. And it was going to go to this company that had been around for year before we were. And they had this like all locked up. And we called and said “we have this better product you have to meet with us” and they said “well we’re signing this deal tomorrow. sorry.” We drove to the airport, we got on a plane, we were at their office at 6am the next morning. We just sat there, they told us to go away, we just kept sitting there. Finally once of the junior guys decided to meet with us, after that, finally one of the senior guys decided to meet with us. They ended up ripping up the contract with the other company, and we closed the deal with them about a week later. And I’m sure, that had we not gotten on a plane, had we not shown up in person, that would not have worked out.
当我经营自己的公司时，我们发现我们即将失去一笔交易。这是该领域第一个大客户的关键交易。这家公司在我们成立之前已经存在了一年。他们把这些都锁起来了。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“好吧，我们明天就签这个协议。“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，我们就坐在那里。最后有一个小家伙决定和我们见面，之后，最后一个大家伙决定和我们见面。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达成了交易。我敢肯定，如果我们没有上飞机，如果我们没有亲自出现，那就不会有结果。
And so, you just sort of show and and do these things, when people say get on plane in marginal situations, they actually mean it, but they don’t mean it literally. But I actually think it’s good, literal advice.
所以，你只是展示和做这些事情，当人们说在边缘情况下上飞机，他们实际上是认真的，但他们不是字面意思。但我真的觉得这是个很好的建议。
So I mentioned this momentum and growth earlier. Once more: the momentum and growth are the lifeblood of startups. This is probably in the top three secrets of executing well. You want a company to be winning all the time. If you ever take your foot off the gas pedal, things will spiral out of control, snowball downwards. A winning team feels good and keeps winning. A team that hasn’t won in a while gets demotivated and keeps losing. So always keep momentum, it’s this prime directive for managing a startup. If I can only tell founders one thing about how to run a company, it would be this.
所以我在前面提到了这种势头和增长。再次强调：动力和增长是初创企业的命脉。这可能是执行良好的三大秘诀之一。你想让一家公司一直赢。如果你把你的脚从油门踏板上拿开，事情就会失控，滚雪球向下。一支获胜的球队感觉很好，而且不断获胜。一支球队如果在一段时间内没有赢得比赛，就会失去动力，不断输球。所以，始终保持动力，这是管理初创企业的首要指示。如果我能告诉创始人一件关于如何经营公司的事情，那就是这个。
For most software startups, this translates to keep growing. For hardware startups it translates to: don’t let your ship dates slip. This is what we tell people during YC, and they usually listen and everything is good. What happens at the end of YC is that they get distracted on other things, and then growth slows down. And somehow, after that happens, people start getting unhappy and quitting and everything falls apart. It’s hard to figure out a growth engine because most companies grow in new ways, but there’s this thing: if you build a good product it will grow. So getting this product right at the beginning is the best way not to lose momentum later.
对于大多数软件初创企业来说，这意味着它们将保持增长。对于硬件初创企业来说，这意味着：不要错过发货日期。这是我们在YC期间告诉人们的，他们通常会倾听，一切都很好。在YC结束时，他们会在其他事情上分心，然后增长放缓。不知何故，在那之后，人们开始变得不开心，放弃，一切都崩溃了。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，但有一点：如果你创造了一个好的产品，它就会增长。所以一开始就做好这个产品是以后不失去动力的最好方法。

If you do lose momentum, most founders try to get it back in the wrong way. They give these long speeches about vision for the company and try to rally the troops with speeches. But employees in a company where momentum has sagged, don’t want to hear that. You have to save the vision speeches for when the company is winning. When you’re not winning, you just have to get momentum back in small wins. A board member of mine used to say that sales fix everything in a startup. And that is really true. So you figure out where you can get these small wins and you get that done. And then you’ll be amazed at how all the other problems in a startup disappear.
如果你真的失去了动力，大多数创始人都会试图以错误的方式重新获得动力。他们就公司的愿景发表长篇大论，并试图用演讲来动员军队。但是，在一个动力已经衰退的公司里，员工们不想听这个。你必须把愿景演讲留到公司获胜的时候。当你不赢的时候，你只需要在小的胜利中找回动力。我的一个董事会成员曾经说过，销售可以解决初创企业的所有问题。这是真的。所以你要找出哪里能赢得这些小胜利，然后你就完成了。然后你会惊讶于创业公司的所有其他问题是如何消失的。
Another thing that you’ll notice if you have momentum sag, is that everyone starts disagreeing about what to do. Fights come out when a company loses momentum. And so a framework for that that I think works is that when there’s disagreement among the team about what to do, then you ask your users and you do whatever your users tell you. And you have to remind people: “hey, stuff’s not working right now we don’t actually hate each other, we just need to get back on track and everything will work.” If you just call it out, if you just acknowledge that, you’ll find that things get way better.
另一件事，你会注意到，如果你有动力下垂，是每个人都开始不同意做什么。当一家公司失去动力时，就会发生争吵。因此，我认为一个可行的框架是，当团队中对该做什么有分歧时，你问你的用户，然后你按照用户的要求去做。你必须提醒人们：“嘿，事情现在不顺利，我们其实并不恨对方，我们只需要回到正轨，一切都会好起来。”如果你只是大声说出来，如果你承认这一点，你会发现事情会变得更好。
To use a Facebook example again, when Facebook’s growth slowed in 2008, mark instituted a “growth group.” They worked on very small things to make Facebook grow faster. All of these by themselves seemed really small, but they got the curve of Facebook back up. It quickly became the most prestigious group there. Mark has said that it’s been one of Facebook’s best innovations. According to friends of mine that worked at Facebook at the time, it really turned around the dynamic of the company. And it went from this thing where everyone was feeling bad, and momentum was gone, back to a place that was winning.
再举一个Facebook的例子，2008年Facebook的增长放缓时，马克成立了一个“增长小组”，他们致力于非常小的事情，让Facebook发展得更快。所有这些看起来都很小，但是他们让Facebook的曲线恢复了。它很快成为那里最有声望的团体。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，它确实扭转了公司的动态。它从每个人都感觉不好的地方，动力消失了，回到了一个胜利的地方。
So a good way to keep momentum is to establish an operating rhythm at the company early. Where you ship product and launch new features on a regular basis. Where you’re reviewing metrics every week with the entire company. This is actually one of the best things your board can do for you. Boards add value to business strategy only rarely. But very frequently you can use them as a forcing function to get the company to care about metrics and milestones.
因此，保持势头的一个好方法是尽早在公司建立一个经营节奏。定期发布产品和推出新功能。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。董事会很少为商业战略增加价值。但通常你可以用它们来强迫公司关注指标和里程碑。
One thing that often disrupts momentum and really shouldn’t is competitors. Competitors making noise in the press I think probably crushes a company’s momentum more often than any other external factor.
有一件事经常会打乱动力，其实不应该是竞争对手。我认为，竞争对手在媒体上制造噪音，可能比其他任何外部因素更能摧毁一家公司的发展势头。

So here’s a good rule of thumb: don’t worry about a competitor at all, until they’re actually beating you with a real, shipped product. Press releases are easier to write than code, and that is still easier than making a great product. So remind your company of this, and this is sort of a founder’s role, is not to let the company get down because of the competitors in the press.
所以这里有一个很好的经验法则：不要担心竞争对手，除非他们真的用一个真正的，发货的产品打败了你。新闻稿比代码更容易编写，这仍然比制作一个伟大的产品更容易。所以提醒你的公司，这是一种创始人的角色，是不要让公司因为媒体上的竞争对手而失望。
This great quote from Henry Ford that I love: “The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.”
我很喜欢亨利·福特的一句名言：“令人害怕的竞争对手是一个从不为你烦恼，却一直在把自己的生意做得更好的人。”
These are almost never the companies that put out a lot of press releases. And they bum people out.
这些公司几乎从来没有发布过大量的新闻稿。他们把人赶出去。