视频信息
- 标题: 斯坦福：YC创业课 - 第02集：创意，产品，团队与执行（二）
- BV号: BV1oWKpzoE1Z
- 时长: 46分19秒（2779秒）
- 作者: 常春藤中英字幕课
- 原始链接: B站视频
视频摘要
本集YC创业课聚焦创业公司的联合创始人选择、早期招聘与团队执行三大主题。导师强调联合创始人关系是公司最重要的关系，应选择认识多年的人而非随机配对，所需特质是无情的足智多谋和James Bond式的冷静坚韧。早期招聘应极度谨慎，尽量保持小团队，招聘时投入25%时间，Airbnb花五个月面试首员工并设定极高文化标准的案例说明早期招聘决定公司命运。招聘标准是找聪明、能成事、愿意相处的人，通过推荐人验证。股权分配应对前10名员工慷慨，给10%公司股份。执行层面强调专注与强度，CEO核心工作是设定执行标准，要会说不。动能和增长是创业公司的命脉，需持续保持获胜状态，避免被竞争对手和媒体噪音干扰，通过小胜利恢复动能。
核心要点
联合创始人选择：避免随机配对，选择认识多年的人；最佳是认识的创始人，其次是独自创始人，最糟糕是随机联合创始人
James Bond特质：联合创始人需镇定自若、坚韧、行动迅速、果断有创造力，能在任何情况下知道该怎么做
早期招聘原则：尽量不招聘，招聘时投入25%时间，前三个员工的招聘失败往往直接导致公司死亡
招聘三标准：候选人是否聪明、能否把事情做成、是否愿意花时间相处；通过推荐人电话深入验证
员工股权分配：对前10名员工应给10%公司股权并四年兑现，创始人对员工应比投资者更慷慨
团队管理：设定高文化标准，学管理技巧，给团队荣誉而自己承担坏事，通过小胜利恢复动能
专注与强度：CEO核心是设定执行标准，专注两三件关键事务，97%时间说不，速度有巨大溢价
动能管理：增长和动能是创业公司命脉，持续获胜的团队会继续获胜，创始人不应让公司被其他事情分散注意力
视频全文转录（中英双语）
以下为完整中英双语转录，已加标点。英文在前，中文在后，逐段对照。
由 Groq Whisper 转录 → M2.7 B 方案整文标点 + 分段 → M2.7 段号保留翻译 → 逐段对照。
[段 1]
Before I jump into today’s lecture, I wanted to answer a few questions. People emailed me saying they had questions about the last lecture they ran out of time for. So if you have a question about what we covered last time, I’m welcome to answer it now, starting with you. It should be on. Can you not hear me? No? Maybe you can ask them to turn it on. Hopefully it’ll come on. Anybody else? Yes. So one question that was submitted online was, How do I identify if a market has a fast growth rate now and also for the next 10 years? All right, so the question is how you identify markets that are growing quickly. The good news about this is this is one of the big advantages students have.
[译文 1]
在我开始今天的讲座之前，我想先回答几个问题。有人给我发邮件说他们对上一堂课的内容有问题，但没时间问完。所以如果你们对上次讲的内容有问题，我现在很乐意回答，从你开始。应该开了。你听不到我说话吗？听不到？也许你可以让他们打开。希望它能打开。还有其他人吗？是的。所以有一个网上提交的问题是，我如何判断一个市场现在是否有快速增长，以及未来10年是否也会快速增长？好，这个问题就是如何识别快速增长的市场。好消息是这是学生拥有的主要优势之一。
[段 2]
You should just trust your instincts on this. Older people have to basically guess about the technologies that young people are using, right? Because young people get older and they become the dominant market, but you can just watch what you’re doing and what your friends are doing, and you will almost certainly have better instincts on fast growing markets than anybody older than you, and so the answer to this is just trust your instincts. Think about what you’re using more, think about what you’re seeing people your age begin to start using, that will almost certainly be the future. Maybe I can do one more question. In the last lecture before we start, this isn’t really the last lecture, but another question online is: How do you deal with burnout while still…
[译文 2]
你应该相信自己的直觉。老年人基本上只能猜测年轻人在使用什么技术，对吧？因为年轻人会长大并成为主导市场，但你可以观察你自己和你的朋友在做什么，你几乎肯定会比对任何比你年长的人对快速增长的市场有更好的直觉，所以答案是相信你的直觉。想一想你更多地使用什么，想一想你看到你同龄的人开始使用什么，那几乎肯定是未来。也许我可以再回答一个问题。在我们开始之前的最后一讲，这其实不是最后一讲，但网上的另一个问题是：你如何在仍然…的时候应对倦怠…
[段 3]
how do you deal with burnout while still being effective and remaining productive? Yeah, sure. So the question is how you deal with burnout as a founder. The answer to this is just that it sucks and you keep going. Unlike a student, where you can sort of throw up your hands and say, You know what, I’m really burned out, 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 like go on vacation or whatever. That never works for founders. It’s sort of all-consuming in this way. It’s very difficult to understand. So what you do is you just keep going.
[译文 3]
你是如何在精疲力竭的情况下依然保持效率和生产力？是的，当然。所以问题是，作为创始人，你如何应对倦怠？答案就是，这很糟糕，但你只能继续前进。不像学生，你可以举手投降说，你知道吗，我真的太累了，这学期我就拿差成绩吧。创业最难的部分之一是，这是真实的生活。你只能熬过去。典型的建议是去度假什么的。但这对创始人从来没用。它在某种程度上是全吞噬式的。这很难理解。所以你要做的就是继续前进。
[段 4]
You rely on people. It’s really important, and founder depression is a serious thing, and you need to have the support network. But the way through burnout is just to address the challenges, address the things that are going wrong, and you’ll eventually feel better. All right. Alright, so last week, or last lecture, we covered the idea and the product. And I want to just emphasize again 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. So, first I want to talk about co-founders. Co-founder relationships are among the most important in the entire company.
[译文 4]
你依赖人。这真的很重要，founder depression 是一个很严肃的问题，你需要有一个支持网络。但是克服 burnout 的方法就是去解决这些挑战，解决那些出问题的事情，你就会慢慢感觉好起来。好了，那么上周，或者上一讲，我们讨论了 idea 和 product。我想再次强调，如果你没有把那些做好，其他的一切都救不了你。今天，我们要讨论如何招聘以及如何执行。希望你们不会 execute 你们招聘的人。有时候。那么，首先我想谈谈 co-founders。Co-founder 关系在整个公司中是最重要的关系之一。
[段 5]
And everyone says that you need to watch out for tension brewing among co-founders and address it immediately. And that’s all true. And certainly in YC’s case, the number one cause of early death for startups is co-founder blow-ups. But for some reason, a lot of people treat choosing their co-founder with even less importance than they put on 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. And for some reason, students are really bad at this. They just pick someone, and they’re like, I want to start a business, you want to start a business, let’s start a startup together.
[译文 5]
而且每个人都说需要注意联合创始人之间的紧张关系，并立即解决。这确实都是真的。当然在 YC 的案例中，初创公司早期死亡的头号原因就是联合创始人闹崩。但由于某种原因，很多人对待选择联合创始人这件事的重视程度甚至还不如招聘。千万别这样。这是你在创业生涯中做出的最重要的决定之一，你需要认真对待它。但出于某种原因，学生们在这方面做得很差。他们只是随便选一个人，然后说我想创业、你也想创业，那我们一起创业吧。
[段 6]
There are these co-founder dating things, where you’re like, Hey, I’m looking for a co-founder, we don’t really know each other, let’s start a company. And this is 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 co-founder, or choosing someone you don’t have a long history with, choosing someone that you’re not friends with, so that when things are really going wrong, you have this sort of past history to bind you together, usually ends up in disaster. We had one YC batch where nine of about 75 companies added on a random co-founder between when we interviewed the companies and when they started, and all nine of those teams fell apart the next year.
[译文 6]
有一些联合创始人约会的事情，就是你这样想，嘿，我在找一个联合创始人，我们其实不太了解彼此，我们来创业吧。这太疯狂了。你永远不会这样招聘一个人，但人们却愿意这样选择他们的商业伙伴。这真的真的很糟糕。随机选择一个联合创始人，或者选择一个你与之没有长期关系的人，选择一个你不是朋友的人——这样当事情真的出问题的时候，你们有那种过去的历史把你们绑在一起——通常最终都会以灾难告终。我们有一批YC batch，当时大约75家公司中有9家在面试公司和公司启动之间添加了一个随机联合创始人，这9个团队第二年全部散伙了。
[段 7]
The track record for founders that don’t already know each other is really bad. A good way to meet a co-founder is in college. If you’re not in college and you don’t know a co-founder, the next best thing, I think, is to go work in an interesting company. If you work at Facebook or Google or something like that, it’s probably almost as co-founder rich as Stanford. It’s better to have no co-founder than to have a bad co-founder, but it’s still bad to be a solo founder. I was just looking at the stats here before we started. For the top 20 most valuable YC companies, all of them have at least two founders. And we probably fund at a rate of something like 1 out of 10 solo teams.
[译文 7]
不预先认识的创始人搭档，成功记录真的很差。遇到联合创始人的好方式是在大学里。如果你不在大学里，也不认识联合创始人，我认为次好的方式是去一家有趣的公司工作。如果你在 Facebook 或 Google 或类似的公司工作，那里可能几乎和 Stanford 一样容易找到联合创始人。没有联合创始人比有一个糟糕的联合创始人要好，但做单人创始人仍然是不好的。在开始之前我刚看了这些统计数据。对于估值最高的 20 家 YC 公司，它们全部至少有两个创始人。我们资助单人团队的比例大约是 10 个里 1 个。
[段 8]
So, best of all: founder you know, co-founder you know better than that. Not as good as that, but still okay: solo founder. Random founder you meet. Again, students do this for some reason, really, really bad. So as you’re thinking about co-founders and people that could be good, there’s a question of what you’re looking for. And at YC we have this public phrase, and it’s relentlessly resourceful, and everyone’s heard of that. And I think that really is a very good description for what you’re looking for with co-founders. You definitely need relentlessly resourceful co-founders. 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.
[译文 8]
所以，最理想的情况是：你认识的创始人，联合创始人你比这更了解。不是那么好，但还可以：单打独斗的创始人。随机遇到的创始人。再说一次，学生们出于某种原因会这样做，真的非常糟糕。所以当你在考虑联合创始人以及什么样的人可能适合时，你需要思考一个问题：在YC，我们有一句公开的口号，叫relentlessly resourceful，每个人都听说过。我认为这真的是你对联合创始人要求的一个很好的描述。你绝对需要relentlessly resourceful的联合创始人。但在YC kickoff，我们分享了一个更有趣的例子。Paul Graham开始用这个说法，我一直延续着。
[段 9]
So you’re looking for co-founders 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 really 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. 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, you know, an expert in some particular domain. As I mentioned earlier, you really want to know your co-founders for a while.
[译文 9]
所以你在找的联合创始人需要是沉稳冷静的、坚韧的，他们知道在各种情况下该怎么做，他们行动迅速、果断、有创造力，随时准备好应对一切。而事实证明，流行文化中就有一个这样的形象。这听起来确实很傻，但至少令人印象深刻，而且我们已经给每一届YC的学员讲了很久了，我觉得这对他们有帮助。这个形象就是James Bond。再说一次，这听起来很疯狂，但它至少会印在你的记忆里，你需要的是一个行为像James Bond那样的人，而不是某个特定领域的专家。正如我之前提到的，你确实需要和你的联合创始人相处一段时间。
[段 10]
Ideally years. This is true for early hires as well, but incidentally, more people get this right for early hires than they do for co-founders. So, again, take advantage of school. In addition to relentlessly resourceful, you want a tough and a calm co-founder. There are all the obvious things like smart, but everyone knows that you want a smart co-founder. Most people don’t prioritize tough and calm well enough, especially if you feel like you yourself aren’t. You need a co-founder who is. If you’re not technical, and hopefully most people in this room are, you really want a technical co-founder. 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 technical founders, we’re going to hire people, we’re just going to be great managers.
[译文 10]
理想情况下是几年。这对早期招聘同样适用，但有意思的是，更多的人在早期招聘方面做对了这件事，而不是在联合创始人方面。所以，再说一遍，好好利用学校资源。除了极度机智之外，你需要找一个坚韧且冷静的联合创始人。聪明之类的明显特质不用多说，每个人都知道你想要一个聪明的联合创始人。大多数人没有足够重视坚韧和冷静这两点，特别是如果他们觉得自己不具备这些品质的话。你需要一个具备这些品质的联合创始人。如果你不是技术出身——希望今天在座的各位大多数都是——你真的需要一个技术型联合创始人。现在初创公司中出现了一种奇怪的风气，变得很流行的说法是：“你知道吗，我们不需要技术创始人，我们会雇人，我们只会成为优秀的管理者。”
[段 11]
That doesn’t work too well in our experience. Software people really should be starting software companies. Media people should be starting media companies. In the YC experience, two or three co-founders seems to be about perfect. One, obviously not great. Five, really bad. Four works sometimes, but two or three I think is what to target. Okay, the second part of how to hire: try not to. So one of the weird things that you’ll notice if you start a company is that everyone asks you how many employees you have. And this is the metric people use to sort of judge how real your startup is and how cool you are. And if you say you have a high number of employees, people think you’re more real.
[译文 11]
根据我们的经验，这种做法效果不太好。软件人真的应该去创业软件公司。媒体人应该去创业媒体公司。根据YC的经验，两到三个联合创始人似乎是最理想的。一个人创业显然不太好。五个人就很糟糕了。四个人有时候也行，但我认为应该以两到三个为目标。好的，关于招聘的第二部分：尽量不要招人。所以如果创业，你会发现一件奇怪的事：每个人都会问你公司有多少员工。这是人们用来判断你的创业公司有多真实、你有多酷的指标。如果你说你的员工数量很多，人们就会觉得你的公司更真实。
[段 12]
But the number of employees that you have is actually a measure of how unproductive you are. The goal is to have as few employees as possible. The best companies, when you first meet them, they’re sort of embarrassed about how many people they have. They say things like, Yeah, we have 10 people, we’re really a team of five. And so you should try to hire as little as possible. They’re really impressed. And if you say you have a low number of employees, then you sound like sort of this little joke. But actually, it sucks to have a lot of employees, and you should be proud of how few employees you can have. Lots of employees ends up with things like a high burn rate, means you’re losing a lot of money every month, complexity, tension, slow decision making.
[译文 12]
但你拥有的员工数量实际上是你有多低效的衡量标准。目标是让员工越少越好。最好的公司，当你第一次见到它们时，它们对自己有多少员工感到有点不好意思。它们会说类似的话，比如"是啊，我们有10个人，实际上我们相当于5个人的团队。“所以你应该尽量少招聘。它们真的很 impressed。如果你说你员工人数很少，那你听起来就像在讲一个小笑话。但实际上，拥有很多员工是很糟糕的，你应该为自己能用这么少的员工而感到自豪。员工多会导致高 burn rate，意味着你每个月亏损很多钱，复杂性，紧张关系，决策缓慢。
[段 13]
The list goes on, but it’s nothing good. So you want to be proud of how much you can get done with a small number of employees. Many of the best YC companies have had a phenomenally small number of employees for the 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 have a desperate need to. Later, you need to learn how to hire fast and scale at the company. But in the early days, the goal should be not to hire, 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.
[译文 13]
名单还在继续，但都不是什么好事。所以你会为能用少量员工完成大量工作而感到自豪。很多最优秀的 YC 公司在第一年都只有极少量的员工，有时候除了创始人之外一个人都没有。他们真的尽可能地保持小规模。一开始，你只有在迫切需要的时候才应该招聘。之后，你需要学会如何快速招聘和扩大公司规模。但在早期，目标应该是不招聘，不招聘。其中一个原因是这真的很糟糕，因为早期招聘失误的代价真的非常高。
[段 14]
In fact, a lot of the companies that I’ve been very involved with that have had a very bad first hire in the first three or so employees never really…bad first hire, and the first three or so employees never recover from it. It just kills the company. Airbnb spent five months interviewing their first employee before they hired someone. And in their first year, they only hired two people. Before they hired a single person, they wrote down a list of the cultural values that they wanted any Airbnb employee to have. One of those was that you had to bleed Airbnb. And if you didn’t sort of agree to that, they just wouldn’t hire you. As an example of how intense Brian Chesky is, he’s the Airbnb CEO.
[译文 14]
事实上，我深入参与过的很多公司，如果在最初三个左右的员工中招到了很差的第一个员工，就真的……糟糕的第一个员工，而且最初三个左右的员工永远无法从中恢复。这直接毁掉了公司。Airbnb在招聘第一位员工之前花了五个月的时间进行面试。在第一年，他们只招了两个人。在招聘任何人之前，他们先写下了希望每个Airbnb员工都具备的文化价值观清单。其中一条是，你必须为Airbnb奉献一切。如果你不同意这一点，他们就不会雇用你。举个例子说明Brian Chesky有多严格，他是Airbnb的CEO。
[段 15]
He used to ask people, before he hired them at Airbnb, if they would take the job if they got a medical diagnosis that they had one year left to live. He wanted them to be that committed. Later he decided that was a little bit too crazy. And I think he relaxed it to 10 years. But last I heard, he still asked that question. But 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.
[译文 15]
他在录用他们之前，曾经问Airbnb的求职者，如果他们被诊断出只剩一年寿命，他们是否还会接受这份工作。他希望他们能够如此 committed。后来他认为那有点太疯狂了。我记得他放宽到了 10 年。但据我上次听到的，他仍然会问这个问题。但这些招聘真的很重要。这些人最终会定义你的公司。所以你需要那些几乎和你一样相信它的人。问这个问题听起来很疯狂，但他已经形成了这种极度敬业的文化，当公司面临危机时，大家会团结在一起。
[段 16]
And when the company faced a big crisis early on, everyone in the company lived in the office, and they shipped product every day until the crisis was over. One of the remarkable observations about Airbnb is if you talk to any of the first, say, I don’t know, 40 or 50 employees, they all feel like they were part of the founding of the company. And this is really hard to get right, and this is really rare. And this is really hard to get right, and this is really rare. But by having an extremely high bar, and hiring slowly, and making sure everyone believes in the mission, you can get that. Okay, so let’s say you’ve listened to the warning about not hiring, and now you absolutely have to.
[译文 16]
当公司早期面临重大危机时，公司里的每个人都住在办公室，他们每天发布产品，直到危机结束。关于 Airbnb 的一个显著观察是，如果你和早期任意40或50名员工交谈，他们都会觉得自己是公司创始人之一。这真的很难做到，这也很罕见。这真的很难做到，这也很罕见。但通过设立极高的标准，放慢招聘速度，确保每个人都相信公司的使命，你就能做到这一点。好的，假设你已经听进去了关于不要招聘的警告，但现在你不得不招聘了。
[段 17]
When you’re in this hiring mode, your job should be your number one priority to get the best people. Just like when you’re in product mode, that’s your number one priority, and when you’re in fundraising mode, fundraising is your number one priority. One thing that founders always underestimate is how hard it is to recruit. You think you have this great idea, everyone’s going to come and 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 you have to convince them that your mission is the most important of anything that they’re looking at.
[译文 17]
当你处于招聘模式时，你的工作应该是你的第一优先事项，以获得最优秀的人才。就像当你处于产品模式时，那是你第一优先的事项；当你在融资模式时，融资是你第一优先的事项。创始人总是低估的一件事是招聘有多困难。你以为你有这个绝妙的想法，每个人都会来加入，但事实并非如此。要获得最优秀的人才，他们有很多很好的选择，所以招聘一个人可能需要一年的时间。这是一个漫长的过程，你必须说服他们，你的使命是他们正在考虑的一切中最重要的事情。
[段 18]
This is another case of why it’s really important to get the product right before anything else. The best people know that they should join a rocket ship. By the way, that’s my number one piece of advice. If you’re going to join a startup, pick a rocket ship, pick a company that’s already working, 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, right? And so good people will wait, and they want to see that you’re on this breakout trajectory before they join. One question that people asked online this morning is how much time you should be spending hiring.
[译文 18]
这又是一个案例，说明了在产品做对之前其他一切都得靠边站是有多么重要。最优秀的人才知道他们应该加入一艘火箭飞船。顺便说一句，这是我排名第一的建议。如果你要加入一家初创公司，选一艘火箭飞船，选一家已经运转起来的公司。不是每个人都意识到了这一点，但因为你在关注，你知道这家公司将会非常成功。再说一遍，你通常能够识别出这类公司，但优秀的人才也知道这一点，对吧？所以优秀的人才会等待，他们想看到你正处在这种突破性的发展轨迹上，然后才会加入。今天早上在网上有人问了一个问题：你应该花多少时间在招聘上。
[段 19]
The answer is either like 0 or 25%. You’re either not hiring at all, like zero, or it’s probably your single biggest block of time. In practice, like all these books on management or whatever say that you should spend 50% of your time hiring, but the people that give that advice, it’s rare for them to even spend 10% themselves. 25% is still a huge amount of time. But that’s really how much you should be doing once you’re in hiring mode. Okay, so if you compromise and hire someone mediocre, you will always regret it. We always like to warn founders of this. No one really feels it until they make the mistake the first time. But it can poison the culture.
[译文 19]
答案要么是0，要么是25%。你要么根本不招聘，也就是0，要么招聘就是你最大的一块时间占用。实际上，就像所有那些管理书籍或之类的说的，你应该把50%的时间花在招聘上，但给出这种建议的人，自己能真正做到10%的都很少。25%仍然是大量的时间。但一旦你进入招聘模式，这才是你真正应该投入的时间。好吧，所以如果你妥协，招了一个平庸的人，你会一直后悔。我们总是喜欢警告创始人们这一点。在他们第一次犯这个错误之前，没有人真正感受到这一点。但这可能会毒害文化。
[段 20]
Mediocre people at a big company cause some problems. They don’t usually kill the company. A single mediocre hire in the first five will often, in fact, kill a startup. A friend of mine has a sign up in the conference room that he uses for interviews. And he like positions the signs that the candidate is looking at it while they’re interviewing. 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, right? Because people just sort of fall through the cracks. But every person in a startup sets the tone. So if you compromise in the first, say, five, ten hires, it might kill the company.
[译文 20]
大公司的普通员工会造成一些问题，但他们通常不会让公司倒闭。而在初创公司，前五名员工中只要招到一个普通的人，实际上往往就会让公司垮掉。我的一个朋友在会议室里挂了一块牌子，用来在面试时使用。他会把这块牌子放在候选人面试时能看到的位置。上面写着“普通的工程师打造不出伟大的公司”。是的，这话没错，确实是真的。在大公司里你可以容忍这种情况，对吧？因为人们往往就那么混过去了。但在初创公司，每一个人都在定调。所以如果你在前五到十名员工中妥协了，公司可能就会完蛋。
[段 21]
And you should 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 life of the company when you’re bigger, you will compromise on a hire. There will be some pressing down. You will compromise on a hire. There will be some pressing deadline or something like that. You will still regret it, but this is the difference between theory and practice. And 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. Sources of candidates. This is another thing that students get wrong a lot.
[译文 21]
你应该为每一位招聘的人都这样考虑。我会把公司的未来赌在这一次的招聘上吗？这是一个很高的门槛。在公司发展的某个阶段，当你规模变大时，你会在某次招聘上做出妥协。会有一些紧迫的压力。你会在某次招聘上做出妥协。会有一些紧迫的截止日期或类似的情况。你仍然会后悔，但这就是理论和实践的差别。后面会有其他演讲者来谈当这种情况发生时该怎么做。但在早期阶段，你就是不能把它搞砸。候选人来源。这是学生们经常搞错的另一件事。
[段 22]
The best source by far for hiring is people that you already know and people that other employees in the company already know. Most great companies in tech have been built by personal referrals for the first at least 100 employees, and often many more. Most founders feel awkward about calling everyone good that they’ve ever met and asking their employees to do the same. But you’ll notice that if you go work at Facebook or Google, one of the things they do in your first few weeks is an HR person sits you down and beats out of you every smart person you’ve ever met, no matter how likely you think you are to be able to recruit them.
[译文 22]
到目前为止，最好的招聘来源是你已经认识的人，以及公司其他员工已经认识的人。大多数伟大的科技公司在前至少100名员工的招聘中都是靠个人推荐建立的，而且通常远不止这个数字。大多数创始人都觉得联系他们见过的每一个优秀的人很尴尬，并要求员工也这么做。但你会注意到，如果你去Facebook或Google工作，在最初几周他们会做的事情之一就是有一个人力资源人员让你坐下来，想方设法从你那里挖掘出你见过的每一个聪明的人，不管你认为能够招募到他们的可能性有多大。
[段 23]
And these personal referrals really are the trick to hiring. So you have to go way beyond your comfort zone here. Another tip is to look outside the valley. It is brutally competitive to hire engineers here, but you probably know very good people living elsewhere in the world that would love to work with you. Another question that founders ask us a lot about is experience and how much that matters. The short version here is that experience matters for some roles and not others. When you’re hiring someone that is going to run a large organization of your company, experience probably matters a lot. For most of the early hires you make in a startup, experience doesn’t matter very much.
[译文 23]
这些个人推荐确实是招聘的关键。所以在这里你必须远超你的舒适区。另一个建议是把目光投向硅谷以外的地方。在这里招聘工程师竞争非常激烈，但世界上其他地方可能有很多你认识的很优秀的人很乐意与你共事。另一个创始人经常问我们的问题是经验以及它有多重要。简而言之，经验对某些职位很重要，对其他职位则不那么重要。当你招聘要管理公司大型组织的人时，经验可能非常重要。对于你在初创公司中的大多数早期招聘，经验并没有那么重要。
[段 24]
And you should go for aptitude and believe in what you’re doing. Most of the best hires that I’ve ever 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? Most of the time you don’t in the early days. There are three things that I look for when I hire people. Are they smart? Do they get things done? And do I want to spend a lot of time around them? And if I get an answer, If I end up getting a yes for all three of these, I almost never regretted the hire. It’s almost always worked out. You can learn a lot about all three of these things from an interview, but the very best way is by working together.
[译文 24]
你应该选择能力，相信你所做的事情。我一生中最好的招聘，大多数人在之前从未做过那件事。所以真的值得思考，这个角色我是否在乎经验？大多数时候，在早期你是不在乎的。我招聘人才时看三样东西。他们聪明吗？他们能完成任务吗？我愿意长时间和他们相处吗？如果我得到答案，如果我对这三个问题都是肯定的，我几乎从不后悔这个招聘。几乎总是成功的。你可以从面试中学到很多关于这三点的信息，但最好的方式是一起工作。
[段 25]
So ideally, it’s someone you’ve worked with in the past, and in which 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 quick 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. So one of the pieces of advice that we give at YC is to try to work together on a project rather than just doing an interview. If you are going to interview, which you’ll probably do as well, you should ask specifically about projects that someone has done in the past.
[译文 25]
所以理想情况下，这个人是你过去一起工作过的人，这种情况下你甚至可能根本不需要面试。如果你没有这样的经验，那么我认为在雇佣之前和对方一起做一个短期项目会好得多，做个一两天。你们双方都能学到很多。他们也是。而且大多数第一次创业的创始人都是糟糕的面试官，但在评估共事过的人方面却很在行。所以我们在YC给出的建议之一是，尝试一起做一个项目，而不是仅仅进行面试。如果你打算面试——你可能也会这么做——你应该具体询问对方过去做过的项目。
[段 26]
Ask specifically about projects that someone has done in the past. You’ll learn a lot more than you will with brain teasers. For some reason, young technical founders love to ask brain teaser questions rather than just ask what someone’s done. Really dig into 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, like, oh, how was so-and-so? You really want to dig in. Is this person in the top 5% of people you’ve ever worked with? What specifically did they do? Would you hire them again?
[译文 26]
询问某人过去做过的具体项目。你会学到比脑筋急转弯多得多（的东西）。由于某种原因，年轻的技术创始人喜欢问脑筋急转弯问题，而不是直接问某人做过什么。真正深入了解人们参与过的项目。并且打电话给推荐人。这是首次创业的创始人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。当你这样做时，你不仅仅想问，哦，某某人怎么样？你真的想深入了解。这个人是你共事过的人中最顶尖的5%吗？他们具体做了什么？你还会再次雇用他们吗？
[段 27]
Why aren’t you trying to hire them again? You really have to press on these reference calls. Another thing that I’ve noticed from talking to a lot of YC companies is that good communication skills tend to correlate really well 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 people that have somewhat of a risk-taking attitude. You generally get this, or they wouldn’t be interested in the startup, but now that startups are sort of more in fashion, you want people that actually sort of like a little bit of risk.
[译文 27]
为什么你不再试着招聘他们了？你真的得紧追这些推荐电话。另一件事是我从与很多YC公司交谈中注意到的，良好的沟通能力往往与成功的招聘高度相关。我以前不关注这一点。我们稍后会更多讨论为什么沟通在早期创业公司中如此重要。如果一个人难以沟通，如果一个人不能清晰表达，在他们成功的可能性方面这会是个真正的问题。另外，对于早期员工，你想要有一定冒险精神的人。你通常会得到这样的人，否则他们不会对创业公司感兴趣，但现在创业公司更加流行了，你需要实际上有点喜欢风险的人。
[段 28]
If someone’s choosing between McKinsey and joining your startup, they’re very unlikely to work out at the startup. 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. There’s a famous test from Paul Graham called the animal test, and the idea here is that you should be able to describe any employee as an animal at what they do. And I don’t think that probably translates out of English very well, but you need unstoppable people. You want people that are just going to get it done. Founders that end up being really happy with their early hires usually end up describing these people as the very best in the world at whatever they do.
[译文 28]
如果有人在McKinsey和加入你的startup之间做选择，他们很可能不适合在startup工作。你还想要有狂热决心的人，这与拥有风险容忍的态度略有不同，所以你真的应该同时寻找这两种人。顺便说一句，随着事情的出现，欢迎大家随时打断我提问。有一个来自Paul Graham的著名测试叫做animal test，其理念是你应该能够把任何员工描述为所在领域的动物。我觉得这个可能很难翻译成英文以外的语言，但你需要不可阻挡的人。你想要能把事情搞定的人。对早期员工非常满意的创始人通常最终会把这些人描述为所在领域世界上最优秀的人。
[段 29]
Mark Zuckerberg once said that he tries to hire people that A, he would spend time with socially, and B, that 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 can’t have that, you need to at least deeply respect them. But again, if you don’t want to spend a lot of time around people, you should sort of trust your instincts on that. While I’m on this topic of hiring, I want to talk about employee equity. Founders screw this up all the time. I think that as a rough guideline, you should aim to give 10% of the company to the first 10 employees.
[译文 29]
马克·扎克伯格曾说过，他试图雇用这样的人：A，他愿意在社交上花时间相处的人；B，如果角色互换，他会乐于向其汇报的人。这在我看来是一个非常不错的框架。你不必和每个人都成为朋友，但你至少应该享受和他们一起工作，如果做不到这一点，你至少需要深深地尊重他们。但同样，如果你不想和某些人花很多时间在一起，你应该相信自己的直觉。在我谈到招聘这个话题时，我想谈谈员工股权。创始人经常在这方面搞砸。我认为作为一个粗略的指导原则，你应该把公司10%的股份给前10名员工。
[段 30]
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 by way more than that. And if not, then they won’t be around anyway. So for whatever reason, founders are usually very stingy with equity to employees and very generous with equity to investors. I think this is totally backwards. I think this is one of the things that founders screw up the most often. You know, employees will only add more value over time. Investors sort of like write the check, and then despite a lot of big 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.
[译文 30]
他们无论如何都需要四年时间才能获得，而如果他们成功了，他们会做出的贡献将远远超过那个数字。他们将使公司的价值增加远远超过那个数字。如果不成功，那他们反正也不会留下来。所以无论出于什么原因，创始人对员工的股权通常非常吝啬，而对投资者却非常慷慨。我认为这完全本末倒置了。我认为这是创始人最常犯的错误之一。你要知道，员工会随着时间的推移创造更多价值。投资者基本上就是写张支票，然后虽然许下很多大承诺，但通常并不会做那么多事。有时候他们确实会。但真正花多年时间建立公司的是你的员工。
[段 31]
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 equity to early employees, in general are the most successful ones that we funded. All right. So one thing that founders forget is that after they hire employees, they have to retain them. I’m not going to go into a huge amount of detail here because we’re going to have a full 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 that your employees are happy and feel valued.
[译文 31]
所以我相信在与投资者的斗争中减少他们获得的股权数量，然后尽可能对员工慷慨大方。那些在股权方面对早期员工非常慷慨的YC公司 generally 是我们资助的最成功的公司。好。创始人容易忘记的一件事是，招聘员工之后，还需要留住他们。我不会在这里详细展开，因为我们后面会有专门的讲座来讲这个问题，但我确实想稍微提一下，因为创始人经常在这方面出错。你必须确保你的员工感到快乐和被重视。
[段 32]
This is one of the reasons that big equity grants are 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 like they’ve been treated unfairly, that will really start to grate on them, and resentment will build. But more than that, learning just a little bit of management skill, 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, but struggled early on and had his team turn over a few times, someone asked him what his biggest learning was. He said that it turns out you shouldn’t tell your employees they’re fucking up every day unless you’d like them all to leave, because they will.
[译文 32]
这是大额股权授予重要的原因之一。人们在加入创业公司的兴奋中不会想太多，但日复一日、年复一年，如果他们觉得自己受到了不公平对待，那真的会开始让他们难以忍受，怨恨会逐渐积累。但更重要的是，学一点管理技能——初次担任CEO的人通常在这方面做得很差——会有很大帮助。YC今年夏天的演讲者之一，他现在非常成功，但早期经历过挣扎，团队成员流失过好几次，有人问他最大的收获是什么。他说，事实证明你不应该每天都告诉员工他们在搞砸，除非你想让他们都离开，因为他们会的。
[段 33]
But as a founder, this is this very natural instinct, right? 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 while to learn this too. You have to let your team get all the credit for everything good that happens, and you take responsibility for the bad stuff. You have to not micromanage. You have to continually give people new areas of responsibility. These are not the things that most founders think about. I think the best thing you can do is be aware that as a first-time founder, you are likely to be a very bad manager and try to overcompensate for that.
[译文 33]
但作为创始人，这是非常自然的本能，对吧？你觉得自己能把所有事情做到最好，而且很容易指出别人做得不好的地方。所以在这里稍微学一点，就能避免团队的大量流失。对大多数创始人来说，真正赞扬团队也不是天生就会的。这一点我也花了不少时间才学会。你必须让你的团队获得所有好事带来的荣誉，而你要为坏事承担责任。你不能 micromanage。你必须不断地给员工新的责任领域。这些都不是大多数创始人会想到的事情。我认为你能做的最好的事情就是意识到，作为一个第一次创业的创始人，你很可能是一个非常糟糕的管理者，并试图对此过度补偿。
[段 34]
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 it since. And I think that’s actually right, and I think it’s worth trying to think about that. It also took me a while to learn to do things like one-on-ones and give clear feedback. All of these things that first-time CEOs just don’t do until they get burned a few times. But maybe I can save you from doing that. All right, and the last part on the team section is about firing people when it’s not working. No matter what I say here, this is not going to prevent anyone from doing it wrong.
[译文 34]
Dan Pink谈到这三件事激励人们做好工作：自主、精通和目的。当我经营公司时，我从未想过这些，但后来我想过了。我认为这确实是对的，而且我认为值得尝试去思考这一点。我也花了一段时间才学会做one-on-ones和给出明确反馈这样的事情。所有这些事情，首次担任CEO的人就是不会做，直到他们碰壁几次。但也许我可以帮你避免重蹈覆辙。好的，团队部分的最后一部分是关于在行不通的时候解雇人员。无论我在这里说什么，这都不会阻止任何人犯错。
[段 35]
And the reason is that firing people is one of the worst parts of running a company. Actually, in my own experience, I think it is the worst. 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 out. 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. In addition to firing people who are doing badly at their job, You also want to fire people who, A, create office politics, and B, are persistently negative. The rest of the company is always aware of employees doing things like this, and it’s just this huge drag.
[译文 35]
原因是，解雇员工是经营公司最糟糕的事情之一。事实上，以我个人的经验，我认为这是最糟糕的。每一位第一次创业的创始人都会拖得太久。每个人都希望某个员工能够转变。但正确的做法是，当事情不顺利时，要快速解雇。这对公司更好。对员工也更好。但这太痛苦、太可怕了，以至于每个人在前几次都会做错。除了解雇那些工作表现不佳的人之外，你还应该解雇那些 A，制造办公室政治的人，和 B，持续消极的人。公司其他人总是能注意到这类员工的行为，这简直就是巨大的拖累。
[段 36]
It’s completely toxic to the company. Again, this is an example of something that might work okay in a big company, although I’m still skeptical, but will kill a startup. So I think you need to watch out for people that are… Yes? Can you tell us? Out for people that are yes, so the question is: How do you fight balance firing people fast and making early employees feel secure? The answer is, when an employee is not working, it’s not like this screw up once or twice. Anyone will screw up once or twice, or more times than that. And you should be very loving, not take it out on them, be a team, work together. If someone is getting every decision wrong, that’s when you need to act.
[译文 36]
这对公司来说完全是毒药。再说一次，这是一个在大型公司可能还行的例子，虽然我仍然持怀疑态度，但会扼杀一家初创公司。所以我认为你需要留意那些……是的？你能告诉我们吗？指的是那些只会说“是”的人。问题在于：如何在快速解雇人以及让早期员工感到安全之间取得平衡？答案是，当一个员工无法胜任工作时，不是因为一次或两次失误。任何人都会有一次或两次失误，甚至更多次数的失误。你应该非常有爱心，不要把气撒在他们身上，要像一个团队一样，一起努力。如果有人每一个决定都做错了，那才是你需要采取行动的时候。
[段 37]
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 a period of many weeks or a month, you’ll be aware of it. 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. 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.
[译文 37]
到那时，每个人都会痛苦地意识到这一点。这不是偶尔犯几次错误的问题，而是每次有人做某件事，你都会做出相反的选择。你无法替他们做决定，但你有权选择做决定的人。如果有人持续几周或一个月都在把一切都搞砸，你自然会察觉到。这是一种理论上听起来很难确定自己在说什么，但实际上几乎从未有过疑问的情况。某人一两次失误与持续把一切都搞砸、引发问题或让所有人都不开心之间的差异，你第一次看到时就会痛苦地显而易见。
[段 38]
Yes? When should co-founders decide on the equity split? Great question. When should co-founders decide on the equity split? For some reason, I’ve equity split. 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. They’ll even sign the incorporation documents in some crazy way so they can wait to have this discussion. This is not a discussion that gets easier with time. You want to 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, 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.
[译文 38]
好的？联合创始人应该在什么时候决定equity split？好问题。联合创始人应该在什么时候决定equity split？由于某些原因，我一直不太确定为什么会这样，很多创始人，很多联合创始人喜欢把这件事推迟很长时间。他们甚至会以某种疯狂的方式签署公司注册文件，这样他们就可以推迟进行这个讨论。这个讨论不会随着时间变得更容易。你理想情况下想在你们开始合作后不久就确定这个。而且应该接近平等。如果你不愿意给你的联合创始人平等的equity份额，我认为这应该让你认真考虑你是否想要他们作为co-founder。
[段 39]
But in any case, you should try to have the ink dry on this before the company gets too far along, certainly in the first number of weeks. Yes? Any experience would be okay, but then how do you know if it’s going to be crippling and you can fire that way? So the question is, I said that inexperience is okay. How do you know if that’s going to, you know, if someone’s going to 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.
[译文 39]
但无论如何，你应该尽量在公司走得太远之前把这件事敲定，当然是在前面几周之内。明白吗？任何经验都可以接受，但你怎么知道这会不会造成严重影响，让你不得不那样解雇他们？所以问题是，我说过缺乏经验是可以接受的。你怎么知道这会不会，你知道的，某人的发展是否会超越，而不是随着事情的发展晋升到某个职位，然后 later 变得造成严重影响？真正聪明且能学习新事物的人，随着时间推移 almost 总是能在公司找到自己的位置。你可能需要把他们调到其他岗位，不是他们开始的地方。
[段 40]
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 though can almost always find some great place in the company. I have not seen that be a problem. Some great place in the company. I have not seen that be a problem too often. What if your relationship with your founder or founders breaks down over time? What type of the announcement? What’s the best way? All right, so the question is, what happens when your relationship with your co-founder falls apart? We’re going to have a session on mechanics near the end of the course, but here is the most important thing that founders screw up, which is: every co-founder, you yourself, of course, has to have vesting.
[译文 40]
你知道，可能的情况是，你雇佣了一个人来领导工程团队，但随着公司发展到50人规模时，他无法适应这种规模扩张，于是你给他们安排了不同的角色。不过，真正优秀的人几乎总能在公司里找到合适的位置。我从没觉得这是个问题。在公司里找到合适的位置。我不常看到这是个问题。如果你和你的创始人或联合创始人之间的关系随着时间推移破裂了怎么办？应该发布什么样的公告？最好的方式是什么？好的，那么问题是，当你和联合创始人之间的关系破裂时会发生什么？我们将在课程临近尾声时有一个关于机制细节的环节，但这里最重要的事情是，创始人们经常搞砸的一点是：每一位联合创始人，你自己，当然，必须有vesting。
[段 41]
Basically what you’re doing with co-founder investing 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 50-50. 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 25% of the equity. If you leave after two years, 50%, and on and on like that. 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 dead weight on your equity table, and it’s very hard to get investors to fund you or to do anything else.
[译文 41]
基本上，联合创始人投资就是在提前协商如果其中一人离开会发生什么。因此，Silicon Valley 对此的通常做法是需要四年时间。比如说你们 50-50 平分股权，需要四年才能获得全部股权。而且计时从一年后开始。所以如果一年后离开，你保留 25% 的股权。如果两年后离开，50%，以此类推。如果不这样做，而且如果发生了严重冲突，一位创始人在早期带着一半的公司离开，你的股权表中就有这种沉没成本，让投资者很难资助你或做任何其他事情。
[段 42]
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 to do is: as soon as problems come up in the relationship between the co-founders, which happens to some degree in every company, talk about it early. Don’t let it just sit off there and fester. If you have to choose between hiring an employee that’s not ideal and moving your users to another competitor, what do you do? If you have to choose between hiring a suboptimal employee and losing your customers to a competitor, what do you do? If it would be one of the first five, say, employees of a company, I would lose those customers.
[译文 42]
所以，防止这种情况的首要建议是在股权上设置归属期。我们现在基本上不会投资创始人没有归属股权的公司，因为那真的很糟糕。另一件要做的事是：一旦联合创始人之间出现问题——这种情况在每个公司都会不同程度地发生——就要尽早沟通。不要让它就那样搁置并恶化。
If you have to choose between hiring an employee that’s not ideal and moving your users to another competitor, what do you do? If you have to choose between hiring a suboptimal employee and losing your customers to a competitor, what do you do? If it would be one of the first five, say, employees of a company, I would lose those customers.
[段 43]
I just, I think the damage that it does to the company, you know, you don’t want to, it’s better to lose some customers than kill the company. Later on, I might have a slightly different opinion, but it’s really hard to say in the general case. How about one more question and I’ll keep going. Yes? What’s your experience with co-founders who aren’t working in the same location? I’m going to get to that later. The question is, what about co-founders that aren’t working in the same location? Don’t do it. I am skeptical of remote teams in general, but in the early days of a startup where communication and speed outweigh everything else, for whatever reason, video conferencing or calls just don’t work that well.
[译文 43]
我只是，我觉得它对公司造成的损害，你知道，你不想这样，失去一些客户总比毁掉公司要好。之后，我可能会有稍微不同的意见，但总的来说真的很难说。再来一个问题怎么样，我会继续说下去。是吗？你对在不同地方工作的联合创始人有什么经验？我稍后会谈到这一点。问题是，对于在不同地方工作的联合创始人怎么办？不要这样做。我一般对远程团队持怀疑态度，但在创业初期，沟通和速度比一切都重要，无论出于什么原因，视频会议或电话就是没那么好用。
[段 44]
The data on this is: look at the say like 30 most successful software startups of all time, and try to point to a single example where the co-founders were in different locations. It’s really, really tough. All right, we’ll skip a little bit of this. All right, so now we’re going to talk about execution. Execution, for most founders, is not the most fun part of starting a company, but it is often the most critical. Most people that start a company think that they are signing up to have this brilliant idea, and then they’re just going to be on magazine covers and go to parties. But really what it’s about, more than anything else, what being a founder means is signing up for this years-long grind on execution.
[译文 44]
相关数据表明：看看有史以来最成功的30家软件创业公司，试着找出任何一个联合创始人身处不同地点的例子。这真的非常困难。好的，我们跳过这部分。好的，现在我们来谈谈执行。对于大多数创始人来说，执行并不是创业过程中最有趣的部分，但它往往是最关键的。大多数创业的人认为自己是在实现一个绝妙的创意，然后就能登上杂志封面、参加各种派对。但实际上，成为一名创始人意味着什么，更重要的是，意味着选择了一场旷日持久的执行马拉松。
[段 45]
And you can’t outsource this. The way to have a company that executes well is to execute well yourself. Everything in a startup gets modeled after the founders. Whatever the founders do becomes the culture. So if you want a culture where people work hard and pay attention to detail and focus on the customer and are frugal, you have to do it yourself. There is no other way. You cannot hire a COO and have them, you know, do this while you go off to conferences. The company just needs to see you as like this maniacal execution machine. As I said in the first lecture, there’s like a hundred times at least more people with great ideas than people that are willing to put in the effort to execute them well.
[译文 45]
你不能把这个外包出去。让一家公司执行力强的办法是你自己就要执行力强。创业公司里的一切都会以创始人为模板。创始人做什么，就会成为企业文化。所以如果你想要一种人们努力工作、注重细节、关注客户、节俭的文化，你必须自己先做到。没有别的办法。你不能雇一个 COO 然后让他来做这些，而你跑去参加各种会议。公司需要看到你就像一台疯狂执行的机器。就像我在第一场讲座中说的，至少有 100 倍的人有很棒的想法，但愿意付出努力去好好执行的人却没有那么多。
[段 46]
Ideas by themselves are not worth anything. Only executing well is what adds value, or what creates value. 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, I think, three classes can learn about how to be good at it. And so we’re going to have, I think, three classes that just talk about this. So the CEO, people have asked me a bunch of times, like, the jobs of a startup CEO. And there are probably more than five, But here are five that come up a lot in the early days. The first four, I think everyone thinks of as CEO jobs: set the vision, raise money, evangelize the company to people you’re trying to recruit, existing employees, partners, press, customers, everybody, hire and manage the team.
[译文 46]
创意本身毫无价值。只有执行得好才能增加价值，或者说才能创造价值。执行很大程度上就是付出努力。但关于如何擅长执行，有很多可以学习的东西。所以我认为我们将有 three classes 来学习如何擅长执行。所以我认为我们将有三节课专门讨论这个问题。所以，关于 startup CEO 的工作，很多人问过我很多次。可能不止 five 个，但以下是早期经常出现的五个。前 four 个，我想大家都认为是 CEO 的工作：设定愿景、融资、向你要招募的人、现有员工、合作伙伴、媒体、客户、所有人大力宣扬公司，以及雇用和管理团队。
[段 47]
But the fifth one is setting the execution bar. And this is not something that most founders get excited about or think about themselves doing, but I think is actually one of the critical CEO roles, and no one but the CEO can do this. Execution gets divided into two key questions: one, can you figure out what to do? And two is, 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 is what they’re spending their time and their money on. This reveals almost everything about what founders think is important.
[译文 47]
但第五个是设定执行标准。这不是大多数创始人会感到兴奋或认为自己应该做的事情，但我认为这实际上是关键的CEO角色之一，而且除了CEO之外没有人能做到这一点。执行分为两个关键问题：第一，你能弄清楚要做什么吗？第二，你能完成它吗？所以我想谈谈完成它的两个部分，假设你已经弄清楚要做什么了。那就是专注和强度。所以专注至关重要。我最喜欢问创始人的问题之一是他们把时间和金钱花在哪里。这几乎揭示了创始人认为重要的一切。
[段 48]
One of the hardest parts about being a founder is that there are 100 important things competing for your attention every day. And you have to identify the right two or three, work on those, and then ignore or delegate or defer the rest. And a lot of these things that founders think are really important—interviewing a lot of different law firms, going to conferences, recruiting advisors, whatever—they just don’t matter, right? And what really does matter varies with time, but it’s an important piece of meta advice: you need to figure out what the two or three most important things are, and then just do those. And you can only have two or three things every day, because everything else will just come at you—fires of the day.
[译文 48]
当创始人最难的部分之一，就是每天有100件重要的事情争夺你的注意力。你必须找出正确的两三件，专注于这些，然后把其余的忽略、委托或推迟。很多创始人认为非常重要的事情——面试很多不同的律师事务所、参加各种会议、招募顾问等——其实根本不重要，对吧？真正重要的事情会随着时间变化，但这是一条重要的元建议：你需要找出最重要的两三件事，然后只做这些。每天你只能专注于两三件事，因为其他所有事情都会扑面而来——每天的紧急事务。
[段 49]
And if you don’t get really good at setting what these two or three priorities are every day, you’ll never be great at actually getting stuff done. This is really hard for founders, right? Founders are people that get excited by starting new things. Unfortunately, the trick to great execution is to say no a lot. You know, you’re saying no 97 times out of 100. And most founders find that they have to make a very conscious effort to do this. Most startups are not nearly focused enough. They work really hard—maybe, but they don’t work hard on the right things. And you’ll still fail. One of the great and terrible things about starting a startup is that you get no credit for trying.
[译文 49]
如果你不能真正擅长每天确定这两三个优先事项，你就永远不会擅长真正把事情做完。这对 founders 来说真的很难，对吧？Founders 是那些对开始新事物感到兴奋的人。不幸的是，伟大执行力的秘诀是经常说不。你知道，100次中你有 97 次在说"不”。大多数 founders 都发现他们必须非常刻意地努力去做这件事。大多数 startups 远远不够专注。他们工作真的很努力——也许吧，但他们没有在正确的事情上努力。而你仍然会失败。关于创业，有一件既伟大又可怕的事情——你尝试了也不会得到任何 credit。
[段 50]
You only get points when you make something that the market wants. So if you work really hard on the wrong things, no one will care. So then there’s this question of how do you figure out what to focus on each day. And this is where it’s really important to have goals. Most good founders that I know, at any given time, have a small number of overarching goals for the company. Everybody in the company knows what they are. It could be things like ship a product by this date, maintain this growth rate, get this certain engagement rate, hire for these key roles, get this deal done. But anybody could tell you in the company every week what our key goals are.
[译文 50]
只有当你做出市场需要的东西时，才能得分。所以如果你在错误的事情上非常努力，没有人会关心。那么问题来了：你如何弄清楚每天应该关注什么。这就是为什么拥有目标非常重要的原因。我认识的大多数优秀创始人，在任何给定的时间，都为公司设定了几个总体目标。公司里的每个人都知道这些目标是什么。这些目标可能是这样的：在某个日期前推出产品，保持这个增长率，达到某个参与率，为这些关键岗位招聘人员，完成这笔交易。但公司里的任何人都能告诉你，我们每周的关键目标是什么。
[段 51]
And then everybody executes based off of that. The founder really does set the focus. Whatever the founder cares about, whatever the founders think are the key goals, that’s going to be what the whole company focuses on. And 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, all-hands meeting every week. But it keeps the company focused. One of the keys to focus, and why I said I think co-founders in different places struggle, is that you can’t be focused without really great communication. Even if you only have, say, four or five people in a company, a small communication breakdown is enough for everybody to be working on slightly different things, and then you lose focus and the company just scrambles.
[译文 51]
然后每个人基于此执行。创始人确实设定焦点。无论创始人关心什么，无论创始人们认为什么是关键目标，这就是整个公司会聚焦的方向。最优秀的创始人会反复重复这些目标，次数远超过他们认为需要的频率。他们把它们贴在墙上，在一对一谈话中提到，在每周的全员会议上也讲。但这保持公司聚焦。聚焦的关键之一，以及为什么我说我认为在不同地方的联合创始人会很挣扎，是因为没有非常好的沟通就无法保持专注。即使你公司只有 four or five 个人，很小的沟通失误就足以让每个人做稍微不同的事情，然后你失去焦点，公司就会陷入混乱。
[段 52]
I’m going to talk about this a little bit more 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 to someone about how they’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’re going to ship this because we’re focused on this other thing. We’re doing a rebrand, whatever. Almost always a disaster.
[译文 52]
我稍后会再多谈谈这个，但增长和momentum是你永远不能失去专注的东西。增长和momentum是一家startup的命脉，你必须始终专注于保持这些。你应该始终知道你的表现与你的metrics相比如何。你应该每周进行一次周review会议，如果你在和某人交谈时发现他们说“现在不专注于增长”，你应该极度警惕。我们现在增长得不太好，但我们正在做这个别的事情。我们没有timeline来说什么时候ship这个，因为我们专注于这个别的事情。我们在做一个rebrand什么的。几乎总是一场灾难。
[段 53]
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 by 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 feels like you’re actually really cool. But in a year, you’ll still 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 started this new startup, it’s going to be the next big thing. And now you have nothing. And that sucks. And then, as I mentioned already, be in the same space.
[译文 53]
所以你需要有正确的 metrics，并且要专注于增长这些 metrics 并保持 momentum。不要让公司被其他事情分散注意力或兴奋不已。一个常见的错误是公司会被自己的 PR 所迷惑。不做出实际成果却获得 PR 报道其实很容易。这会让你感觉自己是真的很酷。但一年后，你仍然什么都没有，到那时你就不会再酷了。而你只能谈论一年前的那些文章，哦，你知道，这些 Stanford 学生创办了这家新 startup，它将成为下一个 big thing。而现在你什么都没有。这真是太糟糕了。然后，正如我之前提到的，要在同一个 space。
[段 54]
This is like, I think this is pretty much a non-starter. Remote co-founding teams is just really, really hard. It slows down the cycle time more than anybody ever thinks it’s going to. The other piece besides focus for execution is intensity. Startups only work at a fairly intense level. A friend of mine says that the secret to startup success is extreme focus and extreme dedication. You can have a startup and one other thing. You can have a startup and a family, but you probably can’t have many other hobbies. 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.
[译文 54]
这就像是，我想这基本上是根本不可行的。远程联合创始团队真的非常非常困难。它会让周期时间变慢，比任何人想象的都要慢。除了专注执行之外的另一个要素是强度。创业公司只有在相当高的强度下才能运作。我有一个朋友说，创业成功的秘诀是极端专注和极端投入。你可以同时经营一家创业公司和另一件事。你可以同时拥有创业公司和家庭，但你可能无法兼顾太多其他爱好。创业公司不是工作生活平衡的最佳选择，而这基本上就是残酷的现实。创业有很多很棒的地方，但工作生活平衡不在其中。
[段 55]
They are all-consuming in a way that is difficult to explain. You generally need to be willing to outwork your competitors. The good news here—wow, that’s hard to see—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 0.99, the company will eventually flatline and then die. And if it’s 1.01, you’ll be in this happy place of exponential growth forever. So this is just one concrete example of where a tiny bit of extra work is the difference between success and failure. And 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.
[译文 55]
它们非常耗费精力，很难用言语解释。你通常需要愿意比竞争对手付出更多的努力。好消息是——哇，这很难看到——在正确的事情上多做一点点工作就能产生巨大的差异。我喜欢举的一个例子是考虑消费类 web 产品的病毒系数：每个现有用户带来多少新用户。如果是 0.99，公司最终会趋于平稳然后消亡。如果是 1.01，你就会永远处于指数增长的美好境地。所以这只是一个小小的额外工作决定成功与失败的具体例子。当我们与成功的创始人交谈时，他们总是讲述这样的故事——正是比竞争对手多付出一点点努力让他们获得了成功。
[段 56]
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 startups 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. The trick is that you have to do both at a startup. You need to have a culture where people have very high quality standards for everything the company does, but still move quickly. Apple, Facebook, and Google have all done this extremely well.
[译文 56]
所以你必须真的非常有紧迫感。这只能来自CEO。这只能来自创始人。创业公司最大的优势之一就是执行速度。而且你必须要有这种不懈的运营节奏。Facebook有这张著名的海报，上面写着"move fast and break things"。但与此同时，他们还能做到对质量痴迷。这就是为什么这很难。快速行动或对质量痴迷都很容易做到。诀窍在于你在创业公司必须两者兼顾。你需要有一种文化，让公司所有人对每件事都有非常高的质量标准，但仍然快速行动。Apple、Facebook和Google都做得极为出色。
[段 57]
It’s not just about the product, it’s about everything they do. They move fast, they break things, and 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 do 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 quite make this decision. They’re talking about, well, I could do this thing that sounds great, or I could do this other thing, and they keep going back and forth, and they don’t act.
[译文 57]
这不仅仅是关于产品，而是关于他们所做的切。他们行动迅速，敢于打破常规，在该节俭的地方节俭，但对质量的关注无处不在。如果你不希望他们写出糟糕的代码，就不要给他们买烂电脑。你确实需要设定一个贯穿整个公司的质量标准。与此相关的是，你必须果断。优柔寡断是创业公司的杀手。平庸的创始人花大量时间谈论宏伟计划。但他们从未真正做出这个决定。他们说，呃，我可以做这件听起来很棒的事，或者我可以做另一件，他们来回摇摆，就是不行动。
[段 58]
And what you actually need is this bias towards action. The best founders work on things that seem small, but they move really quickly. 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’ve learned best predicts the success of founders in YC. Every time we talk to a team, they’ve gotten new things done. That’s the best predictor we have that the company will go on to be successful. Part of this is that you can do huge things in incremental pieces. If you just keep knocking down small chunks one at a time, in a year you look back and you’ve done this amazing thing.
[译文 58]
你真正需要的是这种行动倾向。最优秀的创始人做的事情看起来很小，但他们行动非常迅速。他们完成任务非常快。每次你和最优秀的创始人交谈，他们都已经完成了新的事情。事实上，这是我们学到的最能预测YC创始人成功的唯一因素。每次我们和一个团队交谈，他们都完成了新的事情。这是我们拥有的最能预测公司将继续成功的因素。其中一部分原因是，你可以把大事分成小块来做。如果你一次一次地攻克小块，一年后回头看，你已经完成了一件了不起的事情。
[段 59]
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. So you have to pick these right-sized projects. Even if you’re building this crazy synthetic biology company, most people would say, Well, I have to go away for a year. I can’t do this incrementally. There’s almost always a way to break it down into smaller projects. So speed is this huge premium, right? The best founders usually respond to email the most quickly. They make decisions the most quickly. They’re generally quick in all these different ways. And they just have this do-whatever-it-takes attitude. They also show up a lot. They come to meetings.
[译文 59]
另一方面，如果你消失一年，期望回来时一下子就能拿出惊人的成果，这种情况通常不会发生。所以你必须选择这些规模合适的项目。即使你要创建这家疯狂的合成生物学公司，大多数人可能会说，呃，我必须离开一年，没办法逐步推进。但几乎总会有办法把它分解成更小的项目。所以速度是巨大的优势，对吧？最优秀的创始人通常回复邮件最快，做决定最快，在各种不同方面通常都很迅速。而且他们有这种不遗余力的态度。他们也经常出现，会来参加会议。
[段 60]
They come in. They meet us in person. One piece of advice that I have that’s always worked for me is they get on planes in marginal situations. How are we doing on time? I’ll tell a quick story here. When I was running my own company, we found out that 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 years before we were, and they had us all locked up. So we called and said, Hey, we have this better product. You’ve got to meet with us. They said, You know what, we’re signing this deal tomorrow.
[译文 60]
他们进来了。他们亲自来见我们。我有一条一直对我很有效的建议，那就是在情况紧急时，他们会直接坐飞机赶过来。我们时间上还来得及吗？我来快速讲个故事。当我自己经营公司时，我们发现即将失去一单生意。这是一笔来自该领域第一个大客户的关键交易，而它即将被一家比我们早成立多年的公司抢走，他们已经把我们完全锁定了。所以我们打电话说，嘿，我们有更好的产品。你们一定要来见见我们。他们说，你知道吗，我们明天就要签这笔交易了。
[段 61]
Sorry. We drove to the airport. We got on a plane. We were at their office at 6 a.m. the next morning. We just sat there. They told us to go away. We just kept sitting there. Finally, one of the junior guys decided to meet with us. Finally, after that, one of the senior guys decided to meet with us. They ended up ripping up the contract with this 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. And so you just sort of like you show up, you do these things.
[译文 61]
对不起。我们开车去了机场。我们登上了飞机。第二天早上6点我们就在他们的办公室了。我们就坐在那里。他们叫我们走开。我们就继续坐在那里。最后，一个资历较浅的家伙决定见我们。之后，终于有一个资深的人决定见我们。他们最终撕毁了与那家公司的合同。大约一周后我们就和他们成交了。我确信，如果我们没有登上飞机，如果我们没有亲自到场，那件事就不会成功。所以你就是那种——你出现了，你做了这些事情。
[段 62]
When people say get on planes in marginal situations, they usually mean it. Well, they don’t usually mean it literally, but I think it’s actually good literal advice. Alright, I’ll skip that part then. So I mentioned this momentum and growth earlier. Once more, momentum and growth are the lifeblood of startups. This is probably in the top three secrets to 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 is this prime directive for managing a startup.
[译文 62]
当人们说在关键时刻要登上飞机时，他们通常是认真的。嗯，他们通常不是字面意思，但我认为这实际上是个很好的字面建议。好吧，那我就跳过这部分。所以我之前提到了增长动能和增长。再说一次，增长动能和增长是初创公司的命脉。这可能是成功执行的top three secrets之一。你希望公司一直处于获胜状态。如果你一旦take your foot off the gas pedal，事情就会失控，像滚雪球一样下滑。一个获胜的团队会感觉良好并持续获胜。一个一段时间没有获胜的团队会变得demotivated并持续失败。所以始终保持增长动能是管理初创公司的prime directive。
[段 63]
If I can only tell founders one thing about how to run a company, it would be this. For most software startups, this translates to keep growing. For hardware startups, it translates to don’t let your ship date slip. This is what we tell people during YC, and they usually listen and everything is good. What happens after 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 then everything falls apart. It’s hard to figure out a growth engine because most companies grow in new ways. But there is this thing about if you build a good product, it will grow.
[译文 63]
如果我只能告诉创始人一件关于如何经营公司的事，那就是这个。对大多数软件初创公司来说，这意味着保持增长。对硬件初创公司来说，这意味着不要让产品发布日期延后。这是我们在YC期间告诉大家的，他们通常会听，一切都很顺利。YC结束后发生的是，他们会被其他事情分心，然后增长放缓。然后，不知怎么的，在这之后，人们开始变得不开心并离职，然后一切都崩溃了。很难找到一个增长引擎，因为大多数公司以新的方式增长。但有件事是，如果你打造一个好产品，它就会增长。
[段 64]
And so getting this product right at the beginning is the best way to not lose momentum later. 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 they 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 how all the other problems in a startup disappear.
[译文 64]
所以在一开始就把这个产品做好，是避免日后失去势头最好的方式。如果你真的失去了势头，大多数创始人会尝试用错误的方式来找回。他们大谈公司愿景，试图用演讲来鼓舞团队。但在势头已经衰退的公司里，员工不想听这些。你必须把愿景演讲留到公司获胜的时候。当你没有获胜的时候，你只能通过小胜利来重获势头。我的一位董事会成员曾说，销售能解决初创公司的一切，这是真的。所以你要弄清楚哪里可以获得这些小胜利，然后完成它，之后你会惊讶地发现初创公司的其他问题都消失了。
[段 65]
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, like, 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. And if you just call it out, if you just acknowledge that, you’ll find that things get way better. To use a Facebook example again, when Facebook’s growth slowed in 2008, Mark instituted a growth group.
[译文 65]
如果你遇到增长动力下降，你会注意到的另一件事是，每个人开始对应该做什么产生分歧。当公司失去增长动力时，冲突就会出现。对于这个问题，我认为有效的一个框架是：当团队对应该做什么产生分歧时，你去问你的用户，然后按照用户告诉你的去做。你必须提醒人们，比如，嘿，现在事情不太顺利。我们并没有真的互相讨厌。我们只是需要回到正轨，一切都会好起来的。如果你直接指出来，如果你承认这一点，你会发现情况会好很多。再用Facebook的例子来说，2008年Facebook的增长放缓时，Mark成立了一个增长小组。
[段 66]
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. So a good way to keep momentum is to establish an operating rhythm in the company early, where you ship product and launch new features on this regular basis, where you’re reviewing metrics every week with the entire company.
[译文 66]
他们致力于非常小的细节，让Facebook增长得更快。所有这些单独来看似乎都很微小，但它们让Facebook的曲线重新上升。它很快成为那里最负盛名的团队。Mark说过，这是Facebook最出色的创新之一。据当时在Facebook工作的我的朋友们说，它真的扭转了公司的动力，从每个人都感觉糟糕、动力全无的状态，回到了胜利的状态。所以保持动力的一个好方法是在公司早期就建立运营节奏，在这种规律的基础上发布产品和推出新功能，每周与全公司一起review指标。
[段 67]
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 force and function to get the company to care about metrics and milestones. 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. 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.
[译文 67]
这实际上是董事会能为你做的最好的事情之一。董事会在业务战略方面很少能增加价值，但非常频繁的是，你可以把它们当作一股力量和功能，让公司关心指标和里程碑。经常扰乱势头但其实不应该的一件事是竞争对手。竞争对手在媒体上制造噪音，我认为，可能比任何其他外部因素都更频繁地摧毁公司的势头。所以这里有一个好的经验法则。在竞争对手真正用实际发货的产品击败你之前，完全不要担心他们。新闻稿比代码容易写，而写代码仍然比做出好产品容易。所以提醒你的公司这一点。
[段 68]
This is sort of a founder’s rule, is not to let the company get down because of the competitors in the press. 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. These are almost never the companies that put out a lot of press releases and that bum people out. Should we move on to this section? You know what, we’ll cover this in a later lecture. We’ll talk about finance, deal making, and distribution. Are there any questions? Okay, so on Tuesday, Paul Graham is going to speak. See you then. Thank you.
[译文 68]
这是条创始人准则——不要让公司因为竞争对手的 press 而一蹶不振。我很喜欢 Henry Ford 的这句名言：真正值得警惕的竞争对手是那些完全无视你、只顾不断提升自己业务的对手。这些几乎都不是那些频繁发布 press releases、让人厌烦的公司。我们继续讲下一部分吗？这样吧，我们留到后面的 lecture 再讲。我们来讲讲 finance、deal making 和 distribution。有什么问题吗？好的，Tuesday Paul Graham 会来做演讲。到时候见。谢谢。
Source: bilibili BV1oWKpzoE1Z