- 作者：Sam Altman
- 译者： Iceyl Tao，杜月，闻宇
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.
在开始今天的课程之前，我想先回答一下同学们邮件问到，上节课没时间涉及的一些问题。所以如果对上节课的内容有疑问，我现在非常乐意解答。就从你开始吧。
Q: How do I identify if a market has a fast growth rate now and also for the next ten years?
问: 如果市场现在增长率很快，怎么判定它未来十年依然能保持呢？
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.
答: 好消息就是，学生有一大优势：相信你的直觉。年轻人正在使用的科技对于年纪大一点的人来说只能靠猜（来了解）。而你们只要看看自己在干嘛，身边的朋友在干嘛，直觉就几乎肯定会比年纪大一点的人准得多。所以答案就是直觉，想想自己最近做什么做的多，想想自己在用什么，你的同龄人在用什么，那基本上就是未来导向了。
Okay, one more question on the last lecture before we start.
好，再回答一个上节课的问题，然后我们开始今天的内容。
Q: How do you deal with burnout while still being productive and remaining productive.
问：你在保持高效率的同时怎么平衡自己特别疲劳的状况？
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 founder. It's sort of all consuming in this way that is very difficult to understand.
答：答案很简单，尽管他妹的非常不爽，也只能挺住。不像当学生的时候，你可以一甩手说，你太累了不管了，不就一学期分数低一点么。创业最苦的最现实的就是，必须面对现实熬过去。传统的建议是休个假，不过对创业者来说完全不适用。【基本上就全是这么消耗过去的，简直不可想象。】
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，能做的就是继续战斗。你得靠朋友，这非常重要。创业者抑郁不是空穴来风，所以你必须有个支持性的朋友圈。但是战胜疲劳的方法也只是更加凸显了（创业的）挑战，凸显了出问题时候的情况，不过最终，【你会感到好很多的】。
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.
上节课我们讲到了创意和产品，我想强调的是，如果你们没理解这两点，那之后的内容也是无益。今天，我们要讨论的是如何招聘和如何裁员。希望你们不会时不时裁掉自己雇来的员工。
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，我想讲的是创业合伙人。创业合伙人间的关系是整个公司里最重要的关系之一。人人都说，合伙人间逐渐萌生的紧张是必须重视的问题，也是必须立即重视的问题。这都千真万确，YC也是如此。新公司夭折的首要原因就是合伙人们闹蹦了。但出于某些原因，许多人选择合伙人还不如招聘员工那么上心。千万别这样！（选合伙人）是创业生涯中最重要的决定之一，也必须予以最高的重视。
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.
也不知道为什么，学生在这方面真是逊爆了，总是随便选个谁。常常是我想创业，你也想创业，那我们一块创业吧。简直跟速配似的，我想找个合伙人，我们相互不了解，一块创业吧。这简直就是2B吧。谁都不会这么选职员，但居然好多人就这么敲定了商业合伙人。真的非常非常不靠谱。无比随意的选定合伙人，或者选交情不够深的，还算不上朋友的人，一旦出了问题，就没有深厚的基础保证你们的关系，通常结果都会很惨痛。
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.
YC有一批一共有75个公司，其中有九个公司在我们面试他们，和他们开始创业之间这段时间里，增加了新合伙人，第二年，这九个公司全崩盘了。合伙人彼此不了解的公司，记录真的是相当不好。
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.
大学是认识合伙人的好地方。如果你没在学校里，也还没有合伙人，那我觉得最好的选择是去个有意思的公司工作。如果能到诸如facebook或者google之类的公司工作，那里的合伙人资源和斯坦福一样丰富。即使没有合伙人也比差劲的合伙人要好，但是独自创业并不理想。首先在我们开始之前，我只是想陈述一下数据。在YC最有价值的二十个公司中——我可能漏掉了一两个因为我只迅速数了一下——几乎所有都有至少两个合伙人。我们对独立创业者的赞助比率大致在十分之一。
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，最好是和了解的合伙人合作，不然的话，独自创业虽然稍为逊色，但也可行。
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 relentless 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.
当你考虑合伙人和可能合适的人选时，问题就在于究竟选择什么样的才好。在YC我们有一个公共词汇，就是“【无限资源】”，这人人都听说过。你绝对需要【取之不尽用之不竭资源丰富】的合伙人，但是在YC发布会上，我们通常会举一个更色彩斑斓的例子。Paul Graham最先开始用的，我继续发扬光大。
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.
你要寻找淡定、坚韧不拔，在什么情况下都知道该怎么做的合伙人。他们反应迅速，抉择果断，创意丰富，时刻可以应付一切。在流行文化里就有这样一个例子。听起来好像很傻叉，但是至少特别好记，而且很久以来YC的每个课程我们都会讲到，对学员也非常有帮助。
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.
这个例子就是邦德（James Bond）。听起来很玄，但是至少你们会记忆犹新。比起一个某领域的专家，你会更需要一个像邦德一样的人。
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.
像我之前提到的，你真的有必要对你的合伙人有长期了解，最好是多年的了解。这也适用于早期的员工雇用。奇怪的是，大多人在招聘时比选合伙人时对此认识得更清楚。所以，好好利用学校的机会吧。除过【无限资源】之外，合伙人还要坚毅冷静。有些特质一看就很重要，比如聪明，但是每个人都想要个聪明的合伙人，却不够看重坚毅和冷静。尤其是自认为不够坚毅冷静的人，就更需要一个这样的合伙人。如果你不够懂技术，即便可能在座绝大部分人都觉得自己技术上够强，那也还是需要一名技术合伙人。如今在创业圈里开始流行一个说法，说：“我们不需要技术合伙人，雇人就行了，我们管理得够出色就行。” 这不靠谱。
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.
在我们的经验中这并不很奏效。做软件在行的人就应该去做软件公司，做媒体在行的人也正应该去做媒体公司。从YC的经验中看，两到三个合伙人最为完美。一个人，显然不是很好；五个人，就很没谱了；四个人有时候还成；但是我认为两到三个才是目标。
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.
第二部分是如何雇员工：尽量不雇。开始一个公司的时候，你会发现一个怪事，就是大家都会问你公司有多少员工。人们用这种方式来判断你开公司这事有多现实，你有多酷。如果你说你有好多员工，他们就印象深刻。你要是没几个员工，就好像在搞笑。但真实情况是，员工多其实会苦不堪言，而你应该为为员工数量少而骄傲。大量员工导致高消耗率——每月要花一大笔钱，还有复杂化，决策缓慢，等等等等，总之没什么好处。
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.
所以你应该为少数员工能完成多少工作而骄傲。YC最好的公司第一年的员工数都极少，有的除了公司创建者外一个员工也没有。他们尽可能保持人员最少。在最开始，除非万不得已，不然就别雇员工。之后，再学着尽快雇人，扩大公司规模。但是早期，目标是尽量少雇人。不值得雇很多员工的一大原因是，早期用人错误的消耗是极高的。实际上，我曾经很了解的许多公司，在头三个月左右的早期用人上非常失败。这导致他们一蹶不振，自此陨落。
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他们首个雇员。在他们第一年里，一共也只雇用过两个员工。在他们招聘任何一个人之前，他们都会列出他们希望Airbnb员工具有的所有文化价值。【？？？】，如果你不接受，他们就根本不会雇用你。Airbnb的CEO是Brian Chesky，一个关于他有多极端【intense】的例子是，他曾经会问（面试者），如果他已经拿到医学诊断说自己只剩下一年可活了，还会不会做这份工作。后来他觉得这个问题有点太离谱，我记得好像是把期限放宽到了10年，不过就我所知，他现在还在问这个问题。
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.
员工招聘真的很要紧，这些员工将定义你的公司，所以你也需要和你一样对公司信念坚定的人。听起来他（Brian Chesky）这个面试问题很疯狂，但是他就是如此才创造了这样忠诚度极高的公司文化。当公司面临危机时，这些员工能够共同面对。早先公司面临一个更大的危机时，每个人都以公司为家，每天发货，直到危机结束。Airbnb非常卓越的一点就在于，如果你跟公司的大约头四十个员工聊聊，他们都感到自己是公司创建过程的一部分。
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.
通过极高的标准和缓慢的雇用过程，就能够确保每个雇员都相信公司的使命。这是可以达成的。所以，假设你采纳了警告，不到非不得已不雇员工。在这种雇用模式里，最首要的就是吸纳最好的员工。而在筹款阶段，记得筹款的优先级最高。
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.
创业者常常低估的一点是招人有多困难。你觉得你创意极好，人人都会加入。事实却并非如此。最好的人选本身也面临着无数机遇，一年都未必能招到一个合适的。（招聘）过程会相当漫长，所以你更得说服他们你的公司使命是他们寻找的最重要的方向。这个例子也再次说明了，选对产品有多么重要，是其他一切开始的前提。最好的人才也希望加入一个能极速起飞的企业(rocketship)。
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.
顺便提一下，如果你准备加入一个初创公司，我最大的建议就是加入一个rocketship. 找一个已经在运作，但是大多数其他人还没有注意到的，以后能够做大做强的公司。你关注了，所以你了解它。通常都很容易看出这些特点。但是好的人才懂得辨识，所以在加入之前会等着看这公司方向是否正确。
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.
早上有人在网上问，招人花多少时间好。答案就是要么一点功夫不花，不然就投入25%时间。要么不投入，要么可能会投入最大块的时间。实际上，管理书籍上一般会说花一半的时间在招人上，但是说这话的人通常招人花的时间还不到10%。25%是相当多的时间，但是一旦进入招聘模式，还真的是有必要花这么多时间。
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.
如果你妥协的招个凑合的人才，你一定会后悔。我们总是警告创业者，但是很多人不犯一次错误都意识不到它的重要性。（偶合的员工）真的对公司文化非常不好。大公司里，水平凑合的员工也会引发问题，但不至于毁灭公司。而起步公司里的头五个员工一旦有一个凑合的职员，很可能就会让公司夭折。
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.
我一个朋友总在面试的会议室里立一个标牌，还放在面试者面试时候一定能看见的地方，上面写着：半瓶醋的工程师建不起来好公司。对的，就是这样，真的是这样。大公司就比较无所谓，因为【员工慢慢就被筛掉了】，但是对初创公司来说，每个人都会奠定公司基调。所以如果招的前五、前十个人你就在凑合了，公司可能就会被拖垮。每招一个人的时候都该想想：能不能拿公司的前途押在这人身上？这是个很严苛的标准。以后公司做大了，你可能可以将就招招某个职位。但也许会出现【紧迫的最后期限之类的事情】，还是会让你后悔。但是理论和实际有所不同，后面会有别人来讲如果这种事真的发生了该怎么办。但是创业早期，绝对不能犯错误。
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.
人才来源。学生在这个话题上也老有错误观念。人才最好的来源是你或者公司其他员工已经了解的人。教科书上最好的公司里前一百个，甚至常常更多员工都来源于个人推荐。许多创业者觉得，主动联系自己觉得好，或者同事觉得好的人才，会有些尴尬。但是如果你在Facebook或者google工作，入职的头几周就会有人力资源的人来和你聊，把你认识的每个聪明人都挖掘出来，以便以后能招聘他们。
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.
招聘的关键真的在于个人推荐。还有个建议是到【硅谷外】找找。可能当地的工程师招聘竞争惨烈，但是你可能认识世界其他地方有愿意来工作的人选。
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.
创业者还常问我们关于经验的问题，经验有多重要。简短的回答是，有的角色需要经验，有的无所谓。如果要招聘一个将要管理公司大量事物的人，经验就可能相当重要。创业早期的大部分招聘可能都并不太需要着重经验，潜质和【少量经验】才是更重要的。我一生中招的最成功的几个人，以前都从没在公司特定方向方面从业过。必须好好考虑，某职位到底需不需要在意经验。其实常常是不需要的，尤其在创业早期。
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.
我招聘的时候看重三点。人才聪明吗？能完成事情吗？我是否愿意和他们相处？如果我能得到答案，如果三个问题的答案都是肯定的，那我绝不会后悔，绝对奏效。面试里可以看到这三方面不少东西，但是能解答这三个问题最好的方法是一起工作。所以曾经一起工作过的人最为理想，甚至都没必要再面试他们。如果没有和他们一起工作过，那最好是正式雇用前先和他们一起做一两天的项目。你们双方都会学到很多，他们也会的。大多数首次创业者作为面试官都不怎么样，但是都非常善于评价共事者。
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.
因而YC的一个建议就是，用共同完成一个项目来代替面试。如果要面试，你八成要，就问问他们过去曾经完成过的项目中的特定问题。比起问知识储备，你会多很多收获。出于某些原因，年轻的技术型创业者总喜欢考知识，而不是问之前做过什么。仔细发掘面试者过去做过的项目。初期创业者还老是不愿主动联系有关系的人。给曾经一起工作过的人打电话吧！联系的时候，不要就只问问“最近怎么样”，好好挖掘一下！这人能不能排到你共事者们的前5%？他们有什么特长之处？你会不会再聘用他？你为什么没聘用他？真的要好好利用这些联络。
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.
在同YC公司的交谈中，我发现成功的招聘和优秀的沟通能力往往息息相关。我之前没注意到这点。因此，我们要谈谈为什么沟通能力对于早期创业如此重要。如果和一个人很难交流或者很难清楚地沟通，那将严重影响到他们的顺利发展。同时，你会期望你的早期员工有点冒险精神。早期员工一般都具备这种冒险精神，否则，他们也不会真对创业感兴趣，但现在，创业变得有些普遍了，你需要真正喜欢一点冒险的人。如果一个人要在麦肯锡和你的创业团队两份工作中选择，那么结果他很可能不会选择加入创业团队。
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.
你也希望这些人拥有坚定的决心，这有些不同于富于冒险精神。所以你应找到同时具备这两种品质的人。另外，如果你们有任何问题，欢迎随时打断我。保罗·格雷厄姆（Paul Graham）有一个著名的实验，叫做动物实验。实验主要在于能够根据任一员工的表现将其比作一种动物。我想这可能不太好用语言描述，但你需要无坚不摧的人。
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 unstoppablepeople. 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.
你需要能够解决任何问题的人。创始人对他们感到满意的早期员工通常的评价是：他们最擅长于做他们在做事情。马克伯格(Zuckerburg)曾说过他希望雇佣A.在社交方面，能够舒服地相处的人B.如果角色互换，愿意向他汇报工作的人。
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.
这是个非常好的招聘方式，真的触动了我。你不用和每个人成为朋友，但你至少应该能享受和他们共事。如果你做不到这点那你至少应该非常尊重他们。但是，如果你不想在人事方面花费太多时间，你应该相信再次相信直觉。
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.
讨论招聘这个话题时，我想谈谈员工股份。创始人总是把这个搞得很糟糕。我认为往少里估算【大致上】，应该给公司最初10名员工10%的股份。
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.
当然，员工需要用四年以上的时间才能赢得这些股权，如果他们真的能得到股权，他们贡献得将比得到的多得多。他们将大大提升公司的价值如果他们做不到，他们也留不下来。
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.
不管出于什么原因，创始人通常在股份方面对员工很吝啬，但却对投资人相当慷慨。我认为这完全是本末倒置。我想这是创始人最经常搞砸的事情之一。员工为公司增加越来越多的价值。而投资人经常就是写张支票给钱，然后除了一堆许诺之外，就不会再多做什么。有时候投资人也会出点力，但员工才是真正的年复一年在建设发展公司的人。
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.
所以，我坚信应当尽量减少投资人得到的股份并且，尽可能对员工慷慨些。YC公司在这方面做得很好。给早期员工最多股份的YC公司通常也是我们投资的所有企业里最成功的。
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.
另一件创始人经常忽略的事情是如果雇佣了员工，就要留住他们。我这里就不细说了，因为以后会专门有一讲讨论这个问题。但我还是想稍微提一下，因为创始人实在是太经常犯这种错误你需要确认你的员工工作得满意，并且感到有价值。这就是股权授予如此重要的原因。人们通常对于加入一个初创公司会感到很激动，因此不会过多考虑股权的事情，但是，日复一日，年复一年，如果他们对待遇不满意，这不满意就会刺激他们，让他们心生怨言。
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，要学习一些管理技巧，这是大有益处的，新CEO们这方面通常特别菜，今年夏天，有一个YC的创业者，他现在已经很成功了，早期却很挣扎，进行了好几次团队【转型】【重组？】。有人问他遇到的最大挑战是什么结果他说，你不应该天天说你的员工老在搞砸事情，除非你想把他们赶跑。他们真的会因此离开。
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.
但作为一名创始人，这是一种本能。你觉得自己能把一切事情做到最好，尤其别人做的不够好时，就特别容易这么教训别人。所以在这方面学上一两招能能预防大规模的这种团队【流失】。对于创始人来说，也不是天生就懂得称赞自己的团队。我也花了不少时间才学会这点。你必须学会把功劳归于团队，而把责任留给自己。
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.
你不能事无巨细亲自操刀，而要划分职责交给别人。这些不是创始人应该考虑的。我认为首次创业者首先必须要自知，自知自己是一名不合格的管理者，并倍加努力进行改善。Dan Pink表示有三个要素激发着人们去从事伟大的工作，这三种要素是：自制力【自主】，掌控力，和决心。在我开公司的时候，我从未想到过这些但我后来考虑了这个问题并且认为这样是对的。我想值得去思考这些。学会【一对一做事情】并给出清晰的解决方案也花费我不少时间。
All of these things are things first time CEO don't normally do, and maybe I can save you from not doing that.
所有这些事情都是首次出任CEO的人不常做到的，或许我可以让你免于做那些。
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.
关于团队要讲的最后一部分是如何辞退不合适的员工。我在这里说再多也不能避免你们在这方面犯错我这么说是有原因的因为辞退员工是经营公司时最郁闷的事情。实际上就我的经验而言，这确实是最 糟糕的部分。每个首次创业者都等太久才会决定辞退某人，他们都希望这些员工能够变好但正确的处理办法是，不合适的员工得尽早辞退。这对公司对于那些员工本人，都是更好的结果。但辞退员工实在是太讨厌，太令人痛苦了，以至于人们在最初的几次总是会犯错误。
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 if is.
另外，除了需要辞退那些做不好本职工作人，还需要辞退另外两类员工：A）搞办公室政治的人B）一直态度消极的人。如果公司有这样的人，其他员工都会心知肚明。这对公司来说将是巨大的累赘。完全有害无利的。另外，这也是一个在大公司无所谓，但可能会扼杀创业公司的例子不过其实我也很怀疑大公司究竟ho不ho的住。所以你要小心上面那两类人。
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.
那么，现在的问题是，如何在快速辞退一些员工和保证其他员工安全感之间找到平衡？解决办法是，如果有不称职的员工，不称职不是指他们一次两次搞砸了事情。谁都会有一两次的失误，甚至更多次，这时候你应当表现得非常友善，不要把自己得的怒气发泄到他们身上，要表现得像个团队，一起解决问题。
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.
如果一个人工作上总是犯错，你就得采取行动，到了这个地步，对双方来说都很痛苦。这不是关于少数弄糟事情的人的个案，而是每次某些人做某些事情，你自己都完全不会这么做你没法帮他们做决定，但你必须选对要做决定的人。 如果一个人总是失误，持续比如一个星期甚至一个月你就得注意。
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.
理论上听起来很复杂，但实际操作中通常简单无疑。一个人犯一两次错误和不停的把事情搞砸，不停地制造问题，或者弄得人人都不开心是不一样的，这种情况一眼就能看出来。
When should co-founders decide on the equity split?
创业伙伴应该什么时候决定分配股权？
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.
我一直不太明白为什么这么多创业者和创业伙伴将这件事一拖再拖。他们甚至采用一些极端方式来签订合并文件，这样他们就能够拖更久。
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.
这个决定并不会随时间流逝就变得容易协商，最理想的，是在你们开始共事不久就解决掉。而且，每人分配到的股权应该大致相当。如果你不想给别人——你的创业伙伴——相对平等的股权，我想你就该仔细想想你是否希望他们成为你的合伙人。但不管怎样，你应该在公司规模发展壮大前，就让股权尘埃落定。比如，最初的几周（就决定）。
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.
我认为缺乏经验是可以的，所以问题关键在于，怎样知道某人能否胜任某职位，而不是只会吹牛，然后逐渐体现出不称职，把事情搞砸。那些真正聪明并且善于学习新东西的人，随着时间的发展几乎都能够在公司中找到他们的角色。可能需要调动他们的职位，让他们接手不同于他们最初工作的事情。你可能雇了一个人来管理工程师团队，但是随着时间的推移，比如当你们达到50人以上的时候，他无法管理那么多人，那你就给他一个新职位。一些真正优秀的人总能在公司里找到他们适合的位置，至少我没有频繁看到这问题。
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，当你和你创业伙伴的关系破裂时应当怎样做？我们以后会有单独一节课来讨论【？】。但是创业者，每个创业合作者，当然也包括你自己，都必须有股权兑现的权利。在这最重要的一点上创业者总是搞砸对于联合创始人股权兑现权利，谈合作伙伴的股权兑现，基本上就是在提前协商，如果其中一人离开团队，这种情况该如何处理。因此，硅谷里一般这种情况都要花上四年时间，假如你们五五平分股权，就需要花四年的时间来把它们全部赚回。并且从（持股？？）满一年才开始计算。所以如果你一年后就离开，你持有股份的25%如果你两年后离开，则是50%，以此类推。
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 hard to do. 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.
如果你没有如此操作，并且你们完全吵翻了，其中一个创始人早早就走了，并且带走了半个公司，在你的股权分配方面就有了重负，会导致很难有投资人会投你，或者采取其他行动。所以最重要的防以上情况发生的建议就是，建立股权退出机制。现在我们极不倾向于投资一家没有创始人股权变现机制的企业因为这很难操作。在每一家公司都一定程度存在着着另一个问题关于和创业伙伴间关系。一定要早点讨论（创业伙伴间的关系），不能一直拖着、置之不理直至恶化。
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.
如果在雇佣一名【不那么得力的(语义上我不太明白这里为什么是sub-optimal)】员工和让客户流失至竞争对手两项中选择，你会选择哪一个？如果这名员工是公司的早期五名员工之一，我将选择失去顾客的员工。这样做对公司造成的伤害会小一点，流逝一点客户总比公司倒闭要好得多。之后，也许我的观点稍有不同，但真的不是所有情况全都适用。
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 most dirty 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.
这个话题我一会也将说到。问题是：你怎么看创始团队不在同一个地点办公？答案是，不要这样。总的来说我对距离办公持怀疑态度，但在公司刚创立的时候，当沟通和响应速度比其他任何事情都要重要的时候，电话会议的确并不是很有效。我们遍寻世界上最成功的软件公司，并且试图找出能够证明创始团队在不同地点办公的例子，很难找的出来。
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.
好的，我们接着来聊一下执行。对于大部分的创始团队来说，执行这个部分并不是创业最有趣的部分，但这是最重要的部分。许多创始团队认为他们只要发布了NB的创业点子（可以这么翻嘛 当然可以），之后就可以上杂志封面出任CEO担任董事长迎娶白富美走向人生的巅峰。但是它比任何其他事情都重要，它是一个创业者的个人价值所在，你必须坚定的花费数年时间在执行这一环节中，你也不能把它外包。
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.
要想把公司管理得好，你也要管理好你自己。初创企业的一切规矩都是创始人定的。创始人的行事作风将形成公司的文化。所以如果你希望公司文化是拼命工作，那么你就需要死抠细节，维护顾客关系，当然最基本的是，你自己也得拼命工作，没有其他办法。你不能雇一个COO做这件事，而你自己出去开会。你要像一台疯狂工作的机器，让给大家都看到。正如我在第一章所说，有NB点子的人是愿意努力把点子变成现实的人的一百倍。点子本身一文不值，只有执行得好才能加分并且创造价值。
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.
执行中很大的部分是努力与勤奋，但同时你也可以通过学习一些方法来让自己善于执行。我们会有三堂专门的课来讲这部分。
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.
大家一直都在问我CEO这份工作的含义。近些日子我想到了差不多5个点。前四个每个人都会认为这是CEO的职责：设立目标、筹集经费、对你想雇的人、工作人员、合作伙伴、媒体、几乎所有人忽悠公司愿景、招人和管理团队。但是第五点是一个执行层面的门槛，这不是大部分创业者非常激动的想做或者希望自己去做的，但我认为这实际上是CEO最重要的职责之一，团队中没有其他人可以替代、只有CEO才能做。
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.
执行分为两个主要问题，第一，你是否能意识到该去做什么，第二，你是否能把它做到。我想聊一下如果想把它做到有两个点，假设你已经想到该去做什么了。这两个点就是专注和拼命。专注非常重要。我最喜欢问创业者们的一个问题就是他们将把时间和钱花在什么地方。这里差不多能看出这个创业者认为哪些东西重要。
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.
做一个创业者最难的部分就是每天有成百上千的事情都很重要分散你的注意力。你必须认清哪两三件事是真正需要注意的，去做这些，然后把其他的忽略、删除或者推迟。有很多这样那样的事创业者认为它们很重要，在不同的律所去面试很多人，开会，招顾问，其实这些都不重要。真正重要的事情随阶段推移也会有变化，但只有一条非常有价值的建议，你需要认清哪一两件事是最重要的，然后只做这一两件。
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.
你每天只能计划2-3件事，因为你得去处理其他突然发生的事情。每天都有紧急事项，如果你不善于安排你计划的2-3件事，你的计划就总是完不成。这对于创业者来说非常难。创业者只对从头开始做新的事情感到兴奋。
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，拥有良好的执行力的秘诀在于无数次说“不”。100次中你将会有97次说“不”，大部分的创业者发现它们不得不刻意非常努力的去说“不”。大部分初创企业都不够专注。他们真的工作非常努力，可能吧，但是他们不是在正确的事情上工作努力，所以他们仍会失败。创立一个初创企业好也不好的事情在于，你并不会仅因为尝试而得到认可。只有当你做了市场认可的东西的时候你才能得分。所以如果你在错误的事情上努力，没人会在意。
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.
所以接下来的问题就是，你怎么去认清你每天该关注的是哪些问题。每一天都应该有目标。我认识的大部分好的创始人都有一些关于公司的小的首要目标，公司里的其他人也都知道。就像某个日期之前把这个产品原型做出来，增长百分之多少多少，获得多少参与度，招到这几个重要岗位的人，这只是其中的一些但是公司里的所有人每周都能告诉你我们的重要目标是什么。然后所有人都会在这基础上去做事情。
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.
创始人特别需要确定关注点。不管创始人关心什么，关注什么，这件事都将成为整个公司奋斗的目标。最好的创始人会反复重复这些目标，重复次数比他们认为他们需要的还要多。他们把这些挂在墙上，他们一遍一遍跟每个人提到，每周周会上去说。这让使得整个公司专注。专注的一个重要要素在于，这也是为什么我说联合创始人如果不是好朋友就会有很大问题，因为没有好的沟通你们就无法专注。即便是公司只有四五个人，一点点的沟通不畅都足以让团队目标去做的事情上有轻微差异。之后你们就丧失了专注力，公司就是一盘散沙。
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.
我一会会接着讨论这件事，但是增长速度和势头是你不能不关注的东西。增长速度和势头是初创企业依仗的根本，你必须专注于把握它们。你总是应该知道你和你的指标相比完成的怎样，你每周都应该有个回顾周会，如果你每次都说下面这些话的时候你应当极度自省，我们目前没有专注于增长速度，我们现在增长得不太好但是我们正在做另一件事，我们并没有出原型的时间表因为我们专注于做另一件事情，我们在做品牌重塑，不管是什么，基本都是灾难。
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.
所以你要有正确的指标，然后你要专注于不断提升这些指标，保持势头。不要让团队被其他事情分散注意力或者心情。一个常见的错误是团队被自己的PR曝光所迷惑，觉得很兴奋。其实没有成果也很容易获得曝光，感觉自己非常NB，但是一年后你还是什么都没有，而且在那时你也不会再觉得自己NB，这时候你只能提起一年前的那篇文章。你得悉那些斯坦福的学生创立了个初创公司，那家公司未来会成为下一个大公司，而你什么都没有，这感觉很糟。
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.
正如我已经提到的，尽量一起办公。我认为这点非常非常重要。彼此远距离的创业团队做事情真的非常非常难，距离对更新速度的不良影响比所有人想象的都要大。
The other piece for focus besides 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.
对于执行力来说，除了专注以外，另一个重要要素就是拼命。创业团队一直在一个非常紧张的环境下工作。我的一个朋友说，创业团队成功的秘诀就在于极致专注与极致献身。你可以有个创业公司和其他事情，譬如说你可以有个家庭，但是你不可能同时又很多事情在做。创业并不是工作生活平衡的最好选择，这多多少少是个悲催的现实。做一家创业公司有很多很棒的感受，但享受生活可能并不是其中之一。初创团队在创业过程中会拼尽全力，所付出的其实很难描述。你至少希望要比竞争对手做得更好。
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.
好消息是只要在正确的事情上付出额外的辛苦，这将会带来巨大的改变。一个例子是我们设想一下一个面向大众的网页产品的病毒传播效率。每个老用户能带多少新用户进来？如果是0.99，那么这个公司的增长曲线将会逐渐变缓最终死掉。如果是1.01你将会受益于这个非常棒的指数永远增长。
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.
所以这是具体的小努力就会带来成功与失败之差的例子。当我们和成功的创始人聊天时，他们经常讲起类似的故事。就只是比他们的竞争对手做得好了一点点，最终这一点点使他们成功。
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.
所以你们真的应该拼命。这种感觉只有CEO只有创始人们的精神中才能迸发。初创企业在执行力方面最大的优势就是速度，而你必须让它成为一个不可放缓的激昂进行曲。Facebook有一张著名的海报上面说“跑快点，把东西都打破”。但同时他们对品质也要求的非常严格。所以这才是它的困难之处。行动得快很容易，关注品质也很容易，但难的是初创企业要兼顾这两个。你的团队需要有非常高标准完成每个人做的每件事的文化，但你们仍需要迅速行动。
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.
Apple，Google，Facebook在这件事上做得非常好。不光是产品，他们做的每一件事情都是如此。他们行动迅速打破常规，他们在一些正确的地方非常节省成本，但是他们无时无刻不关注质量。如果你不想让你的程序员们写出很渣的代码，你也不应该给他们买很渣的电脑。你应该设立全公司通用的质量标准，你也要非常坚定的支持这个标准。不坚定是创业公司最大的毒瘤。平庸的创业者花费大量时间讨论大的计划，但是他们从来不下决定。他们说你知道我能做这件事，或者我能做那件事，然后他们前后摇摆、一事无成。所以你真正需要的是去行动的决定。
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.
最好的创业者会去做看上去小的事情，但是他们行动非常迅速。他们非常快就能完成这些事情。每次你跟最好的创业者聊天，他们已经把新的事情做完。事实上在YC的创业者中有一条制胜的铁律，如果每次我们提到一个团队他们已经把新的东西都做出来了，这是我们最好的预测指标，这个团队将会非常成功。有一个办法是将很庞大的工作拆解开来做。如果你持续不断的分解小部分的工作去完成，积累一年你回头看的时候，你已经做了非常了不起的事情。另一方面，如果你一年什么都没有做你期待一次性带来了不起的成果，这样的事情几乎从来没发生过。
So you have to pick these right size projects. Even if you're building this crazy biosynthetic 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.
所以你应该去选择适量的工作去做。即便是你创立了一家奇葩的生物合成的公司，你说，我需要离开一年时间，尽管没办法把它拆开一点点来做，你通常还是能找到办法从一个小项目开始做的。
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.
速度是最大的奖励，最好的创业者通常回email回得最快，下决定下得最快，他们几乎在所有事情上都很迅速。即便是需要思考和态度的事情他们也会这样去做。（凡是涉及到态度的问题，他们都会这么做。）
They also show up a lot.
他们总是在很多场合出现。
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.
他们去开会，他们去公司，他们单独会见我们。对我最受用的一句话是：只要有机会，他们就坐着飞机去。我在这里讲个小故事。
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.
我在创立我自己的公司的时候，我们发现我们将要失去一个订单。这差不多是我们最大的客户的一个重要订单。它将签给比我们早一年创立的一家竞争对手。并且他们这个交易已经锁定。我们打电话过去说“我们有更好的产品，你们应该见见我们”，他们说“抱歉，我们明天就签合同了”。我们开车去机场，登上飞机，第二天早上到了他们办公室，我们坐在那儿，他们让我们走开，我们还是坐在那。最后一个级别很低的人决定要见见我们，之后一个级别高一些的人决定要见一下我们。最终他们撕毁掉了和另一家公司的协议，我们在一周后和他们签了合同。我非常确定的是，如果我们没登上那架飞机，没有亲自去挽回，这个合同就签不成。
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.
所以你只是出现并且做做这类事情，当人们说只要有机会，他们就坐着飞机去的时候，他们是真的这样做得，不只是说说。我的确认为这样很好，所以当成建议。
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.
所以我之前提到了要把握势头和增长速度。再强调一下：试剂盒增长速度是初创企业的生命之源。这几乎位列如何运行良好的三个秘诀之中。你希望一个公司一直在赢，如果你一旦把脚从油门上拿下来，很多事情就无法控制，正如雪崩一样。一个好的团队感觉良好，就会一直赢。如果一个团队一段时间都没有成果感觉没有动力，那么他们就会一直输。所以一定要保持势头，这是管理初创企业最重要的方针。如果我只能告诉创业者如何管理团队的一件事情，我将告诉他们这件。
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.
对于大部分软件创业团队来说，这意味着持续增长。对于硬件团队它意味着：不要跳票。这就是我们在YC告诉大家的，他们通常都会听，所有事情做得都很好。在YC孵化结束的时候，他们被其他事情分心，然后增长变缓停滞。然后在这之后，团队成员越来越不开心，他们离开团队于是团队就散了。其实很难确切指出增长的驱动力是什么，因为大部分公司会通过新的方式获得增长，但是有一件事情：如果你做了一个好的产品，那么它会增长。所以一开始一定要做一个正确的产品，这是后续不会失去势头的最好方法。
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.
如果你失去了增长势头，大部分的创业者会希望用错误的方式挽回。他们发表长篇大论讲述公司愿景，希望利用演讲重振士气。但是如果当团队的员工们势头都已经松懈了的时候，他们不想听这个。你应该把愿景演讲留在公司成功的时候。当你没有成功，你需要用小的成功来把势头赢回来。我的董事会成员之一过去常说销量是维护初创公司的一切。我认为这句话很对。所以你要找到你能获取小的成功的地方，并且做到它。然后你会惊奇的发现初创公司的其他许多问题都消失了。
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.
当你的势头减弱时你应该注意的另一件事是，团队其他成员开始反对你的指示。当团队势头减弱的事后，冲突就会出现。对此我认为有效的框架是当团队的争议集中在要做什么的时候，在用户那里寻求答案，做用户希望你们做的事情。你需要提醒成员们：“注意，很多事情不奏效并不是因为我们真的彼此讨厌，我们只要回到正轨一切就都会正常运转起来”只要你把它说出来，只要你意识到这点，你将会发现事情进展的顺利多了。
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.
再次举Facebook的例子，当2008年Facebook增长放缓的时候，马克设立了一个“增长小组”。他们着手做了许多小事，让Facebook增长更快。他们做的所有事情看上去都很小，但是他们让Facebook的增长曲线回升。它迅速成为公司最受尊敬的工作组之一。马克曾说过这是Facebook最好的创新之一。根据我的一位那时在Facebook的好友所说，它真的让公司充满动力。从这件事情上也可以看出，当所有人都感觉不再良好，当势头已经减弱的时候，是胜利让势头重回高点。
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.
所以保持势头的一个好的方法是在公司早期的时候树立一个运行的节奏。在那个时间点出原型，在哪个时间点在原有基础上上架新品，在哪个时间点你和全公司一起回顾进展。这实际上是董事会能为你做的最好的事情。董事会其实很少能为团队的战略提供价值，但是你可以将他们视为一个督促的职能，让公司关注节奏和每个重要时点。
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.
有一件经常影响势头，但真的不应该受影响的事情就是竞争对手。竞争对手会在媒体发出一些噪音，会比其他外在的因素更打击一些公司的势头。
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.
所以有个很好地大拇指定律：不要担心竞争对手，除非他们真的拿一款已经成为现实、出了原型的产品打败了你。发布媒体消息比写代码简单多了，写代码比做出一款NB的产品简单多了。所以提醒你的团队，这也是创始人的职责，不要因为竞争对手的报道而让团队变得消沉。
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Henry Ford说过的一句话：“竞争对手最害怕的是从不受他们影响的人，这些人不但不受影响还不断把自己的那摊事儿做得更好”
These are almost never the companies that put out a lot of press releases. And they bum people out.
这些公司不是那些总是发布新闻媒体宣传的公司。人们就会远离那些公司。（这些公司几乎不受那些公司发布的消息的压力影响，而且，他们会自动的隔离那些消息。）