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

2015-01-09

原文地址：Lecture 2 – Ideas, Products, Teams and Execution Part II

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.

Q: How do I identify if a market has a fast growth rate now and also for the next ten years?

如何识别潜在市场？

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.

感知潜在的市场趋势，是 student 的优势；相信自己的本能判断（本能判断之后，也要进行一些识别和分析）。younger\student通过观察他们同龄人在做什么、用什么、什么趋势，然后，通过本能就有判断，整体上比older的判断更为准确。

Okay, one more question on the last lecture before we start.

Q: How do you deal with burnout while still being productive and remaining productive.

发展势头良好的情况下，倦怠了怎么应对？有哪些要注意的？

A: The answer to this is just that it sucks and you keep going. Unlike a student where you can throw up your hands and say you know I’m really burnt out and I’m just going to get bad grades this quarter, one of the hard parts about running a startup is that it’s real life and you just have to get through it. The canonical advice is to go on a vacation and that never works for founders. It’s sort of all consuming in this way that is very difficult to understand.

这是现实生活，你必须继续下去，但要缓解这种情况，你可以去度个假。（后半句什么含义？没明白）

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.

要做的事，就一件：保持前进。最最重要的一点：你依赖人、信任人，需要一个核心团队，缓冲其中的变故。面对倦怠的情绪，需要进行两个方面：通过定位、细化，去明确问题的位置；通过推演，预估正在变坏的方面，以及潜在的最坏情况。这样你就能好受一些。

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.（最后一句，什么意思？）

上次关于 idea 和 product 的内容，是基础，一定要先看。此次，着重两点：

Cofounder

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.

筛选 cofounder 是startup存活期间，最重要的事情之一，一定要认真对待，这个比招聘团队成员要重要，因为 cofounder 的话语权很重，而且会影响团队。

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.

student在这方面是弱项，几个特点：

上面，都奠定了未来灾难的基础。

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.

在 YC 75家 company 中有9家公司，在招聘过程中，找到的cofounder，很不幸，半年就分道扬镳了，因为 cofounder 之间相互不了解。

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.

寻找 cofounder 的一个好办法是在高校中找（估计美国是这样，中国现阶段，还值得思考）。如果你没有身处高校内，也很难找到cofounder；另一个最佳意见是：去一家你感兴趣的公司工作。两点：

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.

So as you’re thinking about cofounders and people that could be good, there’s a question of what you’re looking for right? At YC we have this public phrase, and it’s relentlessly resourceful, and everyone’s heard of it. And you definitely need relentlessly resourceful cofounders, but there’s a more colorful example that we share at the YC kickoff. Paul Graham started using this and I’ve kept it going.

你在寻找什么样的 cofounder？足智多谋的、理智无情的（是这样理解吗？）

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.

寻找的 cofounder 目标：

我们将这些告诉 YC 内的团队，坚信这些将会帮到他们的。（上述有个表述，没理解）

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.

这个典型代表就是 James Bond。切记，像 James Bond 一样做事情的人，胜过某个领域的专家。

As I mentioned earlier, you really want to know your cofounders for awhile, ideally years. This is especially true for early hires as well, but incidentally, more people get this right for early hires than they do for cofounders. So, take advantage of school. In addition to relentlessly resourceful, you want a tough and a calm cofounder. There are obvious things like smart, but everyone knows you want a smart cofounder, they don’t prioritize things like tough and calm enough, especially if you feel like you yourself aren’t, you need a cofounder who is. If you aren’t technical, and even if most of the people in this room feel like they are, you want a technical cofounder. There’s this weird thing going on in startups right now where it’s become popular to say, You know what, we don’t need a technical cofounders, we’re gonna hire people, we’re just gonna be great managers.

最好与 cofounder 相互能够熟知，理想状态是：相互接触了几年。招聘早期员工，也应这样要求。对于 cofounder 的期望，大家都知道 smart，很可能忽略 tough 和 calm，特别是自己在这方面有欠缺时。如果你不是技术出身，你需要一个 technical cofounder。当前，有种奇怪的现象：不找 technical cofounder，反倒坚信管理招聘的技术人员就可以把事情做成。

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.

做什么事，就需要什么人；软件公司，就应该注重软件技术；媒体公司，就应该找媒体相关人员。通常，2~3个合伙人是最佳的，4个勉强能维持，5个就极其糟糕。

How to hire

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.

求职者，通常会问，现在公司有多少人，人数多，他们会印象深刻；人数少，他们会认为不太靠谱。而实际情况是，你应该为员工少而高兴，因为，员工多，意味着花费高、决策效率低下。（具体情况具体看待，比如公司很大，但不同的项目、团队之间差异很大，有的团队人数就很少，例如当前的小米）

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.

值得自豪的地方是：极少的人，做了很多的事情 （而不是，极少的人）。 仅在必须的时候再去招人，YC 中有的团队早起甚至只是一个人。几点：

早期的时候，招人有一个重要问题：招聘的人如果不靠谱，公司将损失巨大。接触到的一些项目，因为招聘的前 3 个员工时，不谨慎，最终导致项目失败。

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 招第一个员工时，花费 5 个月时间来面试；第一年，总共招了 2 个人。在招人时，他们会写下一串他们期望的基本价值观，这些是铁律，不符合绝不录用。例如，Airbnb CEO，经常问应聘者：如果你的声明还剩一年，你是否会继续工作？ （想了一下，如果条件允许，我会适度工作，不想给家人、朋友带来太多负担）

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.

按上述情况，严格招聘员工确实很重要，因为员工将最终定义公司，需要确定这些员工与你的理念一致。这些理念，有助于当公司出现危机时，大家能够一条心坚持度过难关。一个有趣的现象是：一个公司的前 40 名员工，会感觉是他们参与创建了这家公司。

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.

谨慎的进行招聘，来确保每个员工都有相似的使命感，通常这将会使得招聘周期变得很长。（最后一句什么含义？不明白）

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.

创始人，通常会低估招聘的难度。期间，founder需要让candidate确认公司的使命是值得投入时间的，这反方面说明了深思熟虑定位一个有用的产品的重要性。因为最优秀的人，知道他们应该搭上火箭一起前进。

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.

我的第一个建议：去快速发展的公司，去一家已经在运行、并且前景开阔（市场规模、开展市场机遇）、发展迅速的公司，但并不是所有人都知道，你知道只是因为你关注了。优秀的人知道这个，他们也愿意观察这家公司是否已经步入快车道，然后加入进去。

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.

在招聘上花费多长时间？ 0~25%的时间，这个时间上线已经很高了。

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.

如果招来的职工，资质平平，保证你会很后悔（原因是：这个人会破坏团队文化、价值观）。这都是血泪的教训，在大公司，一个平庸的人，不会导致公司倒闭；但一家小公司，如果前5个团队成员，有一个平庸的，将导致队伍覆灭。（卧槽，好吓人）

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.

注：mediocre engineers do not build great companies. 在前 5~ 10 个员工中，一定不要出现平庸者，招人时，你可以问自己：愿意把公司的未来寄托在这个人身上吗？但大公司情况不同，可以放宽招聘条件。（今后会说这个问题）

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.

从哪些人中找员工？最佳的来源是：你和公司内其他员工都了解的人。great company通常前100名员工都是通过熟人推荐而来的。大部分 founder 会从他们已经知道的优秀的人中，去发掘员工。（最后一句，什么含义？）

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.

靠员工推荐方式来招人，很有效；另一个办法是：去热门地区之外招人，因为当地招人太激烈了，如果你知道其他地方有优秀的人，请出发吧。

Another question that founders ask us a lot about his experience and how much that matters. The short version here is that experience matters for some roles and not for others. When you’re hiring someone that is going to run a large part of your organization experience probably matters a lot. For most of the early hires that you make at a startup, experience probably doesn’t matter that much and you should go for aptitude and belief in what you’re doing. Most of the best hires that I’ve made in my entire life have never done that thing before. So it’s really worth thinking, is this a role where I care about experience or not. And you’ll often find to don’t, especially in the early days.

另一个问题是：candidate 的经验和报酬（？）。通用说法是：某些情况下，经验很重要，而其他情况下，经验无关紧要。几个例子：

There are three things I look for in a hire. Are they smart? Do they get things done? Do I want to spend a lot of time around them? And if I get an answer, if I can say yes to all three of these, I never regret it, it’s almost always worked out. You can learn a lot about all three of these things in an interview but the very best way is working together, so ideally someone you’ve worked together with in the past and in that case you probably don’t even need an interview. If you haven’t, then I think it’s way better to work with someone on a project for a day or two before hiring them. You’ll both learn a lot they will too and most first-time founders are very bad interviewers but very good at evaluating someone after they’ve worked together.

我在招聘中看重 3 点：

通常你对一起工作过的同事，在这方面的理解还是有的，因此，大都不需要面试，就能直接入职；但如果之前没有接触过，那最好花几天时间，一起工作，然后再决定是否要拉他入伙。

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.

招人时，我们的建议是：尽量尝试在一起工作，而不仅仅是面试。面试过程中，尽量问一些，他们在实际项目中遇到的问题，这比脑筋急转弯要好得多。不知什么原因，年轻的合伙人，倾向于问脑筋急转弯，而不是过往的工作细节。首次面试的founder，经常会忘记询问candidate过去的工作细节。你在面试的过程中，不仅要发问，而且要对问题挖得深一点。最后，回顾几点：

Another thing that I have noticed from talking to YC companies is that good communication skills tend to correlate with hires that work out. I used to not pay attention to this. We’re going to talk more about why communication is so important in an early startup. If someone is difficult to talk to, if someone cannot communicate clearly, it’s a real problem in terms of their likelihood to work out. Also. for early employees you want someone that has somewhat of a risk-taking attitude. You generally get this, otherwise they wouldn’t be interested in a startup, but now that startups are sort of more in fashion, you want people that actually sort of like a little bit of risk. If someone is choosing between joining McKinsey or your startup it’s very unlikely they’re going to work out at the startup.

我发现一件事情，良好的沟通技巧/方式，增加了录用的机会，而之前我对此并不在意。在早期startup中，沟通很重要：如果一个人无法清晰的沟通、很难交谈，则，他很难锻炼成长。冒险精神，startup需要这个，员工应该有这个。（最后什么含义？麦肯锡是冒险意识太强，还是太弱？）

思考：沟通技巧/方式，有哪些呢？尊重、互惠、分享荣誉、借用别人的话？

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.

既要有冒险者，也要有承担风险者。（完全不懂，什么意思？）

There is a famous test from Paul Graham called the animal test. The idea here is that you should be able to describe any employee as an animal at what they do. I don’t think that translates out of English very well but you need unstoppable people. You want people that are just going to get it done. Founders who usually end up being very happy with their early hires usually end up describing these people as the very best in the world at what they do.

著名测试：Animal test，将工作的队员看作 animal（是这样理解吗？）。需要一往无前的队友，坚韧的队友，他们通常确保将事情做成。

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.

Zuckerberg 说他招人，两个要点：

你不必与每一个人都成为朋友，但至少，你应该与每个人都能愉快的工作，即使不能这样，你也至少尊重他们 （尊重他们的工作方式，和工作成果）。 另一方面，如果你不能与他们长时间待在一起，你至少需要相信你的直觉是正确的。 （理解对吗？感觉有偏差）

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.

员工报酬上，初略估算，目标是：给前 10 名队友 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.

如果幸运，他们至少要等 4 年才能拿到这些酬劳，而他们的贡献远超这些，他们为公司增加的市值也远超这些。

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.

不知道什么原因，创始人给投资人股份时，很大方；而给员工股份时，很小气，我认为他们本末倒置了。员工真正创造并定义的公司，投资人的帮助很有限，他们大都是定期的查看公司的运行情况，尽管他们承诺了很多。

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.

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.

还有一个方面：现金报酬方面；创始人通常会有疏忽，针对这个今后会专门说明，但是我强调一点：让你的员工感到高兴，并且让他们感到有价值的。

But more than that, learning just a little bit of management skills, which first-time CEOs are usually terrible at, goes a long way. One of the speakers at YC this summer, who is now extremely successful, struggled early on and had his team turn over a few times. Someone asked him what his biggest struggle was and he said, turns out you shouldn’t tell your employees they’re fucking up every day unless you want them all to leave because they will.

学习一点管理技巧，帮助公司走的更远，经验不足的 CEO 这一点经常忽略。一条重要经验：不要告诉员工，他们每天的工作多糟糕，这样他们都会离去。（因为startup追求把事情做好，而大多数员工没能做好？）

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.

这可能是自然的本能：你希望把事情做好，当队友没有把事情好时，你很容以喷他们。还有一个问题，founder 没能很巧当的称赞他们的队伍；在这方面，我也花了一点时间学习，才掌握的。很重要的：让你的队伍获得办事周到的荣誉和奖励，你来承担那些做砸了得事情。（是这样？）

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.

细微的地方，不要干预，在员工力所能及的范围给出足够的信任、持续的支持，让他们放手去做，这些不是founder考虑的范围（不要说不是自己的职责，而应说信任、重托）。对于第一次当 founder 的人，最好的建议是：请意识到，你们是一个 bad manager，并努力克服这点。激发人们开展高效率工作，有 3 点：

我也花了一些时间，养成了事情一件一件处理，每件都有明确答复/结果的习惯。

All of these things are things first time CEO don’t normally do, and maybe I can save you from not doing that.

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.

最后，如何 fire 一个队员？无论什么原因 fire 队员绝对是很糟糕的一件事。founder 为了队员回心转意，等待太久。而正确的做法是，如果不合适，尽快 fire；这对 company 和 employee 都好 （如何安抚现有的其他队员情绪波动？）。 这个过程很痛苦、很糟糕，很多人第一次都会做得不恰当。（不恰当在什么地方？怎么才能恰当？能来点例子吗？）

In addition to firing people who are doing bad at their job, you also wanna fire people who are a) creating office politics, and b) who are persistently negative. The rest of the company is always aware of employees doing things like this, and it’s just this huge drag - it’s completely toxic to the company. Again, this is an example of something that might work OK in a big company, although I’m still skeptical, but will kill a startup. So that you need to watch out for people that are ifs.

几类：

其他队员，通常都会注意到这些人的行为，这将持续毒害团队文化。上述情况，在 big company 可能还能维持，但会导致 startup 覆灭。

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.

关键问题是：如何 fire fast 的同时，让 early employees 感到安全？每个人都有懈怠的时候，一次、两次或者更多，这些都不是问题，团队要一起向前走，这些都是可以预料到的。

If someone is getting every decision wrong, that’s when you need to act, and at that point it’ll be painfully aware to everyone. It’s not a case of a few screw-ups, it’s a case where every time someone does something, you would have done the opposite yourself. You don’t get to make their decisions but you do get to choose the decision-makers. And, if someone’s doing everything wrong, just like a consistent thing over like a period of many weeks or a month, you’ll be aware of it.

如果某队员，每次都采取相反的行为、观点，特别是，需要真正做事情的时候，这将导致所有人都很痛苦。这不只出现一两次，而是，基本上每次你都需要做与他相反的事情（团队的凝聚力，受到很大影响，损耗了战斗力）。你不需要帮队员做出正确的决定，你只需要找出那些做正确决定的人，并成为队友即可。如果有人，持续不断的拖延事情的进度，数周或者一个月，你会感觉到的。

This is one of those cases where in theory, it sounds complicated to be sure what you’re talking about, and in practice there’s almost never any doubt. It’s the difference between someone making one or two mistakes and just constantly screwing everything up, or causing problems, or making everyone unhappy, is painfully obvious the first time you see it.

注意区分偶尔犯错误一两次与持续错误的情况。

When should co-founders decide on the equity split?

什么时候，进行 equity split？（股权划分）

For some reason, I’ve never really been sure why this is, a lot of founders, a lot of co-founders like to leave this off for a very long time. You know, they’ll even sign the incorporation documents in some crazy way so that they can wait to have this discussion.

出于种种原因，founder\co-founder 冲动之下签订合作协议，而不讨论 equity spilt 的问题，留作今后再讨论。

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.

往后推延 equity split 的讨论，并不会是问题简化，应该开始协作之前，尽快讨论并敲定好，在前几周，最好就能敲定。一个基本原则，给出合理的份额，这样才能一起走得更远。

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.

优秀的人，随着公司成长，能够适应并热爱岗位的变化。

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.

另一件事：如果 cofounder 关系破裂怎么办？今后将专门对此介绍，在这儿简要说几点：

If you don’t do that and if you have a huge fallout and one founder leaves early on with half the company, you have this deadweight on your equity table, and it’s very hard to get investors to fund you or to do anything else. So number one piece of advice to prevent that is to have vesting on the equity. We pretty much won’t fund a company now where the founders don’t have vested equity because it’s just that bad. The other thing that comes up in the relationship between the cofounders, which happens to some degree in every company, is talk about it early, don’t let it sit there and fester.

记得将 vest 考虑到 equity 中，这样才能规避风险。尽早讨论这个问题，越早也好，避免问题变糟糕。

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.

在招募次优的队员和损失客户，两个方面选择时，你选哪个？（次优队员，会降低招募难度，短期内反倒增加客户；同时，能力、价值观问题，导致事情不是最优，长远会损失客户；是这样理解吗？）通常说法，前 5 个早期队员的招聘过程中，可以不惜短期损失客户，一定要招最优的队员，因为，不能为了增加客户，导致增加公司覆灭的风险。此后，具体情况，具体对待。

疑问：队员/员工这样的态度和表述，哪一种相对合适一些？

I am going to get to that later. The question is: what about cofounders that aren’t working in the same location? The answer is, don’t do it. I am skeptical of remote teams in general but in the early days of a startup, when communication and speed outweigh everything else, for some reason video conferencing calls just don’t work that well. The data on this is look at say the 30 successful software companies of all time and try to point to a single example where the cofounders were in different locations. It’s really really tough.

一个问题：cofounder 不在同一地点，怎么办？我的建议是：那就不要一起做。我个人对远程协助办公，持怀疑态度，但在 early days of startup，沟通和推进速度是第一位的，视频会议的效果并不好。

Execution

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.

执行，不是最有趣的（相比于 idea、product），但却是最重要的。成为cofounder就意味着，要持续数年的投入和执行。

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.

company中事务执行怎么样，要看founder自己的执行情况，其他员工都会受founder的影响，founder就是典范，绝大多数人都会效仿他，并形成文化。因此，如果你希望文化是：努力工作、注重细节、贴近客户（不要与客户失连）、节俭朴素，那你就这样带好头（不必告诉所有人都要想你一样，但要恰当时机表达出你的心情，例如，舍不得浪费打印纸的另一面，工作没做完内心无法平息。）。除此之外，没有其他途径。有 great ideas 的人中，只有 1% 的人会付诸行动，idea 并不产生价值，只有认真的去执行才会产生影响。

A big part of execution is just putting in the effort, but there is a lot you can learn about how to be good at it. And so we’re going to have three classes that just talk about this.

执行的一个要点是努力地去做；但可以通过学习，掌握如何更好地去做。（我们将花费3节课，来说明这个问题。）

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.

CEO 的职责有很多，早期的时候，主要有 5 个：

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，可以细分为两个问题：

通过观察、询问：如何安排自己的时间和钱？能够得知一个人看重哪些事情。（对看重的事情的一个排序；疑问：通常有哪些事情？大部分人的排序是怎么样的？）

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.

founder最难的事情是：从近百个待做的事情中，选出 2-3个关键的，然后当天完成，其余的事情，忽略、授权、推迟处理。很多founder认为重要的事情，实际上，并不重要：了解不同的律师事务所、参加会议、招募顾问。而且重要的事情，随着时间的推移，处境的不同，也在发生变化。

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.

每天完成 2-3 件事，每天都有太多的事情去做，你需要善于完成这2-3件事情，以此来保证做事情有始有终（这样理解？）。这点很重要，因为founder通常对发起新的事情很兴奋，而在有始有终上比较疏忽，而这一点缺失很重要的，至少这 2-3 件事情上，是这样。

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.

great execution的关键在于 say no，100次询问中可能要说97次；有不少 startup 很勤奋，但他们没有专注在正确的事情上，注定是徒劳；一个重要的点是：先把确定的市场需求满足了，再去尝试不确定的需求。在错误的事情上，努力付出，没有人会在意你的工作的。

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.

应该专注哪些事情？每天都有 goals，company 应该有一些总体目标，而且每个员工都能知道（清晰、简介、通俗、易懂）。例如：

力争每个人都知道当前的 key goals，只有如此，大家的才会基于这些 goals 来开展工作。

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.

有意或无意，founder 会凝聚注意力。founder 关注的、努力去做的事情，都会被认为是整个公司的 goal。好的 founder 一遍遍的重复公司的 goal （不仅仅是口头的，也可能是身体力行的，墙上的海报）， 这可能比预想的频率还要高，这加强了整个公司的关注度（此处强调的是goal，如果具体的操作方案有争议怎么办？）。这个也很能说明一个相互熟知的cofounder很重要，因为，你需要天气与cofounder关于focus形成一直（基于信任或者基于理解，基于服从呢？），如果在其他队员面前，多次暴漏几个cofounder之间的分歧，将导致company无法聚焦关注在重要事情上，最终将导致company 覆灭。（很吓人呀）

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.

startup 生存的根本是：增长和势头；这是必须聚焦关注的，要时刻提醒自己，有时，需要拨开数据，看到本质，短暂的数据下降并不会影响太大，反倒应该关注势头。

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.

找到合适的指标，来保证大家聚焦在关键的事情上。一个常见的错误是：company特别关注自己的 PR，实际上，很低成本就可以获得较好的 PR，这通常会迷惑自己，误认为自己很 cool，而实际上，一年之后，你会发现什么进展都没有，新的公司和 PR 将替代你。

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.

intensity

The other piece besides focus for execution is intensity. Startups only work at a fairly intense level. A friend of mine says the secret to start up success is extreme focus and extreme dedication. You can have a startup and one other thing, you can have a family, but you probably can’t have many other things. Startups are not the best choice for work life balance and that’s sort of just the sad reality. There’s a lot of great things about a startup, but this is not one of them. Startups are all-consuming in a way that is generally difficult to explain. You basically need to be willing to outwork your competitors.

focus 的另一个关键点是：intensity。（强度？工作强度？脑袋不断强化信念的强度？完全的投入，是时间）。一个朋友曾说，start up sucess的秘诀是：极尽专注、全身心的投入。startup期间，很难保证工作和生活的平衡，这是不可避免的。

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.

有一点：在正确事情上的，额外的投入，将产生很大的差异。举例：viral coefficient 维里系数，如果日复一日的0.99，将最终变为无穷下，而日复一日的1.01，将获得指数级的增长。

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.

要不 competitor 多做一些工作，做的专注、做的细致。

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.

保持全身心的投入（努力是给自己看的，而不是看起来很努力）。startup的一大优势就是执行速度，需要拥有这种无情的工作节奏。Facebook推崇的理念：move fast、break things，同时，manage to be obwessed with quality。需要一种公司文化：每个人都高标准地完成每一件事情，然后，尽力去提高速度。（质量是第一位的，然后才是速度）

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 做得很极致，不是说他们的 product，而是关于他们做的所有事情（执行，专注细节？）；他们有几点：

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.

best founder 在看起来很小的事情上，快速推进（seem small的事情？）。每次用心观察，总会发现，他们已经又完成了一些事情。这点，是识别best founder的重要指标。如果每次跟一个团队接触，总能发现他们已经完成了一件事，这说明这个team十分难的，因为，他们在很短的时间间隔内完成了大量的工作。只有每次都完成一点，才能实现一年内整体上有个台阶的跨越。

So you have to pick these right size projects. Even if you’re building this crazy synthetic biology company and you say well I have to go away for a year, there’s no way to do this incrementally, you can still usually break it into smaller projects.

每年都安排适当大小的project作为目标，如果项目太大，就拆分为小的，方便渐进式的解决问题。

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.

startup中speed会产生巨大的溢价（相对同类产品来说，速度带来巨大的价值）。best founder通常很快就回复 E-mail，这样会传播他认真及时的工作态度，影响其他队员，也构成溢价。（？）

They also show up a lot.

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.

不放过任何的可能，即使是已经确定要发生，但还没有发生的时候。（这么上赶着，真有必要吗？公司生死存亡了吗？如果真需要这么做，那需要有提前备案和准备的。）

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.

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.

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.

发展和势头，是 startup 的命脉（甚至是良好执行的关键因素之一，怎么理解？）。要保持势头，及时偶尔碰壁，屡屡碰壁也要开次荤。（反思，推演）

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.

发展和势头下降的常见原因是：他们分心去做其他事情了，很大可能导致growth下降，unhappy，quit，everything falls apart。实际上，很难明确认定一个增长引擎，因为很多时候都是新的模式驱动的（即，具体增长的方式无法确定），但有一点，如果你做的是一个 good product（idea好，同时product做的也好），那他自然会增长。

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.

如果势头有变，出现衰落迹象，大部分founder以错误的方式来挽回。例如：发表长篇大论，来描述公司的愿景；尝试把大家聚集起来，并进行公开演讲。然而，此时，身处其中的员工，切身体会到势头的变化，他们此刻并不想听公司的愿景。因此，你应该在公司获取阶段成长时，再去发表愿景的演讲；而当还没有进步时，一心去获取小的增长势头。身边很多同事都坚持这个观点：销售解决一切 （是这样理解吗？）。 因此，找到哪些可以往前推进的地方，向前推进，你会发现所有的问题都会慢慢消失掉。

Another thing that you’ll notice if you have momentum sag, is that everyone starts disagreeing about what to do. Fights come out when a company loses momentum. And so a framework for that that I think works is that when there’s disagreement among the team about what to do, then you ask your users and you do whatever your users tell you. And you have to remind people: “hey, stuff’s not working right now we don’t actually hate each other, we just need to get back on track and everything will work.” If you just call it out, if you just acknowledge that, you’ll find that things get way better.

另一个势头开始下降的现象是：所有人都开始怀疑所做的事情。一旦势头下降，内部就会产生激烈的争论。避免这一问题的一个办法是：当怀疑产生的时候，不要过多争论，而去问你的用户，看看他们的意见（通过什么途径？能从用户哪儿得到明确的意见？）。

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.

上面Facebook的growth group是什么含义？

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.

在公司早期，就找到事情推进的规律，这个有助于保持势头。（后面几句，什么意思？）

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.

竞争对手在媒体上的一些言论，是扰动startup势头的最常见外部原因。

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.

面对竞争对手，有一个好的经验结论：不要担心你的竞争对手，他们只能通过实际的product打击到你；媒体的报道比实际研发product容易得多。提醒你的团队这个现实情况，这是founder的职责，而不是让竞争对手在媒体上的报道影响队员的士气。

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.”

关于竞争对手在媒体上的报道，这件事情，下面这个态度，是实际情况。

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 they bum people out.

原文地址：https://ningg.top/lecture-2-ideas-products-teams-and-execution-part-ii-annotated/
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