 March 2024 2024 年 3 月 (This is a talk I gave to 14 and 15 year olds about what to do now if they might want to start a startup later. Lots of schools think they should tell students something about startups. This is what I think they should tell them.) （这是我给 14 岁和 15 岁的孩子的演讲，如果他们以后想创业，现在该怎么做。许多学校认为他们应该告诉学生一些关于创业公司的事情。这是我认为他们应该告诉他们的。 Most of you probably think that when you're released into the so-called real world you'll eventually have to get some kind of job. That's not true, and today I'm going to talk about a trick you can use to avoid ever having to get a job. 你们中的大多数人可能认为，当你被释放到所谓的现实世界时，你最终将不得不找到某种工作。这不是真的，今天我要谈谈一个技巧，你可以用它来避免找工作。 The trick is to start your own company. So it's not a trick for avoiding work, because if you start your own company you'll work harder than you would if you had an ordinary job. But you will avoid many of the annoying things that come with a job, including a boss telling you what to do. 诀窍是创办自己的公司。所以这不是逃避工作的伎俩，因为如果你创办自己的公司，你会比你有一份普通工作更努力。但是你会避免工作带来的许多烦人的事情，包括老板告诉你该怎么做。 It's more exciting to work on your own project than someone else's. And you can also get a lot richer. In fact, this is the standard way to get really rich. If you look at the lists of the richest people that occasionally get published in the press, nearly all of them did it by starting their own companies. 在自己的项目上工作比在别人的项目上工作更令人兴奋。你也可以变得更富有。事实上，这是真正致富的标准方式。如果你看看偶尔在媒体上发表的最富有的人的名单，几乎所有人都是通过创办自己的公司来做到这一点的。 Starting your own company can mean anything from starting a barber shop to starting Google. I'm here to talk about one extreme end of that continuum. I'm going to tell you how to start Google. 创办自己的公司可能意味着从开一家理发店到创办谷歌的任何事情。我在这里要谈谈这个连续体的一个极端。我将告诉你如何启动谷歌。 The companies at the Google end of the continuum are called startups when they're young. The reason I know about them is that my wife Jessica and I started something called Y Combinator that is basically a startup factory. Since 2005, Y Combinator has funded over 4000 startups. So we know exactly what you need to start a startup, because we've helped people do it for the last 19 years. 处于连续体谷歌末端的公司年轻时被称为初创公司。我之所以知道他们，是因为我和我的妻子杰西卡（Jessica）创办了一家名为Y Combinator的公司，它基本上是一家初创公司。自 2005 年以来，Y Combinator 已资助了 4000 多家初创公司。因此，我们确切地知道启动初创公司需要什么，因为在过去的 19 年里，我们一直在帮助人们做到这一点。 You might have thought I was joking when I said I was going to tell you how to start Google. You might be thinking "How could we start Google?" But that's effectively what the people who did start Google were thinking before they started it. If you'd told Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, that the company they were about to start would one day be worth over a trillion dollars, their heads would have exploded. 当我说我要告诉你如何启动谷歌时，你可能以为我在开玩笑。你可能会想“我们怎么能创办谷歌？但这实际上就是创办谷歌的人在创办谷歌之前的想法。如果你告诉谷歌的创始人拉里·佩奇（Larry Page）和谢尔盖·布林（Sergey Brin），他们即将创办的公司有一天价值超过一万亿美元，他们的脑袋会爆炸。 All you can know when you start working on a startup is that it seems worth pursuing. You can't know whether it will turn into a company worth billions or one that goes out of business. So when I say I'm going to tell you how to start Google, I mean I'm going to tell you how to get to the point where you can start a company that has as much chance of being Google as Google had of being Google. [1] 当你开始在创业公司工作时，你所能知道的是，它似乎值得追求。你不知道它是否会变成一家价值数十亿美元的公司，还是一家倒闭的公司。因此，当我说我要告诉你如何创办谷歌时，我的意思是我要告诉你如何创办一家公司，这家公司很有可能成为谷歌，就像谷歌成为谷歌一样。[1] How do you get from where you are now to the point where you can start a successful startup? You need three things. You need to be good at some kind of technology, you need an idea for what you're going to build, and you need cofounders to start the company with. 你如何从现在的位置到可以开始成功创业的地步？你需要三样东西。你需要擅长某种技术，你需要对你将要建立的东西有一个想法，你需要联合创始人来创办公司。 How do you get good at technology? And how do you choose which technology to get good at? Both of those questions turn out to have the same answer: work on your own projects. Don't try to guess whether gene editing or LLMs or rockets will turn out to be the most valuable technology to know about. No one can predict that. Just work on whatever interests you the most. You'll work much harder on something you're interested in than something you're doing because you think you're supposed to. 你如何擅长技术？您如何选择擅长哪种技术？这两个问题都有相同的答案：做你自己的项目。不要试图猜测基因编辑或LLMs火箭是否会成为最有价值的技术。没有人能预测到这一点。只做你最感兴趣的事情。你会在你感兴趣的事情上比你正在做的事情更努力，因为你认为你应该这样做。 If you're not sure what technology to get good at, get good at programming. That has been the source of the median startup for the last 30 years, and this is probably not going to change in the next 10. 如果您不确定要擅长什么技术，那就擅长编程。在过去的30年里，这一直是中位数创业的来源，而且在未来10年内可能不会改变。 Those of you who are taking computer science classes in school may at this point be thinking, ok, we've got this sorted. We're already being taught all about programming. But sorry, this is not enough. You have to be working on your own projects, not just learning stuff in classes. You can do well in computer science classes without ever really learning to program. In fact you can graduate with a degree in computer science from a top university and still not be any good at programming. That's why tech companies all make you take a coding test before they'll hire you, regardless of where you went to university or how well you did there. They know grades and exam results prove nothing. 那些在学校上计算机科学课的人此时可能会想，好吧，我们已经解决了这个问题。我们已经学习了所有关于编程的知识。但对不起，这还不够。你必须从事自己的项目，而不仅仅是在课堂上学习东西。你可以在计算机科学课上做得很好，而不需要真正学习编程。事实上，你可以从一所顶尖大学毕业，获得计算机科学学位，但仍然不擅长编程。这就是为什么科技公司在雇用你之前都会让你参加编码测试，无论你在哪里上大学，或者你在那里的表现如何。他们知道成绩和考试成绩并不能证明什么。 If you really want to learn to program, you have to work on your own projects. You learn so much faster that way. Imagine you're writing a game and there's something you want to do in it, and you don't know how. You're going to figure out how a lot faster than you'd learn anything in a class. 如果你真的想学习编程，你必须在自己的项目上工作。这样你学得更快。想象一下，你正在写一个游戏，你想在里面做一些事情，但你不知道该怎么做。你会弄清楚比你在课堂上学到任何东西要快得多。 You don't have to learn programming, though. If you're wondering what counts as technology, it includes practically everything you could describe using the words "make" or "build." So welding would count, or making clothes, or making videos. Whatever you're most interested in. The critical distinction is whether you're producing or just consuming. Are you writing computer games, or just playing them? That's the cutoff. 不过，您不必学习编程。如果你想知道什么算作技术，它几乎包括了你可以用“制造”或“建造”这两个词来描述的一切。所以焊接很重要，或者做衣服，或者制作视频。无论你最感兴趣什么。关键的区别在于你是在生产还是只是在消费。你是在写电脑游戏，还是只是在玩？这就是分界线。 Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, spent time when he was a teenager studying calligraphy — the sort of beautiful writing that you see in medieval manuscripts. No one, including him, thought that this would help him in his career. He was just doing it because he was interested in it. But it turned out to help him a lot. The computer that made Apple really big, the Macintosh, came out at just the moment when computers got powerful enough to make letters like the ones in printed books instead of the computery-looking letters you see in 8 bit games. Apple destroyed everyone else at this, and one reason was that Steve was one of the few people in the computer business who really got graphic design. 苹果公司的创始人史蒂夫·乔布斯（Steve Jobs）在十几岁的时候就花时间学习书法——你在中世纪手稿中看到的那种优美的文字。包括他在内的任何人都认为这会对他的职业生涯有所帮助。他这样做只是因为他对此感兴趣。但事实证明这对他有很大帮助。让苹果真正变得强大的计算机，Macintosh，是在计算机变得足够强大，可以发出像印刷书籍中的字母，而不是你在8位游戏中看到的看起来像计算机的字母的那一刻问世的。苹果在这一点上摧毁了其他所有人，其中一个原因是史蒂夫是计算机行业中为数不多的真正从事平面设计的人之一。 Don't feel like your projects have to be serious. They can be as frivolous as you like, so long as you're building things you're excited about. Probably 90% of programmers start out building games. They and their friends like to play games. So they build the kind of things they and their friends want. And that's exactly what you should be doing at 15 if you want to start a startup one day. 不要觉得你的项目必须是认真的。它们可以随心所欲地轻浮，只要你正在构建你感兴趣的东西。大概 90% 的程序员都是从构建游戏开始的。他们和他们的朋友喜欢玩游戏。所以他们建造了他们和他们的朋友想要的东西。而这正是你在15岁时应该做的事情，如果你想有一天开始创业。 You don't have to do just one project. In fact it's good to learn about multiple things. Steve Jobs didn't just learn calligraphy. He also learned about electronics, which was even more valuable. Whatever you're interested in. (Do you notice a theme here?) 您不必只做一个项目。事实上，了解多种事情是件好事。史蒂夫·乔布斯（Steve Jobs）不只是学习书法。他还学习了电子学，这更有价值。无论您对什么感兴趣。（你注意到这里的主题了吗？ So that's the first of the three things you need, to get good at some kind or kinds of technology. You do it the same way you get good at the violin or football: practice. If you start a startup at 22, and you start writing your own programs now, then by the time you start the company you'll have spent at least 7 years practicing writing code, and you can get pretty good at anything after practicing it for 7 years. 所以这是你需要的三件事中的第一件事，要擅长某种或多种技术。你这样做的方式与擅长小提琴或足球的方式相同：练习。如果你在 22 岁时创办了一家初创公司，现在你开始编写自己的程序，那么当你创办公司时，你至少会花 7 年时间练习编写代码，并且在练习 7 年后，你可以在任何事情上都做得相当好。 Let's suppose you're 22 and you've succeeded: You're now really good at some technology. How do you get startup ideas? It might seem like that's the hard part. Even if you are a good programmer, how do you get the idea to start Google? 假设你22岁，你已经成功了：你现在非常擅长一些技术。你如何获得创业的想法？这似乎是最困难的部分。即使你是一个优秀的程序员，你是如何得到创办谷歌的想法的？ Actually it's easy to get startup ideas once you're good at technology. Once you're good at some technology, when you look at the world you see dotted outlines around the things that are missing. You start to be able to see both the things that are missing from the technology itself, and all the broken things that could be fixed using it, and each one of these is a potential startup. 实际上，一旦你擅长技术，就很容易获得创业的想法。一旦你擅长一些技术，当你看世界时，你会看到缺失的东西周围有虚线轮廓。你开始能够看到技术本身所缺少的东西，以及所有可以用它修复的损坏的东西，而这些都是一个潜在的创业公司。 In the town near our house there's a shop with a sign warning that the door is hard to close. The sign has been there for several years. To the people in the shop it must seem like this mysterious natural phenomenon that the door sticks, and all they can do is put up a sign warning customers about it. But any carpenter looking at this situation would think "why don't you just plane off the part that sticks?" 在我们家附近的小镇上，有一家商店，上面挂着一个标志，警告说门很难关上。这个标志已经存在了好几年了。对于店里的人来说，门一定是粘在门上的这种神秘的自然现象，他们所能做的就是挂一个牌子警告顾客。但是任何看到这种情况的木匠都会想：“你为什么不把粘在上面的部分刨掉呢？ Once you're good at programming, all the missing software in the world starts to become as obvious as a sticking door to a carpenter. I'll give you a real world example. Back in the 20th century, American universities used to publish printed directories with all the students' names and contact info. When I tell you what these directories were called, you'll know which startup I'm talking about. They were called facebooks, because they usually had a picture of each student next to their name. 一旦你擅长编程，世界上所有缺失的软件就会开始变得像木匠的一扇门一样明显。我给你举一个真实世界的例子。早在 20 世纪，美国大学就习惯于发布带有所有学生姓名和联系信息的印刷目录。当我告诉你这些目录叫什么时，你就会知道我说的是哪家创业公司。他们被称为Facebooks，因为他们的名字旁边通常有一张每个学生的照片。 So Mark Zuckerberg shows up at Harvard in 2002, and the university still hasn't gotten the facebook online. Each individual house has an online facebook, but there isn't one for the whole university. The university administration has been diligently having meetings about this, and will probably have solved the problem in another decade or so. Most of the students don't consciously notice that anything is wrong. But Mark is a programmer. He looks at this situation and thinks "Well, this is stupid. I could write a program to fix this in one night. Just let people upload their own photos and then combine the data into a new site for the whole university." So he does. And almost literally overnight he has thousands of users. 因此，马克·扎克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg）于2002年出现在哈佛大学，而哈佛大学仍然没有将Facebook上网。每个学院都有一个在线Facebook，但整个大学都没有。大学管理部门一直在努力就此开会，并可能在十年左右的时间里解决这个问题。大多数学生并没有自觉地注意到任何不对劲的地方。但马克是一名程序员。他看着这种情况，心想：“嗯，这太愚蠢了。我可以在一夜之间编写一个程序来解决这个问题。只需让人们上传自己的照片，然后将数据合并到整个大学的新网站中即可。所以他做到了。几乎在一夜之间，他就拥有了成千上万的用户。 Of course Facebook was not a startup yet. It was just a... project. There's that word again. Projects aren't just the best way to learn about technology. They're also the best source of startup ideas. 当然，Facebook还不是一家初创公司。这只是一个...项目。又有那个词。项目不仅仅是学习技术的最佳方式。它们也是创业创意的最佳来源。 Facebook was not unusual in this respect. Apple and Google also began as projects. Apple wasn't meant to be a company. Steve Wozniak just wanted to build his own computer. It only turned into a company when Steve Jobs said "Hey, I wonder if we could sell plans for this computer to other people." That's how Apple started. They weren't even selling computers, just plans for computers. Can you imagine how lame this company seemed? Facebook在这方面并不罕见。苹果和谷歌也是从项目开始的。苹果本来就不是一家公司。史蒂夫·沃兹尼亚克（Steve Wozniak）只想建造自己的计算机。当史蒂夫·乔布斯（Steve Jobs）说：“嘿，我想知道我们是否可以将这台计算机的计划出售给其他人时，它才变成了一家公司。苹果就是这样开始的。他们甚至不卖电脑，只是计划买电脑。你能想象这家公司看起来有多蹩脚吗？ Ditto for Google. Larry and Sergey weren't trying to start a company at first. They were just trying to make search better. Before Google, most search engines didn't try to sort the results they gave you in order of importance. If you searched for "rugby" they just gave you every web page that contained the word "rugby." And the web was so small in 1997 that this actually worked! Kind of. There might only be 20 or 30 pages with the word "rugby," but the web was growing exponentially, which meant this way of doing search was becoming exponentially more broken. Most users just thought, "Wow, I sure have to look through a lot of search results to find what I want." Door sticks. But like Mark, Larry and Sergey were programmers. Like Mark, they looked at this situation and thought "Well, this is stupid. Some pages about rugby matter more than others. Let's figure out which those are and show them first." 谷歌也是如此。拉里和谢尔盖一开始并没有想创办一家公司。他们只是想让搜索变得更好。在谷歌之前，大多数搜索引擎并没有尝试按重要性顺序对他们给你的结果进行排序。如果你搜索“橄榄球”，他们只是给你每个包含“橄榄球”这个词的网页。1997 年的网络是如此之小，以至于这实际上奏效了！有点。可能只有 20 或 30 页带有“橄榄球”一词，但网络呈指数级增长，这意味着这种搜索方式正呈指数级增长。大多数用户只是想，“哇，我肯定必须浏览大量搜索结果才能找到我想要的东西。门棒。但和马克一样，拉里和谢尔盖也是程序员。像马克一样，他们看着这种情况，心想：“嗯，这太愚蠢了。一些关于橄榄球的页面比其他页面更重要。让我们弄清楚这些是哪些，并首先展示它们。 It's obvious in retrospect that this was a great idea for a startup. It wasn't obvious at the time. It's never obvious. If it was obviously a good idea to start Apple or Google or Facebook, someone else would have already done it. That's why the best startups grow out of projects that aren't meant to be startups. You're not trying to start a company. You're just following your instincts about what's interesting. And if you're young and good at technology, then your unconscious instincts about what's interesting are better than your conscious ideas about what would be a good company. 回想起来，很明显，这对初创公司来说是一个好主意。这在当时并不明显。这从来都不是显而易见的。如果创办苹果、谷歌或Facebook显然是个好主意，那么其他人早就这样做了。这就是为什么最好的创业公司是从不打算成为创业公司的项目中成长起来的。你不是想创办一家公司。你只是在追随你对有趣事物的直觉。如果你很年轻，擅长技术，那么你对有趣事物的无意识直觉要比你对什么是好公司的有意识想法要好。 So it's critical, if you're a young founder, to build things for yourself and your friends to use. The biggest mistake young founders make is to build something for some mysterious group of other people. But if you can make something that you and your friends truly want to use — something your friends aren't just using out of loyalty to you, but would be really sad to lose if you shut it down — then you almost certainly have the germ of a good startup idea. It may not seem like a startup to you. It may not be obvious how to make money from it. But trust me, there's a way. 因此，如果你是一个年轻的创始人，为自己和你的朋友构建一些东西是至关重要的。年轻的创始人犯的最大错误是为一些神秘的其他人建立一些东西。但是，如果你能做出一些你和你的朋友真正想用的东西——你的朋友不仅仅是出于对你的忠诚而使用的东西，但如果你关闭它，失去它会非常难过——那么你几乎可以肯定有一个好的创业想法的萌芽。对你来说，它可能看起来不像是一家初创公司。如何从中赚钱可能并不明显。但相信我，有办法。 What you need in a startup idea, and all you need, is something your friends actually want. And those ideas aren't hard to see once you're good at technology. There are sticking doors everywhere. [2] 在创业想法中，你需要的，以及你所需要的，都是你的朋友真正想要的东西。一旦你擅长技术，这些想法就不难看出来了。到处都是粘门。[2] Now for the third and final thing you need: a cofounder, or cofounders. The optimal startup has two or three founders, so you need one or two cofounders. How do you find them? Can you predict what I'm going to say next? It's the same thing: projects. You find cofounders by working on projects with them. What you need in a cofounder is someone who's good at what they do and that you work well with, and the only way to judge this is to work with them on things. 现在，你需要的第三件事也是最后一件事：一位或多位联合创始人。最佳的创业公司有两到三个创始人，所以你需要一两个联合创始人。你如何找到它们？你能预测我接下来要说什么吗？这是一回事：项目。您可以通过与他们合作开展项目来找到联合创始人。在联合创始人中，你需要的是一个擅长他们所做的事情并且与你合作得很好的人，而判断这一点的唯一方法就是与他们合作。 At this point I'm going to tell you something you might not want to hear. It really matters to do well in your classes, even the ones that are just memorization or blathering about literature, because you need to do well in your classes to get into a good university. And if you want to start a startup you should try to get into the best university you can, because that's where the best cofounders are. It's also where the best employees are. When Larry and Sergey started Google, they began by just hiring all the smartest people they knew out of Stanford, and this was a real advantage for them. 在这一点上，我要告诉你一些你可能不想听到的事情。在课堂上取得好成绩真的很重要，即使是那些只是背诵或喋喋不休的文学，因为你需要在课堂上取得好成绩才能进入一所好大学。如果你想创办一家创业公司，你应该尽可能地进入最好的大学，因为那里是最好的联合创始人所在的地方。这也是最优秀的员工所在的地方。当拉里和谢尔盖创办谷歌时，他们一开始只是雇用了他们从斯坦福大学认识的所有最聪明的人，这对他们来说是一个真正的优势。 The empirical evidence is clear on this. If you look at where the largest numbers of successful startups come from, it's pretty much the same as the list of the most selective universities. 经验证据很清楚这一点。如果你看看最多的成功创业公司来自哪里，它与最具选择性的大学名单几乎相同。 I don't think it's the prestigious names of these universities that cause more good startups to come out of them. Nor do I think it's because the quality of the teaching is better. What's driving this is simply the difficulty of getting in. You have to be pretty smart and determined to get into MIT or Cambridge, so if you do manage to get in, you'll find the other students include a lot of smart and determined people. [3] 我不认为是这些大学的声望导致了更多优秀的创业公司。我也不认为这是因为教学质量更好。推动这一切的只是进入的困难。你必须非常聪明和有决心才能进入麻省理工学院或剑桥大学，所以如果你设法进入，你会发现其他学生包括很多聪明和坚定的人。[3] You don't have to start a startup with someone you meet at university. The founders of Twitch met when they were seven. The founders of Stripe, Patrick and John Collison, met when John was born. But universities are the main source of cofounders. And because they're where the cofounders are, they're also where the ideas are, because the best ideas grow out of projects you do with the people who become your cofounders. 你不必和你在大学里认识的人一起创业。Twitch 的创始人在七岁时相识。Stripe 的创始人 Patrick 和 John Collison 在 John 出生时相识。但大学是联合创始人的主要来源。因为他们是联合创始人所在的地方，他们也是想法所在的地方，因为最好的想法来自你与成为你的联合创始人的人一起做的项目。 So the list of what you need to do to get from here to starting a startup is quite short. You need to get good at technology, and the way to do that is to work on your own projects. And you need to do as well in school as you can, so you can get into a good university, because that's where the cofounders and the ideas are. 因此，从这里开始创业需要做的事情清单很短。你需要擅长技术，而做到这一点的方法就是在你自己的项目上工作。你需要在学校里尽可能地好，这样你才能进入一所好大学，因为那是联合创始人和想法所在的地方。 That's it, just two things, build stuff and do well in school. 就是这样，只有两件事，建造东西并在学校取得好成绩。 Notes [1] The rhetorical trick in this sentence is that the "Google"s refer to different things. What I mean is: a company that has as much chance of growing as big as Google ultimately did as Larry and Sergey could have reasonably expected Google itself would at the time they started it. But I think the original version is zippier. [1] 这句话的修辞技巧是“谷歌”指的是不同的事物。我的意思是：一家公司很有可能像拉里和谢尔盖一样，最终像拉里和谢尔盖一样大，可以合理地预期谷歌本身在他们创立它时会发展壮大。但我认为原始版本更拉链。 [2] Making something for your friends isn't the only source of startup ideas. It's just the best source for young founders, who have the least knowledge of what other people want, and whose own wants are most predictive of future demand. [2] 为朋友做点什么并不是创业想法的唯一来源。对于年轻的创始人来说，这是最好的来源，他们最不了解别人想要什么，而他们自己的需求最能预测未来的需求。 [3] Strangely enough this is particularly true in countries like the US where undergraduate admissions are done badly. US admissions departments make applicants jump through a lot of arbitrary hoops that have little to do with their intellectual ability. But the more arbitrary a test, the more it becomes a test of mere determination and resourcefulness. And those are the two most important qualities in startup founders. So US admissions departments are better at selecting founders than they would be if they were better at selecting students. [3] 奇怪的是，在像美国这样本科招生做得不好的国家尤其如此。美国招生部门让申请者跳过许多与他们的智力无关的任意箍。但是，越是武断的考验，就越是对决心和足智多谋的考验。这是创业公司创始人最重要的两个品质。因此，美国招生部门在选择创始人方面比在选择学生方面做得更好。 Thanks to Jared Friedman, Carolynn Levy, Jessica Livingston, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this. |