Written by Sam Altman · Illustrated by Gregory Koberger · Spanish translation 撰稿：山姆·奥尔特曼 · 插画：格雷戈里·科伯格 · 西班牙语翻译
We spend a lot of time advising startups. Though one-on-one advice will always be crucial, we thought it might help us scale Y Combinator if we could distill the most generalizable parts of this advice into a sort of playbook we could give YC and YC Fellowship companies. 我们花了很多时间为初创公司提供建议。尽管一对一的建议始终至关重要，但我们认为，如果我们能够将这些建议中最通用的部分提炼成一种可以提供给 YC 和 YC Fellowship 公司的手册，这可能会帮助我们扩大 Y Combinator 的规模。
Then we thought we should just give it to everyone. 然后我们想我们应该把它给每个人。
This is meant for people new to the world of startups. Most of this will not be new to people who have read a lot of what YC partners have written—the goal is to get it into one place. 这适用于刚接触初创企业世界的人。对于读过大量 YC 合作伙伴所写内容的人来说，其中大部分内容并不陌生——目标是将其集中到一个地方。
There may be a part II on how to scale a startup later—this mostly covers how to start one. 稍后可能会有第二部分介绍如何扩大初创公司的规模——这主要涵盖如何创办一家公司。
We spend a lot of time advising startups. Though one-on-one advice will always be crucial, we thought it might help us scale Y Combinator if we could distill the most generalizable parts of this advice into a sort of playbook we could give YC and YC Fellowship companies.
Startup Playbook - The Idea 创业手册 - 想法
6 min 6分钟
One of the first things we ask YC companies is what they’re building and why. We look for clear, concise answers here. This is both to evaluate you as a founder and the idea itself. It’s important to be able to think and communicate clearly as a founder.
Startup Playbook - A Great Team 创业手册 - 一支伟大的团队
3 min 3分钟
Mediocre teams do not build great companies. One of the things we look at the most is the strength of the founders. When I used to do later-stage investing, I looked equally hard at the strength of the employees the founders hired.
Startup Playbook - A Great Product 创业手册 - 一个伟大的产品
4 min 4分钟
Here is the secret to success: have a great product. This is the only thing all great companies have in common. If you do not build a product users love you will eventually fail. Yet founders always look for some other trick. Startups are the point in your life when tricks stop working.
Startup Playbook - Great Execution 创业手册——出色的执行力
4 min 4分钟
Although it’s necessary to build a great product, you’re not done after that. You still have to turn it into a great company, and you have to do it yourself—the fantasy of hiring an “experienced manager” to do all this work is both extremely prevalent and a graveyard for failed companies. You cannot outsource the work to someone else for a long time.
Startup Playbook - Growth 创业手册 - 成长
6 min 6分钟
Growth and momentum are the keys to great execution. Growth (as long as it is not “sell dollar bills for 90 cents” growth) solves all problems, and lack of growth is not solvable by anything but growth. If you’re growing, it feels like you’re winning, and people are happy.
Startup Playbook - Focus & Intensity 创业手册 - 焦点和强度
3 min 3分钟
If I had to distill my advice about how to operate down to only two words, I’d pick focus and intensity. These words seem to really apply to the best founders I know.
Startup Playbook - Jobs of the CEO 创业手册 - 首席执行官的工作
6 min 6分钟
Earlier I mentioned that the only universal job description of the CEO is to make sure the company wins. Although that’s true, I wanted to talk a little more specifically about how a CEO should spend his or her time.
Startup Playbook - Hiring & Managing 创业手册 - 招聘和管理
4 min 4分钟
Hiring is one of your most important jobs and the key to building a great company (as opposed to a great product). My first piece of advice about hiring is don’t do it. The most successful companies we’ve worked with at YC have waited a relatively long time to start hiring employees.
Startup Playbook - Competitors 创业手册 - 竞争对手
1 min 1分钟
A quick word about competitors: competitors are a startup ghost story. First-time founders think they are what kill 99% of startups. But 99% of startups die from suicide, not murder. Worry instead about all of your internal problems. If you fail, it will very likely be because you failed to make a great product and/or failed to make a great company.
Startup Playbook - Making Money 创业手册 - 赚钱
2 min 2分钟
Oh yes, making money. You need to figure out how to do that. The short version of this is that you have to get people to pay you more money than it costs you to deliver your good/service. For some reason, people always forget to take into account the part about how much it costs to deliver it.
Startup Playbook - Fundraising 创业手册 - 筹款
1 min 1分钟
Most startups raise money at some point. You should raise money when you need it or when it’s available on good terms. Be careful not to lose your sense of frugality or to start solving problems by throwing money at them. Not having enough money can be bad, but having too much money is almost always bad.
Startup Playbook - Closing Thought 创业手册 - 结束语
1 min 1分钟
Remember that at least a thousand people have every great idea. One of them actually becomes successful. The difference comes down to execution. It’s a grind, and everyone wishes there were some other way to transform “idea” into “success”, but no one has figured it out yet.
Your goal as a startup is to make something users love. If you do that, then you have to figure out how to get a lot more users. But this first part is critical—think about the really successful companies of today. They all started with a product that their early users loved so much they told other people about it. If you fail to do this, you will fail. If you deceive yourself and think your users love your product when they don’t, you will still fail. 作为一家初创公司，你的目标是做出用户喜欢的东西。如果你这样做，那么你必须弄清楚如何获得更多用户。但这第一部分至关重要——想想当今真正成功的公司。他们都从早期用户非常喜欢的产品开始，并告诉其他人。如果你做不到这一点，你就会失败。如果你欺骗自己并认为你的用户喜欢你的产品，但实际上他们并不喜欢你的产品，那么你仍然会失败。
The startup graveyard is littered with people who thought they could skip this step. 初创公司的坟墓里到处都是那些认为自己可以跳过这一步的人。
It’s much better to first make a product a small number of users love than a product that a large number of users like. Even though the total amount of positive feeling is the same, it’s much easier to get more users than to go from like to love. 首先做一个少数用户喜欢的产品比做大量用户喜欢的产品要好得多。尽管积极感觉的总量是相同的，但获得更多用户比从喜欢到喜爱要容易得多。
A word of warning about choosing to start a startup: It sucks! One of the most consistent pieces of feedback we get from YC founders is it’s harder than they could have ever imagined, because they didn’t have a framework for the sort of work and intensity a startup entails. Joining an early-stage startup that’s on a rocketship trajectory is usually a much better financial deal. 关于选择创业的一个警告：这很糟糕！我们从 YC 创始人那里得到的最一致的反馈之一是，这比他们想象的要困难，因为他们没有一个框架来适应初创公司所需的工作类型和强度。加入一家处于火箭发展轨道上的早期初创公司通常是一笔更好的财务交易。
On the other hand, starting a startup is not in fact very risky to your career—if you’re really good at technology, there will be job opportunities if you fail. Most people are very bad at evaluating risk. I personally think the riskier option is having an idea or project you’re really passionate about and working at a safe, easy, unfulfilling job instead. 另一方面，创业实际上对你的职业生涯来说风险并不大——如果你真的擅长技术，即使失败也会有工作机会。大多数人都不善于评估风险。我个人认为风险更大的选择是拥有一个你真正热衷的想法或项目，然后从事一份安全、轻松、没有成就感的工作。
To have a successful startup, you need: a great idea (including a great market), a great team, a great product, and great execution. 要拥有一个成功的初创公司，你需要：一个伟大的想法（包括一个伟大的市场）、一个伟大的团队、一个伟大的产品和伟大的执行力。
One of the first things we ask YC companies is what they’re building and why. 我们首先询问 YC 公司的问题之一是他们正在构建什么以及为什么构建。
We look for clear, concise answers here. This is both to evaluate you as a founder and the idea itself. It’s important to be able to think and communicate clearly as a founder—you’ll need it for recruiting, raising money, selling, etc. Ideas in general need to be clear to spread, and complex ideas are almost always a sign of muddled thinking or a made up problem. If the idea does not really excite at least some people the first time they hear it, that’s bad. 我们在这里寻找清晰、简洁的答案。这既是对你作为创始人的评估，也是对这个想法本身的评估。作为创始人，能够清晰地思考和沟通非常重要——你需要它来招聘、筹集资金、销售等。一般来说，想法需要清晰地传播，而复杂的想法几乎总是思维混乱的表现或一个虚构的问题。如果这个想法至少在某些人第一次听到时并没有真正激发他们的兴趣，那就糟糕了。
Another thing we ask is who desperately needs the product. 我们问的另一件事是谁迫切需要该产品。
In the best case, you yourself are the target user. In the second best case, you understand the target user extremely well. 在最好的情况下，您自己就是目标用户。在第二种最佳情况下，您非常了解目标用户。
If a company already has users, we ask how many and how fast that number is growing. We try to figure out why it’s not growing faster, and we especially try to figure out if users really love the product. Usually this means they’re telling their friends to use the product without prompting from the company. We also ask if the company is generating revenue, and if not, why not. 如果一家公司已经拥有用户，我们会询问有多少用户以及该数字增长的速度。我们试图弄清楚为什么它没有更快地增长，我们特别试图弄清楚用户是否真的喜欢这个产品。通常这意味着他们告诉朋友在没有公司提示的情况下使用该产品。我们还询问该公司是否正在产生收入，如果没有，为什么没有。
If the company doesn’t yet have users, we try to figure out the minimum thing to build first to test the hypothesis—i.e., if we work backwards from the perfect experience, we try to figure out what kernel to start with. 如果公司还没有用户，我们会尝试找出首先要构建的最小内容来测试假设，即，如果我们从完美体验开始向后推，我们会尝试找出从哪个内核开始。
The way to test an idea is to either launch it and see what happens or try to sell it (e.g. try to get a letter of intent before you write a line of code.) The former works better for consumer ideas (users may tell you they will use it, but in practice it won’t cut through the clutter) and the latter works better for enterprise ideas (if a company tells you they will buy something, then go build it.) Specifically, if you are an enterprise company, one of the first questions we’ll ask you is if you have a letter of intent from a customer saying they’ll buy what you’re building. For most biotech and hard tech companies, the way to test an idea is to first talk to potential customers and then figure out the smallest subset of the technology you can build first. 测试一个想法的方法是要么启动它并看看会发生什么，要么尝试出售它（例如，在编写一行代码之前尝试获得一封意向书。）前者更适合消费者想法（用户可能会告诉你他们会使用它，但实际上它不会消除混乱）而后者更适合企业创意（如果一家公司告诉你他们会购买某些东西，那么就去构建它。）具体来说，如果你是一家企业公司，我们会问您的第一个问题是您是否有客户的意向书表明他们会购买您正在构建的产品。对于大多数生物技术和硬技术公司来说，测试想法的方法是首先与潜在客户交谈，然后找出可以首先构建的技术的最小子集。
It’s important to let your idea evolve as you get feedback from users. And it’s critical you understand your users really well—you need this to evaluate an idea, build a great product, and build a great company. 当您收到用户的反馈时，让您的想法不断发展非常重要。真正了解你的用户至关重要——你需要它来评估一个想法、构建一个伟大的产品并建立一个伟大的公司。
As mentioned earlier, startups are really hard. They take a very long time, and consistent intense effort. The founders and employees need to have a shared sense of mission to sustain them. So we ask why founders want to start this particular company. 正如前面提到的，创业真的很难。他们需要很长的时间和持续不断的努力。创始人和员工需要有共同的使命感来维持他们。因此，我们要问创始人为什么想要创办这家特定的公司。
We also ask how the company will one day be a monopoly. There are a lot of different terms for this, but we use Peter Thiel’s. Obviously, we don’t want your company to behave in an unethical way against competitors. Instead, we’re looking for businesses that get more powerful with scale and that are difficult to copy. 我们还想知道，该公司有一天将如何成为垄断企业。有很多不同的术语，但我们使用 Peter Thiel 的术语。显然，我们不希望贵公司对竞争对手采取不道德的行为。相反，我们正在寻找规模更大且难以复制的企业。
Finally, we ask about the market. We ask how big it is today, how fast it’s growing, and why it’s going to be big in ten years. We try to understand why the market is going to grow quickly, and why it’s a good market for a startup to go after. We like it when major technological shifts are just starting that most people haven’t realized yet—big companies are bad at addressing those. And somewhat counterintuitively, the best answer is going after a large part of a small market. 最后，我们询问市场情况。我们问它今天有多大，增长有多快，以及为什么十年后它会变得很大。我们试图理解为什么这个市场会快速增长，以及为什么这是一个适合初创公司追求的好市场。我们喜欢重大技术变革刚刚开始，而大多数人还没有意识到——大公司不擅长解决这些问题。有点违反直觉的是，最好的答案是追求小市场的大部分。
A few other thoughts on ideas: 关于想法的其他一些想法：
We greatly prefer something new to something derivative. Most really big companies start with something fundamentally new (one acceptable definition of new is 10x better.) If there are ten other companies starting at the same time with the same plan, and it sounds a whole lot like something that already exists, we are skeptical. 与衍生品相比，我们更喜欢新的东西。大多数真正的大公司都是从根本上新的东西开始的（新的一个可接受的定义是好十倍。）如果有其他十家公司同时开始执行相同的计划，并且这听起来很像已经存在的东西，那么我们就是持怀疑态度。
One important counterintuitive reason for this is that it’s easier to do something new and hard than something derivative and easy. People will want to help you and join you if it’s the former; they will not if it’s the latter. 造成这种情况的一个重要的违反直觉的原因是，做一些新的、困难的事情比做一些衍生的、简单的事情更容易。如果是前者，人们会想要帮助你并加入你；如果是后者，他们就不会。
The best ideas sound bad but are in fact good. So you don’t need to be too secretive with your idea—if it’s actually a good idea, it likely won’t sound like it’s worth stealing. Even if it does sound like it’s worth stealing, there are at least a thousand times more people that have good ideas than people who are willing to do the kind of work it takes to turn a great idea into a great company. And if you tell people what you’re doing, they might help. 最好的想法听起来很糟糕，但实际上是好的。所以你不需要对你的想法过于保密——如果它实际上是一个好主意，它可能听起来不值得窃取。即使听起来确实值得窃取，但拥有好想法的人比愿意付出努力将好想法变成一家伟大公司的人至少多一千倍。如果你告诉人们你在做什么，他们可能会有所帮助。
Speaking of telling people your idea—while it’s important the idea really excites some people the first time they hear it, almost everyone is going to tell you that your idea sucks. Maybe they are right. Maybe they are not good at evaluating startups, or maybe they are just jealous. Whatever the reason is, it will happen a lot, it will hurt, and even if you think you’re not going to be affected by it, you still will be. The faster you can develop self-belief and not get dragged down too much by haters, the better off you’ll be. No matter how successful you are, the haters will never go away. 说到告诉人们你的想法——虽然这个想法确实让一些人第一次听到它时感到兴奋很重要，但几乎每个人都会告诉你你的想法很糟糕。也许他们是对的。也许他们不擅长评估初创公司，或者也许他们只是嫉妒。无论原因是什么，这种事都会发生很多次，会造成伤害，即使你认为自己不会受到影响，但你仍然会受到影响。你越快培养自信并且不被仇恨者拖垮太多，你的生活就会越好。无论你多么成功，仇恨者永远不会消失。
What if you don’t have an idea but want to start a startup? Maybe you shouldn’t. It’s so much better if the idea comes first and the startup is the way to get the idea out into the world. 如果你没有想法但想创业怎么办？也许你不应该。如果这个想法是第一位的，并且初创公司是将这个想法推向世界的方式，那就更好了。
We once tried an experiment where we funded a bunch of promising founding teams with no ideas in the hopes they would land on a promising idea after we funded them. 我们曾经尝试过一个实验，我们资助了一群有前途但没有想法的创始团队，希望他们在我们资助后能够找到一个有前途的想法。
All of them failed. I think part of the problem is that good founders tend to have lots of good ideas (too many, usually). But an even bigger problem is that once you have a startup you have to hurry to come up with an idea, and because it’s already an official company the idea can’t be too crazy. You end up with plausible sounding but derivative ideas. This is the danger of pivots. 他们都失败了。我认为部分问题在于优秀的创始人往往有很多好的想法（通常太多）。但更大的问题是，一旦你有了一家初创公司，你就必须赶紧想出一个想法，而且因为它已经是一家正式的公司，所以这个想法不能太疯狂。你最终会得到听起来似乎合理但衍生的想法。这就是支点的危险。
So it’s better not to try too actively to force yourself to come up with startup ideas. Instead, learn about a lot of different things. Practice noticing problems, things that seem inefficient, and major technological shifts. Work on projects you find interesting. Go out of your way to hang around smart, interesting people. At some point, ideas will emerge. 因此，最好不要过于积极地强迫自己提出创业想法。相反，了解很多不同的事情。练习注意问题、看似低效的事情以及重大技术变革。从事您感兴趣的项目。不遗余力地与聪明、有趣的人交往。到了某个时候，想法就会出现。
Mediocre teams do not build great companies. One of the things we look at the most is the strength of the founders. When I used to do later-stage investing, I looked equally hard at the strength of the employees the founders hired. 平庸的团队造不出伟大的公司。我们最看重的事情之一就是创始人的实力。当我以前进行后期投资时，我同样会仔细观察创始人雇用的员工的实力。
What makes a great founder? The most important characteristics are ones like unstoppability, determination, formidability, and resourcefulness. Intelligence and passion also rank very highly. These are all much more important than experience and certainly “expertise with language X and framework Y”. 是什么造就了伟大的创始人？最重要的特征是不可阻挡、决心、强大和足智多谋。智力和热情也排名很高。这些都比经验更重要，当然也比“语言 X 和框架 Y 的专业知识”更重要。
We have noticed the most successful founders are the sort of people who are low-stress to work with because you feel “he or she will get it done, no matter what it is.” Sometimes you can succeed through sheer force of will. 我们注意到，最成功的创始人是那种工作压力较小的人，因为你觉得“他或她会完成它，无论是什么。”有时你可以通过纯粹的意志力取得成功。
Good founders have a number of seemingly contradictory traits. One important example is rigidity and flexibility. You want to have strong beliefs about the core of the company and its mission, but still be very flexible and willing to learn new things when it comes to almost everything else. 优秀的创始人具有许多看似矛盾的特征。一个重要的例子是刚性和灵活性。你想要对公司的核心及其使命有坚定的信念，但在几乎所有其他事情上仍然非常灵活并愿意学习新事物。
The best founders are unusually responsive. This is an indicator of decisiveness, focus, intensity, and the ability to get things done. 最好的创始人反应异常灵敏。这是决定性、专注力、强度和完成任务能力的指标。
Founders that are hard to talk to are almost always bad. Communication is a very important skill for founders—in fact, I think this is the most important rarely-discussed founder skill. 难以交谈的创始人几乎总是不好的。沟通对于创始人来说是一项非常重要的技能——事实上，我认为这是最重要但很少被讨论的创始人技能。
Tech startups need at least one founder who can build the company’s product or service, and at least one founder who is (or can become) good at sales and talking to users. This can be the same person. 科技初创公司需要至少一名能够打造公司产品或服务的创始人，以及至少一名善于（或能够）擅长销售和与用户交谈的创始人。这可以是同一个人。
Consider these criteria when you’re choosing a cofounder -- it’s one of the most important decisions you’ll make, and it’s often done fairly randomly. You want someone you know well, not someone you just met at a cofounder dating thing. You can evaluate anyone you might work with better with more data, and you really don’t want to get this one wrong. Also, at some point, the expected value of the startup is likely to dip below the X axis. If you have a pre-existing relationship with your cofounders, none of you will want to let the other down and you’ll keep going. Cofounder breakups are one of the leading causes of death for early startups, and we see them happen very, very frequently in cases where the founders met for the express purpose of starting the company. 当你选择联合创始人时，请考虑这些标准——这是你将做出的最重要的决定之一，而且通常是相当随机的。你想要的是一个你熟悉的人，而不是你刚刚在联合创始人约会时认识的人。你可以用更多的数据来评估你可能会更好地合作的任何人，而且你真的不想弄错这一点。此外，在某些时候，初创公司的预期价值可能会低于 X 轴。如果你和联合创始人之间已有关系，那么你们中的任何一个人都不会想让对方失望，并且会继续前进。联合创始人分手是早期初创企业死亡的主要原因之一，我们发现，在创始人为了创办公司的明确目的而会面的情况下，这种情况非常频繁地发生。
The best case, by far, is to have a good cofounder. The next best is to be a solo founder. The worse case, by far, is to have a bad cofounder. If things are not working out, you should part ways quickly. 到目前为止，最好的情况是拥有一位优秀的联合创始人。其次是成为一名独立创始人。到目前为止，最糟糕的情况是有一个糟糕的联合创始人。如果事情进展不顺利，你应该尽快分手。
A quick note on equity: the conversation about the equity split does not get easier with time—it’s better to set it early on. Nearly equal is best, though perhaps in the case of two founders it’s best to have one person with one extra share to prevent deadlocks when the cofounders have a fallout. 关于股权的简要说明：关于股权分割的讨论并不会随着时间的推移而变得更容易——最好尽早确定。几乎平等是最好的，但也许在两位创始人的情况下，最好让一个人拥有一份额外的股份，以防止联合创始人产生分歧时陷入僵局。
Here is the secret to success: have a great product. This is the only thing all great companies have in common. 这是成功的秘诀：拥有出色的产品。这是所有伟大公司的唯一共同点。
If you do not build a product users love you will eventually fail. Yet founders always look for some other trick. Startups are the point in your life when tricks stop working. 如果你不打造用户喜欢的产品，你最终会失败。然而创始人总是在寻找其他的伎俩。创业是你人生中技巧不再奏效的时刻。
A great product is the only way to grow long-term. Eventually your company will get so big that all growth hacks stop working and you have to grow by people wanting to use your product. This is the most important thing to understand about super-successful companies. There is no other way. Think about all of the really successful technology companies—they all do this. 优秀的产品是长期发展的唯一途径。最终你的公司会变得如此之大，以至于所有的增长黑客都不再起作用，你必须通过想要使用你的产品的人来实现增长。这是了解超级成功公司最重要的事情。没有其他办法。想想所有真正成功的科技公司——他们都这样做。
You want to build a “product improvement engine” in your company. You should talk to your users and watch them use your product, figure out what parts are sub-par, and then make your product better. Then do it again. This cycle should be the number one focus of the company, and it should drive everything else. If you improve your product 5% every week, it will really compound. 您想在公司中建立一个“产品改进引擎”。您应该与您的用户交谈并观察他们使用您的产品，找出哪些部分低于标准，然后改进您的产品。然后再做一次。这个周期应该是公司的首要关注点，并且它应该驱动其他一切。如果你每周改进你的产品 5%，它就会真正实现复合。
The faster the repeat rate of this cycle, the better the company usually turns out. During YC, we tell founders they should be building product and talking to users, and not much else besides eating, sleeping, exercising, and spending time with their loved ones. 这个周期的重复率越快，公司的业绩通常就越好。在 YC 期间，我们告诉创始人他们应该开发产品并与用户交谈，除了吃饭、睡觉、锻炼和与亲人共度时光之外，不要做其他事情。
To do this cycle right, you have to get very close to your users. Literally watch them use your product. Sit in their office if you can. Value both what they tell you and what they actually do. You should not put anyone between the founders and the users for as long as possible—that means the founders need to do sales, customer support, etc. 为了正确地完成这个循环，您必须非常接近您的用户。从字面上看他们使用你的产品。如果可以的话，请坐在他们的办公室。重视他们告诉你的和他们实际做的事情。你不应该尽可能长时间地将任何人置于创始人和用户之间——这意味着创始人需要进行销售、客户支持等工作。
Understand your users as well as you possibly can. Really figure out what they need, where to find them, and what makes them tick. 尽可能地了解您的用户。真正弄清楚他们需要什么，在哪里可以找到他们，以及他们的动机是什么。
“Do things that don’t scale” has rightfully become a mantra for startups. You usually need to recruit initial users one at a time (Ben Silbermann used to approach strangers in coffee shops in Palo Alto and ask them to try Pinterest) and then build things they ask for. Many founders hate this part, and just want to announce their product in the press. But that almost never works. Recruit users manually, and make the product so good the users you recruit tell their friends. “做无法规模化的事情”理所当然地成为初创公司的口头禅。您通常需要一次招募一名初始用户（Ben Silbermann 曾经在帕洛阿尔托的咖啡店里接近陌生人并要求他们尝试 Pinterest），然后构建他们要求的东西。许多创始人讨厌这一部分，只想在媒体上宣布他们的产品。但这几乎永远不会奏效。手动招募用户，并将产品做得很好，让您招募的用户告诉他们的朋友。
You also need to break things into very small pieces, and iterate and adapt as you go. Don’t try to plan too far out, and definitely don’t batch everything into one big public release. You want to start with something very simple—as little surface area as possible—and launch it sooner than you’d think. In fact, simplicity is always good, and you should always keep your product and company as simple as possible. 您还需要将事情分解成非常小的部分，并不断迭代和适应。不要试图计划得太远，也绝对不要将所有内容批量放入一个大型公开版本中。您希望从非常简单的事情开始（尽可能少的表面积）并比您想象的更早启动它。事实上，简单总是好的，你应该始终让你的产品和公司尽可能简单。
Some common questions we ask startups having problems: Are users using your product more than once? Are your users fanatical about your product? Would your users be truly bummed if your company went away? Are your users recommending you to other people without you asking them to do it? If you’re a B2B company, do you have at least 10 paying customers? 我们向遇到问题的初创公司提出一些常见问题：用户是否多次使用您的产品？您的用户对您的产品狂热吗？如果您的公司消失，您的用户真的会感到沮丧吗？您的用户是否在没有您要求的情况下向其他人推荐您？如果您是一家 B2B 公司，您是否至少有 10 个付费客户？
If not, then that’s often the underlying problem, and we tell companies to make their product better. I am skeptical about most excuses for why a company isn’t growing—very often the real reason is that the product just isn’t good enough. 如果不是，那么这通常是根本问题，我们告诉公司要改进他们的产品。我对大多数公司无法发展的借口持怀疑态度——真正的原因往往是产品不够好。
When startups aren’t sure what to do next with their product, or if their product isn’t good enough, we send them to go talk to their users. This doesn’t work in every case—it’s definitely true that people would have asked Ford for faster horses—but it works surprisingly often. In fact, more generally, when there’s a disagreement about anything in the company, talk to your users. 当初创公司不确定下一步要如何处理他们的产品，或者他们的产品不够好时，我们会派他们去与用户交谈。这并不是在所有情况下都有效——人们肯定会要求福特提供更快的马——但令人惊讶的是，它经常有效。事实上，更一般地说，当公司对任何事情存在分歧时，请与用户交谈。
The best founders seem to care a little bit too much about product quality, even for seemingly unimportant details. But it seems to work. By the way, “product” includes all interactions a user has with the company. You need to offer great support, great sales interactions, etc. 最好的创始人似乎有点过于关心产品质量，即使是看似不重要的细节。但这似乎有效。顺便说一句，“产品”包括用户与公司的所有互动。您需要提供强大的支持、出色的销售互动等。
Remember, if you haven’t made a great product, nothing else will save you. 请记住，如果你没有制造出出色的产品，那么没有什么可以拯救你。
Although it’s necessary to build a great product, you’re not done after that. You still have to turn it into a great company, and you have to do it yourself—the fantasy of hiring an “experienced manager” to do all this work is both extremely prevalent and a graveyard for failed companies. You cannot outsource the work to someone else for a long time. 尽管打造出色的产品是必要的，但之后你还没有完成。你仍然必须把它变成一家伟大的公司，而且你必须自己做——聘请“经验丰富的经理”来完成所有这些工作的幻想非常普遍，也是失败公司的墓地。你不能将工作长期外包给别人。
This sounds obvious, but you have to make money. This would be a good time to start thinking about how that’s going to work. 这听起来很明显，但你必须赚钱。现在是开始思考如何运作的好时机。
The only universal job description of a CEO is to make sure the company wins. You can do this as the founder even if you have a lot of flaws that would normally disqualify you as a CEO as long as you hire people that complement your own skills and let them do their jobs. That experienced CEO with a fancy MBA may not have the skill gaps you have, but he or she won’t understand the users as well, won’t have the same product instincts, and won’t care as much. 首席执行官唯一通用的职责就是确保公司获胜。作为创始人，即使你有很多缺陷，这些缺陷通常会使你失去担任首席执行官的资格，但只要你雇佣与你自身技能互补的人，并让他们做好自己的工作，你就可以做到这一点。那位拥有高级 MBA 学位、经验丰富的 CEO 可能没有你所拥有的技能差距，但他或她也不会理解用户，不会有相同的产品本能，也不会那么关心。
Growth and momentum are the keys to great execution. Growth (as long as it is not “sell dollar bills for 90 cents” growth) solves all problems, and lack of growth is not solvable by anything but growth. If you’re growing, it feels like you’re winning, and people are happy. If you’re growing, there are new roles and responsibilities all the time, and people feel like their careers are advancing. If you’re not growing, it feels like you’re losing, and people are unhappy and leave. If you’re not growing, people just fight over responsibilities and blame. 增长和动力是出色执行力的关键。增长（只要不是“卖一美元换90美分”的增长）可以解决所有问题，而缺乏增长除了增长以外其他任何办法都无法解决。如果你在成长，就会感觉自己赢了，人们也会很高兴。如果你在成长，就会一直有新的角色和责任，人们会感觉自己的职业生涯正在进步。如果你没有成长，你就会感觉自己在失败，人们就会不高兴并离开。如果你没有成长，人们就会为了责任和指责而争吵。
Founders and employees that are burn out nearly always work at startups without momentum. It’s hard to overstate how demoralizing it is. 精疲力竭的创始人和员工几乎总是在没有动力的初创公司工作。很难夸大它是多么令人沮丧。
The prime directive of great execution is “Never lose momentum”. But how do you do it? 伟大执行力的首要指令是“永远不要失去动力”。但你要怎么做呢？
The most important way is to make it your top priority. The company does what the CEO measures. It’s valuable to have a single metric that the company optimizes, and it’s worth time to figure out the right growth metric. If you care about growth, and you set the execution bar, the rest of the company will focus on it. 最重要的方法就是将其作为您的首要任务。公司按照首席执行官的衡量标准行事。拥有公司优化的单一指标很有价值，并且值得花时间找出正确的增长指标。如果你关心增长，并设定了执行标准，公司的其他人就会关注它。
Here are a couple of examples. 这里有几个例子。
The founders of Airbnb drew a forward-looking graph of the growth they wanted to hit. They posted this everywhere—on their fridge, above their desks, on their bathroom mirror. If they hit the number that week, great. If not, it was all they talked about. Airbnb 的创始人绘制了他们想要实现的增长的前瞻性图表。他们把这个贴在各处——冰箱上、桌子上方、浴室镜子上。如果他们在那周达到这个数字，那就太好了。如果没有，那就是他们谈论的一切。
Mark Zuckerberg once said that one of the most important innovations at Facebook was their establishment of a growth group when growth slowed. This group was (and perhaps still is) one of the most prestigious groups in the company—everyone knew how important it was. 马克·扎克伯格曾表示，Facebook 最重要的创新之一是在增长放缓时成立增长小组。这个团队曾经（也许仍然是）公司中最负盛名的团队之一——每个人都知道它有多么重要。
Keep a list of what’s blocking growth. Talk as a company about how you could grow faster. If you know what the limiters are, you’ll naturally think about how to address them. 列出阻碍增长的因素。作为一家公司，讨论如何才能更快地成长。如果您知道限制因素是什么，您自然会考虑如何解决它们。
For anything you consider doing, ask yourself “Is this the best way to optimize growth?” For example, going to a conference is not usually the best way to optimize growth, unless you expect to sell a lot there. 对于您考虑做的任何事情，请问问自己“这是优化增长的最佳方式吗？”例如，参加会议通常不是优化增长的最佳方式，除非您希望在那里卖出很多东西。
Extreme internal transparency around metrics (and financials) is a good thing to do. For some reason, founders are always really scared of this. But it’s great for keeping the whole company focused on growth. There seems to be a direct correlation between how focused on metrics employees at a company are and how well they’re doing. If you hide the metrics, it’s hard for people to focus on them. 关于指标（和财务）的极端内部透明度是一件好事。出于某种原因，创始人总是非常害怕这一点。但这对于让整个公司专注于增长非常有用。公司员工对指标的关注程度与他们的工作表现之间似乎存在直接关联。如果隐藏指标，人们就很难关注它们。
Speaking of metrics, don’t fool yourself with vanity metrics. The common mistake here is to focus on signups and ignore retention. But retention is as important to growth as new user acquisition. 说到指标，不要用虚荣指标来欺骗自己。这里常见的错误是专注于注册而忽视保留。但保留对于增长来说与获取新用户一样重要。
It’s also important to establish an internal cadence to keep momentum. You want to have a “drumbeat” of progress—new features, customers, hires, revenue milestones, partnerships, etc that you can talk about internally and externally. 建立内部节奏以保持动力也很重要。你想要有一个“鼓点”的进展——新功能、客户、员工、收入里程碑、合作伙伴关系等等，你可以在内部和外部谈论这些。
You should set aggressive but borderline achievable goals and review progress every month. Celebrate wins! Talk internally about strategy all the time, tell everyone what you’re hearing from customers, etc. The more information you share internally—good and bad—the better you’ll be. 您应该设定积极但可实现的目标，并每月回顾进展情况。庆祝胜利！始终在内部讨论策略，告诉每个人您从客户那里听到的信息等。您在内部分享的信息（无论好坏）越多，您就会越好。
There are a few traps that founders often fall into. One is that if the company is growing like crazy but everything seems incredibly broken and inefficient, everyone worries that things are going to come unraveled. In practice, this seems to happen rarely (Friendster is the most recent example of a startup dying because of technical debt that I can point to.) Counterintuitively, it turns out that it’s good if you’re growing fast but nothing is optimized—all you need to do is fix it to get more growth! My favorite investments are in companies that are growing really fast but incredibly un-optimized—they are deeply undervalued. 创始人经常陷入一些陷阱。一是，如果公司疯狂发展，但一切看起来都极其破碎且效率低下，那么每个人都会担心事情会崩溃。在实践中，这种情况似乎很少发生（Friendster 是一家初创公司因技术债务而死亡的最新例子，我可以指出。）与直觉相反，事实证明，如果你增长很快，但没有任何东西得到优化，那是件好事。你需要做的就是修复它以获得更多增长！我最喜欢的投资是那些增长非常快但极其未优化的公司——它们的价值被严重低估。
A related trap is thinking about problems too far in the future—i.e. “How are we going to do this at massive scale?” The answer is to figure it out when you get there. Far more startups die while debating this question than die because they didn’t think about it enough. A good rule of thumb is to only think about how things will work at 10x your current scale. Most early-stage startups should put “Do things that don’t scale” up on their wall and live by it. As an example, great startups always have great customer service in the early days, and bad startups worry about the impact on the unit economics and that it won’t scale. But great customer service makes for passionate early users, and as the product gets better you need less support, because you’ll know what customers commonly struggle with and improve the product/experience in those areas. (By the way, this is a really important example—have great customer support.) 一个相关的陷阱是考虑太遥远的未来问题——即“我们如何大规模地做到这一点？”答案是当你到达那里时才弄清楚。在争论这个问题时死去的初创公司远多于因为考虑不够而死去的初创公司。一个好的经验法则是只考虑在当前规模 10 倍的情况下事情会如何运作。大多数早期初创公司应该把“做那些无法规模化的事情”挂在墙上，并以此为生。举个例子，优秀的初创公司在早期总是拥有出色的客户服务，而糟糕的初创公司则担心对单位经济效益的影响以及无法扩大规模。但是，出色的客户服务会带来热情的早期用户，随着产品变得更好，您需要的支持也会减少，因为您会知道客户通常遇到的困难，并改善这些领域的产品/体验。 （顺便说一句，这是一个非常重要的例子——拥有强大的客户支持。）
There’s a big catch to this—”Do things that don’t scale” does not excuse you from having to eventually make money. It’s ok to have bad unit economics in the early days, but you have to have a good reason for why the unit economics are going to work out later. 这有一个很大的问题——“做无法规模化的事情”并不能成为你最终必须赚钱的借口。早期单位经济效益不佳没关系，但你必须有一个充分的理由来解释为什么单位经济效益会在以后发挥作用。
Another trap is getting demoralized because growth is bad in absolute numbers even though it’s good on a percentage basis. Humans are very bad at intuition around exponential growth. Remind your team of this, and that all giant companies started growing from small numbers. 另一个陷阱是士气低落，因为尽管从百分比来看增长良好，但从绝对数字来看增长却很糟糕。人类对指数增长的直觉非常差。提醒您的团队这一点，所有大公司都是从小规模开始成长的。
Some of the biggest traps are the things that founders believe will deliver growth but in practice almost never work and suck up a huge amount of time. Common examples are deals with other companies and the “big press launch”. Beware of these and understand that they effectively never work. Instead get growth the same way all great companies have—by building a product users love, recruiting users manually first, and then testing lots of growth strategies (ads, referral programs, sales and marketing, etc.) and doing more of what works. Ask your customers where you can find more people like them. 一些最大的陷阱是创始人认为会带来增长的事情，但实际上几乎从不奏效，而且会占用大量时间。常见的例子是与其他公司的交易和“大型新闻发布”。小心这些并了解它们实际上永远不会起作用。相反，要以所有伟大公司所采用的方式实现增长，即构建用户喜爱的产品，首先手动招募用户，然后测试大量增长策略（广告、推荐计划、销售和营销等）并做更多有效的事情。询问您的客户在哪里可以找到更多像他们一样的人。
Remember that sales and marketing are not bad words. Though neither will save you if you don’t have a great product, they can both help accelerate growth substantially. If you’re an enterprise company, it’s likely a requirement that your company get good at these. 请记住，销售和营销并不是坏词。虽然如果您没有出色的产品，这两种方法都无法拯救您，但它们都可以帮助大幅加速增长。如果您是一家企业公司，那么您的公司可能需要擅长这些。
Don’t be afraid of sales especially. At least one founder has to get good at asking people to use your product and give you money. 尤其不要害怕销售。至少有一位创始人必须擅长要求人们使用你的产品并给你钱。
Alex Schultz gave a lecture on growth for consumer products that’s well worth watching. For B2B products, I think the right answer is almost always to track revenue growth per month, and remember that the longer sales cycle means the first couple of months are going to look ugly (though sometimes selling to startups as initial customers can solve this problem). 亚历克斯·舒尔茨 (Alex Schultz) 做了一场关于消费品增长的演讲，非常值得一看。对于 B2B 产品，我认为正确的答案几乎总是跟踪每月的收入增长，并记住，较长的销售周期意味着前几个月会看起来很丑陋（尽管有时将产品卖给初创公司作为初始客户可以解决这个问题）。
If I had to distill my advice about how to operate down to only two words, I’d pick focus and intensity. These words seem to really apply to the best founders I know. 如果我必须将关于如何运作的建议提炼为两个词，我会选择焦点和强度。这些话似乎确实适用于我所认识的最好的创始人。
They are relentlessly focused on their product and growth. They don’t try to do everything—in fact, they say no a lot (this is hard because the sort of people that start companies are the sort of people that like doing new things.) 他们不懈地专注于他们的产品和增长。他们不会尝试做所有事情——事实上，他们经常说“不”（这很难，因为创办公司的人都是喜欢做新事物的人。）
As a general rule, don’t let your company start doing the next thing until you’ve dominated the first thing. No great company I know of started doing multiple things at once—they start with a lot of conviction about one thing, and see it all the way through. You can do far fewer things than you think. A very, very common cause of startup death is doing too many of the wrong things. Prioritization is critical and hard. (Equally important to setting the company’s priorities is setting your own tactical priorities. What I’ve found works best for me personally is a pen-and-paper list for each day with ~3 major tasks and ~30 minor ones, and an annual to-do list of overall goals.) 一般来说，在你主导第一件事之前，不要让你的公司开始做下一件事。据我所知，没有一家伟大的公司会同时做多件事——他们一开始就对一件事充满信心，然后一直坚持到底。你能做的事情比你想象的要少得多。创业公司死亡的一个非常非常常见的原因是做了太多错误的事情。确定优先顺序至关重要且困难。 （对于设定公司的优先事项同样重要的是设定你自己的战术优先事项。我发现对我个人来说最有效的是每天用笔和纸列出约 3 个主要任务和约 30 个次要任务，以及每年总体目标的待办事项列表。）
While great founders don’t do many big projects, they do whatever they do very intensely. They get things done very quickly. They are decisive, which is hard when you’re running a startup—you will get a lot of conflicting advice, both because there are multiple ways to do things and because there’s a lot of bad advice out there. Great founders listen to all of the advice and then quickly make their own decisions. 虽然伟大的创始人不会做很多大项目，但他们做任何事情都非常投入。他们做事很快。它们是决定性的，当你经营一家初创公司时，这很难——你会得到很多相互矛盾的建议，既因为做事的方法有多种，也因为有很多糟糕的建议。伟大的创始人会听取所有建议，然后迅速做出自己的决定。
Please note that this doesn’t mean doing everything intensely—that’s impossible. You have to pick the right things. As Paul Buchheit says, find ways to get 90% of the value with 10% of the effort. The market doesn’t care how hard you work—it only cares if you do the right things. 请注意，这并不意味着做每件事都要紧张——那是不可能的。你必须选择正确的东西。正如 Paul Buchheit 所说，找到用 10% 的努力获得 90% 的价值的方法。市场并不关心你工作有多努力——它只关心你是否做了正确的事情。
It’s very hard to be both obsessed with product quality and move very quickly. But it’s one of the most obvious tells of a great founder. 既注重产品质量又快速行动是非常困难的。但这是一位伟大创始人最明显的表现之一。
I have never, not once, seen a slow-moving founder be really successful. 我从来没有见过行动缓慢的创始人真正取得成功。
You are not different from other startups. You still have to stay focused and move fast. Companies building rockets and nuclear reactors still manage to do this. All failing companies have a pet explanation for why they are different and don’t have to move fast. 你和其他初创公司没有什么不同。你仍然必须保持专注并快速行动。制造火箭和核反应堆的公司仍然设法做到这一点。所有失败的公司都有一个自己喜欢的解释来解释为什么他们与众不同，并且不需要快速行动。
When you find something that works, keep going. Don’t get distracted and do something else. Don’t take your foot off the gas. 当你发现有用的东西时，继续前进。不要分心并做其他事情。不要把脚从油门上移开。
Don’t get caught up in early success—you didn’t get off to a promising start by going to lots of networking events and speaking on lots of panels. Startup founders who start to have initial success have a choice of two paths: either they keep doing what they’re doing, or they start spending a lot of time thinking about their “personal brand” and enjoying the status of being a founder. 不要沉迷于早期的成功——你并没有通过参加大量的社交活动并在大量的小组演讲中获得一个有希望的开始。开始取得初步成功的初创公司创始人有两条路可供选择：要么继续做他们正在做的事情，要么开始花大量时间思考他们的“个人品牌”并享受作为创始人的地位。
It’s hard to turn down the conferences and the press profiles—they feel good, and it’s especially hard to watch other founders in your space get the attention. But this won’t last long. Eventually the press figures out who is actually winning, and if your company is a real success, you’ll have more attention than you’ll ever want. The extreme cases—early-stage founders with their own publicists—that one would think only exist in TV shows actually exist in real life, and they almost always fail. 很难拒绝会议和媒体简介——它们让人感觉很好，尤其很难看到你所在领域的其他创始人受到关注。但这不会持续太久。最终，媒体会找出谁真正获胜，如果您的公司真正成功，您将获得比您想要的更多的关注。人们认为只存在于电视节目中的极端案例——早期创始人拥有自己的公关人员——实际上存在于现实生活中，而且他们几乎总是失败。
Focus and intensity will win out in the long run. (Charlie Rose once said that things get done in the world through a combination of focus and personal connections, and that’s always stuck with me.) 从长远来看，专注和强度将会获胜。 （查理·罗斯曾经说过，世界上的事情是通过专注和个人关系的结合来完成的，这一直困扰着我。）
Part IV: Execution 第四部分：执行Jobs of the CEO 首席执行官的职位
Earlier I mentioned that the only universal job description of the CEO is to make sure the company wins. Although that’s true, I wanted to talk a little more specifically about how a CEO should spend his or her time. 早些时候我提到过，首席执行官唯一通用的职责就是确保公司获胜。尽管这是事实，但我想更具体地谈谈首席执行官应该如何度过他或她的时间。
A CEO has to 1) set the vision and strategy for the company, 2) evangelize the company to everyone, 3) hire and manage the team, especially in areas where you yourself have gaps 4) raise money, and 5) set the execution quality bar. 首席执行官必须 1) 为公司设定愿景和战略，2) 向每个人宣传公司，3) 雇用和管理团队，特别是在您自己有差距的领域，4) 筹集资金，5) 设定执行力质量吧。
In addition to these, find whatever parts of the business you love the most, and stay engaged there. 除此之外，找到您最喜欢的业务部分，并保持参与其中。
As I mentioned at the beginning, it’s an intense job. If you are successful, it will take over your life to a degree you cannot imagine—the company will be on your mind all the time. Extreme focus and extreme intensity means it’s not the best choice for work-life balance. You can have one other big thing—your family, doing lots of triathlons, whatever—but probably not much more than that. You have to always be on, and there are a lot of decisions only you can make, no matter how good you get at delegation. 正如我在开头提到的，这是一项紧张的工作。如果你成功了，它会以你无法想象的程度占据你的生活——公司将一直在你的脑海中。极度专注和极度强度意味着它不是工作与生活平衡的最佳选择。你可以拥有另一件大事——你的家人、参加大量铁人三项比赛等等——但可能不会比这更多。你必须始终保持在线状态，并且无论你在授权方面做得有多好，都有很多决定只有你才能做出。
You should aim to be super responsive to your team and the outside world, always be clear on the strategy and priorities, show up to everything important, and execute quickly (especially when it comes to making decisions others are blocked on.) You should also adopt a “do whatever it takes” attitude—there will be plenty of unpleasant schleps. If the team sees you doing these things, they will do them too. 你的目标应该是对你的团队和外部世界做出超级反应，始终明确策略和优先事项，展示所有重要的事情，并快速执行（特别是在做出其他人受阻的决策时）。采取“不惜一切代价”的态度——会有很多不愉快的麻烦。如果团队看到你做这些事情，他们也会做。
Managing your own psychology is both really hard and really important. It’s become cliché at this point, but it’s really true—the emotional highs and lows are very intense, and if you don’t figure out how to stay somewhat level through them, you’re going to struggle. Being a CEO is lonely. It’s important to have relationships with other CEOs you can call when everything is melting down (one of the important accidental discoveries of YC was a way for founders to have peers.) 管理自己的心理非常困难，但也非常重要。在这一点上，这已经成为陈词滥调，但这是真的——情绪的高潮和低谷非常强烈，如果你不知道如何在其中保持一定的水平，你就会陷入困境。担任首席执行官是孤独的。当一切都崩溃时，与其他 CEO 建立联系非常重要（YC 的重要意外发现之一是创始人拥有同行的一种方式。）
A successful startup takes a very long time—certainly much longer than most founders think at the outset. You cannot treat it as an all-nighter. You have to eat well, sleep well, and exercise. You have to spend time with your family and friends. You also need to work in an area you’re actually passionate about—nothing else will sustain you for ten years. 一家成功的初创公司需要很长的时间——当然比大多数创始人一开始想象的要长得多。你不能把它当作通宵熬夜。你必须吃好、睡好、锻炼身体。你必须花时间与家人和朋友在一起。你还需要在一个你真正热爱的领域工作——没有什么可以支撑你十年。
Everything will feel broken all the time—the diversity and magnitude of the disasters will surprise you. Your job is to fix them with a smile on your face and reassure your team that it’ll all be ok. Usually things aren’t as bad as they seem, but sometimes they are in fact really bad. In any case, just keep going. Keep growing. 一切都会一直让人感觉支离破碎——灾难的多样性和严重性会让你大吃一惊。你的工作就是面带微笑地解决这些问题，并向你的团队保证一切都会好起来的。通常事情并不像看起来那么糟糕，但有时实际上真的很糟糕。无论如何，继续前进。持续增长。
The CEO doesn’t get to make excuses. Lots of bad and unfair things are going to happen. But don’t let yourself say, and certainly not to the team, “if only we had more money” or “if only we had another engineer”. Either figure out a way to make that happen, or figure out what to do without it. People who let themselves make a lot of excuses usually fail in general, and startup CEOs who do it almost always fail. Let yourself feel upset at the injustice for 1 minute, and then realize that it’s up to you to figure out a solution. Strive for people to say “X just somehow always gets things done” when talking about you. 首席执行官不能找借口。许多糟糕和不公平的事情将会发生。但不要让自己说，当然也不要对团队说，“如果我们有更多的钱就好了”或“如果我们有另一位工程师就好了”。要么找出一种方法来实现这一点，要么找出没有它该怎么办。那些给自己找很多借口的人通常都会失败，而这样做的初创公司首席执行官几乎总是会失败。让自己因不公正而感到沮丧一分钟，然后意识到需要由你来找出解决方案。努力让人们在谈论你时说“X 总能以某种方式把事情做好”。
No first-time founder knows what he or she is doing. To the degree you understand that, and ask for help, you’ll be better off. It’s worth the time investment to learn to become a good leader and manager. The best way to do this is to find a mentor—reading books doesn’t seem to work as well. 没有一个首次创始人知道他或她在做什么。只要您了解这一点并寻求帮助，您的情况就会更好。学习成为一名优秀的领导者和管理者是值得投入时间的。最好的方法就是找一位导师——读书似乎不太管用。
A surprising amount of our advice at YC is of the form “just ask them” or “just do it”. First-time founders think there must be some secret for when you need something from someone or you want to do some new thing. But again, startups are where tricks stop working. Just be direct, be willing to ask for what you want, and don’t be a jerk. 在 YC，我们提出的大量建议都是“只问他们”或“只管去做”的形式。首次创始人认为，当你需要某人提供某些东西或者你想做一些新事情时，一定有一些秘密。但同样，初创公司是技巧不起作用的地方。直接一点，愿意提出你想要的东西，不要表现得像个混蛋。
It’s important that you distort reality for others but not yourself. You have to convince other people that your company is primed to be the most important startup of the decade, but you yourself should be paranoid about everything that could go wrong. 重要的是，你要为别人而不是为你自己扭曲现实。你必须让其他人相信你的公司将成为十年来最重要的初创公司，但你自己应该对一切可能出错的事情保持偏执。
Be persistent. Most founders give up too quickly or move on to the next product too quickly. If things generally aren’t going well, figure out what the root cause of the problem is and make sure you address that. A huge part of being a successful startup CEO is not giving up (although you don’t want to be obstinate beyond all reason either—this is another apparent contradiction, and a hard judgment call to make.) 坚持不懈。大多数创始人放弃得太快，或者太快转向下一个产品。如果事情总体进展不顺利，请找出问题的根本原因并确保解决该问题。作为一名成功的初创公司首席执行官，很大一部分是不放弃（尽管你也不想毫无理由地固执——这是另一个明显的矛盾，也是一个很难做出判断的决定。）
Be optimistic. Although it’s possible that there is a great pessimistic CEO somewhere out in the world, I haven’t met him or her yet. A belief that the future will be better, and that the company will play an important role in making the future better, is important for the CEO to have and to infect the rest of the company with. This is easy in theory and hard in the practical reality of short-term challenges. Don’t lose sight of the long-term vision, and trust that the day-to-day challenges will someday be forgotten and replaced by memories of the year-to-year progress. 要乐观。尽管世界上的某个地方可能存在一位伟大的悲观首席执行官，但我还没有见过他或她。相信未来会更美好，公司将在让未来变得更美好的过程中发挥重要作用，这一信念对于首席执行官来说非常重要，并能感染公司的其他成员。这在理论上很容易，但在短期挑战的现实中却很困难。不要忽视长期愿景，并相信日复一日的挑战有一天会被遗忘，并被逐年进步的记忆所取代。
Among your most important jobs are defining the mission and defining the values. This can feel a little hokey, but it’s worth doing early on. Whatever you set at the beginning will usually still be in force years later, and as you grow, each new person needs to first buy in and then sell others on the mission and values of the company. So write your cultural values and mission down early. 您最重要的工作之一是定义使命和价值观。这可能感觉有点做作，但值得尽早做。无论你一开始设定的是什么，通常在几年后仍然有效，随着你的成长，每个新人都需要首先接受然后向其他人推销公司的使命和价值观。因此，请尽早写下您的文化价值观和使命。
Another cliché that I think is worth repeating: Building a company is somewhat like building a religion. If people don’t connect what they’re doing day-to-day with a higher purpose they care about, they will not do a great job. I think Airbnb has done the best job at this in the YC network, and I highly recommend taking a look at their cultural values. 我认为值得重复的另一个陈词滥调是：建立一家公司有点像建立一个宗教。如果人们不能将日常工作与他们关心的更高目标联系起来，他们就不会做好工作。我认为 Airbnb 在 YC 网络中在这方面做得最好，我强烈建议您了解一下他们的文化价值观。
One mistake that CEOs often make is to innovate in well-trodden areas of business instead of innovating in new products and solutions. For example, many founders think that they should spend their time discovering new ways to do HR, marketing, sales, financing, PR, etc. This is nearly always bad. Do what works in the well-established areas, and focus your creative energies on the product or service you’re building. 首席执行官经常犯的一个错误是在人们熟悉的业务领域进行创新，而不是在新产品和解决方案上进行创新。例如，许多创始人认为他们应该花时间探索人力资源、营销、销售、财务、公关等方面的新方法。这几乎总是不好的。做在成熟领域有效的事情，并将你的创造力集中在你正在构建的产品或服务上。
Hiring is one of your most important jobs and the key to building a great company (as opposed to a great product.) 招聘是您最重要的工作之一，也是建立一家伟大公司（而不是一个伟大产品）的关键。
My first piece of advice about hiring is don’t do it. The most successful companies we’ve worked with at YC have waited a relatively long time to start hiring employees. Employees are expensive. Employees add organizational complexity and communication overhead. There are things you can say to your cofounders that you cannot say with employees in the room. Employees also add inertia—it gets exponentially harder to change direction with more people on the team. Resist the urge to derive your self-worth from your number of employees. 我关于招聘的第一条建议是不要这样做。我们在 YC 合作过的最成功的公司都等了相对较长的时间才开始招聘员工。员工很贵。员工增加了组织的复杂性和沟通开销。有些话你可以对你的联合创始人说，但你不能对房间里的员工说。员工也会增加惯性——团队中的人越多，改变方向就会变得越困难。抵制从员工数量中获取自我价值的冲动。
The best people have a lot of opportunities. They want to join rocketships. If you have nothing, it’s hard to hire them. Once you’re obviously winning, they’ll want to come join you. 最优秀的人有很多机会。他们想加入火箭飞船。如果你什么都没有，就很难雇用他们。一旦你明显获胜，他们就会想加入你。
It’s worth repeating that great people have a lot of options, and you need great people to build a great company. Be generous with equity, trust, and responsibility. Be willing to go after people you don’t think you’ll be able to get. Remember that the kind of people you want to hire can start their own companies if they want. 值得重复的是，优秀的人才有很多选择，而你需要优秀的人才来建立一家优秀的公司。慷慨、公平、信任和责任。愿意去追求那些你认为你无法得到的人。请记住，您想雇用的人可以根据自己的意愿创办自己的公司。
When you are in recruiting mode (i.e., from when you get product-market fit to T-infinity), you should spend about 25% of your time on it. At least one founder, usually the CEO, needs to get great at recruiting. It’s most CEOs’ number one activity by time. Everyone says that CEOs should spend a lot of their time recruiting, but in practice, none but the best do. There’s probably something to that. 当你处于招聘模式时（即，从你的产品市场契合度到 T-infinity），你应该花大约 25% 的时间在这上面。至少有一位创始人（通常是首席执行官）需要擅长招聘。从时间上看，这是大多数首席执行官的首要活动。每个人都说首席执行官应该花大量时间进行招聘，但实际上，只有最优秀的人才会这么做。这可能是有原因的。
Don’t compromise on the quality of people you hire. Everyone knows this, and yet everyone compromises on this at some point during a desperate need. Everyone goes on to regret it, and it sometimes almost kills the company. Good and bad people are both infectious, and if you start with mediocre people, the average does not usually trend up. Companies that start off with mediocre early employees almost never recover. Trust your gut on people. If you have doubt, then the answer is no. 不要在你雇用的人员的质量上妥协。每个人都知道这一点，但每个人在迫切需要的时候都会在这一点上做出妥协。每个人都会后悔，有时甚至几乎毁了公司。好人和坏人都有传染性，如果你从平庸的人开始，平均值通常不会上升。早期员工平庸的公司几乎永远无法恢复。相信你的直觉。如果您有疑问，那么答案是否定的。
Do not hire chronically negative people. They do not fit what an early-stage startup needs—the rest of the world will be predicting your demise every day, and the company needs to be united internally in its belief to the contrary. 不要雇用长期消极的人。它们不符合早期初创公司的需求——世界其他地方每天都会预测你的灭亡，而公司需要在内部团结起来，坚信相反的信念。
Value aptitute over experience for almost all roles. Look for raw intelligence and a track record of getting things done. Look for people you like – you'll be spending a lot of time together and often in tense situations. For people you don't already know, try to work on a project together before they join full-time. 对于几乎所有的角色来说，都看重能力而不是经验。寻找原始情报和完成工作的记录。寻找你喜欢的人——你们会花很多时间在一起，而且经常处于紧张的情况下。对于那些你还不认识的人，在他们全职加入之前尝试一起做一个项目。
Invest in becoming a good manager. This is hard for most founders, and it’s definitely counterintuitive. But it’s important to get good at this. Find mentors that can help you here. If you do not get good at this, you will lose employees quickly, and if you don’t retain employees, you can be the best recruiter in the world and it still won’t matter. Most of the principles on being a good manager are well-covered, but the one that I never see discussed is “don’t go into hero mode”. Most first-time managers fall victim to this at some point and try to do everything themselves, and become unavailable to their staff. It usually ends in a meltdown. Resist all temptation to switch into this mode, and be willing to be late on projects to have a well-functioning team. 投资成为一名优秀的管理者。这对大多数创始人来说很难，而且绝对是违反直觉的。但擅长这一点很重要。在这里寻找可以帮助您的导师。如果你不擅长这一点，你很快就会失去员工，如果你不留住员工，即使你是世界上最好的招聘人员，也没关系。成为一名优秀管理者的大部分原则都得到了很好的阐述，但我从未看到讨论过“不要进入英雄模式”。大多数初次上任的经理都会在某些时候成为这种情况的受害者，并试图自己做所有事情，而让员工无法接受。它通常以崩溃告终。抵制所有切换到这种模式的诱惑，并愿意在项目上迟到以拥有一支运作良好的团队。
Speaking of managing, try hard to have everyone in the same office. For some reason, startups always compromise on this. But nearly all of the most successful startups started off all together. I think remote work can work well for larger companies but it has not been a recipe for massive success for startups. 说到管理，尽量让每个人都在同一个办公室。由于某种原因，初创公司总是在这一点上做出妥协。但几乎所有最成功的初创公司都是一起起步的。我认为远程工作对于大公司来说效果很好，但它并不是初创公司取得巨大成功的秘诀。
Finally, fire quickly. Everyone knows this in principle and no one does it. But I feel I should say it anyway. Also, fire people who are toxic to the culture no matter how good they are at what they do. Culture is defined by who you hire, fire, and promote. 最后，快速开火。原则上每个人都知道这一点，但没有人这样做。但我觉得无论如何我都应该说出来。此外，解雇那些对文化有害的人，无论他们做得有多好。文化是由你雇用、解雇和提拔的人来定义的。
A quick word about competitors: competitors are a startup ghost story. First-time founders think they are what kill 99% of startups. But 99% of startups die from suicide, not murder. Worry instead about all of your internal problems. If you fail, it will very likely be because you failed to make a great product and/or failed to make a great company. 关于竞争对手的简单介绍：竞争对手是初创公司的鬼故事。首次创始人认为他们是杀死 99% 初创公司的原因。但 99% 的初创公司死于自杀，而不是谋杀。相反，担心你所有的内部问题。如果你失败了，很可能是因为你未能创造出伟大的产品和/或未能创造出伟大的公司。
99% of the time, you should ignore competitors. Especially ignore them when they raise a lot of money or make a lot of noise in the press. Do not worry about a competitor until they are beating you with a real, shipped product. Press releases are easier to write than code, which is easier still than making a great product. In the words of Henry Ford: "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." 99%的时候，你应该忽略竞争对手。尤其是当他们筹集大量资金或在媒体上发出很大噪音时，不要理睬他们。不要担心竞争对手，直到他们用真正的、已发货的产品击败您。编写新闻稿比编写代码更容易，而编写代码又比制作出色的产品更容易。用亨利·福特的话来说：“令人畏惧的竞争对手是那些根本不关心你，而是不断让自己的生意变得更好的人。”
Every giant company has faced worse competitive threats than what you are facing now when they were small, and they all came out ok. There is always a counter-move. 每个大公司在小的时候都面临着比现在更严重的竞争威胁，但结果都还不错。总是有反动的。
Oh yes, making money. You need to figure out how to do that. 哦，是的，赚钱。你需要弄清楚如何做到这一点。
The short version of this is that you have to get people to pay you more money than it costs you to deliver your good/service. For some reason, people always forget to take into account the part about how much it costs to deliver it. 简而言之，你必须让人们付给你的钱比你提供商品/服务的成本更多。由于某种原因，人们总是忘记考虑交付成本的部分。
If you have a free product, don’t plan to grow by buying users. That’s really hard for ad-supported businesses. You need to make something people share with their friends. 如果你有免费产品，就不要计划通过购买用户来增长。这对于广告支持的企业来说确实很难。你需要制作一些人们与朋友分享的东西。
If you have a paid product with less than a $500 customer lifetime value (LTV), you generally cannot afford sales. Experiment with different user acquisition methods like SEO/SEM, ads, mailings, etc., but try to repay your customer acquisition cost (CAC) in 3 months. 如果您的付费产品的客户生命周期价值 (LTV) 低于 500 美元，您通常无法承担销售费用。尝试不同的用户获取方法，如 SEO/SEM、广告、邮件等，但尝试在 3 个月内偿还客户获取成本 (CAC)。
If you have a paid product with more than a $500 LTV (net to you) you generally can afford direct sales. Try selling the product yourself first to learn what works. Hacking Sales is a useful book to read. 如果您的付费产品的 LTV（净值）超过 500 美元，您通常可以承担直销费用。首先尝试自己销售产品，了解哪些方法有效。 《黑客销售》是一本值得一读的有用书。
In any case, try to get to “ramen profitability”—i.e., make enough money so that the founders can live on ramen—as quickly as you can. When you get here, you control your own destiny and are no longer at the whims of investors and financial markets. 无论如何，要尽快实现“拉面盈利”——即赚到足够的钱，让创始人可以靠拉面为生。当你到达这里时，你就掌控了自己的命运，不再受投资者和金融市场的影响。
Watch your cash flow obsessively. Although it sounds unbelievable, we’ve seen founders run out of money without being aware it was happening a number of times (and read Paul Graham’s essay). 密切关注你的现金流。虽然这听起来令人难以置信，但我们已经多次看到创始人在没有意识到的情况下耗尽了资金（并阅读保罗·格雷厄姆的文章）。
Most startups raise money at some point. 大多数初创公司都会在某个时候筹集资金。
You should raise money when you need it or when it’s available on good terms. Be careful not to lose your sense of frugality or to start solving problems by throwing money at them. Not having enough money can be bad, but having too much money is almost always bad. 您应该在需要时或条件良好时筹集资金。小心不要失去节俭意识，或者开始通过花钱来解决问题。没有足够的钱可能是坏事，但拥有太多的钱几乎总是坏事。
The secret to successfully raising money is to have a good company. All of the other stuff founders do to try to over-optimize the process probably only matters about 5% of the time. Investors are looking for companies that are going to be really successful whether or not they invest, but that can grow faster with outside capital. The “really successful” part is important—because investors’ returns are dominated by the big successes, if an investor believes you have a 100% chance of creating a $10 million company but almost no chance of building a larger company, he/she will still probably not invest even at a very low valuation. Always explain why you could be a huge success. 成功筹集资金的秘诀是拥有一家好的公司。创始人为过度优化流程而做的所有其他事情可能只在大约 5% 的情况下起作用。投资者正在寻找无论是否投资都会真正成功的公司，而且这些公司可以利用外部资本实现更快的增长。 “真正成功”的部分很重要——因为投资者的回报是由巨大的成功决定的，如果投资者相信你有100%的机会创建一家价值1000万美元的公司，但几乎没有机会创建一家更大的公司，他/她就会即使估值非常低，也可能不会投资。总是解释为什么你可以取得巨大的成功。
Investors are driven by the dual fears of missing the next Google, and fear of losing money on something that in retrospect looks obviously stupid. (For the best companies, they fear both at the same time.) 投资者既担心错过下一个谷歌，又害怕在回想起来显然愚蠢的事情上赔钱。 （对于最好的公司来说，他们同时担心这两个问题。）
It is a bad idea to try to raise money when your company isn’t in good enough shape to attract capital. You will burn reputation and waste time. 当你的公司状况不足以吸引资本时，试图筹集资金是一个坏主意。你会烧毁名誉并浪费时间。
Don’t get demoralized if you struggle to raise money. Many of the best companies have struggled with this, because the best companies so often look bad at the beginning (and they nearly always look unfashionable.) When investors tell you no, believe the no but not the reason. And remember that anything but “yes” is a “no”—investors have a wonderful ability to say “no” in a way that sounds like “maybe yes”. 如果您很难筹集资金，请不要灰心丧气。许多最好的公司都在这个问题上苦苦挣扎，因为最好的公司一开始往往看起来很糟糕（而且它们几乎总是看起来不时尚）。当投资者告诉你“不”时，相信“不”，但不要相信原因。请记住，除了“是”之外的任何事情都是“不”——投资者有一种奇妙的能力，以听起来像“也许是”的方式说“不”。
It’s really important to have fundraising conversations in parallel—don’t go down a list of your favorite investors sequentially. The way to get investors to act is fear of other investors taking away their opportunity. 并行进行融资对话非常重要——不要按顺序列出你最喜欢的投资者的名单。让投资者采取行动的方法是担心其他投资者夺走他们的机会。
View fundraising as a necessary evil and something to get done as quickly as possible. Some founders fall in love with fundraising; this is always bad. It’s best to have just one founder do it so the company doesn’t grind to a halt. 将筹款视为一种必要的罪恶，并且应该尽快完成。一些创始人热衷于筹款；另一些创始人则热衷于融资。这总是不好的。最好只有一位创始人来做这件事，这样公司就不会陷入停滞。
Remember that most VCs don’t know much about most industries. Metrics are always the most convincing. 请记住，大多数风险投资家对大多数行业了解不多。指标永远是最有说服力的。
It’s beginning to change, but most investors (Y Combinator being a notable exception) unfortunately still require introductions from people you both know to take you seriously. 这种情况已经开始发生变化，但不幸的是，大多数投资者（Y Combinator 是一个明显的例外）仍然需要你们都认识的人的介绍才能认真对待你。
Insist on clean terms (complicated terms compound and get worse each round) but don’t over-optimize, especially on valuation. Valuation is something quantitative to compete on, and so founders love to compete for the highest valuation. But intermediate valuations don’t matter much. 坚持干净的条款（复杂的条款会复合，每一轮都会变得更糟），但不要过度优化，尤其是在估值方面。估值是一种定量的竞争手段，因此创始人喜欢争夺最高估值。但中间估值并不重要。
The first check is the hardest to get, so focus your energies on getting that, which usually means focusing your attention on whoever loves you the most. Always have multiple plans, one of which is not raising anything, and be flexible depending on interest—if you can put more money to good use, and it’s available on reasonable terms, be open to taking it. 第一张支票是最难得到的，所以集中你的精力去得到它，这通常意味着把你的注意力集中在最爱你的人身上。总是有多个计划，其中之一是不筹集任何资金，并根据兴趣灵活地使用 - 如果你可以充分利用更多的钱，并且可以以合理的条件获得，那么就可以接受它。
An important key to being good at pitching is to make your story as clear and easy to understand as possible. Of course, the most important key is to actually have a good company. There are lots of thoughts about what to include in a pitch, but at a minimum you need to have: mission, problem, product/service, business model, team, market and market growth rate, and financials. 善于推销的一个重要关键是让你的故事尽可能清晰易懂。当然，最重要的关键还是要有一个好的公司。关于推销中要包含的内容有很多想法，但至少你需要有：使命、问题、产品/服务、商业模式、团队、市场和市场增长率以及财务状况。
Remember that the bar for each round of funding is much higher. If you got away with just being a compelling presenter for your seed round, don’t be surprised when it doesn’t work for your Series A. 请记住，每轮融资的门槛要高得多。如果你只是在种子轮中成为一名引人注目的演讲者，那么当它不适用于你的 A 轮融资时，请不要感到惊讶。
Good investors really do add a lot of value. Bad investors detract a lot. Most investors fall in the middle and neither add nor detract. Investors that only invest a small amount usually don’t do anything for you (i.e., beware party rounds). 优秀的投资者确实会增加很多价值。糟糕的投资者会分散很多注意力。大多数投资者处于中间位置，既不增也不减。仅投资少量资金的投资者通常不会为您做任何事情（即小心派对回合）。
Great board members are one of the best outside forcing functions for a company other than users, and outside forcing functions are worth more than most founders think. Be willing to accept a lower valuation to get a great board member who is willing to be very involved. 对于公司来说，除了用户之外，优秀的董事会成员是最好的外部强制功能之一，而外部强制功能的价值超出了大多数创始人的想象。愿意接受较低的估值，以获得愿意积极参与的优秀董事会成员。
I think this essay by Paul Graham is the best thing out there on fundraising. 我认为保罗·格雷厄姆的这篇文章是关于筹款的最好的文章。
Remember that at least a thousand people have every great idea. One of them actually becomes successful. The difference comes down to execution. It’s a grind, and everyone wishes there were some other way to transform “idea” into “success”, but no one has figured it out yet. 请记住，每一个好主意至少有一千人有。其中一位实际上取得了成功。差异归结于执行。这是一件苦差事，每个人都希望有其他方法可以将“想法”转化为“成功”，但还没有人想出办法。
So all you need is a great idea, a great team, a great product, and great execution. So easy! ;) 因此，您所需要的只是一个伟大的想法、一个伟大的团队、一个伟大的产品和伟大的执行力。太简单！ ;)
Thanks to Paul Buchheit, Erica Carpenter, Brian Chesky, Adam D’Angelo, Drew Houston, Justin Kan, Matt Krisiloff, Aaron Levie, Gabriel Leydon, Jessica Livingston, Dustin Moskovitz, David Rusenko and Colleen Taylor for contributing thoughts to this. 感谢 Paul Buchheit、Erica Carpenter、Brian Chesky、Adam D’Angelo、Drew Houston、Justin Kan、Matt Krisiloff、Aaron Levie、Gabriel Leydon、Jessica Livingston、Dustin Moskovitz、David Rusenko 和 Colleen Taylor 对此提出的想法。
