离开硅谷11年后总结出的4条经验教训

作者：小昭，英国top10名校毕业，玩过音乐，在硅谷搞过互联网，目前回国创业中，本文来自作者投稿！ 来自：http://seekflare.com/post/45

Opportunity, success, reputation, and relationships in tech

技术领域的机会，成功，声誉和关系

 

Silicon Valley is a magical place with some strange norms—perhaps because companies, careers, and fortunes rise and fall with such astounding speed. Here are a few of the quirky, brutal, and hopefully useful lessons I learned during my 11 years living and working in the technology industry’s epicenter.

硅谷是一个神奇的地方，有一些奇怪的规范 - 也许是因为公司、事业和财富以惊人的速度兴衰更迭。以下是我在技术行业中心生活和工作的11年中学到的一些奇怪，粗鲁和希望能对你有帮助的经验教训。

 

1. There’s opportunity in what others undervalue

有些机会是被人低估了

There’s a rigid hierarchy of functions in Silicon Valley. At the top of the pyramid sit the entrepreneurs, the engineers, the venture capitalists. The closer you are to building or funding, the more respect you get—which probably makes sense. But when I began my career in tech, I wasn’t prepared for how little respect is left over for other functions: recruiting, HR, marketing, communications, etc. There’s an assumption that truly great products market themselves or that truly great companies are magnets for top talent. To work in these superfluous fields is either a sign that your company must compensate for its lack of greatness or that you’re but an intermediary for the inevitable.

硅谷的职能层次严格。在金字塔的顶端坐着企业家，工程师和风险资本家。你越接近去构建或者投资这个行业建，你得到的尊重就越多 - 这可能是有道理的。但是，当我开始从事科技行业时，我并没有准备好人们对其他职能工种微博的尊重：招聘，人力资源，市场营销，传播等。有一种假设，即真正伟大的产品可以自我推销自己，或真正伟大的公司是顶级人才的吸铁石。在这些看似多余的领域里工作，要么是一个迹象，表明你的公司必须为其不是那么伟大而做出补偿，或者你只是处在不可或缺到可有可无的中间地带。

Of course, not everyone thinks like this. And that’s where the upside to this warped view comes in. At the company level, it’s quite clear you’ll need to out-innovate your competitors by building a better product. But what about the less obvious vectors for competition? With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see where investments in culture have paid off exceptionally well (and where the lack thereof has halted otherwise unstoppable companies). In nascent industries—especially highly regulated ones—educating customers and stakeholders about your product and market may be as core to survival as the product itself.

This opportunity for differentiation also exists at the individual level.

当然，不是每个人都这么想。这就是这种扭曲观点的积极的一面。从公司层面来讲，很明显你需要通过构建更好的产品来超越创新竞争对手。但是那些对竞争来说不那么明显的方面呢？事后看来，人们很容易看到去投资一个公司的文化，在哪些方面得到了非常好的回报（以及不重视公司文化，会如何制约和阻碍了貌似战无不胜的公司的发展）。在新兴行业 - 特别是受到高度监管的行业 - 向客户和利益相关者去宣传您的产品和市场，这些花费的营销宣传工作，很可能是才是产品本身的生存核心。

这种差异化的竞争机会也存在于个人层面。

It used to bother me that people made certain assumptions about me based on my profession. I craved validation from my peers and resented the stereotypes that came along with PR. But the longer I’ve been in this field, the more respect I have for how nuanced, impactful, and essential our work is, and consequently, I’m bothered less by other people’s projections. An unfortunate consequence of the hierarchy of functions is that it’s harder to attract top talent to the layers we undervalue, which hurts the industry as a whole. But, as an individual, it means that it’s probably more feasible to distinguish yourself as one of the top recruiters or marketers than it is to become a top engineer in a world where that is the ultimate prize.

过去常常令我困扰的是，人们根据我的专业对我做出了某些假设。我渴望得到同行的认可，并对公共宣传里营造的关于我所从事的职业的刻板印象感到不满。但是，我在这个领域的时间越长，我对工作中存在的细微差别，影响力和重要性的认识也就越多，因此，其他人的看法不是那么太能左右我了。公司里职能等级的一个令人遗憾的结果是，对于被我们低估的职能，我们很难招到顶尖的人才，这对整个行业造成了伤害。但是，作为我个人，这意味着自己能在顶级招聘人员或顶级营销人员中脱颖而出的几率，可能要比在在一个所有荣誉最终都会归功于工程师的这样一个职能领域多的多。

 

2. There’s nothing more dangerous early in your career than success

在你职业生涯的早期，没有什么比成功更危险

 

One of our industry’s oft-repeated (and oft-abused) sayings is, “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t ask what seat. You just get on.” It’s what Google’s then-CEO Eric Schmidt told Sheryl Sandberg to convince her to come onboard in 2001, and I’ve always appreciated the humility embedded in this perspective (for the seat-taker, that is). But we often fail to dwell on the inevitable follow-up question: If you took a seat on that rocket ship, and it was indeed a rocket ship, how do you know if you made any meaningful impact on its speed or trajectory?

我们经常重复（并且经常被滥用）的说法之一是，“如果你在火箭飞船上获得一个座位，你不用问座位是哪一个。你只要坐上就好了。“这就是谷歌当时的首席执行官埃里克施密特告诉Sheryl Sandberg（雪莉·桑德伯格，现任Facebook首席运营官），说服她2001年加入谷歌时说的话，我一直很欣赏这种观点中的谦逊（对于座位接受者来说）。但是我们经常没有详细讨论不可避免的后续问题：如果你在那艘火箭飞船上随便占了个座，而它确实是一艘火箭飞船，你怎么知道你是否对它飞行的速度或轨迹产生了任何有意义的影响？

Success is one of the most dangerous things that can happen to you early in your career. When you’re on a so-called rocket ship, you’re likely drinking from the fire hose daily, making things up as you go along. If you’re given responsibilities that exceed your experience, you’re probably plagued by self-doubt. Then, at some point, if you’re lucky, the company you’ve helped build is declared a success. And those many bumps along the way are ironed out into a perfect narrative. Perhaps you’re even tempted to believe it.

成功是你职业生涯早期可能发生的最危险的事情之一。当你在一艘所谓的火箭飞船上时，你很可能每天都从火箭上配备的消防水管中喝水，每天做着例行的事情。如果分配你的责任超过了你的经验，你还可能会被自我怀疑所苦恼。然后，突然有一天，如果你足够幸运，你所在的公司宣布成功（上市）了。而那些沿途的许多颠簸，因为最后成功的光晕，都显的不适那么重要而被忽视了。也许你甚至相信你自己也走向了成功。（这是不对的）

 

Some reputations are built on much less than you would assume.

一些声誉建立在比你想象的要少得多的基础上。

 

In Silicon Valley, myths about people and companies tend to beat out carefully considered case studies. Maybe it’s because so much creation happens when companies are still private and therefore less observable. Maybe it’s because there are so many new and invisible forces at work (emerging technology trends, cultural and behavioral shifts) in a company’s meteoric rise that mythology is the only way we can make sense of it. Maybe it’s because we love a good story—and a good creation story most of all.

在硅谷，关于人和公司的神话往往会比那些精心编写的案例分析更精彩。也许是因为当公司仍处于私有状态时，如此多的创造力不易被发觉。也许是因为在公司的迅速崛起过程中，有许多新的和无形的力量在起作用（新兴的技术趋势，文化和行为的变化），而神话便成为我们理解它的唯一方式。也许仅仅是是因为我们喜欢一个好故事 - 而且最重要的是一个好的原创故事。

It’s a balancing act to allow yourself pride in what you’ve helped accomplish without getting caught up in your own personal mythology. Be grateful for the tough times: They will keep you anchored during headier cycles. If you battle insecurity and anxiety on the regular (raises hand), find solace in the fact that you’re probably working harder than you would if you were capable of believing that it was your seat that made all the difference.

这是一种平衡的艺术，让自己为自己所帮助的事情感到自豪，但并不会陷入自我为中心的个人神话中。我们要对那些艰难的时刻表示感激：他们会让你在骄傲的周期中保持稳定。如果你经常会与不安全和焦虑作斗争（会的请举手），如果想安慰自己，你可以这么想：如果你有能力相信你的座位会对火箭飞行产生重大影响，那么你可能会比你现在工作更努力。

 

3. Some reputations are built on surprisingly little

一些声誉建立在极少的基础上

 

This is going to seem random, but bear with me: In the 1999 rom-com Never Been Kissed, Drew Barrymore’s character, Josie, is a reporter who goes undercover as a high school student to write about the “cool” high school crowd. But there’s just one problem: She’s super uncool, so she can’t get anywhere near them. Then her naturally cool younger brother decides to relive his high school glory days and salvages her assignment by convincing the cool kids that Josie is, in fact, quite cool. “All you need is for one person to think you’re cool,” he tells her. “And you’re in.”

这似乎有不搭界，但请耐心听我说：在1999年上映的浪漫喜剧电影《一吻定江山》中，Drew Barrymore饰演的角色Josie是一名记者，她作为一名高中学生卧底想去描写高中里那些“酷”的学生群体。但是只有一个问题：她自己非常不酷，所以她无法靠近他们。然后，她自己天然就很酷的弟弟，决定重温他的高中荣耀时代，通过去说服那些很酷的孩子，让他们觉得Josie实际上非常酷，来帮助姐姐挽救她的任务。 “你只需要一个人认为你很酷，”他告诉她, “你就成功了。”

Silicon Valley can feel a little like high school—in many ways, but especially when it comes to people’s reputations. I’m regularly shocked by how much just one person declaring someone a “rockstar” can open doors and even change the trajectory of a career. And if the person doing the declaring is particularly influential, other people will repeat their pronouncement as a given. The speed and opacity of startup trajectories make it impossible to really know how impactful someone was (how to separate the seat from the rocket ship), so personal endorsements carry a tremendous amount of weight. Which means that some reputations are built on much less than you would assume.

硅谷在许多方面可能会感觉有点像是在高中，尤其是在确立人们的声誉方面。我经常感到震惊的是，一旦一个人宣称某人是“摇滚明星”的时候，那整个就可以为他敞开，甚至可以帮他改变整个行业对他的看法。如果刚好宣布他是摇滚明星的这个人特别有影响力，那么其他人就会跟着重复这个结论。初创企业发展的速度和不透明的发展轨迹，使得人们无法真正了解某人是多么有影响力（如何将座椅与火箭飞船两者之间的影响力区分清楚），因此个人贡献被过分高估。这也从反向说明，一些人的声誉和名望，其实是建立在了比你想象的要少得多的基础上。

This is troubling, especially because influential people tend to skew white and male, as do their networks, which only reinforces existing power structures. But it’s also an incredible opportunity to elevate deserving but underappreciated and underrepresented people—especially if you yourself are influential. I doubt many people know how much weight their words carry.

这是令人不安的，尤其是当那些有影响力说话有份量的人往往是白人和男性的时候。他们的社交圈层也是如此，这只会强化现有的权力结构。但这也是一个令人难以置信的机会，可以提升那些值得、但却不被欣赏不被重视的人群 - 特别是如果你自己有影响力的话。我怀疑一些人是否知道自己的分量有多重。

Of course, if you’re not accustomed to wielding this power—or asking for it to be wielded on your behalf—it can feel pretty uncomfortable. Women in particular have a harder time transitioning from the personal and emotional to the transactional in their relationships. My female friends and I have discussed this extensively and have even experimented with a “favor swap” event where the whole point is to get transactional. Maybe this is what Lean In Circles should have been all along—lead with the favors, not the feelings.

当然，如果你不习惯去使用这种影响力 - 或者你想让其他人代劳 – 你就会觉得这样做非常不舒服。特别是女性，女性在关系中更难以从个人和情感过渡到交易。我的女性朋友和我已经广泛得讨论了这个问题，甚至尝试过“利益互换”，其中重点是获得交易。也许这就是“简洁人际交往”一直以来的优势，用利益驱使，而不是感情驱使。

 

4. Your former co-workers are your rocks, so keep them close

你以前的同事是你的基石，所以要与他们拉近关系

 

This one is simple, but important. We all know how critical it is to build strong relationships inside a company, but it wasn’t until I moved on from my first startup job that I realized how incredibly valuable co-worker relationships become after you leave. After years together in the trenches, former co-workers know your strengths and can call you on your bullshit. And once you’re no longer co-workers, all those pesky work-related complications and politics disappear.Your non-co-worker friends will of course cheer you on, but if you’re in a rut professionally or trying to figure out if you’re the one being difficult in a dysfunctional work relationship, no one can help you troubleshoot like your former colleagues. Same if you need a substantive ego boost. And because your relationship started in a work context, it’s also much easier to be transactional, whether that means asking for intros, references, funding, or feedback.

这个很简单，但很重要。我们都知道在公司内部建立牢固的关系是多么重要，但直到我从第一份创业工作开始，我才意识到，在你离开公司后，同事关系变得非常有价值。经过多年战壕中的共同努力，以前的同事都知道你的优势，可以打电话给你。因为一旦你们不再是同事了，那之前所有那些讨厌的和工作相关的复杂关系和公司政治就会消失。你的非同事朋友当然会为你加油，但是如果你在职业上处于低谷，试图想弄清楚自己是不是一个在一段在机能失调的工作关系中很难应付的人，这个时候，没有人可以像你的前同事那样，帮助过你排除这些困惑。相同的情形也会发生在当你需要一个实质性的自我提升的时候。因为你的关系始于工作环境，所以相互交换也更容易，不管是向前同事求助帮着做引荐，面试回访，募集资金或得到各种反馈意见。

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