YC about StartUp
我最近一直在思考这样一个问题：那些非常成功的公司在刚起步的时候都是怎么做的？从我的个人经验出发，我列出了成功公司的创始人所具备的十多个特征。当然肯定有很多例外。然而很多最终没有成功的创业公司一开始也做了这些事情，我想可能是行动与公司模式匹配度上的问题。
他们在产品品质或者用户体验上面几乎到了痴迷的程度——他们在细节上花了大量的时间，而有些细节乍一看似乎没有那么重要。如果产品的某个部分有一点小问题，或者用户有一个不好的体验，这些公司的创始人就感觉是自己的身体在隐隐作痛。虽然他们坚信产品重在尽早推出和迭代，但他们一般不会推出一个蹩脚的东西。（当然，这不是慢悠悠发布产品的借口，不过，有可能的是，你为了发布产品，花的时间是不是太长了？）
此外，他们不会在创始人和用户之间安插任何人。这些公司的创始人通常亲自做销售和客户支持的工作。
他们可以用几个清晰的字眼来说明公司的愿景。这与有些公司需要数个复杂的句子来说明形成鲜明的对比，而复杂的说明似乎从来没有起到很好的效果。同时，他们可以有条不紊的解释为什么他们将会成功，即使其他人在遇到某些问题后惨遭失败；他们对市场有着敏锐的洞察力，并相信他们会有一个相当不错的市场。
更泛点说，他们的沟通能力也相当不错。
他们往往很早就有赚钱的能力。通常只要他们获得了第一个用户，就能产生收益。
他们会做一些核心用户真正喜爱的东西。Paul Buchheit是我所知道的第一个提出这个观点的人，确实有道理。成功的初创公司几乎总是先从用户喜爱的产品作为最初的创业核心，然后使用户对他们的产品产生依赖，再逐渐发展壮大。通常经验性地以大多数人的喜好为出发点制定产品战略都不会起到很好的作用。
他们有组织地成长。他们对于大的合作伙伴关系一般都持怀疑态度，并尽可能在较小程度上依靠公关。他们当然不会有大型新闻发布会来推出其创业项目。平庸的创业者才会依赖于大型公关来帮他们解答自己的成长历程。
他们专注于成长。创始人们对用户和收益的数字了然于胸，当你问他们的时候，他们可以脱口而出。同时，他们会设定下一星期，下一个月和下一年的目标。
他们会在企业发展及未来的战略之间做好平衡。他们有明确的计划，并且很清楚自己要做的是什么。但在那一刻，他们更注重的是计划的执行，而不是制定好几年的战略计划。
这一特点还可以从第一个创业项目的规模来体现。你不可能从零基础就直接到一个大规模项目，你必须先从一个不会太大，但也不会太小的项目开始。他们似乎就有一种与生俱来的天赋，做出规模合适的项目。
他们做的事情，最初都不起眼。 Paul Graham 已经讨论过这一点。最出色的创业者通常能把小事情做得很大。
他们善于针对事情的轻重缓急安排优先次序。随便哪一天可能有100件事情要处理。那些真正成功的创业者在这方面称的上坚决，他们要确保每天优先完成的两到三个重点工作（优先级的判断也当然也是必须的），并忽略其他项目。
他们性格坚韧、冷静。那些成功公司的创始人都有种坚韧不拔，处事冷静的品格。每一次运作遭遇困难濒临倒闭，有时甚至一天之内发生数次这种情形，他们应对这种情况就像是掏出一杆枪射击坏人一样，从来不会失去他们的理智。
坚韧的品格是可以挖掘和养成的，我见过一些一开始并不那么坚强的创始人，后来很快就练就了这种品质。
他们对人才非常痴迷。创始人对自己团队的质量引以为傲，并不惜一切代价吸引人才加盟。就像人们说的一样，他们只希望雇用最好的人，而最出色的创业者在这一点上丝毫不能妥协。如果他们在聘用人才上犯了错误，他们会马上更正。
他们招聘过程非常缓慢。为招人而招人的话， 他们压根兴奋不起来。
当然了，这也侧面说明了他们对公司文化的重视程度。
他们会控制开支。除了在招聘上很慢，他们在起步的时候都非常节俭。有趣的是，那些不这么做的公司（通常都失败了）总是理直气壮地说：“我们在构想一个伟大的蓝图”。
在一切都运行妥当之后，他们有时也会增加投入，但是只花在真正重要的事情上面。
他们有一种不介意什么事都自己干的态度。在创业过程中会有一些枯燥乏味的事情，平庸的创业者通过雇人来做自己不想做的事情，而出色的创业者则会做任何他们认为是对公司有利的事情，即使他们不喜欢做。
创始人都很友好。当然并非个个如此，但我认识的最成功的创始人都比普通人还更友好些。作为创始人的他们，坚韧、有竞争力，有时也称的上残忍，但总的来说，他们都很友好。
他们对假装创建一家公司没有兴趣。他们关心的是成功，而不是“看起来成功”。他们不会因为有一个公司的实体而感到兴奋，他们不会花很多时间与律师或会计师会面，或进行社交活动或其他类似的事情。他们想赢，但不在意他们看起来怎么样。
一个极为重要的原因是，他们愿意上手去做那些看似微不足道的事情，比如创办一个网站，让你能在别人家的气垫床上过夜——Airbnb就是这么来的。最好的点子在刚起步的时候，大都备受质疑。而如果你注重表象甚于本质，你就会在意别人是否会嘲笑你。两个选择：一是做一家会遭人嘲笑，但增强迅猛的公司；二是呆在像模像样的漂亮办公室里，但公司的增长曲线是那么的平缓。你要怎么选？
他们对细小的事情也一丝不苟。在平庸的创业者在夸夸其谈其宏伟计划的时候，优秀的创业者可能正在做一些看起来很小的事情，而且他们可以快速的完成这些事情。你每次跟他们谈话的时候，他们可能已经完成了一些新的东西。即使他们正在做一个大项目，他们也是一个一个小模块地逐个攻破，并最后取得大的突破。他们永远不会消失了一年，什么也没干，然后突然间就完成了一个大项目。所以他们是值得信赖的，如果他们告诉你，他们想做点什么，就一定会去做。
他们会迅速采取行动。对于一切事情，他们会迅速做出决定，对电子邮件也都迅速回复。这是优秀的创业者与平庸的创业者之间最显着的区别之一。优秀的创业者都是行动机器。
How To Be Successful
I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off wanting the former and end up wanting the latter.
Here are 13 thoughts about how to achieve such outlier success. Everything here is easier to do once you’ve already reached a baseline degree of success (through privilege or effort) and want to put in the work to turn that into outlier success. [1] But much of it applies to anyone.
- Compound yourself
Compounding is magic. Look for it everywhere. Exponential curves are the key to wealth generation.
A medium-sized business that grows 50% in value every year becomes huge in a very short amount of time. Few businesses in the world have true network effects and extreme scalability. But with technology, more and more will. It’s worth a lot of effort to find them and create them.
You also want to be an exponential curve yourself—you should aim for your life to follow an ever-increasing up-and-to-the-right trajectory. It’s important to move towards a career that has a compounding effect—most careers progress fairly linearly.
You don't want to be in a career where people who have been doing it for two years can be as effective as people who have been doing it for twenty—your rate of learning should always be high. As your career progresses, each unit of work you do should generate more and more results. There are many ways to get this leverage, such as capital, technology, brand, network effects, and managing people.
It’s useful to focus on adding another zero to whatever you define as your success metric—money, status, impact on the world, or whatever. I am willing to take as much time as needed between projects to find my next thing. But I always want it to be a project that, if successful, will make the rest of my career look like a footnote.
Most people get bogged down in linear opportunities. Be willing to let small opportunities go to focus on potential step changes.
I think the biggest competitive advantage in business—either for a company or for an individual’s career—is long-term thinking with a broad view of how different systems in the world are going to come together. One of the notable aspects of compound growth is that the furthest out years are the most important. In a world where almost no one takes a truly long-term view, the market richly rewards those who do.
Trust the exponential, be patient, and be pleasantly surprised.
- Have almost too much self-belief
Self-belief is immensely powerful. The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion.
Cultivate this early. As you get more data points that your judgment is good and you can consistently deliver results, trust yourself more.
If you don’t believe in yourself, it’s hard to let yourself have contrarian ideas about the future. But this is where most value gets created.
I remember when Elon Musk took me on a tour of the SpaceX factory many years ago. He talked in detail about manufacturing every part of the rocket, but the thing that sticks in memory was the look of absolute certainty on his face when he talked about sending large rockets to Mars. I left thinking “huh, so that’s the benchmark for what conviction looks like.”
Managing your own morale—and your team’s morale—is one of the greatest challenges of most endeavors. It’s almost impossible without a lot of self-belief. And unfortunately, the more ambitious you are, the more the world will try to tear you down.
Most highly successful people have been really right about the future at least once at a time when people thought they were wrong. If not, they would have faced much more competition.
Self-belief must be balanced with self-awareness. I used to hate criticism of any sort and actively avoided it. Now I try to always listen to it with the assumption that it’s true, and then decide if I want to act on it or not. Truth-seeking is hard and often painful, but it is what separates self-belief from self-delusion.
This balance also helps you avoid coming across as entitled and out of touch.
- Learn to think independently
Entrepreneurship is very difficult to teach because original thinking is very difficult to teach. School is not set up to teach this—in fact, it generally rewards the opposite. So you have to cultivate it on your own.
Thinking from first principles and trying to generate new ideas is fun, and finding people to exchange them with is a great way to get better at this. The next step is to find easy, fast ways to test these ideas in the real world.
“I will fail many times, and I will be really right once” is the entrepreneurs’ way. You have to give yourself a lot of chances to get lucky.
One of the most powerful lessons to learn is that you can figure out what to do in situations that seem to have no solution. The more times you do this, the more you will believe it. Grit comes from learning you can get back up after you get knocked down.
- Get good at “sales”
Self-belief alone is not sufficient—you also have to be able to convince other people of what you believe.
All great careers, to some degree, become sales jobs. You have to evangelize your plans to customers, prospective employees, the press, investors, etc. This requires an inspiring vision, strong communication skills, some degree of charisma, and evidence of execution ability.
Getting good at communication—particularly written communication—is an investment worth making. My best advice for communicating clearly is to first make sure your thinking is clear and then use plain, concise language.
The best way to be good at sales is to genuinely believe in what you’re selling. Selling what you truly believe in feels great, and trying to sell snake oil feels awful.
Getting good at sales is like improving at any other skill—anyone can get better at it with deliberate practice. But for some reason, perhaps because it feels distasteful, many people treat it as something unlearnable.
My other big sales tip is to show up in person whenever it’s important. When I was first starting out, I was always willing to get on a plane. It was frequently unnecessary, but three times it led to career-making turning points for me that otherwise would have gone the other way.
- Make it easy to take risks
Most people overestimate risk and underestimate reward. Taking risks is important because it’s impossible to be right all the time—you have to try many things and adapt quickly as you learn more.
It’s often easier to take risks early in your career; you don’t have much to lose, and you potentially have a lot to gain. Once you’ve gotten yourself to a point where you have your basic obligations covered you should try to make it easy to take risks. Look for small bets you can make where you lose 1x if you’re wrong but make 100x if it works. Then make a bigger bet in that direction.
Don’t save up for too long, though. At YC, we’ve often noticed a problem with founders that have spent a lot of time working at Google or Facebook. When people get used to a comfortable life, a predictable job, and a reputation of succeeding at whatever they do, it gets very hard to leave that behind (and people have an incredible ability to always match their lifestyle to next year’s salary). Even if they do leave, the temptation to return is great. It’s easy—and human nature—to prioritize short-term gain and convenience over long-term fulfillment.
But when you aren’t on the treadmill, you can follow your hunches and spend time on things that might turn out to be really interesting. Keeping your life cheap and flexible for as long as you can is a powerful way to do this, but obviously comes with tradeoffs.
- Focus
Focus is a force multiplier on work.
Almost everyone I’ve ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on. It is much more important to work on the right thing than it is to work many hours. Most people waste most of their time on stuff that doesn’t matter.
Once you have figured out what to do, be unstoppable about getting your small handful of priorities accomplished quickly. I have yet to meet a slow-moving person who is very successful.
- Work hard
You can get to about the 90th percentile in your field by working either smart or hard, which is still a great accomplishment. But getting to the 99th percentile requires both—you will be competing with other very talented people who will have great ideas and be willing to work a lot.
Extreme people get extreme results. Working a lot comes with huge life trade-offs, and it’s perfectly rational to decide not to do it. But it has a lot of advantages. As in most cases, momentum compounds, and success begets success.
And it’s often really fun. One of the great joys in life is finding your purpose, excelling at it, and discovering that your impact matters to something larger than yourself. A YC founder recently expressed great surprise about how much happier and more fulfilled he was after leaving his job at a big company and working towards his maximum possible impact. Working hard at that should be celebrated.
It’s not entirely clear to me why working hard has become a Bad Thing in certain parts of the US, but this is certainly not the case in other parts of the world—the amount of energy and drive exhibited by entrepreneurs outside of the US is quickly becoming the new benchmark.
You have to figure out how to work hard without burning out. People find their own strategies for this, but one that almost always works is to find work you like doing with people you enjoy spending a lot of time with.
I think people who pretend you can be super successful professionally without working most of the time (for some period of your life) are doing a disservice. In fact, work stamina seems to be one of the biggest predictors of long-term success.
One more thought about working hard: do it at the beginning of your career. Hard work compounds like interest, and the earlier you do it, the more time you have for the benefits to pay off. It’s also easier to work hard when you have fewer other responsibilities, which is frequently but not always the case when you’re young.
- Be bold
I believe that it’s easier to do a hard startup than an easy startup. People want to be part of something exciting and feel that their work matters.
If you are making progress on an important problem, you will have a constant tailwind of people wanting to help you. Let yourself grow more ambitious, and don’t be afraid to work on what you really want to work on.
If everyone else is starting meme companies, and you want to start a gene-editing company, then do that and don’t second guess it.
Follow your curiosity. Things that seem exciting to you will often seem exciting to other people too.
- Be willful
A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are.
People have an enormous capacity to make things happen. A combination of self-doubt, giving up too early, and not pushing hard enough prevents most people from ever reaching anywhere near their potential.
Ask for what you want. You usually won’t get it, and often the rejection will be painful. But when this works, it works surprisingly well.
Almost always, the people who say “I am going to keep going until this works, and no matter what the challenges are I’m going to figure them out”, and mean it, go on to succeed. They are persistent long enough to give themselves a chance for luck to go their way.
Airbnb is my benchmark for this. There are so many stories they tell that I wouldn’t recommend trying to reproduce (keeping maxed-out credit cards in those nine-slot three-ring binder pages kids use for baseball cards, eating dollar store cereal for every meal, battle after battle with powerful entrenched interest, and on and on) but they managed to survive long enough for luck to go their way.
To be willful, you have to be optimistic—hopefully this is a personality trait that can be improved with practice. I have never met a very successful pessimistic person.
- Be hard to compete with
Most people understand that companies are more valuable if they are difficult to compete with. This is important, and obviously true.
But this holds true for you as an individual as well. If what you do can be done by someone else, it eventually will be, and for less money.
The best way to become difficult to compete with is to build up leverage. For example, you can do it with personal relationships, by building a strong personal brand, or by getting good at the intersection of multiple different fields. There are many other strategies, but you have to figure out some way to do it.
Most people do whatever most people they hang out with do. This mimetic behavior is usually a mistake—if you’re doing the same thing everyone else is doing, you will not be hard to compete with.
- Build a network
Great work requires teams. Developing a network of talented people to work with—sometimes closely, sometimes loosely—is an essential part of a great career. The size of the network of really talented people you know often becomes the limiter for what you can accomplish.
An effective way to build a network is to help people as much as you can. Doing this, over a long period of time, is what lead to most of my best career opportunities and three of my four best investments. I’m continually surprised how often something good happens to me because of something I did to help a founder ten years ago.
One of the best ways to build a network is to develop a reputation for really taking care of the people who work with you. Be overly generous with sharing the upside; it will come back to you 10x. Also, learn how to evaluate what people are great at, and put them in those roles. (This is the most important thing I have learned about management, and I haven’t read much about it.) You want to have a reputation for pushing people hard enough that they accomplish more than they thought they could, but not so hard they burn out.
Everyone is better at some things than others. Define yourself by your strengths, not your weaknesses. Acknowledge your weaknesses and figure out how to work around them, but don’t let them stop you from doing what you want to do. “I can’t do X because I’m not good at Y” is something I hear from entrepreneurs surprisingly often, and almost always reflects a lack of creativity. The best way to make up for your weaknesses is to hire complementary team members instead of just hiring people who are good at the same things you are.
A particularly valuable part of building a network is to get good at discovering undiscovered talent. Quickly spotting intelligence, drive, and creativity gets much easier with practice. The easiest way to learn is just to meet a lot of people, and keep track of who goes on to impress you and who doesn’t. Remember that you are mostly looking for rate of improvement, and don’t overvalue experience or current accomplishment.
I try to always ask myself when I meet someone new “is this person a force of nature?” It’s a pretty good heuristic for finding people who are likely to accomplish great things.
A special case of developing a network is finding someone eminent to take a bet on you, ideally early in your career. The best way to do this, no surprise, is to go out of your way to be helpful. (And remember that you have to pay this forward at some point later!)
Finally, remember to spend your time with positive people who support your ambitions.
- You get rich by owning things
The biggest economic misunderstanding of my childhood was that people got rich from high salaries. Though there are some exceptions—entertainers for example —almost no one in the history of the Forbes list has gotten there with a salary.
You get truly rich by owning things that increase rapidly in value.
This can be a piece of a business, real estate, natural resource, intellectual property, or other similar things. But somehow or other, you need to own equity in something, instead of just selling your time. Time only scales linearly.
The best way to make things that increase rapidly in value is by making things people want at scale.
- Be internally driven
Most people are primarily externally driven; they do what they do because they want to impress other people. This is bad for many reasons, but here are two important ones.
First, you will work on consensus ideas and on consensus career tracks. You will care a lot—much more than you realize—if other people think you’re doing the right thing. This will probably prevent you from doing truly interesting work, and even if you do, someone else would have done it anyway.
Second, you will usually get risk calculations wrong. You’ll be very focused on keeping up with other people and not falling behind in competitive games, even in the short term.
Smart people seem to be especially at risk of such externally-driven behavior. Being aware of it helps, but only a little—you will likely have to work super-hard to not fall in the mimetic trap.
The most successful people I know are primarily internally driven; they do what they do to impress themselves and because they feel compelled to make something happen in the world. After you’ve made enough money to buy whatever you want and gotten enough social status that it stops being fun to get more, this is the only force I know of that will continue to drive you to higher levels of performance.
This is why the question of a person’s motivation is so important. It’s the first thing I try to understand about someone. The right motivations are hard to define a set of rules for, but you know it when you see it.
Jessica Livingston and Paul Graham are my benchmarks for this. YC was widely mocked for the first few years, and almost no one thought it would be a big success when they first started. But they thought it would be great for the world if it worked, and they love helping people, and they were convinced their new model was better than the existing model.
Eventually, you will define your success by performing excellent work in areas that are important to you. The sooner you can start off in that direction, the further you will be able to go. It is hard to be wildly successful at anything you aren’t obsessed with.
[1] A comment response I wrote on HN:
The biggest reason I'm excited about basic income is the amount of human potential it will unleash by freeing more people to take risks.
Until then, if you aren't born lucky, you have to claw your way up for awhile before you can take big swings. If you are born in extreme poverty, then this is super difficult :(
It is obviously an incredible shame and waste that opportunity is so unevenly distributed. But I've witnessed enough people be born with the deck stacked badly against them and go on to incredible success to know it's possible.
I am deeply aware of the fact that I personally would not be where I am if I weren't born incredibly lucky.