Team and Execution

Before I jump into today’s lecture, I wanted to answer a few questions people had emailed me about the last lecture that we didn’t have time for. So, if you have a question about what we covered last time, I am welcome to answer it now, starting with you.

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

A: The good news about this is this is one of the big advantages students have. You should just trust your instincts on this. Older people have to basically guess about the technologies young people are using. But you can just watch what you’re doing and what your friends are doing and you will almost certainly have better instincts than anybody older than you. And so the answer to this is just trust your instincts, think about what you’re doing more, think about what you’re using, what you’re seeing people your age using, that will almost certainly be the future.

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

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

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

So what you do is you just keep going. You rely on people, it’s really important, founder depression is a serious thing and you need to have a support network. But the way through burn out is just to address the challenges, to address the things that are going wrong and you’ll eventually feel better.

Last lecture, we covered the idea and the product and I want to emphasize that if you don’t get those right, none of the rest of this is going to save you. Today, we’re going to talk about how to hire and how to execute. Hopefully you don’t execute the people you hire. Sometimes.

First, I want to talk about cofounders. Cofounder relationships are among the most important in the entire company. Everyone says you have to watch out for tension brewing among cofounders and you have to address is immediately. That’s all true and certainly in YC’s case, the number one cause of early death for startups is cofounder blowups. But for some reason, a lot of people treat choosing their cofounder with even less importance than hiring. Don’t do this! This is one of the most important decisions you make in the life of your startup and you need to treat it as such.

And for some reason, students are really bad at this. They just pick someone. They’re like, I want to start a business and you want to start a business, let’s start a startup together. There are these cofounder dating things where you’re like, Hey I’m looking for a cofounder, we don’t really know each other, let’s start a company. And this is like, crazy. You would never hire someone like this and yet people are willing to choose their business partners this way. It’s really really bad. And choosing a random random cofounder, or choosing someone you don’t have a long history with, choosing someone you’re not friends with, so when things are really going wrong, you have this sort of past history to bind you together, usually ends up in disaster.

We had one YC batch in which nine out of about seventy-five companies added on a new cofounder between when we interviewed the companies and when they started, and all nine of those teams fell apart within the next year. The track record for companies where the cofounders don’t know each other is really bad.

A good way to meet a cofounder is to meet in college. If you’re not in college and you don’t know a cofounder, the next best thing I think is to go work at an interesting company. If you work at Facebook or Google or something like that, it’s almost as cofounder rich as Stanford. It’s better to have no cofounder than to have a bad cofounder, but it’s still bad to be a solo founder. I was just looking at the stats here before we started. For the top, and I may have missed one because I was counting quickly, but I think, for the top twenty most valuable YC companies, almost all of them have at least two founders. And we probably funded a rate of like one out of ten solo teams.

So, best of all, cofounder you know, not as good as that, but still okay, solo founder. Random founder you meet, and yet students do this for some reason, really really bad. So as you’re thinking about cofounders and people that could be good, there’s a question of what you’re looking for right? At YC we have this public phrase, and it’s relentlessly resourceful, and everyone’s heard of it. And you definitely need relentlessly resourceful cofounders, but there’s a more colorful example that we share at the YC kickoff. Paul Graham started using this and I’ve kept it going.

So, you’re looking for cofounders that need to be unflappable, tough, they know what to do in every situation. They act quickly, they’re decisive, they’re creative, they’re ready for anything, and it turns out that there’s a model for this in pop culture. And it sounds very dumb, but it’s at least very memorable and we’ve told every class of YC this for a long time and I think it helps them.

And that model is James Bond. And again, this sounds crazy, but it will at least stick in your memory and you need someone that behaves like James Bond more than you need someone that is an expert in some particular domain.

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

That doesn’t work too well in our experience. Software people should really be starting software companies. Media people should be starting media companies. In the YC experience, two or three cofounders seems to be about perfect. One, obviously not great, five, really bad. Four works sometimes, but two or three I think is the target.

The second part of how to hire: try not to. One of the weird things you’ll notice as you start a company, is that everyone will ask you how many employees you have. And this is the metric people use to judge how real your startup is and how cool you are. And if you say you have a high number of employees, they’re really impressed. And if you say you have a low number of employees, then you sound like this little joke. But actually it sucks to have a lot of employees, and you should be proud of how few employees you have. Lots of employees ends up with things like a high burn rate, meaning you’re losing a lot of money every month, complexity, slow decision making, the list goes on and it’s nothing good.

So you want to be proud of how much you can get done with a small numbers of employees. Many of the best YC companies have had a phenomenally small number of employees for their first year, sometimes none besides the founders. They really try to stay small as long as they possibly can. At the beginning, you should only hire when you desperately need to. Later, you should learn to hire fast and scale up the company, but in the early days the goal should be not to hire. And one of the reasons this is so bad, is that the cost of getting an early hire wrong is really high. In fact, a lot of the companies that I’ve been very involved with, that have had a very bad early hire in the first three or so employees never recover, it just kills the company.

Airbnb spent five months interviewing their first employee. And in their first year, they only hired two. Before they hired a single person, they wrote down a list of the culture values that they wanted any Airbnb employee to have. One of those what that you had to bleed Airbnb, and if you didn’t agree to that they just wouldn’t hire you. As an example of how intense Brian Chesky is, he’s the Airbnb CEO, he used to ask people if they would take the job if they got a medical diagnosis that they have one year left to life. Later he decided that that was a little bit too crazy and I think he relaxed it to ten years, but last I heard, he still asks that question.

These hires really matter, these people are what go on to define your company, and so you need people that believe in it almost as much as you do. And it sounds like a crazy thing to ask, but he’s gotten this culture of extremely dedicated people that come together when the company faces a crisis. And when the company faced a big crisis early on, everyone lived in the office, and they shipped product every day until the crisis was over. One of the remarkable observations about Airbnb is that if you talk to any of the first forty or so employees, they all feel like they were a part of the founding of the company.

But by having an extremely high bar, by hiring slowly ensures that everyone believes in the mission, you can get that. So let’s say, you listened to the warning about not hiring unless you absolutely have too. When you’re in this hiring mode, it should be your number one priority to get the best people. Just like when you’re in product mode that should be your number one priority. And when you’re in fundraising mode, fundraising is your number one priority.

On thing that founders always underestimate is how hard it is to recruit. You think you have this great idea and everyone’s going to join. But that’s not how it works. To get the very best people, they have a lot of great options and so it can easily take a year to recruit someone. It’s this long process and so you have to convince them that your mission is the most important of anything that they’re looking at. This is another case of why it’s really important to get the product right before looking at anything else. The best people know that they should join a rocketship.

By the way, that’s my number one piece of advice if you’re going to join a startup, is pick a rocketship. Pick a company that’s already working and that not everyone yet realizes that, but you know because you’re paying attention, that it’s going to be huge. And again, you can usually identify these. But good people know this, and so good people will wait, to see that you’re on this trajectory before they join.

One question that people asked online this morning was how much time you should be spending on hiring. The answer is zero or twenty-five percent. You’re either not hiring at all or it’s probably your single biggest block of time. In practice, all these books on management say you should spend fifty percent of your time hiring, but the people that give that advice, it’s rare for them to even spend ten percent themselves. Twenty-five percent is still a huge amount of time, but that’s really how much you should be doing once you’re in hiring mode. If you compromise and hire someone mediocre you will always regret it. We like to warn founders of this but no one really feels it until they make the mistake the first time, but it can poison the culture. Mediocre people at huge companies will cause some problems, but it won’t kill the company. A single mediocre hire within the first five will often in fact kill a startup.

A friend of mine has a sign up in the conference room that he uses for interviews and he positions the sign that the candidate is looking at it during the interview and it says that mediocre engineers do not build great companies. Yeah that’s true, it’s really true. You can get away with it in a big company because people just sort of fall through the cracks but every person at a startup sets the tone. So if you compromise in the first five, ten hires it might kill the company. And you can think about that for everyone you hire: will I bet the future of this company on this single hire? And that’s a tough bar. At some point in the company, when you’re bigger, you will compromise on a hire. There will be some pressing deadline or something like that you will still regret. But this is the difference between theory and practice we’re going to have later speakers talk about what to do when this happens. But in the early days you just can’t screw it up.

Sources of candidates. This is another thing that students get wrong a lot. The best source for hiring by far is people that you already know and people that other employees in the company already know. Most great companies in text have been built by personal referrals for the first hundred employees and often many more. Most founders feel awkward but calling anyone good that they’ve ever met and asking their employees to do the same. But she’ll notice if you go to work at Facebook or Google one of the things they do in your first few weeks is an HR person sits you down and beat out of you every smart person you’ve ever met to be able to recruit them.

These personal referrals really are the trick to hiring. Another tip is to look outside the valley. It is brutally competitive to hire engineers here but you probably know people elsewhere in the world that would like to work with you.

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

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

So one of the pieces of advice that we give at YC is try to work on a project together instead of an interview. If you are going to interview, which you probably will, you should ask specifically about projects that someone worked on in the past. You’ll learn a lot more than you will with brainteasers. For some reason, young technical cofounders love to ask brainteasers rather than just ask what someone has done. Really dig in to projects people have worked on. And call references. That is another thing that first time founders like to skip. You want to call some people that these people have worked with in the past. And when you do, you don’t just want to ask, How was so-and-so, you really want to dig in. Is this person in the top five percent of people you’ve ever worked with? What specifically did they do? Would you hire them again? Why aren’t you trying to hire them again? You really have to press on these reference calls.

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

You also want people who are maniacally determined and that is slightly different than having a risk tolerant attitude. So you really should be looking for both. By the way, people are welcome to interrupt me with questions as stuff comes up.

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

Mark Zuckerberg once said that he tries to hire people that A. he’d be comfortable hanging with socially and B. he’d be comfortable reporting to if the roles were reversed. This strikes me as a very good framework. You don’t have to be friends with everybody, but you should at least enjoy working with them. And if you don’t have that, you should at least deeply respect them. But again, if you don’t want to spend a lot of time around people you should trust your instincts about that.

While I’m on this topic of hiring, I want to talk about employee equity. Founders screw this up all the time. I think as a rough estimate, you should aim to give about ten percent of the company to the first ten employees.

They have to earn it over four years anyway, and if they’re successful, they’re going to contribute way more than that. They’re going to increase the value of the company way more than that, and if they don’t then they won’t be around anyway. For whatever reason founders are usually very stingy with equity to employees and very generous with equity for investors. I think this is totally backwards. I think this is one of the things founders screw up the most often. Employees will only add more value over time. Investors will usually write the check and then, despite a lot of promises, don’t usually do that much. Sometimes they do, but your employees are really the ones that build the company over years and years.

So I believe in fighting with investors to reduce the amount of equity they get and then being as generous as you possibly can with employees. The YC companies that have done this well, the YC companies that have been super generous with their equity to early employees, in general, are the most successful ones that we’ve funded.

One thing that founders forget is that after they hire employees, they have to retain them. I’m not going to go into full detail here because we’re going to have a lecture on this later, but I do want to talk about it a little bit because founders get this wrong so often. You have to make sure your employees are happy and feel valued. This is one of the reasons that equity grants are so important. People in the excitement of joining a startup don’t think about it much, but as they come in day after day, year after year, if they feel they have been treated unfairly that will really start to grate on them and resentment will build.

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

But as a founder, this is a very natural instinct. You think you can do everything the best and it’s easy to tell people when they’re not doing it well. So learning just a little bit here will prevent this massive team churn. It also doesn’t come naturally to most founders to really praise their team. It took me a little while to learn this too. You have to let your team take credit for all the good stuff that happens, and you take responsibility for the bad stuff.

You have to not micromanage. You have to continually give people small areas of responsibility. These are not the things that founders think about. I think the best thing you can do as a first-time founder is to be aware that you will be a very bad manager and try to overcompensate for that. Dan Pink talks about these three things that motivate people to do great work: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. I never thought about that when I was running my company but I’ve thought about since and I think that’s actually right. I think it’s worth trying to think about that. It also took me a while to learn to do things like one on one and to give clear feedback.

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

The last part on the team section is about firing people when it’s not working. No matter what I say here is not going to prevent anyone from doing it wrong and the reason that I say that is that firing people is one of the worst parts of running a company. Actually in my own experience, I’d say it is the very worst part. Every first time founder waits too long, everyone hopes that an employee will turn around. But the right answer is to fire fast when it’s not working. It’s better for the company, it’s also better for the employee. But it’s so painful and so awful, that everyone gets it wrong the first few times.

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

So, the question is, how do you balance firing people fast and making early employees feel secure? The answer is that when an employee’s not working, it’s not like they screw up once or twice. Anyone will screw up once or twice, or more times than that, and you know you should be like very loving, not take it out on them, like, be a team, work together.

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

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

When should co-founders decide on the equity split?

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

This is not a discussion that gets easier with time, you wanna set this ideally very soon after you start working together. And it should be near-equal. If you’re not willing to give someone - your co-founder - you know, like an equal share of the equity, I think that should make you think hard about whether or not you want them as a co-founder. But in any case, you should try to have the ink dry on this before the company gets too far along. Like, certainly in the first number of weeks.

So the question is - I said that inexperience is OK - how do you know if someone’s gonna scale past, not scale up to a role, as things go on and later become crippling. People that are really smart and that can learn new things can almost always find a role in the company as time goes on. You may have to move them into something else, something other than where they started. You know, it may be that you hire someone to lead the engineering team that over time can’t scale as you get up to 50 people, and you give them a different role. Really good people that can almost find some great place in the company, I have not seen that be a problem too often.

So the question is what happens when your relationship with your cofounder falls apart. We’re gonna have a session on mechanics later on in the course, but here is the most important thing that founders screw up. Which is, every cofounder, you yourself of course, has to have vesting. Basically what you’re doing with cofounder vesting is you’re pre-negotiating what happens if one of you leaves. And so the normal stance on this in Silicon Valley is that it takes four years, let’s say you split the equity fifty-fifty, is that it takes four years to earn all of that. And the clock doesn’t start until one year in. So if you leave after one year, you keep twenty-five percent of the equity, and if you leave after two years, fifty, and on and on like that.

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

If you have to choose between hiring a sub-optimal employee and losing your customers to a competitor, what do you do? If it’s going to be one of the first five employees at a company I would lose those customers. The damage that it does to the company- it’s better to lose some customers than to kill the company. Later on, I might have a slightly different opinion, but it’s really hard to say in the general case.

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

Alright, so now we’re going to talk about execution. Execution for most founders is not the most fun part of running the company, but it is the most critical. Many cofounders think they’re just signing up to this beautiful idea and then they’re going to go be on magazine covers and go to parties. But really what it’s about more than anything else, what being a cofounder really means, is signing up for this years long grind on execution and you can’t outsource this.

The way to have a company that executes well is you have to execute well yourself. Every thing at a startup gets modeled after the founders. Whatever the founders do becomes the culture. So if you want a culture where people work hard, pay attention to detail, manage the customers, are frugal, you have to do it yourself. There is no other way. You cannot hire a COO to do that while you go off to conferences. The company just needs to see you as this maniacal execution machine. As I said in the first lecture, there’s at least a hundred times more people with great ideas than people who are willing to put in the effort to execute them well. Ideas by themselves are not worth anything, only executing well is what adds and creates value.

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

The CEO, people ask me all the time about the jobs of the CEO. There are probably more than five, here are five that come up a lot in the early days. The first four everyone thinks of as CEO jobs: set the vision, raise money, evangelize the mission to people you’re trying to recruit, executives, partners, press, everybody, hire and manage the team. But the fifth one is setting the execution bar and this is not the one that most founders get excited about or envision themselves doing but I think it is actually one of the critical CEO roles and no one but the CEO can do this.

Execution gets divided into two key questions. One, can you figure out what to do and two, can you get it done. So I want to talk about two parts of getting it done, assuming that you’ve already figured out what to do. And those are focus and intensity. So focus is critical. One of my favorite questions to ask founders about what they’re spending their time and their money on. This reveals almost everything about what founders think is important.

One of the hardest parts about being a founder is that there are a hundred important things competing for your attention every day. And you have to identify the right two or three, work on those, and then ignore, delegate, or defer the rest. And a lot of these things that founders think are important, interviewing a lot at different law firms, going to conferences, recruiting advisers, whatever, they just don’t matter. What really does matter varies with time, but it’s an important piece of advice. You need to figure out what the one or two most important things are, and then just do those.

And you can only have two or three things every day, because everything else will just come at you. There will be fires every day and if you don’t get good at setting what those two or three things are, you’ll never be good at getting stuff done. This is really hard for founders. Founders get excited about starting new things.

Unfortunately the trick to great execution is to say no a lot. You’re saying no ninety-seven times out of a hundred, and most founders find they have to make a very conscious effort to do this. Most startups are nowhere near focused enough. They work really hard-maybe-but they don’t work really hard at the right things, so they’ll still fail. One of the great and terrible things about starting a start up is that you get no credit for trying. You only get points when you make something the market wants. So if you work really hard on the wrong things, no one will care.

So then there’s this question of how do you figure out what to focus on each day. Each day it’s really important to have goals. Most good founders I know have a set of small overarching goals for the company that everybody in the company knows. You know it could be something like ship a product by this date, get this certain growth rate, get this engagement rate, hire for these key roles, those are some of them but everyone in the company can tell you each week what are our key goals. And then everybody executes based off of that.

The founders really set the focus. Whatever the founders care about, whatever the founders focus on, that’s going to set the goals for the whole company. The best founders repeat these goals over and over, far more often than they think they should need to. They put them up on the walls they talk about them in one on ones and at all-hands meetings each week. And it keeps the company focus. One of the keys to focus, and why I said cofounders that aren’t friends really struggle, is that you can’t be focused without good communication. Even if you have only four or five people at a company, a small communication breakdown is enough for people to be working on slightly different things. And then you lose focus and the company just scrambles.

I’m going to talk about this a little bit later, but growth and momentum are something you can never lose focus on. Growth and momentum are what a startup lives on and you always have to focus on maintaining these. You should always know how you’re doing against your metrics, you should have a weekly review meeting every week, and you should be extremely suspicious if you’re ever talking about, we’re not focused on growth right now, we’re not growing that well right now but we’re doing this other thing, we don’t have a timeline for when we are going to ship this because we’re focused on this other thing, we’re doing a re-brand, whatever, almost always a disaster.

So you want to have the right metrics and you want to be focused on growing those metrics and having momentum. Don’t let the company get distracted or excited about other things. A common mistake is that companies get excited by their own PR. It’s really easy to get PR with no results and it actually feels like you’re really cool. But in a year you’ll have nothing, and at that point you won’t be cool anymore, and you’ll just be talking about these articles from a year ago that, Oh you know these Stanford students start a new start up, it’s going to be the next big thing and now you have nothing and that sucks.

As I mentioned already, be in the same space. I think this is pretty much a nonstarter. Remote confounding teams is just really really hard. It slows down the cycle time more than anybody ever thinks it’s going to.

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

The good news here is that a small amount of extra work on the right thing makes a huge difference. One example that I like to give is thinking about the viral coefficient for a consumer web product. How many new users each existing user brings in. If it’s .99 the company will eventually flatline and die. And if it’s 1.01 you’ll be in this happy place of exponential growth forever.

So this is one concrete example of where a tiny extra bit of work is the difference between success and failure. When we talk to successful founders they tell stories like this all the time. Just outworking their competitors by a little bit was what made them successful.

So you have to be really intense. This only comes from the CEO, this only comes from the founders. One of the biggest advantages that start ups have is execution speed and you have to have this relentless operating rhythm. Facebook has this famous poster that says move fast and break things. But at the same time they manage to be obsessed with quality. And this is why it’s hard. It’s easy to move fast or be obsessed with quality, but the trick is to do both at a startup. You need to have a culture where the company has really high standards for everything everyone does, but you still move quickly.

Apple, Google, and Facebook have each done this extremely well. It’s not about the product, it’s about everything they do. They move fast and they break things, they’re frugal in the right places, but they care about quality everywhere. You don’t buy people shitty computers if you don’t want them to write shitty code. You have to set a quality bar that runs through the entire company. Related to this is that you have to be decisive. Indecisiveness is a startup killer. Mediocre founders spend a lot of time talking about grand plans, but they never make a decision. They’re talking about you know I could do this thing, or I could do that other thing, and they’re going back and forth and they never act. And what you actually need is this bias towards action.

The best founders work on things that seem small but they move really quickly. But they get things done really quickly. Every time you talk to the best founders they’ve gotten new things done. In fact, this is the one thing that we learned best predicts a success of founders in YC. If every time we talk to a team they’ve gotten new things done, that’s the best predictor we have that a company will be successful. Part of this is that you can do huge things in incremental pieces. If you keep knocking down small chunks one at a time, in a year you look back and you’ve done this amazing thing. On the other hand, if you disappear for a year and you expect to come back with something amazing all at once, it usually never happens.

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

So speed is this huge premium. The best founders usually respond to e-mail the most quickly, make decisions most quickly, they’re generally quick in all of these ways. And they had this do what ever it takes attitude.

They also show up a lot.

They come to meetings, they come in, they meet us in person. One piece of advice that I have that’s always worked for me: they get on planes in marginal situations. I’ll tell a quick story here.

When I was running my own company, we found out we were about to lose a deal. It was sort of this critical deal from the first big customer in the space. And it was going to go to this company that had been around for year before we were. And they had this like all locked up. And we called and said “we have this better product you have to meet with us” and they said “well we’re signing this deal tomorrow. sorry.” We drove to the airport, we got on a plane, we were at their office at 6am the next morning. We just sat there, they told us to go away, we just kept sitting there. Finally once of the junior guys decided to meet with us, after that, finally one of the senior guys decided to meet with us. They ended up ripping up the contract with the other company, and we closed the deal with them about a week later. And I’m sure, that had we not gotten on a plane, had we not shown up in person, that would not have worked out.

And so, you just sort of show and and do these things, when people say get on plane in marginal situations, they actually mean it, but they don’t mean it literally. But I actually think it’s good, literal advice.

So I mentioned this momentum and growth earlier. Once more: the momentum and growth are the lifeblood of startups. This is probably in the top three secrets of executing well. You want a company to be winning all the time. If you ever take your foot off the gas pedal, things will spiral out of control, snowball downwards. A winning team feels good and keeps winning. A team that hasn’t won in a while gets demotivated and keeps losing. So always keep momentum, it’s this prime directive for managing a startup. If I can only tell founders one thing about how to run a company, it would be this.

For most software startups, this translates to keep growing. For hardware startups it translates to: don’t let your ship dates slip. This is what we tell people during YC, and they usually listen and everything is good. What happens at the end of YC is that they get distracted on other things, and then growth slows down. And somehow, after that happens, people start getting unhappy and quitting and everything falls apart. It’s hard to figure out a growth engine because most companies grow in new ways, but there’s this thing: if you build a good product it will grow. So getting this product right at the beginning is the best way not to lose momentum later.

If you do lose momentum, most founders try to get it back in the wrong way. They give these long speeches about vision for the company and try to rally the troops with speeches. But employees in a company where momentum has sagged, don’t want to hear that. You have to save the vision speeches for when the company is winning. When you’re not winning, you just have to get momentum back in small wins. A board member of mine used to say that sales fix everything in a startup. And that is really true. So you figure out where you can get these small wins and you get that done. And then you’ll be amazed at how all the other problems in a startup disappear.

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

To use a Facebook example again, when Facebook’s growth slowed in 2008, mark instituted a “growth group.” They worked on very small things to make Facebook grow faster. All of these by themselves seemed really small, but they got the curve of Facebook back up. It quickly became the most prestigious group there. Mark has said that it’s been one of Facebook’s best innovations. According to friends of mine that worked at Facebook at the time, it really turned around the dynamic of the company. And it went from this thing where everyone was feeling bad, and momentum was gone, back to a place that was winning.

So a good way to keep momentum is to establish an operating rhythm at the company early. Where you ship product and launch new features on a regular basis. Where you’re reviewing metrics every week with the entire company. This is actually one of the best things your board can do for you. Boards add value to business strategy only rarely. But very frequently you can use them as a forcing function to get the company to care about metrics and milestones.

One thing that often disrupts momentum and really shouldn’t is competitors. Competitors making noise in the press I think probably crushes a company’s momentum more often than any other external factor.

So here’s a good rule of thumb: don’t worry about a competitor at all, until they’re actually beating you with a real, shipped product. Press releases are easier to write than code, and that is still easier than making a great product. So remind your company of this, and this is sort of a founder’s role, is not to let the company get down because of the competitors in the press.

This great quote from Henry Ford that I love: “The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.”

These are almost never the companies that put out a lot of press releases. And they bum people out.

团队与执行力

在进入今天的课程之前，我想先回答一些同学们通过邮件提出的关于上次课程的问题，因为上次时间不够我们没有来得及讨论。所以，如果你对上次我们讨论的内容有问题的话，现在我可以回答，先从你开始。

问：如何判断一个市场现在和未来十年是否有快速增长的潜力？

答：好消息是，作为学生，这其实是你们的一个巨大优势。你只需要相信自己的直觉。年长的人必须猜测年轻人在用什么技术，但你们可以直接观察自己和朋友们在使用什么，这几乎肯定会让你们有比他们更好的直觉。因此，答案就是：相信自己的直觉，多思考你在做什么、你在用什么、你看到同龄人在用什么，这几乎肯定会成为未来的趋势。

好了，在开始今天的内容之前，我们再回答一个关于上次课程的问题。

问：如何在仍然保持生产力的情况下应对倦怠？

答：这个问题的答案很简单，那就是它真的很糟糕，但你必须继续前进。与学生可以说“我真的很累了，这个学期成绩可能会不好”不同，创业公司的创始人面临的困难是真实的生活问题，你必须坚持下去。标准的建议是去度个假，但这对创始人来说从来都没用。创业是全面而深入的，你无法真正从中抽身。

所以你只能继续前进。你必须依赖他人，这非常重要，因为创始人的抑郁症是一个很严重的问题，你需要一个支持网络。但解决倦怠的方法就是面对那些挑战，解决那些正在发生的问题，你最终会感觉好一些。

上节课我们讨论了产品的理念，我想强调的是，如果你不能把这些做好，接下来的一切都无法挽救你。今天我们要讨论的是如何招聘和如何执行。希望你们不要把招到的人给“执行”掉（笑）。

首先，我想谈谈联合创始人。联合创始人之间的关系是整个公司中最重要的关系之一。大家都说你要注意联合创始人之间的紧张关系并及时解决，这些都是真的。而且在 YC 的情况下，初创公司早期失败的头号原因就是联合创始人之间的分裂。但奇怪的是，很多人对选择联合创始人的态度甚至比招聘员工还要轻率。千万不要这样！这是你创业生涯中最重要的决策之一，你需要以这样的态度对待它。

奇怪的是，学生们在这方面特别糟糕。他们只是随便挑一个人，好像说“我想创业，你也想创业，那我们一起创个公司吧”。还有一些所谓的联合创始人约会活动，你会听到类似“嘿，我在找联合创始人，我们彼此不太了解，但还是一起创个公司吧”的说法。这简直是疯狂的，你永远不会以这种方式雇人，但人们却愿意这样选择商业伙伴。这真的非常糟糕。选择一个随机的联合创始人，或者选择一个你没有长期历史的人，选择一个不是你朋友的人，这意味着当事情真的出问题时，你们之间没有过去的纽带来维持关系，通常最终会走向灾难。

我们曾有一个 YC 批次中的大约七十五家公司中，有九家在我们面试后到项目开始前添加了一个新的联合创始人，结果在接下来的一年内，这九家公司全部解体了。联合创始人之间不熟悉的公司，成功的几率非常低。

结识联合创始人的一个好方法是大学。如果你已经不在大学里了，又找不到合适的联合创始人，那么我认为接下来的最好选择是去有趣的公司工作。如果你在 Facebook 或 Google 之类的公司工作，这里几乎和斯坦福一样充满了联合创始人的潜力。没有联合创始人总比有一个糟糕的联合创始人好，但单独创始人也不是好选择。我在我们开始课程之前刚看了一下数据，可能漏掉了一些，但我认为，在最有价值的二十家 YC 公司中，几乎所有公司至少都有两位创始人。而我们可能只资助了大约十分之一的单独创始人。

所以，最好的选择是你认识的联合创始人，其次是单独创始人。随机认识的创始人，这种选择非常差劲，然而学生们常常这样做。

在你思考联合创始人以及可能成为好伙伴的人选时，你要考虑的一个问题是：你在寻找什么样的人？在 YC 我们有一句公开的口号，那就是“足智多谋”，大家都听过这个。你确实需要一个足智多谋的联合创始人，但在 YC 开端时我们有一个更生动的例子。Paul Graham 开始使用这个例子，我也延续了下去。

你需要的是一个泰然自若、坚强果断的联合创始人，他们知道在每一种情况下该做什么。他们反应迅速，果断而富有创造力，随时准备应对任何挑战，事实上，这种特质在流行文化中有一个模范，这听起来很傻，但至少很容易记住，我们也向每届 YC 的学员分享过这个模范。

这个模范就是James Bond。虽然听起来可能有些疯狂，但它至少会留在你脑海中，比起需要某个领域的专家，你更需要一个像James Bond那样应对各种情况的人。

如前所述，你希望自己与联合创始人有较长的认识时间，最好是几年。这对于早期员工也尤其重要，不过令人意外的是，很多人对于早期员工选择得比选择联合创始人更得当。因此，在校期间好好利用这段时间。除了“足智多谋”之外，你还想要一个坚强冷静的联合创始人。显然，大家都知道你想要一个聪明的联合创始人，但他们往往没有优先考虑“坚强”和“冷静”这两个特质，尤其是当你觉得自己缺乏这些特质时，那么你需要一个拥有这些特质的联合创始人。如果你不是技术人员，即使在座的大多数人觉得自己是，你还是需要一个技术联合创始人。现在的创业公司有一个奇怪的趋势，大家似乎认为，“我们不需要技术联合创始人，我们可以雇人来做，我们只要成为优秀的管理者就行。”

但根据我们的经验，这并不是很成功。软件人应该创立软件公司，媒体人应该创立媒体公司。在 YC 的经验中，两位或三位联合创始人几乎是完美的组合。一位显然不够好，五位非常糟糕，四位有时候还行，但我觉得两到三位是最理想的。

关于如何招聘的第二部分：尽量不招聘。当你开始创业的时候，你会注意到一件奇怪的事情，那就是每个人都会问你有多少员工。这成了他们判断你的创业公司是否靠谱以及你是否厉害的标准。如果你说有很多员工，他们会非常钦佩你；如果你说员工很少，他们就会觉得你像个小笑话。但实际上，拥有太多员工是一件很糟糕的事情，你应该为自己能用少量员工完成大量工作而感到自豪。很多员工意味着高成本、复杂性、决策缓慢，等等，都是不好的事。

所以你应该为用少量员工完成大量工作而自豪。许多最优秀的 YC 公司在第一年里员工数量少得惊人，有时甚至没有任何员工，只有创始人自己。他们真的尽量保持小规模，尽可能地长时间维持这种状态。创业初期，你应该只在你迫切需要的情况下才招聘员工。之后，你可以学习如何快速招聘并扩展公司规模，但在早期阶段，你的目标应该是尽量不招聘。而这件事情之所以这么糟糕的原因之一，就是早期招聘错误的代价非常高。事实上，我深度参与的一些公司，如果在前三个员工中有一个人是错误的，那么他们几乎从未恢复过来，这对公司来说是致命的。

Airbnb 花了五个月的时间才招聘了第一个员工。在第一年里，他们只雇佣了两个人。在雇佣第一个人之前，他们列出了一份他们希望 Airbnb 员工具备的文化价值观清单，其中之一就是必须“为 Airbnb 而战”，如果应聘者不认同这一点，他们就不会雇佣他。Brian Chesky 作为 Airbnb 的 CEO，他会问人们如果他们被诊断只剩下一年寿命，他们还会不会接受这份工作。后来他觉得这个问题有点过于疯狂，于是放宽到十年，但据我所知，他仍然会问这个问题。

这些招聘真的很重要，这些人将定义你的公司，因此你需要那些几乎和你一样相信公司使命的人。这听起来可能有点疯狂，但正是这种文化使得员工在公司面临危机时能团结一致。在公司早期面临巨大危机时，每个人都住在办公室，每天发布产品，直到危机过去。关于 Airbnb 的一个显著观察是，如果你与前四十名员工中的任何一个交谈，他们都会觉得自己是公司创立的一部分。

通过保持极高的招聘标准，通过缓慢招聘以确保每个人都相信公司的使命，你可以实现这一点。所以假设你听从了关于“只有在绝对必要时才招聘”的警告，当你进入招聘模式时，招聘最优秀的人应该成为你最重要的优先事项。就像当你处于产品模式时，产品是你的最重要优先事项一样；当你在融资模式时，融资就是你的最重要优先事项。

创始人常常低估招聘的难度。你以为你有一个好点子，每个人都会加入你，但事实不是这样。要吸引最优秀的人才，他们有很多很棒的选择，因此招募一个人可能需要花费一年时间。这是一个漫长的过程，你必须说服他们，你的使命是他们所考虑的所有选项中最重要的。这也是为什么在关注其他事情之前首先把产品做好非常重要的原因。最优秀的人才知道他们应该加入一艘正在腾飞的火箭。

顺便说一下，如果你要加入创业公司，我的第一建议是选择一艘火箭船。选择一家已经成功，而不是所有人都已经意识到的公司，但你知道，因为你在关注，这家公司会变得非常大。而通常你可以识别出这样的公司。但优秀的人才知道这一点，所以他们会等待，等你达到这样的增长轨迹再加入你。

今天早上有人在网上问我，你应该花多少时间在招聘上。答案是零或者百分之二十五。要么你不招聘，要么招聘应该是你最大的时间块。在实践中，所有关于管理的书都说你应该花百分之五十的时间招聘，但那些给出这个建议的人，自己很少花百分之十的时间在招聘上。百分之二十五已经是一个巨大的时间量，但一旦你进入招聘模式，这就是你应该投入的时间。

如果妥协雇用一个平庸的人，你会一直后悔。我们喜欢提醒创始人这一点，但在第一次犯错之前，没有人真正感受到这一点。这种错误会破坏公司文化。在大公司中，平庸的人可能会引发一些问题，但不会致命。但在初创公司中，一个平庸的雇员往往真的会毁掉公司。

我的一个朋友在面试用的会议室里挂了一个标语牌，面试时候它正好面向应聘者，上面写着“平庸的工程师无法建立伟大的公司”。这是真的，非常真实。在大公司中，你可以勉强应付，因为人们只是从缝隙中滑落，但在初创公司中，每一个人都在设定基调。所以如果你在前五、十个员工中妥协，可能会毁了公司。你可以这样想：你愿意为公司未来的成败押注在这个雇员身上吗？这是一个很难达到的标准。在公司成长到一定程度之后，你可能会在某次招聘上妥协。也许有紧迫的期限之类的，但你仍会后悔。这是理论和实践的区别。我们会有后续的演讲者讨论当发生这种情况时该怎么办。但在初期，你真的不能搞砸。

招聘的来源是学生们经常搞错的另一件事情。招聘的最佳来源绝对是你已经认识的人，以及公司其他员工已经认识的人。大多数成功的科技公司，前一百名员工几乎都是通过私人推荐招募的，甚至更多。大多数创始人觉得打电话联系他们曾经见过的任何优秀的人很尴尬，并且要求他们的员工也这样做。但你会注意到，如果你在 Facebook 或 Google 工作，入职头几周，HR 人员会让你想出你曾经认识的每个聪明人，以便招募他们。

这些个人推荐确实是招聘的秘诀。另一个建议是看看硅谷之外的地方。在这里招募工程师竞争非常激烈，但你可能认识世界其他地方的优秀人才，他们愿意和你一起工作。

创始人们经常问我们有关经验的重要性。简短的回答是，经验对某些角色非常重要，但对其他角色则没那么重要。当你要雇用一个负责管理公司大部分部门的人时，经验可能非常重要。而对于创业公司早期大部分的雇员来说，经验可能并不那么重要，你应该看重的是他们的能力和对你所做事情的信念。我职业生涯中做出的最好的招聘，大多是那些之前从未做过这个工作的人。所以这真的值得思考，这个角色是不是我真正需要经验的人。而通常你会发现其实不需要，尤其是在早期。

在招聘员工时，我会看三点：他们是否聪明？他们能否完成工作？我是否愿意与他们共度大量时间？如果这三点我都能给出肯定的回答，那么我几乎从未后悔过，通常这些人都会证明自己是对的。在面试中你可以了解到很多这三方面的信息，但最好的方法还是通过一起工作来了解。因此，理想情况下，你应该选择和你过去共事过的人，这样的话，可能甚至都不需要面试。如果没有共事过，那么我认为比起直接面试，和对方一起完成一个项目一两天更好。你们双方都会学到很多，而大多数初次创业的创始人在面试上不太在行，但在评估一个人时却很擅长。

所以 YC 给出的建议之一就是尽量通过一起完成项目来代替面试。如果你还是要面试（大概率你还是会面试的），你应该问应聘者他们过去完成的项目。你会比用脑筋急转弯问题学到更多。有些原因使得年轻的技术创始人喜欢用脑筋急转弯，而不是简单地询问应聘者曾经做过什么。深入了解应聘者之前完成的项目。还有就是打电话进行推荐信调查。这也是初创创始人们喜欢跳过的事情之一。你需要打电话给那些和应聘者共事过的人，不只是简单地问“某某人怎么样”，你需要深入挖掘。这个人是你合作过的最优秀的前百分之五之一吗？他们具体做了什么？你会再雇佣他们吗？为什么你没有试图重新雇佣他们？你在进行推荐信调查时真的要深入探讨。

还有一件从和 YC 公司交流中了解到的事情是，良好的沟通能力往往与招聘成功率呈正相关。我以前不太关注这一点。我们之后会讨论为什么沟通在初创公司早期如此重要。如果某个人很难沟通，或者不能清晰表达，这在未来会成为一个问题。而对于初期员工来说，你希望他们有某种冒险精神。通常情况下，如果不是这样，他们可能就对初创公司不感兴趣，但现在创业公司变得越来越受欢迎，你想要的是那些真正喜欢承担风险的人。如果有人在麦肯锡和你的初创公司之间犹豫不决，那么他们很可能不适合你的公司。

你还需要那些疯狂坚持的人，这与具有风险承受能力稍有不同。所以你真的需要两者兼备。顺便说一下，大家在我讲解时可以随时打断我提问。

Paul Graham 有一个著名的测试，叫做动物测试。这个想法是你应该能够将每个员工形容为他们所做事情上的某种动物。我不确定这个概念在英文之外能否很好地表达，但你需要不可阻挡的人。你想要那些能够完成任务的人。创始人们往往会对他们的早期员工感到非常满意，通常他们会把这些人形容为在他们所做的事情上最优秀的人之一。

马克·扎克伯格曾说，他试图雇佣那些 A. 他愿意在社交上与之相处的人，以及 B. 如果角色互换他也愿意向他们汇报的人。这对我来说是一个很好的框架。你不必和每个人都成为朋友，但至少你应该喜欢与他们共事。如果没有这一点，至少你应该对他们有深深的尊敬。但如果你不愿意花大量时间与某人相处，你应该相信自己的直觉。

在讨论招聘的过程中，我想谈谈员工的股权。创始人们经常在这方面搞砸。我认为一个大概的目标是，你应该向前十名员工提供公司大约百分之十的股权。

他们反正也需要四年才能获得全部股权，而如果他们成功了，他们的贡献会远远超过这一点。他们会让公司的价值增长超过这一点，而如果他们不行，他们也不会一直留在公司。

不知为何，创始人们通常对员工的股权非常吝啬，而对投资者的股权却非常慷慨。我认为这完全本末倒置了。这也是创始人们最常犯的错误之一。员工只会随着时间的推移增加价值。投资者通常在签了支票之后，尽管有很多承诺，但通常不会做太多。有时他们会做一些事情，但真正多年构建公司的还是你的员工。

所以我相信你应该和投资者斗争，减少他们获得的股权，然后尽可能地慷慨地分配给员工。那些在股权方面做得好的 YC 公司，那些对早期员工非常慷慨的 YC 公司，通常也是我们资助的最成功的公司。

创始人们常常忘记的是，在雇佣了员工之后，还需要留住他们。我不会在这里详细讨论，因为我们后续会有一节课专门讲这个问题，但我还是想稍微提一下，因为创始人们在这方面错误频出。你必须确保你的员工感到开心并且受到重视。这也是为什么股权分配如此重要的原因之一。加入初创公司的兴奋感让人们当下不会多想，但当他们日复一日，年复一年地工作，如果他们觉得自己被不公平对待，这种感觉会不断累积，最终变成怨恨。

此外，学习一些基本的管理技能，这对初次担任 CEO 的人来说往往很难，但能带来巨大的帮助。YC 今年夏天的一位演讲者，如今非常成功，但在早期却面临了不少困难，团队成员也更换了几次。有人问他最大的困难是什么，他回答说，“如果你每天都告诉员工他们搞砸了，除非你想让他们全部离开，否则不要这么做，因为他们真的会离开。”

但作为创始人，这种行为非常自然。你认为你自己能把每件事情做到最好，很容易指出别人没有做好。而学习一些管理技能，能防止团队成员频繁更换。大多数创始人不习惯于称赞团队，学习如何做到这一点也是很重要的。这对我来说也花了一些时间去学习。你需要让团队在所有好事发生时获得赞誉，而你则需要为所有的坏事负责。

你还需要避免微观管理。你需要不断地给人们小范围的责任。这些都不是创始人通常会去思考的事情。我认为初次创业的创始人最好的做法是意识到自己会是一个非常糟糕的管理者，并努力在这一点上多加弥补。Dan Pink 谈到激励人们做出伟大工作的三件事：自主性、掌握和目标感。在我管理公司的时候我从来没有考虑过这些，但事后回想我觉得他说得非常对。我觉得这是值得去思考的事情。我也花了一些时间学习如何进行一对一沟通，如何给予清晰的反馈。

这些都是初次创业的 CEO 通常不会做的事情，也许我可以帮你避免犯这些错误。

团队部分的最后一点是关于当员工不适合时开除他们。无论我在这里说什么都不会阻止任何人在这方面做错，因为解雇员工是管理公司最糟糕的部分之一。就我个人经验而言，我认为这是最糟糕的部分。每个第一次创业的创始人都会拖延，大家都希望某个员工能有所改观，但正确的做法是当它不起作用时快速开除。这对公司有利，对员工也有利。但由于这个过程如此痛苦和令人不快，以至于每个人在第一次面对时都会犯错。

除了解雇那些工作表现不佳的人外，你还需要解雇那些 a) 制造办公室政治的人，和 b) 长期持消极态度的人。公司里的其他人总是能意识到这些员工的行为，这种行为是巨大的拖累——对公司有害无益。这种事情可能在大公司中还能勉强运作，但在初创公司中绝对致命。因此你需要密切关注那些有问题的员工。

有人问，如何在快速解雇不适合的人和让早期员工感到安全之间取得平衡？答案是，当一个员工不合适时，并不是因为他们犯了一两次错误。任何人都会犯一两次错误，或者不止几次，你需要对此非常包容，像一个团队一样，一起努力解决问题。

如果某个人做的每一个决定都是错误的，那么这时候你就需要采取行动了。这种时候，不光是你，每个人都会清楚地感受到问题。这不是一两次失误的问题，而是某个人每次做某件事情，你都会觉得自己会做出相反的决定。你不能决定他们的每一个决定，但你可以选择决策者。如果某个人在数周或一个月内不断犯错，这种现象会非常明显。

这是理论上听起来复杂，实际中却几乎没有疑问的一个例子。一个人偶尔犯错和持续犯错、引起问题、让每个人都不开心之间的区别，在第一次看到时非常明显。

联合创始人什么时候应该决定股权分配？

出于某种原因，我一直不太清楚为什么，很多联合创始人喜欢把这个问题拖很久。他们甚至会在公司注册文件上做一些疯狂的操作，以便拖延讨论这个问题。

这个问题不会随着时间的推移而变得更容易，你最好在开始合作后尽快解决它。而且它应该是接近平等的。如果你不愿意给某人——你的联合创始人——一个接近平等的股份，那你需要认真思考是否真的想让他们成为联合创始人。但无论如何，你都应该在公司走得太远之前就确定股权分配，最好是在几周内完成。

有人问到，我说过经验无所谓，那你怎么知道某人能否胜任未来的角色，或者后来会不会限制公司发展？对那些非常聪明并且能学习新事物的人来说，他们几乎总能在公司中找到适合的位置。你可能需要让他们转到其他部门，做一些和最初不同的事情。例如，你雇佣一个人来领导工程团队，但随着团队规模达到五十人，这个人可能无法胜任，于是你给他一个不同的角色。真正优秀的人才几乎总能在公司找到合适的地方，我很少见到这会成为一个问题。

那么如果和联合创始人的关系破裂了该怎么办？我们将在课程的后续部分讨论一些操作上的问题，但这里是创始人们经常搞砸的最重要的一点。那就是，每个联合创始人，包括你自己，都必须有股权归属。基本上，联合创始人的股权归属就是你在预先谈判如果你们中的某一个人离开会发生什么。因此，硅谷的标准做法是需要四年时间来获得全部股权，比如你们平分股权，这就意味着需要四年时间来全部获得。股权时钟从一年后才开始，如果你在一年后离开，你可以保留百分之二十五的股权，两年后就是百分之五十，以此类推。

如果你不这样做，而你们之间发生了严重的分裂，一位创始人早早离开却带走了公司的一半，那么在股权表上会有一个很难处理的累赘，让投资者很难投资你或做其他事情。所以防止这种情况的头号建议就是要有股权归属制度。我们现在几乎不会资助没有股权归属的公司，因为问题真的会这么严重。联合创始人之间还会出现的另一件事情是：问题在任何公司中都会或多或少发生，你应该尽早沟通，不要让它坐在那里发酵。

如果在招不到理想的员工和被竞争对手抢走客户之间只能选择一个怎么办？如果这会是公司前五名员工之一，我宁愿失去那些客户。因为不合适的员工会对公司造成极大的破坏，失去一些客户总比毁掉公司好。至于后期我可能会有不同的看法，但很难在一般情况下下定论。

我要稍后再讨论这个问题。问题是：联合创始人不在同一个地点怎么办？我的答案是：不要这样做。我对远程团队总体持怀疑态度，但在初创公司的早期，沟通和速度至关重要，而视频会议在这个阶段就是行不通的。从数据来看，看看历史上最成功的三十家软件公司，很难找到一个联合创始人不在同一地点的案例。这种情况非常非常少见。

好了，现在我们来谈谈执行力。对大多数创始人来说，执行并不是运营公司中最有趣的部分，但却是最关键的。很多联合创始人以为自己只是要为一个美好的理念负责，然后会登上杂志封面、参加派对。然而，实际上，成为联合创始人意味着更多的是承诺长期的执行磨砺，而这并不是可以外包的事情。

打造一家执行力强的公司，首先你自己就得擅长执行。创业公司的一切都由创始人树立榜样。创始人做什么，公司的文化就会是什么。因此，如果你想要建立一种大家努力工作、关注细节、关心客户、精打细算的文化，你自己首先得做到。没有其他方法，你不能指望雇一个首席运营官去做这些，然后自己跑去参加各种会议。公司必须把你看作一个执行的狂热机器。正如我在第一节课中所说的，有至少一百倍多的人有伟大的想法，但只有很少人愿意投入努力去好好执行这些想法。想法本身不值钱，只有出色的执行才能增加和创造价值。

执行力的一大部分在于付出努力，但你仍然可以学到很多关于如何做好执行的知识。因此，我们将有三节课专门讨论这一点。

谈到首席执行官，人们总是问我CEO的工作内容。或许不仅仅有五项，但以下五项在早期经常出现。前四项大家都认为是CEO的职责：制定愿景、筹集资金、向你想要招募的人、执行团队、合作伙伴和媒体宣讲公司使命，招聘和管理团队。但第五项是设定执行标准，而这并不是大多数创始人所期待或想象中的工作，但我认为这实际上是关键的CEO职责之一，而且只有CEO能做到这一点。

执行力分为两个关键问题。一是能否找出要做的事情，二是能否将其完成。所以假设你已经找到了该做什么，我想谈谈如何完成它的两个方面，那就是专注和强度。

专注是至关重要的。我最喜欢问创始人的问题之一就是他们花时间和金钱在做什么。这几乎揭示了创始人认为重要的所有事情。

作为创始人最难的部分之一就是每天都有一百件重要的事情在争夺你的注意力。你必须识别出正确的两到三件事，集中精力去做，然后忽略、委派或推迟其他的事情。很多创始人认为很重要的事情，比如频繁去不同的律所咨询、参加会议、招募顾问等，其实根本不重要。真正重要的事情会随着时间而变化，但这是一条重要的建议：你需要找出那一两件最重要的事情，然后去完成它们。

每天你只能有两到三件重要的事情，因为其他的事情会不停向你袭来。每天都会有突发情况，如果你不能明确那两三件事情是什么，就永远也无法很好地完成任务。对于创始人来说，这真的很难。创始人对开启新事物充满激情。

不幸的是，优秀执行的秘诀就是要多说“不”。你需要在一百个选择中说九十七次“不”，而大多数创始人发现他们必须非常有意识地做到这一点。大多数创业公司都远不够专注。他们可能非常努力地工作，但并没有把精力放在正确的事情上，因此他们依然会失败。创业公司的一个伟大而又残酷的特性是：你不会因为尝试而得到任何赞誉。你只有在做出市场需要的东西时才会得分。所以如果你努力在错误的事情上，没人会在乎。

那么问题来了，如何确定每天应该专注于什么？每天有明确的目标非常重要。我认识的大多数优秀创始人都会为公司设定一些小而总体性的目标，所有公司里的每个人都清楚这些目标。这可能是某个日期发布产品、实现特定的增长率、获得某种用户参与率、为某些关键职位招聘等。这些都是目标，公司里的每个人都能告诉你每周的关键目标是什么。然后每个人都根据这些目标来执行。

创始人真正决定了公司的专注点。无论创始人关心什么、专注于什么，那都会成为整个公司的目标。最优秀的创始人不断重复这些目标，远比他们认为需要的次数更多。他们把目标挂在墙上，每周的一对一和全体会议上都谈论这些目标，这样公司才能保持专注。

专注的关键之一，以及我之前提到为什么不是朋友关系的联合创始人很难成功的原因在于，如果没有良好的沟通，就无法保持专注。即使公司只有四五个人，小小的沟通不畅就足以让大家在做的事情上产生些许偏差。然后你就失去了专注，公司也会陷入混乱。

稍后我会再谈这个，但增长和势头是创业公司永远不能失去专注的东西。增长和势头是创业公司的生命线，你必须时刻专注于维持它们。你应该时刻了解自己的指标状况，应该每周有一次指标审查会议。如果你发现自己在讨论“我们现在不专注于增长，我们现在增长不好，但我们在做其他事情，我们现在没有明确的发布时间表因为我们在专注于其他事情，比如品牌重塑”等等，那么几乎都是灾难的预兆。

所以你需要正确的指标，并专注于提升这些指标，保持势头。不要让公司因其他事情分散注意力或激动起来。一个常见的错误是，公司会被自己的公关炒作所激动。只凭炒作而没有实际成果是很容易做到的，这确实让人感觉非常酷。但是一年后，如果你一无所成，你将不再酷，你只能谈论那些一年前的报道，诸如“哦，你看，这些斯坦福学生创办了一家新公司，它将成为下一个大事”，而现在你却什么也没有，这感觉糟透了。

正如我之前所提到的，团队应该处在同一空间。我认为这是基本条件。远程联合创始团队非常非常难，它比任何人预想的都要慢得多。

除了专注，执行的另一个关键是强度。创业公司只能在相当高的强度下运作。我的一个朋友说，创业成功的秘诀是极度的专注和极度的投入。你可以拥有一个创业公司和另一件事情，你可以拥有一个家庭，但你可能不能再兼顾更多其他的事情。创业公司不是实现工作与生活平衡的最佳选择，这就是现实中的一个悲哀的事实。创业公司有很多很棒的地方，但这不是其中之一。创业公司以一种普遍难以解释的方式将所有人吞没。你基本上需要愿意比竞争对手更加努力。

好消息是，正确方向上的少量额外努力会产生巨大的差异。我喜欢给出的一个例子是关于一个消费类网络产品的病毒系数。即每个现有用户能带来多少新用户。如果这个系数是0.99，公司最终会趋于停滞甚至死亡。如果它是1.01，你将处在指数级增长的快乐状态。

所以这是一个具体的例子，展示了少量额外的工作如何成为成功和失败之间的差异。当我们与成功的创始人交流时，他们总是分享类似的故事——只是在某些方面比竞争对手多做一点点努力，就是他们成功的原因。

所以你必须非常强势地投入。这只能由CEO和创始人来带动。创业公司最大的优势之一就是执行速度，你必须要有这种不断追求高效运作的节奏。Facebook有一张著名的海报，上面写着“快速行动，打破常规”。但与此同时，他们对质量的要求又近乎痴迷。这就是难点所在。要么快速行动，要么注重质量，而创业公司要做的是两者兼顾。你需要创造一种文化，让公司对每个人的工作都有很高的标准，但仍然保持迅速的行动。

苹果、谷歌和Facebook都非常好地做到了这一点。这不只是关于产品，而是关于他们所做的一切。他们快速行动，打破常规，他们在合适的地方精打细算，但对质量无处不关注。如果你不想让员工写出低质量的代码，就不要给他们用劣质的电脑。你必须在整个公司内设定一个统一的质量标准。

这与必须果断决策是相关的。犹豫不决是创业公司的杀手。平庸的创始人花很多时间讨论宏伟的计划，却从不做出决策。他们谈论着“我可以做这个，也可以做那个”，在两者之间摇摆不定，却从不采取行动。而你真正需要的是行动偏好。

最优秀的创始人处理的事情看起来很小，但他们行动迅速。而且他们能快速完成事情。每次你与最优秀的创始人交谈时，他们总是已经完成了新的工作。事实上，这也是我们在YC中学到的最好预测创始人成功的指标。如果每次我们与某个团队交谈时，他们都有新的进展，这是我们拥有的关于公司成功的最佳预测之一。部分原因在于，你可以通过逐步分解完成巨大的目标。如果你持续地一个一个地完成小块任务，一年后你回过头来，会发现自己已经完成了一件惊人的事情。而如果你消失了一年，期待着带回来一些惊人的成果，这通常是不会发生的。

所以你必须选择这些合适的项目规模。即使你在构建一个疯狂的合成生物学公司，你说“我必须离开一年，没法逐步完成”，你通常还是可以把它分解为更小的项目。

速度是巨大的优势。最优秀的创始人通常回应邮件最快，做决策最快，通常在各个方面都迅速。他们有一种“无论如何完成它”的态度。

他们也经常现身。

他们出现在会议上，亲自来到公司，和我们见面。我有一个一直对我很管用的建议：在模棱两可的情况下搭上飞机。我来讲一个小故事。

当我自己在经营公司的时候，我们发现自己快要失去一份交易了。这份交易是某个领域内的第一个大客户，至关重要。交易即将签给一家比我们早成立一年的公司，他们已经把合同基本谈妥了。我们打电话过去，说：“我们有一个更好的产品，你必须和我们见面。”他们说：“不好意思，我们明天就要签合同了。”于是我们赶往机场，登上了一架飞机，第二天早上六点就到了他们的办公室。我们就坐在那里，他们让我们离开，我们只是继续坐在那里。最后，一个初级员工决定见见我们，然后再是一个高级员工也决定见见我们。最终，他们撕毁了和另一家公司的合同，一周后我们和他们签了约。我确信，如果我们没有登上那班飞机，如果我们没有亲自到场，这件事绝不会成。

所以，当人们说在不确定的情况下就登上飞机时，他们实际上是认真的，但他们不一定是字面意义上的。然而，我确实认为这是一个很好的字面意义上的建议。

我之前提到过势头和增长，再次重申：势头和增长是创业公司的生命线。这大概是执行得好的前三大秘诀之一。你希望公司一直在赢。如果你一旦松开油门，情况就会失控，螺旋式地下滑。一个获胜的团队感觉良好，并持续获胜。一个很久没有赢的团队则会失去动力，并不断失败。所以要始终保持势头，这对管理创业公司来说是一条至关重要的指导原则。如果只能告诉创始人一件关于如何经营公司的事情，那就是这一条。

对于大多数软件创业公司，这意味着要保持增长。对于硬件创业公司来说，这意味着：不要让你的出货日期推迟。这是我们在YC期间告诉人们的事情，他们通常听了之后一切都很好。然而在YC结束后，他们就被其他事情分散了注意力，增长也慢了下来。然后不久，员工们开始变得不开心，开始辞职，一切都开始分崩离析。找到一个增长引擎很难，因为大多数公司都是以新的方式增长的。但有一点是：如果你打造了一个好的产品，它自然会增长。因此在一开始就把产品做对是以后不丧失势头的最佳方法。

如果你失去了势头，大多数创始人会用错误的方法找回它。他们发表关于公司愿景的长篇演讲，试图通过演讲来鼓舞士气。但是在公司失去势头的情况下，员工们并不想听这些。你需要把愿景演讲留在公司获胜的时候。当你处于不利状态时，你只需要通过小的胜利来找回势头。我的一个董事会成员曾说过，销售可以解决创业公司中的一切问题。这真的很正确。因此，你要找出可以取得小胜利的地方，然后去实现它们。你会惊讶地发现，创业公司中的其他问题都会因此而消失。

另一个你会注意到的现象是，如果公司失去势头，每个人都会开始对接下来该做什么产生分歧。当公司失去势头时，争吵会随之而来。所以在团队对该做什么产生分歧时，有一个有效的框架：问问你的用户，然后按照用户告诉你的去做。你还需要提醒大家：“嘿，事情现在不顺利，我们并不是真的互相讨厌，我们只需要重新找回状态，一切都会好起来的。”如果你直言不讳地指出这一点，如果你只是承认它，你会发现情况会好很多。

再以Facebook为例，当2008年Facebook的增长放缓时，马克成立了一个“增长组”。他们致力于做一些很小的事情来让Facebook增长得更快。这些事情本身看起来都很小，但它们使Facebook的增长曲线重新上升。很快，这成为了公司最受尊敬的团队之一。马克说过，这是Facebook最好的创新之一。根据当时在Facebook工作的朋友们的说法，这确实扭转了公司的动态。公司从一个所有人都感觉不好、失去势头的状态，变回了一个充满活力的地方。

保持势头的一个好方法是在公司早期建立起运作节奏——定期发布产品和推出新功能，每周和全公司一起审查指标。这实际上是董事会能为你做的最好的事情之一。董事会在商业战略方面的增值作用很少见，但你可以很频繁地利用它们，作为推动公司关注指标和里程碑的催化剂。

经常破坏势头而本不该如此的事情之一是竞争对手。在媒体上制造声势的竞争对手可能是最常破坏公司势头的外部因素。

因此，有一个好的经验法则：不要担心任何竞争对手，除非他们真的有了一个超越你的产品并实际发布了。写新闻稿比写代码容易，而写代码又比打造一个好产品容易得多。因此，提醒你的团队，这也是创始人的责任，就是不要让公司因为竞争对手在媒体上的炒作而士气低落。

我很喜欢亨利·福特的一个名言：“最可怕的竞争对手是那些根本不在意你，只顾不断改进自己业务的人。”

这些公司几乎从来都不会发布大量的新闻稿，而它们却会让人感到畏惧。