Before the Startup

One of the advantages of having kids is that when you have to give advice to people you can ask yourself, “what would I tell my own kids?”, and actually you’ll find this really focuses you. So even though my kids are little, my two year old today, when asked what he’ll be after two, said “a bat.” The correct answer was three, but “a bat” is so much more interesting. So even though my kids are little, I already know what I would tell them about startups, if they were in college, so that is what I’m going to tell you. You’re literally going to get what I would tell my own kids, since most of you are young enough to be my own kids.

Startups are very counterintuitive and I’m not sure exactly why. It could be simply because knowledge about them has not permeated our culture yet, but whatever the reason, this is an area where you cannot trust your intuition all the time. It’s like skiing in that way - any of you guys learn to ski as adults? When you first try skiing and you want to slow down, your first impulse is to lean back, just like in everything else. But lean back on the skis and you fly down the hill out of control. So, as I learned, part of learning to ski is learning to suppress that impulse. Eventually you get new habits, but in the beginning there is this list of things you’re trying to remember as you start down the hill: alternate feet, make s-turns, do not drag the inside foot, all this stuff.

Startups are as unnatural as skiing and there is a similar list of stuff you have to remember for startups. What I’m going to give you today is the beginning of the list, the list of the counterintuitive stuff you have to remember to prevent your existing instincts from leading you astray.

The first thing on it is the fact I just mentioned: startups are so weird that if you follow your instincts they will lead you astray. If you remember nothing more than that, when you’re about to make a mistake, you can pause before making it. When I was running Y Combinator we used to joke that our function was to tell founders things they would ignore, and it’s really true. Batch after batch the YC partners warned founders about mistakes they were about to make and the founders ignored them, and they came back a year later and said, “I wish we’d listened.” But that dude is in their cap table and there is nothing they can do.

Q: Why do founders persistently ignore the partner’s advice?

A: That’s the thing about counterintuitive ideas, they contradict your intuitions, they seem wrong, so of course your first impulse is to ignore them and, in fact, that’s not just the curse of Y Combinator, but to some extent our raison d’être. You don’t need people to give you advice that does not surprise you. If founders’ existing intuition gave them the right answers, they would not need us. That’s why there are a lot of ski instructors, and not many running instructors; you don’t see those words together, “running instructor,” as much as you see “ski instructor.” It’s because skiing is counterintuitive, sort of what YC is—business ski instructors—except you are going up slopes instead of down them, well ideally.

You can, however, trust your instincts about people. Your life so far hasn’t been much like starting a startup, but all the interactions you’ve had with people are just like the interactions you have with people in the business world. In fact, one of the big mistakes that founders make is to not trust their intuition about people enough. They meet someone, who seems impressive, but about whom they feel some misgivings and then later when things blow up, they say, “You know I knew there was something wrong about that guy, but I ignored it because he seemed so impressive.”

There is this specific sub-case in business, especially if you come from an engineering background, as I believe you all do. You think business is supposed to be this slightly distasteful thing. So when you meet people who seem smart, but somehow distasteful, you think, “Okay this must be normal for business,” but it’s not. Just pick people the way you would pick people if you were picking friends. This is one of those rare cases where it works to be self indulgent. Work with people you would generally like and respect and that you have known long enough to be sure about because there are a lot of people who are really good at seeming likable for a while. Just wait till your interests are opposed and then you’ll see.

The second counterintuitive point, this might come as a little bit of a disappointment, but what you need to succeed in a startup is not expertise in startups. That makes this class different from most other classes you take. You take a French class, at the end of it you’ve learned how to speech French. You do the work, you may not sound exactly like a French person, but pretty close, right? This class can teach you about startups, but that is not what you need to know. What you need to know to succeed in a startup is not expertise in startups, what you need is expertise in your own users.

Mark Zuckerberg did not succeed at Facebook because he was an expert in startups, he succeeded despite being a complete noob at startups; I mean Facebook was first incorporated as a Florida LLC. Even you guys know better than that. He succeeded despite being a complete noob at startups because he understood his users very well. Most of you don’t know the mechanics of raising an angel round, right? If you feel bad about that, don’t, because I can tell you Mark Zuckerberg probably doesn’t know the mechanics of raising an angel round either; if he was even paying attention when Ron Conway wrote him the big check, he probably has forgotten about it by now.

In fact, I worry it’s not merely unnecessary for people to learn in detail about the mechanics of starting a startup, but possibly somewhat dangerous because another characteristic mistake of young founders starting startups is to go through the motions of starting a startup. They come up with some plausible sounding idea, they raise funding to get a nice valuation, then the next step is they rent a nice office in SoMa and hire a bunch of their friends, until they gradually realize how completely fucked they are because while imitating all the outward forms of starting a startup, they have neglected the one thing that is actually essential, which is to make something people want. By the way that’s the only use of that swear word, except for the initial one, that was involuntary and I did check with Sam if it would be okay; he said he had done it several times, I mean use the word.

We saw this happen so often, people going through the motion of starting a startup, that we made up a name for it: “Playing House.” Eventually I realized why it was happening, the reason young founders go though the motions of starting a startup is because that is what they have been trained to do, their whole life, up to this point. Think about what it takes to get into college: extracurricular activities? Check. Even in college classes most of the work you do is as artificial as running laps, and I’m not attacking the educational system for being this way, inevitably the work that you do to learn something is going to have some amount of fakeness to it. And if you measure people’s performance they will inevitably exploit the difference to the degree that what you’re measuring is largely an artifact of the fakeness.

I confess that I did this myself in college; in fact, here is a useful tip on getting good grades. I found that in a lot of classes there might only be twenty or thirty ideas that had the right shape to make good exam questions. So the way I studied for exams in these classes was not to master the material in the class, but to try and figure out what the exam questions would be and work out the answers in advance. For me the test was not like, what my answers would be on my exam, for me the test was which of my exam questions would show up on the exam. So I would get my grade instantly, I would walk into the exam and look at the questions and see how many I got right, essentially. It works in a lot of classes, especially CS classes. I remember automata theory, there are only a few things that make sense to ask about automata theory. So it’s not surprising that after being effectively trained for their whole lives to play such games, young founders’ first impulse on starting a startup is to find out what the tricks are for this new game. What are the extracurricular activities of startups, what are things I have to do? They always want to know, since apparently the measure of success for a startup is fundraising, another noob mistake. They always want to know, what are the tricks for convincing investors? And we have to tell them the best way to convince investors is to start a startup that is actually doing well, meaning growing fast, and then simply tell investors so.

Then they ask okay, so what are the tricks for growing fast, and this is exacerbated by the existence of this term, “Growth Hacks.” Whenever you hear somebody talk about Growth Hacks, just mentally translate it in your mind to “bullshit,” because what we tell them is the way to make your startup grow is to make something that users really love, and then tell them about it. So that’s what you have to do: that’s Growth Hacks right there.

So many of the conversations the YC partners have with the founders begin with the founders saying a sentence that begins with, “How do I,” and the partners answering with a sentence that begins with, “Just.” Why do they make things so complicated? The reason, I realized, after years of being puzzled by this, is they’re looking for the trick, they’ve been trained to look for the trick.

So, this is the third counterintuitive thing to remember about startups: starting a startup is where gaming the system stops working. Gaming the system may continue to work, if you go to work for a big company, depending on how broken the company is, you may be able to succeed by sucking up to the right person; Giving the impression of productivity by sending emails late at night, or if you’re smart enough changing the clock on your computer, cause who’s going to check the headers, right? I like an audience I can tell jokes to and they laugh. Over in the business school: “headers?” Okay, God this thing is being recorded, I just realized that.

Alright for now on we are sticking strictly to the script. But, in startups, that does not work. There is no boss to trick, how can you trick people, when there is nobody to trick? There are only users and all users care about is whether your software does what they want, right? They’re like sharks, sharks are too stupid to fool, you can’t wave a red flag and fool it, it’s like meat or no meat. You have to have what people want and you only prosper to the extent that you do. The dangerous thing is, especially for you guys, the dangerous thing is that faking does work to some extent with investors.

If you’re really good at knowing what you’re talking about, you can fool investors, for one, maybe two rounds of funding, but it’s not in your interest to do. I mean, you’re all doing this for equity, you’re puling a confidence trick on yourself. Wasting your own time, because the startup is doomed and all you’re doing is wasting your time writing it down. So, stop looking for the trick. There are tricks in startups, as there are in any domain, but they are an order of magnitude less important than solving the real problem. Someone who knows zero about fundraising, but has made something users really love, will have an easier time raising money than someone who knows every trick in the book, but has a flat usage graph.

Though, in a sense, it’s bad news that gaming the system stops working now, in the sense that you’re deprived of your most powerful weapons and, after all, you spent twenty years mastering them. I find it very exciting that there even exist parts of the world where gaming the system is not how you win. I would have been really excited in college if I explicitly realized that there are parts of the world where gaming the system matters less than others, and some where it hardly matters at all. But there are, and this is one of the most important thing to think about when planning your future. How do you win at each type of work, and what do you want to win by doing it?

That brings us to our fourth counterintuitive point, startups are all consuming. If you start a startup, it will take over your life to a degree that you cannot imagine and if it succeeds it will take over your life for a long time; for several years, at the very least, maybe a decade, maybe the rest of your working life. So there is a real opportunity cost here. It may seem to you that Larry Page has an enviable life, but there are parts of it that are defiantly unenviable. The way the world looks to him is that he started running as fast as he could, at age twenty-five, and he has not stopped to catch his breath since. Every day shit happens within the Google empire that only the emperor can deal with and he, as the emperor, has to deal with it. If he goes on vacation for even a week, a whole backlog of shit accumulates, and he has to bear this, uncomplaining, because: number one, as the company’s daddy, he cannot show fear or weakness; and number two, if you’re a billionaire, you get zero, actually less than zero sympathy, if you complain about having a difficult life.

Which has this strange side effect that the difficulty of being a successful startup founder is concealed from almost everyone who has done it. People who win the one-hundred meter in the Olympics, you walk up to them and they’re out of breath. Larry Page is doing that too, but you never get to see it.

Y Combinator has now funded several companies that could be called big successes and in every single case the founder says the same thing, “It never gets any easier.” The nature of the problems change, so you’re maybe worrying about more glamorous problems like construction delays in your new London offices rather than the broken air conditioner in your studio apartment, but the total volume of worry never decreases. If anything, it increases.

Starting a successful startup is similar to having kids; it’s like a button you press and it changes your life irrevocably. While it’s honestly the best thing—having kids—if you take away one thing from this lecture, remember this: There are a lot of things that are easier to do before you have kids than after, many of which will make you a better parent when you do have kids. In rich countries, most people delay pushing the button for a while and I’m sure you are all intimately familiar with that procedure.

Yet when it comes to starting startups a lot of people seem to think they are supposed to start them in college. Are you crazy? What are the universities thinking – they go out of their way to ensure that their students are well supplied with contraceptives, and yet they are starting up entrepreneurship programs and startup incubators left and right.

To be fair, the universities have their hand forced here. A lot of incoming students are interested in start-ups. Universities are at least de-facto supposed to prepare you for your career, and so if you’re interested in startups, it seems like universities are supposed to teach you about startups and if they don’t maybe they lose applicants to universities that do claim to do that. So can universities teach you about startups? Well, if not, what are we doing here? Yes and no, as I’ve explained to you about start-ups. Essentially, if you want to learn French, universities can teach you linguistics. That is what this is. This is linguistics: we’re teaching you how to learn languages and what you need to know is how a particular language. What you need to know are the needs of your own users. You can’t learn those until you actually start the company, which means that starting a startup is something you can intrinsically only learn by doing it. You can’t do that in college for the reason I just explained. Startups take over your entire life. If you start a startup in college, if you start a startup as a student, you can’t start a startup as a student because if you start a startup you’re not a student anymore. You may be nominally a student but you won’t even be that for very much longer. Given this dichotomy: which of the two paths should you take?

Be a real student and not start a startup or start a real startup and not be a student. Well, I can answer that one for you. I’m talking to my own kids here. Do not start a startup in college. I hope I’m not disappointing anyone seriously. Starting a startup could be a good component of a good life for a lot of ambitious people. This is just a part of a much bigger problem that you are trying to solve. How to have a good life, right. Those that are starting a startup could be a good thing to do at some point. Twenty is not the optimal time to do it.

There are things that you can do in your early twenties that you cannot do as well before or after. Like plunge deeply into projects on a whim that seem like they will have no pay off. Travel super cheaply with no sense of a deadline. In fact they are really isomorphic shapes in different domains.

For unambitious people your thing can be the dreaded failure to launch. For the ambitious ones it’s a really valuable sort of exploration and if you start a startup at twenty and you are sufficiently successful you will never get to do it.

Mark Zuckerberg will never get to bum around a foreign country. If he goes to a foreign county, it’s either as a de-facto state visit or like he’s hiding out incognito at George V in Paris. He’s never going to just like backpack around Thailand if that’s still what people do. Do people still backpack around Thailand? That’s the first real enthusiasm I’ve ever seen from this class. Should have given this talk in Thailand. He can do things you can’t do, like charter jets to fly him to foreign countries. Really big jets. But success has taken a lot of the serendipity out of his life. Facebook is running him as much as he’s running Facebook.

While it can be really cool to be in the grip of some project you consider your life’s work, there are advantages to serendipity. Among other things, it gives you more options to choose your life’s work from. There’s not even a trade off here. You’re not sacrificing anything if you forgo starting a start up at twenty because you will be more likely to succeed if you wait. In the astronomically unlikely case that you are twenty and you have some side project that takes off like Facebook did, then you face a choice to either be running with it or not and maybe it’s reasonable to run with it. Usually the way that start ups take off is for the founders to make them take off. It’s gratuitously stupid to do that at twenty.

Should you do it at any age? Starting a startup may sound kind of hard, if I haven’t made that clear let me try again. Starting a startup is really hard. If it’s too hard, what if you are not up to this challenge?

The answer is the fifth counter intuitive point. You can’t tell. Your life so far has given you some idea of what your prospects might be if you wanted to become a mathematician or a professional football player. Boy, it’s not every audience you can say that to. Unless you have had a very strange life indeed you have not done much that’s like starting a startup. Meaning starting a startup will change you a lot if it works out. So what you’re trying to estimate is not just what you are, but what you could become. And who can do that? Well, not me. for the last nine years it was my job to try to guess (I wrote “predict” in here and it came out as “guess”—that’s a very informative Freudian slip). Seriously it’s easy to tell how smart people are in ten minutes. Hit a few tennis balls over the net, and do they hit them back at you or into the net? The hard part and the most important part was predicting how tough and ambitious they would become.

There may be no one at this point who has more experience than me in doing this. I can tell you how much an expert can know about that. The answer is not much. I learned from experience to keep completely open mind about which start ups in each batch would turn out to be the stars. The founders sometimes thought they knew. Some arrived feeling confident that they would ace Y Combinator just as they had aced every one of the few easy artificial tests they had faced in life so far. Others arrived wondering what mistake had caused them to be admitted and hoping that no one discover it.

There is little to no correlation between these attitudes and how things turn out. I’ve read the same is true in the military. The swaggering recruits are no more than likely to turn out to be really tough than the quiet ones and probably for the same reason. The tests are so different from tests in people’s previous lives. If you are absolutely terrified of starting a startup you probably shouldn’t do it. Unless you are one of those people who gets off on doing things you’re afraid of. Otherwise if you are merely unsure of whether you are going to be able to do it, the only way to find out is to try, just not now.

So if you want to start a startup one day, what do you do now in college? There are only two things you need initially, an idea and cofounders. The MO for getting both of those is the same which leads to our sixth and last counterintuitive point.

The way to get start up ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. I have written a whole essay on this and I am not going to repeat the whole thing here. But the short version is that if you make a conscious effort to try to think of startup ideas, you will think of ideas that are not only bad but bad and plausible sounding. Meaning you and everybody else will be fooled by them. You’ll waste a lot of time before realizing they’re no good. The way to come up with good startup ideas is to take a step back. Instead of trying to make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, turn your brain into the type that has startup ideas unconsciously. In fact, so unconsciously that you don’t even realize at first that they’re startup ideas. This is not only possible: Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Apple all got started this way. None of these companies were supposed to be companies at first, they were all just side projects. The very best ideas almost always have to start as side projects because they’re always such outliers that your conscious mind would reject them as ideas for companies.

How do you turn your mind into the kind that has startup ideas unconsciously? One, learn about a lot of things that matter. Two, work on problems that interest you. Three, with people you like and or respect. That’s the third part incidentally, is how you get cofounders at the same time as the idea. The first time I wrote that paragraph, instead of learn a lot about things that matter, I wrote become good at some technology. But that prescription is too narrow. What was special about Brain Chesky and Joe Gebbia from Airbnb was not that they were experts in technology. They went to art school, they were experts in design. Perhaps more importantly they were really good at organizing people in getting projects done. So you don’t have to work on technology per se, so long as you work on things that stretch you.

What kinds of things are those? Now that is very hard to answer in the general case. History is full of examples of young people who were working on problems that no one else at the time thought were important. In particular that their parents didn’t think were important. On the other hand, history is even fuller of examples of parents that thought their kids were wasting their time and who were right.

How do you know if you’re working on real stuff? I mean when Twitch TV switched from being Justin.tv to Twitch TV and they were going to broadcast people playing video games, I was like, “What?” But it turned out to be a good business. I know how I know real problems are interesting, and I am self-indulgent: I always like working on anything interesting things even if no one cares about them. I find it very hard to make myself work on boring things even if they’re supposed to be important. My life is full of case after case where I worked on things just because I was interested and they turned out to be useful later in some worldly way.

Y Combinator itself is something I only did because it seemed interesting. I seem to have some internal compass that helps me out. This is for you not me and I don’t know what you have in your heads. Maybe if I think more about it I can come up some heuristics for recognizing genuinely interesting ideas. For now all I can give you is the hopelessly question begging advice. Incidentally this is the actual meaning of the phrase begging the question. The hopelessly question begging advice that if you’re interested in generally interesting problems, gratifying your interest energetically is the best way to prepare yourself for a startup and probably best way to live.

Although I can’t explain in the general case what counts as an interesting problem I can tell you about a large subset of them. If you think of technology as something that’s spreading like a sort of fractal stain, every point on the edge represents an interesting problem. Steam engine not so much maybe you never know. One guaranteed way to turn your mind into the type to start up ideas for them unconsciously. Is to get yourself to the leading edge of some technology. To, as Paul Buchheit put it, “Live in the future.” And when you get there, ideas that seem uncannily prescient to other people will seem obvious to you. You may not realize they’re start up ideas, but you will know they are something that ought to exist.

For example back at Harvard in the mid 90s. A fellow grad student of my friends Robert and Trevor wrote his own voice over IP software. It wasn’t meant to be a startup, he never tried to turn it into one. He just wanted to talk to his girlfriend in Taiwan without paying for long distance calls. Since he was an expert on networks, it seemed obvious to him that thing to do was to turn the sound into packets and ship them over the internet for free. Why didn’t everybody do this? They were not good at writing this type of software. He never did anything with this. He never tried to turn this into a startup. That is how the best startups tend to happen.

Strangely enough the optimal thing to do in college if you want to be a successful startup founder is not some sort of new vocational version of college focused on entrepreneurship. It’s the classic version of college is education its own sake. If you want to start your own startup what you should do in college is learn powerful things and if you have genuine intellectual curiosity that’s what you’ll naturally tend to do if you just follow your own inclinations. The component of entrepreneurship, can never quite say that word with a straight face, that really matters is domain expertise. Larry Page is Larry Page because he was an expert on search and the way he became an expert on search was because he was genuinely interested and not because of some ulterior motive. At its best starting a startup is merely a ulterior motive for curiosity and you’ll do it best if you introduce the ulterior motive at the end of the process. So here is ultimate advice for young would be startup founders reduced to two words: just learn.

Alright how much time do we have left? Eighteen minutes for questions good god. Do you guys have the questions?

Q: Sure we will start with two questions. How can a nontechnical founder most efficiently contribute to a startup?

A: If the startup is, if the startup is working in some domain, if it’s not a pure technology startup but is working in some very specific domain, like if it is Uber and the non technical founder was an expert in the limo business then actually then the non technical founder would be doing most of the work. Recruiting drivers and doing whatever else Uber has to do and the technical founder would be just writing the iPhone app which probably less, well iPhone and android app, which is less than half of it. If it’s purely a technical start up the non technical founder does sales and brings coffee and cheeseburgers to the programmer.

Q: Do you see any value in business school for people who want to pursue entrepreneurship?

A: Basically no, it sounds undiplomatic, but business school was designed to teach people management. Management is a problem that you only have in a startup if you are sufficiently successful. So really what you need to know early on to make a start up successful is developing products. You would be better off going to design school if you would want to go to some sort of school. Although frankly the way to learn how to do it is just to do it. One of the things I got wrong early on is that I advised people who were interested in starting a startup to go work for some other company for a few years before starting their own. Honestly the best way to learn on how to start a startup is just to just try to start it.

You may not be successful but you will learn faster if you just do it. Business schools are trying really hard to do this. They were designed to train the officer core of large companies, which is what business seemed to be back when it was a choice to be either the officer core of large companies or Joe’s Shoe Store. Then there was this new thing, Apple, that started as small as Joe’s Shoe Store and turns into this giant mega company but they were not designed for that world they are good at what they’re good at. They should just do that and screw this whole entrepreneurship thing.

Q: Management is a problem only if you are successful. What about those first two or three people?

A: Ideally you are successful before you even hire two or three people. Ideally you don’t even have two or three people for quite awhile. When you do the first hires in a startup they are almost like founders. They should be motivated by the same things, they can’t be people you have to manage. This is not like the office, these have to be your peers, you shouldn’t have to manage them much.

Q: So is it just a big no no, someone has to be managed no way they should be on the founding team.

A: In the case were you are doing something were you need some super advanced technical thing and there is some boffin that knows this thing and no one else in this world including on how to wipe his mouth. It may be to your advantage to hire said boffin and wipe his mouth for him. As a general rule you want people who are self motivated early on they should just be like founders.

Q: Do you think we are currently in a bubble?

A: I’ll give you two answers to this question. One, ask me questions that are useful to this audience because these people are here to learn how to start startups, and I have more data in my head than anybody else and you’re asking me questions a reporter does because they cannot think of anything interesting to ask. I will answer your question. There is a difference between prices merely being high and a bubble. A bubble is a very specific form of prices being high where people knowingly pay high prices for something in the hope that they will be able to unload it later on some greater fool. That’s what happened in the late 90’s, when VC’s knowingly invested in bullshit startups thinking that they would be able to take those things public and unload them on other retail investors before everything blew up

I was there for that at the epicenter of it all. That is not what is happening today. Prices are high, valuations are high, but valuations being high does not mean a bubble. Every commodity has prices that go up and down in some sort of sine wave. Definitely prices are high. We tell people if you raise money, don’t think the next time you raise money it’s going to be so easy, who knows maybe between now and then the Chinese economy will have exploded then there’s a giant disaster recession. Assume the worst. But bubble? No.

Q: I am seeing a trend among young people and successful entrepreneurs where they don’t want to start one great company but twenty. You are starting to see a rise in these labs attempts were they are going to try to launch a whole bunch of stuff, I don’t have any stellar examples yet.

A: Do you mean like IDEO?

Q: No, like Idealab, Garrett Camp’s new one…

A: Oh yeah. There’s this new thing were people start labs that are supposed to spin off startups. It might work, that’s how Twitter started. In fact, I meant Idealab, not IDEO, that was another Freudian slip. Twitter was not Twitter at first. Twitter was a side project at a company called Odeo that was supposed to be in the podcasting business, and you like podcasting business, do those words even grammatically go together? The answer turned out to be no as Evan discovered. As a side project they spun off Twitter and boy was that a dog wagging tail, people are starting these things that are supposed to spin off startups, will it work? Quite possibly if the right people do it. You can’t do it though, because you have to do it with your own money.

Q: What advice do you have for female co-founders as they are pursuing funding?

A: It probably is true that women have a harder time raising money. I have noticed this empirically and Jessica is just about to publish a bunch of interviews on female founders and a lot of them said that they thought they had a harder time raising money, too. Remember I said the way to raise money? Make your start up actually do well and that’s just especially true in any case if you miss the ideal target from the VC’s point of view in any respect. The way to solve that problem is make the startup do really well. In fact, there was a point a year or two ago when I tweeted this growth graph of this company and I didn’t say who they were. I knew it would get people to start asking and it was actually a female founded startup that was having trouble raising money, but their growth graph was stupendous. So I tweeted it, knowing all these VC’s would start asking me, “Who is that?” Growth graphs have no gender, so if they see the growth graph first, let them fall in love with that. Do well, which is generally good advice for all startups.

Q: What would you learn in college right now?

A: Literary theory, no just kidding. Honestly, I think I might try and study physics that’s the thing I feel I missed. For some reason, when I was a kid computers were the thing, maybe they still are. I got very excited learning to write code and you can write real programs in your bedroom. You can’t build real accelerators, well maybe you can. Maybe physics, I noticed I sort of look longingly at physics so maybe. I don’t know if that’s going to be helpful starting a startup and I just told you to follow your own curiosity so who cares if it’s helpful, it’ll turn out to be helpful.

Q: What are your reoccurring systems in your work and personal life that make you efficient?

A: Having kids is a good way to be efficient. Because you have no time left so if you want to get anything done, the amount of done you do per time is high. Actually many parents, start up founders who have kids have made that point explicitly. They cause you to focus because you have no choice.

I wouldn’t actually recommend having kids just to make you more focused. You know, I don’t think I am very efficient, I have two ways of getting work done. One is during Y Combinator, the way I worked on Y Combinator is I was forced to. I had to set the application deadline, and then people would apply, and then there were all these applications that I had to respond to by a certain time. So I had to read them and I knew if I read them badly, we would get bad startups so I tried really hard to read them well. So I set up this situation that forced me to work. The other kind of work I do is writing essays. And I do that voluntarily, I am walking down the street and the essay starts writing itself in my head. I either force myself to work on less exciting things; I can’t help working on exciting things. I don’t have any useful techniques for making myself efficient. If you work on things you like, you don’t have to force yourself to be efficient.

Q: When is a good time to turn a side project into a startup?

A: You will know, right. So the question is when you turn a side project into a startup, you will know that it is becoming a real startup when it takes over a alarming large percentage of your life, right. My god I’ve just spent all day working on this thing that’s supposed to be a side project, I am going to fail all of my classes what am I going to do, right. Then maybe it’s turning into a startup.

Q: I know you talked a lot, earlier, about you’ll know when your start up is doing extremely well, but I feel like in a lot of cases it’s a gray line, where you have some users but not explosive growth that is up and to the right, what would you do or what would you recommend in those situations? Considering allocating time and resources, how do you balance?

A: When a start up is growing but not much. Didn’t you tell them they were supposed to read Do Things that Don’t Scale? You sir have not done the readings, you are busted. Because there are four, I wrote a whole essay answered that question and that is to do things that don’t scale. Just go read that, because I can’t remember everything I said. It’s about exactly that problem.

Q: What kind of startup should not go through incubation, in your opinion?

A: Definitely any that will fail. Or if you’ll succeed but you’re an intolerable person. That also Sam would probably sooner do without. Short of that, I cannot think of any, because a large percentage, founders are often surprised by how large a percentage of the problems that start ups have are the same regardless of what type of thing they’re working on. And those tend to be kind of problems that YC helps the most not the ones that are domain specific. Can you think of the class of startups? That YC wouldn’t work for? We had fission and fusion startups in the last batch.

Q: You mentioned that it’s good advice to learn a lot about something that matters, what are some good strategies to figure out what matters?

A: If you think of technology as something that’s spreading as a sort of fractal stain. Anything on the edge represents an interesting idea, sounds familiar. Like I said that was the problem, you have correctly identified the thing I didn’t really answer the question were I gave this question begging answer. I said I’m interested in interesting things and you said you were interested in interesting things, work on them and things will work out.

How do you tell what is a real problem? I don’t know, that’s like important enough to write a whole essay about. I don’t know the answer and I probably should write something about that, but I don’t know. I figured out a technique for detecting whether you have a taste for generally interesting problems. Which is whether you find working on boring things intolerable and there are known boring things. Like literary theory and working in middle management in some large company. So if you can tolerate those things, then you must have stupendous self-discipline or you don’t have a taste for genially interesting problems and vice versa.

Q: Do you like Snapchat?

A: Snapchat? What do I know about Snapchat? We didn’t fund them. I want another question.

Q: If you hire people you like, you might get a monoculture and how do you deal with the blind spots that arise?

A: Starting a startup is where many things will be going wrong. You can’t expect it to be perfect. The advantage is of hiring people you know and like are far greater than the small disadvantage of having some monoculture. You look at it empirically, at all the most successful startups, someone just hires all their pals out of college.

Alright you guys thank you.

创业之前

养育孩子的一个好处是，当你需要给别人建议时，你可以问自己：“我会对自己的孩子说什么？”这其实会让你更加集中注意力。虽然我的孩子们还很小，我两岁的孩子今天被问到两岁之后会变成什么时，他回答“蝙蝠”。正确答案应该是“三岁”，但“蝙蝠”显然有趣得多。所以，虽然我的孩子们还很小，但如果他们到了大学，我已经知道我会对他们说些什么关于创业的建议，所以今天我就把这些告诉你们。你们将听到的内容，实际上就是我会对自己的孩子们说的话，因为你们中的大多数人都足够年轻，可以做我的孩子了。

创业非常反直觉，我也不确定为什么。也许是因为关于它的知识还没有在我们的文化中普及，但无论原因如何，这是一个你不能总是依赖直觉的领域。就像滑雪——你们中有多少人是成年后才学会滑雪的？当你刚开始滑雪，想要减速时，你的第一个本能是往后倾斜，这和做其他事情的直觉相同。但如果在滑雪时你往后倾斜，你只会不受控制地飞速下坡。所以，正如我学到的，学习滑雪的一部分就是学会抑制这种冲动。最终，你会形成新的习惯，但在开始的时候，有一长串你需要记住的事情：交替用脚，做S形转弯，不要拖内侧的脚，等等。

创业和滑雪一样不自然，而且创业也有一份类似的清单，必须牢记这些事项。我今天要给你们的，就是这份清单的开始部分，即必须记住的那些反直觉的事情，以防止你的本能引导你走错方向。

首先，正如我刚才提到的，创业是如此奇怪，以至于如果你顺从自己的本能，它们会引导你走向歧途。如果你只记住这一点，那么当你即将犯错时，你可以在犯错之前停下来。过去我在运营 Y Combinator 时，我们常开玩笑说我们的职责就是告诉创始人一些他们会忽视的事情，事实也确实如此。每一批 YC 合伙人都会警告创始人即将犯的错误，而创始人们无视这些警告，随后一年后回来对我们说：“我希望我们当时听从了你们的建议。”但那个人已经在他们的股东名单上了，现在也无能为力。

问：为什么创始人会一再忽视合伙人的建议？

答：反直觉的观点的特点在于它们与直觉相矛盾，看起来不对，所以你的第一反应当然是忽视它们。事实上，这不仅仅是 YC 的困境，在某种程度上也是我们存在的理由。你不需要人们给你一些不会让你吃惊的建议。如果创始人的直觉给出了正确答案，他们也不需要我们了。正如有很多滑雪教练，但很少有跑步教练一样——你不会看到“跑步教练”这个词出现的频率有“滑雪教练”那么高。因为滑雪是反直觉的，这就是 YC 的性质——创业的滑雪教练——只不过你是在向上爬坡，而不是向下滑坡，理想情况下是这样。

然而，你可以信任你对人的直觉。你的生活到目前为止可能不像创业一样，但你和人们的互动和你在商业世界中与人们的互动是一样的。实际上，创始人犯的一个大错误就是没有足够信任他们对人的直觉。他们见到一个看起来很厉害但让他们感到不安的人，后来当事情出了问题时，他们说：“我其实知道那家伙有点问题，但我因为他看起来很厉害而忽略了它。”

在商业中有一个特殊的情况，特别是如果你是来自工程背景，就像我相信你们中的大多数人一样。你可能认为商业是件略微让人不舒服的事。所以当你遇到那些看起来聪明但又让人有些不舒服的人时，你会想：“好吧，这可能是商业的常态。”但其实不是。就像你挑选朋友一样去挑选人，这是一个可以自我放纵的少数情况之一。选择那些你喜欢和尊重并且你有足够时间认识他们、确认他们的人，因为有很多人非常擅长在短时间内看起来讨人喜欢。但等到你们利益冲突时，你就会看清他们的真面目。

第二个反直觉的观点，可能会让你有点失望，但成功创业所需的不是对创业的专业知识。这使得这门课和你们上过的大多数课有所不同。你学法语课，课结束后你就学会了说法语。你做功课后，虽然不一定完全像法国人，但也很接近了，对吧？这门课可以教你关于创业的知识，但这不是你成功创业所需要的。你需要的不是创业的专业知识，而是对你自己用户的专业知识。

马克·扎克伯格在Facebook上的成功并不是因为他是创业专家，实际上他对创业一窍不通；Facebook最初成立时甚至是佛罗里达州的有限责任公司，连你们都知道比他更好。他成功的原因是他非常了解他的用户。大多数人对如何筹集天使轮资金的具体操作并不了解，对吧？如果你因此而感到难过，就别这样了，因为我可以告诉你，马克·扎克伯格可能也不懂得如何筹集天使轮资金；如果当罗恩·康威给他写大支票时他还在场的话，他现在可能早已忘记了。

事实上，我担心人们详细了解创业的操作流程不仅不是必要的，甚至可能是危险的，因为年轻创始人经常会犯的另一个典型错误就是走过场式的创业。他们想出一个看起来像样的点子，筹集到资金，拿到一个不错的估值，下一步就是租一个好的办公室，雇几个朋友，直到他们逐渐意识到自己是多么地一败涂地，因为在模仿创业的外部形式时，他们忽视了唯一真正重要的东西——创造用户想要的东西。顺便说一下，那是唯一一次用那个词，除了开头那次是无意的，我和萨姆确认过是否可以用这个词，他说他已经用了好几次了，就是这个词。

我们看到这样的情况如此之多，以至于我们为它取了个名字：“过家家（Playing House）”。最终，我明白了为什么会发生这种情况，年轻的创始人之所以会走过场创业，是因为这就是他们一生中被训练去做的事。想想看你是如何进入大学的：课外活动？对，参加了。即使是在大学课程中，你所做的大多数工作也像是跑圈一样是人造的。我不是在批评教育体系的这种方式，不可避免地，你为学习某样东西而做的工作总会有一些虚假的成分。如果你用某种指标来衡量人的表现，他们自然会利用这种虚假去得到尽可能高的分数。

我承认，我自己在大学时也这样做了。事实上，这里有一个获得好成绩的实用小贴士。我发现，在很多课程中，只有二三十个概念适合出考题。所以，我准备这些课程的考试时，不是去掌握课程内容，而是试图猜测考试问题是什么，并提前准备好答案。对我来说，考试不在于我的答案是什么，而在于我猜对了哪些题目。我一进考场就能知道自己的分数，看一眼问题，就知道有多少题是我猜对的。这种方法在很多课上都有效，尤其是计算机科学课。我记得自动机理论，只有少数几个问题是值得考的。

所以，在整个人生中被训练去玩这种游戏后，年轻创始人在创办初创公司时的第一个冲动就是找到新游戏的技巧。创业的“课外活动”是什么，我该做哪些事？他们总是想知道，因为显然初创公司成功的衡量标准是融资，这是另一个新手的错误。他们总是想知道，怎样才能说服投资者？我们不得不告诉他们，打动投资者的最好办法就是创业成功，表现出快速增长，然后告诉投资者。

然后他们问，好吧，那怎样才能快速增长呢？这被“增长黑客”这个词的存在给加剧了。每当你听到有人说“增长黑客”时，请在脑海中把它翻译为“胡扯”。因为我们告诉他们，让初创公司增长的方法是创造用户真正喜爱的东西，然后告诉他们。所以，这就是你需要做的，这就是“增长黑客”。

YC 合伙人与创始人的许多对话都是以创始人问“我该怎么……”开头，而合伙人回答以“只要……”开头。为什么他们把事情搞得这么复杂？我经过多年的困惑，终于意识到，他们是在寻找技巧，他们被训练去寻找技巧。

所以，这是第三个关于创业的反直觉观点：创业是“系统作弊”停止起作用的地方。如果你去大公司工作，系统作弊可能会继续起作用，这取决于公司有多糟糕，你可能通过对对的人阿谀奉承而成功，通过深夜发邮件给人一种工作很卖力的假象，或者如果你够聪明，可以把电脑时钟调晚，谁会检查邮件头呢，对吧？我喜欢这种能让我讲笑话的观众，他们会笑。商学院那边的人会想：“邮件头？”好吧，天啊，刚意识到这玩意正在录音。

从现在起我们严格按照稿子来。但在创业公司里，这行不通。你没有老板可以骗，没有人可以欺骗，只有用户，他们只关心你的软件是否符合他们的需求。用户就像鲨鱼，傻得不能被愚弄，你不能挥动红旗来欺骗它，只有肉还是没肉。你必须拥有用户想要的东西，只有你提供用户想要的东西，你才能成功。而最危险的是，尤其对你们来说，欺骗投资者在一定程度上是可行的。

如果你真的很擅长“显得懂行”，你可以骗过投资者，一轮、甚至两轮融资，但这不符合你的利益。你们做这一切都是为了股份，但如果你自欺欺人，那不过是在浪费自己的时间，因为这个创业注定失败，你只是浪费时间写下它。因此，不要再寻找所谓的技巧了。在创业中确实存在一些技巧，就像任何领域中一样，但它们的重要性远远低于解决真正的问题。一个对融资一无所知但创造了用户真心喜欢的东西的人，比一个知道所有融资技巧但使用者增长持平的人更容易获得投资。

虽然从某种意义上说，“系统作弊”在这个时候停止起作用对你们来说是个坏消息，因为你们失去了最强有力的武器，而你们毕竟花了二十年时间掌握它们。但我却觉得有些地方游戏规则是不同的，这非常令人兴奋。上大学时如果我明确意识到世界上还有些地方，那里“系统作弊”不那么重要，甚至几乎完全不重要，我会非常兴奋。这是你规划自己未来时最需要考虑的问题之一。每种工作类型的成功方式是什么？你希望通过做什么来取得成功？

这引出我们第四个反直觉的观点：创业是耗尽你所有精力的。如果你开始创业，它将占据你的生活，超过你想象的程度。如果成功，它会占据你很长时间的生活，至少几年，也许十年，也许你的整个职业生涯。因此这里确实存在机会成本。在你看来，拉里·佩奇的生活可能让人羡慕，但其中有些部分却绝对不值得羡慕。他所看到的世界是：他在二十五岁时以最快的速度开始奔跑，从未停下喘口气。从那时起，每天都有一些谷歌帝国中只有他这个“皇帝”才能处理的麻烦事，而他，作为“皇帝”，必须处理它们。如果他休假一周，整个问题的积压就会出现，而他必须无怨无悔地承受这一切，因为：首先，作为公司的创始人，他不能表现出害怕或虚弱；其次，如果你是个亿万富翁，抱怨生活艰难不仅没人同情，反而会引来更多的负面反应。

这带来了一种奇怪的副作用，就是那些成功的初创公司创始人都几乎没有机会向外界展示他们成功背后的艰辛。奥运会百米冠军，跑完你走上前去，他们大口喘气。拉里·佩奇也在做同样的事情，但你永远看不到他喘气的样子。

Y Combinator 目前已经资助了几家公司可以称得上是大获成功的，而每一个成功的创始人都说同样的话：“这从来没有变得更容易。”问题的性质改变了，所以你可能担心的会是一些更具吸引力的问题，比如你新建的伦敦办公室的施工延误，而不是你单身公寓里的空调坏了，但总体的烦恼量从未减少，甚至可能会增加。

成功地创办一家初创公司就像生小孩一样——按下按钮，它就会不可逆转地改变你的生活。这是最美好的事情——就像生小孩一样——如果你从这次讲座中只记住一件事，请记住这一点：在生小孩之前，有很多事情比生小孩之后要容易得多，而这些事情中的许多都会使你在有了孩子之后成为一个更好的父母。在富裕国家，大多数人都会推迟按下这个按钮，我相信你们都非常熟悉这个过程。

但说到创办初创公司，很多人似乎认为他们应该在大学期间创办。你疯了吗？大学在想什么——他们努力确保学生有足够的避孕措施，而他们却左手右手地创办创业项目和孵化器。

公平地说，大学在这方面有点无奈。很多新生对创业感兴趣。大学的职责至少在事实层面上是为学生的职业生涯做准备，所以如果你对创业感兴趣，大学似乎有责任教你关于创业的知识，如果他们不这样做，也许他们就会失去那些对创业感兴趣的学生而转向那些声称教授创业的大学。那么，大学能教你创业吗？如果不能，我们在这里干什么？可以，也不可以，就像我对你们解释的那样。基本上，如果你想学法语，大学可以教你语言学，这就是我们正在做的事情。这是语言学——我们在教你如何学习语言，而你需要知道的却是某种特定的语言。你需要知道的是你自己用户的需求。而这些，你只有在真正开始公司后才能学到，这意味着创业本身是只有在实际操作中才能学会的事情。你不能在大学中做到这一点，因为如我刚才所解释的，创业会占据你生活的全部。如果你在大学期间创业，如果你以学生的身份创业，你就无法再作为学生去创业。你可能名义上还是个学生，但实际上不会维持多久。面对这种二选一：是做一个真正的学生而不去创业，还是做一个真正的创业者而不再是学生？

对此，我可以替你们做出回答。我是在对自己的孩子讲话——不要在大学期间创业。我希望没有让任何人失望。对于许多有雄心的人来说，创办一家初创公司可能是美好人生的一部分。但这只是一个更大问题中的一部分，那就是如何过上美好的人生，对吧？在某些时候创办一家初创公司可能是件好事，但二十岁并不是最佳时机。

有些事情你只能在二十多岁的时候去做，那些你既不能在之前做得好也不能在之后做得好的事情。比如随心所欲地深入某个看似毫无回报的项目，或者毫无时间限制地超级便宜地旅行。实际上这些都是在不同领域中同构的形状。

对于没有雄心的人来说，这可能是可怕的“未能起航”。而对于那些有抱负的人来说，这是一种非常有价值的探索。如果你在二十岁时创办了初创公司并且取得了成功，你将永远无法再去做这些事情。

马克·扎克伯格将永远无法在国外闲逛。如果他去了国外，那要么是事实上的国事访问，要么就像他藏身于巴黎的乔治五世酒店那样隐居起来。他永远不可能像以前那样背包旅行泰国，如果现在人们还会这么做的话。人们还会去泰国背包旅行吗？这是我在这堂课上看到的第一次真正的热情。应该在泰国上这节课。他能做你们做不到的事情，比如租用私人飞机飞往国外，还是很大的那种。但成功带走了他生活中很多偶然的因素。Facebook 在主导他，就像他在主导 Facebook 一样。

虽然被某个你认为是你毕生事业的项目主导可能非常酷，但偶然性也有其优势。除了其他方面，它还让你有更多选择去挑选你的毕生事业。在这里甚至没有什么权衡之说。如果你在二十岁时放弃创业，并没有牺牲什么，因为如果你推迟一些时间，你会更有可能成功。极少情况下，你在二十岁时有一个像 Facebook 那样的副项目突然爆发，那么你将面临一个选择：是去追随它，还是不追随它，这时可能去追随它是合理的。但通常来说，初创公司起步的方式是由创始人推动它们起步。在二十岁去做这件事是愚蠢至极的。

你应该在任何年纪做这件事吗？创业听起来可能很难，如果我没有说清楚，让我再试一次——创业真的非常难。如果它太难怎么办？如果你不能应对这个挑战呢？

答案是第五个反直觉的观点：你无法预测。到目前为止的生活可能给了你一些关于你是否有望成为数学家或职业足球运动员的想法。天哪，这可不是每个听众都能对他们说的。除非你的人生非常奇特，否则你没经历过太多类似于创业的事情。这意味着，如果创业成功，它会极大地改变你。因此，你试图估计的不仅仅是你现在的样子，而是你可能会变成什么样。而谁能做到呢？反正不是我。在过去的九年里，我的工作就是去猜测（我写“预测”，结果写出来却是“猜测”——这是一个非常有趣的弗洛伊德式错误）。认真地说，判断一个人是否聪明只需要十分钟。把几个网球击到他们面前，他们是打回来了还是击进了网中？最难也是最重要的部分是预测他们将变得多么坚韧和有野心。

现在可能没有人比我更有这方面的经验了。我可以告诉你一个专家对这个问题能了解多少。答案是：了解得不多。我从经验中学会了对每批公司中哪些初创公司会成为明星保持完全开放的态度。创始人有时候以为他们知道。一些人来到 YC 时信心满满，觉得自己会像在以往人生中通过的每一个简单的人工测试那样顺利通过 YC。另一些人则怀疑自己是因为什么错误才被录取的，希望没人发现这个错误。

而这些态度与结果几乎没有任何相关性。我读过在军队里也是如此。那些趾高气扬的新兵并不比沉默的那些更可能表现得坚韧，原因可能也相同。因为这些测试与人们以往生活中的测试是如此不同。如果你对创业感到绝对恐惧，那你可能不应该做这件事，除非你是那种喜欢去做自己害怕的事情的人。否则，如果你只是不确定自己是否能做到，唯一的办法就是去尝试，但不是现在。

那么，如果你有一天想创业，现在在大学里该做什么呢？一开始你只需要两样东西：一个想法和联合创始人。获得这两样东西的方法是相同的，这引出了我们的第六个也是最后一个反直觉观点。

获得创业想法的方法不是去刻意地想创业点子。我为此写过整篇文章，这里就不重复了。简短的版本是，如果你刻意去想创业点子，你会想到的点子不仅不好，而且听起来很有道理。这意味着你和其他人都会被它们所欺骗，你会在意识到它们不行之前浪费大量时间。获得好创业想法的方法是退一步。不要刻意去想创业点子，而是让你的大脑转变成那种可以不自觉地产生创业点子的类型。实际上，它应该是不自觉到你一开始甚至没有意识到它们是创业点子的地步。这不仅是可能的，雅虎、谷歌、Facebook、苹果都是这样开始的。这些公司起初都不是为了成为公司而创建的，它们最初只是副项目。最好的想法几乎总是以副项目开始，因为它们都是如此的特立独行，以至于你的意识会把它们作为创业点子而拒绝。

如何把大脑转变成可以不自觉地产生创业想法的那种类型呢？首先，学习很多有用的东西。其次，解决让你感兴趣的问题。第三，与你喜欢和尊重的人一起工作。顺便说一句，第三部分正是你在产生想法的同时得到联合创始人的方式。第一次写那段时，我写的是“掌握一些技术”，但这个处方太狭隘了。

Airbnb 的布莱恩·切斯基和乔·杰比亚的特别之处不在于他们是技术专家。他们去了艺术学校，他们是设计领域的专家。也许更重要的是，他们非常擅长组织人们完成项目。所以你不一定要从事技术工作，只要从事能让你成长的事情即可。

那些事情是什么样的？这个问题很难泛泛地回答。历史上有许多年轻人解决的问题，在当时没有人，包括他们的父母，认为这些问题重要。另一方面，历史上更多的是那些父母认为孩子在浪费时间而他们确实在浪费时间的例子。

如何判断你是否在解决真正的问题？我知道当 Twitch TV 从 Justin.tv 转型为 Twitch TV 并决定要直播游戏时，我当时就想：“什么？”但结果这成了一个好生意。我知道如何辨别真正的问题是有趣的，而我很自我放纵：我总是喜欢做那些有趣的事情，即使没人关心它们。让我去做无聊的事情，即使它们看起来很重要，我也很难强迫自己去做。我的生活中有一个又一个案例，我只是因为感兴趣而做的事情，后来它们在某种世俗的意义上变得很有用。

Y Combinator 本身就是我因为觉得有趣才去做的事情。我似乎有某种内在的指南针在帮助我。这是给你们的建议，不是给我的，我不知道你们脑子里在想些什么。也许如果我再多想一下，能给出一些识别真正有趣想法的启发式方法。目前，我只能给你们一个无助地循环论证的建议。顺便说一下，这才是“循环论证”这个短语的真正含义。这个建议是，如果你对普遍有趣的问题感兴趣，那么充满热情地满足你的兴趣是为创业做准备的最好方式，可能也是生活的最好方式。

虽然我不能在一般情况下解释什么算是一个有趣的问题，但我可以告诉你们其中的一个大子集。如果你把技术看作某种类似分形污点一样扩展的东西，每个边缘点都是一个有趣的问题。蒸汽机可能不那么有趣，但你永远不知道。确保你处在某项技术的最前沿，是把大脑转变成无意识地产生创业想法类型的最佳方法。正如 Paul Buchheit 所说，“活在未来”。当你到达那里时，别人觉得神奇的想法对你来说会显得很显然。你可能意识不到它们是创业想法，但你会知道它们是应该存在的东西。

例如，在哈佛读研的 90 年代中期，我的朋友 Robert 和 Trevor 的一个同学写了自己的语音 IP 软件。这本不是为了创业，他从来没想把它变成创业公司。他只是想和在台湾的女朋友通话而不支付长途费用。由于他是网络专家，所以把声音转换成数据包并通过互联网免费传输对他来说再自然不过了。为什么所有人不都这么做呢？因为他们不擅长写这类软件。他从未把这个做成创业公司。而这就是最佳创业公司的诞生方式。

奇怪的是，如果你想要成为成功的创业创始人，大学里最优的做法并不是针对创业的某种新型职业培训版本，而是传统的以教育为本的版本。如果你想自己创业，在大学里你应该做的事情是学习那些有影响力的东西。如果你有真正的学术好奇心，顺着你的兴趣来做这件事会是最自然不过的。创业中真正重要的部分——我实在难以直面地说这个词——就是领域知识。拉里·佩奇之所以是拉里·佩奇，是因为他是搜索方面的专家，而他之所以成为搜索方面的专家，是因为他真的对这个问题感兴趣，而不是出于某种功利的动机。在最佳状态下，创业不过是好奇心的功利动机延伸。如果你在过程结束时再引入功利动机，那你就能把创业做得最好。因此，这就是对年轻有抱负的创业者的终极建议，总结成两个字：去学习。

我们还剩多少时间？天哪，还有十八分钟可以问问题。你们有什么问题吗？

问：好，我们先从两个问题开始。非技术创始人如何最有效地为创业公司做出贡献？

答：如果创业公司是，嗯，如果创业公司在某个特定领域工作，不是纯粹的技术公司，而是涉足某个特定领域的，比如说如果是 Uber，非技术创始人是一个豪华车行业的专家，那么实际上非技术创始人可能会做大部分的工作。比如招募司机，或者做 Uber 需要做的其他事情，而技术创始人只是写 iPhone 应用程序，也就是 iPhone 和安卓的应用程序，这可能还不到整个工作的二分之一。如果是纯粹的技术创业公司，非技术创始人则负责销售，以及给程序员送咖啡和芝士汉堡。

问：对于想要创业的人来说，你觉得商学院有什么价值吗？

答：基本上没有，这听起来不太客气，但商学院是为了教人管理而设计的。而管理这个问题，只有当你创业成功到一定程度时才会遇到。所以，早期让创业公司成功，真正需要的是开发产品。如果你非得上某种学校，设计学院可能比商学院更合适。虽然坦率地说，学会如何做这件事的最好方法就是去做它。我之前的一个错误建议是，我让有创业兴趣的人先去别的公司工作几年再开始自己的事业。但实际上，学习如何创办公司最好的方法就是直接尝试创办它。

你可能不会成功，但如果你直接去做的话，你会学得更快。商学院也在努力做到这一点。它们的设计初衷是培养大公司的管理人员——这就是过去商业的定义：要么成为大公司的管理人员，要么成为乔的鞋店的老板。但后来出现了苹果这样一种新模式，它最初像乔的鞋店一样小，却最终成为一个庞然大物。商学院并不是为这种情况设计的，它们擅长它们所擅长的事情，就该专注于那些，而不要碰什么创业的事情。

问：管理问题只有在成功时才会出现。那么前两三个员工呢？

答：理想情况下，你在雇用两三个人之前就已经成功了。理想情况下，你甚至在相当长一段时间里都没有两三个人。当你开始招募员工时，他们几乎就像创始人一样。他们应该被相同的动机驱动，不能是那些需要你管理的人。这不是办公室文化，他们得是你的同伴，你不应该需要太多管理他们。

问：所以说，有人需要被管理的话，绝对不该在创始团队中？

答：在某些情况下，如果你需要某个非常先进的技术，而有某个专家掌握了这门技术，但却可能连擦嘴都不会，那么雇用这个专家并帮他擦嘴可能对你有利。但作为一般原则，早期你需要的是那些自我驱动的人，他们应该像创始人一样。

问：你认为我们现在处于泡沫中吗？

答：我会给你两个答案。第一，问一些对这个观众有用的问题，因为这些人是来学习如何创业的，我的脑中有比任何人都多的数据，而你却在问记者会问的问题，因为他们想不出有趣的提问。我会回答你的问题。价格高和泡沫之间是有区别的。泡沫是一种非常特殊的价格高的情况，人们明知价格过高，但仍愿意支付高价，因为他们希望以后能卖给下一个更傻的人。这就是上世纪 90 年代末发生的事情，当时风投们明知某些初创公司是瞎扯淡，却仍愿意投资，因为他们觉得可以把这些公司推向公开市场，然后在一切崩溃前转手给其他投资者。

我经历了那一切，就在事情的中心。但今天并不是那样。价格是高了，估值是高了，但高估值并不意味着泡沫。每一种商品的价格都会像正弦波一样上下波动。现在价格确实高了。我们告诉人们，如果你现在募资，别以为下次募资会一样容易，谁知道从现在到那时候，中国经济是否会崩溃，导致巨大的经济衰退。最好预想最坏的情况。但泡沫？不是的。

问：我注意到现在年轻人和成功企业家之间有一种趋势，他们不想只创办一家公司，而是想创办二十家公司。我们看到越来越多的实验室模式，他们想要推出一堆东西，我现在还没看到什么特别好的例子。

答：你是指 IDEO 吗？

问：不，是指 Idealab，Garrett Camp 的那个新项目…

答：哦对，现在有一种新东西，就是有人开始创办实验室，目的是孵化初创公司。这可能行得通，Twitter 就是这么开始的。事实上，我说的是 Idealab，不是 IDEO，那是另一个弗洛伊德式的口误。Twitter 一开始并不是 Twitter，它是一个叫 Odeo 的公司里的副项目，Odeo 本来是要做播客业务的，而你看“播客业务”这几个词组合起来都让人觉得不搭。最终事实也确实如此，正如 Evan 所发现的。他们作为副项目孵化了 Twitter，结果竟然反过来成为公司的主导。现在人们在创办这些实验室，试图孵化初创公司，这会成功吗？很可能，如果有合适的人来做的话。但你自己是做不了的，因为你必须用自己的钱来做。

问：对于女性联合创始人在融资方面有什么建议？

答：女性在筹资方面可能确实更难。我从经验中注意到了这一点，Jessica 也正准备发布一些关于女性创始人的采访，很多人也表示她们觉得自己融资更难。记得我说过的募资的方法吗？让你的初创公司表现好，这尤其适用于那些在某些方面不符合风投理想目标的初创公司。解决这个问题的方法就是让公司表现出色。实际上，一两年前有一次，我发布了某个公司的增长曲线，没有说他们是谁。我知道这会让风投们开始问“那是谁？”其实那是一个女性创办的初创公司，她们在筹资时遇到了困难，但她们的增长曲线非常惊人。所以我把它发布出来，知道所有的风投都会开始问我“那是谁？”增长曲线是没有性别的，让他们先爱上增长曲线。这对所有初创公司来说都是普遍适用的建议——做得好。

问：如果你现在在上大学，你会学什么？

答：文学理论，不，开玩笑的。老实说，我可能会尝试学习物理，这是我觉得自己错过的东西。不知道为什么，我小时候计算机是很火的东西，也许现在依然是。我当时对写代码很兴奋，因为你可以在卧室里写出真正的程序。但你无法建造真正的加速器，嗯，也许你可以。也许是物理，我发现自己对物理有些神往，所以可能是物理。我不知道这对创办公司是否有帮助，但我刚才也说了要追随自己的好奇心，所以谁在乎它有没有用，最终它总会派上用场。

问：你在工作和生活中有哪些系统能让你变得高效？

答：生孩子是提高效率的好方法。因为你没有时间了，所以如果你想完成任何事情，你单位时间内的效率会很高。其实很多做初创公司的父母都明确提出了这一点。孩子会让你集中精力，因为你别无选择。

不过我不会真的建议你为了变得更专注而去生孩子。我觉得自己其实并不高效，我有两种工作的方式。一种是在 Y Combinator 的时候，我是被迫去工作。我得设定申请截止日期，然后人们会申请，有这么多申请，我必须在一定时间内回复。所以我不得不去读这些申请，而且我知道如果我读得不好，我们就会选错初创公司，所以我非常努力地去读好它们。基本上是逼着自己去工作。另一种是写文章，而这是我自愿去做的，我走在路上，文章就开始在我脑海中成型。我要么强迫自己去做不那么令人兴奋的事情，要么就去做那些我控制不住自己想做的有趣的事情。我没有什么让自己高效的有用技巧。如果你做的是你喜欢的事情，就不需要强迫自己变得高效。

问：什么时候把副项目转变成初创公司比较好？

答：你会知道的。问题是，什么时候你会知道它正在变成一个真正的创业公司呢？当它占据你生活中的惊人比例时，你就知道了。天哪，我整天都在搞这个本来应该是副项目的东西，我的课要挂了，我该怎么办？对吧？那时候也许它就正在变成一个初创公司。

问：我知道你之前讲过很多，关于如何知道自己的公司表现非常好，但我感觉很多情况下这中间是灰色地带，有些用户但没有爆炸式增长，曲线不至于直线向上。你会怎么做，或者你会在这种情况下给出什么建议？在分配时间和资源时，你如何平衡？

答：当一个初创公司在增长，但增长不多的时候。你难道没有告诉他们应该去读《做那些不具规模的事情》这篇文章吗？你没有完成作业，被抓住了。因为在那篇文章里，我写了一整篇文章回答了这个问题，那就是去做那些不具规模的事情。去读那篇文章吧，因为我记不全自己写了什么。这篇文章讲的就是这个问题。

问：你认为什么样的创业公司不适合参加孵化计划？

答：肯定是那些会失败的，或者那些会成功但创始人无法忍受的人。这种情况下 Sam 也宁愿不接受。除此之外，我想不出任何不合适的公司。创始人们经常会对创业公司面临的问题有多么相似感到惊讶，无论他们在做什么样的事情。而这些问题往往是 YC 最能帮助的，而不是那些特定领域的问题。你能想到什么类型的初创公司不适合 YC 吗？我们在上一期班里还有裂变和聚变的初创公司呢。

问：你提到学习对某些重要事情很有帮助，有什么好的策略可以帮忙找到这些重要的事情呢？

答：如果你把技术看作一种扩散的分形染色体，任何边缘的东西都代表着一个有趣的想法，这听起来很熟悉。我之前说这是个问题，你正确地指出了我并没有真正回答这个问题的地方，我给出了一个预设的问题回答。我说我对有趣的事情感兴趣，而你也说你对有趣的事情感兴趣，去做它们，事情就会顺利。

你如何判断什么是真正的问题？我不知道，这足够重要，可以写一整篇文章。我不知道答案，但我可能应该写点什么。不过我不知道。我找到了一个方法来判断你是否对真正有趣的问题有品味，那就是看你是否觉得从事无聊的事情无法忍受，而无聊的事情是有公认的，比如文学理论或者在大公司中做中层管理。所以如果你能忍受这些事情，那么你要么有着超凡的自律，要么就对真正有趣的问题缺乏品味，反之亦然。

问：你喜欢 Snapchat 吗？

答：Snapchat？我对 Snapchat 知道什么？我们没有资助他们。我想要另一个问题。

问：如果你雇佣你喜欢的人，可能会导致文化单一化，那你如何处理由此产生的盲点呢？

答：创业是很多事情都会出错的地方。你不能指望一切都完美。雇用你认识和喜欢的人带来的好处，远远大于文化单一化带来的小小劣势。看看那些最成功的创业公司，有些人就是招募了他们所有的大学朋友。

好了，大家，谢谢你们。