Learning from Founders

January 2007 (Foreword to Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work .) Apparently sprinters reach their highest speed right out of the blocks, and spend the rest of the race slowing down.

2007 年 1 月（杰西卡·利文斯顿《工作中的创始人》的前言。）显然，短跑运动员在冲出街区时就达到了最高速度，并在剩下的比赛中放慢速度。

The winners slow down the least.

获胜者放慢的速度最少。

It's that way with most startups too.

大多数初创公司也是如此。

The earliest phase is usually the most productive.

最早的阶段通常是最有成效的。

That's when they have the really big ideas.

那是他们有真正伟大想法的时候。

Imagine what Apple was like when 100% of its employees were either Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak.

想象一下，当苹果 100% 的员工要么是史蒂夫·乔布斯，要么是史蒂夫·沃兹尼亚克时，苹果会是什么样子。

The striking thing about this phase is that it's completely different from most people's idea of what business is like.

这个阶段的惊人之处在于，它与大多数人对商业的看法完全不同。

If you looked in people's heads (or stock photo collections) for images representing "business," you'd get images of people dressed up in suits, groups sitting around conference tables looking serious, Powerpoint presentations, people producing thick reports for one another to read.

如果你在人们的头脑（或库存照片集）中寻找代表“商业”的图像，你会看到穿着西装的人们、一群人坐在会议桌旁、表情严肃的图像、Powerpoint 演示文稿、人们制作厚厚的报告供彼此阅读的图像。

Early stage startups are the exact opposite of this.

早期初创公司的情况恰恰相反。

And

并且

yet they're probably the most productive part of the whole economy.

但它们可能是整个经济中最具生产力的部分。

Why the disconnect?

为什么断线？

I think there's a general principle at work here: the less energy people expend on performance, the more they expend on appearances to compensate.

我认为这里有一个普遍的原则：人们花在表演上的精力越少，他们花在外表上的补偿就越多。

More often than not the energy they expend on seeming impressive makes their actual performance worse.

通常情况下，他们花费在看似令人印象深刻的精力上，却使他们的实际表现变得更糟。

A few years ago I read an article in which a car magazine modified the "sports" model of some production car to get the fastest

几年前，我读到一篇文章，其中一家汽车杂志修改了一些量产车的“运动”模型以获得最快

possible standing quarter mile.

可能站立四分之一英里。

You know how they did it?

你知道他们是怎么做到的吗？

They cut off all the crap the manufacturer had bolted onto the car to make it look fast.

他们砍掉了制造商用螺栓固定在汽车上的所有废品，以使其看起来更快。

Business is broken the same way that car was.

商业的崩溃就像汽车一样。

The effort that goes into looking productive is not merely wasted, but actually makes organizations less productive.

为了看起来富有成效而付出的努力不仅是浪费，而且实际上会降低组织的生产力。

Suits, for example.

例如，西装。

Suits do not help people to think better.

西装并不能帮助人们更好地思考。

I bet most executives at big companies

我敢打赌大多数大公司的高管

do their best thinking when they wake up on Sunday morning and go downstairs in their bathrobe to make a cup of coffee.

当他们周日早上醒来并穿着浴袍下楼煮一杯咖啡时，尽最大努力思考。

That's when you have ideas.

这时候你就有想法了。

Just imagine what a company would be like if people could think that well at work.

试想一下，如果人们在工作中也能如此思考，公司将会是什么样子。

People do in startups, at least some of the time.

人们在初创公司中这样做，至少在某些时候是这样。

(Half the time you're in a panic because your servers are on fire, but the other half you're thinking as deeply as most people only get to sitting alone on a Sunday morning.)

（一半的时间你会因为服务器着火而感到恐慌，但另一半的时间你会像大多数人只能在周日早上独自坐着一样深入思考。）

Ditto for most of the other differences between startups and what passes for productivity in big companies.

初创公司与大公司生产力之间的大多数其他差异也是如此。

And yet conventional ideas of professionalism have such an iron grip on our minds that even startup founders are affected by them.

然而，传统的专业观念对我们的思想有着铁一般的控制，甚至连初创公司的创始人也会受到它们的影响。

In our startup, when outsiders came to visit we tried hard to seem "professional." We'd clean up our offices, wear better clothes, try to arrange that a lot of people were there during conventional office hours.

在我们的初创公司中，当外人来访时，我们努力表现得“专业”。我们会打扫办公室，穿更好的衣服，尽量安排在常规办公时间有很多人在场。

In fact,

事实上，

programming didn't get done by well-dressed people at clean desks during office hours.

办公时间里，穿着考究的人在干净的办公桌上完成编程是不可能的。

It got done by badly dressed people (I was notorious for programmming wearing just a towel) in offices strewn with junk at 2 in the morning.

凌晨 2 点，这些工作是由衣着邋遢的人（我因只穿着毛巾编程而臭名昭著）在撒满垃圾的办公室里完成的。

But no visitor would understand that.

但没有游客会理解这一点。

Not even investors, who are supposed to be able to recognize real productivity when they see it.

甚至投资者也不能，他们应该能够在看到真实生产力时认识到它。

Even we were affected by the conventional wisdom.

甚至我们也受到了传统观念的影响。

We thought of ourselves as impostors, succeeding

我们认为自己是骗子，成功了

despite being totally unprofessional.

尽管完全不专业。

It was as if we'd created a Formula 1 car but felt sheepish because it didn't look like a car was supposed to look.

就好像我们创造了一辆一级方程式赛车，但却感到羞愧，因为它看起来不像一辆汽车应该有的样子。

In the car world, there are at least some people who know that a high performance car looks like a Formula 1 racecar, not a sedan with giant rims and a fake spoiler bolted to the trunk.

在汽车世界中，至少有一些人知道高性能汽车看起来像一级方程式赛车，而不是带有巨大轮辋和用螺栓固定在后备箱上的假扰流板的轿车。

Why not in business?

为什么不做生意呢？

Probably because startups are so small.

可能是因为初创公司规模太小。

The really

真正的

dramatic growth happens when a startup only has three or four people, so only three or four people see that, whereas tens of thousands see business as it's practiced by Boeing or Philip Morris.

当一家初创公司只有三四个人时，就会出现戏剧性的增长，因此只有三四个人看到这一点，而数以万计的人看到了波音或菲利普莫里斯所实践的业务。

This book can help fix that problem, by showing everyone what, till now, only a handful people got to see: what happens in the first year of a startup.

这本书可以帮助解决这个问题，向大家展示迄今为止只有少数人看到的内容：初创公司第一年会发生什么。

This is what real productivity looks like.

这就是真正的生产力。

This is the Formula 1 racecar.

这是一级方程式赛车。

It looks weird, but it goes fast.

看起来很奇怪，但速度很快。

Of course, big companies won't be able to do everything these startups do.

当然，大公司无法完成这些初创公司所做的所有事情。

In big companies there's always going to be more politics, and less scope for individual decisions.

在大公司里，总是会有更多的政治因素，而个人决策的空间则更少。

But seeing what startups are really like will at least show other organizations what to aim for.

但了解初创公司的真实情况至少可以向其他组织展示其目标是什么。

The time may soon be coming when instead of startups trying to seem more corporate, corporations will try to seem more like startups.

也许很快就会到来，那时公司将不再是初创公司试图显得更像企业，而是试图看起来更像初创公司。

That would be a good thing.

那将是一件好事。