Why It's Safe for Founders to Be Nice
August 2015 I recently got an email from a founder that helped me understand something important: why it's safe for startup founders to be nice people.
2015 年 8 月，我最近收到了一位创始人发来的电子邮件，它帮助我理解了一些重要的事情：为什么初创公司创始人做个好人是安全的。
I grew up with a cartoon idea of a very successful businessman (in the cartoon it was always a man): a rapacious, cigar-smoking, table-thumping guy in his fifties who wins by exercising power, and isn't too fussy about how.
我从小就有一个非常成功的商人的漫画形象（在漫画中总是一个男人）：一个贪婪、抽雪茄、敲桌子的五十多岁的人，他通过行使权力来取胜，而且不太挑剔如何运用权力。
As I've <xa href="mean.html">written before , one of
正如我<xa href="mean.html">之前所写的，其中之一
the things that has surprised me most about startups is <a href="mean.html">how few of the most successful founders are like that.
关于初创公司，最让我惊讶的是<a href="mean.html">最成功的创始人中很少有这样的人。
Maybe successful people in other industries are; I don't know; but not startup founders.
也许其他行业的成功人士都是；我不知道;但不是初创公司创始人。
[ 1 ] I knew this empirically, but I never saw the math of why till I got this founder's email.
[ 1 ] 我凭经验知道这一点，但在收到这位创始人的电子邮件之前，我从未明白其中的原因。
In it he said he worried that he was fundamentally soft-hearted and tended to give away too much for
他在信中说，他担心自己本质上是心软的，而且往往会为了别人而付出太多。
free.
免费。
He thought perhaps he needed "a little dose of sociopath-ness." I told him not to worry about it, because so long as he built something good enough to spread by word of mouth, he'd have a superlinear growth curve.
他认为也许他需要“一点反社会心理”。我告诉他不用担心，因为只要他做出来的东西足够好，能够通过口碑传播，他就会有一个超线性的增长曲线。
If he was bad at extracting money from people, at worst this curve would be some constant multiple less than 1 of what it might have been.
如果他不擅长从人们那里榨取金钱，那么在最坏的情况下，这条曲线将是某个常数倍，小于它可能的值的 1。
But a constant multiple of any curve is exactly the same shape.
但任何曲线的常数倍都是完全相同的形状。
The numbers on the Y axis are
Y 轴上的数字是
smaller, but the curve is just as steep, and when anything grows at the rate of a successful startup, the Y axis will take care of itself.
较小，但曲线同样陡峭，当任何事物以成功启动的速度增长时，Y 轴会自行解决。
Some examples will make this clear.
一些例子可以清楚地说明这一点。
Suppose your company is making $1000 a month now, and you've made something so great that it's growing at 5% a week.
假设你的公司现在每月赚 1000 美元，而你做了一些很棒的事情，每周增长率为 5%。
Two years from now, you'll be making about $160k a month.
两年后，您每月将赚取约 16 万美元。
Now suppose you're so un-rapacious that you only extract half as
现在假设你是如此不贪婪，以至于你只提取了一半
much from your users as you could.
尽可能多地从你的用户那里得到。
That means two years later you'll be making $80k a month instead of $160k.
这意味着两年后您每月的收入将达到 8 万美元，而不是 16 万美元。
How far behind are you?
你还落后多少？
How long will it take to catch up with where you'd have been if you were extracting every penny?
如果你榨取每一分钱，需要多长时间才能赶上你原本的水平？
A mere 15 weeks.
仅仅15周。
After two years, the un-rapacious founder is only 3.5 months behind the rapacious one.
两年后，不贪婪的创始人只比贪婪的创始人晚了 3.5 个月。
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