Bible for startups
GROWTH快速地发展
Growth and momentum are the keys to great execution. Growth (as long as it is not “sell dollar bills for 90 cents” growth) solves all problems, and lack of growth is not solvable by anything but growth. If you’re growing, it feels like you’re winning, and people are happy. If you’re growing, there are new roles and responsibilities all the time, and people feel like their careers are advancing. If you’re not growing, it feels like you’re losing, and people are unhappy and leave. If you’re not growing, people just fight over responsibilities and blame.
成长性和冲劲儿是衡量执行质量的关键。只要不是通过无脑烧钱补贴用户的方式换来的，高速发展可以解决一切其他问题，而没有别的因素可以替代高速发展在创业中起的作用。只要公司还在发展，你就会觉得自己棒棒哒，别人也会觉得欢欣鼓舞。只要公司还在发展，别人会觉得自己正走在通往人生巅峰的路上，因为新的项目和新的责任正一波波向他们袭去。相反，如果公司停止发展，你会觉得自己要输了，别人也会离你而去。如果公司停止发展，人们就会勾心斗角相互推诿。
Founders and employees that are burnt out nearly always work at startups without momentum. It’s hard to overstate how demoralizing it is.
在没有冲劲儿的公司里，创始人和员工通常会觉得非常心累心塞。冲劲带来的鼓舞士气的作用，怎么强调都不过分。
The prime directive of great execution is “Never lose momentum”. But how do you do it?
所以想要有强大的执行力，当务之急就是永远不要失去冲劲。但是要如何做到这点呢？
The most important way is to make it your top priority. The company does what the CEO measures. It’s valuable to have a single metric that the company optimizes, and it’s worth time to figure out the right growth metric. If you care about growth, and you set the execution bar, the rest of the company will focus on it.
重中之重，就是把维持冲劲和士气放在 “重中之重”的位置上。因为CEO重视什么，公司就会是个什么模样。花点时间想清楚你要的目标，然后集中全公司的火力去进攻。如果你意欲快速发展，那就设定一个执行标准和目标，然后全公司的所有资源都会聚焦到那上面。
Here are a couple of examples.
下面我举几个例子。
The founders of Airbnb drew a forward-looking graph of the growth they wanted to hit. They posted this everywhere—on their fridge, above their desks, on their bathroom mirror. If they hit the number that week, great. If not, it was all they talked about.
Airbnb的创始人们按照他们的预期，画了一张发展计划表，然后贴得到处都是——冰箱上、桌子上、浴室的镜子上等等。如果这周达到目标，那就皆大欢喜。如果没有达到，那他们就会花大量时间精力总结经验教训。
Mark Zuckerberg once said that one of the most important innovations at Facebook was their establishment of a growth group when growth slowed. This group was (and perhaps still is) one of the most prestigious groups in the company—everyone knew how important it was.
马克·扎克伯格也说过，Facebook最重要的创新之一就是在发展的脚步变慢的时候在内部成立了“发展小组”。这个小组曾经是全公司最受尊敬的团队（说不定现在依然是），每个人都知道它有多重要。
Keep a list of what’s blocking growth. Talk as a company about how you could grow faster. If you know what the limiters are, you’ll naturally think about how to address them.
把阻碍你发展的因素列一个清单记下来，然后思考你的公司如何才能更快地成长。如果你知道你练级的路上会碰到哪些怪，那你肯定会想想该怎样把他们一一打倒。
For anything you consider doing, ask yourself “Is this the best way to optimize growth?” For example, going to a conference is not usually the best way to optimize growth, unless you expect to sell a lot there.
在做任何事之前，先问问自己，“这是优化增长最有效的方式吗？”比方说去某个大会上吹牛出风头通常对发展没啥用处，除非你是抱着在那里做一通销售的目的去的。
Extreme internal transparency around metrics (and financials) is a good thing to do. For some reason, founders are always really scared of this. But it’s great for keeping the whole company focused on growth. There seems to be a direct correlation between how focused on metrics employees at a company are and how well they’re doing. If you hide the metrics, it’s hard for people to focus on them.
保持各项指标（包括财务指标）的内部透明是个不错的主意。不知为啥，创始人们总是很怕公布这些东西。但这么干十分有助于让整个公司把资源都集中到发展性的各项指标上。而如果你不公布指标，人们也就无从着手。通常来说，对内部信息了解得越清楚，你的员工也就越能在工作中表现出彩。
Speaking of metrics, don’t fool yourself with vanity metrics. The common mistake here is to focus on signups and ignore retention. But retention is as important to growth as new user acquisition.
说到指标，千万别用误读那些“虚荣指标”（指用户量、下载量、浏览次数等数据）。有些错误很常见，比方说看重注册量而忽视了留存率，而事实上，对于公司发展而言，留存率与新增用户数一样重要。
It’s also important to establish an internal cadence to keep momentum. You want to have a “drumbeat” of progress—new features, customers, hires, revenue milestones, partnerships, etc that you can talk about internally and externally.You should set aggressive but borderline achievable goals and review progress every month. Celebrate wins! Talk internally about strategy all the time, tell everyone what you’re hearing from customers, etc. The more information you share internally—good and bad—the better you’ll be.
建立一个保持劲头的内部节奏也很重要。新功能、用户数、招聘、收入节点、合伙人……无论是内部还是外部事务，你最好都能有自己的发展节拍。你应该设置一些野心勃勃而有清晰界限的目标，然后每个月都审查一下进度。如果目标达成，那就好好庆祝吧！在内部保持沟通，让大家都知道公司的战略，也知道你一直在倾听用户的声音。你在内部分享的信息越多（不管是好消息抑或坏消息），对你就越有益处。
There are a few traps that founders often fall into. One is that if the company is growing like crazy but everything seems incredibly broken and inefficient, everyone worries that things are going to come unraveled. In practice, this seems to happen rarely (Friendster is the most recent example of a startup dying because of technical debt that I can point to.) Counterintuitively, it turns out that it’s good if you’re growing fast but nothing is optimized—all you need to do is fix it to get more growth! My favorite investments are in companies that are growing really fast but incredibly un-optimized—they are deeply undervalued.
有一些坑，是创业者常常掉进去的。其中一个，就是当公司像脱缰的野马一样在发展，但内部事务都令人难以置信地破碎和低效，每个人都在担心事情会变得无法收场。实际情况中这样的事例不多，最近的一则就是交友社区Friendster（成立于2002年，早于Facebook和MySpace等其它知名的社交网站）由于技术拖后腿而导致项目死掉。虽然有些反直觉，但如果你的公司在快速发展可是问题多多，这倒是件好事——你所需要做的就是解决问题，然后继续上路取得更多成绩。我最喜欢的几笔投资都是成长非常快速但是有许多问题——这样的公司的估值一般都偏低。
A related trap is thinking about problems too far in the future—i.e. “How are we going to do this at massive scale?” The answer is to figure it out when you get there. Far more startups die while debating this question than die because they didn’t think about it enough. A good rule of thumb is to only think about how things will work at 10x your current scale. Most early-stage startups should put “Do things that don’t scale” up on their wall and live by it. As an example, great startups always have great customer service in the early days, and bad startups worry about the impact on the unit economics and that it won’t scale. But great customer service makes for passionate early users, and as the product gets better you need less support, because you’ll know what customers commonly struggle with and improve the product/experience in those areas. (By the way, this is a really important example—have great customer support.)
空想太多也算是个创业路上的大坑——比如思考 “要是这事情做大了该咋办”之类的问题。这种事情到时候再想也不迟——想着想着就死掉的创业公司数量比由于没想清楚而失败的公司要多得多。如果你非要畅想未来，那最多考虑一下要如何应付规模扩大十倍以后的情况吧。其实对于大多数早期创业公司而言，还是更应该积极准备那些 “无法规模化”的事情。比方说，优秀的创业公司在一开始总是把用户伺候得妥妥的，而糟糕的创业者则会担心一旦规模扩大，这样的用户体验不具有可复制性。但是情况往往是由于客服做得好，早期用户爱上了你的产品，提了许多很棒的建议所以产品体验大幅提高，后期的客服压力反而会变小。因为你已经清楚了解用户通常会在哪些方面需要帮助，产品有哪些体验上的不足需要弥补。（顺便说一句，优质的客服真的很重要！）
There’s a big catch to this—”Do things that don’t scale” does not excuse you from having to eventually make money. It’s ok to have bad unit economics in the early days, but you have to have a good reason for why the unit economics are going to work out later.
当然了，做 “无法规模化”的事不意味着你可以心安理得地一直烧钱不盈利。早期亏一些无所谓，但最终你必须有一个能盈利的清晰的商业模式。
Another trap is getting demoralized because growth is bad in absolute numbers even though it’s good on a percentage basis. Humans are very bad at intuition around exponential growth. Remind your team of this, and that all giant companies started growing from small numbers.
当公司增长的绝对值不高，但从百分比来看不错的时候，别失去士气。这也是另一个坑。人类天然就不太擅长用百分比的角度观察公司发展。你得提醒你的团队，大公司的光鲜成绩都是从小数字成长起来的。
Some of the biggest traps are the things that founders believe will deliver growth but in practice almost never work and suck up a huge amount of time. Common examples are deals with other companies and the “big press launch”. Beware of these and understand that they effectively never work. Instead get growth the same way all great companies have—by building a product users love, recruiting users manually first, and then testing lots of growth strategies (ads, referral programs, sales and marketing, etc.) and doing more of what works. Ask your customers where you can find more people like them.
大多数的坑都是因为创业者以为做某些事情能带来公司发展，但是最后发现它们完全是徒劳无功而且赔进去很多时间，比方说处理与竞争对手和合作伙伴的关系，或者搞个盛大的新闻发布会什么的。要注意这些事情，并且了解它们其实完全没啥用。你应该模仿的，是伟大的公司的成长路径——打造一个让用户爱不释手的产品、手动招募一些种子用户，然后多多试错（各种花式发广告、请朋友推荐、做营销等等），一旦发现哪个合适，就把更多的资源倾注进去。再有，向你的用户们请教从什么渠道能把信息传达到像他们这样的人眼中。
Remember that sales and marketing are not bad words. Though neither will save you if you don’t have a great product, they can both help accelerate growth substantially. If you’re an enterprise company, it’s likely a requirement that your company get good at these.记住，
不要因为“营销”和“推广”这些词听起来比较low就逃避。虽然如果你的产品不好那再怎么营销推广也没用，但如果产品好，它们能够给你的公司装上火箭引擎。如果你做的是2B的业务，那做好这几点就更是不可或缺的了。
Don’t be afraid of sales especially. At least one founder has to get good at asking people to use your product and give you money.
尤其是不要害怕去做销售。团队里至少要有一个人擅长厚着脸皮求别人使用你们的产品并且从口袋里掏出钱来。
Alex Schultz gave a lecture on growth for consumer products that’s well worth watching. For B2B products, I think the right answer is almost always to track revenue growth per month, and remember that the longer sales cycle means the first couple of months are going to look ugly (though sometimes selling to startups as initial customers can solve this problem).
关于2C的产品推广，可以看看Facebook负责用户增长的副总、营销大拿Alex Schultz讲的一堂干货课。至于B2B产品，我觉得你就密切关注每个月的收入增长数据，并且牢记销售周期长意味着一开始的几个月的数据会很难看就行（或者你可以通过向创业圈小伙伴兜售你的产品来解决这个问题）。
FOCUS & INTENSITY专心致志
If I had to distill my advice about how to operate down to only two words, I’d pick focus and intensity. These words seem to really apply to the best founders I know.
如果非要用四字真言来提炼我的创业宝典，我觉得应该是“专注”和“投入”。我认识的最强创业大脑都符合这两点。
They are relentlessly focused on their product and growth. They don’t try to do everything—in fact, they say no a lot (this is hard because the sort of people that start companies are the sort of people that like doing new things.)
首先，他们都丧心病狂般地专心聚焦在打磨产品和追求成长上。他们从不尝试去同时做很多事——事实上，他们是说“不”的大师。（其实这很难做到，因为有人总是觉得最好的项目是下一个项目，有人总喜欢不断去开始新项目。）
As a general rule, don’t let your company start doing the next thing until you’ve dominated the first thing. No great company I know of started doing multiple things at once—they start with a lot of conviction about one thing, and see it all the way through. You can do far fewer things than you think. A very, very common cause of startup death is doing too many of the wrong things. Prioritization is critical and hard. (Equally important to setting the company’s priorities is setting your own tactical priorities. What I’ve found works best for me personally is a pen-and-paper list for each day with ~3 major tasks and ~30 minor ones, and an annual to-do list of overall goals.)
在第一件事做得非常好之前，不要让你的公司去做第二件事。据我所知，没有哪个伟大的公司是靠同时做好几件事情而发家的。他们靠的是一次做一件事，并且把这件事做到极致的态度。你真正同时能做的事情比你以为的要少得多。创业公司的一个很普遍的死因就是做了太多不必要的错事，所以分清楚事情的轻重缓急是一项重要而且不易完成的任务。（设定公司战略事项的轻重缓急跟设定你作为CEO的个人事项的轻重缓急一样重要。对我而言最有用的办法还是用纸笔，写下每天三个主要任务和三十个次要任务然后一一完成，每年也定下当年年度计划。）
While great founders don’t do many big projects, they do whatever they do very intensely. They get things done very quickly. They are decisive, which is hard when you’re running a startup—you will get a lot of conflicting advice, both because there are multiple ways to do things and because there’s a lot of bad advice out there. Great founders listen to all of the advice and then quickly make their own decisions.
虽然优秀的创业者不会同时做很多大项目，可他们一旦决定做什么事，就会像饿虎扑食一样冲上去马上开干。他们行事做人非常雷厉风行，也擅于作出决策（创业中要做决策其实很难——你总会听到相互矛盾的建议，因为事情往往有多种解决方法，而且有许多的建议质量极低）。优秀的创业者总是听所有人的意见，但最终自己做决定。
Please note that this doesn’t mean doing everything intensely—that’s impossible. You have to pick the right things. As Paul Buchheit says, find ways to get 90% of the value with 10% of the effort. The market doesn’t care how hard you work—it only cares if you do the right things.
请注意我不是说每件事都要饿虎扑食一样去干——那也是不可能的。你必须做出正确的抉择。Gmail之父Paul Buchheit说过，要找到靠10%的力就能撬动90%的价值的事半功倍的窍门。残酷的市场不会在意你工作有多勤奋，它只会体现你是否做对了事情。
It’s very hard to be both obsessed with product quality and move very quickly. But it’s one of the most obvious tells of a great founder.
的确，又要坚持保证产品质量又要快速向前发展简直太难了。但能不能做到这点，也是优秀创业者与平庸之辈的分水岭。
I have never, not once, seen a slow-moving founder be really successful.
我从来没有见过哪一个行事慢条斯理的创业者取得真正的成功。
You are not different from other startups. You still have to stay focused and move fast. Companies building rockets and nuclear reactors still manage to do this. All failing companies have a pet explanation for why they are different and don’t have to move fast.
想清楚，你跟别的创业公司没什么不同。你必须保持专心致志并且高速成长。所有卢瑟公司都有一些唧唧歪歪的理由来解释他们为啥做不到快速成长。可是想想吧，连那些造火箭和核反应堆的公司也能做到这点，你为啥不能？
When you find something that works, keep going. Don’t get distracted and do something else. Don’t take your foot off the gas.
就好像一片漆黑之中，你看到某个方向显出了曙光，那就赶紧朝着那个方向去。不要分神去做别的事。脚不沾地一路飞奔过去吧！
Don’t get caught up in early success—you didn’t get off to a promising start by going to lots of networking events and speaking on lots of panels. Startup founders who start to have initial success have a choice of two paths: either they keep doing what they’re doing, or they start spending a lot of time thinking about their “personal brand” and enjoying the status of being a founder.
当然，不要被一点早期小成功冲昏了头脑。参加各种互联网大会或者当演讲嘉宾对你的创业没啥帮助。小有名气的创业者一般分两种：一种继续埋头做事，另一种开始考虑他们的 “个人品牌”并且开始享受头上的 “创业者”光环。
It’s hard to turn down the conferences and the press profiles—they feel good, and it’s especially hard to watch other founders in your space get the attention. But this won’t last long. Eventually the press figures out who is actually winning, and if your company is a real success, you’ll have more attention than you’ll ever want. The extreme cases—early-stage founders with their own publicists—that one would think only exist in TV shows actually exist in real life, and they almost always fail.Focus and intensity will win out in the long run. (Charlie Rose once said that things get done in the world through a combination of focus and personal connections, and that’s always stuck with me.)
你往往很难对参加各种大会以及在媒体上露脸的机会说 “不”——当众人的焦点感觉好极了，而且要是同领域的竞争对手出尽风头而你却默默无闻，你心里会觉得非常不好受的。但昙花总是稍纵即逝。当媒体最终发现你才是真正的赢家，你的公司成了江湖大佬，你会被关注的程度绝对超出你的想象。那些养着炒作团队的早期创业公司（简直像是八点档肥皂剧的情节搬到了现实当中）肯定活不久。只有专注和快速才能笑到最后。（访谈节目主持人Charlie Rose曾说，只有集中资源并充分利用人脉关系才能办成大事，我非常认可这点。）
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