返回正常中文阅读
想对这篇译文“指手画脚”吗？
大错 
小错 
不顺 
建议 Learning from Founders
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. The winners
slow down the least. It's that way with most startups too. The
earliest phase is usually the most productive. That's when they
have the really big ideas. Imagine what Apple was like when 100%
of its employees were either Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak.
The striking thing about this phase is that it's completely different
from most people's idea of what business is like. 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. Early stage startups are the exact opposite of this. And
yet they're probably the most productive part of the whole economy.
Why the disconnect? 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. More often than not the energy
they expend on seeming impressive makes their actual performance
worse. 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
possible standing quarter mile. You know how they did it? They
cut off all the crap the manufacturer had bolted onto the car to
make it look fast.
Business is broken the same way that car was. The effort that goes
into looking productive is not merely wasted, but actually makes
organizations less productive. Suits, for example. Suits do not
help people to think better. I bet most executives at big companies
do their best thinking when they wake up on Sunday morning and go
downstairs in their bathrobe to make a cup of coffee. That's when
you have ideas. Just imagine what a company would be like if people
could think that well at work. People do in startups, at least
some of the time. (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.)
Ditto for most of the other differences between startups and what
passes for productivity in big companies. And yet conventional
ideas of professionalism have such an iron grip on our minds that
even startup founders are affected by them. 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. In fact,
programming didn't get done by well-dressed people at clean desks
during office hours. 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. But no visitor would understand
that. Not even investors, who are supposed to be able to recognize
real productivity when they see it. Even we were affected by the
conventional wisdom. We thought of ourselves as impostors, succeeding
despite being totally unprofessional. 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.
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. Why not
in business? Probably because startups are so small. The really
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.
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. This is what real productivity looks like. This
is the Formula 1 racecar. It looks weird, but it goes fast.
Of course, big companies won't be able to do everything these
startups do. In big companies there's always going to be more
politics, and less scope for individual decisions. But seeing what
startups are really like will at least show other organizations
what to aim for. The time may soon be coming when instead of
startups trying to seem more corporate, corporations will try to
seem more like startups. That would be a good thing.
向创业者学习
向创业者学习
Paul Graham
2007年一月
（Jessica Livingston 的新书 《Founders at work》的序言）
毫无疑问，短跑运动员在起跑时速度最快，而后就变慢下来，获胜者是变慢的最少的那个人。大多数创业公司也是如此。在早期创业者是最有生产力的，并且能产生那些很棒的主意。想想当苹果公司的全部员工仅仅是斯蒂夫.乔布斯（Steve Jobs)和斯蒂夫.沃兹尼克(Steve Wozniak)的时候吧。
令人惊讶的是这和一般人心目中的企业形象完全不一样。如果你能看到人们脑中对于企业的形象的话，那一定是一帮人西装革履，表情严肃的坐在会议桌旁，演示幻灯片，并各自拿出砖头厚的给别人看。早期创业者却正好相反，但他们可能是整个经济体中最有创造力的一批人。
为
何会出现这种割裂？我想这是工作中的一个一般原则：人们在工作表现上花费越少，就会在外形上花费的越多来弥补。通常他们花费在着装上的精力使得他们的工作
更加糟糕。几年我在一本杂志上读到一篇文章，一个汽车公司改装了它的运动款汽车使其能达到尽可能高的四分之一英里速度(standing quarter mile)。你知道他们是怎么做的吗？仅仅是把那些绑在汽车上的附件去掉而已，而那些附件是被用来使汽车看起来跑的很快的。
企
业存在和汽车一样的问题。那些使企业看起来有效率的努力浪费了精力，反而使得企业变得没有效率。例如职业套装。套装并不能是员工更好的思考。我敢打赌大部
分大公司高管最佳思考时间是在一个星期天的早上，当他们披着浴袍下楼冲咖啡的时候。那个时候你们能产生新主意。想象一下当所有的员工都能那么好的思考时，
一个公司会怎么样吧。创业公司中，至少一部分时间，他们的确是在这种状态下思考的。（一半时间你处于混乱当中因为你的服务器已经开动了，而剩下的时间你就
可以象星期天早上那样深入的思考）
还有很多创业公司和大公司中的差别。很可惜，我们关于职业精神的观念像个紧箍咒一样束缚着我们的思想，
以至于一些创业者都受其影响。在我们的创业公司里，当外来人来访时，我们都努力看起来很”职业化“。我们会清理办公司，穿好一些的衣服，在办公时间安排很
多人在办公室里。实际上，那些坐在干净的办公桌旁穿着整洁的员工并不能很好的编程。编程通常都是由那些穿得很邋遢，在满是垃圾的环境中工作到两点的人来完
成的（仅穿着一条浴巾编程的确挺爽）。但是没有参观者会理解这些。不仅那些被认为能识别出什么是真正生产力的投资者会误解，甚至我们这些创业者都会被这种
传统思想所左右。我们认为自己是骗子，虽然毫不专业但却意外成功。这就像是我们造了一架一级方程式赛车却感到浑身不自在，仅仅因为它和汽车应该的摸样相差
太远。
在汽车界，至少有一些人知道高性能赛车应该象一级方程式，而不是那种装饰了巨大的镶边和假底盘扰流板的轿车。但为何在商业界却没有
这样的人？可能因为创业公司太小了。真正的快速成长发生在公司仅有三四个人的时候，并且仅这三四个人理解这点，而其他的人却认为公司应该想波音或者飞利浦
一样运作。
这本书可以帮助解决这个问题，它向每个人展示了至今只有很少人知道的事情：创业公司的第一年会发生什么，那是真正的有生产力的时候，那才是一级方程式赛车，它开起来很怪，但的确跑的很快。
当然大公司不能象创业公司那样来做每件事情。在大公司里有更多的政治，并且更少的考虑个人想法。但看看创业公司怎么做至少使得其他企业明白努力的方向。很快，不仅创业公司会看起来更像一个正规企业，同时那些大企业也会努力看起来更像创业公司。这是件很棒的事情！
