这里不是要大家罢课，是要大家翘课
有些东西非得听老师怎么讲吗？自己看看不也ok？大学不是以自学为主吗？连自学都学不明白怎么叫大学？
一周听到三人次说：“对不起，因为有课，所以没能去上您的座谈……”倒不是说不来与我交流我生气，而是觉得这种木讷，这种被奴化了十多年的习惯所气氛！
中国学生是听话，但是中国学生也真是幼稚！当然除了一小部分人
只会听课，举一反三的能力太差了！也除了一小部分人，绝大部分是这样！中国啊，需要创新的人才，连课都不敢翘的人怎么能学会创新？最起码一点这种精神都没有！我太怀念我高中自习课跳窗户的经历了！
亲爱的学弟学妹们，有的课，不上也罢！

问题：

学长，

望学长给予点拨一二。谢谢您！

回复：

我觉得是不是更适合自己运营网站，做站长好一些呢？
你可以多到站长聚集的网站上看看，多多与他们交流，学习
比如：admin5.com  落伍者等等
对于总感觉自己出论茫然的同学：

无论如何，还是要根据你的兴趣来决定，而且要广泛涉猎、阅读大量知识（搜索一下相关关键词，或者看大量的报纸，记得我向你们推荐过的三个报纸么？中国经营报，21世纪经济报道，经济观察报），并且有选择的实践一下，这样你就会站在一定高度上看待问题，这样你就不为难了

我发现有这样一个我有这样一个问题
往往在被强迫做一些事情的情况下能把事情做好，或者有额外收获，或者更容易来发现自我。
在旅途中总能做耐着性子做一些东西出来。
动车上，飞机上等等……
当然不是像同事203说得那样在快速移动中宇宙射线能够激活大脑细胞带来灵感，如果说是时间比较充裕，或者没有其他的干扰的情况下倒是更能说得通。
闭关看来是有道理的……
出家也有道理……

这位同学问：
董学长，
你好！今天上线才看到你的信息，谢谢你给与我的的指点。这点我也想过了，也尝试着做自己网站，但对于网站的运营来说，我还处于婴儿阶段，我有的只是爱好，仅此而已。www.lovecoole.com.cn是我最新作的网站，打算等新的域名下来后重新给网站定位，但人手和资金的缺乏使我有点力不从心的感觉。学长，你知道吉林这边有什么大的计算机学校，我想做一个系统的学习。
再次感谢学长对我的支持与关注！

我的回复：

学弟你好：
我觉得是不是更适合自己运营网站，做站长好一些呢？
你可以多到站长聚集的网站上看看，多多与他们交流，学习
比如：admin5.com  落伍者等等
无论如何，还是要根据你的兴趣来决定，而且要广泛涉猎，这样你就不为难了

这位同学又问：
> 学长， > 你好！ > 这个我也知道，在课余时间我基本上也在自学一些软件和相关方面的知识，来给自己充电。但没有经过系统的学习，始终还是缺点啥似的。 >…

我的回复：

你的 思路不应该好是找东西去学习，应该是为了做成一件事但是有的环节你不掌握，去学这个这个你不会的环节，这样才会有目的有重点有动力的去学习

当你看到这个题目的时候最好是你第一次面试的一年到两年前。

因为：

面试最重要的，肯定不是很多人想象的表层，什么穿着什么证书什么成绩什么长相

而是，

你的能力和经验！

所以，

你要提前培养能力、积累经验

怎么做？

要有成功案例！

什么是成功案例？

1、假如你学计算机，是否应该去校内之类做个小插件，试想，有10万人用你的小作品，哪个企业不会要你呢？

2、假如你学中文的，是否有个10万人看过的文学博客或者网络小说呢？

3、假如你学市场营销的，是否去某个企业实习过并做过销售曾经还在小组里做过top5？

4、假如你学英语的，是否翻译过纽约时报的专题评论并发布到你的博客上？（很容易啊，去找找国外美体的网站吧）

5、假如……

总而言之，就是经验，能力实在不断实践中积累的！

所以，应对面试，不是穿得多好，说得多好，多漂亮的成绩单，多么多的证书

而是，你提前一年、两年、四年前做的那些

得此良法，攻无不克，战无不胜，

此乃面试之道也！

好累啊，还是长春比较好

问题：

董哥，你好！
我是装饰学院大三的学生，非常感谢你能和我们分享你创业的经验。
高考1977是部好片子，最起码非常真实。

一萌电子是国内领先的搜索引擎技术提供商及网络营销服务商。目前，对全国网络营销（主要是北京网络营销、上海网络营销、深圳网络营销、广州网络营销）推出善财童子品牌专业网络营销产品。
这是国内第一个搜索引擎厂商推出的专业搜索引擎网络营销工具。公司会同国内顶尖战略专家周鼎明先生、中国实战营销大师于金龙先生，还有国内实战营销公司联纵智达，贸促会等，（大家可以人肉搜索一下他们），未来他们有计划在很多领域进行搜索引擎及相关营销的搜索,比如：图书搜索、锁头、创业板、马类（相关搜索：汗血马、温血马）、冷笑话、华艾康，干细胞、菲佣，包括地区类的垂直搜索：保洁搜索，是公司会同北京保洁公司联合推出。未来还会与一些木门的专业厂商共同推出木门行业的搜索引擎，与一些公益组织，也共同推出针对残疾人的网上商城。目前已经推出针对大学生就业的职业搜索引擎上班啦，并实现搜索引擎的竞价排名等业务。这种以搜索引擎为核心的网络营销推广方式是超过SEO的新一代推广方式，用公司创始人的话来说就是可以实现某个公司或者机构在搜索引擎上“做庄”。

In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It’s equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed—if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed—and that’s too big a question to answer on the fly.

Afterwards I realized it could be helpful to look at the problem from this direction. If you have a list of all the things you shouldn’t do, you can turn that into a recipe for succeeding just by negating. And this form of list may be more useful in practice. It’s easier to catch yourself doing something you shouldn’t than always to remember to do something you should. [1]

In a sense there’s just one mistake that kills startups: not making something users want. If you make something users want, you’ll probably be fine, whatever else you do or don’t do. And if you don’t make something users want, then you’re dead, whatever else you do or don’t do. So really this is a list of 18 things that cause startups not to make something users want. Nearly all failure funnels through that.

1. Single Founder

Have you ever noticed how few successful startups were founded by just one person? Even companies you think of as having one founder, like Oracle, usually turn out to have more. It seems unlikely this is a coincidence.

What’s wrong with having one founder? To start with, it’s a vote of no confidence. It probably means the founder couldn’t talk any of his friends into starting the company with him. That’s pretty alarming, because his friends are the ones who know him best.

But even if the founder’s friends were all wrong and the company is a good bet, he’s still at a disadvantage. Starting a startup is too hard for one person. Even if you could do all the work yourself, you need colleagues to brainstorm with, to talk you out of stupid decisions, and to cheer you up when things go wrong.

The last one might be the most important. The low points in a startup are so low that few could bear them alone. When you have multiple founders, esprit de corps binds them together in a way that seems to violate conservation laws. Each thinks “I can’t let my friends down.” This is one of the most powerful forces in human nature, and it’s missing when there’s just one founder.

2. Bad Location

Startups prosper in some places and not others. Silicon Valley dominates, then Boston, then Seattle, Austin, Denver, and New York. After that there’s not much. Even in New York the number of startups per capita is probably a 20th of what it is in Silicon Valley. In towns like Houston and Chicago and Detroit it’s too small to measure.

Why is the falloff so sharp? Probably for the same reason it is in other industries. What’s the sixth largest fashion center in the US? The sixth largest center for oil, or finance, or publishing? Whatever they are they’re probably so far from the top that it would be misleading even to call them centers.

It’s an interesting question why cities become startup hubs, but the reason startups prosper in them is probably the same as it is for any industry: that’s where the experts are. Standards are higher; people are more sympathetic to what you’re doing; the kind of people you want to hire want to live there; supporting industries are there; the people you run into in chance meetings are in the same business. Who knows exactly how these factors combine to boost startups in Silicon Valley and squish them in Detroit, but it’s clear they do from the number of startups per capita in each.

3. Marginal Niche

Most of the groups that apply to Y Combinator suffer from a common problem: choosing a small, obscure niche in the hope of avoiding competition.

If you watch little kids playing sports, you notice that below a certain age they’re afraid of the ball. When the ball comes near them their instinct is to avoid it. I didn’t make a lot of catches as an eight year old outfielder, because whenever a fly ball came my way, I used to close my eyes and hold my glove up more for protection than in the hope of catching it.

Choosing a marginal project is the startup equivalent of my eight year old strategy for dealing with fly balls. If you make anything good, you’re going to have competitors, so you may as well face that. You can only avoid competition by avoiding good ideas.

I think this shrinking from big problems is mostly unconscious. It’s not that people think of grand ideas but decide to pursue smaller ones because they seem safer. Your unconscious won’t even let you think of grand ideas. So the solution may be to think about ideas without involving yourself. What would be a great idea for someone else to do as a startup?

4. Derivative Idea

Many of the applications we get are imitations of some existing company. That’s one source of ideas, but not the best. If you look at the origins of successful startups, few were started in imitation of some other startup. Where did they get their ideas? Usually from some specific, unsolved problem the founders identified.

Our startup made software for making online stores. When we started it, there wasn’t any; the few sites you could order from were hand-made at great expense by web consultants. We knew that if online shopping ever took off, these sites would have to be generated by software, so we wrote some. Pretty straightforward.

It seems like the best problems to solve are ones that affect you personally. Apple happened because Steve Wozniak wanted a computer, Google because Larry and Sergey couldn’t find stuff online, Hotmail because Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith couldn’t exchange email at work.

So instead of copying the Facebook, with some variation that the Facebook rightly ignored, look for ideas from the other direction. Instead of starting from companies and working back to the problems they solved, look for problems and imagine the company that might solve them. [2] What do people complain about? What do you wish there was?

5. Obstinacy

In some fields the way to succeed is to have a vision of what you want to achieve, and to hold true to it no matter what setbacks you encounter. Starting startups is not one of them. The stick-to-your-vision approach works for something like winning an Olympic gold medal, where the problem is well-defined. Startups are more like science, where you need to follow the trail wherever it leads.

So don’t get too attached to your original plan, because it’s probably wrong. Most successful startups end up doing something different than they originally intended—often so different that it doesn’t even seem like the same company. You have to be prepared to see the better idea when it arrives. And the hardest part of that is often discarding your old idea.

But openness to new ideas has to be tuned just right. Switching to a new idea every week will be equally fatal. Is there some kind of external test you can use? One is to ask whether the ideas represent some kind of progression. If in each new idea you’re able to re-use most of what you built for the previous ones, then you’re probably in a process that converges. Whereas if you keep restarting from scratch, that’s a bad sign.

Fortunately there’s someone you can ask for advice: your users. If you’re thinking about turning in some new direction and your users seem excited about it, it’s probably a good bet.

6. Hiring Bad Programmers

I forgot to include this in the early versions of the list, because nearly all the founders I know are programmers. This is not a serious problem for them. They might accidentally hire someone bad, but it’s not going to kill the company. In a pinch they can do whatever’s required themselves.

But when I think about what killed most of the startups in the e-commerce business back in the 90s, it was bad programmers. A lot of those companies were started by business guys who thought the way startups worked was that you had some clever idea and then hired programmers to implement it. That’s actually much harder than it sounds—almost impossibly hard in fact—because business guys can’t tell which are the good programmers. They don’t even get a shot at the best ones, because no one really good wants a job implementing the vision of a business guy.

In practice what happens is that the business guys choose people they think are good programmers (it says here on his resume that he’s a Microsoft Certified Developer) but who aren’t. Then they’re mystified to find that their startup lumbers along like a World War II bomber while their competitors scream past like jet fighters. This kind of startup is in the same position as a big company, but without the advantages.

So how do you pick good programmers if you’re not a programmer? I don’t think there’s an answer. I was about to say you’d have to find a good programmer to help you hire people. But if you can’t recognize good programmers, how would you even do that?

7. Choosing the Wrong Platform

A related problem (since it tends to be done by bad programmers) is choosing the wrong platform. For example, I think a lot of startups during the Bubble killed themselves by deciding to build server-based applications on Windows. Hotmail was still running on FreeBSD for years after Microsoft bought it, presumably because Windows couldn’t handle the load. If Hotmail’s founders had chosen to use Windows, they would have been swamped.

PayPal only just dodged this bullet. After they merged with X.com, the new CEO wanted to switch to Windows—even after PayPal cofounder Max Levchin showed that their software scaled only 1% as well on Windows as Unix. Fortunately for PayPal they switched CEOs instead.

Platform is a vague word. It could mean an operating system, or a programming language, or a “framework” built on top of a programming language. It implies something that both supports and limits, like the foundation of a house.

The scary thing about platforms is that there are always some that seem to outsiders to be fine, responsible choices and yet, like Windows in the 90s, will destroy you if you choose them. Java applets were probably the most spectacular example. This was supposed to be the new way of delivering applications. Presumably it killed just about 100% of the startups who believed that.

How do you pick the right platforms? The usual way is to hire good programmers and let them choose. But there is a trick you could use if you’re not a programmer: visit a top computer science department and see what they use in research projects.

8. Slowness in Launching

Companies of all sizes have a hard time getting software done. It’s intrinsic to the medium; software is always 85% done. It takes an effort of will to push through this and get something released to users. [3]

Startups make all kinds of excuses for delaying their launch. Most are equivalent to the ones people use for procrastinating in everyday life. There’s something that needs to happen first. Maybe. But if the software were 100% finished and ready to launch at the push of a button, would they still be waiting?

One reason to launch quickly is that it forces you to actually finish some quantum of work. Nothing is truly finished till it’s released; you can see that from the rush of work that’s always involved in releasing anything, no matter how finished you thought it was. The other reason you need to launch is that it’s only by bouncing your idea off users that you fully understand it.

Several distinct problems manifest themselves as delays in launching: working too slowly; not truly understanding the problem; fear of having to deal with users; fear of being judged; working on too many different things; excessive perfectionism. Fortunately you can combat all of them by the simple expedient of forcing yourself to launch something fairly quickly.

9. Launching Too Early

Launching too slowly has probably killed a hundred times more startups than launching too fast, but it is possible to launch too fast. The danger here is that you ruin your reputation. You launch something, the early adopters try it out, and if it’s no good they may never come back.

So what’s the minimum you need to launch? We suggest startups think about what they plan to do, identify a core that’s both (a) useful on its own and (b) something that can be incrementally expanded into the whole project, and then get that done as soon as possible.

This is the same approach I (and many other programmers) use for writing software. Think about the overall goal, then start by writing the smallest subset of it that does anything useful. If it’s a subset, you’ll have to write it anyway, so in the worst case you won’t be wasting your time. But more likely you’ll find that implementing a working subset is both good for morale and helps you see more clearly what the rest should do.

The early adopters you need to impress are fairly tolerant. They don’t expect a newly launched product to do everything; it just has to do something.

10. Having No Specific User in Mind

You can’t build things users like without understanding them. I mentioned earlier that the most successful startups seem to have begun by trying to solve a problem their founders had. Perhaps there’s a rule here: perhaps you create wealth in proportion to how well you understand the problem you’re solving, and the problems you understand best are your own. [4]

That’s just a theory. What’s not a theory is the converse: if you’re trying to solve problems you don’t understand, you’re hosed.

And yet a surprising number of founders seem willing to assume that someone, they’re not sure exactly who, will want what they’re building. Do the founders want it? No, they’re not the target market. Who is? Teenagers. People interested in local events (that one is a perennial tarpit). Or “business” users. What business users? Gas stations? Movie studios? Defense contractors?

You can of course build something for users other than yourself. We did. But you should realize you’re stepping into dangerous territory. You’re flying on instruments, in effect, so you should (a) consciously shift gears, instead of assuming you can rely on your intuitions as you ordinarily would, and (b) look at the instruments.

In this case the instruments are the users. When designing for other people you have to be empirical. You can no longer guess what will work; you have to find users and measure their responses. So if you’re going to make something for teenagers or “business” users or some other group that doesn’t include you, you have to be able to talk some specific ones into using what you’re making. If you can’t, you’re on the wrong track.

11. Raising Too Little Money

Most successful startups take funding at some point. Like having more than one founder, it seems a good bet statistically. How much should you take, though?

Startup funding is measured in time. Every startup that isn’t profitable (meaning nearly all of them, initially) has a certain amount of time left before the money runs out and they have to stop. This is sometimes referred to as runway, as in “How much runway do you have left?” It’s a good metaphor because it reminds you that when the money runs out you’re going to be airborne or dead.

Too little money means not enough to get airborne. What airborne means depends on the situation. Usually you have to advance to a visibly higher level: if all you have is an idea, a working prototype; if you have a prototype, launching; if you’re launched, significant growth. It depends on investors, because until you’re profitable that’s who you have to convince.

So if you take money from investors, you have to take enough to get to the next step, whatever that is. [5] Fortunately you have some control over both how much you spend and what the next step is. We advise startups to set both low, initially: spend practically nothing, and make your initial goal simply to build a solid prototype. This gives you maximum flexibility.

12. Spending Too Much

It’s hard to distinguish spending too much from raising too little. If you run out of money, you could say either was the cause. The only way to decide which to call it is by comparison with other startups. If you raised five million and ran out of money, you probably spent too much.

Burning through too much money is not as common as it used to be. Founders seem to have learned that lesson. Plus it keeps getting cheaper to start a startup. So as of this writing few startups spend too much. None of the ones we’ve funded have. (And not just because we make small investments; many have gone on to raise further rounds.)

The classic way to burn through cash is by hiring a lot of people. This bites you twice: in addition to increasing your costs, it slows you down—so money that’s getting consumed faster has to last longer. Most hackers understand why that happens; Fred Brooks explained it in The Mythical Man-Month.

We have three general suggestions about hiring: (a) don’t do it if you can avoid it, (b) pay people with equity rather than salary, not just to save money, but because you want the kind of people who are committed enough to prefer that, and (c) only hire people who are either going to write code or go out and get users, because those are the only things you need at first.

13. Raising Too Much Money

It’s obvious how too little money could kill you, but is there such a thing as having too much?

Yes and no. The problem is not so much the money itself as what comes with it. As one VC who spoke at Y Combinator said, “Once you take several million dollars of my money, the clock is ticking.” If VCs fund you, they’re not going to let you just put the money in the bank and keep operating as two guys living on ramen. They want that money to go to work. [6] At the very least you’ll move into proper office space and hire more people. That will change the atmosphere, and not entirely for the better. Now most of your people will be employees rather than founders. They won’t be as committed; they’ll need to be told what to do; they’ll start to engage in office politics.

When you raise a lot of money, your company moves to the suburbs and has kids.

Perhaps more dangerously, once you take a lot of money it gets harder to change direction. Suppose your initial plan was to sell something to companies. After taking VC money you hire a sales force to do that. What happens now if you realize you should be making this for consumers instead of businesses? That’s a completely different kind of selling. What happens, in practice, is that you don’t realize that. The more people you have, the more you stay pointed in the same direction.

Another drawback of large investments is the time they take. The time required to raise money grows with the amount. [7] When the amount rises into the millions, investors get very cautious. VCs never quite say yes or no; they just engage you in an apparently endless conversation. Raising VC scale investments is thus a huge time sink—more work, probably, than the startup itself. And you don’t want to be spending all your time talking to investors while your competitors are spending theirs building things.

We advise founders who go on to seek VC money to take the first reasonable deal they get. If you get an offer from a reputable firm at a reasonable valuation with no unusually onerous terms, just take it and get on with building the company. [8] Who cares if you could get a 30% better deal elsewhere? Economically, startups are an all-or-nothing game. Bargain-hunting among investors is a waste of time.

14. Poor Investor Management

As a founder, you have to manage your investors. You shouldn’t ignore them, because they may have useful insights. But neither should you let them run the company. That’s supposed to be your job. If investors had sufficient vision to run the companies they fund, why didn’t they start them?

Pissing off investors by ignoring them is probably less dangerous than caving in to them. In our startup, we erred on the ignoring side. A lot of our energy got drained away in disputes with investors instead of going into the product. But this was less costly than giving in, which would probably have destroyed the company. If the founders know what they’re doing, it’s better to have half their attention focused on the product than the full attention of investors who don’t.

How hard you have to work on managing investors usually depends on how much money you’ve taken. When you raise VC-scale money, the investors get a great deal of control. If they have a board majority, they’re literally your bosses. In the more common case, where founders and investors are equally represented and the deciding vote is cast by neutral outside directors, all the investors have to do is convince the outside directors and they control the company.

If things go well, this shouldn’t matter. So long as you seem to be advancing rapidly, most investors will leave you alone. But things don’t always go smoothly in startups. Investors have made trouble even for the most successful companies. One of the most famous examples is Apple, whose board made a nearly fatal blunder in firing Steve Jobs. Apparently even Google got a lot of grief from their investors early on.

15. Sacrificing Users to (Supposed) Profit

When I said at the beginning that if you make something users want, you’ll be fine, you may have noticed I didn’t mention anything about having the right business model. That’s not because making money is unimportant. I’m not suggesting that founders start companies with no chance of making money in the hope of unloading them before they tank. The reason we tell founders not to worry about the business model initially is that making something people want is so much harder.

I don’t know why it’s so hard to make something people want. It seems like it should be straightforward. But you can tell it must be hard by how few startups do it.

Because making something people want is so much harder than making money from it, you should leave business models for later, just as you’d leave some trivial but messy feature for version 2. In version 1, solve the core problem. And the core problem in a startup is how to create wealth (= how much people want something x the number who want it), not how to convert that wealth into money.

The companies that win are the ones that put users first. Google, for example. They made search work, then worried about how to make money from it. And yet some startup founders still think it’s irresponsible not to focus on the business model from the beginning. They’re often encouraged in this by investors whose experience comes from less malleable industries.

It is irresponsible not to think about business models. It’s just ten times more irresponsible not to think about the product.

16. Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty

Nearly all programmers would rather spend their time writing code and have someone else handle the messy business of extracting money from it. And not just the lazy ones. Larry and Sergey apparently felt this way too at first. After developing their new search algorithm, the first thing they tried was to get some other company to buy it.

Start a company? Yech. Most hackers would rather just have ideas. But as Larry and Sergey found, there’s not much of a market for ideas. No one trusts an idea till you embody it in a product and use that to grow a user base. Then they’ll pay big time.

Maybe this will change, but I doubt it will change much. There’s nothing like users for convincing acquirers. It’s not just that the risk is decreased. The acquirers are human, and they have a hard time paying a bunch of young guys millions of dollars just for being clever. When the idea is embodied in a company with a lot of users, they can tell themselves they’re buying the users rather than the cleverness, and this is easier for them to swallow. [9]

If you’re going to attract users, you’ll probably have to get up from your computer and go find some. It’s unpleasant work, but if you can make yourself do it you have a much greater chance of succeeding. In the first batch of startups we funded, in the summer of 2005, most of the founders spent all their time building their applications. But there was one who was away half the time talking to executives at cell phone companies, trying to arrange deals. Can you imagine anything more painful for a hacker? [10] But it paid off, because this startup seems the most successful of that group by an order of magnitude.

If you want to start a startup, you have to face the fact that you can’t just hack. At least one hacker will have to spend some of the time doing business stuff.

17. Fights Between Founders

Fights between founders are surprisingly common. About 20% of the startups we’ve funded have had a founder leave. It happens so often that we’ve reversed our attitude to vesting. We still don’t require it, but now we advise founders to vest so there will be an orderly way for people to quit.

A founder leaving doesn’t necessarily kill a startup, though. Plenty of successful startups have had that happen. [11] Fortunately it’s usually the least committed founder who leaves. If there are three founders and one who was lukewarm leaves, big deal. If you have two and one leaves, or a guy with critical technical skills leaves, that’s more of a problem. But even that is survivable. Blogger got down to one person, and they bounced back.

Most of the disputes I’ve seen between founders could have been avoided if they’d been more careful about who they started a company with. Most disputes are not due to the situation but the people. Which means they’re inevitable. And most founders who’ve been burned by such disputes probably had misgivings, which they suppressed, when they started the company. Don’t suppress misgivings. It’s much easier to fix problems before the company is started than after. So don’t include your housemate in your startup because he’d feel left out otherwise. Don’t start a company with someone you dislike because they have some skill you need and you worry you won’t find anyone else. The people are the most important ingredient in a startup, so don’t compromise there.

18. A Half-Hearted Effort

The failed startups you hear most about are the spectactular flameouts. Those are actually the elite of failures. The most common type is not the one that makes spectacular mistakes, but the one that doesn’t do much of anything—the one we never even hear about, because it was some project a couple guys started on the side while working on their day jobs, but which never got anywhere and was gradually abandoned.

Statistically, if you want to avoid failure, it would seem like the most important thing is to quit your day job. Most founders of failed startups don’t quit their day jobs, and most founders of successful ones do. If startup failure were a disease, the CDC would be issuing bulletins warning people to avoid day jobs.

Does that mean you should quit your day job? Not necessarily. I’m guessing here, but I’d guess that many of these would-be founders may not have the kind of determination it takes to start a company, and that in the back of their minds, they know it. The reason they don’t invest more time in their startup is that they know it’s a bad investment. [12]

I’d also guess there’s some band of people who could have succeeded if they’d taken the leap and done it full-time, but didn’t. I have no idea how wide this band is, but if the winner/borderline/hopeless progression has the sort of distribution you’d expect, the number of people who could have made it, if they’d quit their day job, is probably an order of magnitude larger than the number who do make it. [13]

If that’s true, most startups that could succeed fail because the founders don’t devote their whole efforts to them. That certainly accords with what I see out in the world. Most startups fail because they don’t make something people want, and the reason most don’t is that they don’t try hard enough.

In other words, starting startups is just like everything else. The biggest mistake you can make is not to try hard enough. To the extent there’s a secret to success, it’s not to be in denial about that.

Notes

[1] This is not a complete list of the causes of failure, just those you can control. There are also several you can’t, notably ineptitude and bad luck.

[2] Ironically, one variant of the Facebook that might work is a facebook exclusively for college students.

[3] Steve Jobs tried to motivate people by saying “Real artists ship.” This is a fine sentence, but unfortunately not true. Many famous works of art are unfinished. It’s true in fields that have hard deadlines, like architecture and filmmaking, but even there people tend to be tweaking stuff till it’s yanked out of their hands.

[4] There’s probably also a second factor: startup founders tend to be at the leading edge of technology, so problems they face are probably especially valuable.

[5] You should take more than you think you’ll need, maybe 50% to 100% more, because software takes longer to write and deals longer to close than you expect.

[6] Since people sometimes call us VCs, I should add that we’re not. VCs invest large amounts of other people’s money. We invest small amounts of our own, like angel investors.

[7] Not linearly of course, or it would take forever to raise five million dollars. In practice it just feels like it takes forever.

Though if you include the cases where VCs don’t invest, it would literally take forever in the median case. And maybe we should, because the danger of chasing large investments is not just that they take a long time. That’s the best case. The real danger is that you’ll expend a lot of time and get nothing.

[8] Some VCs will offer you an artificially low valuation to see if you have the balls to ask for more. It’s lame that VCs play such games, but some do. If you’re dealing with one of those you should push back on the valuation a bit.

[9] Suppose YouTube’s founders had gone to Google in 2005 and told them “Google Video is badly designed. Give us $10 million and we’ll tell you all the mistakes you made.” They would have gotten the royal raspberry. Eighteen months later Google paid $1.6 billion for the same lesson, partly because they could then tell themselves that they were buying a phenomenon, or a community, or some vague thing like that.

I don’t mean to be hard on Google. They did better than their competitors, who may have now missed the video boat entirely.

[10] Yes, actually: dealing with the government. But phone companies are up there.

[11] Many more than most people realize, because companies don’t advertise this. Did you know Apple originally had three founders?

[12] I’m not dissing these people. I don’t have the determination myself. I’ve twice come close to starting startups since Viaweb, and both times I bailed because I realized that without the spur of poverty I just wasn’t willing to endure the stress of a startup.

[13] So how do you know whether you’re in the category of people who should quit their day job, or the presumably larger one who shouldn’t? I got to the point of saying that this was hard to judge for yourself and that you should seek outside advice, before realizing that that’s what we do. We think of ourselves as investors, but viewed from the other direction Y Combinator is a service for advising people whether or not to quit their day job. We could be mistaken, and no doubt often are, but we do at least bet money on our conclusions.

Thanks to Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, Greg McAdoo, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.

转发著名互联网评论家keso的文章：

昨天，阿里巴巴集团宣布，联合全国千余所院校，共同发起大学生“网络就业创业护航行动”，促进全国百万学子通过网络实现就业创业。

这个护航行动，看上去似乎是要把人都变成商人，我希望这并非“新商业文明” 的既定目标。当然，百万学子上淘宝，必定有利于淘宝的广告收入继续攀升，起码多了百万潜在广告客户。但在解决大学生就业问题上到底能发挥多大作用，恐怕还 是个巨大的问号。而且，假设百万学子真的都成了阿里巴巴的“网商”，对已经竞争到白热化的现有网商到底是利是弊，也是个未知数。

理论上，淘宝依托互联网，完全可以提供无限的摊位、无限的货架，从而成为一个超越所有实体商业的无限庞大的卖场，超越沃尔玛不是梦。但这只是理论 上，实际情况是，淘宝所承载的社会消费能力是有限的。就像把沃尔玛的货物增加两倍，并不必然导致销售额也增加两倍。10亿人民9亿倒，结果会是什么？

首先是价格混战。一个朋友曾经打算在淘宝上卖玩具，他原以为自己依托广东最大的玩具公司之一，价格不会成为障碍。但调研后他发现，同样的玩具，淘宝上的价格比他的出厂价还低。淘宝首席运营官张勇曾说：“与传统零售渠道相比，淘宝具备价格优势，在我们这里发现10-12%的价差是不奇怪的。用同样的钱，你可以在淘宝上买到更多的产品。所以，顾客对价格越敏感，淘宝的优势也就越大。”没错，淘宝的优势的确很大，因为谁也不会跟钱过不去。100元的手机充值卡，有人卖95.5元，你干吗要买99.8元的？

但从某种角度说，我却乐于支付微软所谓的“苹果税”， 不同的体验应该有不同的价格。把一个产品简单地拆解为CPU值多少钱，内存条值多少钱，硬盘、液晶屏、软件分别值多少钱，这是加工业，不是用户体验。消费 者购买的是一个整体，一个不可分割的完整体验，价格固然重要，但它从来都不是惟一重要的因素。更关键的是，一个良性的商业，需要足够的利润去维系，去发 展。当年的DVD机大战，国内厂商竞相压价，相互火拼，尽管最终占据了全球八成市场份额，但却没能培育出一家成规模的世界性企业，在产业链中几乎没有话语 权。

当价格成为淘宝商家最核心的竞争力，这种商业就注定成为一种低层次的、不可持续的、高风险的、高淘汰率的商业。可能仅仅因为你的价格高出5%，你的 产品品质、服务品质，你的所有美好设想，就被一笔勾销，永远没有机会被人了解。让刚出校门的大学生都成为商人，并且是只会做价格奴隶的商人，我实在看不 出，这是在帮大学生，还是在趁火打劫。

当残酷的价格战导致价格无法覆盖成本，其结果必然是劣币驱逐良币，市场假货泛滥。几十块钱一件的The North Face冲锋衣，40多块钱一瓶的50毫升装Dior Jadore香水，能买吗？敢买吗？如果牛奶的销售价比收购价还低，你不喝三聚氰胺喝什么？当三聚氰胺成了牛奶行业的潜规则，食品安全就只能成为一个奢望。

一个商业平台，如果商家的增长速度，远远超过消费者的增长速度，就一定会导致供需失衡。阿里巴巴B2B业务就是一个绝好案例。由于阿里巴巴的收入与 供应商数量直接相关，所以阿里巴巴公司七成员工是销售人员。受金融危机影响，出口萎缩，阿里巴巴必须降价促销，以维持供应商客户的增长。问题在于，买家数 量并不受阿里巴巴销售人员的影响，它只会平稳增长，在经济形势不好的时候，甚至可能下降。在需求没有大幅增加的情况下，供给大幅增加，导致询盘数被稀释， 营销效果急遽下降，要维持与过去相同的询盘数和成交量，供应商必须大幅提高营销费用。平台提供商当然很高兴，供应商增加的营销费用，成为它的新利润，但这 导致供应商的利润空间被进一步压榨。当营销成本高到无法承受的时候，这个模式就崩溃了。

淘宝也面临同样的问题。当大批大学生涌入淘宝，平台上聚集的购买力却不会同步快速增加，竞争必然加剧，各种匪夷所思的卖家行为就会层出不穷。这些大 学生一没资金，二没经验，三没信用，百度上还搜不到他们的网店，他们该怎么办？记住，他们不是业余打理一个网店，赔了赚了问题不大，他们是来“创业”的， 他们除了正在创的这个业，其他一无所有，网店就是他们的饭碗。

“全国百万学子通过网络实现就业创业”，这个理想很美好，也很有社会责任。不过我担心，真正能实现就业创业的，只是极少数，大多数人在淘宝这个价格绞肉机中，将经历人生第一次惨痛的失败。

我只想提醒同学们一句，淘宝有毒，阿里巴巴没有解药。