Why Investors (including YC) Can’t Fix Your Company
发布时间 2022-10-20 15:00:00 来源
摘要
Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel on common pitfalls in the advice from different types of investors and why you, the founder, are ultimately responsible for the success of your company.
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Hey, Dalton, your pre-product market fit. Do you have five year financial projections? You thought it's a great example of that. Financial projections may be a good idea later stage.
嘿，道尔顿，你的预先产品市场适配情况怎么样？你有五年的财务预测吗？你认为这是一个很好的例子。财务预测可能是后期的一个不错主意。
Yes. To even ask me if I had financial projections, I was like, what's the financial project?
是的。当别人问我是否有财务预测时，我还很疑惑财务预测是什么。
This is Michael Sibel with Dalton called, well, and today we're going to talk about why investors, including why see, can't fix their company. For some folks it's like telling them that Santa Claus isn't real. They're like, hey, we finally get some time with you. No one wants our product. What should we do? Here's our designs. Can you help me design this so growth takes off?
嗨，大家好，我是道尔顿的迈克尔·西贝尔。今天我们要讨论的是投资者，包括为什么会看到的投资者，为什么不能修复他们的公司。对于某些人来说，这就像告诉他们圣诞老人并不存在一样。他们会说：“嘿，我们终于能和你谈一谈了。没有人想要我们的产品。我们该怎么办？这是我们的设计，你能帮我设计一下让我们的公司增长起来吗？”
And I have to tell them the unfortunate news, which is I have no idea. Yes. And I went through this to when I was a founder that I really believed that once I raised from the top investors, they would tell me whatever secrets they were holding out on the world.
我必须告诉他们这个不好的消息，那就是我毫无头绪。是的。当我成为创始人时，我也曾经历过这种情况，我真的相信一旦我从顶级投资者那里筹集到资金，他们会告诉我他们一直隐瞒着世界的任何秘密。
What's unfortunate is that there are a lot of investors out there who aren't former founders, right? Who haven't really lived these mistakes themselves. It hasn't been humbled by having a crappy startup like we did that failed a lot like we did. It's easy to sort of like think your hot shit. It's easy to think that your advice can make companies work. That like you are the magician.
很不幸的是，有很多投资者并非前创始人，对吧？他们并没有真正经历过这些错误。他们没有像我们一样经历过创业失败的挫折。很容易认为自己是热门选择。很容易认为自己的建议可以让公司运作良好。就像你是魔术师一样。
And what's interesting is that over the years, a lot of I see founders will kind of start following the advice of these people and they'll make very, very common errors and you can almost track it back to like, oh, I kind of understand the type of person who was giving this advice because I see what you're doing now and like this match is one to one.
有趣的是，多年来我看到很多创始人会开始听从这些人的建议，但他们会犯非常普遍的错误，而且你几乎可以追溯到给出这种建议的人的类型，因为我可以看到你现在在做什么，而这种匹配是一对一的。
So one of the most common types of investors is the investor with the finance background. Someone who's like never run a company, never operate in a company and pure finance. When all you have is a hammer, everything's a nail. And so if what you know is money, the solution is usually involved money. So raising more money, spending more money, throwing money at the problem, right?
其中最常见的投资者之一是有金融背景的投资者。他们从未经营过公司，也从未在公司中工作过，只懂得金融。如果你手中只有一把锤子，所有的问题都看成是钉子。因此，如果你所懂的只有金钱，解决方案通常就会涉及到金钱。所以，筹集更多的资金，花更多的钱，把钱往问题上扔，对吧？
Hey, Dalton, your pre-product market fit. Do you have five year financial projections? You thought it's a great example of that. If my future projections may be a good idea later stage, yes. To even ask me if I had financial projections, I was like, what's a financial project?
嘿，道尔顿，你的产品市场适配前阶段怎么样啊？你有五年财务预测吗？你认为这是个很好的例子。如果在以后的阶段中我的未来预测有用的话，我觉得这是个好主意。你问我是否有财务预测，我当时就有点懵了，不知道它是什么。
Like Michael, how many years have you started to learn what a balance sheet and shit was? Long time. Actually, and I resisted it. I resisted it. Our COO Kevin was like, this is important for you to learn. I'm like, you know what's important for us to learn how not to lose money every month before we die? I'm like, and the balance sheet is not really telling us that. It's that we make no money and we spend money. So that's what's the problem is.
像迈克尔一样，你学习平衡表和狗屎有多少年了？好久了。实际上，我一直反对它。我们的COO凯文说，这对你学习很重要。我说，你知道对我们来说真正重要的是学习如何在我们死之前不每个月都亏钱吗？平衡表并不能真正告诉我们那是我们没赚钱还花钱。所以这才是问题所在。
And for these folks, I get it, right? You spend time in spreadsheets, especially if you're doing stock market investing or private equity investing, it makes sense that your weapon is money and you move money around. That's your leverage point. That's your point of leverage. What's the downside of internalizing that too much, man? I mean, we see this all the time, which is like scaling negative, you could not take a unit economics or spending a ton of money in advertising with ever, ever worse payback periods or no payback period ever. It's really like getting people to work on things that are not making a product good.
对于这些人，我理解，对吧？如果你从事股票市场投资或私募股权投资，你很可能在电子表格中花费大量时间，这是有道理的，因为你的武器是金钱，你可以移动金钱。这是你的杠杆点。这是你的杠杆点。要是过于内化这个思维方式会带来什么不好的后果呢？我的意思是，我们经常看到这种情况，即负面效应扩大化，或者花大量的钱在广告上，但回报期越来越长，甚至根本没有回报期。这真的是让人们去做一些对产品没有好处的事情。
Yeah. I think what Patrick Collison was talking about this when he came to speaking about it recently, where he's like, listen, let me rebound. How many founders treat product as an afterthought? They're basically trying to do financial engineering and the product is like delegated. I think what's also tricky is that like this strategy isn't always wrong. Like for successful companies, there is usually a point where throwing money at it is a good idea. It's just kind of knowing when to give that advice and when not to. It's when you always give that advice is when things get really tricky.
是啊。我认为帕特里克·科里森最近谈到的就是这个问题，他说：“听着，让我回归一下。有多少创始人将产品视为事后才考虑的呢？他们基本上试图进行金融工程，而产品则被委托给其他人去做。”我认为有点棘手的是，这种策略并不总是错误的。对于成功的公司来说，通常有一个投入资金的好时机。只是需要知道什么时候给出这种建议，什么时候不要给出。当你总是给出这种建议时，事情就会变得非常棘手。
All right, here's the second type that's common in the investing world. The big company, exec. The person who's seen companies at a thousand plus people and have a lot of experience and have done like great work in those companies and now become investors.
好的，这是投资领域中常见的第二种类型。这是大型公司高管。他们曾经在拥有一千多人的公司工作过，具有丰富的经验，在这些公司中做过出色的工作，现在成为了投资者。
Folks with big tech experience are really great at taking a successful product and scaling it further or refining a product. It's just pretty different when you were employee number 100 or 200 at Airbnb or Google or Facebook than employee number five.
有丰富科技经验的人真的很擅长将成功的产品扩展或完善。但是，如果你是在Airbnb、Google或Facebook成为100或200位员工，与成为第五位员工相比，它会有所不同。
As we spoke about in a prior video, our friend and colleague Paul Buhite, number 18 at Google, was like the king of dirty hacks. In a lot of ways, when we would interview former Googlers and he was in the room, he wasn't on, he didn't love some of the instincts of folks. It was the same company that they worked at. But the tactics that they brought to bear when you were employee number 1000 to scale up one of these core products was pretty different than the folks in the first 20 employees.
就像我们之前在一个视频中谈到的那样，我们的朋友和同事保罗·布希特，谷歌的第18位员工，是那种肮脏黑客的“国王”。在很多情况下，当我们采访前谷歌员工时，他在场时，他并没有像其他人那样喜欢某些人的本能。但是，在当你是员工号码1000时，他们采取的策略来扩大其中一个核心产品与前20名员工的人们非常不同。
Generally with these folks, it looks more like scaling a process, it looks more like scaling a hiring. Sometimes taking for granted that getting any users at all is really hard.
通常，对于这些人来说，看起来更像是扩大一个过程，看起来更像是扩大一项招聘。有时候认为获得任何用户都非常困难，这是理所当然的。
I talked to folks a lot about this in the batch man. What failure usually looks like for a lot of our companies is they get zero real customers. Zero. It's not that the failure was they couldn't get a series A. It's that they just like bombed, like complete disaster. And so if you have too much of this mentality of big company PM, it doesn't even occur to you that you can fail that badly.
我在批处理中频繁地向人们谈起这件事。对于我们的许多公司来说，失败通常的样子是他们一点真正的顾客都没有。零。失败的原因不是因为他们无法拿到A轮融资，而是他们像坠毁一样，彻底失败了。因此，如果你有太多大公司项目经理的思维方式，你甚至想不到你会如此糟糕的失败。
Yeah. What do you think?
是的，你怎么想？
I think it's tricky because all too often this group of folks are giving founders the advice of hiring executives before product market fit. It's like you need to build up the company. It's like marketing doesn't work. We need a marketing executive. The engineering team isn't productive enough. We need a VP of engineering. And more often than not in this pre product market fit phase, the mistake is that there's the wrong person in the company. Not there aren't enough people. The mistake is like you've got an engineer that no one wants to work with or no one's measuring any of the marketing results. It's like those are the mistakes. Not like you don't have a department for it or an executive to run it.
我认为这很棘手，因为这些人常常给创始人提供在找到产品市场匹配之前雇佣高管的建议。就好像你需要建立公司。就像营销不起作用一样。我们需要一个营销高级主管。工程团队不够高效。我们需要一个工程副总裁。在这个产品市场匹配前阶段，最常犯的错误是公司里有错误的人选，而不是人数不够。错误就像你有一个工程师，没有人愿意和他一起工作，或者没有人在衡量任何营销结果。这些就是错误所在，而不是你没有部门或高管来运营它。
Whereas we go right back to the first one, right? When a company is scaling and growing, post product market fit, like hiring more people is essential. It's like once again, we get this huge economy. Think about the zero to one. Think about the first five employees of Facebook and the first five employees of Instagram before when it was a start before they got acquired. The first five employees of YouTube when it was a start up before got acquired versus the really awesome people post acquisition who had to step in and scale that thing.
我们回到最初的话题，是吗？当公司在产品市场适配后开始扩张和发展时，雇佣更多员工变得至关重要。这就像我们再一次获得了巨大的经济效益。想想从零到一的过程，想想 Facebook 的前五名员工，以及 Instagram 在被收购前的前五名员工。还有 YouTube 在创业初期被收购前的前五名员工与收购后必须介入和扩展业务的真正了不起的人。
Those people are awesome. Hallelujah. They're super valuable. And if they weren't around in the zero to one stage, watch out. You get what I was saying? It's a very different muscle to build. Scaling Instagram post acquisition, if you were on that team, then being getting the first hundred users when you were the founder of Instagram, right? Very. There's a whole lot more, actually, supplying demand. There's so many more people that helped scale Instagram than there are people that found an Instagram. Yep. There's just lots of folks that have lots of experience scaling products. And it's just don't meet as many that did the zero to one.
那些人太棒了，哈利路亚！他们非常有价值。如果没有他们在零到一阶段的帮助，那就麻烦了。你懂我的意思吗？这是需要不同技能的建设过程。如果你在 Instagram 购买后加入了团队，那么在你还是 Instagram 创始人时，获得第一百个用户时的情况就大不相同了。有很多人帮助 Instagram 壮大，他们的经验远比创建者要多。在零到一阶段经历了的人却不是很多。
So the next category is the successful entrepreneur in the non-tech industry. This is really common internationally in new founder ecosystems where the people funding them maybe didn't make their money in tech. What's the common kind of advice given here? Yeah, this one's tricky. Where if someone made all their money investing in real estate or in strip malls or franchise, McDonald's franchise is or something like just something that is not remotely a tech startup, they will often ask for crazy terms that would make sense if they were investing in like a franchise store.
所以下一个类别是非科技行业成功创业者。这在新的创始人生态系统中在国际上非常常见，资助他们的人也许并不是在科技领域赚了钱的人。在这里通常会给出什么样的普遍建议呢？嗯，这有点棘手。如果某人是在房地产投资、购物中心或者麦当劳等连锁店中赚钱的，他们通常会要求一些疯狂的条款，这些条款如果他们是在一家连锁店中投资的话就有意义。
They may ask for more control and they may be really stressed out all the time that you're going to lose their money. And so a lot of the trickiest investors as a nice way to say it, that I've seen the YC founders were like, oh, why did I take their money? It'll just be someone who's totally well-meaning, but they treat this like an investment in a subway franchise and that you're the manager of the subway franchise and they're going to call you and yell at you or something.
他们可能会要求更多的控制权，也可能会一直感到很紧张，担心你会让他们失去他们的钱。因此，我见过很多最棘手的投资者——这是一种委婉的说法——YC创始人们会问：“为什么我要拿他们的钱？”这只是一个完全出于善意的人，但是他们把这视为地铁特许经营的投资，而你是地铁特许经营的经理，他们会打电话给你并大喊大叫。
Yeah. That you're going to lose their money as opposed to letting you do your tech startup. And that's really just like, these folks are like, you can't be mad at them. They're just taking the principles that they learned to make their money and applying them to a different industry, right? And it's like, totally. In some ways, these are people you can be mad at the least because it's like at least they were successful themselves and they're like taking things that work for them, right? Like, they're not reading this shit on Twitter. But it is tricky because like, I think what we've learned is that industries are just different.
是的。他们认为与其让你创办科技公司而亏钱，不如自己保住钱财。这样做其实也可以理解，因为这些人只是将自己创造财富的原则应用到了不同的行业上。在某种程度上，你不应该对这些人发脾气，因为他们至少自己曾获得过成功，而且是将对自己有效的方法应用到自己的事业中。他们不是听取社交媒体上的意见进行决策。但问题也在于，我认为我们应该意识到各个行业都有其独特性。
Like, you know, maybe there's some common principles, but like in general software companies look really different than a lot of other companies out there.
你知道的，也许有一些共同的原则，但是总的来说，软件公司看起来和许多其他公司非常不同。
So all right, here's the next investor type, the junior investor, the person who just got started looking to make a name for themselves, still early in their career, oftentimes having to really have a win pretty quickly to cement themselves in this career. What's the most common type of advice these people give? Yeah, I think this one is tricky. I think a good mental model was to put yourself in their shoes.
所以好的，下一个投资者类型是初级投资者，刚刚开始寻找出名，职业生涯还很早期，往往需要在职业生涯的早期就非常快地获得胜利，以巩固自己的职业生涯。这些人最常见的建议是什么？是的，我觉得这个有点棘手。我认为一个好的心理模型是把自己放在他们的鞋子里。
I think when you're a new investor or you're newly hired at your job, you're not in a position of power inside of the place that you work or you're not in position power with your investors because they want to raise money from someone else.
我觉得当你是一个新投资者或者新加入职场的员工时，你在工作场所或者对于你的投资者来说都不处于权力地位，因为他们想从其他人那里筹集资金。
And so to show weakness or to like screw up their first few investments is very bad for their career. And we know lots of people that basically don't last in the industry because their first investments were bad.
因此，表露出弱点或者让他们的最初几次投资出了差错对于他们的职业生涯来说非常不利。我们知道很多人的职业生涯都因为他们最初的投资做得并不好而很快结束了。
Like it's kind of a career suicide to become an investor, not have any other track record and then make some bad investments. Like you're not going to make it. And so basically these folks are very optimistic that it's going to work, that you're going to make it work that you should totally go raise more money because their KPIs, if you raise money and they can mark up their investment, it makes them look good so they can go tell their colleagues or their investors, hey, I invested in this company and it went on to raise more money at a better valuation I invested at.
就像成为投资者，没有其他记录，然后做出一些不好的投资，这可能会导致你职业生涯的自杀一样。就好像你不会成功一样。所以基本上这些人非常乐观，认为它会成功，认为你应该完全去筹集更多资金，因为他们的关键绩效指标是，如果你筹集资金并且他们可以标记他们的投资增值，这会让他们看起来很好，这样他们可以告诉他们的同事或者他们的投资者，嘿，我投资了这家公司，它得到了更好的估值，筹集了更多的款项。
I'm really sorry. Working. Yeah. And so the thing to understand is that's their KPI. And so when you're interactions with them, they will often just really encourage you to fundraise and to keep doing that a lot and everything's working great and you do a product market fit and you should scale faster. Yeah.
非常抱歉，我在工作中。你要明白的是，那是他们的关键绩效指标。所以在与他们互动时，他们经常会极力鼓励你募资，继续这样做，一切都很顺利，你要做好产品市场适配，加快扩展。
Right? And it's interesting because another example of like they're not trying to hurt your company. Like in many ways. They're great people. They're nice people. Yeah. In many ways they're like amongst the biggest cheerleaders for your company.
对吧？而且这很有趣，因为这是另一个例子，说明他们并没有试图伤害你的公司。在许多方面他们都是很优秀的人。他们是很友善的人。是的，在许多方面，他们是你公司最大的支持者之一。
It's just that like your company at this stage probably has some really broken shit that has to be dealt with. And so unfortunately it's harder for them to kind of go and spend the time in the dirt with you on that stuff because it's going to kind of break their illusion. And, hey, you know, it's what it is. And it's rough.
你们公司可能在这个阶段有一些东西出了问题，必须处理好。所以，对于他们来说，要花时间和你一起处理这些东西就更难了，因为这会破坏他们的幻想。嘿，你知道，这就是事实。这很艰难。
Like if your company where it doesn't make sense to raise for a very long amount of time, it may be the right thing that you want to do but may not be great for them. If their whole thing is to prove that they're great investors really fast so that they can keep their jobs.
如果你的公司长时间内没有涨工资可能是你想做的正确事情，但对于公司来说可能不是很好。如果公司的目标是要证明他们是优秀的投资者，并且要尽快做到这一点才能保住他们的工作。
So the next category investor we see a lot is the influencer slash famous person. What do you, when I think about this kind of person, this is the person that would come to YC Demo Day and everyone would freak out to get them on their cap table. Yeah. They just get, you know, infinite access.
所以我们经常看到的下一个投资者类别是影响力人物/名人。当我想到这种人时，这是那种会来到 YC Demo Day 的人，每个人都会为了将他们放在自己的股本表上而感到惊慌失措的人。是的，他们只是得到了无限的接触机会。
How do you think that they try to help founders who are struggling with their, I think that you really understand distribution if you're an influencer because that's your game is building up your distribution network which you can monetize a bunch of different ways, right? If you have a million, you know, Instagram followers, or a million TikTok followers, you can make money off that and you get it. You're savvy.
你觉得他们怎么帮助那些创始人们正在苦苦挣扎的呢？我觉得，如果你是一个有影响力的人，你一定非常理解分销，因为你的游戏就是建立自己的分销网络，你可以用很多不同的方式来赚钱，对吧？如果你有一百万的Instagram或者抖音粉丝，你可以从中赚钱，你是很精明的。
And so I think these people are very savvy and realize they can kind of treat startups like other ad deals of being like, give me some stuff and I'll promote you. And so a lot of times these folks will like ask for advisor shares or they'll ask, those ask for things. And again, that's how they got big. They're, you know, they know what they're doing.
我认为这些人非常精明，意识到他们可以像处理其他广告交易那样处理初创公司。他们会说，“给我些东西，我会为你做宣传。”所以很多时候，这些人会要求成为顾问的股东，或者提出其他要求。再次强调，这就是他们变得如此强大的方式。他们知道自己在做什么。
And it can be so tempting to do it to think that like celebrities tweeting about your thing is going to fix all your distribution problems. And like maybe in some cases they do, but most of my experience, both personally and with founders in YC, is the founders kind of feel like they got a raw deal on these and that the, the clicks they get from the, from the posts or whatever were not as helpful as they had hoped. That is a nice way to say it.
有时候，我们会尝试这样做，认为像明星那样在推特上谈论你的事情就可以解决你所有的分发问题。或许在某些情况下这确实有效，不过从我个人的经验和YC的创始人的经验来看，他们都觉得这样做不如他们预期的那么有效果。这是一种委婉的说法。
And you know what's weird about this Dalton is that the, the best, most reputable influencers and famous people in tech world, they don't promise distribution. Like they say, I'll try to help, but like I think the founders set expectations way too high. Like it's the founder once again looking for the silver bullet someone else saw the problem for me. And man, the silver bullets don't exist.
你知道什么让这件事情很奇怪吗，Dalton？就是科技界最好、最有声望的意见领袖和名人们并不保证推广。他们会说，我会尽力帮忙，但我认为创始人们对期望值设得太高了。就好像又是创始人在寻找银弹，希望别人帮他们解决问题。可是，银弹根本不存在啊。
All right, we got two more types here. So two more types. Type one is other founders. So this is becoming a lot more common nowadays, right? Like founders investing in each other's companies. It's, you know, some people have seen success doing this. Others not.
好的，我们这里还有两种类型。所以还有两种类型。第一种是其他创始人。这在现在变得越来越普遍，对吧？就是创始人相互投资彼此的公司。有些人成功了，有些人则不是。
But what's the advice that, you know, most often you're going to get from another founder to help you when they're on your cap table? Usually when you get advice from other founders, it's heavily based on their personal experience. The, but like the downside of that is if they're really, if they really struggled with fundraiser, with fundraising personally, all their advice is going to be them basically telling you don't do what I did. Or if they struggle with distribution, all their advice is going to be all right.
从其他创办人那里得到的最常见的建议是什么？通常，当你从其他创办人那里得到建议时，这些建议都是基于他们的个人经历。但是，这种方法的缺点是，如果他们个人对筹款非常困难，那么他们所有的建议都是基本上告诉你不要像我一样做。或者如果他们在分销方面遇到困难，所有的建议就是好吧。
You know, like they're almost like they have a lot of feelings about what happened to them. And this is we were founders too, dude. Like a lot of my advice was heavily based on my personal experience.
你知道的，就像他们几乎有很多关于发生在他们身上的事情的感觉。我们也是创始人啊，伙计。我的许多建议都是基于我的个人经验的。
And it only, it took years of me working at YC to sort of break out of that trap, which is to not be so autobiographical and the things that I'm telling people, you know, I think this is something that like people don't understand enough is like how much we are learning from the founders that we're working with and how much we are condensing their learnings and delivering it to the next generation of YC founders versus how much we're condensing learnings personally that we got in our own companies.
只有通过多年在YC工作，我才成功地摆脱了那个陷阱，也就是不要过于自传式地讲述我告诉人们的事情。你知道，我认为人们没有完全理解我们从我们合作的创始人那里学到了多少东西，以及我们从中汇编他们的经验，传递给下一代YC创始人，相对地，我们汇编自己公司中学到的经验。
I think that's like very counterintuitive to most people. The last one is the extremely young investor, right? The just out of college writing a check, sometimes it's persons in college writing a check and kind of trying to build a career in our world.
我觉得大部分人可能会觉得这很反常规。最后一个指的是非常年轻的投资者，对吗？就是那些刚毕业就开始投资的人，有时候还有在大学期间就开始投资，想在我们这个领域里建立自己的事业。
Given from the, this person often is different from the like junior investor because this person's usually not working at a VC fund or they're big fun like that. They're usually kind of a scout or some kind of in that kind of role. What's the advice they're often given?
这个人通常与像初级投资者一样有所不同，因为他们通常没有在风险投资基金工作或类似的公司。他们通常是一种侦察员或类似这种角色。他们通常会得到什么建议？
Yeah, I mean look, these people are super sweet and they're super exciting, you know, to talk to you. I just think that like the same way that the founder realizes their job is to play the part of a founder and so they like watch movies about how founders are supposed to act and like read books about it and they sort of are being like, am I doing it right? Am I a founder now?
是的，我是说看看，这些人特别友善，和他们交谈非常令人兴奋。我只是认为，就像创始人意识到他们的工作是扮演创始人的角色一样，因此他们会观看有关创始人应该如何行事的电影，阅读相关书籍，并且他们会问自己，我是否做得对？我现在是一个创始人了吗？
Like, I think you kind of see this from these investors where they just, they read what other investors say and do and they sort of like say and do whatever it is they read. And so like whatever the hot new trend is, whatever people are tweeting about, whatever like latest essay they read, they just sort of like repeat that and see if and hopefully no one notices that that's what's going on.
嗯，我觉得你可能从这些投资者那里看到，他们只是看其他投资者写的和做的事情，然后说或做他们所读的任何东西。所以无论什么是最新的热门趋势，人们在推特上谈论什么，或者最新读的文章是什么，他们只是重复那些话题，希望没有人注意到这是怎么回事。
Which is, which is how people learn in school, right? So it kind of makes sense like it's exactly the same. So you know, one of the interesting things here to kind of wrap up is that we make mistakes like we screw up. There is a YC partner common bad advice kind of mode and you know, we were talking about this before the show and I think you said it right, which is like the kind of lean startup don't hire, don't spend too much money like talk to your users, put a shitty MVP out of the world path is the path that works for everyone in all cases.
那么，这就是人们在学校里学习的方式，对吧？所以这有点像完全一样，这是有道理的。你知道，有趣的是我们会犯错，我们会搞砸。有一种YC合伙人常见的坏建议模式，我们在节目之前讨论过，我认为你说得对，也就是说，像精益创业这样的理念，不要雇人，不要花太多钱，与你的用户交流，把一个糟糕的MVP放到世界上的道路是对所有人都适用的方法。
I think sometimes we can fall into that trap, but there are many examples that doesn't apply, right? Like, what are your thoughts on where YC partners ourselves we can get tripped up and give bad advice? Yeah, I think that the biggest critique I would have of ourselves is that sometimes it works right out of the gate.
我想有时候我们可能会掉进那个陷阱里，但是有很多例子并不适用，对吧？比如，关于YC合伙人在哪些方面容易受到绊倒并给出错误建议的想法，你有什么看法？是的，我认为我们自己最大的批评之一是有时会立刻行得通。
And sometimes you can spend two years building a product in a cave and never talk to a single user and it's perfect and you immediately get product market fit. Sometimes that happens. I think that we just we have we have enough data points that it seems like insane of us to ever recommend that strategy.
有时候你会在一个洞穴里花费两年时间制作一个产品，从未与任何一个用户交流，但它却十全十美，立刻得到了产品市场契合度。有时候就是这样。我想我们已经有足够的数据点表明，建议这种策略是疯狂的。
It's like, hey, you have cancer, if you go on a water fast, that might fix it. Like maybe. I think that it just feels a bit hard for us to recommend making a strategy to not do those things. But we have enough data points of YC companies, we see companies that can't bootstrap or can't launch an MVP and have to go build something that vacuum for two or three years. Yes. Sometimes it works. Yes.
就像，嘿，你患了癌症。如果你进行水禁食，那可能能治好。可能吧。我觉得我们觉得有点难以推荐不做这些事情的策略。但我们有足够的YC公司数据点，我们看到一些公司无法自给自足，无法推出MVP，并不得不去建造一个真空吸尘器两三年。是的。有时候会奏效。是的。
The best YC partners are very careful with how forcefully we give the YC advice because like the longer you hear the longer you have a kind of running record of the time I told someone to do it like this and the opposite worked. Yep. And so, you know, honestly to. But to me, you know what the lesson is, Michael?
最好的YC合作伙伴非常注重我们提供YC建议的力度，因为越听越长时间，我们就会有一种记录，记录我告诉某人要这样做，而相反的结果是有效的。是的。所以，你知道，老实说。但对我来说，你知道，迈克尔，你知道这个教训是什么？
The founders have made it work, believed in themselves and they knew that we couldn't fix it. And they internalized the whole meta point of this video or at least what I'm trying to get across with it, which is like, you know, they took bits and pieces, they took information from the outside world, but they took personal accountability that there are the ones who are going to have to make it work. And they weren't counting on blindly following anyone is being the way. It ain't. Right? No.
创始人们让事情运转起来，他们相信自己，并且知道我们不能解决问题。他们内化了这个视频的整个元点，或者至少是我试图通过这个视频表达的，那就是他们吸取了一些外部世界的信息，但他们承担了个人责任来让事情运转起来。他们没有盲目跟随任何人，这不是正确的方式，对吧？没错。
And especially in including us. Yeah. I think that the big takeaway here is that. As a founder, it's your job to figure out how to best use these people who are here to help you. All these investors who are here to help you. It's your job how to figure out how to best use them. They all have your interests in mind, but none of us can tell you exactly what to do to win. None of us.
特别是包括我们在内。是的。我认为这里的重要意义是作为创始人，你的工作就是想办法最好地利用那些来帮助你的人。所有这些来帮助你的投资者。你的工作就是想办法运用他们。他们都是为你的利益着想，但没有人能够告诉你如何获胜。没有一个人。
And like, it's funny because at the YC kickoff, the first thing we say is that, you know, we're experts in failure. We know a lot of paths to not take. But if you want us to sit next to you at your desk and tell you everything to do to win to become a blame dollar company, we can't do it. And we actually ask them, we're like, hey, and if you want to leave YC right now, we'll take, we'll give you our shares back. Like we don't want you to come in here with any false pretenses.
就像，在YC开始时，我们说的第一件事是，你知道的，我们是失败的专家。我们知道很多不要走的路。但如果你想让我们坐在你的桌子旁告诉你所有赢得成为百万富翁公司的方法，我们做不到。我们实际上问他们，我们像是说，“嘿，如果你现在想离开YC，我们会把我们的股份还给你。我们不希望你在这里带着任何虚假的前提条件进来。”
Like, this is a hard problem. Most people don't succeed. And like, you're going to be able to deserve 99.9% of the credit if you figured out because you figured it out. All the rest of the people around who helped you, they didn't figure it out.
就像这是一个困难的问题。大多数人都不会成功。如果你能够解决它，那么你将能够获得99.9％的功劳，因为你是那个解决者。所有其他帮助你的人，他们没有解决它。
Dawson, before we close, you know, we've talked about a number of examples of when investors give advice and it kind of pattern matches to where they come from, but might not apply to you at this time. What are some of the pieces of advice that you've gotten from investors that have really made a huge difference?
Dawson，在我们结束之前，你知道，我们谈到了许多投资者给出建议的例子，它们往往符合他们的文化背景，但可能并不适用于你。你从投资者那里得到了哪些建议真正产生了巨大的影响？如果需要，可以改写。
Like what is, what's been some examples of great investor advice? Because, you know, I think you and I both have these. I think the best investor advice I ever got as a founder is that I was swimming in my head with too many ideas at once and I had too much data and that someone from the outside could look at everything and be like, oh, this is working. They could take, they could take all of this like consternation and like complicated stuff. And like I can think of a couple times in my life when someone was just like, this is working. And they were more of this and they were right and it added a ton of value or conversely, this is bad. You're failing. Yeah. And again, I was full of excuse, like my brain was full of like a thousand different threads going in a different direction, but to have someone synthesize that into something very simple was super helpful, dude. I got great advice like that when I was a founder.
像中文母语者一样说话：像什么样的东西，有哪些伟大的投资者建议的例子？因为你知道，我认为你和我都有这些经历。我认为我作为创始人获得的最好的投资者建议是，我头脑中有太多的想法，同时我有太多的数据，而外部的某个人可以看到一切并说，哦，这是有效的。他们可以去处理所有这些像苦恼一样复杂的东西。我能想到我生命中的几次，当有人说，这是有效的，他们是对的，它增加了大量的价值，反之，这是不好的，你失败了。是的。再次，我满心借口，像我的脑海里有一千个不同方向的思路，但将它们综合成一个非常简单的东西对我非常有帮助，伙计。当我是一个创始人时，我得到了很好的建议，就像那样。
How about you? Number one piece of advice we ever got was from someone who had experienced big companies, guy named Gideon, you. And we had just gotten Justin TV profitable and we were very proud of ourselves. And the first year we really tried to monetize him at $8 million in annual revenue, which I think now would qualify as like a deck of corn or something. And he came to talk to us and he basically said, folks, look, you should be happy. Congratulations, but your company sucks. Maybe don't change stuff. It's all going to die and all the work you put in so far, no one's going to remember what you did. And it was great as like there was no like and so you should do this. It was small. And that's my current status of your company in a nutshell. And it's exactly what we needed to hear. We just like the best investors point out the problem. They don't give you a solution. They just point out the problem and they didn't. We knew it. We knew that was the problem too. It's just when someone says it to you, you're like, oh crap.
你怎么样呢？我们得到的最好的建议来自于一个有大公司经验的人，名叫吉迪恩，就是你。当时我们刚刚让Justin TV盈利了，我们对自己感到非常自豪。我们试图在第一年实现八百万美元的年收入，我现在认为这可能相当于一堆玉米之类的东西。他来找我们谈话，基本上说，朋友们，看，你们应该高兴，祝贺你们，但你们的公司糟透了。也许不要改变什么，一切都会失败，迄今为止你们所做的工作，没有人会记住。这是非常好的，因为没有像这样说：所以你应该这样做。它很微小，而且这就是你们公司目前的状况。这正是我们需要听到的。就像最好的投资者指出问题一样，他们并不给你解决方案。他们只是指出问题，他们没有。我们也知道这是问题，只是当有人对你说时，你就会感觉糟糕。
But isn't that funny? Because again, so many incentives in life are set up to be nice or to tell people that they're great and they should stay great and everything they're doing is great and they're taken over the world. But weirdly again, if I think back to the founder advice like God and say with you, it's actually when people were kind of hard on us. That was actually what was out of control. Yeah.
这不是挺有趣的吗？生活中有很多奖励都是让人变得友善，或者告诉人们他们很棒，并且应该继续做好每件事情，征服整个世界。但是，如果我回想起从创始人那里得到的建议，就像是上帝跟我们说的一样，事实上，当别人对我们比较严厉时，我们反而更能做到好得不可控制。是的。
Well, you know what's crazy? One of the reasons why I think Gideon felt so comfortable giving that advice is that he had no interest in investing in us at all. Yeah. Literally had no interest. And you know, that's a counterintuitive thing, right? Like, wow, it's like really, you can get a lot more honesty out of somebody when they're not financially incentivized to kind of blow smoke up your ass to say nice things. So, alright.
你知道什么很疯狂吗？我觉得吉迪恩觉得很舒服给我们那个建议的其中一个原因是他根本没有兴趣投资我们。是的，完全没有兴趣。你知道，这是一件反直觉的事情，对吧？就像，哇，当别人没有财务激励时，你可以从他们那里得到更多的诚实意见，而不是仅仅说好话来讨好你。所以，好啊。