Hard Starup

The most counterintuitive secret about startups is that it’s often easier to succeed with a hard startup than an easy one. A hard startup requires a lot more money, time, coordination, or technological development than most startups. A good hard startup is one that will be valuable if it works (not all hard problems are worth solving!). 创业公司最违反直觉的秘密是，困难的创业公司往往比简单的创业公司更容易成功。 一个艰难的创业公司比大多数创业公司需要更多的资金、时间、协调或技术开发。 一个好的艰难创业是一个如果成功就有价值的创业（不是所有的困难问题都值得解决！）

I remember when Instagram started to get really popular—it felt like you couldn’t go a day without hearing about another photo sharing startup. That year, probably over 1,000 photo sharing startups were funded, while there were fewer than ten nuclear fusion startups in existence. 我记得当Instagram开始变得非常流行的时候，感觉就像你不能一天不听到另一个照片共享创业公司。 那一年，大概有超过1,000家照片共享初创公司获得了资助，而存在的核聚变初创公司不到10家。

Easy startups are easy to start but hard to make successful. The most precious commodity in the startup ecosystem right now is talented people, and for the most part talented people want to work on something they find meaningful. 简单的创业很容易开始，但很难取得成功。 现在创业生态系统中最宝贵的商品是有才华的人，而在大多数情况下，有才华的人希望从事他们认为有意义的工作。

A startup eventually has to get a lot of people to join its quest. It’s usually reasonably easy to get the first five or ten people to join—you can offer large equity grants and areas of responsibility. But eventually, what you have to recruit with are the mission of the company, the likelihood of massive success, and the quality of the people there. [1] 一家初创公司最终必须让很多人加入它的探索。 让前5到10个人加入通常相当容易你可以提供大量的赠款和责任范围。 但最终，你必须招聘的是公司的使命，取得巨大成功的可能性，以及那里的人的素质。【1】

Few recruiting messages are as powerful (when true) as “the world needs this, it won’t happen any time soon if we don’t do it, and we are much less likely to succeed if you don’t join.” 很少有招聘信息像“世界需要这个，如果我们不这样做，它不会很快发生，如果你不加入，我们成功的可能性就小得多”这样强大（如果是真的话）。

There is a derivative of the Peter Principle at play here—your startup will rise to the level where it can no longer attract enough talented people. (This sometimes holds true for careers too—the limiting factor for many careers eventually becomes how many talented people you know and can get to work with you.) 这里有一个彼得原理的衍生物在起作用-你的创业公司将上升到一个无法吸引足够有才华的人的水平。 (This有时候对职业生涯也是如此–许多职业生涯的限制因素最终会变成你认识多少有才华的人，并能和你一起工作。）

An easy startup is a headwind; a hard startup is a tailwind. If people care about your success because you seem committed to doing something significant, it’s a background force helping you with hiring, advice, partnerships, fundraising, etc. 容易的启动是逆风;艰难的启动是顺风。 如果人们关心你的成功是因为你似乎致力于做一些有意义的事情，这是一种背景力量，可以帮助你招聘，建议，合作伙伴关系，筹款等。

Part of the magic of Silicon Valley is that people default to taking you seriously if you’re willing to be serious—they’ve learned it’s a very expensive mistake, in aggregate, not to. If you want to start a company working on a better way to build homes, gene editing, artificial general intelligence, a new education system, or carbon sequestration, you may actually be able to get it funded, even if you don’t have a degree or much experience. 硅谷的部分魔力在于，如果你愿意认真，人们就会默认认真对待你–他们已经认识到，总的来说，不认真对待你是一个代价高昂的错误。 如果你想创办一家公司，研究更好的建房方式、基因编辑、人工智能、新的教育体系或碳封存，你实际上可能能够获得资金，即使你没有学位或太多经验。

Let yourself become more ambitious—figure out the most interesting version of where what you’re working on could go. Then talk about that big vision and work relentlessly towards it, but always have a reasonable next step. You don’t want step one to be incorporating the company and step two to be going to Mars. 让你自己变得更有野心找出你正在做的事情最有趣的版本。 然后谈论那个大的愿景，并坚持不懈地朝着它努力，但总是有一个合理的下一步。 你不希望第一步是合并公司，第二步是去火星。

Be willing to make a very long-term commitment to what you’re doing. Most people aren’t, which is part of the reason they pick “easy” startups. In a world of compounding advantages where most people are operating on a 3 year timeframe and you’re operating on a 10 year timeframe, you’ll have a very large edge. 愿意为你正在做的事情做出长期的承诺。 大多数人都不是，这也是他们选择“容易”创业的部分原因。 在一个复合优势的世界里，大多数人都在3年的时间框架内运作，而你在10年的时间框架内运作，你将拥有非常大的优势。

Thanks to Luke Miles for reviewing drafts of this. 感谢卢克·迈尔斯审阅了这篇文章的草稿。

[1] Another solution to this problem is to think about startups that can become quite successful with less than ten people. As compensation packages from the giant tech companies continue to increase, I suspect this will become a trend. [1]这个问题的另一个解决方案是考虑那些只有不到十个人就能取得巨大成功的初创公司。 随着大型科技公司的薪酬不断增加，我怀疑这将成为一种趋势。