There may be no one at this point who has more experience than me at doing this.
在这一点上,没人比我更有发言权
And I can tell you how much an expert can know about that.
我可以明确地告诉你,专家能预测对多少
The answer is, not much.
答案是:不多
I learned from experience to keep a completely open mind about which startup in each batch,
从实践中,我学会了以完全开放的心态看待孵化的一批公司中
which startups would turn out to be the stars.
哪些公司能大获成功
The founders sometimes thought they knew.
创始人有时觉得他们知道自己能大获成功
Some arrived feeling confident that they would ace Y Combinator,
有些创始人信心满满
just as they had aced every one of the few, easy, artificial tests they had faced in life so far.
觉得他们能在YC公司竞赛中取胜,就像他们在考试中总能拿高分
Others arrived wondering
有些创始人希望
what mistake could cause them to be admitted and hoping that no one would discover it.
犯点小错也能蒙混过关,没有人发现
But there's little to no correlation between these attitudes in how things turn out.
不过,创始人的这些态度和成功与否没有太大关系
I've read the same is true in the military that
在这点上,和军队有点像
the swaggering recruits are no more likely to turn out to be really tough than the quiet ones.
高调的军人不一定比低调的军人更强大
And probably for the same reason that the tests are so different from the tests in people's previous lives
相同的原因可能是此时的“测试”与生活中其他“测试”太不一样了
If you're absolutely terrified of starting a startup, you probably shouldn't do it,
如果你对创业心存恐惧,最好不要创业
unless you're one of those people who gets off on doing things you're afraid of.
除非,你是那种一定要战胜自己的恐惧的人
Otherwise, if you're merely unsure of whether you're gonna be able to do it,
反之,如果你不确定自己是否适合创业
the only way to find out is to try, just not now.
只有试一下才知道的话,那就先别创业
So, if you wanna startup one day, if you wanna start a startup one day, what do you do now in college?
如果你想今后创业,如果你想今后某天创业,你现在大学该做什么呢?
There are only two things you need initially,an idea, and co-founders.
有两件事:寻找创意,寻找合伙人
And the MO for getting them both is the same, which leads to our sixth, sixth and last counter-intuitive point.
二者可以同时进行,这就引出了反直觉的第六点,也就是最后一点
The way to get startup ideas, is not to try to think of startup ideas.
获得创业创意的方法就是不要刻意去想创业创意
I've written a whole essay on this and I'm not gonna repeat the whole thing here.
关于这点,我写过一篇文章,我在此就不赘述了
But the short version is that
长话短说的话
if you make a conscious effort to try and think of startup ideas,
如果你费了老大劲,想出了一个创意
you will think of ideas that are not only bad, but bad and plausible sounding.
这个创意既不怎么好,却又似乎可行
Meaning you and everybody else will be fooled by them,
如果用这个创意来创业的话,你们都会被坑的
and you'll waste a lot of time before realizing they're no good.
浪费了大把的时间,最终发现效果不好
The way to come up with good startup ideas is to take a step back.
提出好创意的方法是:退一步海阔天空
Instead of trying to make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas,
不要绞尽脑汁地想创意
turn your brain into the type that has startup ideas unconsciously.
让创意无意间映入眼帘
In fact, so unconsciously that you don't even realize at first that they're startup ideas.
如此不经意,以至于当创意出现时,你甚至不能马上意识到
This is not only possible, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and Apple all got started this way.
这绝不是扯淡,Yahoo,Google,Facebook以及Apple,他们的创意都是这么来的
None of these companies were even supposed to be companies at first, they were all just side projects.
这些公司最初都没想到能成为公司,只是小项目而已
The very best ideas almost have to start as side projects,
最好的创意都是由小项目发展而来的
because they're always such outliers that your conscious mind would reject as ideas for companies. Okay?
因为它们难入主流,大家很自然地想,这绝不会是个创业好点子