不把自己的人生，交给标准的流程。
howie serious约 13 分钟去年9月，硅谷创业教父 paul graham 发布了一篇博客文章，立刻引爆硅谷。因为文章提出了一个引人深思的概念——“创始人模式”（founder mode），作为公司运营中”经理人模式“（manager mode）的对立面。paul graham 的文章一贯极具启发性，而这次尤其如此。
但作为普通人，“创始人模式”跟你我有什么关系？
关系大了去了！
一旦你选择了终身学习，选择了建设学习型家庭这条路，很可能你就是家族几代人以来第一个这样做的人。换句话说，你实际上正在进行一场属于自己的人生创业。
真正理解“创始人模式”的理念，带来的价值不可估量。
无论商业创业还是人生创业，最大的敌人往往是那些热衷于瞎指挥、评头论足、指点江山的人。这些声音通常伪装成“传统智慧”（conventional wisdom）、“老人言”，甚至以社会通行规范的形式出现。
不可否认：在过去几百年不变的世界，这些“智慧”和观念是有价值的。
显而易见：在大变局时代，在人类历史上前所未有的 agi 面前，很多传统观念往往只是“思想的阑尾”，一旦发炎，非但没啥好处，破坏力反而相当不小。
商业创业者被这些僵化的“经理人模式”坑得很惨；而在人生和家庭的创业中，你同样也可能被那些所谓的“传统智慧”和社会规范所束缚，误导，甚至“xx皆祸害”。
无论是商业创业，还是自己的人生创业，建设学习型家庭：
不要把自己的人生和家庭，
交给外界定义的标准流程，
因为你才是真正的创始人。
祝阅读愉快！
作者：paul graham
At a YC event last week Brian Chesky gave a talk that everyone who was there will remember. Most founders I talked to afterward said it was the best they'd ever heard. Ron Conway, for the first time in his life, forgot to take notes. I'm not going to try to reproduce it here. Instead I want to talk about a question it raised.
在上周 YC 的一次活动中，Brian Chesky 做了一次让在场所有人都难以忘怀的演讲。我在会后与大多数创始人交流时，他们都说这是他们听过的最棒的演讲。就连 Ron Conway 也生平第一次听得忘了做笔记。我不打算在这里复述 Brian 的演讲内容，而是想聊聊它引发的一个问题。
The theme of Brian's talk was that the conventional wisdom about how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale. Their advice could be optimistically summarized as "hire good people and give them room to do their jobs." He followed this advice and the results were disastrous. So he had to figure out a better way on his own, which he did partly by studying how Steve Jobs ran Apple. So far it seems to be working. Airbnb's free cash flow margin is now among the best in Silicon Valley.
Brian 演讲的主题是：关于如何管理更大规模公司的传统观念是错误的。随着 Airbnb 不断壮大，一些好心人建议他说，为了让公司顺利扩张，他必须按某种特定方式来管理公司。这些建议往好里说，可以总结为：“雇用优秀的人，然后给他们足够的空间去做他们的工作。”他采纳了这些建议，但结果却很惨。于是他不得不自行摸索出更好的管理方法。他为此所做的其中一件事就是研究史蒂夫·乔布斯是如何管理苹果公司的。目前看来，这样做效果不错。Airbnb 的自由现金流利润率如今在硅谷名列前茅。
The audience at this event included a lot of the most successful founders we've funded, and one after another said that the same thing had happened to them. They'd been given the same advice about how to run their companies as they grew, but instead of helping their companies, it had damaged them.
出席这次活动的观众中，有不少是我们投资过的最成功的创始人。他们纷纷表示，同样的事情也发生在自己身上。在公司壮大过程中，他们也得到了同样的关于如何管理公司的建议，但这些建议非但没有帮到公司，反而对公司造成了损害。
Why was everyone telling these founders the wrong thing? That was the big mystery to me. And after mulling it over for a bit I figured out the answer: what they were being told was how to run a company you hadn't founded — how to run a company if you're merely a professional manager. But this m.o. is so much less effective that to founders it feels broken. There are things founders can do that managers can't, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is.
为什么每个人都在给这些创始人提供错误的建议？这对我来说是个巨大的谜团。在思索了一阵之后，我找到了答案：他们被告知的其实是如何去管理一家自己没有创办的公司——换言之，如果你只是一个职业经理人，该如何经营一家公司。然而，这种做法效率低下，在创始人看来根本行不通。有些事情创始人能够做到而职业经理人做不到。如果不去做那些事，创始人会觉得不对劲，因为确实不对。
In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who've tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it.
事实上，经营公司有两种截然不同的方式：创始人模式和经理人模式。直到现在，即使在硅谷，大多数人也默认为，把一家创业公司做大就意味着要切换到经理人模式。然而，从那些尝试了这种方式的创始人的沮丧，以及他们努力摆脱这种方式所取得的成功，我们可以推断出另一种模式的存在。
There are as far as I know no books specifically about founder mode. Business schools don't know it exists. All we have so far are the experiments of individual founders who've been figuring it out for themselves. But now that we know what we're looking for, we can search for it. I hope in a few years founder mode will be as well understood as manager mode. We can already guess at some of the ways it will differ.
据我所知，目前还没有专门讨论创始人模式的书籍。商学院甚至都不知道它的存在。迄今为止，我们所拥有的只是一些创始人自行摸索出的实践经验。但既然我们现在知道要寻找什么，就可以去寻找它。我希望再过几年，创始人模式能够像经理人模式一样被充分理解。我们已经可以猜测出它在某些方面会有什么不同。
The way managers are taught to run companies seems to be like modular design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org chart as black boxes. You tell your direct reports what to do, and it's up to them to figure out how. But you don't get involved in the details of what they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.
职业经理人通常被教导以一种模块化的方式来管理公司。也就是说，你将组织架构图上的各个子部门视作黑箱。你告诉你的直属下属要做什么，由他们自己去弄清楚如何去做。但你不会介入他们工作的细节。那样就变成对他们的微观管理了，而微观管理是不好的。
Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it's described that way, doesn't it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.
“雇用优秀的人，然后给他们足够的空间去做他们的工作。”这样说听起来很棒，不是吗？然而在实践中，从众多创始人的反馈来看，这句话往往就变成了：雇用职业骗子，让他们把公司搞垮。
One theme I noticed both in Brian's talk and when talking to founders afterward was the idea of being gaslit. Founders feel like they're being gaslit from both sides — by the people telling them they have to run their companies like managers, and by the people working for them when they do. Usually when everyone around you disagrees with you, your default assumption should be that you're mistaken. But this is one of the rare exceptions. VCs who haven't been founders themselves don't know how founders should run companies, and C-level execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world. [1]
在 Brian 的演讲里，以及我之后与创始人们的交谈中，都提到了一个现象：创始人们感觉自己正受到来自两方面的“精神操控”。一方面，那些声称公司必须按职业经理人方式来运营的人在对创始人进行这种操控；另一方面，当创始人真的那么做时，他们的下属员工也在误导他们。通常，当你周围的每个人都与你意见相左时，你理应认为是自己错了。但这次是少有的例外。那些自身没有当过创始人的风险投资人并不了解创始人应该如何管理公司，而 C 级高管这一群体中则云集着世界上最擅长撒谎的一些人。[1]
Whatever founder mode consists of, it's pretty clear that it's going to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the company only via his or her direct reports. "Skip-level" meetings will become the norm instead of a practice so unusual that there's a name for it. And once you abandon that constraint there are a huge number of permutations to choose from.
无论创始人模式具体指什么，很明显，它将打破这样一个原则：CEO 只能通过直属下属与公司互动。“跨级”会议将成为常态，而不再是一种罕见到需要特意起名的做法。一旦你抛开这种约束，就会出现无数种可供选择的组合方式。
For example, Steve Jobs used to run an annual retreat for what he considered the 100 most important people at Apple, and these were not the 100 people highest on the org chart. Can you imagine the force of will it would take to do this at the average company? And yet imagine how useful such a thing could be. It could make a big company feel like a startup. Steve presumably wouldn't have kept having these retreats if they didn't work. But I've never heard of another company doing this. So is it a good idea, or a bad one? We still don't know. That's how little we know about founder mode. [2]
举例来说，史蒂夫·乔布斯曾经每年为他认为苹果公司最重要的 100 个人举办一次闭门研讨会，而且这 100 个人并不都是公司组织架构中级别最高的。你能想象在一家普通公司里做到这一点需要多大的魄力吗？然而，同时想想看，这样做可能会带来多大的好处。它可以让一家大公司感觉像一家初创公司。如果这些研讨会没有效果，乔布斯想必就不会年年都办了。但我从未听说过有任何其他公司这样做。这到底是个好主意，还是坏主意？我们仍然不知道。这足以说明我们对创始人模式了解得有多么少。[2]
Obviously founders can't keep running a 2000 person company the way they ran it when it had 20. There's going to have to be some amount of delegation. Where the borders of autonomy end up, and how sharp they are, will probably vary from company to company. They'll even vary from time to time within the same company, as managers earn trust. So founder mode will be more complicated than manager mode. But it will also work better. We already know that from the examples of individual founders groping their way toward it.
显然，当公司发展到 2000 名员工时，创始人不可能还像公司只有 20 人时那样来管理它。一定程度的授权是不可避免的。自主权的边界最终如何划定、划分得多清晰，很可能因公司而异。甚至在同一家公司内部，随着管理者逐渐赢得信任，这些边界也会随时间而变化。因此，创始人模式将比经理人模式更加复杂，但其效果也会更好。这一点，我们从一些创始人摸索前行的案例中已经见证了。
Indeed, another prediction I'll make about founder mode is that once we figure out what it is, we'll find that a number of individual founders were already most of the way there — except that in doing what they did they were regarded by many as eccentric or worse. [3]
的确，关于创始人模式我还要做一个预测：一旦我们弄清楚创始人模式究竟是什么，我们会发现已经有不少创始人几乎走到了这一步——只不过他们当时那么做时，被许多人视为古怪，甚至更糟。[3]
Curiously enough it's an encouraging thought that we still know so little about founder mode. Look at what founders have achieved already, and yet they've achieved this against a headwind of bad advice. Imagine what they'll do once we can tell them how to run their companies like Steve Jobs instead of John Sculley.
说来也奇怪，我们对创始人模式了解得如此之少，这反而是一件令人鼓舞的事。看看创始人们已经取得的成就——而这些成就是在错误建议的逆风下取得的。试想，一旦我们能够告诉他们应当像史蒂夫·乔布斯而不是约翰·斯卡利那样管理公司，他们又将能够取得怎样的成就。
Notes 注释
[1] The more diplomatic way of phrasing this statement would be to say that experienced C-level execs are often very skilled at managing up. And I don't think anyone with knowledge of this world would dispute that.
[1] 更委婉的说法是，经验丰富的 C 级高管通常非常擅长向上管理。我想任何了解这一行的人都不会对此提出异议。
[2] If the practice of having such retreats became so widespread that even mature companies dominated by politics started to do it, we could quantify the senescence of companies by the average depth on the org chart of those invited.
[2] 如果举办这类研讨会的做法变得如此普遍，以至于即使是内部政治盛行的成熟公司也开始这么做，那么我们就可以通过受邀者在组织结构图上的平均层级深度来量化公司的衰老程度。
[3] I also have another less optimistic prediction: as soon as the concept of founder mode becomes established, people will start misusing it. Founders who are unable to delegate even things they should will use founder mode as the excuse. Or managers who aren't founders will decide they should try to act like founders. That may even work, to some extent, but the results will be messy when it doesn't; the modular approach does at least limit the damage a bad CEO can do.
[3] 我还有另一个不太乐观的预测：一旦“创始人模式”这一概念被确立，人们就会开始滥用它。那些即便在该授权时也无法放权的创始人，会把“创始人模式”当作借口。而那些并非创始人的经理人也会决定尝试像创始人一样行事。这么做在某种程度上或许有效，但当它不起作用时，结果就会很混乱；毕竟，模块化的管理方法至少能限制一位糟糕的 CEO 所能造成的损害。
Thanks to Brian Chesky, Patrick Collison, Ron Conway, Jessica Livingston, Elon Musk, Ryan Petersen, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this.
致谢： 感谢 Brian Chesky、Patrick Collison、Ron Conway、Jessica Livingston、Elon Musk、Ryan Petersen、Harj Taggar 和 Garry Tan 审阅本文草稿。