译> 创始人模式
本文由 AI 翻译，人工修正。
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 Y Combinator（YC）的活动中，Airbnb 的创始人 Brian Chesky 发表了一次演讲，让所有出席者都难以忘怀。与我交流的创始人们纷纷表示，这是他们所听过的最佳演讲。甚至 Ron Conway 在他一生中第一次忘了做笔记。我并不打算在这里复述他的演讲内容。相反，我想探讨它引出的一个问题。
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 Chesky 在演讲中提出，人们对于如何管理大型公司的普遍看法存在误区。Airbnb 在发展过程中，许多好心人建议他，为了实现公司的规模化，必须按照某种特定方式来经营。这些建议可以被简单地概括为「聘用优秀人才，并为他们提供足够的空间去大展拳脚」。然而，当他按照这些建议行事时，结果却是灾难性的。因此，他不得不自己去探索出一条更有效的管理途径，这部分是通过学习 Steve Jobs 如何管理苹果公司来实现的。到目前为止，这种方法到目前为止是成功的。Airbnb 的自由现金流目前在硅谷位列前茅。
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.
在这次活动中，许多极为成功的创始人也在场，他们纷纷表示自己也有类似的经历。随着各自公司规模的扩大，他们收到了相同的运营建议，但这些建议并没有促进公司的发展，反而带来了负面影响。
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.
为何许多人都向这些创始人提供了错误的建议？这对我来说一直是个不解之谜。经过一番思考，我找到了答案：他们所接受的建议是如何管理一个并非由你创立的公司。即：如果你仅仅是一个职业经理，该如何去运营公司。但这种运营模式的效果远远不及创始人亲自管理，以至于创始人感觉它行不通。有些只有创始人能做到的事情，职业经理人却做不到，而创始人如果不做去这些事情，他们会感到不对劲，事实确实如此。
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.
实际上，有两种截然不同的公司经营方式：创始人模式和管理人模式。到目前为止，甚至在硅谷，大多数人的共识都是，初创公司要扩大规模，就需要转向管理人模式。然而，从那些尝试过这种模式并感到失望的创始人身上，以及他们努力摆脱这种模式并取得成功的案例中，我们可以推断出还存在另一种模式。
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，目前市面上还没有专门探讨创始人模式的书籍。传统的商学院教育也没有涵盖这一概念。到目前为止，我们所依赖的都是个别创始人的个人实践和自我探索。但现在，既然我们已经明确了探索的方向，我们就可以更有目的地去寻找和学习。我希望在未来几年内，创始人模式能够像管理人模式一样，被人们所熟知和理解。我们甚至可以预测，创始人模式在某些方面将与现有的管理人模式有何不同。
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.
管理人在运营公司时所采用的方法，类似于模块化设计的概念，即将组织结构中的各个分支视为独立的黑匣子。向直接下属指派任务，并由他们想办法完成。管理人不会介入他们具体的工作细节，因为那样会被视为过度管理，这通常被认为是一种不良的管理方式。
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.
招聘优秀人才并给予他们足够的自由去大展拳脚，听起来这是一个不错的主意，对吧？然而，根据许多创始人的反馈，实际情况往往并非如此。这种做法的潜台词是：招募那些只会表面工作的人，并任由他们将公司带向失败。
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 的演讲和与创始人的后续对话中，我注意到了一个共同的信息，那就是创始人感到自己被两边的人操纵 —— 一边是那些告诉他们必须以管理人模式运营公司的人，另一边是当他们尝试这样做时，为他们工作的员工。通常，当你周围的人都与你持相反意见时，你通常会默认认为自己可能错了。但在这种情况下，情况并非如此。没有创业经验的风险投资家实际上并不清楚创始人应该如何管理公司，而且作为一群顶着 CxO 头衔的高管，他们已经在另一个阶层了，并且他们中有些人是世界上最擅长说谎的人。[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.
创始人模式无论包含哪些要素，它显然将违背传统的 CEO 仅通过直接下属与公司互动的原则。相反，「跨级」会议将变得司空见惯，而不是一种罕见到需要特别强调的事情。一旦放弃了这些约束，你将有众多可以选择的管理方式。
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]
比如，Steve Jobs 曾为他认为对苹果公司最重要的 100 人举办年度静思会，而这 100 人并不是在公司组织结构中级别最高的。你能想象在一般公司中做这样的事情需要多大的决心和意志吗？但想象一下，这样的活动可能带来多大的好处。它能让一家大公司保持初创公司的氛围。如果这些静思会效果不佳，Steve Jobs 就不可能会持续举办它们。然而，我从未听说过其他公司采取类似的做法。这是一个好主意还是坏主意？我们目前还无法确定。这也正是我们对创始人模式所知甚少的一个例证。[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，随着公司规模的扩大，创始人不可能像管理一个 20 人的小团队那样去管理一个 2000 人的公司。一定程度的权力下放是必要的。但下放的边界，以及这些边界的明确程度，可能会因公司而异。甚至在同一公司内部，这些边界也会因管理人获得信任而变化。所以，创始人模式将比管理人模式更为复杂。但它也许会更为有效。我们已经从一些创始人的个人探索中看到了这一点。
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]
事实上，我对创始人模式的另一个预测是，一旦我们理解了它是什么，我们可能就会发现许多创始人其实已经在很大程度上实现了这一模式 —— 尽管他们在这个过程中被许多人视为离经叛道。[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.
我们对创始人模式的了解仍然如此有限，这确实令人好奇且鼓舞人心。看看那些创始人们至今已经取得的成就，他们可是在众多不佳建议的逆流中实现这些的啊！想象一下，如果未来我们能够指导他们如何像 Steve Jobs 而不是像 John Sculley 那样去管理公司，他们会怎么做。
Notes
[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] 用更委婉的方式来表达这个观点，可以说，资深的 CxO 高管往往在向上管理方面拥有高超的技巧。对于这一点，任何熟悉职场的人应该都不会否认。
[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] 如果举办此类静思会的做法变得非常普及，以至于那些充满政治色彩的成熟公司也开始采纳，我们或许可以通过参与这些活动的员工在组织结构中的平均层级来衡量公司的僵化程度。
[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] 我还有一个不那么乐观的预测：一旦创始人模式的概念被广泛接受，人们可能会开始滥用这一概念。一些本应做好指派任务却未能做到的创始人可能会以创始人模式为由来为自己辩护。或者，并非创始人的管理人可能会开始模仿创始人的行为。这种做法在某种程度上可能有效，但如果不奏效，结果可能会很混乱；至少模块化的方法能够减轻一个不称职的 CEO 可能造成的损害。