创业者为何可以友善：增长率的复利效应
Paul Graham 在本文中解释了创业公司创始人为什么可以保持友善，而不必像刻板印象中那样贪婪。核心论点是：只要产品足够好，能通过口碑实现超线性增长，那么单位用户收益的损失只是一个常数倍数，对增长曲线的形状几乎没有影响。他通过数学例子说明：如果公司每月增长5%，两年后月收入可达16万美元；即使只提取一半收益，也仅落后15周。但如果将增长率从5%提升到6%，即使收益减半，两年后反而超过贪婪的对手（月收入21.4万 vs 16万）。因此，创始人的最优策略是专注于提升增长率，而不是压榨用户。文章适合创业者、产品经理以及对增长策略感兴趣的读者。
I recently got an email from a founder that helped me understand something important: why it's safe for startup founders to be nice people.
我最近收到一位创始人的邮件，它让我明白了一个重要道理：为什么创业公司的创始人可以安心做个好人。
I grew up with a cartoon idea of a very successful businessman (in the cartoon it was always a man): a rapacious, cigar-smoking, table-thumping guy in his fifties who wins by exercising power, and isn't too fussy about how. As I've written before, one of the things that has surprised me most about startups is how few of the most successful founders are like that. Maybe successful people in other industries are; I don't know; but not startup founders.
我从小对成功商人（卡通里总是男性）有一个刻板印象：一个贪婪、抽雪茄、拍桌子的五十多岁男人，靠权力取胜，并且不太在乎手段。正如我先前写过的，最让我惊讶的是，最成功的创始人中很少有这样的人。或许其他行业的成功人士是这样，我不知道，但初创公司的创始人不是。
I knew this empirically, but I never saw the math of why till I got this founder's email. In it he said he worried that he was fundamentally soft-hearted and tended to give away too much for free. He thought perhaps he needed "a little dose of sociopath-ness." I told him not to worry about it, because so long as he built something good enough to spread by word of mouth, he'd have a superlinear growth curve. If he was bad at extracting money from people, at worst this curve would be some constant multiple less than 1 of what it might have been. But a constant multiple of any curve is exactly the same shape. The numbers on the Y axis are smaller, but the curve is just as steep, and when anything grows at the rate of a successful startup, the Y axis will take care of itself.
我凭经验知道这一点，但直到看了这位创始人的邮件，我才明白其中的数学原理。他在邮件中说，担心自己本质上心太软，总是不自觉地免费给太多。他认为自己可能需要“一点点反社会人格”。我告诉他不必担心，因为只要他做的东西足够好、能靠口碑传播，他就会得到一条超线性增长曲线。如果他不善于从用户身上赚钱，最坏情况下，这条曲线只是乘以一个小于1的常数。但任何曲线的常数倍形状完全一样。Y轴上的数字变小了，但斜率不变；只要达到成功创业公司的增长速度，Y轴自然会跟上。
Some examples will make this clear. Suppose your company is making $1000 a month now, and you've made something so great that it's growing at 5% a week. Two years from now, you'll be making about $160k a month. Now suppose you're so un-rapacious that you only extract half as much from your users as you could. That means two years later you'll be making $80k a month instead of $160k. How far behind are you? How long will it take to catch up with where you'd have been if you were extracting every penny? A mere 15 weeks. After two years, the un-rapacious founder is only 3.5 months behind the rapacious one.
举个例子就更清楚了。假设你的公司现在每月收入1000美元，你做出了一个非常好的产品，每周增长5%。两年后，你每月将赚到约16万美元。现在假设你非常不贪婪，只从用户身上收取了原本可能的一半。这意味着两年后你每月只能赚8万美元，而不是16万。你落后了多少？需要多久才能赶上如果你榨干每一分钱时的水平？仅仅15周。两年后，不贪婪的创始人只比贪婪的晚3.5个月。
If you're going to optimize a number, the one to choose is your growth rate. Suppose as before that you only extract half as much from users as you could, but that you're able to grow 6% a week instead of 5%. Now how are you doing compared to the rapacious founder after two years? You're already ahead—$214k a month versus $160k—and pulling away fast. In another year you'll be making $4.4 million a month to the rapacious founder's $2 million.
如果你要优化一个数字，请选择你的增长率。假设像之前一样，你只从用户身上收取一半的费用，但你能够实现每周6%的增长而非5%。两年后，与贪婪的创始人相比你表现如何？你已经领先了——每月21.4万美元对16万美元——并且差距在快速拉大。再过一年，你将每月赚到440万美元，而贪婪的创始人只有200万美元。
Obviously one case where it would help to be rapacious is when growth depends on that. What makes startups different is that usually it doesn't. Startups usually win by making something so great that people recommend it to their friends. And being rapacious not only doesn't help you do that, but probably hurts.
显然，在增长依赖于贪婪的情况下，贪婪会有帮助。但初创公司的独特之处在于，通常并非如此。初创公司通常通过做出非常出色的产品、让用户推荐给朋友来获胜。而贪婪不仅无助于此，甚至可能有害。
The reason startup founders can safely be nice is that making great things is compounded, and rapacity isn't.
创业公司创始人可以安全地善良的原因是，创造卓越的事物是复利，而贪婪不是。
So if you're a founder, here's a deal you can make with yourself that will both make you happy and make your company successful. Tell yourself you can be as nice as you want, so long as you work hard on your growth rate to compensate. Most successful startups make that tradeoff unconsciously. Maybe if you do it consciously you'll do it even better.
所以，如果你是一位创始人，你可以和自己做一个交易，既能让你开心，也能让公司成功。告诉自己，你可以随心所欲地善良，只要你在增长率上努力补偿就好。大多数成功的初创公司都是无意识地做出这种权衡。也许你有意识地去做，会做得更好。
Notes
[1] Many think successful startup founders are driven by money. In fact the secret weapon of the most successful founders is that they aren't. If they were, they'd have taken one of the acquisition offers that every fast-growing startup gets on the way up. What drives the most successful founders is the same thing that drives most people who make things: the company is their project.
[2] In fact since 2 ≈ 1.05 ^ 15, the un-rapacious founder is always 15 weeks behind the rapacious one.
[3] The other reason it might help to be good at squeezing money out of customers is that startups usually lose money at first, and making more per customer makes it easier to get to profitability before your initial funding runs out. But while it is very common for startups to die from running through their initial funding and then being unable to raise more, the underlying cause is usually slow growth or excessive spending rather than insufficient effort to extract money from existing customers.
Thanks to Sam Altman, Harj Taggar, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this, and to Randall Bennett for being such a nice guy.
注释
[1] 许多人认为成功的创业公司创始人由金钱驱动。事实上，最成功创始人的秘密武器是他们不是。如果是的话，他们早就接受了每个快速增长的初创公司在此过程中收到的收购要约。驱动最成功创始人的与驱动大多数创造者的是同一件事：公司就是他们的项目。
[2] 实际上，因为2 ≈ 1.05^15，不贪婪的创始人总是比贪婪的落后15周。
[3] 善于从客户身上榨取金钱可能有所帮助的另一个原因是，初创公司通常在初期亏损，每个客户赚得更多有助于在初始资金耗尽前实现盈利。但虽然许多初创公司因为花光初始资金且无法再融资而倒闭，但其根本原因通常是增长缓慢或支出过高，而不是未能从现有客户身上榨取足够收入。
感谢Sam Altman、Harj Taggar、Jessica Livingston和Geoff Ralston对本文草稿的审阅，也感谢Randall Bennett这样的好人。