The Pooled-Risk Company Management Company
In this classic essay, Paul Graham responds to David Heinemeier Hansson's advice that startup founders should build profitable companies and live off revenues rather than hope for an acquisition. Graham argues that the ultimate goals of founders are freedom and security — ideally, you could hand your company to a professional management firm and still receive income. He then reveals that such a firm already exists: a public company acquiring your startup. By trading your company for shares in a larger entity, you gain professional management and pooled risk. The catch is that the acquisition market is fickle (like Mr. Market), so you must be profitable and patient to get the average outcome. The essay concludes that building a revenue-generating company and selling it are not opposites; the latter is often the optimal case of the former.
July 2008At this year's startup school, David Heinemeier Hansson gave a talk in which he suggested that startup founders should do things the old fashioned way. Instead of hoping to get rich by building a valuable company and then selling stock in a "liquidity event," founders should start companies that make money and live off the revenues.
Sounds like a good plan. Let's think about the optimal way to do this.
2008年7月，在今年的创业学校上，David Heinemeier Hansson 发表演讲，建议创业者应该采用传统方式：不要指望通过建立有价值的公司然后通过“流动性事件”出售股票来致富，而应该创办能赚钱并靠收入过活的公司。
听起来是个好计划。我们来思考一下实现这一目标的最佳方式。
One disadvantage of living off the revenues of your company is that you have to keep running it. And as anyone who runs their own business can tell you, that requires your complete attention. You can't just start a business and check out once things are going well, or they stop going well surprisingly fast.
The main economic motives of startup founders seem to be freedom and security. They want enough money that (a) they don't have to worry about running out of money and (b) they can spend their time how they want. Running your own business offers neither. You certainly don't have freedom: no boss is so demanding. Nor do you have security, because if you stop paying attention to the company, its revenues go away, and with them your income.
依靠公司收入生活的一个缺点是，你必须持续经营它。任何经营自己生意的人都会告诉你，这需要全神贯注。你不能创办一家公司，然后一旦事情顺利就撒手不管，否则它会以惊人速度走向衰败。
创业者的主要经济动机似乎是自由和安全。他们希望拥有足够的钱，这样（a）就不用担心钱花光，（b）可以随心所欲地支配时间。经营自己的公司两者都无法提供。你当然没有自由：没有哪个老板像这样苛刻。你也没有安全感，因为一旦你不再关注公司，收入就会消失，你的经济来源也随之断绝。
The best case, for most people, would be if you could hire someone to manage the company for you once you'd grown it to a certain size. Suppose you could find a really good manager. Then you would have both freedom and security. You could pay as little attention to the business as you wanted, knowing that your manager would keep things running smoothly. And that being so, revenues would continue to flow in, so you'd have security as well.
对大多数人而言，最理想的情况是：当你把公司发展到一定规模后，雇用一个专业人士为你管理公司。假设你能找到一个非常出色的经理，那么你就能同时拥有自由和安全。你可以随心所欲地少关注业务，因为知道经理会把一切打理得井井有条。这样一来，收入会持续流入，你也就有了安全感。
There will of course be some founders who wouldn't like that idea: the ones who like running their company so much that there's nothing else they'd rather do. But this group must be small. The way you succeed in most businesses is to be fanatically attentive to customers' needs. What are the odds that your own desires would coincide exactly with the demands of this powerful, external force?
Sure, running your own company can be fairly interesting. Viaweb was more interesting than any job I'd had before. And since I made much more money from it, it offered the highest ratio of income to boringness of anything I'd done, by orders of magnitude. But was it the most interesting work I could imagine doing? No.
Whether the number of founders in the same position is asymptotic or merely large, there are certainly a lot of them. For them the right approach would be to hand the company over to a professional manager eventually, if they could find one who was good enough.
当然，有些创业者不会喜欢这个主意：他们太喜欢经营自己的公司了，以至于想不出更愿意做别的事。但这群人一定很少。大多数企业成功的方式是狂热地关注客户需求。你自己的愿望恰好与这个强大的外部力量完全吻合的概率有多大呢？
诚然，经营自己的公司可能相当有趣。Viaweb 比我以前做过的任何工作都有趣。而且因为我从中赚了更多钱，它的收入与无聊程度之比是我所做过的所有事情中最高的，高出几个数量级。但这是我能想象到的最有趣的工作吗？不。
无论处于这种境况的创业者数量是趋近于无限还是仅仅很多，但肯定不少。对他们来说，正确的做法是，如果能找到一个足够好的专业经理，就最终把公司交给他。
_____So far so good. But what if your manager was hit by a bus? What you really want is a management company to run your company for you. Then you don't depend on any one person.
If you own rental property, there are companies you can hire to manage it for you. Some will do everything, from finding tenants to fixing leaks. Of course, running companies is a lot more complicated than managing rental property, but let's suppose there were management companies that could do it for you. They'd charge a lot, but wouldn't it be worth it? I'd sacrifice a large percentage of the income for the extra peace of mind.
_____到目前为止还不错。但如果你的经理被公交车撞了怎么办？你真正需要的是一个管理公司来替你运营公司。这样你就不依赖于任何一个人。
如果你拥有出租房产，可以雇公司为你管理。有些公司会包办一切，从找租户到修漏水。当然，运营公司比管理出租房产复杂得多，但假设存在这样的管理公司可以为你代劳。它们会收费很高，但难道不值得吗？我愿意为了多一份安心而牺牲很大一部分收入。
I realize what I'm describing already sounds too good to be true, but I can think of a way to make it even more attractive. If company management companies existed, there would be an additional service they could offer clients: they could let them insure their returns by pooling their risk. After all, even a perfect manager can't save a company when, as sometimes happens, its whole market dies, just as property managers can't save you from the building burning down. But a company that managed a large enough number of companies could say to all its clients: we'll combine the revenues from all your companies, and pay you your proportionate share.
If such management companies existed, they'd offer the maximum of freedom and security. Someone would run your company for you, and you'd be protected even if it happened to die.
我意识到我所描述的听起来已经好得不像真的，但我还想到了让它更具吸引力的方法。如果存在公司管理公司，它们可以提供一项额外服务：通过将风险池化来为客户保障收益。毕竟，即使是最完美的经理也无法在公司的整个市场消亡时拯救它——这种情况有时会发生，就像物业经理无法阻止大楼被烧毁一样。但是，一家管理足够多公司的管理公司可以对所有客户说：我们将所有公司的收入合并，然后按比例支付给你们。
如果存在这样的管理公司，它们将提供最大限度的自由和安全。有人会替你运营公司，即使公司不幸倒闭，你也能得到保护。
Let's think about how such a management company might be organized. The simplest way would be to have a new kind of stock representing the total pool of companies they were managing. When you signed up, you'd trade your company's stock for shares of this pool, in proportion to an estimate of your company's value that you'd both agreed upon. Then you'd automatically get your share of the returns of the whole pool.
The catch is that because this kind of trade would be hard to undo, you couldn't switch management companies. But there's a way they could fix that: suppose all the company management companies got together and agreed to allow their clients to exchange shares in all their pools. Then you could, in effect, simultaneously choose all the management companies to run yours for you, in whatever proportion you wanted, and change your mind later as often as you wanted.
If such pooled-risk company management companies existed, signing up with one would seem the ideal plan for most people following the route David advocated.
让我们想想这样的管理公司可能如何组织。最简单的方式是设立一种新型股票，代表它们所管理的所有公司的总池。当你签约时，你将用自己的公司股票换取这个池子的份额，比例取决于双方商定的公司估值。然后你会自动获得整个池子的收益份额。
问题在于，因为这种交易很难逆转，你无法更换管理公司。但有一种方法可以解决：假设所有公司管理公司联合起来，同意允许客户交换它们各个池子的份额。这样一来，你实际上可以同时选择所有管理公司为你运营公司，按你想要的任何比例分配，并且以后可以随时改变主意。
如果存在这样的风险共担式管理公司，签约其中一家似乎是大多数遵循David所倡导道路的人的理想计划。
Good news: they do exist. What I've just described is an acquisition by a public company.
Unfortunately, though public acquirers are structurally identical to pooled-risk company management companies, they don't think of themselves that way. With a property management company, you can just walk in whenever you want and say "manage my rental property for me" and they'll do it. Whereas acquirers are, as of this writing, extremely fickle. Sometimes they're in a buying mood and they'll overpay enormously; other times they're not interested. They're like property management companies run by madmen. Or more precisely, by Benjamin Graham's Mr. Market.
好消息：它们确实存在。我刚才描述的实际上就是被上市公司收购。
不幸的是，尽管上市公司收购方在结构上与风险共担式管理公司相同，但它们并不这么看待自己。对于物业管理公司，你可以随时走进去说“帮我管理出租房产”，它们就会照做。而收购方，在写这篇文章时，极其反复无常。有时它们兴致勃勃，会以极高溢价收购；有时则毫无兴趣。它们就像疯子运营的物业管理公司——或者更准确地说，像本杰明·格雷厄姆笔下的市场先生。
So while on average public acquirers behave like pooled-risk company managers, you need a window of several years to get average case performance. If you wait long enough (five years, say) you're likely to hit an up cycle where some acquirer is hot to buy you. But you can't choose when it happens.
You can't assume investors will carry you for as long as you might have to wait. Your company has to make money. Opinions are divided about how early to focus on that. Joe Kraus says you should try charging customers right away. And yet some of the most successful startups, including Google, ignored revenue at first and concentrated exclusively on development. The answer probably depends on the type of company you're starting. I can imagine some where trying to make sales would be a good heuristic for product design, and others where it would just be a distraction. The test is probably whether it helps you to understand your users.
You can choose whichever revenue strategy you think is best for the type of company you're starting, so long as you're profitable. Being profitable ensures you'll get at least the average of the acquisition market—in which public companies do behave as pooled-risk company management companies.
因此，尽管平均而言，上市公司收购方的行为类似于风险共担式管理公司，但你需要几年的时间窗口才能获得平均表现。如果你等待足够久（比如五年），你很可能会遇到一个上升周期，某个收购方热切地想买你。但你无法选择它何时发生。
你不能指望投资者会一直支撑你等到那么久。你的公司必须赚钱。关于何时开始关注盈利，意见不一。Joe Kraus 认为你应该立即尝试向客户收费。然而，一些最成功的初创公司，包括 Google，最初都忽略了收入，只专注于开发。答案可能取决于你创立的公司类型。我可以想象，在某些公司中，尝试销售可能是产品设计的好启发；而在另一些公司中，这可能只是分散注意力。检验标准大概是它是否帮助你理解用户。
你可以选择你认为最适合你公司类型的收入策略，只要你能盈利。盈利确保你至少能获得收购市场的平均回报——在这个市场中，上市公司的确表现得像风险共担式管理公司。
David isn't mistaken in saying you should start a company to live off its revenues. The mistake is thinking this is somehow opposed to starting a company and selling it. In fact, for most people the latter is merely the optimal case of the former.
David 说应该创办公司以靠其收入为生，这并没有错。错误的是认为这与创办公司然后出售是相互对立的。事实上，对大多数人来说，后者仅仅是前者的最优情形。