On Recruiting
频道: Naval
视频: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8x978NnZSI
原文语言: en
统计: 共 34 轮 · Nivi 10 · Naval 24
[0:00] Nivi
This is Nivei and you're listening to the Naval podcast. Today we're going to be talking about recruiting, hiring, team, and culture. There's a famous quote from Venode Kla, the team you build is the company you build. Or in other words, they told you it was a technology game when it's really a recruiting game. So I pulled up a tweet from Naval from August 2025. Founders can delegate everything except recruiting, fundraising, strategy, and product vision. Recruiting is the most important thing because you need creativity. You need motivated people. Ideally, the early people are all geniuses. They're self-managing, low ego, hardworking, highly competent builders, technical, maybe one or two sellers, but you can't watch everything. You can't micromanage everything. The early people are the DNA of the company. When you outsource recruiting, when you have other people hiring and interviewing and making hiring decisions without your direct involvement in veto, that's a sad day. That's the day that the company's no longer being driven directly by you. There's now a fly by wire element in between. There's some mechanical linkage going through another human, often at a distance, and other people are not going to have the same level of selectivity that you will as founder. The important size at which a company starts changing is not some arbitrary number like 20 or 30 or 40. It's the point at which the founder is not directly recruiting and managing everyone. The moment that there are middle layers of management then you are somewhat disconnected from the company and your ability to directly drive a product team that can take the company from 0 to one goes away. So you really cannot outsource recruiting.
我是 Nivi，你正在收听 Naval 播客。今天我们要聊招聘、雇人、团队和文化。Vinod Khosla 有一句名言：你打造的团队，就是你打造的公司。换句话说，他们告诉你这是一场技术的游戏，但其实它是一场招聘的游戏。我翻出了 Naval 在 2025 年 8 月发的一条推文：创始人可以把一切都交出去，唯独招聘、融资、战略和产品愿景不行。招聘之所以最重要，是因为你需要创造力，需要有干劲的人。理想情况下，早期成员个个都是天才。他们能自我管理，低自我，勤奋，能力极强，是会动手的建造者，技术型的，也许有一两个是销售型的，但你没法盯住一切，你没法事事亲自微管理。早期的人就是公司的 DNA。当你把招聘外包出去，当你让别人去雇人、去面试、去做录用决定，而你不直接参与、不行使否决权时，那是一个悲伤的日子。那一天，公司就不再由你直接驱动了。中间多了一个'电传操纵'的环节，多了一段要经过另一个人的机械传动，往往还隔着距离，而别人不会有你作为创始人那样的挑剔程度。一家公司开始发生质变的关键规模，不是 20、30、40 这样某个随意的数字，而是创始人不再直接招聘和管理每一个人的那个点。一旦出现了中间管理层，你就和公司有了某种程度的脱节，你直接驱动一个能把公司从 0 做到 1 的产品团队的能力就消失了。所以你真的不能外包招聘。
[1:52] Naval
People think you can. They hire recruiters, for example. Maybe you can outsource a little bit of sourcing, but I would even argue that's difficult. The reason recruiting is so so so important, and a lot of it is obvious. I'll skip the obvious reasons. But one non-obvious reason is that the best people truly only want to work with the best people. Working with anyone who's not at their level is a cognitive load upon them. And the more people they're surrounded by who are not as good as they are, the more keenly they're aware that they belong somewhere else or they should be doing their own thing. The best teams are mutually motivated. They reinforce each other. Everyone's trying to impress each other. One good test is when you're recruiting a new person, you should be able to say to them, "Walk into that room where the rest of the team is sitting, take anyone you want, pick them at random, pull them aside for 30 minutes, and interview them. And if you aren't impressed by them, don't join. When you do that test, you will instinctively flinch at the idea of them interviewing randomly a certain person that's kind of in the back of your mind. That's the person you need to let go because that's the person keeping you from having this high functioning team that all wants to impress each other. That's the bar you have to keep. Especially for all the people you're going to directly manage, the first 20, the first 30, the first 40, the first 10, whatever that number is. In those early people that you directly manage, what are you looking for? There's the old Warren Buffett line of intelligence, energy, integrity. I would add low ego.
人们以为可以外包。比如他们会去雇招聘人员。也许你可以外包一点点'寻源'的工作，但我甚至觉得连这个都很难。招聘之所以如此如此重要，很多原因是显而易见的，那些显而易见的我就跳过了。但有一个不那么明显的原因是：最顶尖的人是真心只想和最顶尖的人共事。和任何不在他们水平上的人一起工作，对他们来说都是一种认知负担。而他们身边水平不如自己的人越多，他们就越敏锐地意识到自己应该待在别的地方，或者应该去做自己的事情。最好的团队是相互激励的，他们彼此强化，每个人都想让对方刮目相看。有一个很好的测试：当你在招一个新人时，你应该能对他说——走进那个团队其他人坐着的房间，随便挑一个人，随机挑，把他拉到一边谈 30 分钟，面试他。如果你不被他打动，那就别加入。当你做这个测试时，对于让他随机面试到某个人，你脑子里会下意识地一缩——那个隐隐在你心里的人，就是你需要放走的人，因为正是这个人让你没法拥有一个所有人都想互相打动的高效团队。这就是你必须守住的标准。尤其是对所有你将直接管理的人——头 20 个、头 30 个、头 40 个、头 10 个，不管那个数字是多少。在那些你直接管理的早期成员身上，你要找的是什么？有 Warren Buffett 那句老话：智力、精力、正直。我还要再加一条：低自我。
[3:19] Naval
Low ego people are just much easier to manage. They tend to engage less in interpersonal conflict. They care more about the work than about politicking or fighting for credit. You just scale better. You'll be able to manage 30 or 40 low ego people when you might only be able to manage five high ego people because you're always massaging their egos. So I think Venode's phrase is absolutely correct. The team you build is the company you build especially for the first end people that you are directly managing. They are the DNA of the company. Back to the tweet, you can't outsource fundraising because investors are betting on you. If you're outsourcing fundraising, whoever you're outsourcing to is really the person running the company. Good investors certainly are not going to back a company where there's a proxy fundraiser. which is why companies that raise money through bankers are always starting off on the wrong foot. You shouldn't need a banker to raise money for you. Now, in later rounds, it's a little different because you're reaching money that's outside of the normal venture market, but especially in early stage, if you're engaging a banker, that's symptomatic of a deeper problem. Strategy, you have to set and communicate the strategy. Product vision. This is the one that's up for debate. There are some founders who outsource product vision. But I would argue that because your job here is to take the best team you can find and distill their energy into a perfect product to instantiate their knowledge and creativity into a product. You need to unify the product vision. One person needs to hold any complex product entirely in their head. And this is where it helps to have more than one founder because it's rare that someone can fund raise and recruit and hold product vision entirely in their head.
低自我的人就是好管理得多。他们更少卷入人际冲突，他们更在乎工作本身，而不是搞政治或争功。你就是能扩展得更好。你也许只能管五个高自我的人，因为你总在抚慰他们的自尊；但你能管 30 个、40 个低自我的人。所以我觉得 Vinod 那句话完全正确：你打造的团队就是你打造的公司，尤其是对那头 N 个你直接管理的人来说。他们就是公司的 DNA。回到那条推文——你不能外包融资，因为投资人押注的是你。如果你外包融资，那你外包给的那个人才是真正在经营公司的人。好的投资人当然不会去投一家有'代理融资人'的公司，这也是为什么通过投行融资的公司总是一开始就走错了脚。你不应该需要一个投行的人来帮你融资。当然，在后期轮次里情况有点不同，因为你触及的是常规风投市场之外的钱；但尤其在早期阶段，如果你请了投行的人，那是更深层问题的征兆。战略——你必须自己制定并传达战略。产品愿景——这一条是有争议的。确实有一些创始人会外包产品愿景。但我会说，因为你在这里的工作就是找到你能找到的最好的团队，把他们的能量提炼成一个完美的产品，把他们的知识和创造力实例化进一个产品里，所以你必须统一产品愿景。必须有一个人能把任何复杂的产品完整地装在脑子里。这也是为什么有不止一个创始人会有帮助——因为很少有人能同时把融资、招聘和产品愿景全都装进自己脑子里。
[4:59] Naval
Steve Jobs was one of these people. Elon Musk is probably another one. But usually you see a twoerson team. One person who's better at selling, although it helps if they have some builder background, so they know what they're talking about, and one person who's better at building, but it helps if they have a little bit of a seller bone because they're probably going to be recruiting the other builders. I don't think you can outsource any of those four. There are cases where product vision has been outsourced. There's some brilliant person underneath who's driving the product vision, but those are rare. Usually, all four are handled by the core founding team. There will never be a better recruiter in the company than the founder. And I mean that in two ways. One, in any successful startup, the founder is always a great recruiter. But there's also the flip side of that, which is the quality of the founder as a recruiter, as a human being, or as a contributor is a cap on the quality of anybody you're going to bring into the organization. You're never going to be able to hire anybody who's better than you are, right? People say hire people who are better than you. I don't think that really works. People who are better than you don't want to work for you for long. Now, it may be different down the road when you've built a huge enterprise and there's a network effect, an amazing product, then maybe you can hire people who are better than you because you're bringing a lot more than just you. But early on, all you're bringing to the startup is you.
Steve Jobs 就是这样的人之一，Elon Musk 大概也是另一个。但通常你看到的是两人组合：一个人更擅长销售——不过如果他有一些建造者的背景会更好，这样他知道自己在说什么；另一个人更擅长建造，但如果他身上有一点销售的细胞也会有帮助，因为他大概率要去招募其他的建造者。我不认为那四件事里任何一件可以外包。确实有产品愿景被外包的案例，底下有某个才华横溢的人在驱动产品愿景，但那很罕见。通常这四件事都是由核心创始团队来掌控的。公司里永远不会有比创始人更好的招聘者。这句话我是从两个意义上说的。其一，在任何一家成功的创业公司里，创始人永远是一个出色的招聘者。但它还有反面：创始人作为招聘者、作为一个人、作为一个贡献者的素质，是你能引进组织的任何人的素质上限。你永远没法雇到比你更强的人，对吧？人们说要雇比你强的人，我不觉得那真的行得通。比你强的人不会想为你长久工作。当然，等你建起了一个庞大的企业，有了网络效应、有了惊艳的产品，那时也许就不同了，那时你也许能雇到比你强的人，因为你带来的远不止你自己。但早期，你能带给这家创业公司的全部，就是你自己。
[6:18] Naval
And for people to want to work for you, you have to be at least on their level. This is why I think early stage investors judge the founding team so heavily. They don't even care about early progress, at least the good ones don't, or about partnerships or domain expertise. They just want to see how good you are. And the clearest way you can show how good you are is by recruiting great people.
而要让别人愿意为你工作，你至少得在他们的水平上。这就是为什么我觉得早期阶段的投资人会如此看重创始团队。他们甚至不在乎早期进展——至少好的投资人不在乎——也不在乎合作关系或领域专长。他们只想看你有多强。而你能展示自己有多强的最清晰的方式，就是招到了优秀的人。
[6:44] Nivi
Another reason you can't outsource recruiting is that recruiting takes a tremendous amount of creativity. Otherwise, you're going to be doing the same cookie cutter stuff that every other company in the world is doing, and you're going to end up with the same interchangeable talent every other company has. So, don't take the fact that you don't know anything about recruiting as a negative.
还有一个你不能外包招聘的原因是：招聘需要极大量的创造力。否则你做的就会是和世界上每家其他公司一模一样的、千篇一律的套路活儿，最后你拿到的就是和每家其他公司一样的、可随意互换的人才。所以，别把'你对招聘一窍不通'这件事当成一个负面因素。
[7:07] Naval
Absolutely. In my own most recent company, I think I've recruited the best team I've ever worked with by far and have broken so many rules. Every single hire, we had to break some core rule of recruiting. I won't go into all of them because some of those are still tricks that are valid in the environment. Some of those are probably pushing boundaries, but we break every rule. We break all the objections around commuting. We'll break the objections around, "Oh, I'm having a kid." We'll break the objections around, "Oh, I can't afford to exercise these options." We'll break the objections around, "Oh, but I'm at a university." We'll even break the objections around people who may have goals like, "Oh, I want to be surrounded by the best scientists, or I want to work in a different kind of environment." In the 2025 environment, everyone is trying so hard to recruit AI people and engineers. The demand for top level engineers is higher than ever because they're so leveraged through the new tools. And you can just see that in the salary offers that are going out to the top people. You just have to be incredibly creative. You just have to break rules. This is another reason why you can't outsource recruiting because when you outsource it, you're outsourcing to someone else who doesn't know what rules they can break and what they can't. Their HR or they're afraid that they'll break some rule that you're not going to be happy with them breaking. But as a founder, you can break rules around the cap table. You might be giving a certain amount of stock to each employee, but one might come along for whom you have to break the rules. Or you have to convince them why you can't break the rules for them.
完全同意。在我自己最近的这家公司里，我觉得我招到了迄今为止合作过的最好的团队，远远超过以往，而且打破了非常多的规则。每一次招人，我们都不得不打破某条核心的招聘规则。我不会把它们全讲出来，因为有些至今仍是这个环境里有效的'诀窍'，有些大概是在试探边界，但我们打破了每一条规则。我们打破围绕通勤的所有反对意见。我们会打破'哦，我要生孩子了'这类反对意见。我们会打破'哦，我没钱去行权这些期权'这类反对意见。我们会打破'哦，可我在大学里任职'这类反对意见。我们甚至会打破那些有自己目标的人的反对意见，比如'哦，我想被最顶尖的科学家包围'，或者'我想在一种不同的环境里工作'。在 2025 年的环境里，每个人都在拼命招 AI 人才和工程师。对顶级工程师的需求比以往任何时候都高，因为通过这些新工具，他们的杠杆太大了。你从开给顶尖人才的薪资报价里就能看到这一点。你就是必须极有创造力，你就是必须打破规则。这是另一个你不能外包招聘的原因——因为当你外包时，你是外包给了另一个人，而那个人不知道哪些规则能打破、哪些不能。他们要么是 HR，要么是害怕打破某条规则会让你不高兴。但作为创始人，你可以打破围绕股权结构表的规则。你也许给每个员工的股票数量是固定的，但可能来了一个人，你必须为他打破规则。或者你得说服他，为什么你不能为他打破规则。
[8:32] Naval
Or you have to structure their stock compensation in a different way or their salary in a certain way or their start date or their hours or their location or their title or who they're working with or who they're reporting to or what their office is like or who they get to hire or what say they get to have in what part of the product or in what part of the company or how they get to straddle roles across different parts of the company. You're going to have to break rules to get the best people because the best people are not cogs in a machine. They don't fit into a neat and comfortable place. They're multiddisciplinary and they have to temporarily dawn an identity of oh I'm an electrical engineer I'm a software engineer I'm a marketer I'm a product manager whatever but the great people are capable of anything they chose to specialize in a particular thing but their input is valuable everywhere and they're respected by a group of peers my co-founder has a phrase he likes to use from Latin primis interparis first among equals where they're all peers but each person given their expertise and their particular knowhow is acknowledged by the others as being the first among equals in a given domain. So one person might be better at naming and branding. One person might be better at industrial design. Other person might be better at electrical engineering or software engineering or have taste in a different domain. But a great team will have multi-disiplinary people who are each capable of doing many jobs but are specialized and have extreme taste and judgment in particular areas. and their peers are smart enough to recognize where they have that taste and will confer upon them the ability to make decisions in that area. You have to break the rules not just on recruiting but also an operator of the company and how it's structured. Every good company is idiosyncratic. Its culture is unique to it. You can't just transplant it. To give you an example, at my latest company, we don't use Slack, which is one of these group chat platforms. And especially in a small company, Slack just becomes a hangout spot. It's kind of like email. In email, it's too easy to generate tasks for large groups of other people. I can fire off an email with 20 todos for other people and it takes me 5 seconds to generate that email and then it takes up the day of the other people trying to respond to it. It creates this asymmetric ability to waste other people's time. Over time, email has degenerated into a medium where there's very low signal and a lot of noise aka spam. Even well-meaning spam from friends, family, and co-workers. So, we also switch to text messaging where we understand the barrier to entry is higher. Like if you're going to text me, it better be important. And if you're texting me a lot and it's not that important, I'm probably going to mute you. Or if you're in a group text and someone starts messaging too much, you exit the group text, which is why all these large group texts die out over time cuz the good people mute them and leave. Slack and group messaging platforms have a similar dynamic where over time they degenerate into a combination of people asking random questions into thin air, people prognosticating, people politicking, people bickering, people talking about stuff that is not germanine to the work and they become largely entertainment platforms for group culture building, which is fine with a high noise to signal ratio. Whereas if you don't have Slack, if you have a question, you have to really think about and try to solve it yourself. And if you can't, you have to figure out who in the company might have an answer to that question. And you have to track that person down, which is highly interruptive. And you have to figure out how to approach them properly. You could argue that communication overhead is too high. This limits your ability to scale as a company, which is exactly the point.
或者你得用不同的方式来设计他的股票薪酬，或者用某种特定方式来设计他的薪水、入职日期、工作时长、工作地点、头衔，或者他和谁共事、向谁汇报、办公室是什么样的、他能招谁、他在产品的哪一部分或公司的哪一部分里有多大话语权、他怎样横跨公司不同部门的角色。你将不得不打破规则才能拿到最好的人，因为最好的人不是机器里的齿轮。他们装不进一个整齐又舒服的位置。他们是多学科的，他们必须临时披上一个身份——'哦我是电气工程师''我是软件工程师''我是营销人员''我是产品经理'，随便什么——但真正厉害的人什么都能做，他们选择在某个特定领域钻研，但他们的输入在任何地方都有价值，而且他们受到一群同侪的尊重。我的联合创始人喜欢用一个拉丁语短语：primus inter pares，平等者中的第一人——他们都是同侪，但每个人凭借自己的专长和独到的技能，被其他人公认为是某个特定领域里的'平等者中的第一人'。所以某个人也许更擅长命名和品牌，某个人也许更擅长工业设计，另一个人也许更擅长电气工程或软件工程，或者在某个不同领域有品味。但一个伟大的团队会拥有多学科的人，他们每个人都能做很多种工作，但又各有专精，并且在特定领域有极致的品味和判断力，而他们的同侪足够聪明，能认出他们在哪里有那种品味，并把在那个领域做决定的权力赋予他们。你必须打破规则，不只是在招聘上，还包括作为公司的运营者、在公司如何架构上。每一家好公司都是有其独特个性的。它的文化是它独有的，你没法直接移植过来。举个例子，在我最新的这家公司，我们不用 Slack——就是那种群聊平台之一。尤其在一家小公司里，Slack 会变成一个闲逛的地方，有点像电子邮件。在电子邮件里，给一大群别人制造任务太容易了。我可以发出一封带着 20 条待办的邮件给别人，我花 5 秒钟就能生成那封邮件，然后它就占掉了别人一整天去回复它的时间。它制造出一种不对称的、浪费别人时间的能力。随着时间推移，电子邮件退化成了一种信号极低、噪音极多的媒介，也就是垃圾邮件——哪怕是来自朋友、家人和同事的善意的垃圾邮件。所以我们也转向了短信，因为我们明白它的进入门槛更高。比如你要给我发短信，那最好是重要的事。如果你给我发很多短信而又不那么重要，我大概会把你静音。或者如果你在一个群短信里，有人开始发太多消息，你就退出那个群短信——这也是为什么所有这些大群短信会随时间消亡，因为好的人把它静音并离开了。Slack 和群消息平台有类似的动态：随着时间推移，它们退化成一种混合体——人们对着空气问随机的问题、人们做预言、人们搞政治、人们斗嘴、人们谈论和工作不相干的东西，它们在很大程度上变成了用于群体文化建设的娱乐平台，那也无妨，只是噪声信号比很高。而如果你没有 Slack，当你有一个问题时，你必须真的去思考它、试着自己解决它。如果解决不了，你必须弄清楚公司里谁可能有这个问题的答案，你必须把那个人找出来——这是高度打断性的——而且你必须想清楚如何恰当地去接近他。你可以说这沟通开销太高了，这限制了你作为一家公司去扩张的能力——而这恰恰就是重点。
[12:01] Naval
When you have a small number of brilliant people working together to try to take a product from 0 to one, the last thing you want is scale. Scale is your enemy. It just takes a small group of people to create something great. Every good founder knows this. One of the reasons Steve Jobs implemented secrecy at Apple was to prevent teams from cross-pollinating too much and being in each other's business and trying to take credit for each other's work. It's also why he moved the Macintosh team into a separate building from the Apple 2 team. Elon Musk encourages people to walk out of meetings and do standing meetings only. Jeff Bezos limits teams to two pizza teams. These are all attempts by founders to unscale the company to break it down to smaller components so people can actually get work done instead of spending all their time in meetings and politicking. Slack breaks those boundaries. It allows 50 people to be in a group at once and waste each other's time. If you force people to be thoughtful about their interactions, you move from a meeting schedule to a maker schedule, then people can have uninterrupted free time to be creative. And creativity is all that matters because we do live in the age of infinite leverage and AI and robotics are making that more clear every day. You need to let your people be bored rather than busy. Always keeping them busy with make work is not effective.
当你有一小群才华横溢的人在一起，试图把一个产品从 0 做到 1 时，你最不想要的就是规模。规模是你的敌人。创造出某种伟大的东西，只需要一小群人。每个好的创始人都明白这一点。Steve Jobs 在 Apple 推行保密制度的原因之一，就是为了防止团队之间过度交叉渗透、互相插手对方的事、试图抢夺对方的功劳。这也是为什么他把 Macintosh 团队搬进了一栋和 Apple II 团队分开的楼。Elon Musk 鼓励人们走出会议、只开站着开的会。Jeff Bezos 把团队限制为'两个披萨的团队'。这些都是创始人在试图给公司'去规模化'，把它拆解成更小的组件，让人们能真正把活干出来，而不是把所有时间都花在开会和搞政治上。Slack 打破了那些边界。它让 50 个人同时待在一个群里，互相浪费时间。如果你迫使人们对自己的互动深思熟虑，你就从'会议节奏'转向了'创造者节奏'，那样人们才能拥有不被打断的自由时间去发挥创造力。而创造力是唯一重要的东西，因为我们确实生活在一个无限杠杆的时代，AI 和机器人技术每天都在让这一点变得更清楚。你需要让你的人无聊，而不是让他们忙碌。总是用'凑数的活儿'让他们忙着，是没有效果的。
[13:19] Naval
You need to give them makers time, builder time, which means large amounts of uninterrupted free time to do deep creative work. And then when they stick their heads out of that and they're bored, they can go for a run or they can spend time with their family or they can even go surf TikTok. No one's judging, but they get to manage their time better. Where Slack takes the disease of meetings and makes it pervasive 24/7. So now on top of checking your email inbox, you have to check your Slack inbox and it has that Tik Tok like insidious addiction loop where there's a lot of slop in there, but once in a while there's a nugget. So you're constantly now running through this pile of slop to find that nugget. people can asymmetrically waste each other's time by sending one message that then 50 other people have to sift through and figure out if it's flop or not. So, especially in a small team, one-on-one communications are much better. And by limiting the use of Slack, especially early on, you can force the team to stay small. And when a team is small, people who aren't pulling their weight can't hide. You can curate it much better as a leader. You can manage them directly or work with them directly. and you can actually deliver worldchanging products.
你需要给他们创造者的时间、建造者的时间，也就是大段不被打断的自由时间，去做深度的创造性工作。然后当他们从那种状态里探出头来、感到无聊时，他们可以去跑个步，可以陪陪家人，甚至可以去刷 TikTok。没人评判，但他们能更好地管理自己的时间。而 Slack 把'开会'这种病变得 24/7 无处不在。于是现在，在查你的电子邮件收件箱之外，你还得查你的 Slack 收件箱，而它有那种 TikTok 式的、阴险的成瘾循环——里面有大量的'泔水'，但偶尔会有一颗金块。所以你现在不断地在这一堆泔水里翻找，去找到那颗金块。人们可以不对称地浪费彼此的时间——发出一条消息，然后另外 50 个人不得不去筛选它、判断它是不是废话。所以，尤其在一个小团队里，一对一的沟通要好得多。而通过限制 Slack 的使用，尤其是在早期，你可以迫使团队保持精简。当一个团队精简时，那些没有尽到本分的人就藏不住了。作为领导者你能把它打理得好得多，你可以直接管理他们或直接和他们共事，你也就真的能交付出改变世界的产品。
[14:29] Nivi
It reminds me of Nasim Taleb's idea of never hiring an assistant because it gives you the opportunity to expand your scale and the assistant ends up having a paradoxical effect of making you busier instead of less busy. In July 2025, you tweeted that the job of a startup is to find undiscovered talent and distill it into a product. Obviously the product vision is there. Obviously you have to find talent. The key is undiscovered. That's the part that we haven't talked about and that I think a lot of people miss. If you can identify the talent from afar easily, so can everybody else. You have to find them before other people do. How do you do this? Elon is probably the modern master of this. Although Jobs, Altman, and a few other people have also done extremely well in this regard. The playbook that Elon uses is interesting. First, you pick a mission that's extremely audacious. There's only so many hours in a day. You're going to work anyway. You might as well work on something big. The best people know that deep down. They want to work on something big. For example, I think the best people don't want to build video games or slop entertainment that's wasting people's lives. They don't want to build a crypto casino. The best people want to do meaningful work because deep down they're aware of their potential. And so when they see an opportunity to express themselves as engineers, as artists, hopefully as both, because I think the great engineers are often great artists as well, they're going to be drawn to a big mission. So the first thing Elon does across the board is he picks a big mission and he frames it in the largest way possible. We're not going into space. We're not going to the moon.
这让我想起 Nassim Taleb 的一个观点：永远不要雇助理，因为那给了你扩大自身规模的机会，而助理最终会产生一种悖论性的效果——让你更忙，而不是更不忙。2025 年 7 月，你发推说：一家创业公司的工作，就是找到未被发现的人才，并把它提炼成一个产品。产品愿景显然得在那儿；你显然得找到人才。关键在'未被发现'。这是我们还没聊到的、而且我觉得很多人忽略的部分。如果你能轻易地从远处识别出人才，那别人也能。你必须在别人之前找到他们。这要怎么做？Elon 大概是这方面的当代大师，不过 Jobs、Altman 还有另外几个人在这方面也做得极其出色。Elon 用的打法很有意思。第一，你选一个极其大胆的使命。一天就那么多小时，你反正都要工作，那不如做一件大事。最好的人内心深处都知道这一点，他们想做一件大事。比如说，我觉得最好的人不想去做电子游戏，或者那种浪费人们生命的泔水娱乐。他们不想做一个加密货币赌场。最好的人想做有意义的工作，因为他们内心深处清楚自己的潜力。所以当他们看到一个能把自己作为工程师、作为艺术家——但愿是两者兼具，因为我觉得伟大的工程师往往也是伟大的艺术家——表达出来的机会时，他们会被一个宏大的使命所吸引。所以 Elon 一以贯之做的第一件事，就是选一个宏大的使命，并用尽可能宏大的方式去框定它。我们不是要进入太空，我们不是要去月球。
[16:14] Naval
We're going to Mars. That's a big mission. Similarly, Sam Alman stays true to we're not just building Sora to video feeds. We're not just building chat bots. We're building AGI. He's not wavering from that. He wants to build AGI. Elon doesn't want to stop at just electric cars. He doesn't even want to stop at self-driving cars. He wants robots. He wants an army of 100 million robots. Tesla's going all the way. So, these are inspiring. These attract the best people. Second, you're early. You lay out these missions and you do it before everybody else does. So Elon did SpaceX long before space was cool. People thought it was impossible. And so he managed to attract the best engineers out of NASA and Boeing and Lockheed and universities before everybody else did. Now if you're in a more crowded space, you need to get creative and find the undiscovered talent in that space. By the time someone's famous on Twitter, it's too late to recruit them. Everybody knows. Even by the time someone is pedigreed, they've won all the awards and the papers. Very hard to recruit. You have to hack your way to them. So to be a great recruiter, you have to first be a great sorcerer. And a great sorcerer is a good hunter of undiscovered talent, which means you have to have taste and you have to have interest in other people and you have to put in the time. For example, my co-founder loves to find tinkerers. He loves to find weird projects, not mainstream projects, not the obvious stuff. He's not looking at who's training a better AI model. That's too obvious. Instead, he might be looking at something adjacent like who's really into using weird ML algorithms for micro weather forecasting. Then he'll spend a day or two going through their GitHub or going through their paper and really understanding it. And then he'll go off and he'll think deeply about it. And then he'll come back with a tweak or a modification and he'll email that person and say, "Hey, I saw your code. I saw what you've done. I thought it's really interesting. I wrote a little bit of code that I think you may want to incorporate or plug in." Or, "I have a question." And usually it's a good question. It's a considered question.
我们要去火星。那是一个宏大的使命。同样地，Sam Altman 也坚守着——我们不只是在做把视频做成信息流的 Sora，我们不只是在做聊天机器人，我们是在做 AGI。他在这一点上毫不动摇。他想做出 AGI。Elon 不想止步于电动车。他甚至不想止步于自动驾驶汽车。他想要机器人。他想要一支一亿台机器人的大军。Tesla 要一路走到底。所以这些是鼓舞人心的，它们能吸引最好的人。第二，你要早。你把这些使命摆出来，而且是在所有人之前摆出来。所以 Elon 在'太空很酷'之前很久就做了 SpaceX。人们当时觉得那是不可能的。于是他得以在所有人之前，从 NASA、Boeing、Lockheed 和各大学里把最好的工程师吸引过来。如果你身处一个更拥挤的领域，你就需要有创造力，去找到那个领域里未被发现的人才。等一个人在 Twitter 上出名了，再去招他就太晚了，所有人都知道他了。甚至等一个人有了光鲜的资历、拿遍了所有奖项、发了那些论文，也很难招了。你必须用'黑客'的办法找到他们。所以要成为一个伟大的招聘者，你得先成为一个伟大的'寻源者'。而一个伟大的寻源者，是一个善于猎取未被发现的人才的人，这意味着你必须有品味，你必须对其他人有兴趣，你必须投入时间。比如说，我的联合创始人喜欢去找那些'捣鼓者'。他喜欢找那些古怪的项目，不是主流的项目，不是显而易见的东西。他不会去看谁在训练一个更好的 AI 模型——那太显而易见了。相反，他可能在看一些相邻的东西，比如谁真的很热衷于用一些古怪的机器学习算法做微观天气预报。然后他会花上一两天去翻看那个人的 GitHub，或者翻看他的论文，真正把它弄懂。然后他会走开，深入地思考它。然后他会带着一个微调或一个改动回来，给那个人发邮件说：嘿，我看了你的代码，我看了你做的东西，我觉得真的很有意思，我写了一小段代码，我觉得你也许会想把它整合进去或者插进来。或者说：我有一个问题。而通常那是一个好问题，一个经过深思的问题。
[18:20] Naval
And the person responds well because here they are off tinkering on the side and somebody has spotted their tinkering and has a good question about it. And the best part is he's not doing this to recruit people. He's doing this because that's just what he does for fun. he's genuinely interested. So, he finds these weird loners tinkering at the edge and then I get to go in and recruit them. Most of the time it fails and sometimes it succeeds, but you find really interesting people. That's an example of how his taste allows him to source a particular category of people. So, you do have to look for talent in undiscovered places. We recently hired an assistant at the company and it was just someone I ran into at a restaurant who was incredibly hospitable and had never worked a day in their life at a tech company. But you could just tell this person was good at everything they did. Everything they touched was quality and stylish and they cared. We recruited them. We took a chance. So, it's about finding undiscovered talent, not the obvious talent. And this is another problem with outsourcing recruiting, which is you hand to a recruiter, you hand to HR. They can't bring you weird people. It's too high risk. They don't have the taste themselves. Makers have taste in other makers. Builders have taste in other builders. Engineers have taste in other engineers. Good salespeople have taste in other sales people. copywriters have tasted other copywriters. So, it's very hard to outsource that. As a related aside, one of my pet peeves is hiring marketing and PR people who have no evidence of being able to market themselves. For example, if you want to hire someone to do your social media, they better have a great social media account for themselves.
那个人反应很好，因为他正在一旁自己捣鼓东西，结果有人注意到了他的捣鼓，还能就此提出一个很到位的问题。最妙的是，他做这件事并不是为了招人。他这么做纯粹是因为这就是他觉得好玩的事，他是发自内心地感兴趣。所以他能找到这些在边缘地带独自捣鼓的怪人，然后我就能上场去把他们招进来。大多数时候会失败，有时候会成功，但你能找到非常有意思的人。这就是一个例子，说明他的品味让他能从某一类人群里发掘人才。所以你确实得到那些没被发掘的地方去找人才。我们公司最近招了个助理，就是我在一家餐厅偶遇的人，这人待客极其周到，而且这辈子从没在科技公司干过一天活。但你一眼就能看出这个人做什么都很在行。他经手的每件事都很有质感、很有格调，而且他是真的用心。我们就把他招进来了，我们赌了一把。所以关键是去发掘那些没被发现的人才，而不是那些显而易见的人才。这也是把招聘外包出去的另一个问题：你交给猎头，你交给 HR，他们没法给你带来那些怪人，风险太高了。他们自己也没有那种品味。创造者对其他创造者有品味，建造者对其他建造者有品味，工程师对其他工程师有品味，好的销售对其他销售有品味，文案对其他文案有品味。所以这件事很难外包出去。说个相关的题外话，我有个特别看不惯的事，就是去招那些做市场和公关的人，可他们却拿不出任何能证明自己会做自我营销的证据。比如说，你想招个人帮你做社交媒体，那他自己最好就有一个很棒的社交媒体账号。
[19:52] Naval
They should be playing their own social media game at the top of the game. And in fact, I would argue the best social media people are not even hireable. You have to discover them when they're very raw, when their accounts are small and young and up and coming or you have to contract with them because they know that their real opportunity is to build a channel around themselves uniquely and they'll briefly rent you their channel rather than hand it over to you completely.
他们自己就应该在玩社交媒体这件事上玩到顶尖水平。事实上我甚至会说，最好的社交媒体人才根本是招不到的。你得在他们还很青涩的时候就把他们发掘出来，那时候他们的账号还很小、很年轻、刚刚崭露头角；或者你只能跟他们签合作，因为他们清楚自己真正的机会是围绕自身去打造一个独一无二的渠道，他们顶多是把渠道短期租给你，而不会完全交给你。
[20:15] Nivi
One thing Angelus has done to be creative in sourcing is to turn our first floor into a cafe. It's called Founders Cafe and we have a constant stream of founders. oneman companies, twoerson companies that are just trying to get started and a lot of these companies are not going to go anywhere and we will have the opportunity to recruit them if their companies fail. This is not an idea that any recruiter is going to come up with.
Angelus 在人才来源上做的一件有创意的事，就是把我们公司的一楼改成了一家咖啡馆。它叫 Founders Cafe，我们这里源源不断地有创始人来——一人公司、两人公司，都还在努力起步阶段。这些公司里很多最后都不会成什么气候，而一旦他们的公司失败了，我们就有机会把他们招进来。这种点子是任何猎头都想不出来的。
[20:46] Naval
And I would go one level further. I think you should open a cafe like that, not because you want to recruit people, but just cuz you like hanging around founders and you like having a cafe. that's going to be a lot more genuine and authentic and won't feel like work and you'll do a better job and then there'll be an benefits to it.
我还想再往前推一层。我觉得你确实应该开一家这样的咖啡馆，但不是因为你想招人，而单纯是因为你喜欢跟创始人待在一起、你喜欢有这么一家咖啡馆。这样会真诚得多、自然得多，也不会让你觉得是在干活，于是你反而会做得更好，然后种种好处自然就跟着来了。
[21:03] Naval
Agreed. We opened it because we are in the business of serving founders. In August 2025, you tweeted that every great engineer is also an artist. I know this experentially, but let's also talk about what art is. My definition of art is much broader than a conventional definition. I characterize art as something that is done for its own sake and done well and often creates a sense of beauty or some strong emotion. And a lot of engineers are introverts. As an aside, I hate the term incel. It's just a way of putting introverts down. It's the new nerd, if you will. If someone says that somebody is an incel, I'm more likely to want to interview them. So, let's move away from the slurs. Introverts tend to want to express themselves through other things rather than going out and expressing themselves directly. So what are they going to do? They're going to express themselves through their craft. They're going to create art. In my current company, at least half the engineers have serious artwork they've done on the side, worldclass artwork. Everything from elegant mathematical proofs to beautiful computer art to literally sculpting things with clay, designing clothing, designing doorork knobs, water bottles. There's one who's done incredible music videos. Really good stuff. And I see a lot of the better engineers tinker with the AI art products much more so than even so-called artists do. I think a lot of artists are scared by AI art products saying this is going to replace me.
同意。我们开这家咖啡馆，是因为我们做的就是服务创始人的生意。（Nivi 提问）2025 年 8 月，你发了条推文说每一个伟大的工程师同时也是一个艺术家。我从亲身经历就知道这一点，但我们也来聊聊艺术到底是什么。（Naval 回答）我对艺术的定义比传统定义宽泛得多。我把艺术界定为：为它本身而做、并且做得很好、并且常常能营造出一种美感或某种强烈情感的东西。很多工程师都是内向的人。顺便说一句，我讨厌 incel（非自愿单身者）这个词，它无非是又一种贬低内向者的说法，可以说是新版的“书呆子”。如果有人说某个人是 incel，我反而更想去面试这个人。所以我们别再用这些侮辱性的词了。内向的人往往倾向于通过别的东西来表达自己，而不是出去直接表达自己。那他们会怎么做呢？他们会通过自己的手艺来表达自己，他们会创作艺术。在我现在这家公司里，至少有一半的工程师都在业余时间做过很正经的艺术作品，世界级水准的作品。从优雅的数学证明，到漂亮的计算机艺术，到真的用黏土做雕塑、设计服装、设计门把手、设计水瓶，什么都有。还有一位做过非常出色的音乐视频，是真的很棒的东西。而且我发现，很多更优秀的工程师摆弄 AI 艺术产品的程度，甚至比所谓的艺术家还要深。我觉得很多艺术家被 AI 艺术产品吓到了，心想这东西要取代我了。
[22:41] Naval
Whereas someone who doesn't have that identity of an artist and doesn't feel threatened by it, it's just a tool and they try it out to see what it can create. Anything done for its own sake and done as well as one possibly can is art. And great engineers are also artists. They're capable of anything. It's just they've chosen to be engineers and focused on building things. Because engineering is the ability to turn your ideas and your art into things that actually work, that do something useful, that embody some knowledge in a way that it can be repeated and people can get utility out of it. But that doesn't mean that it can't be beautiful. Again, I'm channeling my co-founder, but if you ask him what is the best form of art, painting, music, literature, etc. for him, it's industrial design. For example, if you look at the AirPods, the way they're sculpted aerodynamically and still have to be manufacturable on a machine at a certain price point by someone in China, according to a spec, the way they satisfyingly click into the little resting places in their case with magnets. The way they pioneered that whole charging case with the Find My AirPods product built in. The way they hid all the extra buttons. The way they made it carry spare batteries. The way they fit inside your ear with the replaceable tips. That is a marvel of art and engineering. It took incredible artistry to figure out how to design it so it fits sculpted into the human ear, which is a beautiful and natural form, while still being mass-producible at a certain price point and making all of the little elements work together. When you close the lid on the AirPods, it makes a very satisfying snap. The way the curves around it, those are G3 curves. Those are hand sculpted and then scanned in. Computers can't generate those. the way it feels in your hand. It feels like a smooth, polished pebble that fell from the sky. It's a thing of beauty. It's a work of art. And I think people intrinsically know that, which is why they flocked to Apple products over various Android products because they are sculpted like works of art. The care goes in there and you can feel it. Apple triumphed as a company of people who genuinely deeply cared of engineer artists. That's why to this day, even all the other founders, even ones who might have built more market cap recently than Apple has, they still all look up to Apple. Every entrepreneur from my generation and I think many subsequent generations looks up to Steve Jobs and his team more than any other because they were truly artists, not just engineers. To me, the ideal person for any role is technical, an artist, constantly generating new knowledge, and finally automating the repetitive parts of their job through code, product, or AI. Exceptions apply, but the ideal candidate for any role should either have these capabilities or be aspiring to gain these capabilities. technical, an artist, constantly generating new knowledge, call that creativity, and automating the tedious parts of their job.
而一个没有“艺术家”这种身份认同、也不觉得受到威胁的人，对他来说这只是个工具，他会去试一试，看看它能创造出什么来。任何为它本身而做、并且尽可能做到极致的事情，都是艺术。而伟大的工程师同时也是艺术家。他们什么都做得来，只是他们选择了当工程师，专注于把东西造出来。因为工程的本质，就是把你的想法和你的艺术变成真正能运转、真正有用、并且把某种知识以可重复的方式凝固下来、让人们能从中获得实用价值的东西。但这并不意味着它就不能是美的。我又要替我的联合创始人代言了——如果你问他艺术的最高形式是什么，绘画、音乐、文学等等，对他来说答案是工业设计。比如你看 AirPods，它被雕琢成符合空气动力学的形状，却仍然要能在机器上按某个价位、由中国的某个人按照规格量产出来；它靠磁铁那种令人满足的“咔哒”一声扣进充电盒里的小凹槽；他们如何开创了那整个内置 Find My AirPods 功能的充电盒；他们如何把所有多余的按钮都藏了起来；他们如何让它能携带备用电池；他们如何用可替换的耳塞让它贴合你的耳朵。那是艺术与工程的奇迹。要想出怎么设计它，让它雕琢得恰好贴合人耳——人耳是一种美丽而自然的形态——同时还要能按某个价位量产，还要让所有这些小元素彼此配合，这需要不可思议的艺术功力。当你合上 AirPods 的盖子时，会发出非常令人满足的“啪”一声。它周围的那些弧线，那些是 G3 曲线，是手工雕出来再扫描进去的，计算机生成不了那种曲线。它握在手里的感觉，就像一颗从天上掉下来的、光滑打磨过的鹅卵石。它是个美的东西，是件艺术品。我觉得人们内心是知道这一点的，这就是为什么他们涌向苹果的产品而不是各种安卓产品，因为苹果的产品像艺术品一样被精雕细琢。那份用心倾注其中，你是能感受到的。苹果之所以能作为一家公司取得辉煌成就，是因为这是一群发自内心深切在乎的人、一群“工程师艺术家”。这就是为什么直到今天，哪怕是所有其他的创始人，哪怕是那些近来打造出的市值可能比苹果还高的人，他们仍然都仰望苹果。我这一代、以及我认为后面好几代的每一个创业者，对 Steve Jobs 和他的团队的仰慕都超过任何其他人，因为他们是真正的艺术家，不只是工程师。对我来说，任何岗位上的理想人选都应该是：技术过硬、是个艺术家、不断在产生新知识，并且最终通过代码、产品或 AI 把自己工作中重复的部分自动化掉。会有例外，但任何岗位上的理想候选人，要么已经具备这些能力，要么正在渴望获得这些能力——技术过硬、是个艺术家、不断产生新知识（你可以把这叫作创造力），并把自己工作中那些枯燥的部分自动化掉。
[25:50] Naval
I think that's right. And it's telling that when you talked about automation, you left out automating through process or people. That's the worst form of automation because then that adds non-technical or non-creative people into the process and those people aren't going to be happy in those jobs for long because they're cogs in the machine and will eventually be replaced by some piece of technology. It also changes the environment because humans are social animals. If you start mixing them together, they're always going to want to accommodate the other people and so the level of conversation will shift. For example, if you have a bunch of politicians in a room and bunch of engineers, you're not going to be talking engineering for long. Eventually, you will drift into common topics. And in a large enough group, the common topics are always travel and food because they're non-threatening topics. People always degenerate to that. If you really want to have a strong culture of people who are missionoriented, you can't mix too many different kinds of people. That's where the cult and culture comes from. Early teams do look like cults. They are monomomaniacal. They are weird, but they're all kind of weird in a similar way. And if you start mixing too many different kinds of people, you're just going to get a bland average, which is not how you're going to build a great company or product.
我觉得这说得对。而且很能说明问题的一点是，你在谈自动化的时候，把“通过流程或人来实现自动化”排除掉了。那是最糟糕的一种自动化形式，因为那样会把不懂技术或没有创造力的人塞进流程里，而这些人在那种岗位上不会开心太久，因为他们只是机器里的齿轮，最终会被某种技术取代。它还会改变整个环境，因为人是社会性动物。如果你开始把不同的人混在一起，他们总会想去迁就别人，于是对话的层次就会发生偏移。比如说，如果你把一屋子政客和一屋子工程师放一起，你们不会聊工程聊太久，最终你们会漂移到共同话题上去。而在一个足够大的群体里，共同话题永远是旅行和美食，因为这些是无威胁的话题，人们总是退化到那上面去。如果你真的想拥有一种由使命驱动的人组成的强大文化，你就不能混进太多不同种类的人。“邪教”（cult）和“文化”（culture）的渊源就在这里。早期团队看上去确实像邪教，他们是偏执狂式的，他们很怪，但他们都怪在某种相似的点上。如果你开始混进太多不同种类的人，你得到的就只是一种平淡的平均值，而那不是你打造一家伟大公司或伟大产品的方式。
[27:02] Naval
It's a regression to the mean problem. There's actually an old Kora thread by a famous founder that I won't name where he says the last thing you want in an early stage company is quote unquote diversity. You want a monoculture of people who all believe the same things. Because if you don't have that, you're going to just spend your time arguing about everything. And you don't have that time at an early stage startup. So you need everybody to already be on the same exact page. And then there's a few things that you might argue about that really move the needle on the performance of the business. Founders want to be popular like everybody else. So externally they'll try to project this image that they're consensus driven and sometimes they're even stupid enough to fall for it. But every great founder I've seen up close or even from afar is highly opinionated and they're almost dictatorial in how they run things. Also early stage teams are opinionated and the products they built are opinionated. Opinimated means they have a strong vision for what it should and should not do. If you don't have a strong vision of what it should and should not do, then you end up with a giant mess of competing features. Jack Dorsey has a great phrase, limit the number of details and make every detail perfect. And that's especially important in consumer products. You have to be extremely opinionated. All the best products in consumerland get there through simplicity. You could argue the recent success of Chat GPT and similar AI chat bots is because they're even simpler than Google. Google looked like the simplest product you could possibly build. It was just a box. But even that box had limitations on what you could do. You were trained not to talk to it conversationally. You would enter keywords and you had to be careful with those keywords. You couldn't just ask a question outright and get a sensible answer. It wouldn't do proper synonym matching and then it would spit you back a whole bunch of results that was complicated. You'd have to sift through and figure out which ones were ads, which ones were real, were they sorted correctly, and then you'd have to click through and read it. Chat GPT and the chatbot simplified that even further.
这是个“向均值回归”的问题。其实有一条很老的 Quora 帖子，是一位很有名的创始人写的，名字我就不说了，他在里面说，早期阶段的公司里你最不想要的就是所谓的“多样性”。你想要的是一种单一文化，一群全都相信同样东西的人。因为如果你没有这一点，你就会把时间全花在为各种事情争论上。而在一家早期创业公司里你没有那个时间。所以你需要每个人一开始就完全在同一个频道上。然后才会有那么几件你可能会去争论、并且真正能撬动公司业绩的事。创始人跟所有人一样也想受欢迎，所以对外他们会努力塑造一种“我是靠共识来驱动决策”的形象，有时候他们甚至蠢到自己都信了。但我近距离观察过、甚至只是远远看过的每一个伟大创始人，都是高度有主见的，他们在管理上几乎是独裁式的。早期阶段的团队也是有主见的，他们做出来的产品也是有主见的。“有主见”意味着他们对产品该做什么、不该做什么有一个强烈的愿景。如果你对它该做什么、不该做什么没有强烈的愿景，你最后就会得到一堆互相打架的功能组成的烂摊子。Jack Dorsey 有句很棒的话：限制细节的数量，并把每一个细节都做到完美。这一点在消费级产品里尤其重要，你必须极其有主见。消费领域里所有最好的产品，都是靠简洁做到那一步的。你甚至可以说，ChatGPT 以及类似的 AI 聊天机器人近来的成功，是因为它们比 Google 还要简单。Google 看上去已经是你可能造出来的最简单的产品了，它就是一个框。但即便是那个框也对你能做什么有所限制。你被训练成不能用对话的方式跟它说话，你得输入关键词，而且你还得很小心地选这些关键词。你没法直接抛出一个问题就得到一个合理的答案。它不会做恰当的同义词匹配，然后它会甩给你一大堆结果，那很复杂，你得从里面筛，搞清楚哪些是广告、哪些是真的、它们的排序对不对，然后你还得点进去读。ChatGPT 和聊天机器人把这件事进一步简化了。
[29:04] Naval
You just talk to it like a human. Use your voice or you type and it gives you back a straight answer. It might not always be right, but it's good enough and it gives you back a straight answer in text or voice or images or whatever you prefer. So, it simplifies what we looked at as a simplest product in the internet, which was formerly Google, and makes it even simpler. And you just cannot make a product that's simple enough. To be simple, you have to be extremely opinionated. You have to remove everything that doesn't match your opinion of what the product should be doing. You have to meticulously remove every single click, every single extra button, every single setting. In fact, things in the settings menu are an indication that you've abdicated your responsibility to the user. Choices for the user are an abdication of your responsibility. Maybe for legal or important reasons, you can have a few of these, but you should struggle and resist against every single choice the user has to make. In the age of Tik Tok and Chat GPT, that's more obvious than ever. People don't want to make choices. They don't want the cognitive load. They want you to figure out what the right defaults are and what they should be doing and looking at, and they want you to present it to them. Warren Buffett says that you should hire people who have energy, intelligence, and integrity. Joel Spolski put it another way that you want people who are smart and gets things done. What's become important to me on the intelligence side is that there's really only one significant test for a candidate, which is are they generating new knowledge, which is just a fancy way of saying are they creative? because otherwise you're just hiring a robot whose job should be automated.
你就像跟一个人说话一样跟它说话，用你的声音，或者你打字，它就给你一个直截了当的答案。它不一定永远是对的，但它够好用了，而且它会用文字、语音、图像，或者任何你偏好的形式，给你一个直截了当的答案。所以它把我们曾经视为互联网上最简单的产品——也就是以前的 Google——又进一步简化了。而你做产品永远没法做到“足够简单”。要做到简单，你就必须极其有主见。你必须把所有不符合你“产品该做什么”这一观点的东西都去掉。你必须一丝不苟地去掉每一次点击、每一个多余的按钮、每一项设置。事实上，设置菜单里的东西，本身就是一个信号，说明你已经把你对用户的责任推卸掉了。给用户提供选择，就是在推卸你的责任。也许出于法律或其他重要原因，你可以保留少数几个，但对于用户必须做出的每一个选择，你都应该挣扎着去抵抗它。在 TikTok 和 ChatGPT 的时代，这一点比以往任何时候都更明显。人们不想做选择，他们不想要那份认知负担，他们希望你替他们想清楚什么才是正确的默认设置、他们应该做什么、看什么，然后希望你把它直接呈现给他们。Warren Buffett 说，你应该招那些有干劲、有智慧、有诚信的人。Joel Spolsky 换了个说法，他说你想要的是那种聪明、并且能把事情做成的人。在“智慧”这一面，对我来说越来越重要的一点是：对一个候选人其实只有一个有意义的测试，那就是他们是否在产生新知识——这只是“他们有没有创造力”的一种文绉绉的说法。因为否则的话，你不过是在招一个机器人，而它的岗位本就该被自动化掉。
[30:47] Nivi
I think that's correct. And people may get unhappy saying, well, you're calling these people robots. But I don't think anybody wants to do the same thing over and over. Everybody wants to do new, unique, and creative things. Everyone can be an artist. Not in the sense of grabbing a paintbrush and painting, but in the sense of creating new knowledge and enjoying that process. It may just be in different domains. Even figuring out how to hack Twitter or YouTube to get your word out is a form of creating new knowledge. For example, a couple of years ago, the way to get the word out was probably writing blog posts. Now, it might be X plus Substack or going viral on Tik Tok or doing a great startup launch video. The target is always moving and people are always trying to apply creativity to hack that system. even fundraising. Rather than going and meeting VCs one by one today, I would argue you're better served if your product shows well to build a killer launch video and a great demo of the product and try to get it to go viral online to have a personality and stand out from the noise. So creativity can be applied anywhere. The other thing I look for in people is being selfotivated. So you don't have to tell them what to do. You don't have to push them, hey, what did you get done this week? That's a famous Elon question and I think it's a great one, but it is fundamentally still a management question. It's a manager's question. It's not a leader's question. With leadership, you motivate people. You give them the place to march to, but they're relatively self-motivated once they know what direction you're all headed in. They're going to figure out how best to get there and contribute to the team getting there. And if they have to be told when to march and they have to be pushed along and flogged, then they don't belong in an early stage startup. So I think being self motivated is really important and as I'd mentioned earlier low ego is also very important and these are pretty rare combinations but high ego people can just destroy the functioning of a team. A lot of these principles are very difficult to adopt once the company is past a certain size.
我觉得这是对的。可能有人会不高兴，说你这是在把这些人叫作机器人。但我不觉得有谁愿意一遍又一遍地做同样的事。每个人都想做新的、独特的、有创造性的事。每个人都可以是艺术家——不是说拿起画笔去画画那种意义上的，而是创造新知识、并享受那个过程的意义上的。只不过可能是在不同的领域里。哪怕只是琢磨怎么“黑”一下 Twitter 或 YouTube 来把你的话传出去，那也是一种创造新知识的形式。比如说，几年前把话传出去的办法大概是写博客文章；现在可能是 X 加 Substack，或者在 TikTok 上做爆款，或者做一个很棒的创业发布视频。目标永远在移动，而人们永远在尝试用创造力去破解那个系统。连融资也是。今天，与其一个一个地去见 VC，我倒会说，如果你的产品本身展示效果好，你更应该去做一个杀手级的发布视频和一个很棒的产品演示，争取让它在网上传开，让它有个性、在嘈杂声中脱颖而出。所以创造力可以应用到任何地方。我在人身上还看重的另一点，是自我驱动。也就是你不用告诉他们该做什么，你不用去推着他们，问“嘿，你这周完成了什么？”那是 Elon 那个著名的问题，我觉得是个很棒的问题，但它本质上仍然是一个管理者的问题，是经理的问题，不是领导者的问题。靠领导力，你是去激励人们，你给他们一个要进军的方向，但一旦他们知道大家共同前进的方向是什么，他们就相对是自我驱动的。他们会自己想出怎样最好地抵达那里、并为团队抵达那里做出贡献。而如果一个人必须被告知什么时候迈步、必须被推着走、被鞭策着走，那他就不属于一家早期创业公司。所以我觉得自我驱动真的非常重要。还有就是我前面提过的，低自我（low ego）也非常重要，这些是相当稀有的组合，但高自我的人能彻底毁掉一个团队的运转。这些原则里有很多，一旦公司过了某个规模，就很难再采纳了。
[32:40] Nivi
For example, you could have the criteria saying I'm only going to work with self-motivated people. I'm only going to work with people who don't need a lot of direction. So, I can work with as many of them as possible and I don't have to look over their shoulder all the time. But if you already have 40 or 50 people in the company, odds are you've already hired a bunch of these people. Then what are you going to do? A mass layoff based on what? Some fuzzy feeling about motivation. How much conviction do you have? Probably not enough. So, it's not only that the team you build is a company you build. Literally the founders's personality is the company because your principles and your non-negotiables and your values dictate who you're going to hire. The best founders have extreme taste in people and in products. They are extremely judgy. For example, in my current company, I have extreme taste about investors. I won't take money from any VC. I don't respect most VCs. They're just money managers pushing money around. A lot of them like taking credit for other people's work. I've had bad encounters with VCs in the past. There's no VC who's going to sit on my board and give me advice, which I probably haven't already heard. So, what am I going to recruit a VC for? I'm going to have very extreme taste about a VC. My co-founder has extreme taste about builders. I have extreme taste about marketers and sellers and copywriting. I'm never going to hire a marketing person who can't outright me. And that's a rare person.
比如说，你可以定下一个标准，说我只跟自我驱动的人共事，我只跟那些不需要很多指挥的人共事，这样我就能跟尽可能多的这种人合作，而不用时时刻刻盯着他们。但如果你公司里已经有了 40、50 个人，很可能你早就已经招了一堆不是这样的人。那你要怎么办？基于什么去搞大规模裁员？基于某种关于“有没有干劲”的模糊感觉？你有多少把握？大概不够。所以这不仅仅是说“你打造的团队就是你打造的公司”。从字面意义上说，创始人的人格就是这家公司，因为你的原则、你不可妥协的底线、你的价值观，决定了你会招什么样的人。最好的创始人对人、对产品都有极致的品味。他们极其挑剔。比如说在我现在这家公司，我对投资人有极致的品味。我不会从任何 VC 那里拿钱。我不尊重大多数 VC，他们不过是把钱倒来倒去的资金管理者，他们当中很多人喜欢把别人的功劳揽到自己身上。我过去跟 VC 有过一些不愉快的交往。没有哪个 VC 能坐在我的董事会里、给我一个我大概率还没听过的建议。那我招个 VC 进来图什么呢？我对 VC 会有非常极致的品味。我的联合创始人对建造者有极致的品味。我对营销人、销售人和文案有极致的品味。我绝不会招一个在写作上写不过我的市场人员，而那样的人很稀有。
[34:01] Nivi
It helps to be very judgy. You do want to be very opinionated. Anyone who tells you to listen to others and build consensus and gather feedback is implying that you're weak, you're not good enough at what you do, or that you have the wrong approach. Good founders are incredibly opinionated. The problem is the bad founders are very opinionated, too. There's a lot of ways people try to assess whether someone has the ability to create new knowledge. Peter Teal has his famous question, what important truth do very few people agree with you on? He's trying to find out if that person has opinions of their own. Do they have their own ideas? I will sometimes ask people whether they have any unique theories that they've come up with about their hobbies. Even if it's about squash, I've heard people give me unique theories about squash. If you are able to generate new knowledge, you will start coming up with ideas about how squash should be played and taught within the first hour of learning squash. They might not all be right, but you will come up with novel theories. Naval also has one question he mentioned on Twitter recently, which I would sum up as, "What do you care about that isn't popular?" That's another way of trying to assess whether that person has the ability to generate their own ideas. Teal's famous question about a secret is really from an investor's perspective where he's hunting for the unique bet that the business is making because he doesn't want competition. As he says, competition is for losers. As we learn in basic microeconomics, competition reduces profits to zero. And he wants to make a unique bet or as Mike Maples early investor likes to say, non-conensus and right. But that's for investing. I think in everyday work, you want to work with people who are very good at distilling the insight from their work on a constant basis. Malcolm Gladwell popularized 10,000 hours.
挑剔一点是有帮助的。你确实应该非常有主见。任何一个告诉你要去听取别人意见、要去建立共识、要去收集反馈的人，言下之意都是说你很弱、你在自己做的事上还不够好、或者你的路子不对。好的创始人都是极其有主见的。问题在于，糟糕的创始人也非常有主见。人们尝试用很多方法去评估一个人是否有创造新知识的能力。Peter Thiel 有他那个著名的问题：有哪个重要的真相，是很少有人同意你的？他想搞清楚这个人有没有自己的观点，他们有没有自己的想法。我有时会问别人，关于他们的爱好，他们有没有想出过什么独特的理论。哪怕是关于壁球，我也听过有人给我讲关于壁球的独特理论。如果你有能力产生新知识，那么在学壁球的头一个小时之内，你就会开始冒出一些关于壁球该怎么打、该怎么教的想法。它们不一定都对，但你会想出一些新颖的理论。Naval 最近在 Twitter 上也提到过他自己的一个问题，我把它概括为：“你在乎什么不那么受欢迎的东西？”这是另一种试图评估这个人有没有能力产生自己想法的办法。Thiel 那个关于“秘密”的著名问题，其实是从投资人的视角出发的，他是在搜寻这家企业正在下的那个独特的赌注，因为他不想要竞争。正如他所说，竞争是失败者的游戏。我们在基础微观经济学里学到，竞争会把利润压到零。他想下一个独特的赌注，或者像早期投资人 Mike Maples 喜欢说的那样——“非共识且正确”。但那是针对投资而言的。我觉得在日常工作中，你想合作的是那种非常擅长持续不断地从自己工作中提炼出洞见的人。Malcolm Gladwell 让“一万小时”这个说法广为流传。
[36:03] Naval
10,000 hours is directionally correct, but it's not exactly correct. It implies that if you spend 10,000 hours doing something, you get mastery. Let's put aside whether 10,000 is the right number or not. It's not just hours put in, it's iterations. How many learning loops do you have that drive the learning curve? What is an iteration? Iteration is when you do something and then you look at the result, you test the results somehow, ideally against a free market, nature or physics. Then you ask what part of this experiment worked or not. And then based on that, you make a new creative guess on how to improve that thing and you do it again. The number of times you can do that rotation, that iteration, the faster you're going to learn. That's the curve you want to be on. Great people will distill insights from every iteration. So it's not as simple as finding one secret. Yes, every company makes a secret bet. They have a theory as to how the world is going to work out that other people don't necessarily have end mass or it's not conventional wisdom yet. But along the way, they're going to discover thousands of insights and each one will build upon the last and that's all going to be driven by the number of iterations they can do. One of the problems you run into when scaling a startup is you hire someone who hires someone and that person is used to a well-defined job at a larger company. They're used to getting credit for their work. They're divorced enough from the end outcome that all they have to do is kind of impress their manager. The principal agent problem. So now what they want is for their work to not be thrown away. A common objection you get when your company scales beyond 20, 30, 40, 50 people is, "We don't want to try this because it's probably not going to work." It's actually probably the number one thing a founder will struggle with as a company scales that they'll come up with more ideas in their organization can execute upon and there will be internal resistance to doing things because nine out of 10 ideas are halfbaked. But really, you're in a search process, you're in a learning process, you're in a discovery process, you're trying to find the thing that works and you do have to try a lot of things. And a good founder will have the ability to iterate on many things and throw away the things that didn't work because learning necessarily involves failure. Remember all new information starts as misinformation. It starts as not being obviously true. And so it's accused of being misinformation.
“一万小时定律”大方向是对的，但并不精确。它暗示只要你花一万小时做一件事，就能达到精通。我们先不管一万这个数字到底对不对。关键不只是投入了多少小时，而是迭代了多少次。你有多少个学习闭环在驱动你的学习曲线？什么叫一次迭代？迭代就是你做一件事，然后看结果，用某种方式去检验结果——最好是拿到自由市场、大自然或物理规律面前去验证。然后你去问：这次实验里哪部分起作用了、哪部分没起作用。再基于此，你对“怎么改进这件事”做出新的创造性猜想，然后再做一遍。你能完成这个循环、这个迭代的次数越多，你学得就越快。这才是你想处于的那条曲线。厉害的人会从每一次迭代中提炼出洞见。所以这事没那么简单，不是找到一个秘密就完事了。没错，每家公司都下了一个秘密的赌注，他们对世界将如何运转有一套别人不一定有的理论，那理论还没成为大众共识。但在这个过程中，他们会发现成千上万个洞见，每一个都建立在上一个之上，而这一切都取决于他们能做多少次迭代。扩张一家创业公司时，你会遇到一个问题：你招了一个人，那个人又招了一个人，而那个人习惯了在大公司里做一份定义明确的工作。他们习惯了因自己的工作而获得认可。他们离最终结果足够远，所以他们要做的只是去取悦自己的经理，这就是“委托代理问题”。于是现在他们想要的是，自己的工作别被丢掉。当公司规模超过二三十、四五十人时，你常会听到一种反对声音：“我们不想试这个，因为它八成不会成。”这其实可能是创始人在公司扩张时面临的头号难题——他们在组织里能想出的点子，比组织能执行的还要多，而且会有内部阻力，因为十个点子里有九个是半成品。但其实你是在一个搜索的过程中，一个学习的过程中，一个探索发现的过程中，你在努力找到那个行得通的东西，你确实必须得多试。好的创始人有能力在很多事情上做迭代，把没成的东西扔掉，因为学习必然包含失败。记住，所有新信息一开始都是“错误信息”。它一开始并不是显然正确的，所以它会被指责为错误信息。
[38:23] Naval
Eventually over time it's proven right or wrong. If it's right then it's information you can then build upon. A good founder will struggle with exactly this. My advice would be power through it. Figure out what is your organizational capacity to get things done. Get people comfortable with the idea that most of their work is going to be thrown away. It's all experimentation and it's fine for it to be thrown away and get comfortable with repeated small failure as long as you distill the insights along the way. Baji Shrinavasan has another way of putting this which is wandering through the idea maze. You're taking left turns and right turns and backtracking and figuring out what works and what doesn't. It might be in the rough direction where you started out. Although it's an ego trip to think that you're always going to be moving in the right direction. The biggest impediment here is pride. People stay locked into their original vision and they don't properly navigate the idea maze. It's about taking lots and lots of repeated steps and backtracks and side turns until you find your way through the maze. This is why even though from the outside it looks like what a company has done is trivial and it's going to be easy for competitors to catch up to them and it's a common thing to see a startup break out and then you say, "Well, that big company's just going to crush it." No. As long as that startup keeps wandering through the idea maze, they're actually much deeper down through the maze than the big company is. Even if the big company copies them, by the time it gets to where the startup is, the startup has moved way ahead. It's in a different part of the maze. The big company can't resist the urge to explore side hallways that the startup has already explored years ago and knows are dead ends. It's this ability to iterate very quickly and to learn from it and constantly generate new insights and secrets. That is a secret to success.
随着时间推移，它最终会被证明是对的或错的。如果是对的，那它就是你可以继续往上搭建的信息。好的创始人会恰恰在这件事上挣扎。我的建议是：硬扛过去。搞清楚你的组织把事情做成的能力到底有多大。让大家接受这个观念——他们大部分工作都会被丢掉。一切都是实验，被丢掉是没问题的，要适应反复的小失败，只要你一路上把洞见提炼出来就行。Balaji Srinivasan 还有另一种说法，叫“在点子迷宫里穿行”。你左转、右转、回头，搞清楚什么行得通、什么行不通。它可能大致还是朝着你最初出发的方向，不过认为自己永远会朝正确方向前进，那是一种自我膨胀。这里最大的障碍是骄傲。人们死守自己最初的愿景，没能正确地在点子迷宫里导航。关键在于走大量反复的步子、不断回头、不断侧转，直到你穿过这座迷宫。这就是为什么，尽管从外面看，一家公司做的事情显得很微不足道、竞争对手好像很容易就能追上来——常见的情形是，一家创业公司突然跑出来，然后你就说：“那家大公司分分钟碾压它。”不会的。只要那家创业公司持续在点子迷宫里穿行，它其实比大公司深入迷宫多得多。即使大公司抄它，等大公司走到创业公司当初的位置时，创业公司早已遥遥领先了，它已经在迷宫的另一个部分了。大公司忍不住要去探那些侧边走廊，而那些走廊创业公司几年前就探过了，知道是死胡同。正是这种快速迭代、从中学习、不断产生新洞见和新秘密的能力，才是成功的秘诀。
[40:00] Naval
It's not just the one simple secret where you ask the founder, what is the thing you believe that nobody else does. It's literally every single day you figure out something new that builds upon something old and you realize, oh, things don't work like I thought they would. They actually work a different way.
它不只是那个简单的秘密——你去问创始人“你相信什么别人都不相信的东西”。它实实在在是：每一天你都搞明白一些新东西，它建立在某个旧东西之上，然后你意识到，哦，事情并不像我以为的那样运转，它们其实是以另一种方式运转的。
[40:16] Nivi
The side effect that you have to be willing to tolerate is that great teams are throwing away most of their work. To me, the missing ingredient in most people's recruiting, is intolerance. You should really just treat every employee in the company, including yourself, as an enemy agent that's trying to destroy the company by bringing mediocre talent into the business. It's unfortunately just human nature.
你必须愿意容忍的一个副作用是：厉害的团队会把自己大部分工作都扔掉。在我看来，大多数人在招聘上缺的那味“配料”，是不容忍。你真应该把公司里的每一个员工，包括你自己，都当成一个企图把公司毁掉的“敌方特工”——他们正通过把平庸的人才带进公司来搞破坏。不幸的是，这就是人性。
[40:42] Naval
My co-founder and I have a new criterion in our company, geniuses only. It's a harsh word, but it sets a very high bar. Now you can just look around for who's not a genius. The only way you're going to attract geniuses, whatever that term means to you, is by having a company full of geniuses. And if someone's not a genius, then either you're transitioning into the phase where you can no longer hire geniuses and you just need to scale up for whatever reason, or you need to show that person the door because you hired them prematurely for the kind of company you're trying to build. Now, this is very difficult. You're lucky if you can hire one genius a month. you as a founder have to identify them and do whatever it takes to recruit them and motivate them. So it's inherently self-limiting given that a person probably isn't going to stick around your company for more than 3, four, 5 years. Although in some great companies, people stick around for decades. At that attrition rate, you're talking about a 30 to 50 person company. But if you can even assemble a team of 10 geniuses, you're way ahead of everybody else. At most companies, the successful ones, the founders and maybe a few early people are at the genius level. But in the urge and the rush to scale, that gets drowned out too quickly. I think genius is actually even a bit of an underused term. I think everybody does have a zone of genius. You want to find people who have already found their zone of genius or they have the capability, they have the slope to be able to find their zone of genius or get close to it while they're still working at your company.
我和我的联合创始人在我们公司定了一条新标准：只要天才。这个词很刺耳，但它立了一个非常高的标杆。现在你只要环顾四周看谁不是天才就行了。要吸引天才——无论这个词对你意味着什么——唯一的办法就是让公司里全是天才。如果某个人不是天才，那要么是你正在过渡到一个你再也招不到天才、只能因为某些原因单纯扩张规模的阶段，要么就是你得请那个人走人，因为对于你想打造的这种公司来说，你太早把他招进来了。这事非常难。你一个月能招到一个天才就算走运了。作为创始人，你得识别出他们，并不惜一切去招募他们、激励他们。所以这本身就有自我设限的性质，因为一个人多半不会在你公司待超过三、四、五年。当然在某些伟大的公司里，人会待上几十年。按那种流失率算，你说的也就是一个三十到五十人的公司。但哪怕你只能凑齐一支十个天才的团队，你也已经远远领先所有人了。在大多数公司里，那些成功的公司，创始人也许加上少数几个早期成员是天才级别的。但在扩张的冲动和仓促中，这种天才的浓度太快就被稀释掉了。我觉得“天才”这个词其实还被用得不够多。我认为每个人确实都有自己的“天才区”。你想找的是那些已经找到自己天才区的人，或者他们有这个能力、有这个上升斜率，能在还为你公司效力时找到自己的天才区、或接近它。
[42:12] Naval
As an investor also, I have an unfair advantage. I've often worked with people where it hasn't worked out in a company and I have to let them go, but I've gotten to know them well enough that I recognize their zone of genius and I can say, "This is not where you're operating in your zone of genius, but if you ever end up doing this other thing, let me know cuz I'll probably want to invest." And that has actually worked out reasonably well in a couple of cases. So, you're right. People often just need to be in the right environment. The thing you can't fix is motivation. If someone's just unmotivated, if they don't want to apply themselves fully, if they have other things going on in their life, then you just have to cut them off at this point. One of the things that's less talked about is often you'll meet the right person at the wrong time. They just have internal problems, life problems, home problems, health problems, things that are going on that make them not capable of functioning at the level that you need. And that's a sad situation, but it happens all the time. On a related note, people say, "Oh, I'm burned out. I need to take a break for a month or two and recharge. In my experience, that's largely not true. Usually, burnout is a sign you're working on something that either isn't working or you don't enjoy the work fundamentally. Just taking time off won't fix it. If you're really enjoying what you do, generally that'll give you more energy and more motivation. There are rare cases like I know Elon is famous for flogging his teams until 4 in the morning and calling staff meetings at odds of the night and doing crazy death marches. That's the culture that he sets and builds. That's fine. In those situations, I could see certain people burning out. But even there, what they're saying is, I cannot sustain this workload in the future. So even there, taking time off doesn't work because when you come back, he's going to put you to task the same way as earlier. So generally, when someone says, "I'm burned out," I just read that as, "I want to quit." even if they don't necessarily realize it themselves.
作为投资人，我还有一个不公平的优势。我常常和一些人共事过，结果在某家公司里没成，我不得不让他们走，但我已经足够了解他们，能认出他们的天才区，于是我可以说：“你现在干的这个不在你的天才区里，但如果你哪天去做另外那件事，告诉我，因为我大概率会想投。”这种做法实际上在好几个案例里效果还相当不错。所以你说得对，人们往往只是需要待在对的环境里。你修不了的那个东西，是动力。如果一个人就是没动力，如果他不愿意全力以赴，如果他生活里有别的事缠身，那到这个点上你就只能跟他切割了。有件事大家谈得比较少：你常常会在错误的时间遇到对的人。他们就是有内部的问题、生活的问题、家庭的问题、健康的问题，种种事情让他们没法在你需要的水平上运转。这是个让人难过的处境，但它一直在发生。相关地，人们会说：“哦，我倦怠了，我得休息一两个月充充电。”以我的经验，这基本上不成立。通常，倦怠是一个信号，说明你在做的事要么没成效，要么你根本不享受这份工作。光是休假并不能修好它。如果你真的享受你做的事，一般来说那会给你更多能量、更多动力。也有罕见的情况，比如我知道 Elon 出了名地把团队压榨到凌晨四点，半夜召开员工会议，搞疯狂的“死亡行军”。那是他设定和构建的文化。这没问题。在那种情形下，我能想象某些人会倦怠。但即便在那里，他们真正想说的是：我未来无法维持这种工作量。所以即便在那里，休假也没用，因为你回来之后，他还是会像之前一样把你往死里使。所以一般来说，当有人说“我倦怠了”，我就直接把它理解为“我想辞职”——哪怕他们自己不一定意识到。
[43:59] Nivi
You have to be careful about who you bring into the organization because they will bring their own sense of aesthetics without even knowing it. They will hire people that are like them without knowing it. For example, at Angel List, one of the people on the team was trying to decide between two consultants that we wanted to hire, and he was picking the wrong one because he was like, I think I'll have more fun with this consultant. The fun one was more like them in their personality and their way of carrying themselves and communicating. My idea of fun is working on great products and succeeding. David Deutsch would say something like, "When you're having fun, you're learning at the edge of your capability to learn." If you are not having fun, what does that mean? You're not getting anything new. You're not learning. If it's anxietyinducing, what does that mean? That means it's beyond your capability. So, if you're operating at the edge of your capability, you're in flow. You're learning, you're doing, you're being stressed enough for it to be interesting, but not so stressed that you're anxious. And it's fun. It may not be fun moment to moment, but when you look back day to day, week to week, month to month, it is fun. What else would you rather be doing than practicing your craft at the highest level of capability at your edge? So, I do think the fun criterion applies to business and to jobs. For example, at my most recent company, the designers are obsessed with design to the point where we are getting a new office space. It's not their job to design it. Nobody asked them to design it. We probably didn't even want them to design it. They can't help but design it down to a tea. It's meticulous. Similarly, I asked them for a book in which we could just collect various checkpoints along the way of the work that we're doing. The people that we have, they're designing their own book binding. They got their own printer to print it on a special paper. They're obsessive. They can't 80% design something. Warren Buffett famously refused to put a bet on a golf game because he doesn't bet. He doesn't take risks. He only does short things. That's his whole model. The same way a good engineer will not let themselves write a shoddy piece of code. And I know you want to be practical and you want to cut corners and you want to get things out the door.
你必须小心你往组织里带进什么人，因为他们会在自己都没意识到的情况下，带进他们自己那套审美。他们会在不知不觉中招进和自己一样的人。举个例子，在 AngelList，团队里有个人要在我们想招的两个顾问之间做选择，他选错了，因为他想的是：我觉得跟这个顾问共事会更有趣。那个“有趣”的顾问在性格、举止、沟通方式上更像他本人。我对“有趣”的定义是：做出色的产品并取得成功。David Deutsch 大概会说这样的话：“当你在享受乐趣时，你正在自己学习能力的边缘学习。”如果你没在享受乐趣，那意味着什么？意味着你没得到任何新东西，你没在学习。如果它让人焦虑，那又意味着什么？意味着它超出了你的能力范围。所以，如果你在自己能力的边缘运转，你就处于心流之中，你在学、在做，被施加了足够的压力让它有意思，但又没大到让你焦虑，而且它很有趣。它可能不是每时每刻都有趣，但当你回头看，一天天、一周周、一月月地看，它是有趣的。还有什么比在你能力的最高水平、在你的边缘上磨炼你的手艺更值得做的事呢？所以我确实认为这个“有趣”的标准也适用于商业和工作。比如说，在我最近的一家公司，设计师们对设计痴迷到这种程度——我们要弄一个新的办公空间，设计它不是他们的工作，没人让他们设计，我们大概甚至都不想让他们设计。但他们就是忍不住，要把它设计到极致，一丝不苟。同样地，我让他们做一本册子，用来收集我们工作过程中的各种节点记录。我们的这些人，他们在设计自己的装订方式，他们搞来自己的打印机，用一种特殊的纸来印。他们就是这么执着。他们没法只把一样东西设计到 80%。Warren Buffett 有个著名的事，他拒绝在一场高尔夫比赛上下注，因为他不赌，他不冒险，他只做胜算大的事，这就是他整套模式。同样地，一个好的工程师不会允许自己写出一段粗制滥造的代码。我知道你想务实，你想抄近路，你想把东西尽快推出门。
[46:14] Naval
But a truly great engineer is not going to create something shoddy. A great designer is not going to halfway design something. I will delete tweets that have 10,000 likes on them because I catch a grammar or spelling error or I think of a better way to formulate it. I'll just kill it. I don't care about the views because I want it to be done just right. People make fun of me on Twitter sometimes because I'll put out a tweet, then I'll change my mind and I'll delete it after it's gotten a lot of traction and I'll reverse the order of two words or I'll change one word. Then I'll wake up the next morning pass the edit window and I decide I like the original one and I'll post the original one back up and I've lost all the virality and all the momentum. But I don't care. I don't want to be associated with a slipshot statement. It has to be correct and incompressible. It has to say something true to me in an interesting way. And that's more important that the art is correct than that it's popular.
但一个真正伟大的工程师不会做出粗糙的东西。一个伟大的设计师不会把东西只设计一半。我会删掉已经有一万个赞的推文，因为我发现了一个语法或拼写错误，或者我想到了一个更好的表述方式，我就直接把它毙了。我不在乎浏览量，因为我想让它做得恰到好处。Twitter 上有人有时会嘲笑我，因为我发一条推文，然后改主意，在它已经火起来之后把它删掉，把两个词的顺序调一下，或者改一个词。然后第二天早上醒来，过了编辑窗口期，我又决定我喜欢原来那条，于是把原版重新发出来，结果我把所有的传播性和势头都丢了。但我不在乎。我不想跟一个马虎的表述扯上关系。它必须是正确的、不可压缩的。它对我来说必须以一种有意思的方式说出某种真实的东西。作品正确，比它受欢迎更重要。
[47:14] Nivi
Yeah. There's an old quote that people who are not good at their jobs, you ask them to do something, they try and do it and then you have to check their work. The best people, you ask them to do something and they come back with something that you never could have come up with yourself and never could have imagined. It's high agency people, founder mode, whatever you want to call it, but it's people who take responsibility for doing the job the best way possible. You just have to communicate to them what it is that you think needs to be done. And it's not just communication. Communication is a management thing. It's a leadership thing. So you also have to motivate them, not in some cheesy rahrra way, but to help them understand the insight you have as to why you think it's so important. And if you think it's really important, then it's your job to either convince them equally that it's important or to be talked out of it yourself because you might have made a mistake. And then once they're convinced it's important, they're high agency enough that they will just go and do it in the absolute best way possible. And to your point about creativity, they'll come up with new knowledge and new creativity along the way to figure out how to solve the problem. And they'll solve it in a way you didn't even know. Sometimes you're in a conversation with someone and a disingenuous person is going to latch on to the exact words you said and jump on you. Whereas a smart person is going to understand the intention of what you're actually trying to say. And a highly intelligent person will often answer the question not that you asked, but the question you really wanted to ask or you meant to ask. If I was going to sum up this whole conversation, the prime directive of a startup is to never compromise on talent. I would rather take a shortterm hit on customer experience than take a short or long-term hit on the quality of the team. I would summarize it in two words, curate people. And the philosophy that I have going forward in my current company and all subsequent ones is that I only want to work with geniuses. I only want to work with self-motivated people. I only want to work with low ego people. I only want to work with people who are builders and engineers and artists and are at the top of their craft. And that's all there is to it.
对。有一句老话：那些不擅长自己工作的人，你让他们做一件事，他们试着去做，然后你还得检查他们的活儿。而最厉害的人，你让他们做一件事，他们带回来的东西是你自己永远想不出来、永远想象不到的。这就是高能动性的人，“创始人模式”，你想怎么叫都行，但本质就是那种会为“把活儿用最好的方式做出来”承担责任的人。你只需要把你认为需要做的是什么传达给他们。而且这不只是沟通。沟通是管理的事，是领导力的事。所以你还得激励他们——不是用那种肉麻的喊口号的方式，而是帮他们理解你拥有的那个洞见：你为什么觉得它如此重要。如果你觉得它真的很重要，那你的工作要么是同样地说服他们相信它重要，要么是被他们说服而放弃——因为你可能搞错了。然后一旦他们被说服相信它重要，他们的能动性足够高，他们就会直接去用绝对最好的方式把它做出来。说到你提的创造力这一点，他们会在过程中产生新的知识和新的创造力，去想出如何解决这个问题。他们会用一种你都不知道的方式解决它。有时候你在和某个人对话，一个不真诚的人会死抠你说出来的那几个字，跳出来揪着你不放。而一个聪明人会理解你真正想表达的意图。一个高度聪明的人常常回答的不是你问出来的那个问题，而是你真正想问、或本意要问的那个问题。如果让我总结整场对话，创业公司的“最高指令”就是：在人才上永不妥协。我宁愿在客户体验上承受短期的打击，也不愿在团队质量上承受短期或长期的打击。我会用两个词来概括它：策展人。我在我目前这家公司、以及之后所有公司里都会秉持的哲学是：我只想和天才共事，我只想和有自我驱动力的人共事，我只想和低自我（low ego）的人共事，我只想和那些是建造者、工程师、艺术家、并且站在自己手艺顶端的人共事。就这么简单。
[49:31] Naval
You just have to be willing to curate people. We haven't talked about firing, by the way. But that's the other side of it. You will always make mistakes. Sourcing is hard. Recruiting is hard. Leadership is hard. I don't like the word management because great people don't need to be managed. But firing, letting go of people is hard, too. But you have to do it. You're never going to have a 100% hit rate. Not even close to it. If you're not firing, it means that you're diluting yourself. So, you do need to let people go who don't match up. Otherwise, you're only going to recruit people who are weaker than them, and your company will slowly deteriorate. One other side note on hiring geniuses. Only hire geniuses. That's the current motto. Obviously, aspirational, but you're not trying to fill slots. You're not trying to fill roles. That is a common trap you fall into. Well, I need to fill a marketing role, so I'm just going to interview a bunch of marketing people and then I'll hire the best one out of that set. Nope. If they're not a genius, don't hire them. Just be aware as a founder of what are the rough capabilities you need and then look for geniuses who can fill those capabilities. And if you find a genius who doesn't fill any of those capabilities, but is somehow hirable, hire them right away. So, collect geniuses, warehouse them. You'll never regret it. Your challenge may be to keep them interested because you may not have the right fit for them. But great people have a way of identifying whatever the problem is and getting involved even if it's not their quote unquote job. So when you find someone who's truly great, you just hire them anyway if you can, regardless of whether you have a slot or not. It's a mistake to try and fit great people into pegs and squares and triangles and holes. The real geniuses are incredibly idiosyncratic. They don't resemble each other. You cannot fit them into a box. By trying to fill a role, you're inherently trying to fit somebody into a box. So, I don't even think you necessarily want to hire for roles. Yes, you want people to have skill sets that matter for your company, but good people are much more flexible than these artificial rigid boxes that we make out, which are more of a function of HR and large companies. Small companies should not be applying large company practices that come from multiund or multi,000 person companies. Things like HR and roles and compensation brackets and things of that nature. As a founder, you're always hacking the system. So, you always have to be incredibly flexible on your feet. And when you recognize genius, just recruit
你必须愿意去“策展”人。顺便说一句，我们还没聊到解雇。但那是这件事的另一面。你总会犯错。寻源很难，招聘很难，领导力很难。我不喜欢“管理”这个词，因为厉害的人不需要被管理。但解雇、让人离开，也很难。可你必须做。你永远不可能有 100% 的命中率，差得远呢。如果你不开除人，那意味着你在稀释自己。所以你确实需要让那些不匹配的人离开。否则，你只会招到比他们更弱的人，你的公司会慢慢退化。关于招天才再补充一个旁注：只招天才。这是当前的座右铭。显然这是个理想化的目标，但你不是在填坑位，你不是在填岗位。这是一个常见的陷阱。“嗯，我需要填一个市场营销的岗位，那我就面一堆做市场的人，然后从这批人里招最好的那个。”不行。如果他们不是天才，就别招他们。作为创始人，你只需大致清楚你需要哪些能力，然后去找能填补这些能力的天才。如果你找到一个天才，他填补不了你需要的任何能力，但不知怎的就是可以招进来，那就立刻招他。所以，收集天才，把他们“囤”起来。你永远不会后悔。你的挑战可能是怎么让他们保持兴趣，因为你可能没有适合他们的位置。但厉害的人有办法识别出问题所在，并参与进去——哪怕那不是他们所谓的“本职工作”。所以当你找到一个真正厉害的人，只要你能，你就直接把他招了，不管你有没有空缺位置。试图把厉害的人塞进各种榫头、方块、三角形和洞里，是一个错误。真正的天才极其特立独行，他们彼此都不像。你没法把他们装进一个盒子。一旦你试图填补一个岗位，你本质上就是在试图把某个人塞进一个盒子。所以我甚至觉得你不一定想按岗位来招人。是的，你想要人具备对你公司重要的技能组合，但好的人比我们划出来的这些人为的、僵硬的盒子要灵活得多——那些盒子更多是 HR 和大公司的产物。小公司不该套用那些来自几千上万人公司的大公司做法，比如 HR、岗位、薪酬区间之类的东西。作为创始人，你总是在“黑”这个系统。所以你必须随时极其灵活、能临场应变。当你识别出天才，就直接去招募——