（本文为杰西卡·利文斯顿所著《Founders at Work》一书的序言。）
(Foreword to Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work.)
据说，短跑运动员在刚冲出起跑线时速度最快，之后的整场比赛其实都在减速。而赢家只是减速最慢的那个人。大多数创业公司也是如此。最早期的阶段通常是生产力最高的时期。正是在这个阶段，他们会诞生真正伟大的创意。想象一下，当苹果公司 100% 的员工只有史蒂夫·乔布斯和史蒂夫·沃兹尼亚克两个人时，那是一种怎样的景象。
Apparently sprinters reach their highest speed right out of the blocks, and spend the rest of the race slowing down. The winners slow down the least. It's that way with most startups too. The earliest phase is usually the most productive. That's when they have the really big ideas. Imagine what Apple was like when 100% of its employees were either Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak.
这个阶段最引人注目的一点在于，它与大多数人对“商业”的想象完全不同。如果你去探寻人们脑海中（或是图库里）代表“商业”的画面，你会看到西装革履的人群、围坐在会议桌旁神情严肃的团队、PowerPoint 演示文稿，以及人们互相撰写并传阅的厚重报告。早期的创业公司则恰恰相反。然而，它们或许才是整个 economic 体中生产力最高的部分。
The striking thing about this phase is that it's completely different from most people's idea of what business is like. If you looked in people's heads (or stock photo collections) for images representing "business," you'd get images of people dressed up in suits, groups sitting around conference tables looking serious, Powerpoint presentations, people producing thick reports for one another to read. Early stage startups are the exact opposite of this. And yet they're probably the most productive part of the whole economy.
为什么会有这种反差？我认为这里有一个普适的规律：人们在实际表现上投入的精力越少，就越会花心思在外观上进行补偿。而且，他们为了让自己看起来很厉害而耗费的精力，往往反而削弱了其实际表现。几年前我读过一篇文章，一家汽车杂志对某款量产车的“运动版”进行了改装，以求跑出最快的四分之一英里起步加速。你知道他们是怎么做的吗？他们拆掉了制造商为了让车子看起来很快而加装的所有垃圾配件。
Why the disconnect? I think there's a general principle at work here: the less energy people expend on performance, the more they expend on appearances to compensate. More often than not the energy they expend on seeming impressive makes their actual performance worse. A few years ago I read an article in which a car magazine modified the "sports" model of some production car to get the fastest possible standing quarter mile. You know how they did it? They cut off all the crap the manufacturer had bolted onto the car to make it look fast.
商业的运转方式也像那辆车一样出了问题。为了让自己看起来高效而付出的努力，不仅白白浪费了精力，实际上还降低了组织的效率。比如西装。西装并不能帮助人们更好地思考。我敢打赌，大公司的大多数高管思考最深的时候，是在周日早上醒来，穿着睡衣下楼冲咖啡的那一刻。那才是灵感迸发的时候。试想一下，如果人们在工作时也能如此高效地思考，公司会变成什么样？在创业公司里，人们确实做到了，至少有一半的时间是这样。（有一半的时间你因为服务器宕机而处于恐慌之中，但另一半的时间里，你正在进行深度的思考，而这种深度是大多数人只有在周日早上独自静坐时才能达到的。）
Business is broken the same way that car was. The effort that goes into looking productive is not merely wasted, but actually makes organizations less productive. Suits, for example. Suits do not help people to think better. I bet most executives at big companies do their best thinking when they wake up on Sunday morning and go downstairs in their bathrobe to make a cup of coffee. That's when you have ideas. Just imagine what a company would be like if people could think that well at work. People do in startups, at least some of the time. (Half the time you're in a panic because your servers are on fire, but the other half you're thinking as deeply as most people only get to sitting alone on a Sunday morning.)
创业公司与大公司里那些所谓的“高效率”之间的其他差异，也同样是这个道理。然而，传统的“专业主义”观念对我们的思想束缚是如此之深，以至于连创业公司的创始人也深受影响。在我们创业时，当有外人来访，我们会极力让自己显得“专业”。我们会打扫办公室，穿上更好的衣服，尽量安排很多人在传统的办公时间里在场。但事实上，写出好代码并不是穿着体面的人在办公时间坐在干净的桌子前完成的。它是由穿着邋遢的人（我曾因只裹着一条浴巾写代码而臭名昭著）在凌晨两点、堆满垃圾的办公室里写出来的。但没有哪个访客能理解这一点。甚至连那些本该具备慧眼、能识辨真正生产力的投资人也无法理解。甚至连我们自己也受到了传统观念的影响。我们觉得自己像个骗子，认为自己是在完全不专业的情况下侥幸成功的。这就好像我们造出了一辆 F1 赛车，却因为它的外观不像一辆普通的轿车而感到有些难为情。
Ditto for most of the other differences between startups and what passes for productivity in big companies. And yet conventional ideas of professionalism have such an iron grip on our minds that even startup founders are affected by them. In our startup, when outsiders came to visit we tried hard to seem "professional." We'd clean up our offices, wear better clothes, try to arrange that a lot of people were there during conventional office hours. In fact, programming didn't get done by well-dressed people at clean desks during office hours. It got done by badly dressed people (I was notorious for programmming wearing just a towel) in offices strewn with junk at 2 in the morning. But no visitor would understand that. Not even investors, who are supposed to be able to recognize real productivity when they see it. Even we were affected by the conventional wisdom. We thought of ourselves as impostors, succeeding despite being totally unprofessional. It was as if we'd created a Formula 1 car but felt sheepish because it didn't look like a car was supposed to look.
在汽车界，至少还有一些人知道，高性能赛车长得像 F1 赛车，而不是一辆装了巨大轮毂、后备箱上用螺栓固定着假尾翼的家用轿车。为什么在商业界就不是这样呢？大概是因为创业公司规模太小了。真正戏剧性的增长发生在一个创业公司只有三四个人的时候，所以只有这三四个人能亲眼目睹这一过程；而成千上万的人看到的，则是波音或菲利普莫里斯这种巨头公司的商业运作方式。
In the car world, there are at least some people who know that a high performance car looks like a Formula 1 racecar, not a sedan with giant rims and a fake spoiler bolted to the trunk. Why not in business? Probably because startups are so small. The really dramatic growth happens when a startup only has three or four people, so only three or four people see that, whereas tens of thousands see business as it's practiced by Boeing or Philip Morris.
这本书可以帮助解决这个问题，它向所有人展示了迄今为止只有少数人才能看到的东西：创业公司第一年究竟在发生什么。这才是真正的生产力该有的样子。这就是那辆 F1 赛车。它看起来很怪，但跑得极快。
This book can help fix that problem, by showing everyone what, till now, only a handful people got to see: what happens in the first year of a startup. This is what real productivity looks like. This is the Formula 1 racecar. It looks weird, but it goes fast.
当然，大公司不可能完全照搬这些创业公司的做法。在大公司里，政治斗争总是更多，个人决策的空间也更小。但看清创业公司的真实面貌，至少能为其他组织指明努力的方向。也许用不了多久，情况就会发生转变：不再是创业公司试图让自己看起来更像成熟的大企业，而是大企业努力让自己看起来更像创业公司。那将是一件好事。
Of course, big companies won't be able to do everything these startups do. In big companies there's always going to be more politics, and less scope for individual decisions. But seeing what startups are really like will at least show other organizations what to aim for. The time may soon be coming when instead of startups trying to seem more corporate, corporations will try to seem more like startups. That would be a good thing.