保罗·格雷厄姆：我曾做过的事

上大学前，我在校外主要钻研的两件事是写作和编程。我不写论文，而是写当时初学写作的人应该写的东西——现在可能依然如此——短篇小说。我的故事糟糕透顶，几乎没有情节，只有情感强烈的角色，我以为这样就能显得深刻。

Before college, the two main things I worked on outside of school were writing and programming. I didn't write essays. I wrote what beginning writers were supposed to write then, and probably still are short stories. My stories were awful. They had hardly any plot, just characters with strong feelings, which I imagined made them deep.

我最初尝试编写的程序是在IBM 1401上运行的，当时我们学区用它进行所谓的数据处理。那时我九年级，大约13、14岁。这台机器恰好位于我们初中地下室，我和朋友Rich Draves获准使用它。那里就像迷你版邦德反派巢穴，各种外形奇特的机器——CPU、磁盘驱动器、打印机、卡片阅读器——排列在抬高的地板上，沐浴在刺眼的荧光灯下。我们使用的语言是早期版本的Fortran。

The first programs I tried writing were on the IBM 1,401 that our school district used for what was then called data processing. This was in ninth grade, so I was 13 or 14. The school district's 1,401 happened to be in the basement of our junior high school, and my friend Rich Draves and I got permission to use it. It was like a mini Bond villain's lair down there with all these alien looking machines, CPU, disk drives, printer, card reader sitting up on a raised floor under bright fluorescent lights. The language we used was an early version of Fortran.

你得先在穿孔卡片上键入程序，然后叠放在读卡器里，按下按钮将程序载入内存运行。结果通常是通过那台噪音惊人的打印机输出内容。我对1401感到困惑，不知该如何使用。现在回想起来，当时确实也做不了什么。

You had to type programs on punch cards, then stack them in the card reader and press a button to load the program into memory and run it. The result would ordinarily be to print something on the spectacularly loud printer. I was puzzled by the 14 o one. I couldn't figure out what to do with it. And in retrospect, there's not much I could have done with it.

程序唯一的输入方式是通过穿孔卡片存储的数据，而我手头没有任何数据卡片。另一个选择是编写不依赖输入的程序，比如计算圆周率近似值，但我的数学水平不足以完成这类有趣的任务。所以毫不奇怪，我记不起自己写过的任何程序——因为它们确实没什么价值。最清晰的记忆是当我的某个程序未能终止时，我才知道原来程序可以不结束运行。

The only form of input to programs was data stored on punched cards, and I didn't have any data stored on punched cards. The only other option was to do things that didn't rely on any inputs, like calculate approximations of pi, but I didn't know enough math to do anything interesting of that type. So I'm not surprised. I can't remember any programs I wrote because they can't have done much. My clearest memory is of the moment I learned it was possible for programs not to terminate when one of mine didn't.

在没有分时系统的机器上，这既是技术失误也是社交灾难——数据中心管理员的脸色说明了一切。微型计算机改变了一切。现在你可以把电脑放在桌上实时响应键盘输入，而不是机械地处理一堆穿孔卡片后停止运转。我朋友中第一个拥有微机的人是自己组装的，那是Heathkit出售的套件。

On a machine without time sharing, this was a social as well as a technical error as the data center manager's expression made clear. With microcomputers, everything changed. Now you could have a computer sitting right in front of you on a desk that could respond to your keystrokes as it was running instead of just churning through a stack of punch cards and then stopping. The first of my friends to get a microcomputer built it himself. It was sold as a kit by Heathkit.

我至今清晰记得看着他坐在电脑前直接输入程序时，那种令我震撼又嫉妒的感觉。那时电脑价格昂贵，经过多年软磨硬泡，我才在1980年左右说服父亲买了台TRS-80。当时的黄金标准是Apple II，但TRS-80也够用了。这才真正开启了我的编程生涯：写简单游戏、预测模型火箭飞行高度的程序，还有父亲用来写书的文字处理器——他至少用它完成了一本书。

I remember vividly how impressed and envious I felt watching him sitting in front of it, typing programs right into the computer. Computers were expensive in those days, and it took me years of nagging before I convinced my father to buy one, a TRS 80 in about 1980. The gold standard then was the Apple two, but a TRS 80 was good enough. This was when I really started programming. I wrote simple games, a program to predict how high my model rockets would fly, and a word processor that my father used to write at least one book.

内存仅能容纳约两页文本，所以他每次写两页就打印出来。但这远比打字机强多了。尽管热爱编程，我并未打算在大学主修它。我计划学习哲学——这在我天真的高中时代看来强大得多，似乎是研究终极真理的学科，相比之下其他领域的知识都只是特定领域的皮毛。

There was only room in memory for about two pages of text, so he'd write two pages at a time and then print them out. But it was a lot better than a typewriter. Though I like programming, I didn't plan to study it in college. In college, I was going to study philosophy, which sounded much more powerful. It seemed to my naive high school self to be the study of the ultimate truths compared to which the things studied in other fields would be mere domain knowledge.

上大学时我发现，其他学科占据了思想领域的大部分空间，留给所谓终极真理的所剩无几。哲学似乎只剩下其他学科认为可以安全忽略的边缘案例。18岁时我还无法用语言表达这种感受，只知道我不断选修哲学课程，却始终觉得它们枯燥乏味。于是我决定转向人工智能领域。

What I discovered when I got to college was that the other fields took up so much of the space of ideas that there wasn't much left for these supposed ultimate truths. All that seemed left for philosophy were edge cases that people in other fields felt could safely be ignored. I couldn't have put this into words when I was 18. All I knew at the time was that I kept taking philosophy courses, and they kept being boring. So I decided to switch to AI.

上世纪八十年代中期，AI正风靡一时。但有两件事尤其吸引我投身其中：海因莱因的小说《严厉的月亮》中名为迈克的智能计算机，以及PBS纪录片里展示的特里·维诺格拉德使用SHRDLU系统的场景。我至今没重读《严厉的月亮》，不知它是否经得起时间考验，但初读时我完全沉浸在那个世界里。

AI was in the air in the mid one thousand nine hundred and eighty seconds. But there were two things especially that made me want to work on it. A novel by Heinlein called The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which featured an intelligent computer called Mike and a PBS documentary that showed Terry Winograd using s h r d l u. I haven't tried rereading the moon is a harsh mistress, so I don't know how well it has aged. But when I read it, I was drawn entirely into its world.

当时觉得拥有迈克这样的智能只是时间问题。看到维诺格拉德使用Strudo系统时，我判断这个时间最多不过几年——你只需要教会Strudo更多词汇。那时康奈尔大学连AI的研究生课程都没有，我只好自学，这意味着要学习Lisp语言，因为当时Lisp被视为AI的专用语言。

It seemed only a matter of time before we'd have, Mike. And when I saw Winograd using Strudo, it seemed like that time would be a few years at most. All you had to do was teach Strudo more words. There weren't any classes in AI at Cornell then, not even graduate classes. So I started trying to teach myself, which meant learning Lisp, since in those days, Lisp was regarded as the language of AI.

当时常用的编程语言相当原始，程序员的思维也相应受限。康奈尔默认使用类似Pascal的PL/I语言，其他院校情况也差不多。学习Lisp极大拓展了我对程序的认知，以至于多年后我才意识到新的边界在哪里——这才像话，这才是我期待大学该有的样子。

The commonly used programming languages then were pretty primitive and programmers' ideas correspondingly so. The default language at Cornell was a Pascal like language called p l divided by I, and the situation was similar elsewhere. Learning Lisp expanded my concept of a program so fast that it was years before I started to have a sense of where the new limits were. This was more like it. This was what I had expected college to do.

虽然没在正式课堂上实现这种突破，但这没关系。随后的两年我势如破竹，明确了自己要做什么：本科毕业论文我逆向工程了SHRDLU系统。天啊，我太爱研究那个程序了。

It wasn't happening in a class like it was supposed to, but that was okay. For the next couple years, I was on a roll. I knew what I was gonna do. For my undergraduate thesis, I reverse engineered SHRDLU. My god, did I love working on that program.

那段代码本身令人愉悦，但更让我兴奋的是（如今看来难以想象但在1985年并非个例）我相信它已开始攀登智能的初级阶梯。康奈尔有个不限定专业的培养方案，可以自由选课并自定学位方向——我自然选择了人工智能。拿到实体毕业证书时，我沮丧地发现专业名被加了引号，显得充满讽刺意味。

It was a pleasing bit of code, but what made it even more exciting was my belief hard to imagine now, but not unique in 1985, that it was already climbing the lower slopes of intelligence. I had gotten into a program at Cornell that didn't make you choose a major. You could take whatever classes you liked and choose whatever you like to put on your degree. I, of course, chose artificial intelligence. When I got the actual physical diploma, I was dismayed to find that the quotes had been included, which made them read as scare quotes.

当时这让我困扰，但后来发现这种标注竟滑稽地准确——这点我即将意识到。我申请了三所研究生院：当时以AI闻名的MIT和耶鲁，以及哈佛（我去参观是因为里奇·德莱斯在那里就读，而且比尔·伍兹也在哈佛，他发明了我克隆SHRDLU时使用的解析器类型）。只有哈佛录取了我。不记得具体是哪个时刻，但在研究生第一年，我意识到当时实践的AI根本是场骗局——我指的是那种被告知「狗坐在椅子上」就将其转化为形式化表示并添加到知识库中的AI。

At the time, this bothered me, but now it seems amusingly accurate for reasons I was about to discover. I applied to three grad schools, MIT and Yale, which were renowned for AI at the time, and Harvard, which I'd visited because Rich Drays went there and was also home to Bill Woods, who'd invented the type of passer I used in my SHR DLU clone. Only Harvard accepted me, so that was where I went. I don't remember the moment it happened or if there even was a specific moment, but during the first year of grad school, I realized that AI, as practiced at the time, was a hoax. By which I mean the sort of AI in which a program that's told the dog is sitting on the chair translates this into some formal representation and adds it to the list of things it knows.

这些程序真正揭示的是自然语言中存在一个子集。那是一种形式语言，但只是非常有限的一部分。显然，在它们的能力与真正理解自然语言之间存在无法跨越的鸿沟。事实上，这不仅仅是教它们更多词汇的问题。那种用显式数据结构表示概念的人工智能方法根本行不通。

What these programs really showed was that there's a subset of natural language. There's a formal language, but a very proper subset. It was clear that there was an unbridgeable gap between what they could do and actually understanding natural language. It was not, in fact, simply a matter of teaching surly more words. That whole way of doing AI with explicit data structures representing concepts was not going to work.

正如常见的那样，它的缺陷确实催生了许多撰写论文的机会，讨论各种权宜之计，但这些永远无法带我们突破，迈克。于是我开始审视计划废墟中能抢救什么，这时我看到了Lisp。经验告诉我，Lisp本身就很有趣，不仅因为它与AI的关联——尽管当时人们主要因此关注它。所以我决定专注于Lisp，甚至打算写一本关于Lisp编程的书。

Its brokenness did, as so often happens, generate a lot of opportunities to write papers about various band aids that could be applied to it, but it was never gonna get us, Mike. So I looked around to see what I could salvage from the wreckage of my plans, and there was Lisp. I knew from experience that Lisp was interesting for its own sake and not just for its association with AI, even though that was the main reason people cared about it at the time. So I decided to focus on Lisp. In fact, I decided to write a book about lispacking.

回想刚开始写那本书时对Lisp编程知之甚少，这很可怕，但没有什么比写书更能帮助你学习某件事了。这本Lisp书直到1993年1月才出版，但大部分内容是我在研究生院完成的。计算机科学是理论与系统两个领域不安的联盟：理论派证明定理，系统派构建实物。我想成为构建者。

It's scary to think how little I knew about lispacking when I started writing that book, but there's nothing like writing a book about something to help you learn it. The book on lisp wasn't published till 01/1993, but I wrote much of it in grad school. Computer science is an uneasy alliance between two halves, theory and systems. The theory people prove things, and the systems people build things. I wanted to build things.

我对理论怀有崇高敬意——甚至暗自认为它比系统更值得钦佩——但构建事物似乎更令人兴奋。然而系统工作的致命缺陷在于其短暂性：今天编写的任何程序，无论多优秀，最多几十年就会过时。人们或许会在脚注提及你的软件，但没人真正使用它。而且届时看来，那会显得非常拙劣。

I had plenty of respect for theory indeed, a sneaking suspicion that it was the more admirable of the two halves, but but building things seems so much more exciting. The problem with systems work, though, was that it didn't last. Any program you wrote today, no matter how good, would be obsolete in a couple decades at best. People might mention your software in footnotes, but no one would actually use it. And indeed, it would seem very feeble work.

只有了解领域历史的人才会意识到它曾有过辉煌时刻。实验室曾散落着些施乐蒲公英电脑的闲置设备，谁想拿来玩都可以拿。我短暂心动过，但以现今标准它们太慢了，有什么意义呢？

Only people with a sense of the history of the field would even realize that in its time, it had been good. There were some surplus Xerox dandelions floating around the computer lab at one point. Anyone who wanted one to play around with could have one. I was briefly tempted, but they were so slow by present standards. What was the point?

其他人也都不感兴趣，于是它们最终被处理掉了。这就是系统工作的宿命。我想构建的不仅是实物，更是能历久弥新的东西。带着这种不满，1988年我去CMU拜访在读研的Rich Draves。有天我去了卡内基研究所——那是我童年常去的地方。

No one else wanted one either, so off they went. That was what happened to systems work. I wanted not just to build things, but to build things that would last. In this dissatisfied state, I went in 1988 to visit Rich Draves at CMU, where he was in grad school. One day, I went to visit the Carnegie Institute, where I'd spent a lot of time as a kid.

当我在那里凝视一幅画时，突然意识到一个或许显而易见、却令我震惊的事实：墙上挂着的正是能永恒存在的创作。画作不会过时，有些杰作已存世数百年。更重要的是，这能成为谋生之道——当然不如写软件容易，但我想只要足够勤奋且生活极简，定能维持生计。而且作为艺术家，你能获得真正的独立。

While looking at a painting there, I realized something that might seem obvious, but was a big surprise to me. There, right on the wall, was something you could make that would last. Paintings didn't become obsolete. Some of the best ones were hundreds of years old, And moreover, this was something you could make a living doing, not as easy as you could by writing software, of course, but I thought if you were really industrious and lived really cheaply, it had to be possible to make enough to survive. And as an artist, you could be truly independent.

你不会有老板，甚至不需要申请研究经费。我，我一直喜欢看画。我能创作吗？我毫无头绪，甚至从未想过这是可能的。

You wouldn't have a boss or even need to get research funding. I, I'd always liked looking at paintings. Could I make them? I had no idea. I'd never imagined it was even possible.

理性上我知道艺术是人创作的，不是凭空出现的，但创作者仿佛是不同的物种。他们要么生活在遥远的过去，要么是《生活》杂志里做着古怪事情的神秘天才。真正能创作艺术、将动词置于那个名词之前的想法，简直像奇迹。那年秋天，我开始在哈佛上艺术课。研究生可以选修任何院系的课程，而我的导师汤姆·奇塔姆非常开明。

I knew intellectually that people made art, that it didn't just appear spontaneously, but it was as if the people who made it were a different species. They either lived long ago or were mysterious geniuses doing strange things in profiles in Life magazine. The idea of actually being able to make art, to put that verb before that noun, seemed almost miraculous. That fall, I started taking art classes at Harvard. Grad students could take classes in any department, and my adviser, Tom Cheatham, was very easygoing.

即便他知道我选了这些奇怪的课，也从不过问。于是我在读计算机科学博士的同时，计划成为艺术家，却又真心热爱Lisp编程并埋头钻研。换句话说，像许多研究生一样，我精力充沛地做着与论文无关的项目。我看不到出路——不想退学，但还能怎么脱身？

If he even knew about the strange classes I was taking, he never said anything. So now I was in a PhD program in computer science, yet planning to be an artist, yet also genuinely in love with lisp hacking and working away on lisp. In other words, like many a grad student, I was working energetically on multiple projects that were not my thesis. I didn't see a way out of this situation. I didn't wanna drop out of grad school, but how else was I gonna get out?

记得1988年1月我的朋友罗伯特·莫里斯因编写互联网蠕虫被康奈尔开除时，我羡慕他找到了如此轰动的退学方式。直到1990年4月某天，转机出现了。偶遇奇塔姆教授时，他问我是否能在六月毕业。我的论文一字未写，但以生平最快的思维速度，我决定用剩余五周拼凑一篇——尽可能复用《OnLisp》内容——并毫不迟疑地回答。

I remember when my friend Robert Morris got kicked out of Cornell for writing the Internet Worm of 01/1988. I was envious that he'd found such a spectacular way to get out of grad school. Then one day in April 1990, a crack appeared in the wall. I ran into professor Cheetham, and he asked if I was far enough along to graduate that June. I didn't have a word in my dissertation written, but in what must have been the quickest bit of thinking in my life, I decided to take a shot at writing one in the five weeks or so that remained before the deadline, reusing parts of OnLisp where I could, and I was able to respond with no perceptible delay.

是的，我想可以。过几天给您初稿。我选了「续体的应用」作为课题。现在回想，本该写宏与嵌入式语言。

Yes. I think so. I'll give you something to read in a few days. I picked applications of continuations as the topic. In retrospect, I should have written about macros and embedded languages.

那是个几乎未被探索的领域，但我只想逃离研究生院，仓促完成的论文勉强达标。同时我申请了两所艺术学院：美国的RISD和佛罗伦萨美术学院（因其历史最悠久而臆测很好）。RISD录取了我，佛罗伦萨音讯全无，于是我去了普罗维登斯。申请RISD本科意味着要重读大学。

There's a whole world there that's barely been explored, But all I wanted was to get out of grad school, and my rapidly written dissertation sufficed, just barely. Meanwhile, I was applying to art schools. I applied to two, Risd in The US and the Academia di Belli Arte in Florence, which, because it was the oldest art school, I imagined would be good. RISD accepted me, and I never heard back from the academia, so off to Providence I went. I'd applied for the BFA program at RISD, which meant, in effect, that I had to go to college again.

这没听起来那么奇怪——我才25岁，而艺术学院本就年龄多元。RISD将我算作大二转学生，要求我暑期修基础课（即素描、色彩、设计等必修课）。夏末时，我收到意外惊喜：因误寄至英国剑桥而迟到的录取信，邀请我参加佛罗伦萨的秋季入学考试——此时距考试仅剩数周。

This was not as strange as it sounds because I was only 25, and art schools are full of people of different ages. RISD counted me as a transfer sophomore and said I had to do the foundation that summer. The foundation means the classes that everyone has to take in fundamental subjects like drawing, color, and design. Toward the end of the summer, I got a big surprise, A letter from the academia, which had been delayed because they'd sent it to Cambridge, England instead of Cambridge, Massachusetts, inviting me to take the entrance exam in Florence that fall. This was now only weeks away.

我和善的女房东允许我把行李存放在她的阁楼里。我在研究生时期做咨询工作攒了些钱，如果省吃俭用的话，大概够维持一年生活。现在唯一要做的就是学习意大利语——只有外国人才需要参加这项入学考试。

My nice landlady let me leave my stuff in her attic. I had some money saved from consulting work I'd done in grad school. There was probably enough to last a year if I lived cheaply. Now all I had to do was learn Italian. Only Stranieri, foreigners, had to take this entrance exam.

现在回想起来，这很可能是为了限制外国学生数量采取的手段。当时有太多外国人被佛罗伦萨艺术学习的名头吸引，若不加以限制，意大利本土学生反而会成为少数。那年夏天我在RISD基础部练就了还算扎实的绘画功底，但至今仍不明白自己是如何通过笔试的。记得当时我以塞尚为题写了论述文章，用尽有限的词汇量拼命拔高理论深度。我才二十五岁，人生模式已如此鲜明——又一次，我即将进入某所知名学府研修显赫学科；又一次，我即将面临失望。

In retrospect, it may well have been a way of excluding them because there were so many stranieri attracted by the idea of studying art in Florence that the Italian students would otherwise have been outnumbered. I was in decent shape at painting and drawing from the RISD Foundation that summer, but I still don't know how I managed to pass the written exam. I remember that I answered the essay question by writing about Cezanne and that I cranked up the intellectual level as high as I could to make the most of my limited vocabulary. I'm only up to age 25, and already there are such conspicuous patterns. Here I was, yet again, about to attend some August institution in the hopes of learning about some prestigious subject, and yet again about to be disappointed.

学院绘画系的师生们亲切得无可挑剔，但他们早已达成默契：学生不要求老师授课，老师也不要求学生学习。与此同时，所有人表面上都严格遵守十九世纪画室的传统规范。我们确实有那种烧柴火的小铁炉，就像十九世纪工作室油画里画的那种，裸体模特会尽可能靠近它取暖而不被烫伤——不过除了我几乎没人画她。其他学生不是闲聊就是偶尔模仿美国艺术杂志上的作品。后来发现这位模特就住在我隔壁街。

The students and faculty in the painting department at the academia were the nicest people you could imagine, but they had long since arrived at an arrangement whereby the students wouldn't require the faculty to teach anything, and in return, the faculty wouldn't require the students to learn anything. And at the same time, all involved would adhere outwardly to the conventions of a nineteenth century atelier. We actually had one of those little stoves fed with kindling that you see in nineteenth century studio paintings and a nude model sitting as close to it as possible without getting burned, except hardly anyone else painted her besides me. The rest of the students spent their time chatting or occasionally trying to imitate things they'd seen in American art magazines. Our model turned out to live just down the street from me.

她靠当模特和给本地古董商仿造赝品维生。她会照着书里某幅冷门古画临摹，然后古董商对仿品做旧处理。在学院就读期间，我开始每晚在卧室画静物。由于房间狭小，这些画尺寸都很迷你——当时我只能用得起帆布边角料作画。静物画与人物画不同，正如其名所示，被描绘对象是不会动的。

She made a living from a combination of modeling and making fakes for a local antique dealer. She'd copy, an obscure old painting out of a book, and then he'd take the copy and maltreat it to make it look old. While I was a student at the academia, I started painting Still Lives in my bedroom at night. These paintings were tiny because the room was because I painted them on leftover scraps of canvas, which was all I could afford at the time. Painting still lives is different from painting people because the subject, as its name suggests, can't move.

人物模特每次最多坚持十五分钟，而且总会轻微晃动。因此传统人物画法要先掌握通用人像技法，再根据具体对象调整。而静物画若愿意，甚至可以像素级复刻眼前所见——当然不能止步于此，否则就只是照片级的精确。静物画的魅力在于它经过了头脑的加工。

People can't sit for more than about fifteen minutes at a time, and when they do, they don't sit very still. So the traditional for painting people is to know how to paint a generic person, which you then modify to match the specific person you're painting. Whereas a still life, you can, if you want, copy pixel by pixel from what you're seeing. You don't wanna stop there, of course, or you get merely photographic accuracy. And what makes a still life interesting is that it's been through a head.

你需要强化那些视觉暗示，比如某处色彩突然变化是因为到了物体边缘。通过微妙地强调这些细节，创作出的画作能比照片更真实——不仅是隐喻意义上的，严格按信息论标准衡量也是如此。我喜欢画静物是因为对所见之物充满好奇。日常生活中，我们对自己看到的大部分景象并无清醒认知。多数视觉感知由底层神经处理完成，它只会告诉大脑‘那是水滴’而不指明明暗分布，或判定‘那是灌木’却不描述每片叶子的形态位置。

You want to emphasize the visual cues that tell you, for example, that the reason the color changes suddenly at a certain point is that it's the edge of an object. By subtly emphasizing such things, you can make paintings that are more realistic than photographs, not just in some metaphorical sense, but in the strict information theoretic sense. I liked painting still lives because I was curious about what I was seeing. In everyday life, we aren't consciously aware of much we're seeing. Most visual perception is handled by low level processes that merely tell your brain that's a water droplet without telling you details like where the lightest and darkest points are or that's a bush without telling you the shape and position of every leaf.

这是大脑的特性而非缺陷。日常生活中若注意到每丛灌木的每片叶子反而会分散注意力。但作画时必须观察得更细致，这时你会发现大量细节。就像连续多日撰写关于习以为常之物的文章会有新发现一样，连续多日描绘寻常静物时，你仍能不断察觉新事物。

This is a feature of brains, not a bug. In everyday life, it would be distracting to notice every leaf on every bush. But when you have to paint something, you have to look more closely. And when you do, there's a lot to see. You can still be noticing new things after days of trying to paint something people usually take for granted just as you can after days of trying to write an essay about something people usually take for granted.

这并不是唯一的绘画方式。我甚至不能百分百确定这是种好方法，但它似乎值得一试。我们的老师乌利维教授人很好，他看到我努力用功，就给了我高分，记录在学生手册里。但学院除了意大利语什么都没教会我，而我的钱也快用完了。

This is not the only way to paint. I'm not 100 sure it's even a good way to paint, but it seemed a good enough bet to be worth trying. Our teacher, professor Ulivi, was a nice guy. He could see I worked hard and gave me a good grade, which he wrote down in a sort of passport each student had. But the academia wasn't teaching me anything except Italian, and my money was running out.

于是在第一年结束时，我回到了美国。我想重返罗德岛设计学院，但当时身无分文，而RISD学费昂贵。于是我决定先工作一年，次年秋季再返校。我在一家叫Interleaf的公司找到了工作，他们开发文档创作软件。你是说像微软Word那样的？

So at the end of the first year, I went back to The US. I wanted to go back to RISD, but I was now broke, and RISD was very expensive. So I decided to get a job for a year and then return to RISD the next fall. I got one at a company called Interleaf, which made software for creating documents. You mean like Microsoft Word?

没错。正是这段经历让我明白低端软件往往吞噬高端软件，不过Interleaf当时还有几年寿命。这家公司做了件相当大胆的事——受Emacs启发，他们添加了脚本语言，甚至将其设计成Lisp方言。现在他们需要Lisp黑客来编写相关功能。

Exactly. That was how I learned that low end software tends to eat high end software, but Interleaf still had a few years to live yet. Interleaf had done something pretty bold. Inspired by Emacs, they'd added a scripting language and even made the scripting language a dialect of Lisp. Now they wanted a lisp hacker to write things in it.

这是我经历过最接近正常工作的岗位，在此我要向老板和同事道歉，因为我不是个好员工。他们的Lisp就像巨无霸蛋糕上薄薄的一层糖霜。由于我不懂C语言也不想学，始终没能理解软件的大部分逻辑。加上我极其不负责任——那时编程工作意味着每天固定坐班，这让我觉得反人性。虽然如今世界逐渐认同我的观点，但当时因此引发了不少矛盾。

This was the closest thing I've had to a normal job, and I hereby apologize to my boss and coworkers because I was a bad employee. Their lisp was the thinnest icing on a giant sea cake, And since I didn't know c and didn't want to learn it, I never understood most of the software. Plus, I was terribly irresponsible. This was back when a programming job meant showing up every day during certain working hours. That seemed unnatural to me, and on this point, the rest of the world is coming around to my way of thinking, but at the time, it caused a lot of friction.

到那年快结束时，我大部分时间都在偷偷开发OnLiSP，当时已签了出版合同。好处是报酬丰厚，尤其对艺术生而言——在佛罗伦萨时，付完房租后我每天只剩7美元预算，而现在每小时收入是当时的四倍多，哪怕坐着开会也有钱拿。靠着节俭生活，我不但攒够了重返RISD的学费，还还清了助学贷款。

Toward the end of the year, I spent much of my time surreptitiously working on OnLiSP, which I had, by this time, gotten a contract to publish. The good part was that I got paid huge amounts of money, especially by art student standards. In Florence, after paying my part of the rent, my budget for everything else had been $7 a day. Now I was getting paid more than four times that every hour even when I was just sitting in a meeting. By living cheaply, I not only managed to save enough to go back to RISD, but also paid off my college loans.

在Interleaf我学到些有用的经验，主要是反面教材：科技公司该由产品人而非销售主导（尽管销售确实是门真本事）；多人编辑代码易生bug；廉价的办公场地若令人压抑反而不划算；走廊闲聊比正式会议高效；官僚主义大客户是危险金主；传统办公时间与最佳编程时段几乎不重合，办公场所亦然。但最重要的收获（后来应用于Fireweb和Y Combinator）是低端颠覆高端法则——即便不够体面，成为入门级选择总是明智的。

I learned some useful things at Interleaf, though they were mostly about what not to do. I learned that it's better for technology companies to be run by product people than salespeople, though sales is a real skill, and people who are good at it are really good at it. That it leads to bugs when code is edited by too many people, that cheap office space is no bargain if it's depressing, that planned meetings are inferior to corridor conversations, that big bureaucratic customers are a dangerous source of money, and that there's not much overlap between conventional office hours and the optimal time for hacking or conventional offices and the optimal place for it. But the most important thing I learned and which are used in both Fireweb and Y Combinator is that the low end eats the high end. That it's good to be the entry level option even though that will be less prestigious.

否则别人就会占据这个位置把你逼到天花板，这意味着声望反而是危险信号。次年秋季返校时，我通过为项目组接外包维持了几年生计。后来有次回访时，有人提起叫HTML的新东西，说是SGML的衍生品。Interleaf里总不缺标记语言狂热者，我当时没在意。但这个HTML后来成了我人生的重要部分。

Because if you're not, someone else will be and will squash you against the ceiling, which in turn means that prestige is a danger sign. When I left to go back to RISD the next fall, I arranged to do freelance work for the group that did projects for customers, and this was how I survived for the next several years. When I came back to visit for a project later on, someone told me about a new thing called HTML, which was, as he described it, a derivative of SGML. Markup language enthusiasts were an occupational hazard at Interleaf, and I ignored him. But this HTML thing later became a big part of my life.

1992年，我回到普罗维登斯继续在罗德岛设计学院学习。基础课程只是些入门内容，而学术体系则像一场文明的玩笑。现在我要见识真正的艺术学院是什么样子了。但可悲的是，它更像那个学术体系。组织得确实更好，费用也高得多，但现在越来越清楚，艺术学院与艺术的关系，并不像医学院与医学的关系那样——至少绘画系不是这样。

In the 1992, I moved back to Providence to continue at RISD. The foundation had merely been intro stuff, and the academia had been a very civilized joke. Now I was gonna see what real art school was like. But alas, it was more like the academia than not. Better organized certainly and a lot more expensive, but it was now becoming clear that art school did not bear the same relationship to art that medical school bought a medicine, at least not the painting department.

我隔壁邻居所在的纺织系似乎相当严谨。毫无疑问插画和建筑系也是，但绘画系是后严谨的。绘画学生应该表达自我，对更世故的人来说，这意味着要炮制某种独特的标志性风格。标志性风格相当于演艺圈所说的'噱头'，能让人立刻认出这是你的作品而非他人。比如当你看到一幅像某种漫画的画，你就知道那是罗伊·利希滕斯坦的作品。

The textile department, which my next door neighbor belonged to, seemed to be pretty rigorous. No doubt illustration and architecture were too, but painting was post rigorous. Painting students were supposed to express themselves, which to the more worldly ones meant to try to cook up some sort of distinctive signature style. A signature style is the visual equivalent of what in show business is known as a shtick, something that immediately identifies the work as yours and no one else's. For example, when you see a painting that looks like a certain kind of cartoon, you know, it's by Roy Lichtenstein.

所以如果你在对冲基金经理的公寓里看到这种大型画作，你就知道他花了数百万美元买下它。艺术家拥有标志性风格并不总是为了这个原因，但这通常是买家愿意高价购买的原因。也有许多认真的学生，他们在高中就擅长绘画，现在来到这所号称全国最好的艺术学院想画得更好。他们在罗德岛设计学院的见闻让他们困惑沮丧，但他们坚持着，因为绘画是他们所做的事。我不是那种高中就会画画的孩子，但在罗德岛设计学院，我绝对更接近他们这群人，而不是那些追求标志性风格的群体。

So if you see a big painting of this type hanging in the apartment of a hedge fund manager, you know, he paid millions of dollars for it. That's not always why artists have a signature style, but it's usually why buyers pay a lot for such work. There were plenty of earnest students too, kids who could draw in high school and now had come to what was supposed to be the best art school in the country to learn to draw even better. They tended to be confused and demoralized by what they found at RISD, but they kept going because painting was what they did. I was not one of the kids who could draw in high school, but at RISD, I was definitely closer to their tribe than the tribe of signature style seekers.

我在罗德岛设计学院上的色彩课学到很多，但除此之外，我基本上是在自学绘画，而这本可以免费进行。于是在1993年，我退学了。我在普罗维登斯逗留了一阵子，后来我的大学朋友南希·帕梅特帮了我大忙——她母亲在纽约有栋公寓楼，其中有套租金管制的房子即将空出。我想要吗？

I learned a lot in the color class I took at RISD, but otherwise, I was basically teaching myself to paint, and I could do that for free. So in 1993, I dropped out. I hung around Providence for a bit, and then my college friend Nancy Parmet did me a big favor. A rent controlled apartment in a building her mother owned in New York was becoming vacant. Did I want it?

价格比我当时住的地方贵不了多少，而纽约理应是艺术家的聚集地。所以，是的，我想要。就像《高卢英雄传》漫画从罗马高卢的一个小角落开始放大，发现那里不受罗马控制。你可以在纽约地图上做类似的事。如果放大上东区，会发现有个小角落并不富裕——至少在1993年不富裕。

It wasn't much more than my current place, and New York was supposed to be where the artists were. So, yes, I wanted it. Asterix comics begin by zooming in on a tiny corner of Roman Gaul that turns out not to be controlled by the Romans. You can do something similar on a map of New York City. If you zoom in on the Upper East Side, there's a tiny corner that's not rich or at least wasn't in 1993.

那个地方叫约克维尔，就是我的新家。现在从严格技术层面来说，我成了纽约艺术家——画画并住在纽约。我为钱发愁，因为能感觉到Interleaf公司正在衰落。自由接案的Lisp编程工作非常罕见，而我不想用其他语言编程——那时候如果幸运的话可能意味着要用C++。于是凭借我对财务机会从不出错的嗅觉，我决定再写一本关于Lisp的书。

It's called Yorkville, and that was my new home. Now I was a New York artist in the strictly technical sense of making paintings and living in New York. I was nervous about money because I could sense that Interleaf was on the way down. Freelance Lisp hacking work was very rare, and I didn't want to have to program in another language, which in those days would have meant c plus plus if I was lucky. So with my unerring nose for financial opportunity, I decided to write another book on Lisp.

这将是一本畅销书，可以用作教材的那种。我幻想着靠版税节俭生活，把所有时间都用来画画。这本书《ANSI Common Lisp》的封面画作就是我那时画的。纽约对我来说最棒的事就是能见到伊德尔和朱利安·韦伯。伊德尔·韦伯是位画家，早期照相写实主义者之一，我在哈佛上过她的绘画课。

This would be a popular book, the sort of book that could be used as a textbook. I imagined myself living frugally off the royalties and spending all my time painting. The painting on the cover of this book, ANSI Common Lisp, is one that I painted around this time. The best thing about New York for me was the presence of Idell and Julian Weber. Idell Weber was a painter, one of the early photorealists, and I'd taken her painting class at Harvard.

我从未见过比她更受学生爱戴的老师。包括我在内，大批往届学生都与她保持着联系。我搬到纽约后，便成了她事实上的画室助手。她喜欢在巨大的方形画布上作画，每边都有四五英尺长。1994年末的一天，当我正在绷紧其中一块巨幅画布时，收音机里正播报着某位著名基金经理的新闻。

I've never known a teacher more beloved by her students. Large numbers of former students kept in touch with her, including me. After I moved to New York, I became her de facto studio assistant. She liked to paint on big big square canvases, four to five feet on a side. One day in late nineteen ninety four, as I was stretching one of these monsters, there was something on the radio about a famous fund manager.

他比我年长不了多少却超级富有。这个念头突然击中了我：为什么我不能变得富有？那样我就能随心所欲地工作。与此同时，我越来越多地听说这个叫万维网的新事物。我去剑桥拜访罗伯特·莫里斯时，他向我展示了这个技术——当时他正在哈佛大学读研究生。

He wasn't that much older than me and was super rich. The thought suddenly occurred to me, why don't I become rich? Then I'll be able to work on whatever I want. Meanwhile, I'd been hearing more and more about this new thing called the World Wide Web. Robert Morris showed it to me when I visited him in Cambridge, where he was now in grad school at Harvard.

在我看来，网络将会是件大事。我曾目睹图形用户界面如何推动微型计算机的普及，而网络似乎也将为互联网带来同样的变革。如果我想致富，这就是即将启程的下一班列车。这部分我判断对了。

It seemed to me that the web would be a big deal. I'd seen what graphical user interfaces had done for the popularity of microcomputers. It seemed like the web would do the same for the Internet. If I wanted to get rich, here was the next train leaving the station. I was right about that part.

但我错判了这个构想。我决定创办公司让画廊上线。老实说，在读过那么多Y Combinator申请后，虽然这算不上史上最糟的创业点子，但也绝对名列前茅。画廊——尤其是高端画廊——当时不愿上线，至今依然如此，这不是他们的销售方式。

What I got wrong was the idea. I decided we should start a company to put art galleries online. I can't honestly say after reading so many Y Combinator applications that this was the worst startup idea ever, but it was up there. Art galleries didn't want to be online and still don't, not the fancy ones. That's not how they sell.

我编写了为画廊生成网站的软件，罗伯特则写了调整图片尺寸的程序，并搭建HTTP服务器来托管页面。随后我们开始尝试签约画廊。用‘难如登天’来形容这个销售过程都算轻描淡写——这简直是白送都无人问津。少数画廊让我们免费建站，但没有一家愿意付费。

I wrote some software to generate websites for galleries, and Robert wrote some to resize images and set up an HTTP server to serve the pages. Then we tried to sign up galleries. To call this a difficult sale would be an understatement. It was difficult to give away. A few galleries let us make sites for them for free, but none paid us.

后来一些在线商店开始出现，我意识到除了下单按钮外，它们与我们为画廊制作的网站如出一辙。这个听起来很厉害的‘互联网店面’，其实正是我们已掌握的技能。于是在1995年，当我将《ANSI Common Lisp》的最终稿件交付出版社后，我们开始尝试编写在线商店构建软件。最初这计划是普通的桌面软件——那个年代即指Windows软件。这个前景令人惶恐，因为我们俩既不懂Windows编程也不愿学习。

Then some online stores started to appear, and I realized that except for the order buttons, they were identical to the sites we've been generating for galleries. This impressive sounding thing called an Internet storefront was something we already knew how to build. So in the 1995, after I submitted the camera ready copy of ANSI Common Lisp to the publishers, we started trying to write software to build online stores. At first, this was gonna be normal desktop software, which in those days meant Windows software. That was an alarming prospect because neither of us knew how to write Windows software or wanted to learn.

我们生活在Unix世界，但还是决定至少尝试在Unix上开发商店构建器的原型。罗伯特编写了购物车系统，而我当然是用Lisp为商店写了新的站点生成器。我们在罗伯特剑桥的公寓里工作。他室友长期不在家时，我就睡在他房间——不知为何那里没有床架和床单，只有地板上的一张床垫。

We lived in the Unix world, but we decided we'd at least try writing a prototype store builder on Unix. Robert wrote a shopping cart, and I wrote a new site generator for stores in Lisp, of course. We were working out of Robert's apartment in Cambridge. His roommate was away for big chunks of time during which I got to sleep in his room. For some reason, there was no bed frame or sheets, just a mattress on the floor.

一天早晨，当我躺在这张床垫上时，突然冒出一个想法，让我像大写字母L般猛地坐起。如果我们在服务器上运行软件，让用户通过点击链接来控制它呢？这样我们就完全不需要在用户电脑上安装任何程序。我们可以直接在提供服务的同一台服务器上生成网站。用户只需要一个浏览器就够了。

One morning, as I was lying on this mattress, I had an idea that made me sit up like a capital l. What if we ran the software on the server and let users control it by clicking on links? Then we'd never have to write anything to run on users' computers. We could generate the sites on the same server we'd serve them from. Users wouldn't need anything more than a browser.

这类被称为网页应用的软件如今很常见，但在当时甚至不确定是否可行。为了验证，我们决定尝试开发一个能通过浏览器控制的网店搭建工具版本。几天后的8月12日，我们做出了可运行的雏形。界面很简陋，但它证明了无需客户端软件或操作服务器命令行，仅通过浏览器就能搭建完整网店。此刻我们感觉真正抓住了机遇。

This kind of software, known as a web app, is common now, but at the time, it wasn't clear that it was even possible. To find out, we decided to try making a version of our store builder that you could control through the browser. A couple days later, on August 12, we had one that worked. The UI was horrible, but it proved you could build a whole store through the browser without any client software or typing anything into the command line on the server. Now we felt like we were really onto something.

我预见到新一代软件都将以这种方式运作。不再需要版本号、移植适配这些繁琐事。在Interleaf时，有个和开发团队规模相当的发布工程部门专门处理这些。而现在可以直接在服务器上更新软件。我们成立了新公司Viaweb，名字源于软件通过网页运行的特性，并从Idel的丈夫Julian那里获得了1万美元种子资金。

I had visions of a whole new generation of software working this way. You wouldn't need versions or ports or any of that crap. At Interleaf, there had been a whole group called Release Engineering that seemed to be at least as big as the group that actually wrote the software. Now you could just update the software right on the server. We started a new company we called Viaweb after the fact that our software worked via the web, and we got $10,000 in seed funding from Idel's husband, Julian.

作为这笔资金、初期法律工作和商业建议的回报，我们给了他10%股份。十年后，这个模式成了YC的范本。我们深知创业者需要这类支持，因为我们亲身体验过。当时我的净资产是负数——银行里的一千美元存款远抵不上欠政府的税款。要是我当初认真存下为Interleaf做咨询收入的应缴税款...然而并没有。

In return for that and doing the initial legal work and giving us business advice, we gave him 10% of the company. Ten years later, this deal became the model for Y Combinators. We knew founders needed something like this because we'd needed it ourselves. At this stage, I had a negative net worth because the thousand dollars or so I had in the bank was more than counterbalanced by what I owed the government in taxes. Had I diligently set aside the proper proportion of the money I'd made consulting for Interleaf, no.

所以尽管Robert有研究生津贴，我却需要靠种子资金生活。原计划九月上线，但随着开发深入我们不断追加功能。最终我们做出了所见即所得的建站工具——编辑页面时的效果与最终生成的静态页面完全一致，只是所有链接都指向服务器哈希表存储的闭包函数而非静态页面。艺术学习背景很有帮助，因为网店工具的核心是让用户显得专业，而专业感的关键在于精良的视觉呈现。

I had not. So although Robert had his graduate student stipend, I needed that seed funding to live on. We originally hoped to launch in September, but we got more ambitious about the software as we worked on it. Eventually, we managed to build a WYSIWYG site builder in the sense that as you were creating pages, they looked exactly like the static ones that would be generated later, except that instead of leading to static pages, the links all referred to closures stored in a hash table on the server. It helped to have studied art because the main goal of an online store builder is to make users look legit, and the key to looking legit is high production values.

只要处理好版式、字体和配色，就能让卧室创业者的店铺看起来比大公司更正规。如果你好奇我的网站为何如此复古——它至今仍由这套软件构建。如今看来可能笨拙，但在1996年这就是顶尖的精致。到了九月，Robert开始抗议：'我们干了一个月还没完工'。

If you get page layouts and fonts and colors right, you can make a guy running a store out of his bedroom look more legit than a big company. If you're curious why my site looks so old fashioned, it's because it's still made with this software. It may look clunky today, but in 1996, it was the last word in slick. In September, Robert rebelled. We've been working on this for a month, he said, and it's still not done.

现在回想很有趣，因为后续他几乎又开发了三年。但我认为招募更多程序员是明智之举，便询问Robert他同学里的高手。他推荐了Trevor Blackwell，起初让我惊讶——当时我对Trevor的印象主要是他那个'把生活全部精简成随身携带的记事卡堆'的计划。但Rootie M一如既往地正确，Trevor最终成了令人震撼的高效黑客。

This is funny in retrospect because he would still be working on it almost three years later. But I decided it might be prudent to recruit more programmers, and I asked Robert who else in grad school with him was really good. He recommended Trevor Blackwell, which surprised me at first, because at that point, I knew Trevor mainly for his plan to reduce everything in his life to a stack of note cards, which he carried around with him. But Rootie M was right, as usual. Trevor turned out to be a frighteningly effective hacker.

与罗伯特和特雷弗共事非常愉快。他们是我认识的最有独立思想的两个人，而且方式截然不同。如果能窥见鲁蒂姆的大脑，那会像一座新英格兰殖民时期的教堂；而特雷弗的则像奥地利洛可可风格最浮夸的体现。1996年1月，我们带着六家门店开业了。

It was a lot of fun working with Robert and Trevor. They're the two most independent minded people I know and in completely different ways. If you could see inside Rutiem's brain, it would look like a colonial New England church. And if you could see inside Trevor's, it would look like the worst excesses of Austrian Rococo. We opened for business with six stores in January 1996.

幸好我们多等了几个月，虽然当时担心入场太晚，实际上我们差点因过早入场而致命。那时媒体大谈电子商务，但真正需要网店的人并不多。软件由三大模块组成：我编写的站点编辑器、罗伯特开发的购物车，以及特雷弗负责的订单统计管理系统。在当时，这款编辑器算得上最通用的建站工具之一。

It was just as well we waited a few months because although we worried we were late, we were actually almost fatally early. There was a lot of talk in the press then about ecommerce, but not many people actually wanted online stores. There were three main parts to the software. The editor, which people used to build sites and which I wrote, the shopping cart, which Robert wrote, and the manager, which kept track of orders and statistics and which Trevor wrote. In its time, the editor was one of the best general purpose site builders.

我的代码非常紧凑，只需与罗伯特和特雷弗的模块对接，所以开发过程很有趣。如果只需专注这个软件，那三年本会是我人生最轻松的时光。可惜我还得处理更多事务——全是我比编程更不擅长的领域，结果那三年成了压力最大的时期。九十年代末期，涌现了大量开发电商软件的初创公司。

I kept the code tight and didn't have to integrate with any other software except Robert and Trevor's, so it was quite fun to work on. If all I'd had to do was work on this software, the next three years would have been the easiest of my life. Unfortunately, I had to do a lot more. All of it stuff I was worse at than programming, and the next three years were instead the most stressful. There were a lot of startups making ecommerce software in the second half of the ninety seconds.

我们立志要做微软Word而非Interleaf，这意味着产品必须易用且廉价。贫穷反而成全了我们，使得Vioweb定价比预期更低：小店月费100美元，大店300美元。低价策略既吸引了客户，也让竞争对手如芒在背——但这并非出于什么商业洞察，纯粹是因为我们根本不懂企业级产品的行情。

We were determined to be the Microsoft word, not the interleaf, which meant being easy to use and inexpensive. It was lucky for us that we were poor because that caused us to make Vioweb even more inexpensive than we realized. We charged $100 a month for a small store and $300 a month for a big one. This low price was a big attraction and a constant thorn in the sides of competitors, but it wasn't because of some clever insight that we set the price low. We had no idea what businesses paid for things.

对我们而言，300美元月费已是天价。我们歪打正着做对了很多事，比如现在所谓的'不可规模化操作'。当时只觉得是自己太无能，才被迫用最极端的方式获取用户——最常见的就是替客户搭建网店。

$300 a month seemed like a lot of money to us. We did a lot of things right by accident like that. For example, we did what's now called doing things that don't scale. Although at the time, we would have described it as being so lame that we're driven to the most desperate measures to get users. The most common of which was building stores for them.

这尤其令人难堪，因为我们软件的核心理念本是让用户自主建站。但为了获取用户，我们不得不深入了解零售业。比如在当时的技术条件下，男式衬衫的小图展示中，领口特写效果远优于整体展示——这个教训让我记忆犹新，因为它意味着我要重新扫描30件衬衫的图片，而我最初那组扫描效果本是多么完美。

This seemed particularly humiliating since the whole raison d'etre of our software was that people could use it to make their own stores, but anything to get users. We learned a lot more about retail than we wanted to know. For example, that if you could only have a small image of a man's shirt and all images were small then by present standards, it was better to have a close-up of the collar than a picture of the whole shirt. The reason I remember learning this was that it meant I had to rescan about 30 images of men's shirts. My first set of scans was so beautiful too.

虽然感觉别扭，但这恰恰是正确的选择。代建网店让我们既了解零售业，也切身感受了软件体验。最初我对商业既困惑又排斥，甚至认为需要专业经理人。但用户出现后，我的转变就像初为人父时那样彻底——从此用户要什么，我就给什么。

Though this felt wrong, it was exactly the right thing to be doing. Building stores for users taught us about retail and about how it felt to use our software. I was initially both mystified and repelled by business and thought we needed a business person to be in charge of it, but once we started to get users, I was converted in much the same way. I was converted to fatherhood once I had kids. Whatever users wanted, I was all theirs.

也许有一天我们的用户会多到我无法逐一查看他们的图片，但眼下没有比这更重要的事了。当时我还没意识到的是，增长率才是初创企业的终极考验。我们的增长率不错——1996年约有70家门店，到1997年1月底增至约500家。我错误地认为用户绝对数量才是关键，从营收角度看确实如此。

Maybe one day we'd have so many users that I couldn't scan their images for them, but in the meantime, there was nothing more important to do. Another thing I didn't get at the time is that growth rate is the ultimate test of a start up. Our growth rate was fine. We had about 70 stores at the 1996 and about 500 at the end of 01/1997. I mistakenly thought the thing that mattered was the absolute number of users, and that is the thing that matters in the sense that that's how much money you're making.

如果收入不足，企业可能倒闭。但长期来看，增长率会带动绝对数量。如果是在YC辅导的初创公司，我会说：别太焦虑，你们做得很好。年增长率七倍，只要别过度招聘，很快就能盈利并掌握命运。

And if you're not making enough, you might go out of business. But in the long term, the growth rate takes care of the absolute number. If we'd been a startup, I was advising at Y Combinator, I would have said, stop being so stressed out because you're doing fine. You're growing seven x a year. Just don't hire too many more people, and you'll soon be profitable, and then you'll control your own destiny.

可惜我大量扩招了，部分因投资者要求，部分因互联网泡沫期的风气。小团队会显得业余。直到1998年被雅虎收购我们才盈亏平衡，这意味着公司始终受制于投资人。由于双方都是初创新手，结果连初创标准都算得上混乱。被收购时我如释重负。

Alas, I hired lots more people partly because our investors wanted me to and partly because that's what startups did during the Internet bubble. A company with just a handful of employees would have seemed amateurish. So we didn't reach breakeven until about when Yahoo bought us in the 1998, which in turn meant we were at the mercy of investors for the entire life of the company. And since both we and our investors were noobs at start ups, the result was a mess even by start up standards. It was a huge relief when Yahoo bought us.

理论上我们的Vioweb股票很有价值——这是家盈利且快速成长的企业股权。但对我而言感受不到价值。我不懂估值，却深刻记得每隔几个月就濒临倒闭的危机。创业后我的学生生活方式也基本未变。

In principle, our Vioweb stock was valuable. It was a share in a business that was profitable and growing rapidly. But it didn't feel very valuable to me. I had no idea how to value a business, but I was all too keenly aware of the near death experiences we seem to have every few months. Nor had I changed my grad student lifestyle significantly since we started.

雅虎收购让我们一夜暴富。因要去加州，我买了辆1998款黄色大众GTI，其真皮座椅是我当时最奢侈的财产。接下来1998到1999年可能是我人生最懈怠的时期——后来才意识到是运营ViyaWeb的疲惫和压力所致。

So when Yahoo bought us, it felt like going from rags to riches. Since we were going to California, I bought a car, a yellow 1998 VW GTI. I remember thinking that its leather seats alone were by far the most luxurious thing I owned. The next year, from the 1998 to the 1999 must have been the least productive of my life. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was worn out from the effort and stress of running ViyaWeb.

初到加州时我还试图保持凌晨三点编程的习惯。但雅虎早衰的企业文化和圣克拉拉压抑的格子间逐渐击垮了我。几个月后竟有种回到Interleaf的错位感。收购时雅虎给了大量期权，当时我认为其估值虚高毫无价值。

For a while after I got to California, I tried to continue my usual MO of programming till three inches the morning. But fatigue combined with Yahoo's prematurely aged culture and grim cube farm in Santa Clara gradually dragged me down. After a few months, it felt disconcertingly like working at Interleaf. Yahoo had given us a lot of options when they bought us. At the time, I thought Yahoo was so overvalued that they'd never be worth anything.

但惊人的是次年股价涨了五倍。熬到期权首次解禁后，1999年我离职了。太久没画画都快忘了初衷——四年间满脑子只有软件和男士衬衫。但我提醒自己：致富是为画画，现在该去实现了。

But to my astonishment, the stock went up five x in the next year. I hung on till the first chunk of options vested, then in the 1999, I left. It had been so long since I'd painted anything that I'd half forgotten why I was doing this. My brain had been entirely full of software and men's shirts for four years. But I had done this to get rich so I could paint, I reminded myself, and now I was rich, so I should go paint.

当我宣布要离职时，雅虎的老板与我长谈了我的计划。我向他详细描述了我想要创作的画作类型。当时，他对我如此关心让我很感动。现在我才明白，那是因为他认为我在说谎——当时我手中的期权每月价值约200万美元。

When I said I was leaving, my boss at Yahoo had a long conversation with me about my plans. I told him all about the kinds of pictures I wanted to paint. At the time, I was touched that he took such an interest in me. Now I realized it was because he thought I was lying. My options at that point were worth about $2 million a month.

如果我放弃这样巨额的收入，唯一合理的解释就是去创办新公司。而如果我这么做，可能会带走一批员工。那时正值互联网泡沫巅峰，雅虎正是风暴中心。我的老板当时已是亿万富翁。在他眼中，此时离职创业必定是个疯狂却又合乎逻辑的野心计划。

If I was leaving that kind of money on the table, it could only be to go and start some new start up. And if I did, I might take people with me. This was the height of the Internet bubble, and Yahoo was ground zero of it. My boss was at that moment a billionaire. Leaving then to start a new startup must have seemed to him an insanely and yet also plausibly ambitious plan.

但我真的只是为了画画而辞职，并且立即开始了创作。时间不等人——我已经耗费四年时间追逐财富。如今每当遇到出售公司后准备离职的创始人，我的建议始终如一：先去度假。

But I really was quitting to paint, and I started immediately. There was no time to lose. I'd already burned four years getting rich. Now when I talk to founders who are leaving after selling their companies, my advice is always the same. Take a vacation.

这本该是我的选择。找个地方闲散一两个月，但这个念头从未闪现。于是我尝试作画，却发现自己毫无精力与抱负。部分原因是我在加州认识的人不多，而我在圣克鲁兹山脉买的房子虽视野绝佳却远离人烟，这加剧了困境。

That's what I should have done. Just gone off somewhere and done nothing for a month or two, but the idea never occurred to me. So I I tried to paint, but I just didn't seem to have any energy or ambition. Part of the problem was that I didn't know many people in California. I'd compounded this problem by buying a house up in the Santa Cruz Mountains with a beautiful view but miles from anywhere.

我勉强坚持了几个月，最终绝望地回到纽约。除非你了解租金管制政策，否则你会惊讶地发现——我那间如同旧生活坟墓的公寓仍原封未动。至少纽约还有地狱（注：此处'dell应为'hell'的笔误），也有其他人在那里尝试绘画，尽管我都不认识。重返纽约后，我重拾旧日生活，只是现在变得富有。这种怪异感正如听起来的这样——所有旧日习惯都回来了，只是如今每扇门都向我敞开。

I stuck it out for a few more months, then in desperation, I went back to New York where unless you understand about rent control, you'll be surprised to hear I still had my apartment sealed up like a tomb of my old life. I'dell was in New York at least, and there were other people trying to paint there even though I didn't know any of them. When I got back to New York, I resumed my old life, except now I was rich. It was as weird as it sounds. I resumed all my old patterns, except now there were doors where there hadn't been.

现在当我走累时，只需抬手（只要不下雨）就会有出租车停下。路过精致小餐馆时，我可以随时进去享用午餐。这种新鲜感持续了一阵子。绘画也开始渐入佳境，我尝试新型静物创作：先用传统方式画一幅，拍照后放大打印在画布上，再以此为底稿对着（但愿尚未腐烂的）原物进行二次创作。

Now when I was tired of walking, all I had to do was raise my hand, and unless it was raining, a taxi would stop to pick me up. Now when I walked past charming little restaurants, I could go in and order lunch. It was exciting for a while. Painting started to go better. I experimented with a new kind of still life where I'd paint one painting in the old way, then photograph it and print it blown up on canvas, and then use that as the underpainting for a second still life, painted from the same objects, which hopefully hadn't rotted yet.

与此同时，我开始物色购房。现在我真的可以选择居住街区了，我不断问自己和房产经纪：'哪里是纽约的剑桥？'几次实地造访剑桥镇后，我逐渐意识到根本不存在这样的地方。2000年左右，我突然萌生一个想法：从Vioweb的经历来看，网络应用显然是未来。

Meanwhile, I looked for an apartment to buy. Now I could actually choose what neighborhood to live in, where I asked myself and various real estate agents is the Cambridge Of New York. Aided by occasional visits to actual Cambridge, I gradually realized there wasn't one. Around this time in the 2000, I had an idea. It was clear from our experience with Vioweb that web apps were the future.

为什么不开发一个用于创建网页应用的网页应用呢？为何不让用户通过浏览器在我们的服务器上编辑代码，然后为他们托管生成的应用？你可以在服务器上运行各种服务，这些应用只需通过API调用就能使用——拨打电话、处理图像、接收信用卡支付等等。这个想法让我兴奋得无法思考其他事情，它显然代表着未来。

Why not build a web app for making web apps? Why not let people edit code on our server through the browser and then host the resulting applications for them? You could run all sorts of services on the servers that these applications could use just by making an API call, making and receiving phone calls, manipulating images, taking credit card payments, etcetera. I got so excited about this idea that I couldn't think about anything else. It seemed obvious that this was the future.

我并非特别想再创办一家公司，但显然这个构想必须以公司形式实现。于是我决定搬到剑桥开始行动。我希望能说服罗伯特一起参与，但遇到了阻碍。罗伯特当时是MIT的博士后，尽管上次我拉他参与我的计划让他赚了不少钱，但也耗费了大量时间。所以他虽然认同这个想法可行，却坚决拒绝参与。

I didn't particularly want to start another company, but it was clear that this idea would have to be embodied as one. So I decided to move to Cambridge and start it. I hoped to lure Robert into working on it with me, but there I ran into a hitch. Robert was now a postdoc at MIT, and though he'd made a lot of money the last time I'd lured him into working on one of my schemes, it had also been a huge time sink. So while he agreed that it sounded like a plausible idea, he firmly refused to work on it.

好吧，那我就自己干。我招募了曾为ViyaWeb工作的丹·吉芬，还有两名需要暑期工的本科生，我们开始构建如今看来相当于20家公司和数个开源项目体量的软件。定义应用的语言自然是Lisp的方言，但我不至于天真到认为能直接向大众推广显式的Lisp。我们会像Dylan语言那样隐藏括号。那时ViyaWeb这类公司已有专属名称——应用服务提供商（ASP）。

Well, I'd do it myself then. I recruited Dan Giffin, who'd worked for ViyaWeb, and two undergrads who wanted summer jobs, and we got to work trying to build what is now clear is about 20 companies and several open source projects worth of software. The language for defining applications would, of course, be a dialect of Lisp, but I wasn't so naive as to assume I could spring an overt Lisp on a general audience. We'd hide the parentheses like Dylan did. By then, there was a name for the kind of company ViyaWeb was, an application service provider or ASP.

这个名称很快被'软件即服务'取代，但在它流行期间，我以此命名了新公司：Aspera。我开始开发应用构建器，丹负责网络架构，两名本科生开发前两项服务（图像和通话）。但暑假过半时，我意识到自己真的不想经营公司，尤其是这种注定要做大的企业。

This name didn't last long before it was replaced by software as a service, but it was current for long enough that I named this new company after it. It was going to be called Aspera. I started working on the application builder. Dan worked on network infrastructure, and the two undergrads worked on the first two services, images and phone calls. But about halfway through the summer, I realized I really didn't wanna run a company, especially not a big one, which it was looking like this would have to be.

当初创办ViyaWeb只是迫于经济需求。既然现在不再缺钱，我为何要做这个？如果这个愿景必须以公司形式实现，那我宁愿放弃。我要构建一个能通过开源项目实现的子集。出乎意料的是，这些工作最终并未白费。

I'd only started ViyaWeb because I needed the money. Now that I didn't need money anymore, why was I doing this? If this vision had to be realized as a company, then screw the vision. I'd build a subset that could be done as an open source project. Much to my surprise, the time I spent working on this stuff was not wasted after all.

创办Y Combinator后，我常遇到致力于新架构组件的初创公司，此前长时间的思考甚至部分编写经验变得极其宝贵。我决定作为开源项目构建的，正是这个无需隐藏括号的新Lisp。许多Lisp爱好者都梦想创造新方言，部分因为这门语言的特色就是允许方言存在，部分源于我们心中有个现有方言都未能企及的理想Lisp形态。那个夏天结束时，我和丹转而在剑桥的房子里开发这个名为Arc的新方言。

After we started Y Combinator, I would often encounter startups working on parts of this new architecture, and it was very useful to have spent so much time thinking about it and even trying to write some of it. The subset I would build as an open source project was the new Lisp whose parentheses I now wouldn't even have to hide. A lot of Lisp packers dream of building a new Lisp, partly because one of the distinctive features of the language is that it has dialects, and partly, I think, because we have in our minds a platonic form of lisp that all existing dialects fall short of. I certainly did. So at the end of the summer, Dan and I switched to working on this new dialect of lisp, which I called ARC in a house I bought in Cambridge.

次年春天，奇迹发生了。我受邀在Lisp大会上演讲，主题是我们在Vioweb如何使用Lisp。会后，我把演讲文稿的PostScript文件上传到多年前用Vioweb创建却从未使用的paulgram.com。单日浏览量竟达3万次——这到底是怎么回事？

The following spring, lightning struck. I was invited to give a talk at a Lisp conference, so I gave one about how we'd use Lisp at Vioweb. Afterward, I put a PostScript file of this talk online on paulgram.com, which I'd created years before using Vioweb, but had never used for anything. In one day, it got 30,000 page views. What on earth had happened?

引用链接显示有人把它发到了Slashdot上。哇，我这才意识到原来有观众存在。如果我写点东西放到网上，任何人都能读到。这在今天看来显而易见，但在当时却令人惊讶。

The referring URLs showed that someone had posted it on Slashdot. Wow. I thought there's an audience. If I write something and put it on the web, anyone can read it. That may seem obvious now, but it was surprising then.

在印刷时代，通向读者的渠道狭窄，由被称为编辑的凶猛怪兽把守。要让作品获得读者，唯一途径就是通过书籍、报纸或杂志出版。如今任何人都能发表任何内容。这一可能自1993年就已存在，但当时没多少人意识到。作为长期参与构建网络基础设施的写作者，我花了八年才明白这点。

In the print era, there was a narrow channel to readers guarded by fierce monsters known as editors. The only way to get an audience for anything you wrote was to get it published as a book or in a newspaper or magazine. Now anyone could publish anything. This had been possible in principle since 1993, but not many people had realized it yet. I had been intimately involved with building the infrastructure of the web for most of that time and a writer as well, and it had taken me eight years to realize it.

即便如此，我又花了数年才理解其深远意义。这意味着将出现全新一代的散文。印刷时代里，散文发表的渠道几乎消失殆尽。除了少数纽约社交圈认可的官方思想家外，只有专业作者才能撰写本领域文章。无数散文因无处发表而从未诞生。

Even then, it took me several years to understand the implications. It meant there would be a whole new generation of essays. In the print era, the channel for publishing essays had been vanishingly small. Except for a few officially anointed thinkers who went to the right parties in New York, the only people allowed to publish essays were specialists writing about their specialties. There were so many essays that had never been written because there had been no way to publish them.

现在它们可以问世了，而我将成为执笔人。我尝试过不同领域，但要说找到人生方向的转折点，就是开始在网上发表散文的那一刻。从那时起，无论做什么，我都会坚持写作。我知道网络散文最初会是边缘媒介——社交层面上，它们更像是怪人在GeoCities网站上的狂言，而非《纽约客》那些排版精美的优雅文章。

Now they could be, and I was gonna write them. I've worked on several different things, but to the extent there was a turning point where I figured out what to work on, it was when I started publishing essays online. From then on, I knew that whatever else I did, I'd always write essays too. I knew that online essays would be a marginal medium at first. Socially, they'd seem more like rants posted by nutjobs on their GeoCity sites than the genteel and beautifully typeset compositions published in The New Yorker.

但此刻我已足够睿智，这反而令我振奋。我人生中最显著的规律就是：从事不受追捧的事业反而收效甚佳。毕竟，生活画作从来都是最不入流的艺术。ViyaWeb和Y Combinator初创时都显得很蹩脚。至今当陌生人听说我在写网站散文时，仍会露出茫然眼神。

But by this point, I knew enough to find that encouraging instead of discouraging. One of the most conspicuous patterns I've noticed in my life is how well it has worked, for me at least, to work on things that weren't prestigious. Still, life has always been the least prestigious form of painting. ViyaWeb and Y Combinator both seemed lame when we started them. I still get the glassy eye from strangers when they ask what I'm writing, and I explain that it's an essay I'm gonna publish on my website.

就连Lisp语言，虽像拉丁语般享有学术声誉，却也显得同样过时。并非不受追捧的工作本身就好，但当你不顾世俗眼光被某项工作吸引时，这既说明那里存在真知灼见，也证明你动机纯粹。对野心家而言，不纯动机是重大隐患。若有什么会让你误入歧途，那必定是取悦他人的欲望。因此，从事冷门事业虽不能保证方向正确，至少能避开最常见的错误路线。

Even Lisp, though prestigious intellectually in something like the way Latin is, also seems about as hip. It's not that unprestigious types of work are good per se, but when you find yourself drawn to some kind of work despite its current lack of prestige, it's a sign both that there's something real to be discovered there and that you have the right kind of motives. Impure motives are a big danger for the ambitious. If anything is gonna lead you astray, it will be the desire to impress people. So while working on things that aren't prestigious doesn't guarantee you're on the right track, it at least guarantees you're not on the most common type of wrong one.

随后几年里，我撰写了大量题材各异的散文。O'Reilly出版社将部分结集出版，取其中一篇题为《黑客与画家》作为书名。我还研究过垃圾邮件过滤器，继续绘画创作。每周四晚为朋友举办晚餐会，由此学会团体烹饪。又在剑桥买下曾是糖果厂（后用作色情片场）的建筑作为办公室。

Over the next several years, I wrote lots of essays about all kinds of different topics. O'Reilly reprinted, a collection of them as a book, called Hackers and Painters after one of the essays in it. I also worked on spam filters and did some more painting. I used to have dinners for a group of friends every Thursday night, which taught me how to cook for groups. And I bought another building in Cambridge, a former candy factory, and later to a said porn studio to use as an office.

2003年10月的一个夜晚，我家举办了一场盛大的派对。这是我朋友玛丽亚·丹尼尔斯的巧妙主意，她是周四晚餐会的成员之一。三位独立主办人将各自邀请朋友参加同一场派对。因此对每位客人而言，三分之二的宾客会是他们不认识但很可能会喜欢的人。其中一位客人是我不认识却最终非常喜欢的女性——杰西卡·利文斯顿。

One night in October 2003, there was a big party at my house. It was a clever idea of my friend Maria Daniels, who was one of the Thursday diners. Three separate hosts would all invite their friends to one party. So for every guest, two thirds of the other guests would be people they didn't know but would probably like. One of the guests was someone I didn't know but would turn out to like a lot, a woman called Jessica Livingston.

几天后，我约她出去。杰西卡当时在波士顿一家投资银行负责市场营销。这家银行自以为了解初创企业。但在接下来的一年里，当她结识我来自初创圈的朋友时，现实与想象的差距和故事的丰富多彩令她震惊。于是她决定编写一本初创企业创始人的访谈录。当银行遭遇财务危机，她不得不解雇半数员工时，她开始寻找新工作。

A couple days later, I asked her out. Jessica was in charge of marketing at a Boston investment bank. This bank thought it understood startups. But over the next year, as she met friends of mine from the startup world, she was surprised how different reality was and how colorful their stories were. So she decided to compile a book of interviews with startup founders When the bank had financial problems and she had to fire half her staff, she started looking for a new job.

2005年初，她面试了波士顿一家风投公司的营销职位。对方花了数周时间做决定，在此期间，我开始向她讲述风险投资领域需要改革的种种问题：应该进行大量小额投资而非少数巨额投资；应该资助更年轻、更具技术背景的创始人而非MBA；应该让创始人继续担任CEO等等。

In early two thousand and five, she interviewed for a marketing job at a Boston VC firm. It took them weeks to make up their minds, and during this time, I started telling her about all the things that needed to be fixed about venture capital. They should make a larger number of smaller investments instead of a handful of giant ones. They should be funding younger, more technical founders instead of MBAs. They should let the founders remain as CEO, and so on.

我写文章的诀窍之一就是通过演讲。站在人群面前讲述有价值内容的前景，总能极大激发想象力。当哈佛计算机协会（本科生计算机俱乐部）邀请我演讲时，我决定告诉他们如何创办初创企业。或许他们能避免我们犯过的最严重错误。在这次演讲中我提到，最理想的种子资金来源是成功的初创创始人，因为他们同时也能提供建议——这时我发现所有人都在期待地看着我。

One of my tricks for writing essays had always been to give talks. The prospect of having to stand up in front of a group of people and tell them something that won't waste their time is a great spur to the imagination. When the Harvard Computer Society, the undergrad computer club, asked me to give a talk, I decided I would tell them how to start a startup. Maybe they'd be able to avoid the worst of the mistakes we'd made. So I gave this talk in the course of which I told them that the best sources of seed funding were successful startup founders, because then they'd be sources of advice too, whereupon it seemed they were all looking expectantly at me.

想到收件箱可能被商业计划书淹没的可怕前景（早知如此），我脱口而出'但别找我'，然后继续演讲。但事后我意识到，自己确实该停止拖延天使投资了。自从雅虎收购我们后就有这个打算，如今七年过去，我仍未做过一笔天使投资。同时，我一直在和罗伯特、特雷弗谋划合作项目。我怀念与他们共事的日子，总觉得我们一定能找到合作方向。

Horrified at the prospect of having my inbox flooded by business plans, if I'd only known, I blurted out, but not me, and went on with the talk. But afterward, it occurred to me that I should really stop procrastinating about angel investing. I'd been meaning to since Yahoo bought us, and now it was seven years later, and I still hadn't done one angel investment. Meanwhile, I had been scheming with Robert and Trevor about projects we could work on together. I missed working with them, and it seemed like there had to be something we could collaborate on.

2005年3月11日，当我和杰西卡晚餐后走到花园街与沃克街的转角时，这三条线索交汇了。去他的风投机构——他们做决定太慢了。我们要创立自己的投资公司，真正实践我们讨论的理念。由我出资，杰西卡可以辞职加入，再拉罗伯特和特雷弗做合伙人。再一次，无知成全了我们。

As Jessica and I were walking home from dinner on March 11 at the corner of Garden And Walker Streets, these three threads converged. Screw the VCs who were taking so long to make up their minds. We'd start our own investment firm and actually implement the ideas we've been talking about. I'd fund it, and Jessica could quit her job and work for it, and we'd get Robert and Trevor as partners too. Once again, ignorance worked in our favor.

我们完全不懂如何做天使投资人。在2005年2月的波士顿，也没有罗恩·康威这样的前辈可学习。于是我们只做出看似显而易见的选择，其中某些做法后来被证明具有创新性。YC包含多个组成部分，我们并非一次性构想出全部。最初实现的角色就是天使投资机构。

We had no idea how to be angel investors. And in Boston in 02/2005, there were no Ron Conways to learn from. So we just made what seemed like the obvious choices, and some of the things we did turned out to be novel. There are multiple components to Y Combinator, and we didn't figure them all out at once. The part we got first was to be an angel firm.

在那个年代，这两个词并不搭配。有组织成公司的风投机构，员工专职做投资，但他们只进行百万美元级别的大额投资。也有做小额投资的天使投资人，但这些人通常是专注于其他事务的个体投资者，投资只是副业。两者在初创阶段都没能给创始人足够的帮助。我们深知创始人在某些方面的无助——因为我们亲身体验过那种茫然。

In those days, those two words didn't go together. There were VC firms which were organized companies with people whose job it was to make investments, but they only did big million dollar investments. And there were angels who did smaller investments, but these were individuals who were usually focused on other things and made investments on the side. And neither of them helped founders enough in the beginning. We knew how helpless founders were in some respects because we remembered how helpless we'd been.

比如，朱利安曾为我们做过一件看似神奇的事：帮我们完成公司注册。我们擅长编写复杂软件，但对公司章程、股权分配这些实务操作却束手无策。我们的计划不仅是做种子投资，还要为初创企业提供朱利安给过我们的一切帮助。YC最初并非以基金形式组建。

For example, one thing Julian had done for us that seemed to us like magic was to get us set up as a company. We were fine writing fairly difficult software, but actually getting incorporated with bylaws and stock and all that stuff. How on earth did you do that? Our plan was not only to make seed investments, but to do for startups everything Julian had done for us. YC was not organized as a fund.

运营成本足够低，我们用自有资金就能维持。这个细节99%的读者会忽略，但职业投资者会惊叹：这意味着他们独享了全部收益。不过这再次证明我们并非有什么先见之明——当时我们根本不懂风投机构的运作模式。

It was cheap enough to run that we funded it with our own money. That went right by 99% of readers, but professional investors are thinking, wow. That means they got all the returns. But once again, this was not due to any particular insight on our part. We didn't know how VC firms were organized.

YC最独特的模式是批次制：每年两次集中投资一批初创公司，然后花三个月时间全力辅导他们。这个模式其实是源于我们对投资的无知——我们需要积累投资经验。当时想：有什么比一次性投资大批初创公司更好的实践方式呢？

It never occurred to us to try to raise a fund, and if it had, we wouldn't have known where to start. The most distinctive thing about YC is the batch model, to fund a bunch of startups all at once, twice a year, and then to spend three months focusing intensively on trying to help them. That part we discovered by accident, not merely implicitly, but explicitly due to our ignorance about investing. We needed to get experience as investors. What better way, we thought, than to fund a whole bunch of startups at once?

我们知道本科生暑期常在科技公司实习。何不组织一个让他们创建公司的暑期项目？某种意义上，作为'伪投资人'的我们与作为'伪创始人'的他们正好相配。虽然可能赚不到钱，但能练习投资技能；对他们而言，这肯定比在微软打工更有趣。我们决定用我在剑桥的房产作为总部。

We knew undergrads got temporary jobs at tech companies during the summer. Why not organize a summer program where they'd start startups instead? We wouldn't feel guilty for being, in a sense, fake investors because they would, in a similar sense, be fake founders. So while we probably wouldn't make much money out of it, we'd at least get to practice being investors on them, and they, for their part, would probably have a more interesting summer than they would working at Microsoft. We'd use the building I owned in Cambridge as our headquarters.

由于我每周四已固定举办晚宴，我们就把集体晚餐定在周二。餐后会邀请创业专家来做分享。考虑到本科生正在决定暑期去向，我们在几天内仓促设计了'暑期创始人计划'，并在我的网站上发布招生公告。没想到写作竟成为获取项目源（投资人术语）的完美渠道——我们收到了225份申请，更意外的是许多申请者已毕业或即将毕业。这个SFP计划开始超出我们预期的严肃性。

We'd all have dinner there once a week on Tuesdays since I was already cooking for the Thursday diners on Thursdays, and after dinner, we'd bring in experts on startups to give talks. We knew undergrads were deciding then about summer jobs, so in a matter of days, we cooked up something we called the summer founders program, and I posted an announcement on my site inviting undergrads to apply. I had never imagined that writing essays would be a way to get deal flow, as investors call it, but it turned out to be the perfect source. We got 225 applications for the summer founders program, and we were surprised to find that a lot of them were from people who'd already graduated or were about to that spring. Already, this SFP thing was starting to feel more serious than we'd intended.

我们从225组中筛选约20组面试，最终选定8组投资。这个首期班堪称梦幻阵容：Reddit创始人、后来创立Twitch的贾斯汀·坎和埃米特·希尔、RSS规范共同起草人（后来成为开放存取殉道者的）亚伦·斯沃茨，以及后来接任YC第二任总裁的萨姆·奥尔特曼。首期班的卓越并非完全偶然——敢放弃微软或高盛等正规机构的暑期工作，选择这种古怪项目的人本就非同寻常。

We invited about 20 of the 225 groups to interview in person, and from those, we picked eight to fund. They were an impressive group. That first batch included Reddit, Justin Khan, and Emmett Shear, who went on to found Twitch, Aaron Swartz, who had already helped write the RSS spec and would a few years later become a martyr for open access, and Sam Altman, who would later become the second president of YC. I don't think it was entirely luck that the first batch was so good. You had to be pretty bold to sign up for a weird thing like the summer founders program instead of a summer job at a legit place like Microsoft or Goldman Sachs.

初创企业的融资方案综合了我们与朱利安达成的协议（10%股权换取1万美元）和罗伯特提到的MIT研究生暑期项目（6000美元）。我们为每位创始人投资6000美元，因此典型的双创始人团队可获得1.2万美元换取6%股权。这必须公平，因为条件比我们当年接受的优渥一倍。那个异常炎热的夏天，杰西卡还免费为创始人们提供了空调。很快我就意识到，我们无意中找到了规模化初创企业融资的方法。

The deal for startups was based on a combination of the deal we did with Julian, dollar 10 k for 10%, and what Robert said MIT grad students got for the summer, dollar 6 k. We invested dollar 6 k per founder, which in the typical two founder case was dollar 12 k in return for 6%. That had to be fair because it was twice as good as the deal we ourselves had taken. Plus that first summer, which was really hot, Jessica brought the founders free air conditioners. Fairly quickly, I realized that we had stumbled upon the way to scale start up funding.

批量投资初创企业对我们更便利，意味着能同时处理多家企业事务，但加入批次对初创企业同样有利。这解决了创始人面临的最大困境——孤立无援。现在你不仅拥有同事，更是能理解你困境、分享解决方案的同路人。随着YC壮大，我们逐渐发现规模化的其他优势。校友们形成了紧密社群，致力于互帮互助，尤其关照当下批次的成员——他们对此感同身受。

Funding start ups in batches was more convenient for us because it meant we could do things for a lot of start ups at once, but being part of a batch was better for the start ups too. It solved one of the biggest problems faced by founders, the isolation. Now you not only had colleagues, but colleagues who understood the problems you were facing and could tell you how they were solving them. As YC grew, we started to notice other advantages of scale. The alumni became a tight community dedicated to helping one another and especially the current batch whose shoes they remembered being in.

我们还注意到初创企业正成为彼此的客户。曾戏称的'YC GDP'随着规模扩大已不再是玩笑。如今许多企业的首批客户几乎全部来自同批次伙伴。我最初并未打算将YC作为全职工作，计划只做三件事：编程、写文章和运营YC。

We also noticed that the startups were becoming one another's customers. We used to refer jokingly to the YC GDP, but as YC grows, this becomes less and less of a joke. Now lots of startups get their initial set of customers almost entirely from among their batchmates. I had not originally intended y c to be a full time job. I was gonna do three things, hack, write essays, and work on y c.

随着YC发展壮大，它占据的精力远超三分之一。但最初几年我仍能兼顾其他项目。2006年，罗伯特与我开始开发新版本ARC语言，其运行速度显著提升——因为编译成了Scheme代码。为测试新版ARC，我用它编写了Hacker News。

As YC grew, and I grew more excited about it, it started to take up a lot more than a third of my attention. But for the first few years, I was still able to work on other things. In the 2006, Robert and I started working on a new version of ARC. This one was reasonably fast because it was compiled into Scheme. To test this new ARC, I wrote Hacker News in it.

这个平台本是为初创创始人设计的新闻聚合器，原名Startup News。但几个月后，我对满屏创业内容感到厌倦。何况我们的目标用户本就不是现役创始人，而是未来创业者。于是更名为Hacker News，话题转向任何激发智力好奇的内容。

It was originally meant to be a news aggregator for startup founders and was called Startup News. But after a few months, I got tired of reading about nothing but startups. Plus, it wasn't startup founders we wanted to reach. It was future startup founders. So I changed the name to Hacker News and the topic to whatever engaged one's intellectual curiosity.

这对YC固然有益，却成为我最大的压力源。如果只需筛选和辅导创始人，工作会轻松许多——这正说明存在问题。真正的压力本应来自核心业务，而我的处境就像马拉松选手的痛苦并非来自奔跑，而是不合脚鞋子磨出的水泡。在YC处理紧急事务时，60%与HN相关，其余40%才涉及其他所有事务。

Was no doubt good for YC, but it was also by far the biggest source of stress for me. If all I'd had to do was select and help founders, life would have been so easy, and that implies that was a mistake. Surely, the biggest source of stress in one's work should at least be something close to the core of the work. Whereas I was like someone who was in pain while running a marathon, not from the exertion of running, but because I had a blister from an ill fitting shoe. When I was dealing with some urgent problem during YC, there was about a sixty percent chance it had to do with HN and a 40% chance it had to do with everything else combined.

除HN外，YC所有内部软件都用ARC编写。虽然仍大量使用ARC，但我逐渐停止开发它——既因时间有限，也因现有基础设施依赖使其难以随意修改。至此我的三大项目缩减为两项：撰写文章和运营YC。YC与我过往工作截然不同——问题会主动找上门来，而非由我决定工作方向。

As well as HN, I wrote all of YC's internal software in ARC. But while I continue to work a good deal in ARC, I gradually stopped working on ARC partly because I didn't have time to and partly because it was a lot less attractive to mess around with the language now that we had all this infrastructure depending on it. So now my three projects were reduced to two, writing essays and working on YC. YC was different from other kinds of work I've done. Instead of deciding for myself what to work on, the problems came to me.

每六个月就有一批新的初创公司涌现，他们的问题，无论是什么，都成了我们的问题。这份工作非常吸引人，因为问题五花八门，而优秀的创始人效率极高。如果你想在最短时间内尽可能多地了解初创企业，没有比这更好的方式了。当然也有我不喜欢的部分——联合创始人之间的纠纷、判断何时有人在欺骗我们、与那些虐待初创公司的人斗争等等。但即便对这些不喜欢的部分，我也全力以赴。

Every six months, there was a new batch of startups, and their problems, whatever they were, became our problems. It was very engaging work because their problems were quite varied, and the good founders were very effective. If you were trying to learn the most you could about startups in the shortest possible time, you couldn't have picked a better way to do it. There were parts of the job I didn't like, disputes between cofounders, figuring out when people were lying to us, fighting with people who maltreated the startups, and so on. But I worked hard even at the parts I didn't like.

凯文·黑尔曾说过关于公司的一句话让我耿耿于怀：'没有人比老板更努力工作'。这句话既是描述也是规训，而后者让我感到恐惧。我希望YC能做好，所以如果我工作的努力程度决定了其他人的上限，那我必须非常拼命。2010年某天，罗伯特·莫里斯来加州面试时做了件令人惊讶的事——他主动给了我建议。

I was haunted by something Kevin Hale once said about companies, no one works harder than the boss. He meant it both descriptively and prescriptively, and it was the second part that scared me. I wanted YC to be good, so if how hard I worked set the upper bound on how hard everyone else worked, I'd better work very hard. One day in 2010, when he was visiting California for interviews, Robert Morris did something astonishing. He offered me unsolicited advice.

我记得他只主动给过两次建议。第一次是在Viaweb时期，当时我因肾结石疼得直不起腰，他建议送我去医院。这就是让'沉默的罗伯特'主动开口的代价。所以我清楚记得他的原话：'听着，你应该确保YC不是你做的最后一件酷事'。

I can only remember him doing that once before. One day at ViyaWeb, when I was bent over double from a kidney stone, he suggested that it would be a good idea for him to take me to the hospital. That was what it took for Rue TM to offer unsolicited advice. So I remember his exact words very clearly. You know, he said, you should make sure Y Combinator isn't the last cool thing you do.

当时我不明白他的意思，但渐渐意识到他是在建议我辞职。这建议很奇怪，因为YC发展得很好。但如果说有什么比罗伯特给建议更罕见的事，那就是他犯错。这让我开始思考：按照当前轨迹，YC确实会成为我最后的事业，因为它正吞噬我全部精力。它已经吞没了ARC，现在连随笔创作也快被吞噬了。

At the time, I didn't understand what he meant, but gradually, it dawned on me that he was saying I should quit. This seemed strange advice because y c was doing great. But if there was one thing rarer than Rootie M offering advice, it was Rootie M being wrong. So this set me thinking, it was true that on my current trajectory, y c would be the last thing I did because it was only taking up more of my attention. It had already eaten ARC and was in the process of eating essays too.

要么YC成为我的终身事业，要么终有一天要离开——而它显然不是前者。2012年，我母亲中风，病因是结肠癌引发的血栓。中风摧毁了她的平衡能力，被送进疗养院，但她渴望回到自己家。我和妹妹决心帮她实现愿望。我定期飞往俄勒冈探望，在航班上有了大量思考时间。某次飞行中，我意识到自己已准备好将YC交给别人。

Either YC was my life's work or I'd have to leave eventually, and it wasn't. So I would in the 2012, my mother had a stroke, and the cause turned out to be a blood clot caused by colon cancer. The stroke destroyed her balance, and she was put in a nursing home, but she really wanted to get out of it and back to her house, and my sister and I were determined to help her do it. I used to fly up to Oregon to visit her regularly, and I had a lot of time to think on those flights. On one of them, I realized I was ready to hand y c over to someone else.

我问杰西卡是否愿意接任总裁，她拒绝了。于是我们决定招募萨姆·奥尔特曼。与罗伯特和特雷弗商议后，我们决定彻底交接权力。此前YC一直由我们四人创立的有限责任公司控制，但我们希望YC能长久存续。要实现这点，就不能再由创始人掌控。

I asked Jessica if she wanted to be president, but she didn't. So we decided we'd try to recruit Sam Altman. We talked to Robert and Trevor, and we agreed to make it a complete changing of the guard. Up till that point, y c had been controlled by the original LLC we four had started, but we wanted y c to last for a long time. And to do that, it couldn't be controlled by the founders.

如果萨姆同意，我们将允许他重组YC。罗伯特和我将退休，杰西卡和特雷弗转为普通合伙人。当我们询问萨姆时，他最初拒绝了——他想创办开发核反应堆的初创公司。但我持续游说，最终在2013年10月，他点头答应了。

So if Sam said yes, we'd let him reorganize YC. Robert and I would retire, and Jessica and Trevor would become ordinary partners. When we asked Sam if he wanted to be president of YC, initially, said no. He wanted to start a startup to make nuclear reactors. But I kept at it, and in October 2013, he finally agreed.

我们决定让他从2014年冬季批次开始接手。在2013年2月余下的时间里，我逐渐将YC的运营工作交给Sam，一方面让他熟悉工作，另一方面我正专注于癌症复发的母亲。她于2014年1月15日去世。我们早有心理准备，但那一刻依然艰难。我一直工作到三月份，帮助那批初创企业度过演示日，之后便彻底退出了。

We decided he'd take over starting with the winter two thousand and fourteen batch. For the rest of 02/2013, I left running YC more and more to Sam, partly so he could learn the job and partly because I was focused on my mother whose cancer had returned. She died on the 01/15/2014. We knew this was coming, but it was still hard when it did. I kept working on YC till March to help get that batch of startups through demo day, then I checked out pretty completely.

我仍会与校友交流，也会接触那些从事我感兴趣领域的新创公司，但这每周只需几小时。接下来我该做什么？Ritiam的建议里没提到这点。我想做些完全不同的事，于是决定画画。我想看看如果全情投入，自己能达到什么水平。

I still talk to alumni and to new start ups working on things I'm interested in, but that only takes a few hours a week. What should I do next? Ritiam's advice hadn't included anything about that. I wanted to do something completely different, so I decided I'd paint. I wanted to see how good I could get if I really focused on it.

于是在离开YC工作的第二天，我开始作画。手法生疏，花了些时间找回状态，但至少完全沉浸其中。2014年余下的大部分时间我都在画画。从未能如此心无旁骛地工作过，我的画技确实进步了——虽不够好，但确有提升。

So the day after I stopped working on YC, I started painting. I was rusty, and it took a while to get back into shape, but it was at least completely engaging. I spent most of the rest of 2014 painting. I'd never been able to work so uninterruptedly before, and I got to be better than I had been. Not good enough, but better.

然而到了十一月，正当创作中途，我突然失去了动力。此前我总是好奇手头画作最终会呈现什么效果。但突然之间完成这幅画成了负担，于是我停笔洗净调色板，至今未再动笔——至少目前如此。我知道这听起来很懦弱，但注意力是零和游戏。当你能自主选择项目时，若选的不是最佳或至少合适的项目，它就会阻碍那个本该做的项目。而到了50岁，虚度光阴是有机会成本的。

Then in November, right in the middle of a painting, I ran out of steam. Up till that point, I'd always been curious to see how the painting I was working on would turn out. But suddenly finishing this one seemed like a chore, so I stopped working on it and cleaned my brushes and haven't painted since, so far anyway. I realize that sounds rather wimpy, but attention is a zero sum game. If you can choose what to work on and you choose a project that's not the best one or at least a good one for you, then it's getting in the way of another project that is and at 50, there was some opportunity cost to screwing around.

我重新开始写文章，随后几个月完成了一批新作。甚至有几篇与创业无关。2015年3月，我又开始研究Lisp语言。Lisp的独特之处在于其核心是通过自身编写解释器来定义的语言，它最初并非传统意义上的编程语言。

I started writing essays again and, wrote a bunch of new ones over the next few months. I even wrote a couple that weren't about startups. Then in March 2015, I started working on Lisp again. The distinctive thing about Lisp is that its core is a language defined by writing an interpreter in itself. It wasn't originally intended as a programming language in the ordinary sense.

它本意是作为图灵机的替代方案——一种形式化的计算模型。若要为语言自身编写解释器，最少需要哪些预定义运算符？约翰·麦卡锡发明（更准确说是发现）的Lisp正是这个问题的答案。麦卡锡当时并未意识到，直到他的研究生史蒂夫·罗素提议，Lisp才被用于计算机编程。

It was meant to be a formal model of computation, an alternative to the Turing machine. If you want to write an interpreter for a language in itself, what's the minimum set of predefined operators you need? The Lisp that John McCarthy invented or more accurately discovered is an answer to that question. McCarthy didn't realize this. Lisp could even be used to program computers till his grad student, Steve Russell, suggested it.

罗素将麦卡锡的解释器翻译成IBM 704机器语言。从那时起，Lisp也开始成为常规编程语言，但其作为计算模型的起源赋予了它其他语言无法比拟的力量与优雅。正是这点在大学时吸引了我，尽管当时并不明白原因。麦卡锡的Lisp 1.5版仅能解释Lisp表达式，缺少许多编程语言应有的功能。这些功能后续被添加时，并未沿用麦卡锡最初的公理化定义方法。

Russell translated McCarthy's interpreter into IBM 704 machine language, And from that point, Lisp started also to be a programming language in the ordinary sense, but its origins as a model of computation gave it a power and elegance that other languages couldn't match. It was this that attracted me in college, though I didn't understand why at the time. McCarthy's one 960 Lisp did nothing more than interpret Lisp expressions. It was missing a lot of things you'd want in a programming language. So these had to be added, and when they were, they weren't defined using McCarthy's original axiomatic approach.

这在当时是不可行的。麦卡锡通过手工模拟程序执行来测试他的解释器，但这已经接近解释器的极限了。你确实可以那样测试。其中有一个麦卡锡忽略的bug。要测试更复杂的解释器，你本需要运行它，而当时的计算机性能不足以支撑。

That wouldn't have been feasible at the time. McCarthy tested his interpreter by hand simulating the execution of programs, But it was already getting close to the limit of interpreters. You could test that way indeed. There was a bug in it that McCarthy had overlooked. To test a more complicated interpreter, you'd have had to run it, and computers then weren't powerful enough.

但现在可以了。现在你可以继续使用麦卡锡的公理化方法，直到定义一个完整的编程语言。只要你对麦卡锡的Lisp所做的每个改变都是保持可发现性的转换，原则上你最终可以得到一个具备这种特性的完整语言。当然，做起来比说起来难，但如果原则上可行，为什么不试试？所以我决定尝试一下。

Now they are, though. Now you could continue using McCarthy's axiomatic approach till you defined a complete programming language. And as long as every change you made to McCarthy's Lisp was a discoveredness preserving transformation, you could, in principle, end up with a complete language that had this quality. Harder to do than to talk about, of course, but if it was possible in principle, why not try? So I decided to take a shot at it.

从2015年3月26日到2019年10月12日，花了四年时间。幸运的是我有一个明确定义的目标，否则很难坚持这么久。我用ARC语言编写了这个名为Bell的新Lisp。这听起来可能自相矛盾，但正说明了我为实现目标不得不采用的各种技巧。通过一系列巧妙的hack，我最终做出了一个接近自解释器的东西，虽然运行不快，但足以测试。

It took four years from the 03/26/2015 to the 10/12/2019. It was fortunate that I had a precisely defined goal, or it would have been hard to keep at it for so long. I wrote this new lisp called Bell, in itself, in ARC. That may sound like a contradiction, but it's an indication of the sort of trickery I had to engage in to make this work. By means of an egregious collection of hacks, I managed to make something close enough to an interpreter written in itself that could actually run not fast, but fast enough to test.

这段时间我不得不禁止自己写文章，否则永远完成不了。2015年底，我花了三个月写文章。当我重新开始研究Bell时，几乎看不懂代码。不是因为写得差，而是问题本身太复杂。当你开发自解释器时，很难追踪各个层级的运行状态，错误出现时可能已被层层加密。

I had to ban myself from writing essays during most of this time, or I'd never have finished. In late twenty fifteen, I spent three months writing essays. And when I went back to working on Bell, I could barely understand the code. Not so much because it was badly written as because the problem is so convoluted. When you're working on an interpreter written in itself, it's hard to keep track of what's happening at what level, and errors can be practically encrypted by the time you get them.

所以我决定Bell完成前不再写文章，但开发期间很少向人提及Bell。因此多年间，表面上我无所事事，实际上却比以往任何时候都更投入工作。有时与某个棘手bug搏斗数小时后，我会刷推特或HN，看到有人问'保罗·格雷厄姆还在编程吗？'开发Bell很艰难但很充实。我如此专注，以至于任何时候脑中都能保留大量代码并继续编写。

So I said no more essays till Bell was done, but I told few people about Bell while I was working on it. So for years, it must have seemed that I was doing nothing when in fact I was working harder than I'd ever worked on anything. Occasionally, after wrestling for hours with some gruesome bug, I'd check Twitter or HN and see someone asking, does Paul Graham still code? Working on Bell was hard but satisfying. I worked on it so intensively that at any given time, I had a decent chunk of the code in my head and could write more there.

我记得2015年一个晴天带孩子们去海边，看着他们在潮池玩耍时，想出了处理延续性问题的方法。那一刻感觉人生很圆满。记忆深刻是因为这种体验竟如此新奇。好消息是随后几年这种时刻越来越多。2016年我们搬到了英国。

I remember taking the boys to the coast on a sunny day in 2015 and figuring out how to deal with some problem involving continuations while I watched them play in the tide pools. It felt like I was doing life right. I remember that because I was slightly dismayed at how novel it felt. The good news is that I had more moments like this over the next few years. In the 2016, we moved to England.

我们希望孩子体验异国生活，而我是英国出生公民，自然选择这里。原计划只住一年，但因太喜欢就定居下来。所以Bell大部分是在英国完成的。2019年Bell终于完成。和麦卡锡最初的Lisp一样，它是个规范而非具体实现。

We wanted our kids to see what it was like living in another country, and since I was a British citizen by birth, that seemed the obvious choice. We only meant to stay for a year, but we liked it so much that we still lived there. So most of Bell was written in England. In the 2019, Bell was finally finished. Like McCarthy's original Lisp, it's a spec rather than an implementation.

尽管与麦卡锡的Lisp语言类似，它是一份以代码形式呈现的规范。既然我又能写文章了，我便把积压已久的主题都写了个遍。我一直写到2020年2月，但也开始思考还能做些什么。我该如何选择方向？回想过去，我是怎样选定课题的？

Although, like McCarthy's Lisp, it's a spec expressed as code. Now that I could write essays again, I wrote a bunch about topics I'd had stacked up. I kept writing essays through 02/2020, but I also started to think about other things I could work on. How should I choose what to do? Well, how had I chosen what to work on in the past?

我为自己写了篇文章来回答这个问题，惊讶地发现答案竟如此冗长凌乱。连亲历者都感到意外，我想或许他人也会觉得有趣，并能鼓舞那些生活同样杂乱无章的人。于是我写了份更详细的版本供人阅读，而这就是它的最后一句话。

I wrote an essay for myself to answer that question, and I was surprised how long and messy the answer turned out to be. If this surprised me, who'd lived it, then I thought perhaps it would be interesting to other people and encouraging to those with similarly messy lives. So I wrote a more detailed version for others to read, and this is the last sentence of it.