精益创业之父明尼苏达理工毕业致辞

George Bernard Shaw once said, Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.
萧伯纳曾说过，有些人喜欢问为什么，有些人却喜欢问“为什么不”。

Engineers like you have the capacity to move the world forward by continually asking “why not?” It’s your special “doing” gene that empowers us to do better. You invent. You imagine. You see things that others don’t. Where others see blank canvases, you’ll see finished paintings. You hear the music that’s not written, you see the bridges that have yet to be built. You envision the products and companies that don’t exist yet.
不停追问“为什么不”的工程师将改变世界。你们体内的行动基因是源源不断的动力，你们发明，你们梦想，你们憧憬着他人不曾见过的未来。旁人只看到空白画布，你们却看到了完成的作品。你们听到了尚未谱就的乐章，你们看到了尚未竣工的桥梁，你们酝酿着未来的公司和产品。

University of Minnesota Science and Engineering alumni like you have founded more than 4,000 active companies, employing over half million people and generating annual revenues of $90 billion. These alums chose not to take the safe road but instead to push beyond their boundaries and DO.At some time you might decide that you want to become the master of your own destiny that you want to take an idea, and start your own company.And all of you sitting here just earned a degree that gives you choices that very few other professions have.
明尼苏达理工大学的校友创办了4000多家企业，提供50多万个就业机会，每年创造900亿的产值。这些校友不满安逸的生活选择挑战自己极限。每个人都希望掌握自己的命运。许多人有好点子，想创办自己的公司。更何况在座各位有着其他专业学生不具备的优势。

Entrepreneurship is not something foreign it’s built into the DNA of this country. America was built by those who left the old behind.Not too many generations ago your family packed up what they had, got on boat and came to America. They struck out across the country and ended up here in Minnesota.And what’s great about the United States is that no other country embraces innovation and entrepreneurship quite like we do. You don’t have to stay in one job, and it’s really, really hard to starve to death.Now I predict that this season 78% of all commencement speeches are gonna have advice about “pursuing your passion and doing stuff you love.” But no one actually tell you why. Well here’s the secret – if you’re going to spend your career in a company, doing stuff you enjoy will help you keep showing up. But if you want to do something, something entrepreneurial, just loving what you do is isn’t enough. You’re pursuing ideas you can’t get out of your head.Ideas that you obsess about. That you work on in your spare time.Because that fearless vision and relentless passion are what it takes to sustain an entrepreneur through the inevitable bad times.The times your co-founder quits, or when no one buys, or the product doesn’t work. The time when everyone you know thinks that what your doing is wrong and a waste of time. The time when people tell you that you ought to get a “real” job.By the way, every year I remind my students that great grades and successful entrepreneurs have at best a zero correlationn and anecdotal evidence suggests that the correlation may actually be negative.
创业精神并非舶来品，它是我们的民族精神。自开国以来，美国人民就勇于创新，几百年前，你们的祖先扛着行李，远渡重洋。横穿美国，来到明尼苏达。没有哪个国家像美国这样尊重创新和冒险。美国不会饿死人，你没必要守着一份工作不放。我估计八成的毕业致辞会鼓励大家追逐梦想但是他们却不曾说明原因。如果你只想给公司打工，找一份热爱的工作就够了，但如果你想创业，仅仅热爱工作远远不够。只有那些为了梦想茶饭不思，愿意放弃业余生活的人才具备弃而不舍的创业激情和动力，才有勇气面对重重难关。合伙人可能反目成仇，产品可能无人问津，每个人都怀疑你在浪费时间。劝你找一份正经的工作。此外，我要提醒你们，优秀的学生不一定能成为优秀的企业家。实际情况可能恰恰相反。

Now we tell the truth.There’s a big difference between being an employee at a great company and having the guts to start one.You don’t get grades for resiliency, curiosity, agility, resourcefulness, pattern recognition and tenacity. But you do get successful.The downside of starting something new is that it’s tough,because unlike the movies – you fail a lot. For every Facebook and Google, thousands never make it.Like Rocket Science Games, which was my biggest failure. 90 days after showing up on the cover of Wired Magazine I knew the game company where I raised 35 million dollars was going out business.We’d believed our own press, inhaled our own fumes and built lousy games. Customers voted with their wallets and didn’t buy our products. The company went out of business. Given the press we had, it was a very public failure.We let our customers, our investors, and our employees down. I thought my career and my life were over.But I learned something important, that in Silicon Valley, honest failure is a badge of experience.All of you will fail at some time in your career…or in love, or in life. No one ever sets out to fail. But being afraid to fail means you’ll be afraid to try. Playing it safe will get you nowhere.As it turns out, rather than run me out of town, the two venture capitalists that had lost $12 million in my failed startup actually asked me to work with them again.And during the next couple years…and much humbler… I raised more money and started another company that we were ultimately able to take public, and those patient investors more than made up for their earlier loss – about billion times more.
这是实话。能进入优秀的公司，并不代表你有胆量创办公司。因为学校无法给毅力、机智、好奇心、观察能力打分，但这并不妨碍你们毕业。创业的风险很高，这不是电影，不可能一帆风顺。Facdbook和Google背后是无数倒闭的公司，就像我那失败的游戏公司一样。尽管筹集了3500万，还上了《连线》杂志的封面，公司最后还是倒闭了。我们过于自负，以为用户会买媒体的账，结果开发的游戏无人问津。我不仅失败了，而且还“声名扫地”。公司员工、投资者、用户大失所望。我几乎以为自己无路可走了。但是我吸取了教训，接受失败才能积累经验，每个人都会遇到挫折。生活挫折、事业挫折、感情挫折，大家都不愿意失败。但是害怕失败意味着害怕尝试，畏首畏尾终将一事无成。后来，我的两位投资人坚持继续与我合作，尽管我让他们损失了1200万美元几年后，我创办的另一家公司成功上市，为投资者带来了丰厚的回报。

As scientists and engineers, you know about failure. You know that virtually no experiment works the first time. And here is the news, a new company all you have is a series of untested hypotheses. You learned something vital in school,to test your hypotheses by designing experiments, getting accurate data, analyzing the results, and then modifying those hypotheses based on those results. This is the scientific method, and surprisingly we just discovered the exact same method works for startups.Because failure is a part of the startup process. In Silicon Valley, we have a special word for a failed entrepreneur – it’s called experienced. Our country and our entrepreneurial culture is one of second and third chances.It’s what makes us great. You don’t have to change your name or leave town. Entrepreneurs in America know that they get multiple shots at the goal.Now someday several of you in this graduating class will be worth a $100 million dollars. And a few of you might change the way the world works.
作为理工科学生，你们对失败并不陌生，没有哪个试验第一次就能成功。新公司除了创意和假设，什么都没有。你们在学校学会了很重要的东西，设计实验来验证假设，收集数据，分析结果，根据结果修正假设。这种科研方法正是创业者必备的。因为创业公司必须在失败中学习。在硅谷，失败是宝贵的经验。我们的文化对失败者特别宽容。这是我们的优势，失败者不必隐姓埋名、远走他乡。失败了可以卷土重来，要知道你们当中有些人会成为亿万富翁，有些人会改变世界。

I want you to look around. Seriously …Go ahead. Take a few seconds and take a look… Go ahead, I’ll wait.While most of you were looking around wondering who were the three people was going to be worth 100 million dollars, I hope a few of you were feeling sorry for the rest of your classmates, knowing that the most successful person in the audience is going to be you.These days I write a blog about entrepreneurship. At the end of each post, I conclude with “lessons learned”a kind of Cliff Notes of my key takeaways.
请大家看看周围的同学，仔细观察一下。还有时间，大多数人都在猜谁会成为亿万富翁。但是少数人会暗自窃喜。他们知道那个人就是自己。我一直坚持写有关创业的博客。每篇博客结尾都有一个小结，就像要点回顾。

So that’s how I’ll finish up today.Here are the two lessons that I’d like to pass on to you.Your science or engineering degree gives you tremendous choices you, and no one else gets to decide two things:
这里我也做个小结，作为今天的结尾。理工科教育背景为你们提供了更多选择，但你们必须决定两件事

one, whether you choose to be or you choose to do
第一，是替人打工，还是独立创业

and whether you “work to live” or whether you “live to work”
第二，是为生活而工作，还是为工作而生活

Remember… live your life with no regrets. There’s no undo button.
记住，世上没有后悔药，不要让生命留下遗憾

And Congratulations — you’ve earned it!
恭喜你们顺利毕业

Thank you very much.
谢谢大家。