Brian Armstrong 讲述 Coinbase 的创办故事：“一切都不顺利。” 2012 年辞职并加入 Y Combinator 创办 Coinbase 后，Brian 接连遭遇挫折： “我找不到任何愿意加入我团队的人……我差点和某个人一起共同创办，但那段合作以非常戏剧化的方式彻底崩溃……后来我终于找到了合适的联合创始人 Fred Erhsam，我们刚开始起步没多久，三个月后就被人起诉了。” 但 Brian 解释说，这对创业公司来说再正常不过： “创业就是在一个又一个挫折之间保持热情地往前走……所有事情都不顺利，这几乎就是默认状态……如果你感觉像这样，那请不要放弃。这才是最关键的。我见过太多人：他们有个想法，也找到了团队，但事情不顺利，四个月后创始人吵架、公司解散，大家各回各家……但实际上，他们根本就算不上真正尝试，因为没有哪一个想法会在第一次尝试时就成功。” 他继续说： “你必须把产品推出去，然后坚持磨两三年。和用户交流、改进产品，再和用户交流、再改进产品……几乎每一家成功创业公司看起来像是一夜成名，但那只是后人书写历史的方式。如果你去问那些创始人在早期的感受，他们都会告诉你，当时任何一个理性的人都会选择放弃，因为一切都在失败……而他们都以某种方式坚持下来了，顶住了，最终找到了能运作的方向。” 这对 Coinbase 尤其真实。Coinbase 的最早版本甚至无法买卖加密货币。Brian 第一次在 Reddit 上发布后，有几百人注册，但很快全部流失。他给五位流失用户发邮件后才意识到：他们喜欢这个应用，但没有比特币可用。 “我记得当时脑袋里亮起一个灯泡，我问其中一个用户：‘如果应用里有一个简单的方式可以买到比特币，你会用吗？’ 他说：‘可能会吧。’ 我挂掉电话后，接下来几个月就在思考：我们该如何做一个简单的‘购买按钮’？而这背后要解决的事情太多了：银行合作、法律合规、牌照等等。但从那一刻起我们终于找到了产品/市场匹配（PMF）。而这只是我做过的数百次尝试中的一个。我不断在找能运作的东西……所以与用户交流、改进产品，这就是我们所做的一切，也是我最推荐别人做的事。” Brian Armstrong tells the founding story of Coinbase: “Nothing was working” After quitting his job in 2012 and joining Y Combinator to build Coinbase, Brian faced setback after setback: “I was struggling to find anybody who would join my team and work with me... I almost cofounded it with one person and that all exploded in dramatic fashion… I finally found the right cofounder, Fred Erhsam, we got off to the races, and someone sued us three months later.” But as Brian explains, this is the norm for startups: “Startups are moving from one setback to the next with enthusiasm… nothing is working, and that’s kind of the default state… If it feels like that, just don’t give up. That’s the main thing. A lot of times I’ve seen people: they have an idea, they have a team that comes together, it doesn’t work, and four months they have a big cofounder fight, blow up, and they all go home… And it’s like, well, you didn’t really try it because there’s no idea that works on the first try.” He continues: “You have to put something out there, and then grind it out for two or three years. Talk to your customers, improve the product, talk to your customers, improve the product… If you look at almost every successful startup, it feels like it was an overnight success, but really that’s just how history gets written in hindsight. If you talk to most of those founders in the early days, there was a period where any reasonable person would have quit. Nothing was working… And all of them somehow persevered and pushed through and finally found something that started to work.” This was especially true for Coinbase. There was no way to buy and sell crypto in the first version. A couple hundred people signed up after Brian posted it on Reddit, and they all left. After emailing five of the people who signed up and churned, he realized some people liked the app but couldn’t use it because they didn’t have Bitcoin: “I remember this light bubble that went off in my head, and I was like, well if there was a simple way to buy [Bitcoin] in the app, would you have done it? He’s like, yeah, probably. And so I hung up and the next few months I had to start thinking about how do we build a simple buy button? And there were a million things that had to go into that: bank partners, legal, licensing, and all this kind of stuff. But that’s when we finally got product/market fit. And that was just one example of hundreds of times where I did that. And I was trying to find something that works… So talk to your customers, improve the product. That’s all we did. And that was one of the things I would recommend.”