The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, by Ben Horowitz
《难中之难：打造一家企业无捷径可循》(The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)，作者：本•霍洛维茨
Here’s how you build and run a start-up, according to Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz: First, prepare for failure—it's inevitable. Building a viable product is hard. Things won't go as planned. Second, take care of your employees. Train them. Invest in them. Give them responsibility. Third, be mindful. Managing a business is, in part, managing your instincts and emotions. (Read more from Fortune on Horowitz here.)
在安德森•霍洛维茨风投公司(Andreessen Horowitz)联合创始人本•霍洛维茨看来，你应该这样构建和运营一家初创公司：首先，请做好遭遇失败的准备——失败是不可避免的。打造一款成功产品绝非易事。总有些事情不会按计划进行。其次，照顾好你的员工。培训他们。投资于他们。让他们担起责任。第三，要警觉。在某种程度上，管理一家企业就是管理自己的本能和情绪。
Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, by Ed Catmull& Amy Wallace
《创意公司：克服阻拦灵感的隐形力量》(Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration) 作者：埃德•卡特莫尔和艾米•华莱士
Creativity is a constant tug of war between originality and appeal, novelty and sales. Ed Catmull writes about how Pixar flourished during the 1990s while Disney floundered. At Disney, “The pressure to create—and quickly!—became the order of the day.” Pixar, by contrast, cherished the creative process. Early mock-ups of Pixar films are “ugly babies”—awkward, inconsistent, and incomplete drafts desperate for nurturing. They required time, patience and thousands of edits. “Making the process better, easier, and cheaper is an important aspiration, something we continually work on—but it is not the goal,” Catmull writes. “Making something great is the goal.”
创意是一场持续发生在原创性、吸引力、新颖性和销售之间的拉锯战。埃德•卡特莫尔阐述了1990年代皮克斯公司(Pixar)如何蓬勃发展而迪斯尼公司(Disney)如何乱作一团的故事。在迪斯尼，“迅速拿出创作成果是无时无刻不存在的压力。”相比之下，皮克斯公司则极其珍惜创作过程。皮克斯电影的早期模型是“丑儿”——这些笨拙、前后矛盾和不完整的草稿亟需进一步打磨。它们需要时间、耐心和数以千计次的编辑。“让这个过程变得更好、更容易、更便宜是一个重要的愿望，我们不断地改善这方面的工作，但它本身不是目的，”卡特莫尔写道。“创造出伟大的作品才是终极目标。”
Money: The Unauthorized Biography, by Felix Martin
《货币外传》(Money: The Unauthorized Biography)，作者：费利克斯•马丁
Economic historians argue that money emerged as an alternative to barter. The story goes: We traded fish or corn or tools (all our goods, both perishable and permanent), until money came along. It was a more efficient and stable commodity — a medium of exchange that lubricated the markets. For Martin, this view is deeply flawed. It is a history that only relies on what survived. Coinage, he says, is not essential to a monetary system. Witness some cultures where wealth was measured by giant, immovable boulders, or today, where it consists of a series of ones and zeros in a computer network. It’s the misunderstanding of money as something real, rather than a political concept, that led to our unequal modern financial system and it will take serious reform (Martin thinks we should break up the banks) to make it just.
经济史学家认为，货币是作为以货易货的替代方案涌现出来的。这个故事据说是这样的：我们交换鱼、玉米或工具（我们所有的物品，包括易腐和能永久存放的东西），直至货币横空出世。它是一种更高效、更稳定的商品——一种润滑市场的交易媒介。在马丁看来，这种观点存在严重缺陷。这是一种仅仅基于幸存物来描述的历史。他说，对于货币系统来说，硬币其实并没有那么重要。比如，一些文化中是用不可移动的巨石来衡量财富的，再比如，在如今的计算机网络世界中，财富可以由一系列1和0组成。正是这种误以为货币是一种实物，而不是一个政治概念的思想，促成了不平等的现代金融体系，亟需深度改革才能变得公正合理（马丁认为我们应该解散银行）。
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