• 本章主要阐明了回答What important truth do very few people agree with you on?的一种方法

PARTY LIKE IT’S 1999

直接回答那个问题，不容易，It may be easier to start with a preliminary: what does everybody agree on?If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.之后作者以1998年的互联网泡沫为例，阐述了如何回答这个问题。

A QUICK HISTORY OF THE ’90S

The first step to thinking clearly is to question what we think we know about the past.
20世纪90年代被认为是一个繁荣十年，随着互联网泡沫的破裂而结束。1990年中期，美国经济开始衰退，制造业一蹶不振，一直到1992年七月，制造业也一直没有反弹。工作大量流失到墨西哥，人们对传统经济不抱有希望。这样的背景下，internet改变了这些，浏览器出现了。Netscape公司发布Mosaic浏览器，这是得Netscape公司能够在不盈利的情况下上市，短短五个月，其股价从$28涨到了$174。与此同时，Yahoo，Amazon出现。到了1998年春天，几乎每家公司的股价都翻了四倍。东亚金融危机在1997年7月爆发，泰国，印尼，韩国都深受次贷危机的影响。1998年卢布危机，这次危机使得美国LTCM到1998年下半年损失了$4.6 billion。这样的背景下，互联网狂热在1998年9月份开始。大家认为Old Economy不起作用了，一切要靠the New Economy of the internet。

MANIA: SEPTEMBER 1998–MARCH 2000

Dot-com mania was intense but short—18 months of insanity from September 1998 to March 2000.那段时间有人一下子开了10家公司，有人吃饭的时候用自己公司未上市的期权买单，所有沾上.com的公司的员工的薪水都比传统公司高4倍，创业公司不是考虑着如何赚钱，而是以现在要投入多少钱来衡量公司能力。
The NASDAQ reached 5,048 at its peak in the middle of March 2000 and then crashed to 3,321 in the middle of April.

image.png

LESSONS LEARNED

The entrepreneurs who stuck with Silicon Valley learned four big lessons from the dot-com crash that still guide business thinking today:

1. Make incremental advances
   Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward.

2. Stay lean and flexible
   All companies must be “lean,” which is code for “unplanned.” You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation.

3. Improve on the competition
   Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors.

4. Focus on product, not sales
   If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth.

These lessons have become dogma in the startup world; those who would ignore them are presumed to invite the justified doom visited upon technology in the great crash of 2000. And yet the opposite principles are probably more correct:

1. It is better to risk boldness than triviality.
2. A bad plan is better than no plan.
3. Competitive markets destroy profits.
4. Sales matters just as much as product.

To build the next generation of companies, we must abandon the dogmas created after the crash. That doesn’t mean the opposite ideas are automatically true: you can’t escape the madness of crowds by dogmatically rejecting them. Instead ask yourself: how much of what you know about business is shaped by mistaken reactions to past mistakes? The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.
作者阐述的方法是：抛弃以往的教条，这不意味着教条的反面自动成立，一切都要自己思考。The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.