- 本章主要闡明了回答What important truth do very few people agree with you on?的一種方法
PARTY LIKE IT’S 1999
直接回答那個問題，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年的互聯網泡沫為例，闡述了如何回答這個問題。
A QUICK HISTORY OF THE ’90S
The first step to thinking clearly is to question what we think we know about the past.
20世紀90年代被認為是一個繁榮十年，隨著互聯網泡沫的破裂而結束。1990年中期，美國經濟開始衰退，制造業一蹶不振，一直到1992年七月，制造業也一直沒有反彈。工作大量流失到墨西哥，人們對傳統經濟不抱有希望。這樣的背景下，internet改變了這些，瀏覽器出現了。Netscape公司發布Mosaic瀏覽器，這是得Netscape公司能夠在不盈利的情況下上市，短短五個月，其股價從$28漲到了$174。與此同時，Yahoo，Amazon出現。到了1998年春天，幾乎每家公司的股價都翻了四倍。東亞金融危機在1997年7月爆發，泰國，印尼，韓國都深受次貸危機的影響。1998年盧布危機，這次危機使得美國LTCM到1998年下半年損失了$4.6 billion。這樣的背景下，互聯網狂熱在1998年9月份開始。大家認為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.那段時間有人一下子開了10家公司，有人吃飯的時候用自己公司未上市的期權買單，所有沾上.com的公司的員工的薪水都比傳統公司高4倍，創業公司不是考慮著如何賺錢，而是以現在要投入多少錢來衡量公司能力。
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.
LESSONS LEARNED
The entrepreneurs who stuck with Silicon Valley learned four big lessons from the dot-com crash that still guide business thinking today:
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.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.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.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:
- It is better to risk boldness than triviality.
- A bad plan is better than no plan.
- Competitive markets destroy profits.
- 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.
作者闡述的方法是：拋棄以往的教條，這不意味著教條的反面自動成立，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.
