It is easy to forget that, when he was a student, the man who brought us the Macintosh, iPhone and iPad (and, with his little finger, Pixar) collected bottle caps to make ends meet. The need to stretch every nickel informed the way Apple was run during the early days. It is on that spell, rather than the enormous public profile commanded by Steve Jobs in his later years, that would-be emulators should dwell.

人们很容易忘记，那个带给我们苹果电脑(Macintosh)、iPhone和iPad（以及其“副业”皮克斯(Pixar)）的人，曾经靠收集瓶盖来维持生计。锱铢必较的宗旨贯穿着苹果公司(Apple)早期的经营方式。这才是准效仿者们应该细细思索的魔咒，而不是史蒂夫(Steve Jobs)后期的高大公众形象。

Lost in the millions of words devoted to Jobs since his sad and untimely death is what established Apple in the first place — an approach to business far removed from the techniques employed by the managers of the three- or four-year-old subprime “unicorns” that command billion-dollar valuations today.

自乔布斯令人遗憾地英年早逝以来，从人们缅怀他的千言万语中找不到当初让苹果立足的经营之道——与如今成立三四年就估值超过10亿美元的次优级“独角兽”公司的经理人使用的手法大相径庭。

Peruse Apple’s initial public offering prospectus, and the numbers are startling. In the year preceding its flotation in 1980 Apple recorded sales of $117m, and pre-tax income of $24m. It did this in a market cluttered with dozens of companies making personal computers and with a payroll of about 1,000 — almost half of whom, believe it or not, were engaged in manufacturing. Apple’s initial public offering, which raised $90m, valued the company at about $1.2bn. (Multiply these numbers by three if you are comparing them with current dollars). Apple’s two founders and their chosen chief executive owned about 40 per cent of their creation, largely because they had been so efficient (and parsimonious) with the small amount of outside capital they had raised. Apple became a public company in a month when the prime rate stood at 21.5 per cent (yes, the decimal point is in the correct position) and the capital markets were bruising.

细细研读苹果首次公开发行(IPO)招股说明书，其中的数字令人瞠目结舌。在1980年上市的前一年，苹果录得1.17亿美元的销售额，税前利润为2400万美元。在数十家个人电脑公司混战的市场中，苹果以1000人左右的员工——信不信由你，其中将近一半从事制造——取得了这一成绩。苹果IPO（融资9000万美元）对公司的估值约为12亿美元。（如果你想与现在的美元进行比较的话，可以把这些数字乘以3）。苹果的两位创始人及其挑选的首席执行官拥有苹果约40%的股份，这主要是因为他们对所筹的少量外部资本的使用非常高效率（而且非常吝啬）。苹果成为上市公司的那个月，基准利率高达21.5%（是的，小数点的位置没错）、资本市场遭受重创。

All this is most germane in the era of the subprime unicorn because the habits adopted during the formative years of a company have such an influence on its eventual operating performance. Apple’s tone in its early years was influenced not just by Jobs but by a management team composed of several alumni of the semiconductor industry — a milieu where the consequences of an operating mistake are harsh.

在次优级独角兽当道的时代，这一切都正中要害，因为一家公司在成长期养成的习惯，对其最终的经营表现具有巨大影响。苹果的早期基调不仅受到了乔布斯的影响，还受到由几个半导体行业老将组成的管理团队的影响。在半导体行业，经营失误的后果是无情的。

Some will argue that Apple’s lineage is irrelevant and, in some respects, they are right. Open source software and Amazon Web Services make it far easier and cheaper to start a company, or at least build a product, than it was when Jobs co-founded his business. On the flip side, at least in Silicon Valley, it is also more difficult and expensive to build a company up than it was at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s.

一些人会认为苹果的出身并不重要，从某些方面而言，他们是对的。开源软件和亚马逊网络服务(Amazon Web Services)使得如今创办公司——至少就打造新产品而言——要远比乔布斯当初与其合伙人共同创办苹果时更容易，也更便宜。另一方面，至少在硅谷(Silicon Valley)，创办一家企业要比1970年代末和1980年代初更加困难而昂贵。

The fact that there are more technology behemoths — Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft — than at any time in history makes life tougher for the start-ups. These companies, together with a raft of smaller, rapidly growing, profitable ones (and, increasingly, several Chinese businesses with Silicon Valley outposts) are run by people eager to conquer new frontiers. That has had a dramatic effect on the cost of start-up labour.

如今的科技巨头——比如亚马逊(Amazon)、苹果、谷歌(Google)、Facebook和微软(Microsoft)——比以往更多，这使得初创企业的日子更加难熬。这些企业，再加上一批规模较小、快速增长的盈利企业（以及——在越来越大的程度上——在硅谷落地的数家中国企业），如今都由渴望征服新前沿的人经营。这对初创公司的用工成本产生了巨大影响。

Every capable person, whether their forte is engineering or sales and marketing, will be keenly fought over; and the large companies, with their ample profit margins and huge cash-flows, are prepared to pay king’s ransoms to retain their best and brightest or recruit the smart graduates. Add to that a large rise in the cost of property and the look-a-like companies sprouting up all over the world, and it is clear Silicon Valley is more expensive, in real dollars, than 40 years ago.

企业竞相争夺每一个有能力的人，无论他们的专长是工程还是销售和市场营销；而拥有充足利润空间以及巨大现金流的大公司，愿意为留住最优秀的顶尖人才或是招募聪明的毕业生支付高薪。再加上房地产成本的大幅攀升，以及相似的公司在全球范围到处涌现，就不难理解按美元实际购买力计算，如今在硅谷开公司比40年前更昂贵。

None of this means that the laws of business have suddenly been reversed. That Apple is now the world’s mightiest company is because its principal founder (and re-inventor) was always aware that his large public profile rested atop a meticulous operating machine — something that those who aspire to replicate his success might bear in mind.

这些并不意味着商业规律突然间被颠覆了。苹果之所以成为全球最强大的公司，是因为其主要创始人和再造者始终明白，他的高大公众形象有赖于一丝不苟的经营体系——那些渴望复制乔布斯成就的人应该记住这一点。

The writer is chairman of Sequoia Capital and co-author with Sir Alex Ferguson of ‘Leading’. The views expressed are his own.

本文作者为红杉资本(Sequoia Capital)董事长，与亚历克斯弗格森爵士(Sir Alex Ferguson)共同著有《领导力》(Leading)一书。本文仅代表作者个人观点